Magister Lajciak

We can only hope. Maybe we will find out some neat stuff soon, I have a feeling with the new generation of gamers playing Kotor 1 and 2. They want to know what's happening next. Most games have multiple endings, so I think it's really possible we might meet Revan, or come upon her grave, where she went, and then get vengeance on Revans death? There's so many things they can do to continue. With todays visuals it could be a spectacular game. I can only hope, for which I have since I first played them. "Revan was a man, not a woman!" "Huh, maybe I just hoped Revan was a woman." According to official canon, Revan was indeed a man and the Exile was a woman, but of course, each of us had our own playthrough.

Well, I don't participate in any pay-to-play online games - I still want to buy the product rather than rent it, so any MMO is automatically bad for me. If it were that the MMO was made to please those who like such games, but would not impact the releases of the single-player games than I would not really care, but if the MMO displaces the single-player games, that makes it bad in my mind. I... I... have been slipping lately... lately, I find myself tempted to ... mind control... lure... deceive... and intimidate people for my own benefit...

The first Pathfinder RPG preview of the final version has been released. They don't give out a huge amount of information, but it is still nice that they have started giving out some snippets. You can find the preview containing Table of Contents and one spread from the Races section here: http://paizo.com/paizo/blog

Well, I believe the 'official' version is that Revan was male and Exile was female, but if they wanted to, they could give the players a similar implicit choice as in KOTOR 2.

They sort of have to be. BioWare is part of EA, which is a publically-traded company and thus required to release certain information. Obsidian, by contrast, is a privately held company.

Seriously, though, this trailer was aimed at a different demographic than classical CRPG players. Although it seems much maligned both here and on BioWare boards, it is nothing to get worked up about - after all, expanding the popularity of CRPGs by marketing the game to people in other game market segments may get them to play the CRPG and some of them might find that CRPGs actually have a lot to offer, thus expanding the market for them and benefiting us all.

Actually: BioWare.

I agree. I don't want things like 'Aero' (though I know that this particular one can be turned off) that pointlessly take up extra memory. What I want is a stable operating system that has a normal graphical/windows interface, good compatibility with programs (including backwards compatibility) and indeed does not have draconian security that will annoy me every five seconds. This is why I wasn't thrilled with Windows Vista and stuck to Windows XP. I understand that Windows 7 is based on Windows Vista, but what Bokishi said about it being designed to run on netbooks does give me hope for the new OS, because it probably means that it cannot include too many useless memory-hogging features. Stability of Windows Vista is supposed to be pretty good, so I don't mind if that carries over to Windows 7 and the interface will probably be normal windows-like (hopefully they won't make too many pointless changes just to be different). Compatibility with older programs is something that I am a bit worried about - Windows Vista had at best a mixed record on that one (though it improved dramatically with SP1 in my experience when I had to deal with Windows 7).

What a telling omission you've got there Mr. Rorie. Happy now? Well, no mention of Aliens... Still, this "other stuff" is intruguing - I hope some revelations are coming soon (though admitedly, the recent revelation of Fallout: New Vegas was pretty momentous).

Either BioWare or Obsidian should make KOTOR 3. I wouldn't really trust any other company to make it well.

Nice work!

Man, I have told you already - it's not your fault. We pretty much all agree with you in this thread that KOTOR = good and MMO = bad. It's just that with no new information coming out, it is difficult to add anything more to the conversation at this time. This thread has had periods of low activity before, so it's not as if it's something new.

It's true and it's awesome.

Good. Now I'll buy it. Holy crap, this is awesome! I'm getting this game for sure. Yep, it's totally awesome! Only a basic disc check, so no DDRM (Draconian DRM) such as online activation or install limits!

Well, I think most of us pretty much agree with you. Single Player CRPG = GOOD whereas MMO = Bad. It's just that there is little more to say on the matter.

It does if you do not want to support the "rental" system. Exactly - the only way not to support the "rental" system is not to participate in it. Also, it is hardly as if Mysteries of Westgate is being picked on - I apply this policy of non-purchasing automatically to any and all games with online activation and/or limited installs. Even if a game like Dragon Age, probably my most anticipated game coming out in the near future, has online activation, I won't buy it regardless of how much I am looking forward to it at the moment. Heck, I wouldn't even buy KOTOR 3, Diablo III or Starcraft II if these had online activation and there are probably no other games I would like to see more than those. It is a blanket policy - no exceptions - no matter how much I was looking forward to the product before its online activation anti-feature was announced, I will simply not participate in the rental model.

Cool, so if DDRM goes away, you will be rid of two annoyances in one fell swoop.

Hopefully a 3.5E NWN2 expansion, rather than some 4E game...

D&D wasn't the first PnP RPG that I have played - that honor would go to a local RPG from former Czechoslovakia (now it is a Czech RPG), but I did transition to D&D after some time. I started playing D&D somewhat later than you - probably about 1995 or so with 2E AD&D, though I did look back at 1E AD&D too (not really that different from 2E AD&D) and I even saw some things about what came before in D&D. I definitely have to agree that 4E is by far and away the worst incarnation of the rules and it also butchers the settings in the most egregious manner by a long stretch compared to any other edition. I will keep on purchasing 3.5E expansion packs for NWN2 (so long as they are good of course), but I too will most likely refuse to purchase any 4E CRPG.

