Humanoid

I love GOG and normally encourage people to throw their money at them, but if cash is tight then Gamersgate currently have *all* the IE games plus ToEE for $6.78. http://www.gamersgate.com/DDB-DBAMC/dungeons-and-dragons-anthology-the-master-collection Disclaimer: I've never used Gamersgate and am not sure to what extent the games in this collection are tweaked to run in modern OSes.

The "too big" issue applies to more than just the planets overall, it's there on a much smaller scale, in most of the architecture. A lot of indoor places like the bars have large swathes of empty space dwarfing the fairly sparse furniture and decorations - it's like every bar is actually a dance hall.

Huh, didn't know there was a second t-shirt, don't see any mention of it in the update. I see it's on the main project page now, but no image loading. I upped from $65 to $95+25 about a week ago for the fuzzy feeling - it wasn't fantastic value previously - but now it seems a real sweet spot with Dragon Commander included (I know nothing about that game though). Guess I'll be nice and get the second shirt on top. The poster, eh, I'll have a think about it depending on how close we get to the 800k goal.

Ohhh, so that's what those speech bubbles mean. Can't believe I've never noticed that.

More specifically, grab the HD version if you want to play MP against other people on Steam, or, I suppose, if you want the Steam Workshop integration. Otherwise pick up the UserPatch which is, if anything, more polished than the official HD version. And even if you decide HD is for you, be aware that the multiplayer portion of it is the most problematic at the moment, particularly with regards to lag. EDIT: Not sure about the audio problem, modern drives should be able to send redbook audio fine through digitally - that's why the additional cable was removed, after all. (You can play regular music CDs right?) You might want to double check that the "enable digital CD audio" setting is on, depending on OS.

I have no specific objection against the idea of optional companions, but I do have concerns in that it does present a bit of an additional resource sink and creates potential balancing issue. Encounter difficulty obviously, and various quest dependencies either of practical or purely character impact. I guess for a good number of people, the simple existence of companion quests like NV would also create somewhat of an obligation to drag them along for completionist purposes. At the other extreme is the personality-less henchmen concept, such as the one currently being proposed for Original Sin. Ultimately I guess we'd be expecting Obsidian to do a good job with any companion writing, such that it'd be a massive drain if they were designed as supplementary content instead of being core to the game. So in the context of fairly tight budgets, I'd say the all-or-nothing approach holds some appeal there. With a bit of stretching, one could argue that AP's handlers were companions of a sort, always sort of there without being actively involved in combat. Or for a recent example I guess there's Bioshock Infinite, though I wouldn't say that'd be a good implementation for an RPG.

Unfortunately the other day I had a bug I outright couldn't solve. "Fixed" it by deleting the procedure outright and typing back the text into a brand new one from a printout - fortunately it was only a hundred lines or so. My only explanation is some sort of corruption occurring when my editor crashed earlier in the day, as repeated checking showed the procedures were line by line identical.

At this point I don't really mind what setting or themes they go with, but would like their next game to be focused on single-character gameplay given the relative glut of party-based titles arriving within the next couple of years.

Not for much longer though. http://games.on.net/2013/03/bioware-to-shut-down-apac-servers-for-swtor-merge-into-na-servers/

Might be slightly out of date here, but I believe most TVs use PVA/MVA panels instead of IPS. Not necessarily a quality compromise even though it's probably a somewhat cheaper tech - as far as I know the main difference is that though *VA panels have slightly inferior colour reproduction than IPS (still bounds ahead of TN of course), they do have better, deeper blacks, which tend to be important for movies and such. If you are looking for a TV though, I'd still suggest a plasma over any LCD tech. An important thing to note when buying TVs is that, unlike common advice for many other consumer goods, trying it for yourself instore isn't actually the best suggestion. They're set up "wrong", in a super-bright shop mode, usually under very cold fluorescent lighting, with the frame interpolation* turned up to maximum (hence the "soap opera effect", or video camera feel as you say, on the picture). Therefore, outside of specialist stores which set them up properly, reviews tend to be the most reliable gauge for quality. *Frame interpolation is sold under such fancy trademarks as "Motionflow" or "Intelligent Frame Creation", but whatever they call it, it sucks. It basically fakes out extra intermediate frames, typically double or quadruple the original source material, to create a "smoother" image. But a typical movie is shot at 24fps (actually, 23.976fps) and broadcast TV at 30 or 60fps, and we're so used to that that is simply looks wrong any other way. Fortunately it's easily switched off, and should be at the first available opportunity.

