Tigranes

Oh, it ended? That might be the reason, then. :D

Well, now I'm getting error 12 (you don't have D3 license) even though I tried the workaround of resetting password. Guess I'll try again later, if I feel like it, though now I'd only play if some of you guys are on.

When have reviews about something like Piranha Bytes games ever been accurate? Brother None at Gamebanshee says it has its ups and downs but is still a Piranha Bytes game through and through, and that is more than good enough for me. They also deserve some faith since I liked Risen. Green Man Gaming has it for $40 with a -20% coupon, but you will get a steam key. Otherwise, gamersgate has $50. Both with preorder DLCs, not that I care. Heck, I always forget to download preorder DLCs I do have. http://www.gamebanshee.com/reviews/107840-risen-2-dark-waters-review.html BN's review.

I don't get it, but it's my most anticipated game over the last 12 months. Gonna preorder as soon as Paypal stops being idiots and fix my accounts.

Tried Ep 1 a while ago, look, games that are entirely about humour just doesn't work very well, unless it's very good, or the game itself is good underneath as well. Psychonauts and Monkey Island are exceptions (and decent games underneath). Also, PA isn't very funny when you're no longer 14. I'd love an Order of the Stick turn-based D20 RPG.

Well, I played on a bit. I had claims on Paris, Troyes and Amiens, all via fabrication, and the King was getting over 50 (those claims aren't inherited.) I married my first daughter to the young King of England to seal a marriage, and waited for my chance for over a decade. Fortuitously, France's young king got himself killed, and his father was crowned - a rather impious man, so I had the Pope excommunicate him (who listens to me since I just won the Second Crusade for him). Seems that was the final straw, and cue half of France rebelling to put his younger brother on the throne - so I nip in, declare war, use my cash reserves to hire a lot of mercenaries, and go around assaulting a lot of places while the French armies are occupied. End result, the rebels get their wish and they have a new king, King Leon (they've done some weird marriages recently, so he has a Berber look); I have my wish, and that is a consolidated frontier on the Seine. So it's 1190, Paris is the new capital of the Andalusian Kingdom, and in terms of landmass and manpower we are now pretty big. Not quite as powerful as England or France on their heyday, but big enough. The only worry is if the Emirate of Cordoba, which owns most of Spain, stops attacking Aragon all the time and turns to us - or even worse, the Mauretanian caliphate that has half of Africa. We're using our chancellor to try and keep on good relations with the latter, while hoping our alliance with England is enough to stop France from coming back for revenge.

Still playing Crusader Kings 2, now with the new 1.05 patch. Started as a custom-made count of Artois in 1066, gobbling up a couple of counties nearby when I could; my immediate liege, the Duke of Flanders, kept rebelling for independence against France, but kept losing, so then I'd turn and join the French side for brownie points. That paid off as King Philippe got fed up and in 1093, revoked the Duchy and gave it to me. Continued to gobble up the counties in Northeast France, but being de jure part of the Holy Roman Empire, had to stop when HRE began to rack up its crown authority. (It's still broken - the HRE acts as if it's a real empire.) So turned my attention to crusades, and I helped win Jerusalem in the 1130s, but the HRE was the chief contributor and got the lands. In 1150s the Pope called a second Crusade to Andalusia, so immediately hired the Knights Templar and Hospitaller, levied all the troops, got on boats and sailed down. The Muslims had a strong presence and we got wiped a couple of times, but kept coming back - funding our war effort in the end by ransoming back prisoners we'd capture. Eventually we won, and as chief contributors, the Duke of Flanders is now also the King of Andalusia - the title change meaning our French lands, too, are independent. Character: Next target is to build up some claims in France itself and declare war. The current Capet king is excommunicated, but we'd need to build up strength before we can try and tackle them head on.

Me, gifted and greylord went through the whole beta, me as monk and others as witch doctor. It's fun to play with others, but damn, it is way, way too easy. I didn't use a single health potion, try to pick up health orbs, or even look at my health bar until the skeleton king at the end. I just had to walk up to things and hit them until they die, it's like playing on God Mode. A few times I tried walking up to mobs by myself and not doing anything, and they all attack at about once a second, do so little damage I can't even see my health bar drop. Even with the Skeleton King, when he does hit you he does fair but not great damage, and half the time he doesn't even hit you, he's doing... whatever. Really needs harder difficulties.

Going to play dodgeball, be back in a couple of hours then online.

The last few years there's been some talk about how this will involve a more multilingual internet, symbolised by the proliferation of various domain suffixes, regional enclaves (because we know now the internet is definitely spatial in its own way), etc. I think you can definitely point to at least the Korean internetscape and note how such enclaves thrive and develop - I'm sure it's also the case in some others I don't have language access to, e.g. Russian. What will really be interesting is how those regional landscapes become commercialised, e.g. in the way the Anglophone one has been. (Not that they aren't already, but I mean how the global interlocking of internet-based industries and businesses will work, the flow of money.)

