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Actually from what I remember when a new update program was put into circulation it donned a skin advertising whatever new xpac was on the shelves. I remember having a NWN1 adventure pack update program despite not having that particular product.

DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE

This again. Great.

For its 50th anniversary, The National Review republished its bruising review of Atlas Shrugged. Oh, the days before Bill Kristol.

From the sound of it, the dialogues in the unlockable modes are going to be humorous and possibly fourth-wall breaking in nature. Which would explain why you can't choose them at the outset.

Read here Interesting part -

so, about that game the thread's about.

I think the game concept is strong enough that it's going to take some major ugliness to mar it, and the AoD engine, though ass ugly, is not ugly enough. I actually think that the game would be best served by being on either end of the graphics bell curve - 2D tiles and text could really work. So could a state-of-the-art engine. I'd rather see the former, really. But AoD's engine looks neither pretty nor neat.

Well. Belabored-geek-trend surfing aside, the concept is a very strong one, and this is relevant to my interests. One of the things I got bummed about when Aliens got canceled was the fact that there weren't any horrific games being created. This turns things around. At first the involvement of Iron Tower gave me pause, as the stuff I had read regarding Age of Decadence had been relatively uninteresting, the characters all fashioned from the same gray, sour-faced template and everything about it being defined more by what it wasn't than what it was. But effective horror does not necessarily require effective characterization, and the phallic thud of Codexian writing could possibly suit the setting, which is bound to be an extended riff on the Hobbesian state of war. Depending on how strategic the combat turns out to be this could be one to watch.

Limiting the number of stims you can carry would be a dumb idea. It's been pretty well established by now that stims are weightless, and there's no good reason at all to say "you can only carry 50 of these" without adding weight. All you can do without making the game plainly dumb and arbitrary is make stimpacks harder to come by (although inevitably, by the time you hit high levels there isn't anything that is hard to come by) Stims have been plentiful in all the other games, but F:NV is taking place in a new setting, so that gives them a certain bit of leeway. Stimpacks were incredibly common and durable prewar tech. The devs will have to come up with a good reason why there would be supply problems. Another possibility is to introduce alternate means of healing. Make stims relatively common but expensive enough to make getting a stim a zero-sum proposition, and have them provide a considerable, immediate benefit. Then provide other healing healing materials that are very common and cheap but only provide small-scale, gradual healing. Like healing powder but more common and with no drawbacks. Reintroducing kits, possibly in order of efficacy (first aid -> doctor, etc) dependent upon medicine skill is probably the easiest means of doing this. Maybe raise maximum daily use from 3 to 4 or 5. I wouldn't hold out much hope of splitting the medicine skill again.

Just speculation. I'd say there's a good chance it'll come out in October. It might not come out on the 6th, but it will be here in October.

If you consider the decade to start in 2000 and go to 2009. He could be referring to the decade starting in 2001 and going to 2010.

At the very least I hope we get a special encounter featuring Nude Obama riding a Vault-Dwelling Unicorn Shouldn't the Unicorn be the one with the pip-boy?

If you max it out will you be UNSTOPPABLE?

It's already been delayed once (twice?), but you can never tell with these things. October is looking pretty crowded. Honestly I would not begrudge them more polish time.

It's pissing off some important people! <url removed - Gorth>

That one's kind of fuzzy. There was already a Mr. T avatar made by Hell Kitty in the first few pages of the thread.

Uh I think something went wrong here.

In one of the E3 demonstrations tranq darts were shown as something you can buy, so I'm guessing the preorder bonus is just a bunch of ammo you get for free.

