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Reported.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/04/stranger-things-lawsuit-trial https://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-zootopia-lawsuit-20170321-story.html https://ktla.com/2019/08/21/judge-tosses-lawsuit-saying-idea-was-stolen-for-2014-thriller-nightcrawler/ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/mar/17/news https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/books/22arts-TWILIGHTAUTH_BRF.html https://slate.com/culture/2016/02/author-sherrilyn-kenyon-sues-cassandra-clare-for-copyright-infringement.html https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/disney-pixar-inside-out-lawsuit-childhood-development-expert-stole-idea-concept-story-a7800066.html https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/lawsuit-disney-stole-idea-for-pirates-of-the-caribbean-from-3-colorado-authors https://www.tmz.com/2019/09/25/what-men-want-lawsuit-stolen-screenwriter-paramount-bet/ https://www.thedrive.com/news/18523/lawsuit-claims-jerry-seinfeld-stole-idea-for-comedians-in-cars-getting-coffee etc.

These are actual pictures from the Florida Turnpike between Wildwood & Orlando. You may think you live in a weird place. Sometimes I think TN is weird. But friends... until you've lived in the sunshine state you don't know s--t about weird!

Good question: how quickly did you get a warning for this one?

IIRC Quickdraw is utter trash. Anything it can do, Shadow Hawk can do better. Except... fetch a higher price when vendoring it, I guess. I really don't remember how the campaign was structured or if all missions had time limits to do them, but it could pay to do some random contracts to get better mechs and more experienced mechwarriors if you're getting creamed. If I'm not mistaken, the game capped the skulls (and thus the tonnage of enemies that show up) of random contracts depending on where you were in the campaign, so that may not help you much either. I do remember that my game ran for ~2000 days, so I did a ton of grinding for mechs -- but I ran a modded game that lifted travel and contract restrictions.

yeah, a lot of people say what Hulk-a-saurus say, but it's not true. The vast, vast majority of sales happen up front, which is why landing a game launch well is so important. It is true that RPGs and similar genres might have better long-term performance, but that long-term performance is a very slow trickle and will likely happen at lower average sales prices.

Can you please back this up somehow? I don't think you are right. As Josh Sawyer himself commented when discussing the poor success of Deadfire, a vast percentage of sales come from the very first days/weeks the game is out. I think the quote is in this very thread (do correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain this is precisely what Sawyer said).

You're not supposed to point out that you're Sharp_One.

It's that time of year again!

Hey! I was that nasenale! Jokes aside, I really liked Neketaka, and I did almost every quest there before moving elsewhere, and pretty early on too, and that made most of the game seemed provisional and uninspired in comparison. Neketaka was Deadfire for me in most respects, and it spoiled me rotten. But having that standard, I guess it would have taken the devs 7 years more to "finish" the masterpiece Deadfire Enhanced Uncut Director's version.

