Humanoid

Sounds about right really, just put in more fetch quests and unskippable cutscenes.

Would be interesting to price it at Newegg, say, to get an idea of how much a typical US customer pays, not the expert bargain hunters.

In Australia, MSY is famous for: a) having the best prices; and, b) having the worst website ever created. For normal folk, PC Case Gear is probably the benchmark and are competitive pricewise while maintaining a usable website and decent customer service, but are an online-only business. Scorptec is probably the place to go for a full service store, but charge at the higher end of the spectrum.

Yeah a good 980Ti is now $1100AUD here. Though to be fair a large part of it is due to the Aussie dollar which is in freefall, if you take the US price of $650, add 10% tax, and convert to AUD, it's $970 for the reference version, so it's unfortunately a "fair" price. Similarly with your example, the Amazon price + VAT would be 800+ EUR so it's the Brits who are getting ripped off the most. (It's worth noting that unlike most of the world, US prices as listed are almost always excluding tax, because they have different tax rates for every state) Speaking of which, concern about the exchange rate means I'm moving ahead faster than I had planned to with my own upgrades. I really wanted the R9 Fury (non-X) and I thought that the US price, which will probably drop soon, was in my range. But realistically that's no longer the case, it'll be about $900 here which is unpalatable. So I think I'm picking up a clearance custom R9 290X for $405AUD which looks like my best option now. For comparison, all AUD and all reputable custom-cooled models: R9 290 $359 R9 290X $405 GTX 970 $460 R9 390 $470 R9 390X $600 GTX 980 $710 I like to think I made the right choice - or at least, the equal best one. I'll get a Fractal Design R5 case and EVGA Supernova G2 850W as well since they're things not subject to change before I build a Skylake system later this year. Alas the rest of it I'll have to wait before buying and cop the price rises as the economy continues to falter.

It's the VESA mount mentioned in the specs. Another handy use for it is to mount a NUC to the screen, as a sort of DIY all-in-one PC.

Hidden object puzzle games are probably the most mature genre of video games, their target audience is 50+ year old women.

I vaguely remember getting a pink tint on my display some years ago on updating the graphics drivers, can't even remember what card I had at the time but I think restoring default settings in the control centre fixed it.

Yeah, well hopefully "hearts of stone" doesn't refer to her feelings about Geralt.

Look who's back. Not a particularly well kept secret, but hey, confirmation by way of the Steam listing

Wonder if it's just a toggle that turns off Geralt's momentum. Think Skyrim movement.

Well in retail, or anything sold under the wholesale model in general, the individual vendors still have control over their own policies. A customer might feel entitled to more than the law allows, but it's up to the discretion of the vendor whether to allow that extra leeway. The is more of a problem under the agency model of sales such as Steam, where you're bound by whatever policies they can unilaterally apply. I'm a little torn about it since it seems they've decided the policy applies retrospectively, which is a fraught issue with any agreement. But then again it's an economic decision for the publisher/developer whether the extra income from being able to sell on Steam outweighs the loss in having to agree to their possibly overgenerous return policy. I'd assume in pretty much every case it absolutely would. Personally I think the only legitimate grievance with the move may be if Steam takes money back from partners when they issue refunds for games bought before the current refund policy was in place - I'm not sure what exactly happens when that kind of refund happens.

Seems to be the obvious thing, yes. But I don't think that alone accounts for a 10% hit necessarily, so some other sneaky but less obvious 'optimisations' may be happening alongside.

Sellers need to have a return policy that at minimum complies with the law on consumer rights. Sometimes these policies exceed the minimum legislated rights, such as the policy Steam have set in place. This is not done out of the kindness of their hearts, it is because it is more economical to have a broader net that sometimes gives an unjustified refund where it's not warranted, compared to the cost of scrutinising every single return carefully. The cost of the occasional unscrupulous customer gaming the system is dwarfed by the cost of implementing a system to prevent that. So don't cry for Steam or Wal-mart or whatever, they're simply implementing the policy most cost-effective to themselves.

