Spider

Yeah, even in PnP circles, the franchise is somewhat niche. It's not a RPG behemoth like D&D or Vampire (even though both seem past their prime). Also, PS:T taught us that quirky settings doesn't exactly bring mass appeal. I'm also not sure how big of a selling point an editor really is. For me personally it may just as well not exist, and while I know there are some who think having it is awesome I fear a majority are like me. Why is that? A game should stand on it's own merits, regardless of how it was funded. As for the universal support from RPG gamers, personally I don't think the game was good enough to gather that kind of support. It was fun and , for me, worth it's price. But it's not without it's issues and the game has problem that would be off-putting to some.

No, companies don't pay VAT, at least not in Sweden. I agree with their math on how to calculate how much you're overpaying with though. The cost of the stuff should be the base, not what you're actually paying.

I had missed that, I saw the price being in dollars and assumed the marketing stunt would have been originating from an american site. Good catch, and yeah ars technica probably didn't take VAT into account. Though that'd still only bring it up to about 800k (if using the Swedish VAT of 25%, which is lower in most places). And I don't think a $250,000 car costs $200,000 to insure for a year.

Do you really think that price ($(1,000,000) is including VAT?

You might want to wait with the daily area until after Tuesday's patch where they reduce the numbers needed to spawn additional instances. Or make sure to play in off-peak hours. Running the dailies with 50 people in the instance is a chore... What did they change with the seeker droids? I hated it before the change, just found it mind-numbingly boring. So maybe now it'll interest me again, if not you. Maybe I could convince myself to go for the star forager and dread seed armors after all (have completed the main quest for it, just no digging).

I think you need to be more specific at the end here. Of course she's in DA:I to sell games, everything in that game is there to sell games. I do agree with your overall sentiment though, and find Isabella problematic for much of the same reasons. Now I believe those who claim that the writer's intent was to create a strong female character that was very sexual by her own choice. But I do think that the sum of all the parts make isabella feel more like eyecandy than anything else. Changing her appearance so the didn't have breasts the size of melons would probably have helped a lot for me, because as a character she had her interesting moments. Personally her sexuality was the least interesting part of her character though, but how she refused to go along with my plans and stole that damn book and took off was pretty sweet (although frustrating at the time). So ironically, a character I like better by not having talked to her much in the game...

Both those positions are linked in the kickstarter update that went out yesterday, and according to that they're both for PE.

It wasn't very difficult in very hard either.

She was one of the few things I really liked about DA2.

Also finished the game. My feelings are a little more mixed compared to the rest here I think. My main problem I guess is that there wasn't any single part where the game excelled. The plot was fine and well written, but was fairly predictable and didn't have enough relevant choices to make up for it. You could play your character with a certain attitude most of the time, but the game didn't care whether you did or not, The combat mechanics were fine with loads of different options. But combat encounters were fairly bland and combat was very easy. I played on the maximum difficulty level and had to reload due to deaths 3 times, one being when I started a level without equipping the two pistols I had bought, meaning my gunslinging street samurai went in unarmed with Coyote and Paco (I still beat that level with my character unarmed on the second attmpt though). All in all it was an enjoyable game for sure, and well worth the money spent on it. A competent game, but not a stellar one.

Edit: Nevermind, read it wrong The game does sound fantastic though, if he delivers it'll be an awesome experience.

I am for sure. Having games on steam is much more convenient for me than keeping track of a lot of different outlets.

Journalists, in my experience, tend to not be too concerned about clicks. Sure they're aware that it's something to be concerned about, but journalists don't write the titles of their pieces and they don't construct the pushers that are supposed to draw people in to the article. The other stuff is the job of the editor, who is much more concerned about clicks. Sure if it's blatantly obvious one article will gather more interest than another, that will factor in. But most of the time it isn't. Would and article about the developer of Braids gather more interest than one on the developer of World of Goo? Also, deadline pressure. Journalists tend to have tight deadlines (maybe not as much in the electronic world, don't know for sure) so going to the guy they know is cooperative will mean less potential time wasted. But I will give you that the blogging nature of some journalists does change things and to a lrage degree removes the editor from the whole picture. But given that those types of journalists are more personas, their selling point is their voice mor than their content. So in my (even more jaded and cynic) eyes, personal bias would play a larger role in content selection, because their own ego is their drive, more than news.