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/189270621926/its-become-a-bit-of-a-meme-lately-that-obsidian I can understand where feeling comes from, and I think a lot of it has to do with the relative ages of people in leadership positions. Depending on the specific game we’re talking about, it’s a type of game that some of us have already iterated on 2, 3, or 4 times. And when it comes to things like dialogue structure and quest design, there’s even more structural commonality between our projects, regardless of the underlying genre or camera perspective. I’ve been a game developer for 20 years now. Regardless of my intelligence or creativity compared to a junior designer, I have seen enough quests move from idea to document to alpha implementation to beta to launch to have a pretty good sense about how certain approaches are going to go. There are some quest concepts or details that are - and I stress that I do not mean this pejoratively - naïve. The quest designer does not, and could not, understand the technical implications of what they are trying to do. When it comes to quest design (especially) a little bit of knowledge can be a very dangerous thing, because as with learning any discipline, it’s hard to comprehend how much you don’t know once you get the basics down. One of my favorite bicycle frame builders is Richard Sachs. He’s been essentially building the same type of brazed steel frames for over 45 years. I have one of his 1978 frames and it looks very similar to the frames he builds now. He’s one of the higher-profile living frame builders and he’s vocal about his opinions. In an interview, he recounted interacting with a talented young frame builder who had been working for a few years, built several dozen frames, and concluded he had pretty much learned everything there was to it. Sachs’ reaction was, “You don’t even know how to make the right kind of mistakes,” This is one thing for a craft like frame building, where it’s often (today) one person working alone as a hobbyist. It’s another thing in a big team environment like game development where 30-100 people are trying to work together on a big, interconnected project. More experienced leads tend to be more conservative and critical about design, not necessarily because of some ideological stance, but because we have seen things go very wrong and we want to prevent the kind of collateral damage we have seen play out in the past. Players remember quests like Beyond the Beef, and rightly so, because it’s a very fun quest with a lot of interesting ways to approach and resolve it. What players don’t remember, because they weren’t there, is how long Beyond the Beef took to complete, and the impact it had on the designers’ schedule and the project as a whole. And players don’t remember the cut content, some of it the product of months of a designer’s time, because it was hopelessly broken or inherently not fun to play through. When I write this, it’s not to put blame at on the quest designers. It’s my responsibility to review their work and to approve or disapprove it. On a game like F:NV, which was almost half-my-career-ago, I very often said, “I don’t think you should do that,” or “I wouldn’t do that,” with an explanation of why and some suggestions for alternative approaches. These days, I am more likely to say, “Don’t do that,” because I have seen 10 out of 12 soft warnings go ignored and yield some really tremendous headaches and heartaches. In contrast, when I see young teams (and by this I mean inexperienced developers with inexperienced leads) working, I am often pleasantly reminded of what naïveté can produce - as long as you have the time and money to burn through your mistakes. I talk with and visit a lot of teams at other companies, and there are some high profile developers I’ve visited where their design process is less of a process and more of an ad hoc “fling **** at the wall” experiment that goes on for 3-5 years. Sometimes the cost of this is just time, which is money. Sometimes the cost is polish. Sometimes the cost is burning out half a generation of young developers. Sometimes it’s all of these things. If you’ve never been at the helm when your project goes so over-budget that the company is in serious peril, this might not seem like a big deal. If you’ve never been in charge when the game comes out and gets slammed for being sloppy, buggy, and messy - when a reviewer straight-up says the team that worked massive overtime to get the game out “phoned it in” - this might not seem like a big deal. And if you haven’t watched the people on your team, people for whom you were responsible, get burned-out or laid off because of crunch, or stress, or a project cancelation, it also might not seem like a big deal. But if you have been in that position, it’s hard to see the consequences of inaction and not try to mitigate them, consciously or unconsciously, by pushing for more tried-and-true approaches to design. I’m not saying it’s an objectively good thing, but it is, I think, a natural reaction for leaders who see things go wrong over and over. Personally, I do hope we take more chances at Obsidian in the future, whether it’s on big projects or small ones. Some of this will involve putting less experienced people in leadership roles. Limiting the project scope itself also helps. Small projects and DLCs are easier to experiment with in good conscience because the impact on the company will probably be low if it fails. But when it comes to our big projects, our more experienced leads will have to be more open-minded about letting certain things wander a little bit. There are additional layers of experience and perspective that I will (hopefully) gain if I remain in the industry another 5, 10, 15 years. Hopefully that will allow me and other people working in leadership positions at the company to let people take more risks in good conscience. I want to help people make the right kinds of mistakes.

I use only KB&M with PC (and would use them with PS3, if I knew how). For DS too. The Outer Worlds. I successfully reached Edgewater. The town was terrifying. I can't quite explain why. The graphics are amazing, in terms of technology and style both. Somehow the open-world maps discourage me from exploring them (too large, too hard to determine quickly if something is relevant or just part of the scenery) and I just try to beeline to the next objective.

being a 2-win team provides a unique freedom insofar as playcalling is concerned. weirdest nfl play we ever saw were late 1970s bears v lions. 4th and 11. detroit center doesn't hand the ball to the qb. instead, after a kinda fake snap, the center puts ball back on the turf and a lions guard picks up the ball and runs it for a 12 yd gain and a first down. guard could run the ball w/o penalty 'cause after center put on the turf, it counted as a fumble. everybody on the field goes right save for the guard with the ball and a single deep bears safety. we were at the game, so no tv announcers or replay to explain what happened. had no idea what occurred on the field 'til we read 'bout it in the paper the next day. lions were a 2-win team that season. HA! Good Fun!

