Humanoid

I didn't even get to max level, so to say nothing on endgame content, I think the problem is an extension of the "it's like WoW" point. It's like an outdated iteration of WoW. Obviously anything specific I say going to be an assumption since I know nothing of the internal development process, but it retains a good number of design elements lifted from designs that have been used and since discarded in WoW. TOR plays like WoW2010 (Lich King), or even WoW2008 (Burning Crusade), and as someone who played through those years, I don't really want to go back to those times. Prime example is the skill/talent tree/system. TOR's system is essentially a clone of WoW's back in 2004 - full of minor, trivial and generally uninteresting 'choices'. +3% damage to one of your abilities? And making it a 5-point talent so you eventually end up, five levels later, with nothing more interesting than +15% damage to one ability? Yawn. WoW got rid of most of these types of talents back in 2010, and ripped up the system completely this year. A more minor example would be the longer cooldowns on your best abilities. WoW has gotten rid of these as they weren't useful restrictions. If your tank doesn't have his/her prime defensive cooldown available when you're about to attempt the boss again, then most people will just wait it out, making it an inconvenience and not the balancing mechanic it was supposed to be. I all-too-frequently found myself idling in front of some elite enemies just waiting for cooldowns to come up before engaging them. The other major issue is the encounter design versus the deliberate design decision to restrict moddability and general UI feedback. In a way I applaud the decision to do this: maintaining a dozen or more mods just to successfully raid in WoW is a right pain. But what TOR has done is simply rip away the ability to do it without considering its consequences on both gameplay balance and general usability - UI feedback as to your abilities is exceedingly poor. For example, some special abilities require fairly complex conditions and prerequisite actions before being able to use them effectively. Maybe it requires the target to be bleeding, and for you to have built up some 'combo points' by using a different ability beforehand. Well, unfortunately the 'bleeding' indicator on your target is a tiny non-descript icon hidden amongst a dozen other status icons above your target's health bar, and your combo points are likewise displayed as a tiny indicator above your health bar. (WoW's other extreme isn't necessarily the best approach, mind you, as in that, you can pre-program that precise combination to make it pop up a massive translucent image overlaid across the centre of your screen, accompanied by a custom musical cue, telling you whenever the best time to use that specific ability came along.) They're definitely guilty of trying to have in both ways here. And finally, one more issue is that the opening level for a quarter of the classes is a damn swamp level.

Exactly that, there is an official update, a hotfix - the Slingshot DLC introduced a bug which made existing ironman games unable to be loaded if you install the DLC - which updates the game regardless of whether you have the DLC or not (tested by logging in on my laptop). (It's made worse because the GPU on my laptop has essentially failed, so I can't try the game, or any 3D games in general, on my laptop either. But I don't want to get a new laptop until Haswell mid-next-year, blah.)

Random example of Steam getting in my way now - I've been playing a self-modded (using both Resource Hacker and Toolboks) XCOM classic run, and am staying in offline mode to prevent Steam autofixing/patching it (I don't need or want the Slingshot hotfix patch). I want to try the Football Manager 13 demo, but am unable to do so because I need to log-in to "complete installation." Yeah, relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, I can log in once, get everything in line, then go offline again and re-mod XCOM, but still, it's something I wouldn't have to do if they weren't both Steamworks games.

I have a separate CC just for Internet stuff. Somewhat frighteningly, I've spent far more on it than on my main day-to-day card so far this year. Haven't pledged to anything since Hero-U, but I'll do one last round-up of projects before the year is out and pick a few to back.

I was hoping it was for "method to exercise a cat".

The unique thing about the Dark Brotherhood questline in Skyrim is that you can totally short-circuit it and take it in another direction right from the outset. Sure, the alternate path is not nearly as engaging as the 'intended' path, but it's a welcome addition. All the more baffling then, that the same approach isn't taken with the other major non-plot questlines. All it takes is removing the plot armour and a simple trigger to activate the fallback questline when you get all stabby.

Might be just you given how generally reviled the Thieves' Guild part of the game is - probably the most disliked writing of the game in general for a lot of folks. That said, I did enjoy it enough to say it's probably the most enjoyment out of a Bethesda-developed game that I've had, and although I didn't have the desire to finish it in the end, I can comfortably say it was worth the money.

The perfect set-up, but I just, just can't bring myself to do it.

I think in the official timeline the island of Morrowind is destroyed? Doing a post-apocalyptic Morrowind setting might infringe on their other main title.

I've no fondness for superhero games, or indeed superheroes in general, so it'd take something special. Maybe a Walking Dead-esque choose-your-own-adventure with 60s Spiderman cartoon graphics, or a 'thinking' 2D platformer like Flashback.

My only real complaint about Alpha Centauri is the colour palette: red, blue, with sprinkles of occasional green. I could describe it as being somewhat visually oppressive, which although thematically appropriate in an alien new world, just wasn't particularly fun to look at. On the other hand, it had more personality than a lot of RPGs, and some of the best voice work ever - apparently all the VAs were asked to use their natural accents (which makes it doubly sad that Firaxis dropped the ball with the XCOM voicework). Oh, the other complaint would be supply crawlers, ugh.

I had the PC version in glorious 4-colour CGA. I didn't know what it was called or how it played given I'd have been under 5 years old at the time (so gameplay would have consisted of mashing the keyboard until something happened onscreen). By the time I grew up it had disappeared, and it was just a thing in the back of my memory until I recognised what it was years and years later reading an article about 80s DOS games. That, along with Pole Position and Tetris, are my earliest memories of video gaming in any form I think. I also remember that to start the PC, I had to enter the magical input t-enter-t-enter. It was only years later that I realised that it was just set up with a user name of 't' and a password of 't'. Yeah....

