Humanoid

I still haven't played perhaps the "big three" titles that perhaps would normally be my top contenders this year, and I doubt there's enough time left in the year to give each of them a fair shake. Those games are Mankind Divided, Civilization 6, and Dishonored 2. In the absence of those games, the title would technically default to Stardew Valley but that probably doesn't reflect my real opinion of it. So uh, yeah, I'll award 2016 GOTY sometime next year I guess. Previous award winners: 2015 - The Witcher 3 2014 - No award, worst year for new games in living memory 2013 - Monaco 2012 - XCOM: Enemy Unknown 2011 - The Witcher 2 2010 - Fallout New Vegas

I logged in and both my existing characters who were level 50-55 last I remember are suddenly level 65. (One had only just started Shadow of Revan and the other had done nothing since finishing the class storyline) Since I'm not a subscriber this is my level cap, so in effect I won't level at all if I decide to play though SoR and the half of KotFE that I'm eligible for. Very confused. A quick scan of the 5.0 patch notes says nothing about being forcibly levelled up to the cap.

Great. Makes sense now that they simplified the companions. I love that I don't have to give them a full set of gear anymore too, and any one of them can heal me. edit: So that probably means if you get your BH to the KOTFE, you get to kill Gault. But only if that particular companion is one of the minority that they've decided to implement in the new content. Guessing here, but for companions that were previously of your current class I imagine the only difference is that you get a few additional lines before killing them, but everyone of every class gets to do the deed.

Yeah I actually read up on a full-spoiler summary of the new expansion since I'm unlikely to play it anytime soon. Apparently you can now kill a number of companions during the course of it, but they will remain usable outside of the story, i.e. they're dead in terms of the story but you can still summon them during normal gameplay.

Well the fact that the expansions all just funnel all classes into the same path regardless of suitability is kinda testament to that. The game remains profitable but not profitable enough to dedicate more than a skeleton crew to maintain it. No longer having to cater to eight different classes, forty different companions (they've completely written most of them out of the game), no new endgame content, it's basically just doing to minimum amount of work to still qualify as an "actively developed" game. I don't mind SWTOR, systems-wise it's pretty crappy but then so were the KoTOR games in hindsight. The storytelling is somewhat constrained by MMO conventions but I find it only rarely impacts in a genuinely stupid way (infamously so with the one traitorous companion character the game forced you to accept back into your party). The important thing is that it did one thing no other MMO did, allow you to shape your player character's personality beyond being a doormat to be bossed around by questgivers. I've been experimenting with the Secret World since it was in a recent Humble Bundle, but for a supposedly story-driven MMO, the player character may as well be a generic henchmen, they have no personality. I guess the thing is, I never really rated KoTOR all that highly. I don't like Star Wars, but I tolerate it when a decent game is built around it (which can be said of any intellectual property really). At the time I found the mechanics acceptable (I wouldn't for a new release game today) and the characters were okay, but mostly I liked the ability for my characters to express themselves in a way that mattered. Thing is, you can do that kind of thing in what basically amounts as a choose-your-own-adventure book. More than a decade later and I can say I feel the same thing of the likes of Tyranny.

The claim of 40% improvement in IPC would place it somewhere in the Ivy Bridge to Haswell range apparently (I'm just parroting other sources for this). That's where Intel was 2-4 years ago, so while not exactly super impressive, it's probably near best-case scenario for AMD to be there. Given Intel's glacial progress in recent years that's not as bad as it sounds to the layman.

Even early on they boxed themselves in for seemingly no reason: that little segment at the end of the first game for example where you decide on the composition of the next council was completely needless and illogical. The writers simply set themselves up a trap, it was a part of the game that added no value and merely served to sabotage their future continuity. However, I'm more forgiving of that type of retcon than I am of lazy ones like the Rachni queen returning in ME3 no matter your previous decision. To add insult to injury, making the correct decision in hindsight actually punishes you, because ME3 had the philosophy of "paragon = good outcome" in the most boring, predictable way possible. Releasing the Rachni queen, blowing up the Collector base, curing the Genophage, all the types of grey decision that really could have gone either way were turned into simple black-and-white Paragon is Good yay puppies outcomes in the end. In the same way, characters who used to occupy a grey middle-ground between good guy and obvious villain were turned into the latter, because ME3 doesn't do subtlety. The treatment of Udina probably being the best (worst) example of this extreme heavy-handedness.

