Fenixp

I find the choice of franchise for this particular title utterly bizarre, but there's so few RTS games that I find it difficult to write off any of them. I just hope it won't completely rape the Homeworld's lore, which was one of its strongest parts.

Prospekt, a fan-made sequel to opposing force, greenlit by fans and Valve themselves. I think Valve is just waiting for a Half-Life 3 fan project so they don't have to make the game. John Romero made a new Doom level.

I always find it fascinating that this: is the low level of argumentation you should always expect to pop up when discussing piracy/copyright laws. I suppose what sets these boards apart from most places I've seen around the internet are people like Amentep, Hurlshot or Nonek who approached the opposing argument from an actually reasonable standpoint and I do thank you for this. Now I finished going trough the old piracy topics and ... Well, came up pretty much empty, really. Either morality of piracy or definition of what "stealing" is gets discussed, which is futile for quite obvious reasons. But any pro-piracy arguments pointing out pretty obvious elephants in the room remain conveniently ignored. See, funny thing is that circa 2008 or so, I peaked in my extreme anti-piracy views, but got into some arguments on a few discussion boards and when looking for ways to counter those arguments, I just came up empty. It's one of the few topics that discussion boards managed to change my mind about, which I suppose is why I like to discuss it (and I swear this is my closing post on the topic and I won't derail the news topic with it any further.)

I play just about everything I can on a controller, but I can't imagine Pillars of Eternity functioning without a massive amount of modifications. Which wouldn't preclude a console version per se I suppose, but it's damn unlikely.

Me and my wife have discovered Lovers in a dangerous spacetime. Me and my wife have suddenly lost two hours of our lives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOnZ9hYiArs&ab_channel=AsteroidBase Getting a second wireless controller was totally worth it.

It is kind of silly. And what's even worse, the game has noticeable input lag. Still - I enjoy this version of Matrix more than in the previous games.

Can I do a necro? Can I pretend that I didn't notice or something? Anyway, as I keep trying to push on anyone who's willing to listen (along with anyone who is not, incidentally), I consider Sunless Sea to be the best written game which came out in 2015. Some people believe the writing is pretentious, but it really is anything but - it's highly practical at what it tries to convey and achieves that splendidly. So, what is it trying to achieve, exactly? Two things which are interconnected, actually: 1) It tries to give player a feeling of wonderlust. It does this by only ever giving player enough information if he's willing to search for it and then piece that information together, yet teasing him with snippets of interesting foreboding of things to come. And that's the genius of this game's writing - it's not just random words cobbled together to get an emotion out of the player, they carry actual meaning and as long as you're willing to properly read and connect the dots, those words convey a wonderful world and stories within it. 2) It still leaves a lot of room for imagination. Oh don't worry, it's not one of those cases of a game which will only make sense once you make up 90% of the lore in your head, the essential pieces are all there for you to find and figure out. But a good chunk of what's going on is left for you to imagine. That's how the game evokes Lovecraft the most - it tells you what happened, but never goes into detail and, willing or not, you will fill in the blanks with whatever terrifies you, makes you happy or concerns you the most. Anyway, Sunless Sea. Buy it. It's great. It's not for everybody, it's slow and you'll read a lot, but it's great. Oh, and since this was posted, a bunch of free DLC in form of new stories came out. You can find and build your own harbor town, among other things. If you can prevent sun from shining on it that is. Depends on the kind of person you are, but if you purely strive to beat the game as opposed to exploring every nook and cranny, it'll take you anywhere between 10-15 hours. Yes, I assume you still care, almost a year later :-P

Something wakes. Flee its gaze, quickly!

Well iD have taken a look at what kind of phenomenon sharing content is and released a significant chunk of their games for essentially free consumption. Shareware model then proved to be an extremely successful way of marketing your game for years to come. You might ask "Well what does that have to do with piracy?", but it's taking advantage of the very same mindset. But even in modern days, pirates were used as a marketing tool and that alone brought games a lot of free publicity - whether it's examples of games like Serious Sam 3 or Developer Tycoon which used cracks in a clever manner to enhance their marketing while giving crackers more of what they enjoy or, say, developer of Hotline Miami who essentially said "I don't care who plays my game, I want you have the best possible experience" and started releasing either his game or patches on torrent sites. There is a reason why different companies are affected by piracy differently - as I said tho, pirates are not the enemy. If you understand reality of their existence you can actively use them to make your product more popular and to have more people purchasing your product. So even statements like "we all know that pirated copy does not equal lost sale, but it certainly doesn't help them at that specific time." might not quite hold water.

