Humanoid

I don't care about the perspective, but if they make it a party-based game I will be very upset.

Only about 20-odd hours into Stellaris and I'm shelving it for now. I'll revisit it come the final pre-DLC patch (1.2) but it's flat out not working for me. People talk about the Paradox sandbox model, but I call it the toybox model. CK2 is a box of Lego, but by comparison Stellaris is a box of Army Men, it's a lot more limited in what you can do with them. I know, I know, it's not fair to compare them at this point in their release cycle and that it'll be fixed once it's received some DLC, but the simple fact is that right now the game is in a state such that I can't enjoy it. I've maxed out peaceful expansion, pointlessly crushed a couple of neighbours, all my resources are capped with literally nothing to spend them on, and all my science and construction ships are idle. So instead I've fired up FTL for the first time and predictably died horribly. Easy ain't easy.

As long as they only remake half of it.

This one benchmark tells the story, but granted FO4 is an extreme case. Other games will show modest gains and others again none at all.

The theory is consoles - game engines are now written on the basis of having the limited (in-size) but very fast shared memory that the current-gen consoles have. The gains vary massively from game to game, but Fallout 4 to give an example benefits massively, well into double-digit framerate gains.

I'd probably be able to play FO4 properly once someone does a fully-functional mod which removes the whole pre-war survivor aspect and instead just makes you a random Joe out in the wasteland. I think that's why Skyrim worked for me - the player character was completely unattached and could be shaped in whatever way the player wanted. Whenever Bethesda stray from that formula, they fall flat on their faces.

Me too, but as Paradox has said - compared to their other titles, it's a bit 'bareboned' at the moment. Which means it's got flavor coming out the wazoo of course, but if you're used to Crusader Kings 2 etc it can fell quite a bit shallow after the midgame. The challenge will be finding at what point they reach "peak Stellaris", when enough features are added but before it becomes a dog's breakfast. For what it's worth I just picked it up myself, haven't had a chance to play yet though. ($28.85 at the moment from WinGameStore seems the cheapest from a 'legit' store)

So, enslave or purge?

Having a bootable Linux stick always on hand is useful for situations like this. Also just run the integrated graphics while testing to minimise points of failure. (EDIT: Or if you suspect something's up, then explicitly disable it because it likely defaults to "auto") Power draw isn't an issue, since all Intel CPUs have similar draw these days and your problems are not occurring under load so the system power consumption at point of failure would only be about 50W. Not to say it's impossible for it to be a PSU problem, but it can't be a wattage problem and since the other CPU works fine, it's unlikely to be a general PSU fault. Optimised defaults for memory might also be incorrect, or maybe the memory isn't stable at the XMP settings. Manually set the RAM to the DDR3 standard of 1333MHz, timings at 9-9-9, 1.5V.

Gamers' time and money are not infinite resources, so you need to consider that when discussing jobs in the videogame industry. The failure of one studio doesn't happen in isolation, it may well directly lead to the survival of another, or in the creation of space for a new entrant in the market. In relation to gaming budgets, Disney Infinity and its rivals would take up an even bigger chunk proportionally due to the high cost of entry with all the toys, microtransactions, and frequent refreshes. It's not hard to imagine then that its disappearance will lead to said money being distributed amongst quite a few different companies and thus keeping them afloat. Impossible to quantify exactly of course, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it led to a net positive in job numbers for the industry as a whole.

Now I want a Witcher - Stardew Valley mashup/crossover.

Realistically though, 60% more performance at 5-10% more power consumption would suggest more like 50% gain in efficiency. Obviously there's no hard data on performance, but I'm mostly taking nVidia's own very basic (and no doubt heavily "massaged") slide here: The other thing to bear in mind is that the 980Ti has a lot of room for overclocking, and I reckon a heavily overclocked one could probably match a stock 1080 given the estimated difference of 20%. Much of the 1080's value then will be in how much it overclocks in turn. EDIT: Another of their own slides here might be more instructive. Eyeballing that shows an approximate rating of 2.6 for the 980, 3.6 for the 980Ti and 4.4 for the 1080. Normalising the figures to 100%, we get 1.38 for the 980Ti and 1.69 for the 1080. Normalising the 1080 vs the 980Ti we get 1.22 which is pretty close to my earlier estimate. 980Ti is down to $550USD now, and the 1080 will roll out later for $600. It barely moves the price/performance stakes at all. The "Founder's Edition" (early access reference design) card for $700 is particularly laughable in this context, it's for suckers only. More speculatively, if we take the same 3.6 value to be the 1070's performance, that's 1.71 relative to the 970 at 2.1. A slightly bigger increase in relative performance to the card it's replacing, but at half the price increase (or two-thirds in relative terms). I reckon that's fair enough, it's around what I'd have guessed prior to the reveal.

For most games, the wise decision is to wait for all DLCs and such to be released and matured before picking it up. This is *not* true for Paradox games, and I think the enthusiasm for Stellaris encapsulates that feeling nicely. I haven't yet picked it up myself, but the prospect of playing a Paradox title without the accumulated cruft of a dozen major DLC and accompanying patches (and scores of minor ones) is attractive. CK2 at this stage is a game that's creaking under the weight of its own changes, made haphazardly over the past four years like a patchwork quilt. Maybe that's being too kind - recently it's been looking more like a dog's breakfast. C'mon Paradox, time to end its suffering and start clean with CK3.

