Humanoid

So with TOR expired for good, I still can't muster up the willpower to install ME3 - as much because of the side decisions as anything else: wait for story "fix" or no, and whether to try create a usable import or no. Instead I decided to have a short bash with Privateer for the first time since going to Win7, on account of finally having a USB flight stick. Ended up playing about 6 hours straight, with the "one more upgrade" syndrome. Tarsus went to Orion - the first time I've tried the Orion seriously - and hated it, and went on a mad push to buy the Centurion. A familiar problem of course, is having the cash to buy the ship but not having any to actually make it usable. So there I was, flying a Centurion with no engine, no shields, no guns - just an afterburner, a missile launcher and a handful of IR missiles, desperately afterburning around trying not to be hit, knowing that even one pirate Talon could kill me with ease. With the hefty repair bills incurred from playing like that, it took a few trips to even be able to buy a set of basic lasers for 4000 credits, let alone the recommended set of Tachyons for 80000. I think I'm just about ready to leave the Troy system now.... It occurs to me that this game is basically the same itch that MMOing gives. A gateway drug? Maybe.

I'd hazard a guess that given the plan was to move on to an MMO based on the Amalur IP, maybe they overreached early on perhaps an overoptimistic schedule.

It works if you go through alts fairly methodically I suppose, with weeks or even months between repeating the content. Thing is, over the last week - my sub ran out today incidentally - I'd been pretty much sampling every class after abandoning my "main" smuggler. That means repeating content in quick succession, and not having any time to build up rested XP - I find myself borderline underlevelled for a lot of content. Admittedly I also do zero group content, so no heroic quests - I get out of all the public chat channels as soon as I create a character. Doing a full clear of Coruscant and Dromund Kass twice each in the space of a week does colour the perception a bit, sure. And yes, the minor dialogue changes depending on class are a pretty nice touch.

Abstaining second round - if it's a new city either way then it doesn't really matter to me whether it's New York, Phnom Penh, Timbuktu or Atlantis.

I have no problem with an MMO that encourages alts - but TOR doesn't really succeed at it beyond two (one of each faction) because of the linearity of the planet progression beyond the tutorial planet. Now granted, creating independent, parallel levelling paths would multiply the development effort required, but if they're insisting on this "levelling over endgame" design then it's sort of a necessary thing. One thing that happened to WoW after the last expansion was an explosion of all the launch zones and reconfiguring them such that they ended up with three, sometimes even four zones you could choose from at any given level. Now this didn't do much for the veterans who had no reason to go back, but it's great incentive for the newer players to go again on a completely different trip around the gameworld. re: Free weekends - they're mostly obsolete now that any subscriber can send out 25 week-long trials (previously limited to three).

It's being given away with AMD cards now, lost value pretty fast so I'm not convinced anything is forthcoming.

It's a lot in absolute terms, but actually less than the previous generation - both the 6990 (dual 6970) and 590 (dual cut-down 580) were significantly more power hungry cards, and also more power hungry individual GPUs. At 170W, a single 680 is the most "efficient" top-end GPU in a long time. A technical aside is that 300W is the paper limit they stick to because of the PCI-E specification, but there's nothing stopping them from enabling an alternate mode that blows right past that - that previous gen, as mentioned, with some voltage hikes and overclocked cores, would blow past 400W - the 6990 in particular had a BIOS switch that when toggled to the alternate mode would essentially unrestrict everything, allowing it to fly past the nominal 450W that its stock cooler was rated for. On the plus side at least both vendors are finally working on idle consumption as well. AMD in particular has a "long idle" state it can fall back to which sips just a couple watts. It's offset, unfortunately, by their load power being a fair bit higher than nV's this generation, but still.

Australia in general has an odd relationship with cheese - raw (read: unpasteurised) milk and products derived thereof are generally banned from production and sale because of perceived health risks. It is one case where it's hard to argue the overused "nanny state" cries aren't accurate. That said, there is a loophole for milk at least, that permits its sale for external use, e.g. for milk baths - and obviously there's nothing preventing the internal use of said "cosmetics" product.