What the Mount and Blade team need is a UI usability expert....

Fakeedit: The topic has drifted away from the title a bit (not in a bad way, there's more insightful discussion in the digression), so this post is just a late two-bob, but eh. The Witcher 2, regardless of how one feels about the gameplay, was just about universally praised for its graphics, dubbed the best ever at the time of its release in some circles. The bulk of its sales were on one platform, was relatively modestly priced on launch, may have lost a greater percentage of sales to piracy than the norm depending on your position on the effectiveness of DRM, and overall couldn't be said to be more than a "good" seller. Yet it did more than enough to be comfortably called a success. Trite to say but really the generalised topic is that high expenses are killing the games industry. The reported 1000-strong team working on the Assassin's Creed franchise. The whole Amalur farce. All Points Bulletin. U Draw. That said, 3D games probably reached the point where I would say I was happy with as the status quo about a decade ago. For 2D, in the late 90s.

I don't mind messing around with a game like that, but it's not something I necessarily expect. It's merely a writing issue in terms of resources, and there's a line beyond which it's not possible to cover off the range of possibilities. In the end I'd feel the best way to imagine it is as if you had a pact with the writer: they provide you with the full range of responses to any path of action that you might reasonably take, and in return you roleplay in a consistent, in-character fashion. It's an aspirational goal obviously and not something that will ever be truly met, but I'd be satisfied with any sincere effort in this direction. As per some of the examples above, you have, say, Torment reasonably not permitting you to realistically challenge the Lady's authority. There's no reason to randomly murder Anderson in Mass Effect. To kill Lord British, easter eggs aside. In all cases I'm perfectly fine with not having the option to do any of those, no matter how it's implemented programmatically, because I feel it's unreasonable to expect the writer to have to deal with the blatantly out-of-character player. On the other hand we have the cases where a blatantly obvious action is denied by writer fiat. This represents a broken "deal", and given that break in immersion, I, the player will no longer feel obligated to play by the rules, leading to a cascade failure and swift disillusionment with the game. The whole contortionist act of turning you into a Warden in DA:O. The obligation to play along with the Brotherhood in FO3. The shenanigans you have to get into in NWN2 just to get past a gate into another part of the city. The Illusive Man. TL;DR: Reasonable actions should be handled gracefully by the writing team. Otherwise, they can pick whatever resolution they like, be it method 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 2037; though I do feel a preference for the Morrowind approach. Another tangential issue is the continuing fear developers are seemingly forming over the idea that players might not see their precious content. Fear that results in crap like the Rachni queen resurrection in ME3, or the virtual-reality vault in Fallout 3. It's more satisfying to circuit-break, even if the result is a significantly shorter, or even immediately ended game. I'd love the option to end New Vegas by killing Benny, then proclaiming "that's it, I'm done - I'm going back home to California." I've raised this before, but I'm reminded of the initial version of Wing Commander 3 when, midway through the game, Thrakhath tries to goad you into a duel, which was meant to be a no-win situation once you accepted. But it was possible (though never did it myself, so someone correct me if I'm wrong) with a big dose of luck, to kill him in time to make the jump, which ended the game early with victory. Unfortunately I think this may have been misguidedly patched out in later releases.

Think I might give this one final go-around before they get around to shutting down the Aussie servers. Given the circumstances though there's no way I'd even buy a single cartel coin. The line they're trying to sell us is that it would be less detrimental to force everyone off the servers because it would be better received than forcing PvP players onto a PvE server, or vice versa (as for the RP server, I was kind of surprised there was an Aussie one in the first place). It seems disingenous to claim that local players would trade an extra 400ms of latency for that, but that's the narrative they're pushing. Meanwhile, the Oceanic UO server keeps on chugging along, 15 years later.

Freespace, Giants, er, Redneck Rampage?

If you want a rogue specifically for the trap skills Safiya's familiar can detrap etc and you can pick a different class. Having said that, I played a rogue(/swashbuckler, iirc) last time without any problems. Nah, I play a rogue because my preferred RPG class is always a rogue thief. Indeed I pretty much blundered into every trap in the short time I played because I don't have the patience to walk half speed to detect them (and to have to reenable search after every fight). Just a shame that it means I end up being completely ineffectual in the beginning. I assume it's mostly just a starter dungeon thing, but starter dungeons can make or break games, unfortunately. From a gameplay design standpoint, it does make me wonder how much this kind of slavish adherence to rulesets to the detriment of gameplay is down to obligation and how much is just failure to consider.

