Orchomene

You can be a marchant too in M&B. Did you bought the first one or M&B:Warband. Because the second one is a bit more guided and has some quests that allows you to have a less tough learning curve. Warfare simulation is very impressive in this game.

At least, some way to oriente the player to Nelson.

Seeing it's done by Bioware, I already doubt the result won't be broken : you either are friendly totally or totally antagonist with someone else nothing will arrive. I've never seen one of their games where a relationship mechanism is not extreme. The concept might be interesting, but the result is what is important. You may be confident, I'm not. I may become a bit more if the friendship/rivalry is not just another light/dark side, that is, if you can build relationship based on both friendship and rivalry as you can expect it to be possible.

Unarmed is really powerful, indeed.

I don't think that DRM has any effect at all on piracy. You can always crack a software whatever the protection put in it. It just gives the feeling to crackers that there is a challenge. Only uncrackable softwares are the one you don't have an access to.

Um, I follow the law because of my morals, not to fit in with society. I'm not sure how that is strange. My argument was meant to be moralistic, that is kind of the point. I've already apologized if it sounded condescending. But you are supporting one of the basic arguments against piracy that many of us have gone on about. If you can afford a PC, you can probably swing some money for a game. Excuse me if I wasn't clear : I'm against piracy because this cuts the pay for the developers, designers and producers. But I don't find that anti-piracy politics are good. I think the best solution is finding another to get paid for the work involved in the creation of the software.

If you are an EU lover, you can find all the versions from EU (0.89 euro), EU II (3.00) and the following titles at gamersgate this week. Very interesting if you have an old PC and wants to find very good strategy games a bit dated.

In most countries, you have three days to reject a buying contract. So you should get a refund. Otherwise, you can just call your bank and block the transaction.

Not at all. In some european countries, it's not a crime. What is criminal is pirating a game and upload it for others : that's considered forgery or illegal distribution. Of course, that means that Torrent process is subject to criminal behaviour in case of pirated games because you do both by default (download and upload). But a direct download is not. Your radical conception of piracy is largely not accepted worldwide, even less in Asia than in Europe. Edit : It is condescending and moralist to tell younger that they will regret pirating games. I'm 34, I've never pirated any game nor downloaded illegally music because I either had no money so no computer at all or I had money to buy a computer and thus bought games too. But I don't see where the moral takes place here. Do you follow the law because of your moral or because you think that following laws is part of integration inside a society ? If this is because of moral, then you have a very strange moral, indeed. Piracy is bad not because it's theft (which is absurd, thieving means that you remove from someone the possibility to use what you have stolen) but because in the economical model used in the gaming industry, the only way the actors of production (I mean producers, developers, designers,...) get paid is buy selling the licence allowing other people to use the software. There are other economical models. If you download freely the software to run WoW, there is no issue with the actors of production since it's by a monthly fee they get paid. Other receive money gifts, other receive public funds. In research, mathematics and algorithms can not be licenced. That means the mathematician that took 10 years to develop a robust algorithm get nothing from it whereas the developer that implements it on a computer language in six months can get all the benefice. Do you think this is a valid model ? Absolutely not. A lot of professions get their pay by other mean than assuming property of something immaterial. Someone here talked about an economical law. There is such an economical principle that states the price of a product asymptotically converges toward the price of its support. That means a music DVD price will end at the price of an empty DVD. That also means the price limit for a software on internet is the connection price. There is no way to fight against this rule and the pathetic attempt of the game industry or more generally the entertainment industry to fight against it is the wrong reaction. A good reaction is the adaptation of the situation and find another economical model. Who are the software winners of the last ten years ? Facebook and Google. Do they charge their customers for the software licence ? No. If you want to know who will be the winners of the gaming industry, have a look at the new sites that propose playing games without install and with poor hardware resources. They are offering what will be some day the only way to reach the game service : you don't see the software but can play it. You don't need to pay a regular update of hardware. You don't pay per game, you pay just a fee to have access to a collection of games. Just like a lot of TV business models.

You may want to check this one : did you download a direct dll or the tool that builds the dll based on you GPU configuration ? Because if it's the former case, it can have some weird effects on the gpu usage since the game will mistakenly identify your graphic card. See Nexus download comments : http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34778 and also this http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34970

Sure, you can use magic without the robe and hat, but it limits you greatly when you know that robes and hat will give you in the end each +40% in magic and you will even be restricted in the effect of your spells with such bonuses. (Not entirely true, only if you go outside the "cheesy spells route"). All in all, I feel a bit deceived with the lack of balance of magic because the system itself is pretty inventive and allow on the paper a lot of possibilities. Too bad that most of the combinations end quickly as unplayable one. Oh, I forgot one of the main issues I had against magic in this game : every hit you take makes you loose concentration. In some fight, you have no choice but to revert to use your staff as a direct weapon or you end dead because the enemy won't allow you to launch even a quick defence spell.

Yeah, she even named her son Chris. Chris Avelline...

In fact, this system is a bit broken. If you try and make complicate spells, you end up crafting spells that cost you 4000 mana, knowing that mana regen ability allow you to regen 100 mana per second. That means you need to wait for 40 sec to replenish your mana for a spell that is not even that effective. On the other hand, if you put a spell that uses : - projectile with empty effect, aiming, forking into 12 projectiles => no cost - area of effect at projectile contact doing water damage => cost is only for one projectile. That means that you end up launching 12 area of effect spells for the cost of one ==> over powered. Books are only a problem at the beginning. During chapter one, you will find more or less all the books exploring the island. It's as much of an issue as for ranger skills or warrior skills. You are not limited to the first 3 slots of the quickbar. I know it's not explicite in the game, bur you can assign your spells all the ten quickslots. But in the end, as explained above, you end up with not so many useful spells (for offensive spells) as damage dealers : drains to recover health, elemental damages with area of effect coupled with aimed projectiles and some low level summoning (otherwise it's too expensive) used as barriers. Of course, you can also use a heavy-mana using mage and stack on potions, but it becomes quickly boring and quickly expensive.

