Tigranes

You get plenty of Glory (XP) so don't worry too much about screwing up. You have to choose Firearms vs. Voodoo later, so don't bother putting points in yet until you do. 4 Cunning is required for pickpocketing & locking picks, so keep that in mind. Game looks a lot better in the actual islands once you get off the firey initial location.

A jolly good time with friends is among the most difficult things to have. And if some of them can be your gaming buddies, even better. (We better get a Diablo 3 group going on here.) 3 more days until end of the year, then 48 hours of frantic packing, then 48 hours of planes and airports. The papers are mostly done, and I've finished Risen 2 before leaving, so mission accomplished.

Dabbling in CK2, but after 200 years the Count of Artois **** Duke of Flanders **** King of Leon, Castille and Andalusia is already so big as to defy any threat, and the High authority HRE is really getting on my nerves. There's a mod on the Codex that hard-locks HRE authority down, so I might try that and start a new game, or something. Map painting is not as fun in CK2 because of the simplified combat - the real fun's at when you're really needing to intrigue and swear fealty elsewhere to survive.

Wouldn't that be the king of all money-grubbing strategies? First make your games annoying to use and inferior to pirated products, then offer one that IS as smooth as the pirated product for double the price. It's like day-one DLCs on crack.

With no Obsidian logo and a typical franchise tie-in cover, if I saw it in a shop I'd dismiss it as another crap $-fodder. As it is, we'll see with the details.

I find the DRM argument incomplete at best, because I somehow doubt it's the chief motivator for piracy in general. That said: I find this logic equally problematic, because it assumes that the way the industry and law currently works is The Way It Is, and the only choice the consumer has is to bend over and get with the program, or refuse by denying oneself access to the product. Why is that? If I really want to go to live music gigs, but hate the oppressive security, wouldn't the ideal solution be to try and find some way that live music gigs gradually reduce that? Idealistic, sure, and not always possible, but oppressive security came into being in the first place because of the consumers and their behaviour and wishes; stands to reason that consumer behaviour and wishes can also play a role in getting rid of it. If you're an avid gamer, you care about getting good games in the future, you want to support devs like Obsidian, and you want DRM and other measures to stop screwing you over, then you don't give yourself the choice of buying, say, Ubisoft DRM games or not buying anything, you try and figure out how you can meaningfully influence that situation. Is the answer piracy, to lend your +1 to the torrent download figures? Or is it something else? Or is everything we do going to have no effect? I think that's the real question and a very tricky one to answer. Certainly I find "pirate to fight the man" in itself ridiculous, because there's nothing to show that pirating actually helps your cause, but I find "buy or don't buy" equally ridiculous, because it actively disenfranchises your own right and capability as a consumer.

I think that's exactly what they do, actually. The cost of games have been going up at every level - initial production costs, marketing costs, and in many cases, end consumer costs. It's harder to tell if you're a PC only gamer, but with licensing fees as part of the reason, console games have led $60 and now even pricier games, and new PC AAA titles are now beginning to debut at well over 50 (e.g. Starcraft 2). And even when the cost doesn't filter down directly to how much one game costs, it does fuel publishers turning developers into whipping boys, designing by committee, adopting the Hollywood corporatization model and the Reign of the Suits, etc. Piracy is only one part of all these seismic shifts, and it's impossible to tell how big a factor it is at any juncture, but its effect isn't just on DRM.

Well the point there is, who judges whether the product met the previously agreed guidelines? Can you have an objective set of milestone guidelines? No - even something like a 'playable level' is very fluid. Do you then have third party bodies that judge whether the dev should be paid for x milestone? No. Are there clear industry standards on the writing and interpretation of milestones? I don't know, but I suspect not. In that case, what you say Rosbjerg - which common sensically is 100% correct - just becomes a white paper for the publisher (who has all the bargaining power) to do what they want. I have no idea whether I'd agree with the publisher or developer for that particular project and the state it was in. But given publishers have all the power in this negotiation, it seems sensible to try and redress that. Edit: example of trying to implement an objective milestone: metacritic. Result: utter failure.

In my experience, CCMs (Contemporary Christian Music) present quite a logistical dilemma for small-time church worship teams. You need to distribute mp3s so people can learn the songs to perform, and you don't want to tell everyone to pirate, but they're as expensive as pop music CDs. Usually the solution is mix CDs and a 'blind eye'. The idea being that you don't want to openly provide free CCMs to everyone, but you assume the people who made these CDs are more than happy to see that kind of 'group use'. Same with sheet music books and the like - you buy them when you can, but you can't exactly require every aspiring worshipper to buy 2 CDs and three songbooks, or something. All this is actually quite analogous to academia, though universities often spend a boatload of money to buy access to journal databases, a library and the like, so it's a rather different proposition when you see some dude scan an entire book and email the class for the next week.

