Recent content by Xanrae

What annoys me endlessly is not how magic is used by casters, but how it is used by EVERYONE. Think about Skyrim. Every single racial power except the orc one is magical; even your magic hating Redguard can cast a magical buff to regenerate stamina, and most likely ends up with several...

Being forced to waste your time researching the best talent distribution while having no say in the matter is not "choice". It's like saying Diablo 2 offered so much build freedom - no it didn't, you just had to do your homework and make one of the few viable builds or else you couldn't farm...

Dota2. I couldn't get used to the lack of smartcast.

League of Legends. Cute cell shaded look, vivid champions, hilarious quotes and bright colours. Depending which city-state you support there's a 90% chance you're fighting an offensive war. Demacia is basically Nazi Germany, including the killing of refugees. Noxus is Commoragh. Zaun is...

Starcraft 2. Recycled gameplay made by a big budget studio too scared to do anything new, and they ruined the custom maps experience in an attempt to consolize it. Popularity sort is rotten, but totally understandable coming from a company that is at the top of the RL "popularity sort". For...

Content aimed at kids. Sometimes you can just tell the main audience were 14 year olds (this includes 18+ games). The main offender in my book are godmode games like Prototype and Crackdown where you're this indestructible death demon and this is supposed to be appealing because you're expected...

The Ball. It can whack people, emit time dissonances, shield people and suck enemies in. She's OP so I'll be fine.

I played with this a bit while developing an RPG mod/map for Starcraft 2 beta. It never got off the ground because the release version irrepairably broke it, but there are some things I wish other games would implement. Firstly, it has more than two alignments. Aside from the two main...

PC game devs tend to approach this from the wrong side. Why bother making your game unplayable by most people to squeeze out a few more polygons? Go for the 5 year old PC market. A high-end PC is more expensive than a console? A low-end PC isn't, because everyone already has one anyway. A...

Supreme Commander was not a revolution, but a feeble attempt to cater to the ADHD crowd by throwing the actual Strategy part out of the window in favour of OMG 500000000 UNITS WITH LAZORS. The game is pretty much dead online. I cannot say I am surprised.

Just like Guild Wars, EVE innovates - and of course, receives flak from people who disapprove of innovation. 'Getting better at a skill by using it' is a flawed concept, because it encourages, worse, requires grinding and (in case of combat skills) fighting the same enemies over and over...

Starcraft is much farther removed from 40K than Warcraft from Warhammer (Blizzard were denied the Warhammer IP when the game was almost finished; Starcraft started out as some sort of Starship Troopers clone and did not even have the Protoss until later). 40K is overrated anyway. Orcs with...

I thought Yathzee reviews were supposed to be 'intelligent'. That is what the ads say and private advertisements are always right and the state is always wrong. First it was the potty humour and unnecessary sexual jokes. Now Yahtzee is dissin' on tha Witcha because it is apparently not easy...

Hellgate was garbage because Bill Roper's team had never heard of project management, they just came together and started writing code. The reason why Blizzard games are considered 'the best' is not because they have the best developers, but because they actually wait until a game is finally...