samm

Skylake it will be then, because there won't be any desktop Broadwell parts As far as I'm informed at least.

Chaotic Neutral Human Wizard (4th Level) Ability Scores: Strength- 15 Dexterity- 14 Constitution- 15 Intelligence- 14 Wisdom- 14 Charisma- 16 not really me I think. I'd consider my Str/Con to be (significantly) lower, Int higher, Cha that high only under special circumstances. And with these stats, I'd prefer to be a Sorcerer instead of a Wizard, please CN does not really fit, maybe because I don't like being around my family and keep away from normal people and from beggars? Other than that, I'd consider myself NG. Interesting what people post here for their stats and their toughts about it

I found BG2 horrible even on the first playthrough regarding story motivation and "epic-ness": Ok, so I want to go free Imoen, but I can't really do that fast enough and when I do it's all this god-stuff mixed with everyday trivialities, random **** like flesh-eating gnomes, and every other enemy in TOB is a dragon and ugh... nah, not really anything that resonated with me, all the proportions were skewed. BG1 was much better in that regard. I played a fledgeling hero, there was a sense of discovery, some political motivations in a scope that felt more realistic etc. Ah, I haven't had the chance to play the SSI games yet... hm, even though I think I started a game of Dark Sun in a Dos-box after having played PS:T, hm, yeah, I remember liking the desert setting and wonder about psionics, but somehow I cannot recall anything more of that game... As I said I've only been playing PC games since BG1, so I've missed most of the older RPGs (with the exception two games of the old The Dark Eye trilogy and some others).

I'm a sucker for good narration and atmosphere. So besides the obvious recommendation of PS:T, I'd go for IWD. It's beautiful to behold and to listen to, and it just plays well. Also, it has combat that's as good as it gets in a AD&D 2e game. IWD2 is a bit tedious to play, does not look as good as it should - lots of garish colours, a mixture of aliased and blurred renderings, and nasty contrasts. Also, while in principle the story is interesting as far as the villains' motivations go, it never really gripped me. I've stopped caring for the Baldur's Gate games by now, just not my cup of tea anymore. I've played BG 1 as one of the first games and it really got me into role playing (pen and paper as well), but after a few replays it just feels stale and flawed.

Cultist, bull***, it's not devs, but in typical cases publishers who think that graphics > gameplay Who make devs calculate their peers down to their emotions. A horrible, expensive machinery. Production trumps content, calculaton trumps truth. Interesting to have you post this Bokishi But it does reflect a sentiment that I share: The need for increased budget due to one aspect of a game - graphics - results in an over-mainstreaming of games in general, and loss in terms of gameplay, story, and "true" game design. And if it's not mainstream enough, as is the case in the example of Tomb Raider selling "only" 3.5 million, it hurts game devs. Game development, when speaking of "the industry", seems to have become an affair of tailoring a product to a mass-market rather than creating an interesting, unique game. It is somewhat akin to pop music and the music industry. Fake, plastic, repetitive, dumbed down to the max and in need of a lot of money in order to keep the industry running, along with the massive touting of copyright issues and the enormous lobbying for it. I'm glad that this model seems to be breaking down a bit. There will always be a place for big productions, but the less mainstream games are on a rise. I think this has to do with the bigger consumer base - even if the mass is stupid, there's bound to be more players in absolute terms who value games that give them something more than polished Hollywood feel around an empty shell of content.

Short interlude regarding Steam, as I've been one of the vocal un-happies here: I understand their explanation and feel somewhat sorry for them now Damn Microsoft - at least they didn't force Games For Windows Live upon them and us gamers.

Yeah, thanks for adressing the concerns, mine are gone They were really small compared to the overall very positive impression to begin with anyway, just wanted to add a little substance to my answer. I've always had a good feeling about this game, and by now I am getting quite excited about it - I actually believe it might end up looking and feeling very good indeed I've seen this technique used - it doesn't look good. It tends to make the game feel more artificial, breaking immersion by periodically reminding the player of the game's compromises. Static shadow direction (from the "sun", not dynamic lightsources) is the better compromise (despite including this point in that "minor critiques"-section before).