Some breaking controversy right now - nVidia driver default settings appear to be overriding in-game quality settings to improve performance at the cost of image quality. When the setting is changed from default to max quality, the performance drop is about 10%. Titan X's lead over the Fury X (which respects the in-game settings and is rendering at maximum quality) at sub-4k resolutions? About 10%. The reviewer at HardOCP has confirmed that they test with all control panel settings at default, so it's definitely a factor that's affected at least some reviews - will be interesting to see as reviewers now don't typically post this kind of information in the actual reviews. Stolen side-by-side comparison from Anandtech forums: Fury X vs Titan X Titan X High Quality vs Default settings

The interaction between the simulated alien pathing with the Unreal engine's live line-of-sight calculations made for the lion's share of bugs XCOM had on launch. The "good" news then is that from what we can see, the design of those mechanics are pretty much unchanged in XCOM2, likely sharing most of the codebase, so that aspect of the game should launch in a fairly mature state. P.S. For games like this which I strongly look forward to, I'll typically spend the first part of the day getting people's first impressions of it and reading a couple of reviews, then either buy a physical copy during my lunch break, or buy a digital copy when I get home.

The tweak was to edit .\The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt\bin\config\platform\pc\platformgameplay.ini - change the left stick sensitivity to 1.0. Made this change with the launch version of the game, so not sure if subsequent patches have changed anything.

On the one hand, it would be unfair for me to judge because I haven't played DA3 past the tutorial. On the other hand ....I haven't been able to play DA3 past the tutorial.

Well Squeenix were disappointed at the sales of the previous game, so I guess they want to give it the best possible chance to succeed ....wait what?

Well Obsidian can't realistically sell Avellone as a stretch goal if he works for them. Now they can!

Not fond of the interdimensional stuff in general, though I know it's pretty core to the books. Way more interested in the war and the affairs surrounding it, Witcher neutrality be damned.

Well there are two things that stop me pursuing alchemy in a serious way, but I think if resolved I'd totally do it over a pure swords build. One is the common complaint of having to go deep into your inventory just to swap out bombs and potions. The other is the meditation requirement to refill them, which leads to be immersion-breaking method of meditating after every fight. I think the latter could be fixed with no balancing implications by letting you do the same thing without meditating, when outside of combat.

It shows how much we've been spoiled in the past by AMD advancing the value proposition that we're disappointed that they've merely caught up to nVidia this round. the 980Ti, as of this second, is probably the better product, but the wildcard is whether Fury gains enough over the coming months to overtake it. It's not an improbable expectation: as a more experimental, less mature product, there's more scope for it to gain performance from driver updates, and the other factor is that at the moment it's voltage locked, we have no idea how much overclocking headroom it has once voltages can be tweaked. To be fair it's a legitimate gripe in that the product effectively does nothing new for now in terms of the consumer market, whereas previous releases, though perhaps technically less impressive, have really made waves by forcing a downward adjustment in all prices. The Fury will do no such thing as AMD seems content to merely price there products along the same price:performance curve established by nVidia. (This is also seen in the surprisingly high prices for the 390 series cards). The economic reality is probably that AMD can no longer afford to undercut to the degree they did back in the 4xxx and 5xxx series days, especially as the Fury is a large chip that is likely more expensive to fabricate than anything they've released previously.

First time I've ever heard the term "fathead wall cling".

At last a legitimate use for the Steam refund system.

Quick and strong attacks probably could use some more differentiation, and having the latter behave more like enemy attacks with huge weapons may be enough of a change to get rid of the "peasants blocking my every attack perfectly" problem. And conversely make the quick attack easier to chain perhaps, enemies probably recover their block while being quick attack chained too quickly. Admittedly though I'm mostly just setting people on fire, so I don't have any deep insight into pure swordplay.