Calax

Oh, I LOVE my history, it's fun, entertaining and amazing.... it's just my English Math and Language that's complete bull**** (I'm about 30 credits from graduation)

I dunno, if he just has that left, things are pretty grim. It's pretty close. I don't trust my parents farther than I can throw them, but am reliant on them for my schooling. I'm 26 and still in college for my 9th year (as my dad likes to keep reminding me so that I don't do anything he doesn't like), I'm barely making 8 dollars an hour, and feel like I'm failing all my classes. Boy what a bright future I have.

Working on finding a therapist... getting some academic disability underway, but last week was just pure hell (four days of work, on top of 5 days of classes... all of which came out to about 40-60 hours of obligations). Add onto that my financial issues, and issues of parents deciding to yank my leash and remind me that ultimately they still have power over what I can do (kinda... if they cut me off I can still go to class, but I'll be a monk in terms of luxuries and what I can do extra-curricularly).

No matter how distasteful a person might be in their personal life (true or not) that does not damage the veracity of their work professionally or the fact that what they might say is or is not the truth based on the evidence available. Basically, just because you think that Julien is a giant douche does not mean that wikileaks and what was placed there are any less true, or necessary (to a degree) for a population within a democracy to operate properly, with an informed voting base.

Ever been standing at a street corner, looking at the cars passing... and have that little voice telling you to just go for it so that you might get some time free of obligations?

Sorta kinda. I'm a lot rougher now and a bit chubbier (put on about 50ish lbs from the photo that seems to have been based on).

You better, or this former superman is going to dust off heat vision and aim them at your gonads

I am very disappointed in you Cant. You don't win the Lottery.

And according to http://www.gladwell.com/2006/2006_02_13_a_murray.html that article, we'd actually save a million bucks if we housed and helped the homeless (this includes the price of the house), JUST in the ER visits alone.

it's from 2008, and even if the chinese are undervalued, we still have them and the world beat by a significant margin.

You realize that Sweden was a military superpower until Peter the Great kicked their ass all over the Baltic right? Also

Except it's not just the Greek issue. It's the Greek, Spanish, Irish, Portuguese, and Italian issue. Greece is merely the first domino to fall and there is a damned good chance that if it takes anyone with it the Euro collapses entirely. Even without that eventuality, the interlocking debt means that a run on one or two key banks will act as removing the keystone on an arch. Still doesn't invalidate what I said about american tax rates.

I was ignoring the greek issue

The name of the country is LIBYA. Geez. Also why does anyone listen to that former crackhead anyway ? Because those who find Rush Limbaugh to be to centerist need somebody to fill their deluded heads. As to captain insano above you... Holder is still an advisor to the president, and while he might not be within the spirit of what you think that the Bush policy stated, he is certainly within the words of that. On the taxes, in the 2010 tax season, the US collected 24% of the GDP as taxes. The only two nations that had lower collections vs the GDP were Chile, and Mexico. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/business/economy/slipping-behind-because-of-an-aversion-to-taxes.html Under Clinton, who had a VERY strong economy, weather you want to admit it or not, we were taxed at about 30%. Under the Bush and Obama administrations, we've raised the amount of spending we do, due to war and other issues, while DROPPING the amount of income our government takes in. The Eurozone, which is doing fairly well right now, has tax rates that are significantly higher than us, even though their gdp and military spending are far lower. As an example, my roommate is norwegian, her father is a EXTREMELY well paid lawyer (as in he'd be a 1% in america) and he's taxed at 60% of his income, because when you get right down to the nitty gritty, people don't need 100 million dollars a year to survive. All that money will do is sit in a corner and accumulate so that some idiot can spend it all after daddy is done. All that money that was "borrowed" to pump into our economy? We got it at a NEGATIVE interest rate. I'm sorry, but I still don't see how Obama is magically to blame for the debt, and by extension, the market crash in 2008, which started all this crap, when he can't even raise the revenue he needs to make the government run properly.

