Humanoid

I really want that letter, but I'd need to go pirate something first.

Only able to spend an hour and a bit on it so far, gaining just the one level. Only real negative I'm finding so far is that the movement can be a bit janky when you stop-start a lot, and end up spending most of the time in accelerate-decelerate animation cycles which look and feel awkward. It's one of those things where the pursuit of realism can get in the way of how players tend to actually move in games. Contrast to Skyrim, say, where you immediately snap into a running animation the moment you hit a movement key, which looks primitive but does feel a lot more responsive as a result (despite its blatant disregard of physics). Partly as a result, getting into the right position to examine or loot objects can be a bit annoying. As for bugs, just a couple minor ones with a pair of auto-opening doors freaking out when I barged through them, and one time where I apparently clipped into the geometry of a table and got shunted to the other side of it. The writing, no complaints. and having continuity of character means the dialogue and the choices I make all come off pretty naturally. At least, I haven't made a dialogue choice yet that would make Geralt sound like an idiot (or which would generally feel like the game is in DM exposition mode). I'm finding myself deliberately *not* exhausting dialogue options with every NPC whenever I feel it's more in character to not talk about a certain thing, and that's usually a good sign because it means I'm treating the NPCs as characters, not bulletin boards. I even feel bad for bowling over peasants while riding past them. Controls, too early to say. I do really like the addition of the dodge/sidestep move, which both plays and feels a lot better than the constant combat rolling of the previous game. It's a bit awkward hitting the left alt key to perform it though, and the default binding for heavy attack (shift-LMB?) was such that I'd not bother even trying to hit it. Next play session I'll try a gamepad and see how it feels in comparison.

I think my Witcher 2 saves are archived on an old disconnected drive somewhere, spent entirely too long looking for them. Kinda silly anyway because even if I did find them, I'd not know which save was what. Hopefully the save simulation thing is a good substitute. As for performance, only getting mid-30s on a HD7950 at 2560x1440. (other specs: i5 750 @ 3.3GHz, 8GB RAM). It'll have to do, the low preset gave me mid-40s but the jaggies bothered me too much. Hopefully drive optimisation helps a little over the coming days and weeks. Plus I should overclock the GPU, now being more or less the start of winter helps.

Wouldn't mind it, but not keen on aliens. Primitive life forms are okay, but not a fan of that old cliche of encountering curiously humanoid aliens with remarkably similar technological progression to our own. That's not even science-fantasy, it's just plain old fantasy.

I've never played any Bard's Tale game and am barely even aware of them, but eh, will back on the strength of Wasteland 2 ....even if I haven't gotten around to playing it either.

Now there's an idea for a game, Mocap Guy Simulator. It'd be sort of a mashup of QWOP with Goat Simulator, where you control individual limbs and do stunts to get high scores. EDIT: Got my copy of the game just now, standard edition physical copy for PC. On the back of the manual there's a key with the note "Enter this code while launching the game to access extra features", which doesn't sound like much, but it's actually just a straight redemption of a GOG copy of the game. Pleased with that.

One would hope that the game was not neutered on request by Sony and/or Microsoft, but I wouldn't put it beyond them. Just like they have to acquiesce to Microsoft's demand that the Xbone CE be given extra goodies over the PS4 and PC versions, really. Unfortunately CDPR being a relatively small player in the games publishing market means they have little influence here, so the big boys are free to dictate terms as they wish. Just like how Namco-Bandai can dictate how much CDPR sell the game for, on CDPR's own store.

Physical copy for me I think. Will cost almost $20 more but happy to do it for any game which includes more than a simple DVD case and disc for their physical releases. If there's a spare CE available for whatever reason I'll buy that, but I'm not expecting to. Generally though, I'd take Steam over Uplay but I'd take anything else over Steam.

I don't think I'd be able to use that setup, I'd be paranoid of all that gear up there falling down and crushing the rest of my stuff, or indeed, crushing *me*. (Also the speakers suck )

I think that's a safe assumption. Not sure how they're defining that though? 30fps?

To separate the marketing from the real data, there's some independent testing being done here, if you can read German. If, like me, you can't, then some selected snippets via Google translate: When you consider the testing was done on a pre-release version, I think it's reasonable to assume real-world performance will be even better.

I'd have thought that games like that were already being made all the time in Japan, not sure why he'd have difficulty finding a willing publisher.