Re. 3: the question is whether, by being the guy who steals change out of the murderer's pocket, you're doing anything to thwart the murderer or to stop him from doing his 'greater evil'. If you pirate games and refuse to pay publishers a cent, will that help bring them down and change the way the industry works? It might - and I'd be interested in seeing someone make the argument on how exactly piracy can actually effect a productive change, directly or indirectly. However, if the argument is simply "get the murderer first", that doesn't actually justify piracy at all, it just shows you have a pirate and you also have an evil publisher. I'm more supportive of 4, and the problems with abandonware, modding, international (non)distribution, retarded DRM that makes pirated products work better than purchased ones (which really pisses me off when I pay good money in the belief that at the moment, it's still better to make that gesture of paying to support Obsidian and other developers even if they don't directly get the $), and so forth. Of course, the difficulty of tracking exactly who pirates what, how many copies of what are pirated, etc., makes turning piracy into an 'activist' gesture rather difficult - anyone arguing for that last point about DRM would have a hard time because of all the indie/DRM-free games that get pirated, and so forth. That's why something like Kickstarter, despite its risks and problems, presents a much stronger message to the industry. Thought experiment: what would really decide once and for all whether piracy is an act of cowardliness or making a point against industry exploitation? Answer: if piracy had a non-monetary cost. E.g. if piracy really ran the risk of legal problems for you, or you being locked out of online game services, etc - and you still pirated games despite those kinds of risks. If you simply decided not to play games anymore or pay for them, it would imply that actually, your former pirating was more about wanting stuff you can't afford.

Hang on, yeah. So is this a Fallout setting, a fantasy setting, or something else? I'm down for whatever, but let us know what's up and I'll post my character.

Very true, but at least since 2004, aren't MMOs one of the last places you'll get that? To be perfectly fair, I don't really play them, but making myself play them is too high a price to pay to speak authoritatively on the subject.

Today, I referenced a Wikipedia article in an academic article. I'm so bad!

Fear me, for I can perform the impossible with comfort and ease! *pose*

One thing I do think is a major barrier is how the credit economy is still very region-specific - you'd think if you had a credit card you could, you know, buy stuff online, but that's often not the case, even if you come from somewhere like New Zealand. I never had it as bad as some describe but NZ 10+ years ago or Korea also had distribution problems. This is naive, but it would be nice to have a globally centralized credit payment system that doesn't take 5/10% cuts, for indies and direct distribution as well.

Let me reiterate: the present discussion of piracy is perfectly fine, but as a forum hosted by an American video game company, we can't have anyone telling people how to pirate X game, encouraging people to pirate X game, or saying they went and pirated X game. That's not a statement on the ethics of the practice, or the various legal differences across the world, or what you do away from this forum. As I said, feel free to discuss what is a major debate in the game industry, and have a variety of views, but I'm sure everyone understands that basic constraint. If you have any Qs, just PM me or Fio.

Yawn.

I tend to like little bits that I latch on to. Alexander is great because we have some nice records of different forms of ancient warfare, but also a window into different interpretations of the psyche re. the man in ancient times, and of course the political/cultural collisions. E.P. Thompson makes Victorian England rather interesting, too. For big time periods, I'd have to say the Byzantine Empire, and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms era China. Anthropological accounts, especially of Southeast Asian groups, is also interesting.

Done. Steam says 23 hours, savefile says 19, they're both probably right given the amount of death/reloads involved. That puts it roughly at the same length as most other RPGs the last 5 years, since I tend to do everything pretty fast. Definitely a solid RPG, fun game, PB title with a few ups and downs from R1. The setting worked well, the game was very consistently good all the way through, but I'm disappointed that it's an easier game and the sword combat has degraded. Looking forward to the voodoo. Not entirely sure how I feel about the exploration stuff, since *in practice*, the exploration I did in R2 wasn't that different from R1. But it definitely is more linear.

Downloadin!

That would definitely take a lot of resources for sites like TPB. That's not an absolute reason not to do it, but I'm not sure if they have any kind of revenue/hiring/logistics structure.

Someone explain to me how I give skill descriptions that are system-agnostic? You mean, just general terms like "can't tell head of gun from arse, but can choke opponents with a shoelace"?

Dunno about that, but GMG are decent in my experience / to my knowledge, though obviously it's hard to beat gamersgate. Still, no reason to preorder this early unless it's cheaper than elsewhere.

There's a lot of QTEs in the prologue, less aftewrads.

Whoa. I agree with the basic point that there is no such thing as 'inherent' property rights, and especially intellectual property is a particular historical construction rather than founded on a consistent set of ethics, but that's a whole load of equally artificial assumptions and judgments you're bringing in there. Anyway, feel free to create a thread on this or find an existing one, but let's keep this one for game news...