Please explain then, since nothing I've said has a grain of truth to it, exactly how I'm wrong. I'll start with an easy one. How is Obama's claim of EP legitimate if the White House was not involved in F&F. Which Obama EXPLICITLY stated to be the case and Holder backed him under oath IN CONGRESS. And actually, the legislative repeal happened well after the initial trial while it was in the middle of the APPELLATE courts. As for the LCR backing McCain, that's because they think other issues like not adding 6 trillion to the debt in 4 years are more important than DADT. F&F was operated by the ATF, not by the Attorny General, or with the direct authorization of Obama. It was just one of five seperate operations carried out by the ATF in conjunction with the US attorneys in AZ. And Obama was just following precedent set, for good or bad, by his predecessor in terms of Executive Privaledge... namely If Obama's use of executive privileged is invalid, so is the Uses by George Bush. As to the 6 Trillion in debt, how can you necessairly blame that on Obama himself? He's trying to generate revenue for the federal government via taxes, which are the primary form of governmental revenue generation, but is consistantly blocked by republicans because they signed a piece of paper made up by a 6th grader. Everything that has been put foreward by his political opponents has been to CUT taxes, and cut back social spending, which means that people start loosing things that they need to survive because "CAPITALISM!" Also he inherited two VERY expensive wars, that hadn't even been thought of to be paid for by the previous administration, a fundamentally broken economy, and a political landscape so split that he can't even try to compromise because to his opponents "Compromise" is another word for "Give us what we want no matter what". It should also be pointed out that when GW hisself became President, he had the strongest Economy in recent history, and a massive surplus that would have paid the national debt in 20 years.

My point about eternity is that it will change business and the industry should it succeed. Because it'd give the developers a lot more power in their negotiations. I mean people like Tim Schafer and Ken Levine had to leverage their names to get things done (and even then, had to point to something similar to get publisher support), while now, Obsidian is doing it without a publishers support. If a game development company wants to make a project after Eternity succeeds commercially, Publishers might be willing to take a larger chance because otherwise they could entirely loose out on the property. Similarly, if Eternity ends up as Single Player only, and succeeds... it'd mean that EA's scheme of "EVERYTHING HAS MULTIPLAYER!" is flawed at it's core, because people will still buy, and play, single player only games.

http://forums.obsidi...tion=boardrules Hate to say it, but this guy is correct. Most of your shields are breaking the 150 pixel rule.

Side note, apparently the guy from the Lybian embassy who played EvE online was a CIA AGENT because he went on the game rather than calling anyone. According to glenn beck

IWDs and BGs had multiplayer. for me, some of the most fun playthroughs of these games were with a couple of friends over lan (some never playes d&d before). also: spectacularly speculating Yourself into patronizng a great heap of players there! Have you ever watched somebody who grew up on todays games try to play something like BG or Tie Fighter, or Deus Ex? BG just becomes so complicated with the rest system, the dice rolling, the dozens of spells, that they end up throwing in the towel, while the other two just hurt their eyes to even look at. I'm not making the speculation that ALL gamers will refuse to join a game, but the current generation/next generation probably would make for a hard sell. JE mos certainly will not have been the one writing net code. also: i'm fairly sure unity comes with pre-built server-client mechanics to choose from. He'd still have to be balancing the world around the possibility of extra players. I don't know what Unity comes with, but there's still a LOT that would need to be done to get Multiplayer in the game, which means that that's time and energy taken away from other parts of the process. i don't see how 'publishers are forcing developers to add multiplayer to games' has any relevance. i thought that one of the prime perks of kicksarter is that no one can force anybody to do anything they don't wan to do. also: colour me peculiar, but i've acually bought me3 because of how fun the multiplayer thingie is. The publisher forcing devs to put in multiplayer ties into my point below, and ties in here. If there is enough kickstarter pressure then they'd throw in multiplayer to get the money. And yes, you are peculiar for using that word and for the fact you purchased ME3 for it's multiplayer component. what Obsidian is trying to do here is a fun game. trying to make a game for any other reason (eg trying to make the game so it can be different! ) is plain stupid. and i'm willing to bet You that publishers will not 'entirely rethink how they do business'. they publish games where the logo on the box alone guarantees You several hundreds of thousands of sold copies. projects like eternity and wasteland will have had to return several times the money gathered by this kickstarter to make the profit comparable. Yes, they are... but consider these two things. One, the age of the Triple A game is dying. The budgets for what are being released are starting to shrink, and player's aren't making as many purchases as they were before. Right now, anything Obsidian does could still be considered a profit because they're 2 million up from where they were a week ago. And yes, they are trying to make a fun game, but they've also been frustrated by the publishers restrictions and deadlines, so they went entirely kickstarter for this. I mean, recently we've seen Bioshock and Assassins Creed pop up as popular names, because the initial games were actually fairly good. But both of those games were massive chances taken by 2k and Ubisoft, and were quickly taken advantage of by their publishers to spawn larger franchises. Eternity has the chance to re-vitalize the RPG genre, but it won't work if they can't devote the time they want to the player's experience. cans and coulds are funny words personaly, i don't care that much for the multiplayer. i had heaps of fun co-oping through Icewind Dales, but i know i would have none playing multiplayer Planescape: Torment. localization for other prominent languages would most certainly be nice and a decent thing to provide. modding tools are a must! You know what else is funny? Divorcing a sentence from the rest of it's context. My entire point was that the publishers were making games have a multiplayer mode because they look at other FPS's and see the multiplayer aspects as what keeps gamers playing... not realizing that those games (battlefield, Call of Duty and those other hot properties) are almost entirely based on their Multiplayer rather than their single player aspect (Battlefield is one of the more rediculous versions, where the Single Player campaign is buggier than a flea ridden dog), and a game like this or Spec Ops would be single player first, with Multiplayer being the backup.