Unfortunately the adjusted skill levels don't open up the skill perks. So to get that ability you will have to put points into lock pick to get it to 60 without any adjustment. To me it was kind of a silly perk anyway as even if I could see what was inside I still was likely to pick the lock for the experience I received from using the skill, which opened up the container that I could then shift through.

Final Fantasy, BG Series and Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines are just some of the titles that have made more money for their proprietor over their lifetime than their first week of release. Granted - you might say that Troika is no more, but their attention and resources were split in many directions at the time. Underrail is one modern example of an extremely small cRPG - the base game was drawn in MS Paint by one man, that has garnered fan support for 3 years into a financially successful Expansion, only to have the devs announce another unexpected - even for the devs - expansion, precisely because they were so successful. The whole idea of an RPG HAVING to be successful on it's first week is, in my opinion, destructive, because these games thrive off community just as much as they do from sales. But community = sales over time, and you do not suddenly build community, you foster that - gently, slowly, methodically. As much as Josh and Obsidian want to be Cash McGoldnuggetngton, they're not. If they want to be, they have to make a different product. Ones that won't interest you or the rest of the people posting in this thread. To cut all the ramblings out - they're trying to serve the contents of a Michelin medium fillet mignon with the speed of a minute steak down at the bistro. Ain't no body who can do that. Not even Elon ''Broken Glass'' Musk. Now, I am not particularly attached to this opinion, but I just want to make an observation from reading this thread that maybe people are defending Obsidian a bit too much. Reminds me in part of the latest CDPR thing where people are saying that CD will never have microtransactions in their mp games, while CDPR have already put lootboxes in their 2018 mp game.

This is a real play that really happened in a NFL game: 1) What possesses somebody to call a direct snap to a punter who then, with no blockers, fakes like he's going to run it in but instead shovel passes to the placekicker? 2) How in the world did this actually work?

It's the same logic to why Weird Al doesn't generally take suggestions from the original artists for the purposes of his parodies. The only exception I know of was for Like a Surgeon, which happened via a mutual friend.

(sorry for triple posting). Yeah, players don't play separate tutorials. They also don't read manuals. (As someone who loved the thick Ultima manuals with their art and bestiary, the decline of rich RPG manuals makes me sad and is one reason why I backed so I could get a cloth map.) There's a reason why so much info gets stuffed into loading screens. Codexes are alright, but none of this is really relevant because at this point we're just talking about people who have already bought the game and are playing it. I'll admit I'm the worst judge for how well mechanics are explained, since I would be happy if the game just shows you all the equations it uses, so I don't know what necessarily puts people off or not. Though frankly if millions of people could figure out THAC0 in the infinity engine games, I don't see why they couldn't also get anything about Deadfire (except maybe inversions).

Huh, I would have taken it as a sign to stop checking email. But then I tend to take any excuse to ignore people, no matter how flimsy. (can't assist with the mission, barely remember anything about specific assignments)

The game is very good, but I expected something better. Still Fallout NV is my favorite Obsidian production. The plot and dialogues should be more refined. I still play, but I try not to abuse the save as in Fallout 1 & 2

Sestak is out. Never heard of him? Probably why he's out. So... what? 17 now? https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/elections-2020/former-pa-congressman-joe-sestak-exits-presidential-race/ar-BBXC296?ocid=spartanntp

Good news: yes. As a matter of fact, that’s all you can do. When you import save you import choices, but not the character. Even if you import your save, you still go through character creation, and whenever you stick to PoE1 (like I did!) or create/modify your character is up to you.

Steve Bullock is out of the race. He is the only Jacksonian Democrat that was running. Hell, he's one of the few left in existence. I would have voted for him had he been nominated. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/dec/2/steve-bullock-democrat-ends-struggling-presidentia/?utm_source=onesignal&utm_campaign=pushnotify&utm_medium=push So the Dems have just one chance to get my vote: Tulsi Gabbard. I'd still vote for her despite some recent misgivings. The rest of them? No chance in hell.

Sherlock Holmes: The Secret of the Silver Earring. This point n click places fairly highly on the pixel hunt scale. There are tons of really small objects in the scenes to find. Admittedly, that is very much on brand, given that this is a Sherlock Holmes game and part of what made Holmes such a good detective was the ability to notice small details others would overlook. I have to say, I really enjoy the voice acting for Holmes and Watson. The other characters are hit & miss (more miss than hit), but the 2 main characters are well voiced.