Think you misread that, the 980 has a TDP of 165W, the 1080 is listed at 180W. Real life power consumption will be slightly higher because of the way nV calculate the number (typical instead of maximum). It has twice the speed of the 980 *only* in VR applications, the gain in regular titles seems more along the order of 60%. Since the 980Ti is about 30% faster than the 980, maybe a little more, we can extrapolate from this that the 1080 is only about 20% faster than the 980Ti for the same price (actually with the latest round of price cuts, the 980Ti is slightly cheaper). That's distinctly unimpressive, but then the x80 series cards have been a trap for the past two generations. As per those series, buy either the x70 or x80Ti cards when they become available.

You can, but as more DX12 games come out, you'll have to move on at some point. That said, it's perfectly viable to dual-boot Win7 with Win10, you can even do it on the same licence I think - i.e. do the free Win10 upgrade, then install Win7 back onto the same PC. Only thing to watch for in that case would be the Win7 install automatically upgrading itself to Win10: personally I've been using this third-party utility to prevent that from happening on a couple machines that I need Win7 on.

Wouldn't say consistently, it was only two generations ago we had nV's "Thermi" debacle. Polaris is reputedly a very small chip, dunno about Vega though.

The GTX 1070 with a $50 increase in the price over the 970 - stings a little for mid-range but probably reasonable (pending test results). The GTX 1080 on the other hand is $100 more than the card it replaces, which was already ridiculously overpriced in the first place. Even though there's a bigger performance gap between the 1080 and 1070 than there was between the 980 and 970, I don't think the pricing can be justified at all but that's the advantage of being the first mover in the market I guess.

You guys suck at selective quoting. Here's how it's done:

My subscription (that one-time Mexican deal) ran out a couple of months ago and so did my desire to go on with the game. Not because of the lack of subscription mind you - mostly it was because going through the expansions felt completely pointless, and my co-op buddy thought the same. My feeling now is that the personal motivations provided by the class quests are essential to getting through the game. I did get through the first expansion, and did the forced dungeons that form the beginning of the second one, and I started questioning why either my character or I as a player was bothering to help out these schmucks. So that was that: "because your faction asked you to" is patently lacking as a hook for characters who had a large range of possible motives before that point.

I didn't dislike Broken Sword 4 I guess.

I spent all day yesterday weighing up my options on what to play next since finishing Long War has resulted in a massive gap in my gaming. PoE was one of the candidates, I've never gotten past the first town in my previous attempts. Others were Massive Chalice, A Link Between Worlds, The Sims 4 and something else that slips my mind right now. Predictably perhaps, I ended up playing nothing. (Still playing Bravely Default in small doses, but it's not proving to be my thing by the way it's going)

Finished my Long War campaign, Normal Ironman. Final mission was a complete walkover, just a sort of victory lap for having fought through the rest of the campaign I guess, Final statistics: Overall Score: 15628 Days until Victory: 604 Battles Won: 294 Battles Lost: 1 (This was a zero-casualty extraction from a month-two landed Transport) Aliens Killed: 5242 Soldiers Lost: 3 Average Shot %: 75.9 Average Damage per Shot: 8.7 Average Number of Turns per Battle: 15.0 Aliens Killed by Explosives: 405 Days Spent in Infirmary: 10940 UFOs Shot Down: 136 Total Credits Earned: 75526

To be fair, that's functionally the same as leaving UFO crash sites alone anyway. The UFO obviously fails its mission once shot down and the aliens are docked resource points to replace it, so it's just the opportunity cost of the loot. I haven't skipped a single one though, because it's easy Meld and Cyberdisc wrecks (the two most valuable things in Long War).

A few final touches and I'll finally finish Long War for the first time, after what I'd estimate would be about 350 hours on this campaign alone. I could assault the Temple Ship right now if I wanted to, but I decided to go all in and shoot down an Assault Carrier instead to get myself a Blaster Launcher. I don't think I've played with one (or tackled the Battleship map in general) since my original run all the way back in 2012, so what's old is new again for a moment at least. Tellingly perhaps, since the launch of XCOM 2, I've played about 40 hours of the new game before going back and playing 200-250 hours of the old. XCOM 2 might get there eventually, but it's probably some time off. That said, I am slowing down a bit on it because of late-game mission grindiness, and I decided to fill in the time by starting Bravely Default, my first JRPG since Final Fantasy 7 way back when, unless you count Fire Emblem Awakening. Also only the second game I've properly played on my 3DS having owned it for about 15 months, which I suppose puts my judgement in question. Anyway, the game itself is thus far not overly whelming, though I'm only just past the first boss fight. I've probably made several mistakes that would be glaringly obvious to genre veterans, and it's pretty tough going as a result.

Suspect it's because the more fantastical the setting is, the easier it is for it to become a crutch. The decision-makers cynically (and correctly) figure that you can sell a game on the novelty of dragons, bombed-out wastelands, zombies, time-travel, etc, and pair it up with some fairly perfunctory writing. The job becomes much harder the more grounded the setting is, which should explain why so few developers even attempt an RPG in a contemporary setting.