Unfortunately Wild Hunt is a GameWorks (i.e. nVidia sponsored) title, so a comparison/conversion to those "requirements" is not possible, nVidia has had a significant amount of exclusive access during the game's development and it can be safely assumed that a given nV card will outperform an otherwise equivalent AMD card initially (the gap will close after launch as AMD get to optimise their drivers for the game, to what extent is anyone's guess). That said, that listing is more consumer advice for those looking to buy a new nV card anyway because it doesn't list older-but-faster products, so it's not useful in the "will my PC run the game" stakes. P.S. The GTX770 is a better card than the GTX960 listed above, so you will be fine.

Yes, free update. Well, not update, it'll be listed as a separate product in your library.

It's raining spiders, hallelujah!

Looks like my plan of waiting until release and getting a CE if still available is no longer on the cards, EB (the CE is an EB exclusive in Australia) aren't even taking orders for it anymore. Not sure if a regular physical copy is worth it now, though I've since learned that it does have a GOG code included in the box. Good to know, because when I checked last year CDPR were saying that it did not include one. A bit weirded out by the disc version being locked (by way of a missing file that can only be downloaded after release), since technically that means this is a DRMed CDPR game. Won't argue too hard on it, but it does mean the disc isn't actually a standalone installer of the game.

Maybe check the GOG forums to see if their version suffers from any similar issues. I trust it doesn't, but would suck having to spend money on the game yet again unless it was guaranteed to work.

Chess is pretty buggy, there's a move you can do where you attack an empty space, but somehow your target gets hit anyway, I think it has some wonky hitbox detection.

You can even have the engagement play out such that you roll around and stun enemies with Aard or whatever to buy yourself time to put on your clothes piece by piece, and once you're fully dressed, you make your escape. Actually what games in general need is animations for equipping gear. No more of this lazy design of gear just instantly appearing on your character model the moment you drag it onto your paperdoll.

Renaming Armored Warfare to incorporate the word Panzer in it would probably doable, but I imagine trying to release it in 1999 would be a somewhat more difficult task.

Hopefully at least the publishers who do "DRM-free" Steam games hop on board to make those games actually DRM-free. But it's not going to convince any publisher to drop their DRM policy, so it's hardly industry-changing. I suppose it's possible that the biggest publishers who are understandably uncomfortable with Steam's hegemony might indirectly or surreptitiously support them with a view that "an enemy of my enemy is my friend". Would a company like EA view Galaxy as something that hurts them by taking away from Origin, or as something that helps them by taking away from Steam? From the customer perspective, it won't stop the irrational argument of people who "want all my games in the game place", but it should help a little against arguments like ease of patching, setting up multiplayer, and, ugh, achievements.

I don't remember much about the game itself, but IWD2 is the reason I'm on this forum, so there's that.

Having your conquests as a collectible card ingame is crass, but making it an achievement is fine and classy I guess. My Witcher 2 playthrough ended up with a pretty high death toll, in that almost everyone who could die during the plot, did. But it's to the game's credit that it was not because I'd deliberately set out to play a homicidal maniac, but that because that's the way things naturally panned out, everyone I had a hand in killing deserved it. I'd be pleased if Wild Hunt turned out the same way. One of my favourite Oglaf quotes: "Good and evil are relative, but being a **** cannot be allowed." As for the whole Ciri thing, I think I've said it before but my objection to it is wholly an objection to playing anything but the singular player character in *any* RPG. I can't help but feel that it undermines the whole roleplaying thing when other characters, who you'd normally only know through their interactions with the player character, are suddenly an open book to you. Instead of having to guess at their feelings, their motives and their personality as a whole from how they behave towards you, it's just there, presented as plain fact while you play as them, and I think that really hurts the characterisation of that character.

Starwars is fine, he doesn't post often but is a valued member of the community. As for the Lucas creation - well, when I'm in a trollish mood, I'll dismiss Star Wars as a meaningless kids movie from the 70s. But in all seriousness it's not a property I've ever had any interest in, although I have to admit I've never actually sat down and watched any of the movies in their entirety. All the small fragments of it that I've unavoidably seen over the years probably add up to a full showing though, such is the media saturation around it, so it's not like I "don't know" it. Maybe it's because for whatever reason I never watched it as a kid - being an 80s baby, I'd be too young for the original release, and too old for easy media availability of the digital era - so by the time I could watch it freely anytime I wanted to, the impressionable period had passed. Or maybe it was because my first real exposure to Star Wars was the god-awful CD-ROM pioneering game, Rebel Assault.

Can't even get to page 2 because questions 3 and 4 are mandatory without there being a 'none of the above' option (though generally checkbox questions should be set optional by their nature, so a 'none' option isn't generally used).