Yes, I am bashing DLC per se *and* the distribution of DLC. DLC just stands for "constant trickling in of money by constant minor expansions", which an attitude and a way of software, esp. game, development that I despise. Either do expansions properly or else it's a patch for a missing feature. Now they've apparently decided to go with the DLC-flow, I also strongly object to their distribution system of that. There is no contradiction in that, even though I understand why you would point it out And it's not just DLC (which I'm not interested in buying) but also user generated content (which I am interested in) that is to be distributed by Steam only. There's no logical reason for that, unless they've designed their game with Steam Workshop already as a premise, so that it's impossible to for example just put user generated content in folder X to have it imported by the game, or execute "myDLC.exe" to install a DLC. I know the difficulties of distributing software, I'm in software business. Granted, mainly as a programmer in a small office, but at times linked to sales as well. Steam is mostly a good DRM system if you're a developer, you can track your users effortlessly. It's no conspiracy, it's dishonesty about the spirit they spread while pitching their game on Kickstarter.

This was a horrible move from their side Steam is the opposite of "DRM free". The true DRM free copy is only their second choice, and won't be persued further for future enhancements of the games or user generated content. DLCs are the devil. Forcing people to use Steam for DLC and user generated content is dishonest to say the least. I paid for the game so I'll play it, but that was the last money I'll ever throw at that big-publisher-like-minded company. Thank you for nothing, scheming hair breads.

Top notch, esp. impressed by the character's shadow on the stones and the dynamic light floating around, kudos to your engine programmer! And the rest of the team of course :D Criticism: comparatively major: When the character walks down the slope towards the water, he is jittering Grass texture (the static parts) looks ugly, sorry.... Trees' / bushes' movement is jerky The bridge isn't as nicely touched up as it was in the demo rendering comparatively minor: cascade's water fog looks like smoke shadows don't move with "sun" during daylight-changes mentioning IWD2 as quality-bar: There were some pretty horrid aliasing issues, washed out environments and off contrasts in there.

The part about checkdisk finding corrupt files is a very bad sign. In fact, the initial posting and that one about checkdisk sound like a dying hard disk drive. And, maybe, USB drivers. Downloadable from the same place AwesomeOcelot provided a link to. [ot]argh, I can't work with the new "quote"-system...

Despite the "Boost"-feature making most reviews unusable (temperature dependent performance - test in a lab on an open rig improves performance compared to real world conditions) and the borderline dangerous marketing stunts (monitor overclocking - anyone could do that manually before to push the monitor's hardware to its limits, but now it's sanctioned): I think it's an attractive piece of GPU-hardware, thanks to good performance and excellent perf / w. The price is a bad joke of course, but for 450€ I'd have bought it immediately, if I weren't happy with my current card

Firstly, it's its own currency, while with your bank card, you pay in $. Secondly, there are some fundamental differences. As noted above, each bitcoin is uniquely identified, that means contrary to a currency like dollars, they cannot be created from thin air. In contrast, other currencies can: the FED can create dollars directly (by giving free loans to banks or physically printing and giving it away), and banks do create dollars indirectly by only keeping a small percentage of the money really at their disposal as a security while "gambling" with the rest. Example is lengthy, thus in spoiler-tag: You see where this is going to? The system can only work if people actually pay back their loans otherwise: instant collapse, because the VAST amount of money is not actually in existence. This cannot happen with bitcoin - there is only existing money, because each part is uniquely identified, and new money cannot be created from thin air, but it has to be calculated at an ever increasing cost (cost measured in ever increasing computation effort per bitcoin, directly measurable in this case in the form of the bitcoin-miners' electricity bill - and as said before, we're already at the point where electricity to calculate new money is more expensive than the money itself is currently worth.)

Hehe, hawt Rosbjerg http://vimeo.com/59929152

Jup, Bitcoin seems like an excellent idea and, to me, on a philosophical level was an inspiration to think about how money actually works, and could work in an ideal situation. Never thought about that before. JFSOCC's last post sums it up nicely. The bitcoin's inherent uniqueness and their creation algorithm are, even if the current "currency" should become worthless for lack of user's trust in it, a solid base for a future virtual currency (well, what currency isn't virtual anyway...) It already doesn't pay anymore to mine for new Bitcoins using standard GPUs. Don't know if we're even already past the point where specialised FPGAs still afford a net benefit.