I'm not sure I have that much to add to a 10 page thread that's all speculation, but here are my guesses / grievances: There's very little about the game that's joyful. Stupid little jokes that you put in for the player to see. I'm not sure that a ton of people had fun making this game. The adventurer portraits in BGII, the Bob Newhart(?) tasloi autograph in BG I, the rug in the city tavern in Pathfinder Kingmaker, the Wild Wasteland Perk in F:NV, the 30s preacher clips in Wasteland II. Other than the unique way of assassinating a pirate, I don't see a whole lot of that in this game. It didn't give a large part of its audience what they wanted. Many players just wanted a 3.75 campaign, complete with cartoonish characters, vancian casting, rounds built in, power treadmill etc. Something Josh mentioned is that Pathfinder Kingmaker sold more than they did. I am currently playing Pathfinder Kingmaker, and am deeply unhappy with some parts of the game and while other parts are pleasant and innovative, but I recognize it as giving those players what they want. Apparently that works. It's worth pointing out that the Pathfinder devs. have separated from their publisher, so it probably didn't set the world on fire either. The combat lacks variety of player actions. It seems like Josh's reaction was to criticism was to hack out any attempt at a strategic layer, particularly the rest, health, and Vancian casting. The problem is that for any players preferred party this creates an ideal economy of actions with few at all differences in each fight. This had not one, but two negative side-effects: Wizard spells got the oomph taken out of them (which a significant minority of players expect, right or wrong); now you can do the same actions over, and over, over again, every fight. It made battles almost algorithmic, certainly some were tedious. This is really significant, because one of the reasons Josh took prebuffing out is that it made certain actions feel superfluos and game-y; with the new system it made all of combat that way. Related, but different. The combat lacks dynamic range. Since there's no Vancian casting / strategic layer, the very little difference between the mobs in place and bosses, and I didn't feel like we got proper boss fights until the end game boss and Forgotten Sanctum. No easy fights means not getting to see your power grow, but it also means there's a very tight limit on how difficult the bosses can be. They responded to this criticism with soulless, narrative free 20 minute boss marathons. The game is not very ambitious. They already had the changes they were going to make in mind and partially implemented when they went to kickstarter. Like dual-classing, full VO, and character portraits. That's all well and good, and the portraits and dual-classing made the game more interesting. Josh talks about why on his tumblr. The plot is just not great in Pillars II. It (and the limited advertising) misleads you into thinking it's a vengeance plot, when it's a pilgrimage plot. It was short-sighted not to let the players try to fight Eothas. Furthermore, it's superfluous compared to the much better, much more interesting faction mechanics. The characters are just not great, particularly the new ones. Very few of them have actual dilemmas in their personal quests. Very few of them have good reasons for joining or staying with you. They don't have a funny character (Eder is working overtime to fill different narrative roles.) A lot of people bought Pillars I, played it before Whitemarch was released and walked away unhappy. Whitemarch really should have been a standalone game like Dragonfall. The difference with the DLC is astonishing. It needs more content. About 10 more islands, maybe 15. Obsidian seems stuck in a place where they're having a hard time doing short (under 3 paragraphs), atmospheric story-telling. TToN, which had many other problems was better about this. Pathfinder is very good at this. BG I is the master of this. Obsidian has been working on shoestring budgets for so long, that they might have forgotten about the thrill of exploration and running across tiny little pieces of flash fiction in the wild. All this said, I liked the game quite a bit on my one and only playthrough. I think it's probably the most polished and well-put together crpg of the new era that I've played so far. However, I'm not going back and replaying it. For one or all of the reasons above I had 500 hours in Pillars I and 100 in Pillars II.

Now I have to buy a controller and play this again! Damn you! If only they would release a remasterd version like they did with DS1 and I could mouse and keyboard it but hey it's Dark Souls, worth a new piece of equipment!

Cheers!

I only like Ignis/Ardyn DLC but I really need to finish Prompto/Gladio's on PC to get the rewards. Pah. At least it's awesome-looking at times on the 4k TV. Or maybe it's just Aranea that is awesome. I hate the freaking snowmobile (any major dmg. taken knocks you off of it and it takes forever to get up/get back on the thing) so I just run on foot and jump off the cliffs.