Tigranes

Thanks Wals, it is rather valuable to have their perspective - they're far from stupid, after all. (2), of course, is a nightmarish thing to consider, because you could argue it's the fault of the sector as a whole, both the personnel and the structure, to check those 'few insane CEOs', but in reality that's a pretty damn hard thing to fix or even evaluate properly. I'm also curious as to what kind of role CEOs have in the sector - i.e. how much of the commandeering adventurist, how much of the wheels-greasing bureaucrat, how much of the Hollywood style split decision go-to man, etc. Same deal with (1), really. How do you go about resolving something like that? Give more autonomy to the financial sector to purely run the world of money by the laws of money? Surely not, both in the moral sense and that it would be politically impossible to enact short-term. Stop poor people getting homes? Well, that's a problem too, right there. What would the Occupy people say about that, in all their various stripes and colours? I wonder how many of them were personally effected by the housing crisis?

And how do you determine what is a loan too big for you, what is a loan you should not be taking? If it's like "takes 50 years, 100x your annual income", etc., it's pretty obvious. And we could go the other way and say really, the right way to live is not to spend more than you can afford. I like that philosophy, but I also know that the way our economies work make that practically impossible for most people, if they want to, you know, have a home and stuff. So we know people have got to take out fairly big loans at some point or other. Of course they should be responsible and they shouldn't take loans that are too dangerous. But again, how should they decide how big is too big? If the banks are saying "go on, you can take this loan, we think you can", and experts you talk to tell you "Yes", practically speaking (instead of some nonsensical dreamworld where everyone has all the facts, makes rational decisions and it's only a question of allocating blame), what's the message here? (Obviously, there are two messages implicit in this situation. (1) Everyone needs to be a financial expert as much as possible, given how important it is now. (2) You will never know enough to make the best decisions, stakes are high and loans are a necessary part of lower/middle class life, so borrow and hope for the best.)

Indeed. As an Arsenal fan I wasn't expecting us to do better than them at anything this season, but hey.

NEVER!

Deraldin:

I remember you. Obsid seems to be in no particular financial / reputational crisis of any sort, though beyond that, given its nature as a middle-sized independent studio, I doubt you could really make any claim to guaranteed stability. I suspect Aliens / Alpha Protocol's inability to please its publisher and do a slam dunk has delayed Feargie's intended company cycle, and so they are taking it a bit slower with DS3 and now South Park RPG to push their engine. One would expect that before the engine's lifetime is over they would want 1 or 2 original IP projects, and at least one seems to be either in development or being pitched around.

No, I'm Anthony Davis!

Playing a male Dunmer, your character's FUS ( i think) shout for whirlwind sprint sounds... just like a dog's bark. So every time I sprint I immediately turn around to check there's no mad dogs chasing my arse.

Still having fun with my second character, level 11 and I plan to be a bit more selective about quests. The Companions always sounded a bit stupid so let them be, and I'm still finding new quests/dungeons I never visited previously - was a big challenge on Master, and I had to use up a valuable scroll of Storm Atronach to get past it.

That's right. Whoever the idiot was that said DS3 was as successful as FONV is SO WRONG. That person should be, like, totally ashamed. It seems pretty certain that this is the 2D project, and the whole game is going to try its best to look as similar to the cartoon as possible. I'm not excited about the SP setting and have no idea if it will work, but if they're going to do it, I 100% agree it should be 2D. Every single time I've seen any game or anything turn 2D cartoons into 3D it's looked horrible. Besides which, 2D turn-based combat RPG from Obsidian? That's one thing to cheer about.

Look up the quests in UESPWiki, then use the console (~) ingame to manually make the quests update. The command is something like setstage [questid] [stagenumber], both variables available in the wiki sites.

It'll be on PC. I haven't watched South Park in oodles, but last time I checked it seemed too in your face and annoyingly noisy to be funny. I also have no clue how it would turn into a cool RPG. We'll see, I guess.

Sorry, they fixed the killable NPCs bug back in 2003.

