Humanoid

The plus side is that we can also safely say that Black Isle didn't make Descent to Undermountain.

The KS box will be a Steam copy, backers who request a DRM-free copy manually will be sent an additional set of DRM-free discs.

LGA1150 will support Broadwell, being the next release, but the next release, Skylake, will absolutely use a new socket. It's a business decision: people don't realistically upgrade on consecutive CPU generations, but it's in Intel's interest to ensure people buy a complete new platform every 'upgrade' (which is a word that is rapidly losing meaning). Drop-in CPU upgrades are effectively a dead concept, and given the noises about BGA packages coming to CPUs in the near future - i.e. CPUs coming soldered to boards - it's certainly the direction the industry is heading. The Crossfire point is completely valid though. EDIT: Indeed it's confirmed that Skylake will be on the LGA1151 socket. Yep, one extra pin, it's like they're taunting us.

I'm tied to Media Centre because of the annoying licencing scheme for BD menus, which can't be displayed without officially licenced software players. You can now play decrypted (using something like AnyDVD or DVDFab) BD streams on XBMC without menus, so that's progress, but paid software like TotalMediaTheatre or PowerDVD is still required for full support, and they plug into Media Centre. The vendors, regardless of whether it's software or an actual hardware BD player, have to pay a royalty to the Blu-ray overlords to be able to support menus, so it's something that's not realistically coming soon to any free software.

Well going the other way then, you can save a little by going for a B85 motherboard, assuming you also don't plan to ever have more than one video card. EDIT: Might need a BIOS update if you're unlucky and get a board manufactured before the Haswell refresh was released early this year.

They'd need to partner with a third company to do the QA though.

I like that Valve has discovered that colours are an actual thing, yeah, but the actual implementation is horrendous. The search bar in particular, good god that's awful. Fortunately I don't have any reason to ever log into the Steam store anymore other than for quick checks of release dates and whatnot. Are the colours actually customisable, or is this whole 'discovery' thing just the ability to control what type of game is displayed on your front page? I have memories as a kid of making my dad change the colour scheme of XTree/Gold over and over for my amusement. I didn't even know what XTree was in those days...

Depends on whether 'not planning to' is the same as 'strictly will not do'. Saving the money is fair enough in the latter case, but a 1GHz overclock, even if you don't do it anytime soon, might add a year or more to the effective lifetime of the machine before you need to upgrade again. But yeah, the K series is now the only overclockable variety of Intel CPU - unlike in the past, you can't do it at all with any other models.

Depends how far you want to go and what the rest of your setup is like. In terms of platform, with Haswell Intel has finally managed to get 23.976Hz playback right, so there's no longer any reason to go for a discrete graphics solution. The basic system is easy enough: any Haswell system will do great as a HTPC, assuming a TV or AVR less than a decade old. With that in mind, unless you want to potentially turn it into a hybrid gaming machine, an i3 will be plenty. An SSD definitely helps, because even more than a normal PC, you probably want to have your HTPC sleep and wake up as quickly as possible. Naturally you still want a spindle drive for the actual recordings though, file size for HDTV recordings will balloon pretty quickly. Other considerations: - Remote control. Even cases marketed as HTPC cases tend not to come with IR receivers, and those that do often come with crappy proprietary ones that are difficult to configure to use with anything but the bundled remote. You can pick up a USB IR receiver and Media Centre remote from eBay for about $20, the most ubiquitous being the HP branded ones. If you have a universal remote such as a Logitech Harmony, then just use the receiver and toss the MCE remote. - Software. Microsoft did a very cynical thing by stripping out Media Centre out of Windows 8 and selling it as an add-on instead. Even worse, the add-on requires the Pro version of Win8, so it's a flat-out rip-off. Win7 Home Premium has Media Centre out of the box, so there's no reason to use anything else for a Windows-based HTPC. Alternatively, XBMC is the popular open source alternative and runs on Linux as well as Windows. The tradeoff when building a Linux-based HTPC though is extremely limited Blu-ray support (and of course the whole games thing). Not that Blu-ray support on Windows is a thing either - you'll be dependent commercial products for at least one of ripping and playback of Blu-ray discs, but at least that software actually exists. - It's tempting to go for a mini-ITX build for a minimalist HTPC, but a nice micro-ATX case probably is a better idea. USB TV tuners generally are only single-tuner devices, so if you want to watch or record more than one thing at once, it's a pain. A HTPC can support as many tuners as you can fit into the machine, so with say, two dual-tuner cards, you can watch one thing while recording three others. With this in mind, consider how many PCI-E vs old PCI slots your motherboard of choice has.

The CPU just won't cut it, the DDR2 would be a waste of money (if you can even find any for sale). Unless it's near-free as a hand-me-down or something like that. Consider going for a Z97 and 4690K instead, if nothing else it'll delay the time before you need to make another 'what to upgrade' post.

I thought they unofficially cancelled it a while back. Didn't they start moving people back to WoW? Or am I remembering the opposite? They rebooted development, so true in a way: last year they scrapped development to date and went back to the drawing board. So despite the headline, it's really just scrapping the work since that news, so a year or so lost instead of the seven quoted.

They sent me two D:OS T-shirts instead of one of each design. Odd too, well over a month between the first one and the second one being delivered.

I have chronic non-starter syndrome - the character creation has completely paralysed me. I can design one, maybe two characters well enough, but four and the possible permutations of roles has had me stuck for hours (by which I mean I stare at the numbers a while, then tab out in despair for half an hour, repeat).

Don't even need fan art, Wasteland 2 is very open-minded.

Missing the high heels.

Long but nowhere near that long. ~10-15 min maybe? Oh, I installed to an SSD though. And from an SSD (a different one).

Download is ~10GB, installed size is a little over double that. Not sure how different the Steam version would be.

Not on my home PC so not actually downloading it, but the GOG download links are up and working now as well, so no D:OS style launch issues.

In terms of being able to get the actual keys, both the Wasteland 2 and Torment backer sites have the GOG option live now (and have been live for a couple of days), and I've been able to redeem the key on GOG immediately. I imagine it's just the PoE backer site that's behind here (understandably so being a third party and all that). No game download link yet obviously, but all the extra content is there under the item in my GOG library.

Happy to report the 'revoke Steam key' functionality on the backer portal which was only enabled earlier today works well. I assume my boxed copies will have Steam keys that I can't trade in, so it's a pretty straightforward decision to redeem my digital copies with GOG instead.

Humble Bundle has finally added a listing of all the individual keys you own but have yet to redeem. I know I had some, but not 50+, that was ...illuminating.

That screenshot is probably a literal fifty shades of grey.

If the amount you need to add is a multiple of an available tier, you can add money by using the Pledge option in the top bar of the backer site, then converting the credit to 'points' instead of whatever the listed option is. But that starts at $30 and the T-shirt is $25 so it's not optimal, so unless you want to add multiple things it's probably better to wait until they have a more elegant method sorted.

I'll troll Star Wars fans but that's about it. Though sometimes the definition of troll gets so liberal that being a part of the peanut gallery is counted as trolling, in which case, yes.

I play girls in Saints Row. In fact, it's pretty much the only franchise where I do. Something about the absurdity of it all fits well. To be fair though, gender in Saints Row is a dynamic concept, as easily changed as one's hairstyle. P.S. I move my sliders to the left because I find it more aesthetically pleasing that way. Am I objectifying women by doing so? Should I move it to the far right to clear my conscience and fight off accusations of sexism?