It was all good MC, it definitely is more fun with two people. You could probably have taken on those mobs by yourself, with the level difference. Witch Doctor was a bit boring, but I remain convinced about my pet peeve - sometimes, with the exact same game mechanics, if you have more enemies that have more HP and punch harder, it makes all the difference in the world. In D3's case I'd argue 20% more enemies itself would do the trick - that, and greater variation in miniboss attributes. What happened to elemental-based bosses? The quilt rat(?) lightning miniboss or the hard-hitting cold-based zombie miniboss, or, god forbid, the cold-based raven archer miniboss made all the difference in D2's Act 1. You want to be running around frantically fighting against enemies that can kill you if you go toe-to-toe or let your guard down. In D3, I can just stand there and spam attacks. With two players, sometimes I had that experience of having to outrun enemies to try and get at health orbs, or having to combine, say, frost nova and arcane orb - then it gets a lot more fun. I think at higher levels, with more players (ideally, 4 at least), with higher difficulty, it could be very fun despite the various features they've stripped out. edit: I'll be on again in 4-5 hours I think, so people, let's play.

Added you MC. Will be around for the next hour or two.

Monty, friend me, and let us tunnel the fighting! Yeah, I enjoyed melee sorcs and other creative things you could do (not to mention the teleport/barbjump spamming the maps). Sounds like I should try the Witch Doctor next.

Something as big as EE, you really want to start a new game. It's on my list, though CK2 1.05 takes priority for now.

Played once through wizard as well. It has potential, but is generally underwhelming. As an SP experience it's not much better than Torchlight 1, and is inferior to DS3 (which has funner combat and similar graphics); as a multiplayer experience, though, it could be fun. That said, I thought D2 was pretty boring SP and phenomenal in MP. It's all dull in the earlier levels until you get past the first few areas, even more than it was in D2, because everything is a lot easier so you never die, the landscape is entirely blanketed in some kind of saturated post-filter that makes it seem like you're walking on badly decoloured styrofoam, and the rate of drops is ridiculously low so you're just mowing past mob after mob of zero challenge and watching 5 gold and a club drop. It gets better later as you get more enemies, enemies with more creative attacks, and you yourself can string together various moves. I think the life of Diablo is in multiplayer and what will decide that is (a) strength of character progression, (b) good balance of loot tables and difficulty. I think (b) could get there depending on how they've designed later areas, but (a), as far as I can tell from the beta, decidedly makes this a lot inferior to D2, and more similar to DS3 (which was very limited). No stats, no choice in skill level up, only choice in what to put in your super-limited selection of hotkeys - rubbish stuff. Hasn't really sold me yet, I'll probably try one or two other classes though.

woohoo, I'm on! Anyone want to play, friend me or post here, I'll be around for a bit. Uh... what do I need to give you? Tigranes#1519 is my tag.

Downloader/installer keeps screwing up with various issues, even after I've spent hours downloading the 3gb a number of times. Bleh.

Bliz is usually pretty good about that stuff, wonder what happened. So it's not always working for everyone yet? Guess I'll do a bit more work.

I remember when I played Guild Wars in NZ and every three days there would be 20 minutes of updating. Shouldn't be as bad in the States, but i'm still only halfway here.

Downloading

It's a pity though. I really liked the intrigue and politics stuff, but TW1 had a great folk-lore charm with a tone that no other game has really reproduced in that same way. If we get more into Nilfgaard and Wild Hunt stuff, it would be cool, but it would also become more urban-cosmopolitan, no? And I don't think the surrealness of the Wild Hunt is really the same. Maybe they can find some plot device to make the early game more pastoral, at least.

What the what what what is this what TO THE DOWNLOADMOBIL

The righteous citizens of the Internet, of course.

Backing a project on kickstarter is just as 'economically rational capitalism' as is purchasing a game for $50, or buying shares, or funding your friend's lemonade stand. You don't even need to get into communism and socialism, and all the silly baggage that comes with it. It's not socialist to back kickstarter and it's not 'capitalist' to buy $50 games. In either case there's a specific funding model within the rubric of free market capitalism, and you can choose to participate in that particular market or not. I'd get more worked up about how amazingly silly this is, but it's also my belief that Delfosse at least wasn't being serious with the communism stuff, so actually, we're all being a bit silly. :D

Oh, Morgoth isn't actually a negative nancy. He just likes certain games, and he will tell you they are great, and all the other games are kind of poo, and he will tell you they are poo and you're a silly for thinking they're not. I'm still not sure what kind of metric, if any, he uses, though, so his recommendations don't really do much for me. But that's alright. Anyway, my take is that the 'normal' form of consumption in the vidgame industry is a form of investment anyway. There's a certain politics associated with it, there's a gamble on what you will get out of it, and the mechanics, the way it is set up, will encourage some games and not others. All that is true with Kickstarter, but it may end up being a very different set of rules and mechanisms. Which would be great, because then we can have a more diverse ecology of games. It's pretty naive to think that paying $50 for games you like and not paying for games you don't, is a completely neutral act that doesn't influence the way the industry works. There's obviously a lot riding on DF & W2, though, because you want to pay for something that's good. If W2 disappoints like, apparently, the Bard's Tale remake did for original fans, then ouch.