The nightingale bow is decent. I never got my enchanting/smithing up high enough to really get the good stuff though, that might be it. For the perks, if there are 2 nodes that connect to a final node, do you need both as prerequisites or only one? I usually find I only want one branch. My Dunmer character continues at Level 7, am going for 1h/block/alteration and also smith/enchant bit more seriously. I'm finding some battles are a lot harder but some are easier (the draugr, for instance), and it also lets me use a lot more weapons that I find. Might reverse the order of cities and head West first towards Markarth.

Archery is quite fun, though it progressively became a bit too weak for me at higher levels. But maybe because I couldn't really enchant great bows. Restarted with a Dunmer, planning to either two-hander or 1h+melee plus alteration.

Never. Soon they'll just start arguing people who don't patch like good little dogs are pirates.

A city building game would be good - if you're 14 you can handle more than just the 'building' side and I learnt a lot in general from Caesar 3 and the like.

I think there's a X point in all open world games in this mold, even F3 and FNV, where you've now explored the map pretty much and every quest becomes a logistical task of fast-traveling to the nearest area, so tha tyou get tunnel vision, don't really look around, and just become a homing missile of mercenary do-goodery. I'm certainly guilty of that because obviously I want to clear my sidequest list as fast as possible, I want to finish a questline if it's near the end even if it takes me halfway across the world, etc. In fact, I just started using console/moveto commands in my 4th/5th FNV playthroughs to instantly jump to characters. That's why I'm planning to restart very soon while the world is still fresh-ish and I haven't done everything - since the anxiety/excitement of rushing to see the world is now done with I can take my time and take a more 'natural' approach trekking where I can. Also, Bethesda obviously takes the choice of placing far, far too muhc loot in the world to make th eplaces look more alive - so going to cut down on pointless and nonsensical thievery (i.e. robbing people that you just helped with your quests).

Feeling like my first playthrough has gone over the hill. Level 34 now, but the slower leveling mod is a bit broken in that after ~25 it slows down so it takes forever. I'm finding that there aren't too many quests and locations popping up, just some of the major ones left. I'm sure I've missed a lot but I don't intend to hunt down everything - I'll finish the Dark Brotherhood, the Stormcloaks, then restart as a melee fighter with the Empire and see if I want to finish the MQ that way.

If you haven't played Morrowind - think FO3 with less story (both quantitatively & qualitatively), zero characters, lot bigger world, lots of things to do, in big fat fantasy world.

You're in it. Am pretty sick of FNV after so many hours so haven't picked up LR. I might go back to FO1 at some point, though.

Oh, where we are today is fine. It's where we are tomorrow that makes the today bad.

Well, when you dined on his corpse, there's no consequences at all, is there? Whereas if you don't, you have an uncompleted quest staring at you. All the time. WILLING YOU TO EAT. TES is probably what would happen in the first ever VR games - everyone just goes around killing & raping.

One striking thing is, though, how difficult it is for people at the ground level to understand what the hell is going on, unless you have some professional, academic or otherwise in depth knowledge/connection to the world of economics, finance, politics. I'm educated above the norm, I watch the news, I know my history, and to be honest, I have zero idea what the hell is happening. I wonder hwo many people participating in Occupy do, in a holistic manner, as opposed to a series of "I see x, y, z and that is wrong." (Not that that is worthless.) E.g. The Economist in particular keeps printing its doomsday manuscripts about EU hurtling towards catastrophe, we see the supercommittee giving up, etc., but at one level, it seems like at several stages in the last 3 years we've seen reality reach beyond the limits of "oh, btw, this might happen but not really in a sensible world", so now it's hard to construct a proper narrative of what's happening and what it all represents. When you don't have intimate contextual knowledge of something you have to rely on narratives to make sense of things, and we aren't getting good narratives, just episodes of train wrecks. That means the only thing my gut can tell me right now is "yes, this is for real, things are getting real crap and will stay crap for a while", but even then it's not immediate or precise enough for me to say, "oh, I should do this and this to prepare/mitigate", if that's even possible. I don't quite subscribe to doomsday scenarios (and if I did, I'd pick a widespread escalation of things like the London Riots rather than WW3+Fallout or Big Brother), but in terms of that kind of uncertainty and an acute awareness of my own ignorance, that's rather disturbing.

It's the ghost of Boone, LC. He has not appreciated being your plaything for three hundred hours, and WILL HAVE HIS REVENGE.