I haven't read the whole PDF (though I intend to, is it part of a series?), but it doesn't look like a particularly solid critique, other than the is/ought problem, which is little more than the kernel of the text. A glaring hole in the system, but one that requires individuals to want other than to survive in order to be a factor. That way she minimizes (even if she doesn't really solve) the thing with the need for an ethical code. This essentially renders the "objective" aspect of her ethics not-quite-so-universal, but to me Rand rather sidestepped the issue, than outright contradicted herself. I may be wrong, but the name of her philosophy isn't important here, as it's more inspired by the epistemological take than the ethical one. *shrug* It's not a "kernel of the text", it's in the name of the goddamn article. You can attempt to dismiss the importance of the dilemma if you wish to but it's still vitally significant to the validity of the entire Objectivist ethical apparatus. The dilemma is that you can't really sidestep the is / ought problem when you're trying to create an objective ethical system. Rand didn't create an "ethical code", ethical codes can be denied. Rand claimed to have unearthed ethical facts using deductive reasoning. The ethical conclusions that Objectivists render are, by the nature of the system, supposed to be laws in the same way that 2+2=4 is a law. Rand's ethics are supposed to be necessitous and inevitable conclusions of rational thought. They are not. We have the central logical proof of Objectivist ethics before us - Rand's entire system hinges on this one sequence, and in order for it to be valid as an objective ethic, this has to always be true. And if you take it prima facae it's valid. But taking it prima facae is dishonest. The article points out a (glaringly obvious for anyone with a semblance of logical aptitude, really) missing premise in the proof. This is the actual sequence, free of Objectivist waffling - Let's go through it, shall we? A - The adoption of Objectivism is necessary for the survival of any human being. - For the sake of argument, we'll agree with this sentence. This premise is always true. B - You are a human being. - This is also true. There is no instance in which I can not be a human being. This premise is always true. C - One ought to do what is necessary in order to survive - There are, however, instances in which I may not want to survive. This premise may be true, but it also may not be true. This presents a fatal problem for Objectivism as an ethic because it is, as we've said, supposed to be objectively true. Because premise C can be either true or untrue, the truth of our conclusion (D) cannot, by the rules of logic, follow from our proof. If it is true, it is because of happenstance and not necessity. It's like saying "When the moon appears in the sky it is full". It's a conditional truth, and thus it cannot be the same sort of truth as 2+2, which can never equal 5 or 3, it always equals 4 no matter what time of the month it is, and no matter how hard a mathematician wants otherwise. It seems like you deem the "not-quite-so-universal" (what's wrong with saying "not-so-universal-at-all"?) nature of Objectivism not terribly important, but if this factual uncertainty is acceptable to you then you cannot be an Objectivist, you are something else. The whole system of Objectivist moral judgment rests upon the notion of Objectivism is inescapable truth and the going against Objectivist dictates as abjectly without a doubt always wrong. The is / ought problem shows that it is not inescapable truth, and thus Objectivism can be wrong, and thus it is useless.

I doubt we'll see a teaser very soon. I'd wager things will start to come together towards the end of the year. Besides, when it comes to Sawyer projects, it seems like in most cases the first images we see of them are desktop shots.

Since as far as I can tell you won't be picking up many items around the gameworld, similar to Splinter Cell (that may have changed, I read this back when ammo was still infinite) there isn't much reason to have a sellback option.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how it worked too.

With New Vegas coming out next year there will be no shortage of Maximum Face opportunities for Obsidian game players.

Right. "Moronic behavior" in games is really kind of relative. "moronic" more often than not means "reckless and dangerous", and it's the reckless and dangerous behaviors in a lot of a games that make them fun (for example, going toe-to-toe with Metzger and his goons or fighting an entire casino full of gangsters in Fallout 2) Thing is I'd like to see "moronic behavior" rewarded if the player handles the aftermath cannily. The kind of character that starts fights and gets into impossible jams and perseveres through wit and guile is a kind of character that countless roleplayers dream to inhabit. And you can't have a Trickster God character if there's no ****-up at the outset of the story. Consider the scenario that the preview outlines - You beat up an informant who rats you out, and you're faced with bigger tougher security. It would be pretty lame if you always got to make use of that beefed up security. But according to the article, you can only do so if you play your cards exactly right. I think that's an ideal setup - I can turn the rough situation to my advantage and feel accomplishment (and what's more, I would be the exact opposite of moronic - I would be cagey), or I can end up putting myself through needless difficulty with the knowledgethat my choices put me in that position and that I'm not being punished for being an ****, I'm being punished for making a dumb ****. The trick is to make being a smart **** a tricky proposition that is nonetheless achievable.