You can turn down the pawn chat in the options. I personally enjoy the combat far more than Skyrim, Dragon Age or Amalur, which was a major reason lost interest in those games after a while. In those games, I'm basically hacking at dudes (or hacking at the shins of bigger dudes) until they die.

I've heard that in general, it's best to stick to the story for a bit just so you gain some levels. The enemies don't scale up to your level, so you'll be able to blow them away eventually, although the caveat is that you may be up for some very unfair fights early on if you try side quests. This is unlike Skyrim's…

The combat is way better. Unless you play ranged in Skyrim, the assumption is you'll probably get hit at some point. The 'special moves' in Skyrim that involve moving a direction while doing a power attack are clunk at best.

I'm an hour or so in and loving every bit of it. The first major battle I've gotten into involved a giant ogre, four goblins, four NPC soldiers and my own party of four. Fun, chaotic and surprisingly lag-free.

OXM has a good overview of the different mechanics in DD.

I liked field runners, but you've go to admit, mobile gaming has waaaaaay too much tower defense iterations.

I'm not 100% sure, since I'm an hour in, but it seems like it leans more towards Skyrim in terms of expanse, but the land mass itself isn't quite as big, so there's an element of being hemmed in somewhat.

I imagine part of that is catering to the lowest common denominator.

PS3. Apparently, this is the version to have.

Playing through this now and loving it so far. Just got through an early battle involving one ogre, four goblins, four NPC soliders plus my own full party which was crazy, fun and with surprisingly no screen tearing or lag.

My buddy is developing this game. Nice to see that it make it on Kotaku :)

Best of all: Sam Mendes

Haha, or deadly ones. We handled some lead type for a class once and the prof was super paranoid about washing up afterwards because of all the crazy stuff ingesting lead can do to you.

Haha, I at least know what a Linotype is (thanks, history of design class) although I have yet to see one in real life.

I'm a professional graphic designer and I don't even recognize half of these.

If how they approach military tech is any indication, I guess Iran's gonna have to come up with its own half-assed low-budget version of a search engine now.

There are like twenty ways that tote bag could get caught in an escalator and drag me down with it.

(retroactive spoiler alert) :P

Anyone who's visited or lived in Singapore for any length of time probably knows what I'm talking about.

A boring country with horrible weather, filled with mean, unimaginative people and ruled over by an overbearing government.