Raven... no. Just... no. not a single thing you've said has a gem of truth to it except, maybe, the China/Japan conflict, but even that is mostly being dealt with by them, and the Chinese wouldn't do anything that drastic because America would retaliate by killing trade, which would cause China's economy to collapse on itself. As to the Don't Ask Don't Tell. The repeal happened while the Log Cabin-ers were in the courts, and the repeal is part of the entire basis for the democratic platform. It should also be pointed out that the Log Cabin supported McCain who had outright stated that he thought Don't Ask Don't Tell was a perfectly good thing and should stay in place lest our military become one massive gay orgy (ok, paraphrasing). Just because something else was happening parallel to what Obama was doing doesn't mean that something else gets the credit for what Obama did. See also: The killing of Osama Bin Laden NOT being because of the torture of enemy combatants, and the bush policies surrounding that.

Hurlie, I'd say that in order for Obama to have negociated with the other side, the other side had to be willing to do it. Everything I've seen has been that the Republicans have, as a general rule, blocked anything that would have been counter to their personal goals... even in the slightest. Obamacare (a name he likes because Obama Cares...) was compromised on... with the Democrats loosing at least one key part of it (the "Public Option) while the Republicans stated that they got 98% of what they wanted... and were unhappy with what they got. That said Foreign Policy: Obama has been trying to right the US's likability factor among the Eurozone countries, and cut down on foreign entanglements. The Iraq pullout was a good step, and he's generally been amicable to requests by other nations. He hasn't run roughshod over anyone to get what he wanted, so he's managed to rehabilitate the US's image at least somewhat on foreign soil. Social policy: Obama has been incredibly pro gay and pro womens equity. He removed the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy and allowed gays to be instated in the military (which was a hard fought battle) and has been trying to get other things passed, but everything he wants gets either nutered beyond recognition, or just filibustered to death. The Aforementioned Obamacare was one such policy. Security: He hasn't changed much, but contrary to what WoD might say, we could easily afford to drop some of our military spending... but we'd HAVE to revamp how we do purchases and the entire military industrial complex within our country. Gates was attempting this, but I'm not sure how he's succeeded (for the record, the US spends about Half of the ENTIRE WORLDS budget on military). TSA needs to be revamped, and Homeland security probably needs a bit more Umph when dealing with more long standing Agencies (like the FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA... all of them) as it's entire purpose is to make sure that those agencies properly communicate. Economic/Domestic: Everything my economics professors have told me is that he managed to pump enough money into our economy to prevent a full on depression, but was blocked from getting enough in there to get us out of any recession. The "Debt counter" the republicans threw up at their convention was also 50% Bush created, and the two Wars that we got into went almost entirely unfunded, by the Bush admin doing things like leaving them out of the budgets. TARP has been repaid in it's entirety, and we're finally starting to come out of our recession, but if Romney/Ryan's budget goes into effect, we'll be right back where we started. One of the major things drilled into my head here, has been that for an economy to actually work, Money needs to "do work". And having the whole 1% controlling the majority of the US money supply schtick means that not much American money is doing work within America. And while Romney will tell you that he's cutting taxes so people can create jobs, the reality is that people won't create jobs, because those tax cuts won't hit the small business owner.... because any smart small business owner doesn't pay personal taxes, everything is "reinvested" in their small business.

