Tigranes

Why should you have to pay more when it doesn't cost them any more to sell it to you?

Well, it will go to 5-6 conferences, and I think I have a fair shot at getting some of it published, so maybe it will see light of day in some way, yes. Actually, a good marketing trick will be to upload the full work somewhere, get a tinyurl, then have that link on every page of my ppt slide in conferences. Yesss....

Krezack, I found Civ V boxed copy at my local JB-Hifi for 88NZD, if Steam is actually charging 90USD you might want to check it out, aren't they an Australian franchise? EDIT: Oh wait, this is the New Vegas thread, my bad. In that case I'm looking for prices, too... another idiotic thing with Steam games is that they region-lock so you can't just buy from any digital retailer, last time I checked. That means you are forced into stupid localised (or, rather, non-localised into the point of absurdity) prices. Let's see if I can find a proper price, I may buy this but I sure as hell won't buy it from Steam.

That's true. Maybe it's your wife. As long as it's their new character, why not? Women dont' look that bad in Arcania, at least. (i.e. Male models with boobs)

MIning skill takes a good while to pick up... but exploring is still very very fun in Risen. Just expect to die... but in such a small island there are a LOT of things hidden.

Well, it was purchased, and I think it was pretty good, yes. I tried Arcania demo on it and on full settings it was fine. Obviously it came with NOrton and all kinds of monstrous things - HP are getting worse and worse, now they have their own mini-OS called quickweb so that you don't even boot into windows! All purged. All this has made me think of replacing my laptop - it all depends on my next career/study step, but how's the market at the moment? Obviously i7 in laptops is going into full swing right now, but are we on the verge of a new generation of CPU/GPUs for laptops?

Any 2-hour portion of Risen, even its railroaded Tomb Raider finale, is vastly superior to anything shown in the Arcania demo. Apart from the famous stunlock in the original Gothic 3, which was retarded, the combat in G3/Risen was vastly superior - everything about it works to ensure that you are a lethal threat to your enemies but they are a lethal threat to you. You kill 20 skeletons then go on autopilot for 2 skellies, they can kill you. You have to work in each and every battle but if you do, then you can overcome most challenges. In Arcania demo you simply ignore what the enemies do and mash the attack key, then when they do their stupid glowy-sword charge-up you roll away and repeat.

I think i played the second one a little ten years ago or so, but I'll try this one.

Yeah, I just finished the demo and the one thing I noticed is that magic is going to be really boring. Risen dumbed down magic but this is nothing in comparison. The problem with combat is that you can't shimmy around while blocking, so the most effective way to fight is to just roll everywhere in really big animations, thus relying on auto-target to orient yourself, and then, because enemies are horrible at adjusting to this, hack slash hack slash. Enemy spellcasters are entirely useless as they take 5 seconds to cast their slow projectile spells; and finally many of the enemies seem lobotomised in that their attacks are languid and ponderous. You can strafe-shot wolves to death here - now compare that with Risen / Gothic wolves. And then it seems like levelling up doesn't really give you anything new to play with, you just get stronger. Level up is a joke - my football game is more RPGish than this. Really disappointed, there are things in there which could end up being fun but I know I shouldn't waste my money on this.

Handed in my Master's thesis. Think it's pretty good. Of course, an MA is a depressing mid-way point where you do pretty good work but nobody's likely to bother reading it.

But then, maybe the said reviewers think all the village / marriage stuff was good, in a Fable sort of way. Hassat, do they give any reasons for the downhill?

Quick check guys: GF is getting a new laptop, and although I keep telling her (non-gamer) that this is overkill, she wants to get a HP DV6-3079TX with an i7 core. # 1.6GHz Intel Core i7-720QM Processor # 4gb DDR3 RAM # ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 Graphics (1gb apparently, but I better check) 1700NZD = 1250USD. Computers are expensive in NZ, so I think this is actually not a bad deal, though I haven't kept up to date on i7s on laptops. Now I know this will be more than good enough for her needs, but I'll be able to use this as well, so my question is, as a games laptop, what do you think about its capabilities? I'm hopeful that it will be able to handle some games that my laptop can't: # Intel Core2Duo Centrino P7350 2ghz # 3gb DDR3 RAM # NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT 512mb It did Risen, Dragon Age, Crysis, Alpha Protocol at mid-high settings but will probably begin to struggle with this year's crop of games. Am I right in thinking the new buy will represent a clear 'step up'? Also generally interested if one of you think it's not a good deal, but keep in mind in NZ options are few for computers, you literallky have to choose from less than 50 models.