Way back when the Annual Pass thing was first announced I thought to myself, yeah, may as well, not like it'd cost me anything. But I waited a couple of days and on reflection decided it wasn't so great a deal - it'd lock me into a game which in the timeframe may well see no new content but would nevertheless be paying for, in exchange for a game that costs less than 4 months subscription anyway. I think I made the right choice in hindsight - pretty much bang on six-months after, I'm without a WoW sub and without D3, and not feeling like I'm missing anything. It's no doubt been a success for the devs on both teams however - they've managed to stop the "subscriber bleed" KPI for the former game and can claim numbers are absolutely steady, even if a significant subset of that subscriber base have just prepaid for something they no longer actually play.

It's basically a community site run on the side by my ISP, heh - all the ads for example are just for the ISP and no external advertisers. I suppose gives it a decent degree of editorial freedom but also the impression it's just a hobby site run by the gamey techs, not that I mind that.

I'd take the one expanded city over two smaller hubs anyway, because that's what they are - cities. No game has, to my mind, done a satisfactory job of even portraying one average sized modern city so I feel like adding another is biting off way more than any developer can chew. And for a recent example of what attempting that might lead to, we have Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I heard that the original design were for four major city hubs. Impressive sounding to be sure, but what did we get? Two half baked city blocks.

Anandtech is my go-to site for reliable reviews, this is theirs - but the findings are pretty universal. 7% or less performance difference to the GTX680 and equal to the 7970, $100 price difference to the former and $80 to the latter.

Bang - and just like that, there are only two gaming video cards remaining on the market that are worth buying. Forgive the hyperbole but the GTX670 looks to have obsoleted every single card above the $250 HD7850, on both sides. 7870, 7950, 7970, 680 and 690 now aren't even worth consideration in all but the most obscure fringe cases, unless every card listed there receives *at least* a $50 price cut.

Given you can formally in-game set your Sith Lord to be married to your Jedi Master, I don't think the mail thing (which I only found out about a week ago) is too big a leap. Especially true of the story-wise non-affiliated classes - don't think there'd be anything unusual at all about free association between smugglers and bounty hunters for example. Which returns the point for me that I'd personally like to see that non-faction affiliation be a real option in the game, it's a game mechanic with no real value when used as it currently is.

In the end it depends on the reasoning for this GK104 chip being released as the 680 in the first place, as the xx4 codenamed chips are normally reserved for the mid-range chip. The specs bear that out - small die, low power consumption, minimal compute power - and it's known that the GK110, the high-end codenamed chip, exists. Now either nV decided to only release the mid-range as their top-end solution because AMD's counterpart this generation was so underwhelming that they didn't need to release the full version of Kepler (and therefore could make a fortune selling a cheap chip for high-end prices), or GK110 was so complex that yield issues made it commercially non-viable to produce and sell at the consumer level (as opposed to releasing them as Quadro chips at several times the price).

One can only hope that TOR delays DA3 indefinitely then. That, and I've also never bought a Blizzard game without the words "World of Warcraft" on the box - never before, and as far as I can see from their roadmap, will never in the future.

Having played on the Oceanic servers, of which there are only three, I can't complain about population density just yet. Pretty much never am the only person questing in a particular area, and could easily enough find groups to do both normal and heroic quests if I had the desire to (which I don't). But it seems it's a different story on the majority of servers, At least they've got the plans to merge the "dead" servers in motion already - WoW players on equivalent servers have been clamouring for mergers for years but keep meeting the "it's too hard" excuse and instead get milked $25 per character to transfer to a viable server.

One thing that I missed first time through was where all the Blue Stripes were in Flotsam - had no idea they'd taken up residence in some other building so I just assumed if Roche wasn't in the tavern then he was off somewhere and you weren't meant to talk to him. EDIT: Vaguely on topic: Steam just autostarted an update for The Witcher 1, redownloading all 15GB of it. Dammit Steam, fix your version control.

Given today's pricing of SSD vs HDD currently - you're probably looking at $100+ for a terabyte 7200rpm drive - there's little reason to get a spindle drive if you don't need the extra storage space. It's spending less than $50 for the biggest possible speed boost you can get on a PC. Unfortunately if you're avoiding Intel drives then there's no good alternative SSD listed at MSY, though it shouldn't be hard to come across a Crucial m4 at an alternative vendor. Personally I imported mine from the US and may well be doing so with a video card later this year.