Yes... and no. Project Eternity is shaping up to be a callback to the halcyon days of BG and BG2. And while developers have learned much since then about narrative and mechanics, you're still dealing with a fairly niche market. You probably aren't going to find many of your friends who play more fast paced games like ME or even Dragon Age will be that enthusiastic about buying a game that appears to be built around a slower more strategic style of play. And even then they'll feel like idiots because games like this tend to have MUCH more complicated combat systems than current RPG's. As has been stated, Multiplayer takes time, money, and dev power. All of which will be drawn away from the single player experience. Instead of JE working on how to fine tune the Single Player system so that it's relatively balanced and no one single playstyle will outright murder everything in sight... He'll be stuck constructing p2p contact, the design for how servers will work, and basically building every little thing you need for the multiplayer aspect to be implemented. This doesn't include QA development, or the decision they'll make about dedicated servers or not. It can make the project insanely more complicated. I forget where I heard it, maybe gameinformer, but recently I saw an article in which a dev outright stated that several publishers are forcing the companies to put in play a Multiplayer aspect because of how profitable it CAN be. This usually ends up showing itself most brutally in those games that are shorter, and not "Triple A" titles. And most people won't even use the multiplayer aspect in something like that... as an example, go look at the multiplayer sides of: Homefront Darkness Ace Combat Mass Effect 3 or Fable How popular are they? How much do you think people said "OH SWEET! MULTIPLAYER SUPPORT! I GOTTA GET THAT!"? How much did they actually add to what you're doing? How relevant to the world did they seem? How did the world respond to the addition of a second player who knew wtf they were doing? Also, think about this: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/08/29/spec-ops-lead-hits-out-at-tacked-on-multiplayer/ And consider the implications of what Obsidian is trying to do here. They're creating a project that no publisher would have chased at the conceptual stages. It's to different from the modern paradigm of games, and thus is to much of a chance for a publisher to have even looked at. It was only after the impressive success of the kickstarted that at least one publisher thought it might be worth something. IF this game succeeds, and the Kickstarter manages to fully fund the game and it becomes commercially successful... Publishers will have to entirely rethink how they do business. They'll have to rethink how they choose projects, how they support projects, what a developer can do with their project, how it will interact with the player... because Obsidian will have shown that A) players will support a developer if the idea is good enough B) A developer would have succesfully ignored all the current "rules" of publishers and is getting the full profit potential, and C) that players don't want the "Safe" alternatives... they will support more risky projects, IF the game can be shown to have a good foundation. Also EA would probably reverse it's statement about making "Multiplayer Only" games. Tacking on the time and QA and money required for the multiplayer to work properly, could jepordize the entire success of the project from a commercial standpoint because it could make the entire thing weaker as a whole.

I will say, even though my title won't ever be changed, this thread did make me drop 100 on the kickstarter.

I'm certain that them leaving will have little effect, since their presence in projects has been diminished in the projects since the EA acquisition. My guess is that they were bogged down in the politics ever since then and were just biding their time as figureheads until they could retire. This is pure speculation, though. I think Greg took SWTOR pretty hard (Ray probably did too). Ray's last public communique was the explanation to the ME3 fans regarding the ending. I wonder if that weighed in on it at all. Though Ray's Facebook was already crazy alive with a lot of politically themed posted, so in retrospect I suppose I shouldn't have been so surprised. Greg didn't really surprise me though. Probably. I mean I know I'd hate it when the last three projects I'd made (Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3, and TOR) were all... not considered as great as they should have been by my customers.

Twu Dat