Following on from a post in another thread (where it was off-topic), I've run into a problem with starting a single player game in Age of Empires 2, post UserPatch. It turns out that the Ubisoft-published "Collector's Edition" implements a community-sourced No-CD crack in order to get around the problem of the game executables not recognising the DVD on which the rerelease is on as valid media. The UserPatch executable, on the other hand, retains the standard CD check and therefore "breaks" the CE release. Now, I only really ever intend to play the game multiplayer, so it's not really unworkable as such, but a trap to be wary of. Additionally, it's also worth noting that the music in the game is present as a Redbook audio track on the CD and therefore does not play on any DVD release. I'm used to playing without the CD since it's never been required for multiplayer, but eh, a lazy effort all-around by both MS and Ubisoft.

Fired up MoTB again and within minutes remembered why I didn't even get out of the starting dungeon on my last attempt, years ago. *Every* bloody thing in that dungeon is immune to sneak attacks. Screw D&D rules, I'd be just as effective waving around soft fluffy cushions as a rogue. Not really having any fun playing as a spectator, so I am once again snookered. Downloading Divinity 2 from GOG now.

Yeah, I'd tend to assume that it's sort of a boilerplate global requirement when any studio, KS-backed or not, deals with Microsoft Games. But it does indicate negligence in any case, either failure to read fine print, or a misinformed (or overconfident) assumption about how far their exemption went. We'll discount malice for now. Random tangent: This week, after seeing the poor reception for AoE2HD, I went ahead and bought a budget disc re-release of the CE (AoE1+2+expansions) for a tenner. The rerelease was published by Ubisoft for whatever reason. UserPatch 1.2 works great by the way.

Things like this will end up pretty awkward logistically too. I mean, I get three copies of the game out of this, nominally the boxed copy, the dogtag copy (even though it's blank it counts as a copy), and the base digital copy. This is confirmed by me getting three Steam keys for the game. But it terms of giving away copies, if the receiving party wanted DRM-free then I'd have to give them access to my HBS website account, or otherwise resort to, ahem, unofficial channels.

This might just be me, but I think Monte may have made a mistake in picking the name. I can't seem to not call it "Nurma-nurma," which makes it somewhat difficult for me to take seriously. And I do participate in a PnP group that I could see possibly playing a campaign in a setting like this. I almost always type it as Numenara before going back and correcting it. :|

Why is that? You can still back the game and get a DRM free version, as well as the expansion, all patches, and even mods. By doing so you aren't supporting DRM in any way, quite the opposite, you are directly supporting the developer and allowing them to circumvent what Microsoft really wants them to do. I think the implication is he didn't back during the actual KS campaign and thus will not be officially given access to the DRM-free version. Did the previous version of the pre-order page state specifically that you'd only be getting a Steam key? It does now. There's a little bit of a gotcha too there I guess, since I assume that previously there'd be an assumption that the pre-order with the dog tags USB key would have the non-Steam game on it.

In context it's understandable, though with the benefit of hindsight given the complexities of the licencing model it's obviously something that should have been cleared up during the campaign. Also raises the question of whether it would be possible to, within the constraints they have, provide an alternate DRMed version which has one-time activation but is not linked to a Steam/Steam-like client. Aside, this bit was weird: "These updates will require Backers to re-download the game from the Harebrained Account Website, since it will not include auto-patching functionality." I hope that means directly downloading a patch file and not the entire package....

I'm kind of the opposite, most of the loot I get is either only incidentally interesting to me, or just filler. I get the hardcover sourcebooks, and I assume I'll read them at some point, but it's pure background as I don't PnP. I get a fifth copy of Wasteland 2 overall so I can, uh, yeah. I don't listen to game soundtracks, don't really have an interest in the novellas, and don't usually bother with pre-release versions of games. Maybe I shouldn't think about this kind of thing too much lest I realise how poorly I spent my cash in objective terms - but nah, the point is that I put in what I think getting a new game of this type is worth to me. EDIT: To kind of illustrate the point, if it was the same cash for a CE box of the game plus a half-dozen T-shirts I'd probably take that one....

Guess that silly petition thing for a Betrayal at Krondor follow-up will be the last we'll hear of it then.