Humanoid

Good enough for me. Was going to do it together with that Darkest Dungeon game, but still waiting on news of alternate distributions with that one (saw a dev post saying news expected later this week). P.S. Since KS handles the payment system for Zaharia internally, and given the recent breach, remember to untick the "remember card details" on the checkout.

I have the Sandisk Extreme II which is more or less the equal best SSD with the 840 Pro as my system disk. The Steam drive is a 840 EVO, and the other games drive is a Crucial m4. All are 240-256GB models, as is the drive I'm considering installing, which would be the slowest of the lot, a Sandisk Ultra Plus (a budget drive). If I do it I guess I could boast about having a terabyte worth of SSD.... but for now I just shunted about 8GB of games I don't play onto another drive. Took less than a minute, so it'll do for now until the next round of games to install.

Giving Skyrim another, perhaps final go, with the Frostfall and Realistic Needs mods to turn it into a sort of equivalent to NV's Hardcore/Josh mode. Haven't decided on what the character direction will be though, am in town and haven't levelled yet so all avenues are open. Already did my archetypal thief in a previous game, so it'll have to be something different. - thought about going heavy weapons, 2H hammer only berserker, but am concerned about carry weight issues with the modded version, what with all the food, water and miscellaneous supplies. Half-tempted to buy Saints Row 4, which is ridiculous because I only slightly liked the previous game (quitting after act 1). But it's on the Humble Store sale, so I can get it guilt free. And while I'm typing this, it looks as if the download of the latest Wasteland 2 beta has failed because my Steam SSD is full. . I actually have a couple of new SSDs on my desk, but they were meant to be installed in new systems I'm building in a month or three's time, but hmm.....

Do let us know how it goes before the early bird tier runs out. (I backed Unrest too, probably to an unreasonable amount given the project scale, but a large part was sort of a personal favour to the writer)

Yeah, most brands carry a few IPS panel-equipped models, but often they're for the premium business/workstation oriented models towards the top of the range. The vast majority still carry awful 1366x768 TN panels, the lowest of the low. Perhaps ironically, the smaller displays are more likely to carry good quality screens with reasonable pixel density. With only a few exceptions, 15-17" laptops have the worst displays. A PS4 will save you money because there aren't any games to buy for it.

The short of it is that hardware manufacturers are filthy lying bastards. Rebranding is rampant, where previous generation cards are relabelled to appear to be current-gen, additional dead-weight memory is added for no purpose other than to look good on a spec sheet, and they use the same model numbers as desktop models while performing at a fraction of the speed. They even have fake generations just to look better (e.g. the nV GT300 and AMD HD8000 series, these exist solely to exploit the "number is higher, so must be better" class of customers). There's some advice about naming schemes above, but just bear in mind that fundamentally the names are based around desktop models. There's a lot more gotchas and deliberate obfuscation in the mobile area. In the event a mobile GPU shares a model number with a desktop one, halve the expected performance as a rough guide, at *best*.

If your usage pattern for a tablet is media-heavy then you'll likely want a tablet with a (micro-)SD card slot. The Nexus 7 is not one of those tablets.

Yeah, it's Steam plus a choice of either GOG or Humble Bundle, manual request by emailing them. The latter option was only added recently, and since I didn't request a GOG key last year, I ended up requesting a Humble key. I didn't originally bother requesting one because they hosted a DRM-free version on their own site, but have just announced that they'll stop doing that since the other places do it better.

GMG's "Australia tax" code brought the price down to the US RRP, but the thing is, GMG essentially always have a minimum 20% off code already, which can't be stacked. So the actual net price still wasn't terribly competitive. But yeah, I'm of the position that retailers should always be able to set their own price regardless of whether stuff is sold under the wholesale model or the agency model, which includes crap like how Miele appliances are priced in department stores.

I wouldn't have thought they'd have resisted all that much in the first place, after all, a 30% cut to them means the higher prices also represent more money in their own pockets. But yeah, I'd love it if the EU stamped out this effective price fixing occurring under the guise of agency agreements. Someday. If I was being super optimistic and naive.

