Humanoid

Yeah, no point upgrading from Haswell really. Fortunately LGA1150 boards are still easy enough to source. Even if you feel you want to upgrade everything later, a budget board like a B85 will at least get you up and running now. H81/B85/H97/Z97 will all work with your CPU.

Fate of Atlantis is the only good Indiana Jones. There are no good Star Wars or Tomb Raiders.

Party of one or three for me. Having just one companion feels weird, almost just like having a butler in tow instead of having two people travelling as equals (weird but honest I guess, since that's what companions in Bethesda games feel like). Two companions is like having two kids in the back of the car distracting each other so they won't bother you as much.

Just change your signature to "EDIT: Corrected typo".

It's a slower process than I'd like to see happen, but any sort of weaning away from outdated Infinity Engine traditions is always going to be something I can support. Hopefully smaller parties are just the beginning.

If you end up playing multiplayer on GOG, let us know how it works out.

Or just ....North Korea today.

But then you might notice nVidia had a disastrous driver release not two weeks ago which drove some people as far as needing to reinstall their OS and realise there are no winners in this race. It's a pretty messed up situation when games are so dependent on hardware vendors to adapt to them, rather than the other way around, and it leads to this stupid race to release "optimised" drivers for every new AAA release with manifestly inadequate testing.

Paradox takeover in progress.

To be fair, it says in the Ars article above:

Why not? It's rare enough that we get games that really let you be actually evil, but if the premise of a game is that you're serving an Evil Overlord, it should really be an Evil Overlord. I want my evil to manifest in all colours of the rainbow! I'm probably going with a Purple Evil playthrough first up, and if I'm not bored by then, I'll try a Turquoise Evil run.

It happens sometimes. People just explode. Natural causes.

I still have XCOM on the brain (plugging away at Long War still), but it seems like a fantasy XCOM 2 where you play as - or at least for - the aliens. Twist: the player character is William Thorne.

Not saying I don't want combat, indeed I think you should be able to freely initiate it anytime you like. But there should be very few scenarios where people would be willing to instigate fights against you, therefore making fighting a choice instead of a chore.

Hopefully neither. I'm hopeful since that short official blurb doesn't even mention fighting, that combat will be heavily de-emphasised. Maybe it'll be something like this: [1. Declare him guilty and summarily execute him] [2. Declare him guilty and leave the punishment up to the people] [3. Set him free] Choose (1) Sir, the people are rioting! What do we do? [1. Slaughter them all]

I'm imagining sort of a travelling Judge Judy, roaming the lands and dismissing people's complaints. Is the party-based thing confirmed from some other source? Don't see anything in the text there that would suggest it.

Two Furies for the price of three!

Pfft, the Witcher 3 CE box was comfortably bigger than that. (Got out the tape measure, 42x36x32cm, or about 17x14x12") EDIT: On reflection, games like Rock Band would obviously come in bigger boxes of course. But they cheat!

It can hardly be boring with the hilarious bugs they tend to have.

Well no one buys a TN panel for its accuracy, so that's to be expected. Indeed in that market segment, I'd say a fair proportion of consumers actually don't want accuracy: they want brighter, cooler colours that "pop" regardless of what actually is correct colour reproduction. That's not to say that you can't get reasonable accuracy on them, assuming a square viewing angle, but it's not something really doable by eye. A decent colorimeter would set you back another 100-200EUR. I use an X-rite i1Display Pro and love it, but then it's a thing where its value is proportional to the number of displays you have. The other consideration is that because you will be running multiple screens, calibration isn't just about the colours being accurate to some ISO standard: the more important aspect at this point becomes that of display matching. One inaccurate display is one thing, but most people won't notice it being inaccurate because they have nothing to compare it against. Two inaccurate displays become much more noticeable because they'll invariably be inaccurate *in different ways*. Factory calibration at least helps with the matching aspect: Dell claimed my pair of U2711s were factory calibrated and they do look the same at default settings, but they were also both way too bright and somewhat too warm - I lived with the incorrect settings for a good while though, because they were matched and therefore I had no reason to assume they were that far off the standard. But without factory calibration, there can be no such assumption, two identical monitors of the same model with the exact same settings will likely look at least somewhat different to each other. Finally, running multiple TN screens tends to be a bit more finicky than multiples of IPS or VA panels, because basic geometry means you won't have the same viewing angle to both of them. Therefore even if they were both calibrated correctly, the colours will appear somewhat different on each depending on how off-axis your viewing position is..

Google sent me to this handy resource that appears to show that there are exactly zero IPS 24" monitors with 120+Hz refresh rates, and exactly one with a VA panel, the Eizo FG2421, which doesn't appear to have a VESA mount and is above your budget anyway. So assuming hard requirements of 2x 24", non-TN panel, VESA mount, then you'll have to settle for the standard 60Hz. There are a lot of those around, but one at 250EUR or under, I imagine that'd cut down the options quite a bit. Going with the devil I know, both the Dell U2414H and the P2414H are within your budget. I'm guessing they have identical panels, but the U-series has thinner bezels and HDMI support, whereas the professional-oriented P-series has DVI input (both do Displayport). Keen pricing might have something to do with the new U2417H that was just released this month, but I don't see it on amazon.de yet. (The U2415 is a 1920x1200 16:10 model if you can make use of the additional vertical space, but is a little above your budget. Likewise the U2515H is 2560x1440, for 300EUR.) EDIT: Speculative left-field suggestion: just buy a single Philips BDM4065 4K 40" monitor and bask in its decadent glory.

But that would suggest combat should always be auto-resolved, no? Positioning and movement, which spell to cast, commanding allies: all those kinds of decisions that make up "traditional" RPG combat should really be controlled purely by character stats (such as a "tactical prowess" stat). Consequently player input to the actual fight should logically be no more than "I want to fight this other person" (and perhaps side-decisions such as whether you're taking a lethal approach) then having the computer spit out the result (spoiler: you probably died). I'd be happy to see such a system, but I suspect the broader market, including purist RPG grognards, would find it rather unpalatable.

As far as KoTOR goes, I'd be happy with a combat system that consists purely of Force Zapping people through dialogue options.

Unoffensive is how I would consider KoTOR in general, I played it once near release, it was fine but had no strong feelings about it, to the extent I didn't go out to grab the sequel despite the Obsidian connection. But now I've just finished watching a KoTOR LP, and I can't say it's aged even remotely well: at more than a few points I was thinking "wow, I can't remember that at all, but that's terrible". This applied for both gameplay and story, so unless a remake does something about both, this is off the table for me. FF7 is another game I played once and that was it. It's also the only FF game I've ever played. I would not play it again unless every random battle was removed, as it, and all the XP grinding that ensued, managed to put me off JRPGs for the next 17 years or so.

Yeah, the "season pass" thing is three DLC, but it doesn't sound all that from the descriptions: So a grand total of two new missions across the 3 DLCs. One new tier of weapons maybe, and a SHIV or whatever. Unlikely I'll experience any of them until the expansion proper, despite me technically owning them already via the Deluxe edition.