rebert said:
So the interface is painful when dual weilding a mouse and keyboard, but the level scaling and voice acting have improved over the last game.
How is the quest compass? Is it intrusive or do some quests offer directions based on the terrain and such.
What about armor and weapons classes, are pauldrons and spears back.. or have they been condensed even further - more importantly have they fixed axes yet or chosen persist in their classification as "blunt."
Any news on spell creation and enchanting? They were the most interesting part of MW, besides the books. And stealing and orcish cuirass from under Meldor's nose as a low level character..
I haven't played the game, but based on the impressions I've read here...
1) Quest compass is the same as always but can be turned off in the ini. I thought I saw someone mention in an early thread that NPCs give directions, and some of sea's posts seem to support this, but I've seen little mention of this since then despite opponents of the game frequently claiming that being able to disable the compass is not a point in its favor due to the lack of NPC directions. So I'm not sure.
2) No pauldrons (in fact, they reduced the number of armor slots from Oblivion; now there's a single set of armor for the torso and legs, though there are still separate gauntlet, helmet, and boot slots) or spears.
3) No spell creation, but enchantment is still in, as is a simple crafting system.
commie said:
I'm semi-arachnophobic IRL(I don't know, I fear most spiders except the really tiny ones and daddy longlegs) but I don't mind pixellated spiders for the most part. The only computer game spiders that instill a real sense of revulsion are those in Thief and System Shock 2. Those spindly, low poly things are just so unsettling, mush like most of the bestiary in those games.
I'm a slight arachnophobe,* and I've had a similar experience with spiders in games. 99 percent of them don't bother me at all, but there were some optional areas in Outlaws I refused to visit when I first played it despite being a completionist because the spiders freaked me out. I think it's partially because they were smaller and faster than most games' spiders - closer to the size of tarantulas rather than the giant spiders of fantasy fare, which also made them harder to hit when they darted at you. That was a long time ago, though; doubt I'd have the same reaction today.
* Well, not exactly. I'm not afraid of spiders so much as I'm a bit OCD and hate the idea of crawly little bugs in general. I don't have any problem dealing with them when it's necessary, so it doesn't really meet the criteria for a phobia.
JarlFrank said:
I'm a rather heavy arachnophobe (that daddy longlegs Commie mentioned is actually one of the worst for me)
Blargh, daddy longlegs. I once visited a cave as a child and brushed up against the ceiling while entering, only to feel something moving. Half a second later it was raining daddy longlegs all over me. (They're apparently less solitary than other spiders, often gathering in dense clusters on the walls and ceilings of places like caves and garages.)
Mortmal said:
For arachnophobia, theres a treatment invovling watching alternatively,naked women pictures and spider pictures, hope it will help.No, no its really a true treatment, youll thanks me later.
Not sure if serious, but I doubt that would work; IIRC, behaviorists did a lot of experiments along these lines (attempting to use classical conditioning to cure phobias), and generally, pairing a pleasant stimulus with a phobia would either have no effect or actually cause the pleasant stimulus to elicit fear/anxiety rather than causing you to grow accustomed to the feared stimulus.**
What does work is exposure therapy, which gradually inures you to an unpleasant stimulus by forcing you to confront your fear in a safe environment until it dissipates. This process is repeated several times while slowly increasing the intensity of the stimulus used. For example, a severe arachnophobe might start out staring at very abstract, static drawings of spiders for several minutes at a time, waiting for their fear to die down, heart rate/breathing/galvanic skin response to return to normal, etc. After repeating this exercise to this to the point that their fear response is minimal/nonexistent, they'd move to a slightly more realistic picture, then maybe a moving picture, etc., slowly working their way up to, say, petting a real, live tarantula.
** In particularly severe cases (such as when a patient can't even stand the first step of exposure long enough for the fear to dissipate), a treatment similar to what you described may be used. However, rather than pairing a fear stimulus with an erotic stimulus, which involves two different forms of limbic system arousal, they'd pair the fear stimulus with a relaxation technique in order to reduce such arousal.
P.S. This thread is now about spiders. (Not that it wasn't before.)