ninjalex

It's almost like there is some sort of...uncertainty in warfare. Imagine that. If you want an optimized math puzzle, I'd recommend chess. But then again you've already said you've played MAXIMUM of 2 hours of JA2, so this is might not the genre for you.

Talking about LAN-parties. VC had multiplayer. Which was fun

Vietcong was amazing. That is also A LONG TIME AGO JESUS CHRIST.

I mean, you can always rationalize why it makes sense, but having both helmet and NV-gear/sunglasses has been in this game series for a while. I personally love outfitting my mercs and seeing them end up with super gear. And making trade-offs can be a tactical choice, I'd still rather have more slots and more to fill up.

Biff loves Flo, they're in a relationship. Which means that they work better together (good relations). What I'm saying is you can sacrifice tactical play for roleplaying. And that is one way to make roleplay more important than tactical decisions in JA2, or a way to incorporate your own kind of roleplaying into the game.

I'm a little confused as to what is "pure roleplay aspect". Is it that choices matters? You could have an incredibly immersive roleplaying experience without having your choices matter. But generally having choices that matters is a staple for roleplaying. And actions have consequences, but what does that mean in a roleplaying aspect. All choices in games have consequences, that doesn't necessarily mean its roleplaying.

If roleplaying were to affect tactical decisions YOU could go into territory where Biff makes an almost suicide run to protect Flo. A sub-optimal tactical choice, but a roleplaying choice.

It can be both I guess. You can roleplay guerilla warfare and it's still mainly a tactical choice. But then every kind of playing is roleplaying. Which kind of waters down the concept.

It's a good question you've proposed. Roleplaying is a very loosely defined concept that varies a lot from people to people. Some people wouldn't call it roleplaying unless you can make choices in game, you have a character progression and a story line connected to it. Then you have theme and flavor for games that can affect the roleplaying aspect, and it's necessary to make the mechanics fun (as mentioned earlier here, if its pure strategy of boxes moving around, it's maybe not as fun). The mechanics in JA2 are amazing, but the flavor makes the game shine. I'd still say that the roleplaying aspects are different from "traditional roleplaying" and some of it's really shallow.

You have to put a lot of your own immersion and do your own kind of roleplaying if you want a roleplaying experience out of JA2. You don't even know what you say to NPC in dialogues, there are just vague approaches (threaten, friendly, direct). Yes there are stats, yes, you get some roleplaying aspects, and you have some choices that have certain effects, but it is flavor, and not a central theme of JA2. IMO I'm not sure if it is in the tactical or the strategy-department where JA2 shines. I guess the weight is on tactical because so much of the game is making tactical decisions in firefights and zone exploration, but the logistics and strategy of painting the map is in it's own class. So I choose tactical mostly because that's the majority part of the game.

I think it is just because it wasn't available to streamers as naturally you don't wanna expose everything. So when I saw streams that IMP wasn't working I was just yeah, it's probably gonna be there day 1, but not in the pre-release.

The activation is pretty much the only concern I have for this game, but I'm glad the devs confirmed that is just a minor reorganization for balancing of the gameplay and not pod-activation like XCOM. Pod-activation in XCOM ruined the entire game for me. Gonna be interesting to see how it actually feels like in play.

The sequences with Elliot and sending Deidranna flowers is amazing. The passion for the games are clearly in your minds, and that's why JA3 is the only preorder I've done (outside of those damn fifa-iterations). That and JA2 being an all time favourite. Didn't know you made Omerta: City of Gangsters. I loved the original Gangsters so much, and it really does have a lot of the same elements (map control, recruitment, resource management) that makes JA shine. Well done!

Brilliant move in that case. The complainers get what they want and at the same time the devs can, as someone here mentioned, signal that CTH isn't a part of the original experience.

Pretty much as I expected. And agree that IMPs are very strong, so it is understandable. Anyways incredibly cool that you have made it COOP, that is so exciting to see how it plays out in the actual game! Now it's just about recruiting friends to trying the game 😄

Can both players make an IMP or is it just the host?