(not directly responding to the above post, just quoting it for context of the conversation and responding to alan's posts more in general) I think most of us here will agree that Beer is a tool. if he aired his grievances in public that is. If he just told Fish about how he felt in a more private way, then it depends more on exactly what he said and what his intent was. What one person sees as a threat, could have just been intended as a friendly warning. Because the thing is Beer isn't wrong. True, a fantastic indie game that gets discovered will see a lot of press regardless, if it gets discovered. But the gaming industry also thrives on prerelease exposure, and if you're low on a journalists "friend"-list, you will get less than that. If your editor tells you "I need a 2-pager on a interesting upcoming indie-game", who do you think a journalist will reach out to first? A person he likes or one he has an antagonistic relationship with? I'm not saying indie developers should be grateful to journalists, or go out of their way to please them. But giving a couple of quotes when you're in a relevant position to do s, will only help a developer in the long run. Unless you're saying things that would bring the wrong kind of attention down on you, but that's something else entirely.

As much as I believe gaming journalism has ethical problems, what seems to have transpired here is by no means unique to the gaming scene. This is how journalism works across the field. Someone who has a good relation with the press is more likely to get their message out when they need word spread compared to someone who tells journalists to blow themselves. Sure, news is news and had Fez 2 turned out to be the second coming of indie gaming I'm sure Beer would begrudgingly have covered it. But had it only been just as good as the original, it's not necessarily the same news priority and then it would be beneficial for the developers to be on friendly terms with the gaming press. After all, journalists are people too, and their biases and interests will factor in to determine what is and isn't worth writing about. They should try to be impartial, but no journalist ever is to 100%.

Don't personally like the RTS genre either, but always loved the syndicate games. First more than the second, but only because it's more fun to be the underdog working your way upwards than to be the one everyone is ganging up on. Also didn't like the religious zealots from the second game very much. But definitely have high hopes for this one.

Cheating violations are supposed to be reported with the /bug command in the game, not the forums for the reason hassat mentioned. As for the violation itself, I belive it'd fall in a grey area. Automation of game play is against the rule, as is macroing when you use it to combine abilities into one keypress. But as long as one ability = keypress you can do what you want. Multiboxing itself isn't illegal as far as I know, and when you do multiboxing, I'm assuming you're binding all of your characters to respond to input from one keyboard somehow? (little unsure about the technicality here) So one keypress will be one ability activated, just on multiple characters. Probably falling on the side of being against the ToS, but in a grey area in my mind. Also, a person multiboxing is playing on several accounts, so from Bioware's perspective, that's a pretty good customer 8at least if they're subbing).

what was the cheat?

Yeah, was thinking the same.

Have you played marauder Hassat? If you think the BH thing is dumb... Edit: meant sith warrior of course

Personally I love the double xp. Doing one planet thoroughly means I can pretty much do class quests on the next two, and have levels line up after that (I also have constant xp boost on). I would have hated it the first time through the game on either faction, but after that the planet side quests aren't interesting enough that I mind skipping them.

If you're interested in healing and dpsing, there's a corruption/lightning hybrid you can run. It's not for the faint of heart though, sooo many procs and dots and stuff to keep track of, but a fun way to solo stuff. Good enough to keep a companion and yourself alive through most things (you're only really missing the aoe heal, which isn't that good when solo-ing anyway), while still dishing out a fair bit of damage.

Actually the amount of channeled abilities or abilities with cast times doesn't matter for alacrity any more. Alacrity also reduces the GCD, so instant abilities benefit just as much. What alacrity doesn't help with is cooldowns, so any class that relies on cooldowns for it's heavy hitting abilities will benefit less from alacrity. Which is virtually all of them. So alacrity isn't very beneficient for DPS classes, although I have seen people trying to incorporate it with decent results. And given the harsh diminishing returns on Surge and pointlessness of going above 100% accuracy, some alacrity will probably be useful in a ger tier or two. Healing is a bit different, since all healers have one long cast heal that heals for a bunch. Not necessarilly your best heals, but they're still there. Personally on my operative healer I want a lot of alacrity. Just shy of 500 was my goal, and until reached that, I took alacrity over surge all the way. Commando healers are a lot more reliant on cooldowns though, so I suppose alacrity might be a bit worse for them, but since having more than 300 surge isn't that great, you'll be bound to take some, I think.

The death of crit is somewhat exaggerated. Power is stronger for most dps classes all the way through the curve, but 100-200 crit isn't that far behind, and for some classes even equal. Don't know the gearing goals for sorc dps though, but 0 crit and all power is probably optimal. but a piece that give more crit than power is still probably better overall. (maybe not if it's a 1 point difference, but at 10 points crit could very well be stronger).