They're also offering GOG or Humble copies on top of the Steam codes, which is even better - despite the recent regional pricing shenanigans of both companies. Thing is, had they asked yesterday I would have requested GOG, but now both are the same in terms of that policy, so it's six of one and half a dozen of the other in that regard.

Yeah, I'd like to see them have some structural separation to ensure the slippery slope is not a problem that they slide down. If they have all these titles in one basket, new and old, restricted and fair price, then it's far too easy to hide one change amongst thousands. Create a new site, GoodNewGames or whatever, with its own address and front end for this kind of thing. At the very least a commitment to put an obvious notice "Note that the price of this title has been set according to our regional pricing agreements" on affected titles should be the least they could do. Needing a third party site to track the differences would be another regrettable Steamism (steamprices.com) - bowing to contractual obligations is one thing, purposeful obfuscation with the intent to ensure the ongoing ignorance of the customer base is quite another.

Thing is, the regional pricing of The Witcher 2 was defeatable by simply changing the country field in your user profile. If I have to VPN in to buy from GOG, I'm not going to be pleased and seek alternatives. I mean even bloody Amazon doesn't do geolocation.

Hm. What game exactly allows you to rest right before facing a boss but after taking out the trash? (honest question, I don't know) I agree with you that this is frankly stupid and should result in either the villain fleeing or a not-so-surprise attack on the resting party. This also rests on the assumption that the player knows in advance that the next portion of the instance cointains the boss fight. This is either a result of metagaming or of signs placed there on purpose to inform the player. Very little that devs can do about the former, though. The more freedom the player has to choose, either in non-linear gameplay or simply character customization, makes it a lot more difficult to know what sort of resources a player has available. Some solutions have been attempted, such as scaling/modifying encounters based on character level, which has mixed results in my experience. Yep. I'm also wondering how approximately should devs consider the amount of resources a player has at a given point—for instance, Kangaxx in BG2 is accessible in chapter 2, but without resorting to cheap ass tactics that exploit design flaws, taking a shot at him straight out of Irenicus' dungeon is... not recommended. That's basically the devs throwing an encounter in there without any regard for the player's resources other than "it's doable with the stuff you can find throughout the game". And it works beautifully. Why do all encounters have to be tailored around the perceived power level of the player? I hate that. Wasn't resting any time you like a key 'feature' of every single IE game? Which brings me to the stated example of BG2. Something like Kangaxx is illustrative enough as a single-encounter segment of content. Exploitative behaviour aside (was it the one you could run in and out of the room without him following you?), you either have the power to beat him, or you don't. You don't partially beat him up, rest, then continue on with the job. And Irenicus' dungeon itself is a good example of a too-long dungeon, it should be balanced so that you finish it without resting, because you shouldn't be able to rest there. The point is whether it's Kangaxx or a Irenicus' Dungeon, each represents a unit of content that, to be remotely believable, should be tackled in one go. It's just that a designer has more freedom in that being optional and off the critical path, it can be tuned to whatever power budget desired as long as that budget can be realistically met while the content is available. Aside, the most absurd example I have of stupid resting mechanics is the last game I played, Might and Magic 10. The final boss was designed around you resting *while* fighting him. A boss that hovers around firing shadowbolts at you while you try to assemble the deus ex machina, but I guess you can ask him to kindly stop shooting for 8 hours while you have a nap.

I don't know how true it is, but I assumed the cost cutting measure comes from decoupling the spoken lines from the conversation. Which is, er, an confusing turn of phrase, but what I mean to say is that you can construct the option-response trees without having to worry about doing any matching. You can do the final writing and voice recording dead last in the production process if desired, and you can get away with a lot less communication between the teams since you can have the actors basically say whatever they like, since even if it's Dadaist gibberish it's still having no effect on the conversation outcomes. It kinda reminds me of the filming style long in vogue in Italy where there was no sound recording on set and all the actors were expected to just flap their mouths a bit, what they were saying could be decided afterwards. Although it's at the same time both similar but potentially the inverse of what's going on with the wheel.