They surely did a good job turning a quite intrusive and obnoxious DRM system into something that is perceived as useful, and is even defended by players. Maybe it's an age issue - people too young to realize that a) games actually can work differently, b) games could once be bought from other sources, c) games can be organized independent of such a corporate tool, d) chats and social networks actually work outside this little corporate wet dream universe, and e) what using such a system actually means. It means submitting your money, your data, your possessions, your communication, your relations, information about you, your hard- and software, the organization of your software (and possibly more I that doesn't come to mind currently) under the government of one corporation. Depending on which of Steam's options one actually uses of course. Aaanyway, long rant short: One time online activation has become tolerable to me (as long as there are hackers who'll manage to keep games playable after relevant servers are offline) - anything more is and stays a no-go.

Hm, yes, you two have good points imo, both regarding the game's somewhat casual appeal and the rather tragic layoffs. While for me personally the setting's lack of magic/technology does not matter and the way it mixes genres rather than uphold the barriers is appealing, I can clearly see people being put off by these aspects as well. And a good recommendation with Unwritten! Pledged

Sounds horrible. Sounds horrible. Sounds horrible. Sounds hypocrite considering the aforementioned. Can't quite see why Wildman pledges aren't going up though Sure it's not a high-end title, but it's promising, and Chris Taylor sure knows how to design a good RTS (or action RPG, although that was not quite my cup of tea).

Cannot run this widescreen mod with the 2-DVD-KOTOR-Collection - Securom issue :/ Let's see whether one can get rid of this nuisance of a DRM...

Seeing that Dell may not rely on Intel's illegal founding anymore (Intel for a while payed for literally three quarters of Dell's income in order to have that company not pursue alternate and at the time more viable options xD * ), and they know how to produce pretty good computer monitors: MS branded hardware was always decent, judging from their computer peripherals I've used so far (mice, joysticks, gamepad) and now the Surface tablet and its accessories, so it would be an okay fit imo. Also, as Luridis states, it may help the propagation of Linux in desktop systems (against MS' intents of course), so all in all, to me this looks like a good deal to me *

Yuck, why Ubisoft Good to hear they decreased the aggressiveness of their horrible DRM somewhat. Still considering to buy it as a first (recent) Ubisoft game since Anno 1404 had its DRM removed via patch.

Seems you have more insight on the current situation Thanks for sharing! Regarding VtMB: Not only Havok was used in a sub-optimal way, their version of the Source Engine wasn't really up to speed either Very sensible suggestion However, this is the internet, I'm lazy, already have an account here as opposed to the Unity boards, and google didn't spit out very helpful topics regarding the current state of PhysX in Unity. Only just now found the remark "Physics: Physics simulation is now using SSE2 on windows for better performance and to make simulation consistent with Mac OS X" in Unity 4's change list which tells me that at least nVidia found the compiler flags to get their engine up to the state of the art from year 2003 regarding cpu instruction sets @Adam Brennecke: Thank you for your answer Do you by chance know which version? And will you / the dev(s) responsible for this plan to invest the extra effort to space independent physics related calculations across multiple threads?

Apart from that maximum launch effect there are the following technical reasons that I can think of: it's not like any game just knows what to do with all those sensor readings or how to alternatingly or even simultaneously render from two viewpoints Seeing how hyped press and game devs are about this (Doom 3 BFG was not least released for that, Carmack invested quite some time in the Rift), I don't really worry about content. On the plus side: It's possible, that purely as a display, it might be used by any 3D-display-capable game, because said limitation of two viewpoints has already been solved there. Maybe they'll even ship their own display driver à la 3D-Vision, Tridef or iZ3D (R.I.P.)

Could play avant-garde and order the dev-version right now They ship by May. There's one sensor lacking however (for head movements forward and backward), and the display will allegedly be higher resolution on the end-user version. The end-user version has no date set in stone yet, they want to launch it when enough content is ready - so that could take some time (year, maybe?) I'm pretty hyped about this actually and will probably buy new high-end hardware for that once it's out, get the feeling that one 7970 just won't be enough xD