Zoraptor

Elex is life. Elex is love. The game is pretty good as well, it is a bit janky in places still but an absolute must for any Gothic fans. The difficulty curve is more of a cliff at the beginning which will put a lot of a casual players off, but that's par for the course with Piranha Bytes games.

Not much chance of remakes of either. IWD2's modifications and kludges to IE make it hard to do and it wasn't that popular compared to Planetscape Tournament which was also heavily modified; Obsidian has copyright over game technology and toolset for NWN2 so permission from them would be needed or a rollback to NWN1EE Aurora if Beamdog were to do it. (Trent Oster may also strongly dislike NWN2, but so far as I'm aware that's hearsay)

The inconsistent wording is definitely confusing and I'm surprised it's there in a legal filing. I'd have preferred them to use nett for receipts after cut and gross for before cut but I'm not an accountant. I don't have much problem with the guy who made the initial calculation being mistaken given most people are familiar with movie or game grosses that include the vendor fees and will thus automatically think that's the case when seeing figures. Journos definitely should have checked though, the agreement is a public filing and they are expected to have better knowledge than a random person on reddit and to be more authoritative sources.

IMO there are three big problems with 'quality' drama. I'll exclude comedy because by and large I dislike recent comedies so can't be objective about their quality. 1) Mistaking expensive with quality- too much money result in spending on extraneous guff that actually detracts from quality 2) Over reliance on auteur creators- spend the money on getting them, give them complete control, find out they really need a decent EP looking over their shoulder later 3) Thinking complicated inherently equals quality- it doesn't with the overarching one being shooting straight for Event TV, rather than quality TV that becomes Event TV. Something like Breaking Bad would be a prime example of doing it right; not expensive for the sake of it, attention paid to details rather than style, little known (in drama terms) actors who own their role, a writer who was mostly known for X Files episodes and script management- albeit quality X Files episodes- beforehand. It got its following because the acting was great, the characters compelling, the scripting fantastic and the plotting rock solidly consistent. It's not even realistic in absolute terms, but you're able to completely suspend disbelief because it's so consistently and well presented. In the end it got massive success despite still looking pretty cheap and actually being, at heart, a pretty simple and straightforward story that was just told superbly. The early seasons of GoT actually followed that formula pretty well- if it had started out with an Event TV budget from the outset we'd have had a lot of time dedicated to the Whispering Wood/ Riverrun battles etc in the first few seasons because, well, battles are cool; but they weren't really necessary to show and would have taken time from the worldbuilding that established the franchise. In contrast something like Westworld is like a game where the developer got too much money and starts packing in extra stuff that isn't necessary from the get go. It doesn't mean it's bad, it's just over engineered and over complicated in about every respect*, and mostly it seems for the sake of it. I like Westworld well enough but I can't help but think that it would be a lot better and way more sustainable long term if they'd dialed everything down a level. Ultimately if it costs that much to make and doesn't drive enough subscriptions it will end up cancelled like Rome or Deadwood not because it's bad or has no viewers but because, well, it's too expensive- and WW S2 did shed viewers. *yet I like Legion overall and it's over complicated; probably because it's more stylised.

Longevity would be OK. Weakest part would be the processor but 6/12 should last a while and except at low resolution and high refresh rates the GPU is the limiting factor most of the time. AMD also offers a decent potential upgrade path through its 3000 series (the part it showed at CES was as fast as Intel's flagship consumer chip in multithreading yet is probably AMD's mid range option) and the MSI B450 boards have very good components- as good as most others' 470 boards- that should last. Who knows with the GPU, you just have to buy what's available. My personal opinion is that this year is a poor time to buy a video card but an excellent time to get a CPU, but the GPU issue is mostly value based rather than them being bad and quick to age (early RTX specific performance is likely to age badly though). You'll have to pick your own monitor, I wouldn't even make a suggestion as it's just too personal a choice in terms of balancing the factors involved. I am very happy with my 34" curved ultrawide Samsung (cf791) but it's impossible to even recommend that in this case as it's about as expensive as your budget for two monitors (and I think it's been superceded by a new model as well).