My disc copy of ME2 turned into an Origin copy automatically, but no idea about the first game as mine is on Steam, but I don't think it or Dragon Age relied on the BSN in the first place (I think they pre-dated the BSN?). I probably could've registered my disc copy of DA1 on Origin but since they gave it away free on Origin anyway I can't test that.

I loathe ME3 and it's nothing to do with the ending because I'd given up in despair long before then. It's a little too convenient for its defenders to readily dismiss complaints with the throwaway "only the ending is bad" argument which attempts to sweep the myriad other issues with the game under the rug. The ending may have been the part that made the most waves, but no, the project had problems all the way to its inception, right back to the cynically parochialism it appealed to (which resulted in the cringeworthy "Take Back Earth" marketing).

I'm successfully multibooting Windows 10 and Windows 7 on a spare PC, but both were clean installs and I installed Win10 first.

You can never trust the Christians to perform a successful Reconquista these days, so I'm helpfully doing it for them as a West African Pagan Empire of Mali.

I don't. Indeed I've never driven a car in my life. And yet I still enjoyed ETS2 for some reason. I didn't bother compiling my own soundtrack for it though, I used the integrated internet radio functionality it has, which more games should copy.

So I sorta kinda goofed in forgetting that 2K has really strict region locking and so Steam codes of any EU copies of their games can't be activated outside Europe, Africa and the Middle East. As a result, my Anniversary Edition copy of Civ6 that I had imported from France simply refused to activate. To get around this impasse, I made an extremely brief trip to London, and while there created a new Steam account for the express purpose of being a container for my copy of Civ6. My French copy of Dishonored 2 activated perfectly fine on my primary account, though like Fallout 4, the game DVD contains an insultingly small proportion of the game data, which I will now have to download overnight.

If you can't afford to upgrade your PC, it's strikes me that a CPU cooler is probably one of the lowest priorities you could have. What are you hoping to gain from the exercise? The performance gains (from overclocking) will be minimal and most games aren't CPU-bound anyway. The money would likely be better put towards something else, or saved for a larger future upgrade.

Amazon's Deal of the Day is $100 for a 750GB MX300, get on it. https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B01DUNLMUU

If you're on a tight budget that's the way to get started. Of course, the lure of quick loading times means there'll always be the temptation to go full SSD later... You can use a utility like Steam Mover to shuffle games across to the SSD to get the speed benefit if you're only actively playing one or two games at any given time.

Inspecting the packaging, the only other company besides Obsidian and Paradox mentioned is Steam, so if this third party is involved, perhaps they wisely chose to stay anonymous. (That, or the German and/or Polish versions are done by different companies, this is a UK copy)

My copy just arrived too. To call this think an "art book" is a serious, and frankly rather cynical stretch. It's about as substantial as the leaflet "Famous Jewish Sports Legends". Here's everything together for a size comparison. Maybe the price of the physical Archon Edition copies - cheaper than buying the regular digital edition - was a giveaway, but it's disappointing nonetheless, Still, it's probably in line with the grand Paradox tradition of nickel and diming everything. EDIT: The hub of the DVD is chipped on one layer but fortunately seems to be working fine. The key (Steam of course) is just on a sticker inside the case. The volume label on the disk is "Tyranny Commander" so clearly there's no different install media for the various versions.

I don't think it's a realistic budget for your needs. For that kind of money you'd only really swing a mid-upper "multimedia" notebook like one in this list.

And with the exchange rate you can pay as low as $35USD for that special (Archon) edition from the UK. Amazing value for a bargain bin price. Thanks Brexiteers!

I'm not really a believer in the high-end SSDs which cost upwards of 50% more per GB than mainstream drives given that actual gains won't really be seen in day to day use. You'd only really see the difference when transferring large amounts of data (like migrating the contents of the entire drive) or in benchmarks, unless you're doing crazy disk-crunching operations like Bokishi. These days you'd be hard-pressed to find an outright "bad" product, so in general my policy would be that a bigger SSD beats out a faster SSD when it comes to purchasing decisions. Bigger SSDs tend to operate faster than their smaller counterparts anyway due to the parallel nature of their operation. Looking at this price comparison, a Crucial MX300 1050GB is $244. Sandisk's budget Ultra II is only a couple bucks cheaper but is only 960GB, and their equivalent model X400 is $259. Samsung's often-recommended mainstream drive, the 850 EVO, is $315. I don't know where you are, but realistically I'd just pick the cheapest model (per GB) out of the ones mentioned above. If you have your heart set on the best available then it depends on what your motherboard supports. In terms of standard 2.5" SATA SSDs, you have the Sandisk Extreme Pro at $380 there, and the Samsung 850 Pro is getting crazy at $426, dangerously close to the cost of two MX300s. Beyond that you have SSDs on the PCIe bus, which can run to $1000+. Note that when I say PCIe bus, this can come either in the form of an actual PCIe card, or an M.2 drive. M.2 is simply a standard of connector, which the motherboard may connect internally to either the SATA bus or the PCIe bus, depending on what it supports and what type of SSD it is. Most modern boards should support both modes.

