Humanoid

Never say never I guess, but the DA property is one that currently has negative currency with me. I was disappointed with the first game and felt it ultimately wasn't worth my money,in that I appreciate what it was trying to do but that effort alone is not enough. Past that, I'm comfortable with my decision to skip the second game altogether. As a consequence, the perception of DA3 from pre-release materials, launch feedback and actual witnessing of unedited gameplay would have to be clearly a net positive to drag the franchise back into the black in my books -- and at the moment it's running at a net negative as well based on the first of those elements. The second problem is that I haven't even taken ME3 into account there, a game that in my personal view was an unmitigated disaster. If I'm generous I could set that aside, writing it of as a result of the separate development teams. If I'm not, then, well....

It would have been an interesting approach if certain skills like Energy Weapons and Outdoorsman were untaggable, both to serve as a subtle hint, and as a piece of world-building. Your character has lived in a vault since birth, a vault apparently without access to advanced weaponry, so the absence of any restriction of tag skills actually is the jarring aspect of character creation here. A skill in a gameworld is both more interesting as a roleplaying choice and can be more elegantly designed around in the game content if it has a context, instead of being just one of dozens of identically presented ones in a flat list.

The problem is mostly an artefact of finite XP. In a "realistic" world, you'd expect someone to pick up skills faster if they had prior synergistic experience: for example an established musician ought to be able to learn a brand new instrument much faster than a complete novice. In a typical game setting the opposite applies, the experienced character literally can't afford to spare the skill points to learn something new, because they've used up all the sources of XP. Game logic is such that the world's best guitarist would be the absolute worst person at learning how to play the piano, and the best candidate would be the uneducated hobo with no skills whatsoever. There are workarounds, I think various PnP games have rules which might let you use a percentage of your ability in a different skill to approximate that of a skill you don't specifically have. Imagine if Fallout for example added half your Guns skill to your Energy Weapons skill when determining effectiveness. Perhaps lower ranks of skills become cheaper for high level characters so they can pick up supplementary skills for little-to-no XP investment. It's not as gamebreaking as it might seem because the gain here is in versatility and not in absolute power: a character with 100 in small guns and 70 in energy weapons is not really more powerful than one with the same score in small guns and zero in energy weapons. But it makes a huge difference in determining whether it's viable to redevelop existing characters rather than restarting the game. TL;DR: In the real world, skills that you've learned but are not actively using are valuable assets that may serve you well in future. In games, they're a millstone that drags you down to the point of almost complete ineffectiveness to the point you should kill yourself and start over. If this penalty were removed or at least made significantly less impactful, then the issue of respecs would be far less important.

Goals scored is the next tiebreaker (head to head is obviously not relevant in this case), and if that's also equal, then it's a coin toss (not literally, but a random mechanism).

Maybe if the Ayatollah was also there.

I can't remember what I used when I played, but the only goal was to get rid of the forehead wrinkles (because apparently it's the number of creases on your forehead that differentiates between the human races) and it was unnecessarily difficult to find something that did just that any nothing else.

Don't normally support the US in any sport, but Jürgen is what got me into* football, so I can't not support them to go through. * As an Aussie kid in the mid 90s there really wasn't much opportunity or incentive to follow the sport - without the Internet it was down to 1 hour weekly highlights packages on TV - but my dad supports Germany having lived there for a few years before I was born. So it was really just a matter of seeing their best player, and, as kids do, becoming fans of them. And because he played for Tottenham (albeit very briefly) I became a supporter of theirs as well. More a fluke of timing than anything else.

Oh wow, AoE2HD changed *all* the hotkeys from the original game. Of all the idiotic things a dev could do, arbitrarily changing the control scheme for an years-old established game is the height of idiocy.

AoE2HD might be on a daily sale on Steam for $5, but Amazon are selling it for half that. Note the description implies it's just the expansion, but it includes the base game - this may be a pricing error, but I've verified it works myself as of 5 minutes ago. Might want to check to comments on OzBargain to see the latest status if it is indeed an error.

I'd bought a Wii U just prior, but what it did was make sure I had no buyer's remorse over it I guess. Don't recall anything else I cared about.

Yeah, take basically any RPG, the one feature I wish all trailers showed off was the inventory management, because that makes or breaks a game. But nooo, they all opt for showing off combat instead.

First Steam sale where I won't be purchasing anything directly, and it feels kinda good not having to think about it. I will, of course, keep looking out for good deals from key resellers like GMG, Humble, Amazon, etc.

The thing is, we keep spiders around to keep us safe from spiders. We let the Daddy Longlegs (Pholcidae) stay because they hunt down and eat the dangerous spiders such as Redbacks. Truly man's best friend.

With any luck the fire will burn off the tumour, leaving you healthy but unemployed.

Dammit, I knew I couldn't hide my 3D modelling prodigy of an alt secret forever. EDIT: Oh, and turns out the extra was just the T-shirt addons I completely forgot about. So should be good now. I'd forgotten to do the Message in the Woods thing as well, they're still accepting the text entry but no idea if it's actually locked down yet.

Heh, I forgot that I made two separate pledges for the game on two Kickstarter accounts, totally forgot to register address details for the one with all the special goodies. Would've sucked not getting my pretty trinkets. EDIT: And now the backer interface shows I gave an extra $50 for add-ons which I don't remember at all. I can't be expected to remember things for two years!

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....