I am primarily a PnP gamer (even more so than computer-gamer) and I really dislike what 4E has done to both the ruleset and the flavor of D&D. Although the marketing prowess of WotC is probably such that the edition will be successful, I refuse to personally support the further butchering of the ruleset and D&D flavor/settings with my money, so having seen what they have done from the previews and browsing in a store, I have not purchased the 4th edition. It would have to be a truly super-epic computer game with an amazing story, great characters, superb polish and so on to even make me consider making an exception for 4E computer games. WotC has decided to go for a new, younger demographic with 4E, essentially sticking it to a great number of existing D&D players. That is a legitimate business decision on their part, but it does mean that many of us will no longer be giving them our money.

Really? Major online newspapers have searchable archives, as far as I can see. Other sites tend to not delete their articles and posts, it's not like they are taking any space. A lot of blogs do not have extensive archives, because they did not exist all that long. May I ask what exactly do you archive news for? Except for gratifying your OCD, that is. Are you going to datamine them? It's rather hard to find anything in a few gigabytes worth of text if you don't precisely know what you are looking for. If I was to do something like this, I'd run a script to periodically scrape text from HTML pages (or RSS feeds) and shove them into a database. But that's just me, I guess. Well, many Slovak news sites have only limited archives and Slovak press agencies tend not to have public archives at all. Other sites do have archives, but searching them is often a paid service or requires that you buy the specific articles in question. An example of that would be Scientific American, which permits the reading some articles and moves other to pay to view sections after a while. I don't datamine the articles. When I come back to them it is generally because I want to read something about a topic. I generally have few problem finding the archived articles I want, since I archive them in a very organized manner with many folders and sub-folders. If I want to know about the various proposals for changes in the Slovak pension system, as well as the actual changes instituted or how it functioned before reforms X and Y, for example, I can go to the Archive and look up the Economics folder, the Pensions subfolder, Slovakia sub-sub-folder and therein I have articles, government documents, analyses of various institutes/think-tanks and other information on the topic. Before you ask, yes, I am the type of person who wants to look up things like this and in this regard the archive has proven very useful, since many of the articles about and analyses of the pension system I can no longer find online if I check again. On top of that, I also feel that I have build up a huge uninterrupted archive (must be getting close to a decade now) - sort of like saving old newspapers from a bygone era. To me, this has an intrinsic value in and of itself. That said, yes, to a large extent what I am doing with the archiving is some sort of OCD. It would therefore be nice to automate it or failing that at least to automate it to some extent.

What's so bad about IE? I am not some sort of "advanced user", so for me it's an ease of use issue - the 'ease' of IE being that it is already on my computer and I am already used to it. Barring auto-archiving, it does most things I want it to do, so why switch? The number one reason would be that it's not secure. Another would be that it doesn't render a lot of pages correctly. The single biggest reason is hundreds of extensions. Including, but not limited to bookmark syncing, ad removal, tweaks to sites with Greasemonkey scripts. Actually, that's no longer a good argument in favour of Firefox. It has become so popular (almost reached IE market share), which makes it a popular target. In the past month, I can't remember a week when my Ubuntu did not download firefox or xulrunner security patch. Anecdotal evidence suggests Chrome is better in this respect. And if you want to be really secure, run Lynx. OK, fair enough - I am not some sort of IE advocate - I have simply been using it, because it's the default browser and I didn't really see any reason to switch. I am perfectly open to using Firefox and Chrome if they offer tangible benefits over Internet Explorer. On that note, I am about to do a system wipe/formatting and complete reinstall on my new computer (about 6 months old now, so time for a system reset). I have been hearing a lot of good about the Ubuntu version of Linux on these boards and elsewhere, so I am sort of entertaining the thought in the back of my mind about installing that OS instead of Windows XP or Windows Vista (I generally favor XP over Vista, but it may be time for an upgrade [i bought both for cheap - some sort of university deal]). Still, I have many worries about it: 1) Compatibility Issues - Work: I would definitely want to install Microsoft Office 2007, since I have many documents that I worked on in that program as well as its older counterpart, Microsoft Office 2003 (and indeed prior Microsoft software such as Winword...). I want to be able to work on them in a familiar program (Office 2007) and everything must work flawlessly in terms of compatibility of older and newer document files, excel files and so on. 2) Compatibility Issues - Gaming: I want to play games on the computer, including upcoming ones such as Dragon Age. 3) Ease of Use: This includes having a graphical 'click-based' interface that is easy to transition to from Windows and without me being left wondering what kind of 'click' I need to perform for function X and so on. 4) Availability: Where can I obtain it from? I understand that it is free, but is it just downloadable online, or should it be ordered? 5) Other: Any other issues I should know about or other advice you care to give? As you can see, I am slightly tempted, but my doubts are still substantial about whether it is worth the hassle or if I should just stick with Windows with which I am already familiar.

Now that would be nice. I would not include off-site clicks, of course, but the Adobe Acrobat feature you describe would be really nice!

About the only things I want to save are pictures (photos, comics, news pics), so I do a lot of r-clicking/save image. Tons of folders for those and most of the time I never browse through them later. So I do know the feeling, kinda. Well, I also do that with comics... it's not just news I archive - that was more of an example than anything else.

We can only hope. Maybe we will find out some neat stuff soon, I have a feeling with the new generation of gamers playing Kotor 1 and 2. Is there a new generation of gamers playing Kotor 1 & 2? Actually there are quite a few people I have met on my forums, that are teens playing it. They want to know what happened to Revan, too. That's good to hear! Let's hope, however, that they won't be satisfied with the MMO as providing sufficient explanation/KOTOR fix... They aren't. They want a complete game we can play, without having to be online. Sometimes if something isn't broke, don't fix it. I hope they get their wish. Obviously, by extension, our wishes for KOTOR 3 would be fulfilled too.