What did they screw up? I liked Westworld season 2. HBO definitely had issues a few years back. True Detective S2, Vinyl etc left them with basically just GoT on the 'quality' drama front while the big new comedy program The Brink also failed. True Detective also got them criticised for rushing a 2nd season- something HBO as a premium channel is expected not to do in principle- with it being severely under cooked as a result and Vinyl was an extremely expensive flop that was basically HBO checklist programming: high profile show runner and associated names! nudity! drugs! big budget! success! Not. And while Westworld is critically well received it's very expensive to make and its ratings aren't great. There was also the very expensive Luck fiasco a few years previous and The Newsroom was both stultifyingly moralistic and monumentally self satisfied and overwritten- Last Week Tonight is a huge improvement since at least John Oliver is meant to be an insufferable blow hard and played for laughs. Their programming has had the same problem that Netflix has now really, trying too hard for Event TV and sometimes coming off as an parody of themselves instead. Seems a lot better now that they've relaxed a bit instead of trying to get a GoT replacement made every year.

That's a relative statement, and we're talking about the the 110K figure people got when they tried determine Deadfire sales through fig investor dividends incorrectly. 110k is a perfectly valid lower bound, and it has almost no relation to whether or not a game is in steam top 100. Just because a game made it into the top 100 does not contradict fig estimates No, it was 100% incorrectly calculated. To be specific about why it was wrong, the redditor who made the initial estimate did not read the Fig investor agreement and neither did any of the people (journos included, unsurprisingly) who quoted him. The correct minimum (using the same set of assumptions) is just under 160k- the figure they used was assumed to be inclusive of distributor cut when per the agreement all figures are after distributor cut. He'd removed the distributor cut a second time and the true figure was 10/7 higher than he'd calculated. And on a slightly unrelated tack, Bronze award on Steam is top 100 sales: 12x Pt, 12x Au, 16x Ag, 59 x CuSn = 99 titles, which included Deadfire.

Yeah, with the current design 8GB of HBM2 isn't really feasible. 4 x 2GB stacks at the same bandwidth would be great but they simply don't exist, and 2 x 4GB stacks halves bandwidth. They'd really need a GDDR5x/6 option which is probably impractical for what looks like a card produced because... how else do you sell the imperfect Instinct cards? The full 64 CUs would help too as that would give it longevity/ some 8k use from the memory and a bit of performance margin over the 2080 at significantly less than a 2080Ti. I wouldn't be overly surprised to see 'Vega 3' 56/64 with GDDR memory once the 7nm yields get a bit better and they get fewer defective Instincts and if there's demand, but I'm a lot less sure of that than I was that there would be a consumer 7nm card. Depends a lot on Navi's performance and how close the successor to GCN is.

'Consumer' 7nm Vega 2 announced at CES for Feb release. It's practically a Vega Titan as it's clearly a professional card that can be used for gaming rather than a specialist gaming card and is basically a rebadged/ low binned Instinct card. 16 GB HBM2 (lol), 60 compute units, performance about the same as a RTX2080/ 1080Ti (though significantly better in Vulkan and other heavily parallelised tasks). 700USD MSRP so it's price competitive with 2080s, but I doubt it's enough so to get much traction. The 16GB of HBM2 is a shame, may be necessary for bandwidth but that's a lot of cost and complete overkill for gaming. An 8GB card with 150 off the price tag would be more competitive assuming that didn't also tank performance. An excellent release for pro types wanting a cheap but powerful option, good for Linux or if Vulkan takes off a bit more; not compelling enough otherwise.

16 cores given the power draw of the 8 core suggests they are likely to need an upgraded socket, so I wouldn't be at all surprised to see AM4+ (presumably backcompatible) and maybe x590 chipset as well. Shame there's no frequency information on the 8 core they showed so it could be compared to the 9900k's. Still, clearly a big improvement on the 2000 series even as an Engineering Sample.