I hope it wasn't Aunty Mena's on Cuba, by 'nice'.

Ouch, if graphics were the ceiling I could try and fiddle, but I don't really know what you can do with a CPU ceiling - anybody have any tips? I guess i'll defrag & delete crap off HD to fool myself that it's helped. edit: wow, 99.8gb of movies I accidentally recorded through Fraps while LP'ing Icewind Dale.

OK, I just tried the demo. Not as bad as I thought but god, it runs so badly on my system - it's surprising, as everyone has been saying it runs very well and performance is not a problem. My laptop has a Dual Core P7350 (2ghz), GeForce 9600m GT 512mb, 3gb ram - not the best, but pretty good for a laptop and ran DA:O, Alpha Protocol, Risen, etc. just fine on high settings. Are the superhigh system requirements for real, then? The game certainly doesn't look good enough on high settings to justify it. I seem to get 10fps at lowest settings, 5fps at highest. Even 20 would be just fine with me, but Gothic style combat is just not fun at that level. Otherwise, I expected the worst and... I don't think it'll be a good game, but might be a decent romp. Ability to deselect the silhouettes and markers and such is a big plus, and voice acting / dialogue is actually okayish in places - it's just that it descends into idiocy a few times. Combat was too easy, but hopefully in the full game it will be fairly simple to mod damage values? I'll have to play a bit more and see if I can get it to run better, but I suspect things like invisible walls and quest design, as well as stealing without consequence, will suck a lot of fun out.

Let's caaaaarefully make sure this isn't a slippery slope here gais, without us deleting everything.

I don't know what goes on behind the scenes at Bio, but it's such a large forum with so many people coming and going (like Bethforums), the dynamics of moderating are quite different. Besides which, Bio have throughout their history always wanted to be as involved as possible with their devs, and I imagine that means they want to keep a fairly tight handle on the atmosphere of the place in order to ensure it goes well.

Actually, the Philharmonic and the Jazz Orchestra are clearly very different things. You are forcing them into one super-broad category of 'mu-ji-shuns' to try and make this look illogical!

I find it rather interesting how many atheists/agnostics often speak from a defensive position when asked things like this (and, to be fair, the original facebook question is ludicrous), and then feel like they can't resist a swipe at various religions in the process of their own defence. It's like an atheist's self-proclamation of validity isn't complete without a comforting assertion that 'the other side' is a bunch of idiot sheep. Of course the vast majority of atheists/agnostics will have a sense of morality, and I don't see why the millions of not-crazy Christians wouldn't see that (or 'can't accept it'). Anyway, didn't Kaftan just post for a laff?

Haven't seen the vid, but is it just no casting time, or no casting time AND no cooldown?

Lot of us love to believe that this pattern holds true all the time (funnily enough, it's usually by those who believe themselves to be different), but meh, Oblivion and FO3 were the only really big examples. DA:O always looked good to me in development and I was always going to buy, and after that I naturally assumed I'd be getting DA2 & 3. It takes quite a bit of crap shoveled at your feet to turn you 180' from that, but crap is being shoveled indeed.

Alright, I'll try this too... as soon as bandwidth opens up

Watching a video of the demo being played, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lj0r7e1mnU - tell me if I'm on the mark here... 1) Rule #1 of voice acting fails again - if you can't get good VA, get unnoticeable VA, not obnoxiously crap VA. Or at least let me kill the idiot girl. Sadly this continues with the retarded farmer, and pretty much everyone sounds like they've been lobotomised. Much, much worse than Risen, and how big a budget did that game have? Even the protagonist VA is retarded. They all sound like people who failed the Harry Potter Radio audition. 2) Graphics/world looks nice, Gothic-ish, as we've known. 3) Obnoxious quest markers and such - but we know we can turn them off. 4) That fade to black just to talk to people is going to get annoying. 5) Can you at least jump up on shoulder-height rockfaces and such in the village? Otherwise it's going to suck. Codex Feedback tells me combat is way too easy, can we get opinions? So far looks like the game will still be fun if the combat is balanced/challenging and there is still some quest nonlinearity.

Agreed, I suspect that Brian Menze & Co's original script was a lot more realgritty.

If you can jump off cliffs anyway, then why can't you run off them? Prevent accidental deaths? Meh. Sounds like Gothic Lite, maybe I need to try for myself before buying then.