Barest minimum - I'm using MSY prices as a guide: CPU: AMD A8-3870 $139 M/B: Asrock A75M-HVS $72 RAM: cheapest 8GB kit $42 SSD: Intel 320 120GB $145 ODD: cheapest one $19 Equals $417 leaving $83 for a case with PSU which I don't tend to spec because taste is everything - but doable assuming you don't need an OS, external peripherals, etc. Now what do you get for increasing the budget up by $200? Well given the lowest GPU I can conscionably recommend for gaming, the HD6850, is $135, not much wiggle room is really added. With a dirt-cheap case you may juuuust be able to stretch to the cheapest Sandy/Ivy Bridge quad-core and suitable budget motherboard. I wouldn't bother with a dual-core. Even then I'd actually lean towards keeping the Llano CPU and instead trying your best to stretch to a $250 7850 GPU - if you're sneaky you'll stick it in your old machine and give her your old one. Obviously if you need anything more than just the system box, it's outright not possible to do a discrete GPU in your budget.

I'm almost always underlevelled but that's probably because I stealth through most content and kill close to the minimum number of mobs for a given quest, that's with no group content at all but with the bonus series and supplementing with space battle xp if I'm near a level threshold. Even then I've had to quit some yellow quests and come back later just because I'm not able to beat some elites without a group. Admittedly the problem is exacerbated by not making use of rested XP early on (frequently I'd just log out in the middle of nowhere because cantinas are few and far between - typically one per planet), not using my planetary commendations until recently (no idea they were only good if used immediately), not realising I could mod my gear without a modification station (thus not bothering most of the time), and not supplementing my gear from my crew skills in general. I do turn down some side quests for RP reasons but the number of those can be counted on one hand so it'd have been of no real impact.

AMD Llano-based (A-series) systems are actually viable for very basic gaming and given a graphics card worth its salt will eat up about a quarter to a third of the budget. I'd say onboard at the $500 budget level and discrete at $700 would be a fair assessment of the budget. I'll add in a couple example specs a bit later.

Nah, just a random image from the interwebs - though I've attempted it with an old P3 before without plugging it in. Don't imagine moisture to be a problem at all though dust would be. But I'm very noise-sensitive so my system is pretty much build the exact opposite principles - sub-1000rpm fans, openings covered with foam and taped up, etc.

My position is about the same, yeah - that said, I'd take a generic fantasy setting over Star Wars which I've grown to dislike even more since my venture with TOR (it's just too limiting a setting to develop a character which I'd be comfortable with). That said, given both the limitations of technology and Bethesda's dismal track record of creating even remotely compelling combat, I don't think it's a horrible thing to copy that aspect - though perhaps with a greater emphasis on skill with a particular weapon or school of magic rather than having combat ability solely based on class and level. Note I don't actually know if ESO will have any notion of either class or level but anyway. NPC handling is subject to the same limitations - in this case also by the reality of human behaviour. If you make an NPC anything other than an indestructable signpost, players will inevitably grief each other. One thing I would genuinely be disappointed about however if the mooted three-faction split approach just apes WoW's system of total isolation from each other except in cases of PvP. I don't like the system in general because I prefer free association from both a character standpoint and from a game viability standpoint. After all, if you split your clientele from a userbase which is dominated by an 800-pound gorilla game in the form of WoW into three, it's just going to decrease population density and make it that much harder to reach that critical mass where your game is commercially viable. Creating for example the concept of Imperial cities vs Thalmor cities and having access to them be mutually exclusive makes the game effectively half the size it actually is for a given player, despite there quantitatively being more content. A much better approach would be a softer approach to factions, such as having the option after some time playing the game to join the Fighters' guild or whatnot, and have the guild send you on tasks which may directly conflict with what players from the Mages' guild at some points. But players would still fundamentally have access to the same cities, the same NPCs, same non-denominational quests, etc.

Dinosaurs for mine - admittedly less so now but it was far more interesting to me than human history as a kid.