Yeah, the placement says that there will be 2 chiplet designs coming, no reason for that positioning unless they are. I presume they're holding off on the announcement so as not to cannibalise Threadripper 2nd gen sales (albeit TR does have other advantages like quad channel memory) and since the release is still a decent amount of time away.

The breakdown I used (in NZD) was ~1300 RTX2080 (non Ti), 600 for the 660p, 500 for a Ryzen 2600 (300) and B450 Tomahawk (200), 300 for RAM which leaves around about 1000 NZD for the monitor(s) and any sundry expenses. That's including 15% GST, most US prices do not include taxes so they are always cheaper. The 2080Ti is seriously expensive, if you want it you'll at minimum have to compromise on 2 monitors, but you also have to spend on a decent monitor to get the benefit of it. Even the cheapest no name TN 4k monitor is around 500$ here, and IPS/VA start at 700. The cheapest 1440p monitor (TN) with a decent refresh rate is 600. There is no point getting worse monitors than that with a 2080Ti unless you're into competitive gaming where a very high refresh 1080p monitor would be an option.

Seriously, there isn't too much point making solid system suggestions at the moment unless it's urgent since AMD is doing their information releases tomorrow and it's supposed to be significant information that is released. Leaks say 16 cores up to 5GHz and better IPC than Intel, and 1080 level performance for 250USD from Navi, but we'll know tomorrow if that's accurate and when they're slated for release. It also depends a lot on the monitors you want, high resolution/ high refresh rate/ curved/ panel type etc. Most people prefer IPS/VA panels over TN, but it's a balance especially if you want two or if you want high refresh and resolution as well. My monitor ended up costing nearly 50% more than my video card, though I don't regret the cost. Samsung 970 is the best SSD available for a reasonable price, but you get most of its practical performance from the Intel 660p which is a fair bit cheaper. At the current prices here I'd definitely go NVMe over SATA. Memory supply is a bit cartelish, so there isn't much prospect of prices dropping significantly. RAM is still pretty expensive as well, unfortunately. Motherboard choice depends on CPU pick, mostly it's just matching CPU/ MB with overclocking if needed. Realistically you'd be pushed to get a 2080Ti and two decent monitors and 2TB SSDs plus CPU/MB for 2500USD even if you didn't also need RAM and a PSU(?), so there will need to be trade offs. If I had to spend 2500USD now with the stipulations given and didn't hate nVidia I'd personally go for something like an RTX2080 (check reviews/ prices for brand), 2TB Intel 660p SSD, AMD Ryzen 2600/ MSI B450 Tomahawk MB, 16GB RAM (around 3000MHz seems to be the price sweet spot at the moment, brand irrelevant so long as it isn't generic) and use the rest to get one good 1440p monitor and a cheapish 1080p secondary. I'm in New Zealand, so price comparisons will vary from Europe.

Assuming it's the fight I'm thinking of you can pick her up with the teleporting gloves and drop her far away, then she uses all her AP running back towards you... I more or less wish I'd just uninstalled it as I surely must have had better things to do with my time; it's overengineered and most of the charming 'emergent' gameplay in the first has been replaced with dreary grind and finding the right exploit to use to make the next fight trivial. Dealt with as a puzzle game it's OK apart from its stultifying length but the armour and initiative systems will always be just awful ideas and implementations for an RPG.

Which one did he talk the US out of ? And who knows if they're actually leaving Syria, Bolton is speaking differently from Trump. And hey, government employees are people, too Bolton is trying to manage the withdrawal from Syria more than anything. The withdrawal itself is a given and always has been so long as the Kurds are a red line for Erdogan and he's willing to cross the US to get at them. But if the US doesn't back the Kurds publicly they will quickly rejoin the Syrian government- negotiations have already made good progress- and that will ruin the other 'solutions' he's looking at before he has a chance to work out that they're impractical and stupid yet tries them anyway. Bolton solutions = things like a mythical arab peacekeeping force consisting of Saudis (lol) and Egyptians. Saudis are the hottest of hot garbage and Egyptians are only slightly less pro Assad than Russia, neither would be acceptable to Erdie for numerous reasons.

