Humanoid

GOG have done D&D bundles more than once previously (though before they got the rights to NWN2, so that last time was the first time that "full" set appeared). And Zoraptor pointed out earlier in this thread that the Gamersgate pack is literally a bundle of the GOG versions, installer and all.

In for minimum game pledge at the moment, but won't really be something I'll think about until release. April's been by some distance the biggest month so far in terms of throwing cash into KS - between the big three titles alone that's $600+ sunk. Just as well there's nothing major on the horizon, and even on the smaller scale I'm not aware of anything else other than maybe Jim Walls' new Police Quest. Aside, $150 minimum for a box copy? On the one hand it's probably a sensible thing to keep overheads down, but I like my boxes.

I take the one licence is one copy of the game dictate at face value since I don't want to think too hard about lawyerish matters. I do maintain that the licences should be fully tradable though, if not currently in use, hence my offer to Tigs. I don't see it as anything out of the ordinary - I bought both the Witcher 2 digital copy and a CE boxed copy, and when the latter arrived I gave away the key in it to a friend so they could redeem it on GOG. Two licences, two people playing, sunshine and lollipops. Obviously some vendors, notably Steam, make this very hard to accomplish, but it can still be done if you register each game on a separate Steam account.

Back in 2007, by alternately serendipitous or cruel circumstance depending on what day you ask me, ended up co-founding what turned into a WoW raiding guild. I was right on the verge of quitting back then, but as a result ended up playing for almost another half-decade. A bit of an oddity is that due to the opinions of the few various founders, right to the end of the guild's heyday at the close of the second expansion, it was operated without voice chat. Some members used it casually between themselves, but all official communications were strictly text-only. I'll say those were easily my best four years playing MMOs, but I have no desire to ever come back. The flipside, although not a personal disadvantage, is that it does tend to become a fairly insular environment - so after the event, it was pretty much guild activities or nothing.

I think all the questions which were basically rate yourself from 1-4 on each of these glaringly telegraphed stats were rather tedious and pointless. I'm not trying to be a negative nancy - indeed some of the random alignment-type test things can be amusing diversions (and a quick look shows some very familiar-looking questions), but yeah, this just seems to be trying to do a little too much.

Unless you have a different distribution to me, the NWN2 CD-key is on a sticker on the front of the fat manual. (And at 35 characters, probably the longest CD-key I remember seeing) As I have the GOG copy now, I can PM you my original copy's key all legal-like if you wish. And hopefully Feargus won't smack me for denying a sale...

A GW2-type guild system would be perfect for a loose-knit type guild that an Obsidianite one would be. That is, the ability to be in multiple guilds simultaneously, on any server. Still, with only 8 US servers and 3 EU English-speaking ones, still a far less daunting task than if it were, say, WoW.

Dragon Commander is $40 from GOG as well right now, so I assume it's a deliberate pricing strategy.

Bit at Amazon's current Gold Box deal, Hitachi 4TB external drive for $150. $20 shipping to Oz, but eh, I've had a couple boxes of scissors sitting in my cart for a few weeks so the combined shipping works out well. Deal ends on the hour.

The only thing about the X series that I remember is that they had a canned benchmark out of their engine back in, oh, 1998 I think (before the release of the game itself), which may have been the first 3D-accelerated program I ever ran (on my nVidia Riva128, which was a terrible product).

They changed their mind then. In the last update they said that you needed to pledge more than 95 in order to get the free dragon commander. Now you have to pledge to a tier higher than 95. Might seem like a minor change but its 54$ (150-96) if you had no addons and even more if you had addons that pushed you over 95$ I fall into the same category, but I did only skim the text and didn't really think about the literal wording. Heck, I'm actually over $150 but at the $95 physical tier so no DC for me at this stage. Actually what would probably be most efficient for me is to downgrade that pledge on the KS site a bit, then make a separate, additional pledge, for the $65 digital tier on their website via Paypal. Kind of silly on the surface but I have absolutely no interest in game-design type rewards. EDIT: Actually need to register another Kickstarter account instead of the Paypal option since the limited quantity tiers aren't available directly. My economic rationalism is making me jump through all these hoops.

Is it just me or is Tomb Raider permanently listed in the specials section despite not being on special at all? It's been there for a few weeks every time I check, and at full price.

I don't completely understand the problem, but I was under the impression that the reason it didn't work is because it was missing that additional cable. The game doesn't seem to know how to use the audio from the CD like it did for CD drives. Nor have I ever met someone who got around the problem, short of simply ripping the audio data and manually playing it...which is what I ended up doing. Wasn't able to check myself, but remembered to ask my sister who has my original CD - she gets music just fine with the UserPatch installed. Win7, fairly standard hardware and definitely no analogue CD audio cable. On the other hand, I've just re-installed the newest release of the patch and at the installation menu you can manually add music tracks to the game.

And the male character lacks the stubble part of "all video game protagonists should be white males with brown hair and stubble". That, or a chainmail mankini.

I used to be one of those types of people, but only during IWD2's development.

Obviously the solution is to have two 27" screens, one 1080p and one 1440p, side by side. Then you can selectively display content on whichever screen handles it better. And this suggestion is only half tongue-in-cheek - it's probably a good genuine option if you're unsure for now and put off the thinking until later.

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/