Humanoid

Heh, weird that all that'd only add up to ten days I guess. I imagine I'll download the DRM-free version direct from the Larian Vault though, so not really concerned about alternate vendors. I guess the rationale becomes opposite here though. They're releasing a full priced title right into the midst of Steam sale hype. Not sure how that'd work.

I'm amazed that given that it looks like those pages are hosted on free ISP webspace that they're somehow still up. Has Missy really not changed ISPs in well over a decade?

Yes. Pretty sure the relationship is really just "Obsidian live in Caliiii, Bioware are Canucks, they get along but a sizeable fraction of the planet's landmass probably means they're not that close." Some old timers probably do feel like Bioware is the Canadian girlfriend who's suddenly cut off all contact and won't answer your calls.

Except Australia left in 2006 and NZ qualified in 2010? But yeah, it's going to be luck on which continent's lucky loser gets drawn in the playoff against the Kiwis. If they get Asia again... Courtesy Wikipedia, in reverse chronological order, the OFC winners have played off against: CONCACAF, AFC, CONMEBOL, CONMEBOL, AFC, CONMEBOL, CONCACAF, CONMEBOL*, UEFA, AFC, AFC. * Israel was OFC winner for this occasion because reasons.

But to answer Bruce's question, I arrived on the pretext of following IWD2's development, and because I had time to burn during my first year of Uni - doing a computing oriented degree meant I had a lot of spare time in the computer labs (as opposed to what Arts students do ). I mostly lurked at the beginning, hence the relatively late join date of June 2002. Not that post counts existed at that point, but I was still relatively dedicated to study back then so I'd estimate low triple digits anyway during the actual BIS period. Since then though, it's all about the non game-specific boards - I've not really paid much attention to any game-specific development since IWD2 (even for PoE my posting is minimal) Anyway, by the second year of Uni I'd kind of found my level of commitment: the 20:80 rule and all that, so I was happy to fritter away even more time. It got to the ridiculous point where I think I was the most prolific poster on the IPLY forum, although mercifully perhaps most of those posts were content-free junk and poor attempts at humour.

Don't make me repost that webcam video of you monologuing to us. Turned up the last time Sargy did one of his annual nostalgia trips, so you might get another shot!

I think you're confusing the Original Sin delay with the Unrest delay? Larian have been pretty clear from the outset the reason for their delay (mainly voice stuff), whereas the Unrest devs are the ones who used that line. The best guess however is that they don't want to release during the Steam sale, because that would completely swamp their game under all the sale hype.

The silliest part of that conspiracy theory is that, in theory, Ubi stands to make more money off each PC copy sold than console copies sold, because they don't have to fork over the licensing fee. I'm not saying that conspiracy theory is definitely wrong, though. Possible that they're factoring the greater likelihood of piracy on the PC I suppose. i.e. someone choosing to pirate a PC version over buying a console version if the console version has no advantages.

Until, one day....

It's only stopped working for me since all these bundles were posted an hour ago, previous days it was fine (except for the very beginning when the sale first started). It's oddly selective, scrolling down to the "top sellers" section the detection isn't working, but if I switch to the "on sale" tab, it works. Both Firefox and Opera displaying the same.

I'd go for the Sirloin I think.

Annoyingly the automatic tagging of the items you already own seems to have been broken.

Aliens. Well, in the absence of any official explanation, one conspiracy theory is as good as another. But in the PC industry alone we've seen purposeful sabotage of game features at the behest of certain hardware companies in order to make their competitors look bad. (For example, the lockout of anti-aliasing in Arkham Asylum if an AMD card is detected, or the invisible tessellation in Crysis 2) I wouldn't be surprised if this 'equalisation measure' had similar motives. Not sure which party would be the primary driver though, Ubi for fear of cannibalisation of the console version sales, or the console vendors to spare embarrassment.

I think I remember Missy hating that picture, yeah. I also still have the frog from the bottom picture (well, not that exact one, but one just like it).

Can't quite recall the story behind these pictures (well, one obviously has to do with MUNKEH), but these were from about that era. Both dated 2003.

I assume it's the publisher's choice on whether Obsidian gets to host their own forums for the games they've developed. Hence NWN2, New Vegas and Armored Warfare forum links go off-site, but Stick of Truth, Alpha Protocol, Dungeon Siege and KoTOR2 forums are hosted locally. So the reason is "because Bioware asked them to".

Apt and much-missed smiley. P.S.

In most of these circumstances I'm happy to accept the reasons given and have no problem giving them all the time they need. At the same time, users really ought to be aware that it's not a given that any similar delays would be as well justified. It's all well and good to tell every developer out there to take their time and get it right, but it only takes one cynical dev to damage a lot of the goodwill out there. Point is that while the vast majority of projects encounter delays for (hopefully) good reason, I wouldn't go so far as to say they all have free licence to repeatedly get away with poor project management or worse, purposeful deception. We should expect them to learn from these early experiences and not have these early teething issues turn into the norm for their future projects.

I need slowtrain back to make me feel younger.

One thing that confuses me is why ice hockey is more popular than field hockey. It's like having table tennis being more popular than actual tennis, or beach volleyball being more popular than volleyball ....actually never mind the last one, the reason is obvious.

Same for me, fellow fossilbooker. This new-fangled "Internet forum" is as far as my social media comfort zone reaches.

Well technically Fallout 1 wasn't a Black Isle title, so you could say he did work on all the actual Black Isle labelled games. But then again Descent to Undermountain wasn't a Black Isle title either, but he *did* get a credit for it...

Sounds about right. Veloxyll is around on FB. Has he had a haircut yet? :D

Think it was "rubs nads with glee".

Moving boards does weird things to nostalgia. There's a thread here reminiscing about the days of the BIS forums that easily comes up via a simple forum search and is full of familiar names. Yet that thread is from *2005*, so it was created two years after the closure. That thread is therefore itself nearly a decade old, five times longer than the gap to what it was addressing. But because it's here it doesn't feel too long ago at all. The other thing is that I think my post count from the one year the IPLY forums existed is still higher than my total here made over more than a decade...