We'll know how things stand better this time tomorrow after AMD's announcements. You'd need to check the prices for the released nVidia cards locally, there are big discrepancies between pricing by location. 2080Ti is fastest by a fair bit but very expensive and very poor on price/ performance basis, and has had reliability issues. The RTX 2060 was announced at CES and it only has a MSRP at the moment (350USD, IIRC) and replaces the 1070Ti more or less. The AMD announcement is at 1700GMT Wednesday. Not too much point speculating on pricing etc since it's so close but it will probably feature consumer 7nm Vega and a Navi release date and definitely details on Zen2/ Ryzen 3000 series CPUs. Intel announcement was filling out the 9000 series CPU line (and mobile 10nm Ice Lake late this year, honest and no backsies). Underwhelming since the 9000 series is still, basically, just another Skylake rebrand and there's at least one more 14nm desktop line planned as well in Comet Lake, so desktop 10nm may still be as much as two years off.

Mali had a good sized and very rich empire for multiple centuries. They certainly are a lot more of a legit Civ faction than Maori are at the very least, and I should be biased towards including the Maori.

It's definitely good news for nVidia users, I'm mostly amused that they've done it in the most nVidia way possible.

At this point you might as well wait three days for CES. AMD will have their CPU/ GPU news and Intel/ nVidia will have something as well. Probably not much from nVidia though since they've just launched their new range, maybe not much more than formal 2060/1160 and below cards and a big campaign to replace Freesync branding with 'G-sync® Compatible' branding. A fair bit will be announcements rather than actual releases but it should clear things up a bit for the future.

Bro, how could you forget the classic post GB non FR D&D game Planetscape: Tournament? Thing about the FR games is that theoretically it's a pretty diverse setting, but they hardly ever use anything apart from its Tolkienesque bits like the Sword Coast and that has got really, really stale even with the dearth of recent D&D games. It would be fine- better at least- having only one 'world' if people used the other parts of that world a bit more.

Probably not that well since 'classic' SLI is deprecated as the new cards use NVLink, and it's always been a bit variable in terms of support/ stability and practical benefit. Would be an option if there was also more DX12/ Vulkan support, but there isn't. At that level of cost the Turing cards would be the best option, though they're not great value in an absolute sense.

If there's one programme on TV that makes me happy that it exists it's Legion. Not my favourite by any means but there should be a place on TV for shows like it.

It's difficult to recommend a 2080Ti to someone looking at a 1080 since the cost discrepancy is so massive* even though it is the fastest. He'd be looking at roughly the same cost to buy a 2080Ti as to build an entire 1080 based system. *OK, it's Boxing Day sales, but I could literally buy 2.9 1080s for the price of the cheapest 2080Ti at the moment...

4k/60fps is more 1080Ti/ RTX 2080/Ti territory if you want it consistently. But the top end RTX cards are overpriced for their conventional performance with there being very few titles using RTX as well, and the 1080Ti is discontinued. There isn't really an alternative though unless you're willing to drop the settings a bit. I don't think it's a great time to be buying a graphics card to be honest. Better than when the mining craze was at its height to be sure, but RTX is immature, the best AMD card is around 1080 level so there's no top level competition and there should be 7nm cards available next year from AMD and probably from nVidia- and the RTX tech will presumably mature and get better adoption in games when they go 7nm as well. But there's always limited point in waiting, as there will inevitably be another new release to wait for.

Definitely, indeed they did fight to keep it after the abortive independence referendum in northern Iraq last year- though that was far from a full on conflict and had only a few hundred deaths. Syria is a bit of an odd man out in that they fairly actively supported Kurdish separatism via the PKK. The current PYD/ SDC (YPG/ SDF) shares a parent organisation with the PKK so they have had better relations than most despite a fair few institutional negatives.