I'm disappointed with the way loot is handled too, with the biggest sign something's off being that a legendary dropped and instead of being happy or excited, I was disappointed because it was a bad item. And now that I have that bad item, I'm no longer eligible for the bad-luck protection system that would have increased my chances of getting a useful one. (It's the druid chestpiece that meaninglessly increases my range by 5%, and increases my passive self-healing. Sure, on its own you'd take it as it's better than nothing, but if you can only have one, then you'd want one that actually improved your performance in your actual role, that being damage. On top of that, the stat combination on it is basically the worst possible for me. It'd be fantastic if I ever tanked on my druid, but I've done that exactly once in 11 years.) On a less negative note, I'm reasonably positive about Karazhan and what it might mean for future content development. It's actually kind of broken in that the rewards for doing it are out of kilter relative to its difficulty but that's something that can be adjusted via hotfix (in its current state, either the loot quality is too low or the difficulty is too high for the intended audience) Emerald Nightmare is hastily put-together filler content, and so is the Trial of Valor raid that will open next week, but I'm far happier with the current difficulty curve in Legion than I was with WoD's messy interleaved difficulties. That will keep me raiding a bit longer, but we'll only see if I'm in it for the long haul after the release of the first real raid at the turn of the year.

Yeah that's how 8 pin connectors are.

If you're in one of the above three countries, or don't mind ordering from abroad. No, I don't mind ordering it at all. Is an Obsidian game after all . If the worst comes to pass, it'll be a nice decoration. edit: how do I import? There are two main factors involved here: one is whether the selling shop is willing to send the particular item to your country (on Amazon for example it will say on the item page itself whether it's allowed, other stores might stop you on checkout). The other is your country's own laws regarding imports, which is more difficult to answer. Most countries I imagine would have some form of import taxes and/or import duties which apply, though often they have a threshold under which no tax is charged. Australia, where I am, charges nothing unless the total value of the order is above $1000AUD, but that's unusually generous compared to most countries. In the UK for example, import taxes (from outside the EU, for now) apply for anything valued above a mere 15 pounds. I've never exceeded the threshold, but from what I know, if you need to pay said tax or import duties, you'll probably get a letter from your country's customs department (or the post office if they do this on behalf of customs) with some paperwork to fill out and information on how to pay what you owe before they'll release your stuff into the mail system. (For larger imports the courier company may contact you directly) P.S. The stores I have used to import from the UK are below, I've had good experiences with each: Amazon (obvious) 365games.co.uk / ozgameshop.com (same company) TheHut.com / zavvi.com (same company) base.com (formerly dvd.co.uk)

So I want a physical copy but I also want it to be on GOG. Alas, I doubt the option would be provided. I'll probably go with the boxed copy from the UK, Amazon doesn't ship it to Australia (which is unfortunate because I have copies of Civ6 and Dishonored 2 in my Amazon UK cart right now) but OzGameShop does. And price-wise, physical copies are actually significantly cheaper thanks to Brexit. Archon edition (all prices converted to AUD for comparison): GOG = $69 Steam = ~$79 Cheapest legit Steam key reseller - GamesPlanet UK = $61.50 Amazon physical (theoretically) = $67 + some expensive shipping unless you combine it with other stuff OzGameShop (UK-based despite the name) = $52 with 5% back as store credit (you can also check with their parent store 365games.co.uk) Obvious which one to go for based on price there. If I'm very lucky it'll show up on GOG Connect down the line, or else I'll buy it there when it's cheap. P.S. Dishonored 2 is currently insanely cheap at 32GBP on Amazon UK, but you'll probably want to buy some other stuff to make up for the expensive shipping.