I've been a bit deceived by Two Worlds 2. The beginning is good, but it becomes less and interesting as the story progresses. Also the magic mechanic is a bit unbalanced. What didn't help was the awful voice acting in the french version, I regret to have taken this version of the game, but thought that a european game would be able to manage localization properly. I'm now enjoying a lot Divinity 2 : DKS.

I'm confident with the Witcher 2 and thus preordered it. Of course, if the game ends being as bad as a new Bioware games, I will just remove this confidence for following games. In the result, I've preordered The Witcher 2 and can't even imagine preordering DA2.

Piracy is theft only if you accept the concept of intellectual property. This concept is not universal and too specific to western culture. To my knowledge, there is no intellectual property in China. About producers, in science, editors take all the intellectual property rights of an article when accepted by a journal. Thus, illegal copies are found everywhere in science laboratories and no scientist cares about having someone copy an article instead of buying it. It's of course a limit in the publication system since scientists put their own articles on their sites wth some changes in presentation (as it is, the property is valid only with the formatting of the publisher and changing it before puting it on a url is legal). I don't dowload pirated games not because it's immoral (I don't consider intellectual property as a valid concept, it's a property put on immaterial product), I don't do it because I consider the developers and publishers should receive funds to go on developing. Would someone put a game freely on a website with a possibility of getting money by subscription or any other mean, I would give money if I download the game to encourage such practice and to allow the one that does that to earn money with their work.

Piracy is not like stealing a book, more like doing a photocopy of a book. Moral judgements based on property are essentially artificial when considering intellectual property. It's too highly subjective and I'm sure that some people thinking that piracy in video game is stealing would consider that producing cheap drugs in poor countries without respect to the licence of big drug companies is totally justified. Whereas it's globally the same thing. The business model is somewhat including the piracy effect in countries where the product is absurdly expensive. There are not a lot of choices : - basing price on the richness of the population and provoking a "leaking" effect (people would command video games in poor countries at 1$ the game) and smuggling - basing price at world level and thus having piracy. What is important at production level is that the earning is exceeding the development cost. This is achieved by selling a certain amount of products that contain the 'amortisation' (don't know if this is the good translation) cost. Then they lower the price (like in high tech market, see computer hardware, LCD, cell phones,...) and increase a bit their earnings because the material part of the product is very low compared to the immaterial part of it. Thus, piracy is stealing only if you would have bought the product but chose instead to pirate it. So, in western Europe, Commonwealth, US, Japan, ... where the market price is not of the level of a salary. This is this form of piracy that is destroying the video game industry. Whereas in countries where salaries are at the level of the video game price, there is no real market and the choice is between almost nobody playing the game or piracy. As a producer or developper, I would rather have people in this situation pirating the game than not playing it for explainable reasons : developer would be happy that more people enjoy the game they put effort in and producer would be happy to know that the image of the company could develop in a country that may tomorrow become a real market. Imagine : 100 millions of people in China pirating FONV and in ten years, with the current development in China it can become 100 millions of new buyers of an Obsidian video game. So, for me, piracy is inherent to the immaterial products market. It's a smoothing mechanism in a world with such economical contrasts (or inequalities, if you want to had a judgement).

Playing Divinity 2 : DKS. Ego Draconis part is easier than it used to be a year ago. I don't really see much difference at the moment but I'm still in the beginning. Graphic has been enhanced though and the game runs smoother. I think it's a better investment than Two Worlds 2.

Just finished Two Worlds 2. Pityful ending with a boss fight very arcade-like. I didn't know you could ruin the feel of a game with just a bad ending. Anyway, without the ending, the game is just above ok. After the part in the marshes, you can just stop playing. By the way, if you didn't play it, Divine Divinity is a good game.

Eschalon book 1 was ok, but lacked a bit of interest storywise, I've not tested the second one yet. Difficult to recommand something without knowing what you have already played. Gothic 4 is not that good, worse than Two Worlds 2 (at least for me). King's bounty is good if you like turn-based strategy games with some rpg aspects. Of course, you can check GoG for games. Mount and blade Warband is very good if you like sandbox games. Very serious in its medieval warfare aspect. Other than that, I don't see many things.

Pre ordered on GoG too.

I would really appreciate to see an expansion like the Night of the Raven (I think that's the name), the expansion for Gothic 2. It added content all through the game, like the game was just larger in itslelf. It felt like it was just one big game and not some added content next to the story.

I'm also convinced that Merlin is the inspiration for Gandalf. And Merlin is of course inspired from the druids, so you are both right. I would really appreciate to see armors and weapons that reflect some kind of practical sense. I mean, for a dinner, you can wear inpractical suits, but when you have to fight, you would avoid having a 50 cm shoulder protection with spikes, just to avoid being wounded by your own armor or even just unbalanced by the lack of symmetry.

Nothing like a decapitation with spiked knuckles.

Magic system is pretty impressive in Two Worlds 2. Some quests are interesting in the city but not that much in the first ten hours. Most dungeons are pretty short, which is for the best, at least for me. But I still think it's lacking something, don't really know what. Maybe some motivations to follow the story.