This could be an interesting area to explore. In JA2 you had local town loyalty and of course you had MERC reputation based on how many of your recruits have died, but it would be really interesting to have a global reputation that is affected by how you act. Word spreads around and that defines how people meet you. Professional reputation, thug reputation etc. They write something about actions having consequences here, but how local are those consequences that's the big question.

It does seem like some key gameplay elements are locked behind perks:

Would maybe hamper late game if you prefer a certain play style and the elite mercs have sub optimal perks for how you want to play. Then I guess the developer has two options two circumvent the problem: 1. Mercs get hired at their current level with perk points available, and you can choose perks yourself first time around you hire them (removing the problem, but also makes character a bit of a blank slate which feels off when you're hiring high level mercs) 2. Mercs come with set perks, but include a "reset" option, but that would also feel a bit gamey, like how many times should you be allowed to respecc. Like some skill tree reset from WoW. I'd probably prefer option 1. But we'll see how it works out when the game is actually released. Maybe the perks aren't that high impact. Do we have a list somewhere of the perks? Are there any that looks to be...a bit game breaking so to speak.

You are incapable of comprehending a text that consists of more than two sentences. I've tried to bring out the teaspoon, but you still don't get it. So it's a waste of time. But hey, enjoy spewing your toxic shit all over this forum.

Not surprised that you don't understand what you're reading. Thanks for your intelligent contribution. And this is why you shouldn't huff glue as a kid.

Nice Grim to be clear about what we are actually talking about. My opinion: Traits are fun, and a part of what makes JA so special in my opinion. I'm holding out on judgement of talents, but I'm a bit concerned that it's gonna be a bit too gamey (oh this one mercenary is the only one that can do this super generic thing that is a special talent). Perks are gonna be interesting, but I'm afraid it makes it way too much RPG-y with special abilities unlocked through perks. I'd rather see the ability to develop traits, like for example x amount of kills during night time improves your night ops traits, stealthing around improves stealth. And that those traits were defined by sort of "novice, advanced, professional, expert, master"-skillbracket

Tabletop roleplaying game != a professional video game. 30 characters take a week to make? 6 per day? Holy timeline batman. Not to go into the whole problem of AI-tools that you are overestemating wildly. The raw material from that probably works perfect for a tabletop RPG, it does not necessarily translate to actual video games and isn't plug and play. Write a prompt and then just magically insert it into a game. Not to mention the whole grey area of AI-tools to make copyrighted commercial products. "You finish the visuals". You keep saying things like this without any regard for how much time it actually takes to do these things. It is time consuming work all of it, not to mention every game out there gets rewritten, refined and changed up during production. Because the things you did (models, voice lines, text etc) just didn't work as you intended. THREE DAYS TO CONTACT NATIVE SPEAKERS AND GET SAMPLES AND TWO DAYS TO MIX IT. What in the actual what. Here we are talking minimum several months because you need to prepare and plan for recruitment (what are you looking for, what is gonna be the salary for the work, how much work are we talking, how are you gonna advertise it and for how long so you make sure you get enough response, how do you filter through candidates, how are you gonna set up interviews and what is your backup plan if you don't get decent candidates). And that's even before salary negotiations, writing up contracts and setting up time to do the actual work, and then evaluate the product you got, do-overs, changing up the script because it's not working. And then finalizing it. This is so unrealistic it's unfathomable.

The range was the entire point. Your reading comprehension is non-existent. And I see that it's pretty much pointless to keep "discussing" with you. Cheers.

The mental gymnastics is impressive. You get a slide showing that people to the age of 90 play World of Warcraft. You pretend you didn't see that (or probably just uncapable of processing so much text), then you go for average age which is pretty much irrelevant, because what's interesting is to see how broad the age spectrum is. That your experience is that World of Warcraft is complex, that I totally understand 😉