In a way, it was good that with the initial release, the custom race option was greyed out for difficulties below average, as it meant that I would learn the game playing a range of different traits, instead of the 'optimal' ones - creative plus aquatic/subterranean (and broadly any +population one) padded out with good starter planet bonuses. By the time I had access the patch, I'd be at least used to a few different styles. That said, I never really got far beyond settling in as an average level player. Mostly I'd attribute this to late-game tedium in terms of colony improvements, which I'd comfortably call MoO2's weakest point: I'd end up clicking semi-randomly at the endless list of similar improvements since none had any particularly defining characteristics. This +production building or that +production building. Eh. For the same reason, I basically never went above average sized galaxies, and indeed preferred small ones.

My answer is that I don't. That is, not in any special way. I enjoy certain RPGs in the way I enjoy certain strategy games or certain adventure games. The only genres I tend to dislike outright are first person shooters and real time strategy, aside from that an RPG has as much chance as anything else. That wasn't always the case. The traditional core of RPGs, the hacking, the slashing, the loot, the levelling - none of it has been of any particular appeal personally. When someone brings up "old-school RPG" as a term of endearment, I'd probably nod politely and change the subject. Just to pick on recent titles, The Legend of Grimrock, for example, had RPG traditionalists cheering in glee, but for me, it was just a throwback to the dozens of games I'd ignored previously. Likewise the ill-fated Hall/Braithwaite Kickstarter. Before Black Isle, the only RPG series I could claim to like was Ultima. That's not really an answer, but I guess it's because I can't give any particularly profound reasons. I like the good RPGs because they're good games.

I think launching a new funding drive so soon after their last one before showing any end product would result in some pretty justifiable scepticism from a sizable proportion of potential backers. I imagine they'd be content with self-funded preliminary work for the time being.

Ouch, $48 shipping. I know these things are heavy, but still. The Glorantha setting Kickstarter only asks $20 for what it's worth.

I can't help but wonder if BG1 is actually the best way to get into the IE games nowadays. It's a game I have no particular love for, which colours my opinion, but I personally consider the value of the game to be the way it changed the direction of the genre and less how the game holds up today. Like the pebble that sets off the ripples then sinks, it made a splash but feels best enjoyed today via its successors instead.

I've never finished Theme Hospital as such, too chaotic for someone too obsessive about neatness and organisation at the end with monster epidemics and vomit tsunamis - it's a bit too overwhelming to be fun for me personally so I tend to just stay at the mid-level hospitals and choose not to advance when the option comes up. My sister on the other hand loves the challenge and has gone through the game multiple times. I ought to hand in my strategy gamer badge...

Yep, indeed it's easier.

In a year where I only bought three new release games - XCOM at a canter. Not an enduring classic by any stretch but a game that's chomped my time like no other since Civ4. Bear in mind I've played MMOs in the interim. Runners-up by pure virtue of my having purchased them are Dishonored and ME3, but misleadingly so because I've only played the former for about an hour thus far (because XCOM) and the latter is a purchase I very much regret. The only new release game I still might buy before the end of the year is New Super Mario Bros Wii U, depending on whether I delay the console purchase to next year or not, but if I do, I expect it to come #2 on my list.

In theory some games would be long enough such that their purchase would be cheaper than the gigabytes of Youtube data would cost you.

I bought CK2 as well, my only purchase so far (and given that the sale ends today, the only purchase altogether) from Steam out of this sale. Not particularly looking for a strategy game but eh, why not. I do own a couple previous Paradox games, but I've never actually played any games by them.

The Sims is a series I would love if only the sims themselves were fully autonomous and didn't require handholding, along the lines of the other Sim-games. Unfortunately, even at the highest 'free will' setting, while they'll do the basic things like eating and going to work, they'll ignore that broken sink while it sprays water all over the house (except for complaining about it every few minutes before merrily ignoring it again). On UK game pricing, yeah it's awesome, but unfortunately Amazon won't ship games to Australia. There are a number of alternatives, but none are perfect: Zavvi/The Hut offer free shipping and frequent discount codes, but don't remove the VAT component of the prices. DVD.co.uk remove the VAT, but charge shipping (1.39GBP) for every single item with no discounts for bulk orders. 365games (via their localised site) offer pricing in Australian dollars, but are usually a bit dearer than the other two. None have any choice over shipping carrier, all use Royal Mail, which is fine for me, but unlike Amazon it means you can't have expedited and/or tracked delivery.

Yeah, curse those mouse drivers eating up all my conventional memory. If someone passed you a floppy disk with a generic mouse driver that took up one less kilobyte than the one you were using, that was worth its weight in gold! Still, at least it wasn't as hungry as MSCDEX.EXE. :D Ahem. Personally I uninstalled all my Logitech software once I stopped needing the remap facility for MMOs and just let Windows handlle it as a generic mouse.

There's the G400 and G500 which are both current models and the same basic shape as the MX518, yeah. I don't really pay attention to things like mouse 'performance' because I don't play anything where it matters: I prefer the utility of the revolution scrollwheels in the non-gaming mice (using an MX1100 at the moment), I'm addicted to that wheel. It's disappointing that they still haven't added that wheel to their trackball products: I use trackballs on both my laptop and my HTPC and it's hard to adapt to life without it. That said, I've heard that some people have had issues with how the G500's sensor works and prefer the simpler G400. I have a couple of the latter if only because they were dirt cheap, one I use at work and the other has been left unopened on my shelf for the past year - I only bought the second one to get my order past a free shipping threshold....