Since Steam exists, price of a product is of no concern at this stage. GOG actually uses cracks to make a bunch of their older games function properly - I believe they even grabbed data from pirates on some occasions when publishers no longer had access to original game's files, but that's literally impossible to prove. (I'm pretty sure I've red it in some interview, but ... Well, difficult to locate) I actually didn't pirate anything that I would not pay for since... Was it about 2004? Later? Not quite sure now. Anyway, ad hominem is an argumentative fallacy for a reason so please, try to avoid it in the future and attack arguments, not the person making them. You'll note that none of my arguments weight either price or morality of piracy as all of these are highly subjective and completely irrelevant when it comes to actual ways in which consumers benefit from piracy. You might also take a look at the genuine research papers I did actually link. Naturally, if you don't wish to read my posts, this discussion board has an ignore functionality. There's no need to be rude. Oh and you asked whether I have any sources on cultural significance, not on preservation of blah blah. I can actually back up a fair amount of my arguments if you're interested.

It's very common for GMG to do a 25% off sale very close to release. Not an offer I personally would take tho as it means you lose your chance to get an automatic refund from Steam in case it turns out the game has technical problems.

It really isn't, positives of piracy are fairly easy to point out and prove, yet negatives are up for scrutiny. There's a reason why most argumentation against piracy you see tends to be along the lines of "It's bad" backed up by "It's common knowledge" or something along those lines. We still have ways to go when it comes to wrapping our heads around this whole digital revolution thing.

There, happy now? :-P Well yes, but the title is completely irrelevant. Replace it with UFO (X-COM), TES: Arena, whatever :-P Anyway, thank you for going trough the effort of finding these for me. Most discussion seem to be concerned with whether piracy is stealing or not and whether it's a "nice thing to do" - which I should have expected I guess, but it doesn't particularly interest me. Anyway, some interesting points were raised at the very least.

How does "Fallout 4" translate into "Most other games"? Can't think of any other RPG featuring sandbox building. That is unless by "Most other games" you mean all those online survival grindfests, in which case... Well there's your answer, Pillars is not one of them. Edit: Spellforce! But that's cheating.

Oh don't play dumb, specific title is beside the point and you know it. And... Well there's a reason why I don't mention price in my arguments. Edit: I should probably elaborate a little - Whys of piracy are an entirely different issue and I believe they are fairly irrelevant to a discussion about whether piracy hurts, helps or doesn't affect gaming. Edit 2 - Revenge of the Edit: All right, just so I don't have to post pointlessly I'll just put this into another edit - You make it seem like the issue has already been discussed around these boards ad infinity, but my terrible searching skills allow me to find very little on the topic. I am, however, quite interested in viewpoints of this community - you guys often enough seem to back up what you're saying with actual reasoning as opposed to "What I'm saying is right lol", but I absolutely understand if you don't want to go into the same argumentation again and again. Anyway, what I'd like is if any of you could provide me with some links to previous topics discussing this issue, if you know about them at any rate. Don't worry, not about to necro anything, just want to read. See, where I'm coming from is not a position of firm belief that piracy definitely helps videogames. I've seen some research papers proving that it either does or at the very least doesn't hurt for other media, I've also seen research papers proving the opposite that just didn't feel particularly persuasive to me, and then there are those which just work with implied "Piracy is fine" and "Piracy is wrong" without much reasoning backing up either position, which is ... Well, meh. As Zoraptor correctly pointed out, there's very little credible research concerning videogames and it shows. My personal viewpoint is that piracy makes me comfortable in knowing I will never lose access to my purchased products and if anything ever goes **** up, there's a third party providing for me. I've seen, hell, been part of rampant piracy for most of my life and it largely helped me become the person I am now (you poor souls :-P) I don't know how much of an interest in videogames would I have if I wasn't part of that entire process, so seeing the different point of view is quite difficult for me without sound evidence and actual research into the subject which seems to be lacking, for the most part. I think it would be really cool to see global sale statistics for consoles before and after they got hacked for instance while keeping in mind natural aging process of these devices or how did services like Steam affect piracy and in turn sales data - as it stands tho, none of this has been put trough much research. Frankly, the thought of piracy going away scares the **** out of me without seeing data confirming beyond shadow of a doubt how harmful is it. Currently we have a system which functions relatively well, preserves itself and gives consumer a decent amount of much needed choice. I'm not sure I want Valve, Ubisoft, EA and such to have complete and uncontested control over their properties, in spite of realizing that's their legal right and that that's exactly what they want. Main issue I've got with it is that they don't perceive videogames as art*, they perceive it as a product which can be disposed of after it outlives its usefulness - and when they lose the rights for their intellectual properties after the ridiculous amount of time this takes, without piracy, it's quite likely any trace of these works of art is going to either be completely gone or not available for public. A very natural counter-argument to this would be "Well only buy physical, DRM-free content!" - thing is, pirate sites are what keeps this content alive naturally, organically, without any outside help, legal or financial. I firmly believe purely digital consumption of purely digital content is the way to go, and allowing consumers themselves to care for and preserve your own content is a very logical thing to do. Software pirates are not the enemy - and neither are big publishers, by the way. Still, for decades, they co-existed, yet software sales didn't drop to 0, quite the contrary, they flourished. I feel like taking piracy away would be taking away a powerful 'force of nature' which existed to curate, support and preserve milestones of our past when nobody else did. ... I'm ramblig now. ... Holy crap that's one hell of an edit. That's not just revenge of the edit, it's all 6 episodes of edit + extras, this is amazing! * Whether you agree or not on whether videogames are a form of art, they're works of cultural signifance and as such deserve to be preserved. Whenever I refer to videogames as an art form, this is what I have in mind. I think we can all agree on that point :-P

