Morgoth

Where did you get that nonsense? Do you mean Floodgate? Entirely different company, makes now mobile games I think....hehe. The Austin team is actually composed of some high-talent (so they say) staff that worked on Ultima Online and other Online games.... Austin seems to be a lively place for MMO talent, so it actually made sense to setup a studio there.

This could be fun while being under time pressure. Slow dork running into wrong direction vs. space-luke closing in T minus 10 secs.

http://www.alexanderbrandon.net/music.html As we all know, Alexander Brandon, famous Audio guru of hits like "Unreal", "Unreal Tournament", "Deus Ex", "Deus Ex: Invisible War" and a bunch of other titles, is now the Audio Director of Obsidian and already debuted with the excellent "Mask of the Betrayer" there. Just thought you should go to the Music section and listen to some tracks of his "Era's End" album. Is it just me, or does the urge to play Deus Ex comes up all of a sudden again? Because I'm totally lovin' his beats! Now, with the recent rumors popping up that Obsidian is allegedly working on a CIA Spy-Themed game, what do you think Alex is gonna do with it? You mean awesomesauce, too? Anyway, just wanted to say "I love you Alex!". Keep on doing this great work, k?

Me too. Damn, it looks gorgeous, it plays gorgeous. Yerli was right when he said console shooters (I look at you Bioshock) are 5 years behind. It's just a shame that I have to play it with low Shadows, med textures, and 1024 res to get somewhat decent framerates. This game deserves to be played on a QuadCore/DX10 rig. Getting it on release and playing it with compromised settings vs. waiting a half year for my new rig and playing it with everything up, that's just a tough thing to decide! Consoles fall behind in the tech race about ten minutes after the console company begins thinking about releasing one. But the Wii has shown that a console doesn't need to be high tech to serve its purpose. Certainly not. But who wants to play with a Wii? Was there anything released on it yet but Sport and Puzzle games? Anyway, no doubt Crysis doesn't brag around with a deep story-line and stuff, but the high level of Physics, AI and environment interaction just leverages the gameplay quality into new fields. And while the basic gameplay doesn't offer anything groundbreaking new (it's a shooter, it has a cool nanosuit, it also has nice graphics), the quality what you can do with it really is breathtaking. Infiltrating invisibly a base, jumping on roofs, crushing whole buildings onto enemies, or just grab a chicken and throw it at them while they run around dead-**** scared....sigh, then just something cheerfully-evil comes out of me.

Shadow quality and Resolution seem to make the biggest performance difference. Switching Shadows to Medium, Res down to 1024 (ugly I know, but you won't notice it after a few minutes anymore) and Post Processing Effects to Med make the game playable, even on a non-Bok-Rig . I also hope ATI is gonna release some sort of magical driver soon, something like 150% performance increase would be nice.

Me too. Damn, it looks gorgeous, it plays gorgeous. Yerli was right when he said console shooters (I look at you Bioshock) are 5 years behind. It's just a shame that I have to play it with low Shadows, med textures, and 1024 res to get somewhat decent framerates. This game deserves to be played on a QuadCore/DX10 rig. Getting it on release and playing it with compromised settings vs. waiting a half year for my new rig and playing it with everything up, that's just a tough thing to decide!

Who wants green nipples anyway! Bleahhhh! Nobody mentioned anything about the writing quality yet. We know it has long loading times, what about the actual roleplaying?

Crysis demo tommarow.

If it wouldn't be for that horrible Transylvania setting, I'd actually get excited. Besides, I heard the game still makes heavy use of the numerous loading screens, heritated from the Aurora engine, right?

Some friends were in the beta and their general take was that it felt 'very Diablo-like' - but the character skills (the ability to be flexible w/them per class, I guess) were very lacking/boring in comparison... or something to that effect. ie, the usual "it has potential as a good action-rpg type game, but as-is, it's disappointing." I'm currently playing the HGL Beta myself, and it's not really comparable with the demo at all. It definitely shows potential, but I feel it doesn't kick off the atmosphere/addiction-factor from Diablo as well. I still have to play more though to make a final judgement. Playing with a Summoner, I always have this salamander tank and two goofy mini-demons with me, annoying enemies and stuff. Very funny actually. The British accents range from "nice try", to "yeah I believe you Mr. Bean" to "just annoying shut up finally!!!11".

And I thought ME is an epic drama that's all about saving those hot blue princesses from the soulless AIs... in order to save humanity, of course!

Seems like the first screenshots have been leaked. Click This is gonna be one wicked hell of a game!

I just finished Portal. Hurray for cake! The ending is awesome. Yeah that song was hilarious indeed.

There's still a chance for a new Ultima....from Bio. But more importantly are Bio's sophisticated Actors... they spend a ton of time and effort into the tech. And I mean it does look amazing. Try to rig, skin and animate a NPC through usual methods, it will take you months just to get one Actor to behave that believable. With the tools Bio created, they can to that in minutes (whatever, Greg Zeschuk mentioned that in an interview). This can be applied to other genres as well. Why do you think EA wouldn't be interested in re-engineering that into other games?

With Bioware, they also acquired a lot of their own made tools and dialog system, which EA can incorporate into other games as well.

I still have to pick up MOTB. But not before the Christmas holidays, if any luck maybe earlier. I also keep an eye on Crysis, Hellgate and Witcher. Although from what I've seen the Witcher won't be my cup of tea.

EA does have plenty of in-house development teams. Think of the Need for Speed series, EA Sports games, Command & Conquer, those Spielberg projects, and a lot more.

Somehow I doubt EA will become big enough to buy the company that owns NBC and Universal studios. Vivendi is worth 10x what EA is worth. Yeah, thanks to World of Warcraft, Vivendi could probably even own EA!

I just played through HL2 Episode 2. I really cried at the end. Now I'm going to finish Portal. There's still cake waiting for me! And here's an image to give you an idea how I'll end up when I become an old fart.

It sucks anyway. The original UT is still the single best UT!

Tim Schafer is simply a genius. You can be sure I'll pick up everything he creates on day one. I didn't with Grim and Psychonauts, but after playing these I knew Tim's my new hero!

Q&A about the buyout with Ray & Greg Nothing new really, just the typical Bioware interview. "We're really excited to work with EA now. They're a great partner!" "We have some super secret stuff in development" "We never give you a straight answer to your questions, because John is pointing a gun at my head right now"

Evilness attracts evilness. What's wrong about that?

Don't want a Wii title? Don't buy one. They have other products (platforms) in development too. Making Wii and DS games in addition is not the end of the world. By 2010 Pandemic + Bioware will have at least 5 products, perhaps more released. What's so hard about that to understand?

They fought so hard for their independence! Oh gawd! Like the new French revolution of Ubisoft! You do know know that while Bungie has become independent again, they still will continue to work with MS, possibly even on a Halo4?