The thing is, nameless mooks have their purpose, which is to weaken the player characters. But the notion of rest and regenerating resources render them completely obsolete in one fell swoop. The 'boss' or whatever sole plot-relevant enemy in the dungeon (I use the term broadly here) sends them at you so he himself can fight you when you're not at full strength. But now all those random guards' deaths were in vain, because what does the player do? "Ok, we're at the boss, time to rest so we can fight him at full strength." The entirety of the previous section of the game has instantly become completely pointless and may as well not exist. It's like engaging in foreplay but then sleeping overnight before doing the deed in the morning. Geez.

How would Obsidian be able to do a Star Trek game if they're opposed to having the captain romance anyone?

Even then I still think it's more a criticism of the encounter design rather than of Vancian magic systems. The level designer ought to know approximately what sort of resources are available to the player and should budget out the encounter design accordingly.

I had typed "Rest as part of beating content is a stupid concept in an RPG, if the player ever needs to regenerate their resources in order to get through a given area, then that area was created poorly and serves no purpose but to contemptibly waste the player's time." Then I realised I wasn't in that thread. But it's easier to type this text disclaimer around the statement rather than rephrase it in milder terms. EDIT: I'll elaborate anyway though. Rest to defeat fatigue should only happen in safe places. Rest as a method of recovery should only happen at home or in a hospital, both under supervision. Content should never be designed around expecting either case to be required, and if a chunk of content ends up requiring rest to get through, then it's a sure sign it's too long as a result of having been divvied up badly, needing to be broken up into multiple parts that are designed to be tackled separately, or that there are too many pointless encounters in it. To do otherwise is to put lipstick on a pig, the pig being that maligned but admirably more honest "hey we can't pace content" design of passive full resource regeneration.

I don't think I can answer the questions as presented in the survey itself, but the notion itself is worth discussing here. Do I like SRPGs? Well, yes and no. I like some games that can be given that label, but I think the term itself is contradictory and that if a game was made with that literal goal in mind, it would be a bad game. A strategy game thrives on challenge and having the smarts to beat the metagame, it's about optimising your play to have the best chance of winning. An RPG neither needs nor wants any of those things. The player's actions are determined by what's interesting and what's in character, and those actions are sometimes, or indeed almost always, not the optimal one. So yeah, the good titles are good not because they're SRPGs, but because they're not RPGs. They're just strategy games, being about as much of an RPG as Civilization, or Starcraft. Being kind, I'd say the only distinguishing feature is the notion of unit persistence such that one redshirt isn't the same as the next, but that's not so much RPG as plain old common sense design.

I was trying to remember the games I've played through more than once, but it turned into trying to remember games that I finished in the first place. As games get near the end, I tend to simultaneously run out of momentum - kind of like "I've seen all this game has to offer, that's enough already" and abandon it. And I do this for games that I *like*.

Dog Armour DLC, get on it.

I did no group content at all during my time in TOR so I'm amazed that crowd control gets used at all. By the end of my time with WoW it certainly felt like an obsolete concept except for a few novelty fights.

I don't see why we need to stop at "Star Wars is a bad RPG setting". Star Wars is just bad, everything about it, it's just a terrible property that should have been forgotten in the year that spawned it. Then repeat that sentence and replace all instances of "Star Wars" with "Lord of the Rings". P.S. Superheroes are a dumb concept.

Wheels make me think of Oblivion dialogue, which is frightening. I appreciate that some options won't be the essentially lucky dips in which you hope the actual response matches what you think it was, but delayed tooltips? Eh, Human Revolution did it better by just instantly displaying the first like of the response verbatim. I'm mixed on the greying out of dialogue options. From a purely idealistic point of view, they shouldn't be there, but that only holds true as long as every conversation where you could reasonably apply conditional dialogue actually has conditional dialogue. The flaw with that thinking is that most often that kind of option is restricted to a few NPCs, often arbitrarily, and so you come back with a completely different character and find that nine out of ten NPCs present exactly the same unchanged dialogue. In that case I'd say I support showing the 'hidden' options. I do, however, feel that you should be able to select the options anyway even if it's a guaranteed failed check. Failure ought to always be an option. New Vegas let you do it, but to a very limited extent, mostly used for humour - it's a start but it could be so much more.