NWN is a great DnD implementation and how it can function as an extremely versatile multiplayer platform is probably my favorite part of it. I've had so much fun doing simple co-op runs of various user campaigns in that game. Sad thing is that SCL tried to replicate precisely that and kinda failed.

That's the part of my statement you take issue with, really? Every widespread phenomena has some cultural and social importance, all you need to do to get that is to live in a country where piracy runs rampant. Heck, there are countries which would apply mods on a game, rebrand it and sell it under a different name - now that's genuinely harmful piracy, but denying its cultural impact on countries where it actually happens would be a little silly. Anyway, the bit of my statement you actually should have taken issue with is the bit which goes on about *what* kind of importance that is, in other words, opening up to western market before it even properly arrived, because that's based purely on anecdotal evidence and my own experience. Edit: We would never talk about Doom in school if a classmate didn't bring a floppy (floppies?) with a copy from his uncle, which then quickly spread around. Majority of the games which formed my childhood were pirated - not that we knew that'S even a thing back then. And a big part of early purchases from me and my friends were based on excitement for next installments of those games or at least games which were similar. I moved around quite a lot when I was a kid/teenager so I experienced more than a single collective where this happened. Naturally, I might have just gotten lucky and what I experienced might not have been an indicative of majority at all.

That actually sort of brings me to the point that western videogames would have a lot more difficult time penetrating European and Russian market if it weren't for piracy. As it stands, when game shops were getting into these parts, we already knew our Ultimas, Dooms and Elder Scrolls and were extremely excited for next installments in these popular franchises. People have a tendency of reducing piracy into this evil movement of doom while completely omitting the cultural and social importance it holds to this very day.

There are several problems with this statement. First of all, a bit of a logical fallacy in "paying for the pirated copies". You don't pay for development of the game and I can assure you that those who do are very well aware of piracy ratings. You're not paying a cent more than you would if pirates were to disappear over night. Secondly, there's the issue with 'piracy causes less sales'. I'm pretty sure I've seen similar research conducted with videogames somewhere, but at least with music, anime and movies, piracy helps sales or at the very least doesn't harm them. The catch here is twofold: 1.) Word of mouth. Even with the most advertised products out there, a lot of sales will be generated by people talking about videogames. This talk stems from both pirated and bought copies. See where I'm going with this? 2.) People who pirate games may often end up purchasing them. People who only pirate games will most likely not purchase them anyway. Belief that reduction of piracy will lead to higher sales is not quite based on real data and any claim of "Piracy led to 90% of lost sales" is completely disconnected from reality. In other words, not only are you not paying for "filthy pirates", they might very well bring more money to your favorite developers! And then there's the last point, and that's how consumer, like you, benefits from piracy. "What is this lunatic talking about", you ask? Well, as long as pirates exist, they're competition. "Can't compete with free!" you say, well... Turns out you can as proven by Steam, Netflix, Spotify, Crunchyroll and similar services. While they provide content with copy protection that's extremely easy to break, they're exactly the services designed to compete with free - to give consumer a hassle-free, cheap experience which outclasses stuff you can pirate. Of course, last point would be my personal one, and that's the already brought up archival. Games that I can't purchase anywhere? They're on pirate sites. What happens when Steam inevitably goes down? Well, I know for a fact that there's someone, completely disconnected from big companies and corporations, who will keep these games I paid for alive and easy to reach. It always provided me with comfort - but with recent developments, both in law and extremely invasive technology, I'm worried that won't be the case any longer in some time. And all benefits piracy brings us will be lost. Honestly, piracy was always a victimless crime and in light of recent studies, it might be even beneficial. But a lot of people are extremely happy to have their liberty taken away because of a lack of understanding and negative propaganda. Piracy is supposedly "Killing gaming!" for as long as I can remember - yet PC gaming is now stronger than ever. Edit: On other thought, let's remove the links to torrent freak, although the site should be fine as it's just a news blog. Anyway, if anybody wants the original links, feel free to message me.

As weirdly as it might sound, the closest I ever got to playing Morrowind was with Sunless Sea. Bizarre world, multi-faceted story with factions you can join, a settlement you can build, spy networks you can construct and maddening Lovecraftian dungeons of impossible horrors you may explore. And go insane in. And then be pursued by nightmares. And then watch as your crew slowly dies of starvation. And then start eating corpses of your crew in desperate attempt at survival. And then you encounter it and SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN

Oh so you intended those as two completely unrelated statements. Well in that case you're right, the game isn't PvP and everything is viable. I get a feeling that what you actually meant that since the game isn't PvP, everything is viable as player doesn't have to compete against other players. What do I know tho :-P Anyway, I think the original goal of Obsidian was to give classes distinct underlying mechanics, yet give player as much freedom as possible in how they use these classes. Even minor difference like accuracy bonuses would inherently lead to different playstyles. Then again, we already do get different endurance and defense increases IIRC... https://youtu.be/fxGqcCeV3qk?t=2m38s

That's not quite correct. Balance exists for a reason, even in SP games. For one, you don't want new players entering your game, creating character which will either be way too easy or, even worse, way too difficult to play. Furthermore, there's no such thing as grinding in Pillars of Eternity - without good balance, it would be absolutely possible for players to create and level their characters in such a way that they'd quite simply not be able to continue the game. And then there's the good old question of quite simply having fun with the game. You might feel like your enjoyment with how specifically you play the game and with your particular builds would be improved by these changes, but can you honestly say the same for builds of other people? What if the game suddenly gets too difficult for them to continue? Or too trivial? (not saying you currently can't break the game mind you) That being said, I don't think affliction grazes downgrading the affliction are a bad idea, but putting soft restrictions on classes kinda is. As it stands even rangers essentially having to use a bow feels kinda wrong to me.

Since I (and most likely everyone else for that matter) react subconsciously to names with which I get referred by often enough (my given name, my real-life nickname, Fenixp), I tend to call my characters that, lore be damned, or some female variation I come up with. Note that I'm almost never roleplaying "myself" - I just like the impact of NPCs referring to "me" as opposed to "Who the hell is Elvik? ... Oh right, that's supposed to be me." - I'm also terrible at remembering names, by the way, and it generally makes returning to a game I stopped playing for some time easier. When it comes to naming other things in the game, I tend to stick to the lore while being as descriptive as possible. Your chant names are a good example of that, PrimeJunta

They do realize that, which is why Obsidian put in the effort of changing enemy composition rather than just damage/HP buffs (even tho Path of the Damned is still a thing). One thing you need to realize, however, is that AI costs a lot of development time and most have a tendency of playing games on normal difficulty. Instead of coding AI that only minority of players would get to see, it's usually a better idea to not code that high tier AI at all and instead focus on things most players will get to experience. Similarly, when you have created a complex AI that's fun to play against, you don't want players going trough lower difficulties to not experience that fun - after all, your game will be judged by the opinion of majority. As for games not having to target every single player out there... It's funny that you use Dark Souls as an example, which is a mainstream game, no matter how you look at it :-P At any rate, Pillars of Eternity is not necessarily built around difficulty, which is why difficulty options as presented are a fairly good idea.

It's a turn-based strategy game. There's no such thing as "Quickly" - without analyzing a situation and making sound tactical calls, you'll likely be toast on higher difficulties. What Firaxis is trying to prevent is abusing the game's mechanics in a way which degenerates gameplay, like moving 3 tiles a turn because of how pack triggering worked in the original games. If anything, the concealment mechanic should give you a lot more tactical options than EU and EW ever did.