Zoraptor

Not in one week. That figure includes kickstarter and all other presales as well. DOS2 had sold over 300k before it was released, and sold ~180k in its first release week.

Don't really see why it couldn't just be that PoE console and Bastard's Wound both released around the time of the articles- and flying people somewhere + accommodation is not all that expensive since even if the Eurogamer guy was based in Europe most of the others weren't. They wouldn't be staying a week at the Ritz after flying in on a specially recommissioned Concorde while drinking Moet & Chandon '62 out of a complimentary diamond encrusted bust of Atton Rand. Far more likely they'd fly economy and stay at the Holiday Inn for a few days. And yes, there's certainly Deadfire to consider as we can only assume that Paradox is keen to publish that, so ongoing promotion and goodwill is a good investment. They had one and it didn't really reveal anything. Yeah, the article Infinitron posted at the top of the page (on 25pp at least) is the follow up Eurogamer article and has basically no info on the new project. The author did at least clarify on twitter that there wouldn't be much new info when people started getting excited about it. Given the way the final paragraph is written it's pretty clearly the last one in Eurogamer's series, at least.

Some random magister killed the black cat that was following me. I'm playing on tactician mode and only a couple of hours in but its combat is almost completely binary- I either roflstomp everything with no casualties or get roflstomped with the enemy taking no casualties. The latter type have all been optional/ avoidable though, so no real problem.

I'm not surprised at all. Countries tend to avoid teaching their less than glorious history, and that which doesn't fit the national narrative. (Polish Lithiuanian War. It's off topic anyway)

Ukraine. Worshipping that unredacted genocidal fascist Bandera as if he's a hero. And most ironically supported by Poland. Well, not quite most ironic, almost as ironic as Poland whining about 1939 when they blatantly stabbed the Lithuanians in the back and stole their land when they were fighting the soviets, and also helped partition rump Czechoslovakia early in 1939. And, as always, the EIC/ Vic's Raj killed more people in India alone through capitalism than the history of communism- primarily so that they could pimp drugs to the Chinese as well.

I'd suspect that right now is a poor time to be buying unless you have to. The Zen based AMD mobile chips ought to be out later this year, and they should have an even better power/ value balance than desktop Ryzen has. Coffeelake on the Intel side should be out soon (next month, supposedly) as well. Personally I'd look at buying a new battery if I could find one for a non extortionate amount. It's almost always the battery failing to charge rather than the laptop's fault.

To post or not to post, that is the question Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of people labeling a 2000 meme as being one for the 'real internet oldies' Or make commentary against a sea of misattributed apocryphal Polish Fighter Pilot stories, and by replying end them. To post, to write no more, and by ignoring do we end the two unnatural triggerings this thread is heir to? 'tis a consummation to be devoutly wished. To ignore to leave; to get more such comments elsewhere- aye, there's the rub for in the ignoring of such comments what further posts may come elsewhere when we have tabbed out of this accursed thread must leave the back button unpressed. (literally shaking, but might be my advanced age to blame)

The DivOS companions were pretty good, but certainly nowhere near as involved as the typical Obsidian or Bioware ones. Most of their personal quests are stacked towards the end game though, so you don't get much from them if you don't get that far. Funny, I thought it had a very good reputation here. Maybe it's because I don't read the PoE forums much, I'd guess there's some competition between the two for best crowdfunded RPG and RT/P vs TB. And while theoretically their settings are quite similarly themed the practical application is almost diametrically opposed. I already have DivOS2 as a backer, but probably will wait a bit for patching before playing and as I have other games to complete.

So what horrible classics have you seen on GOG? Except Master of Orion 3 maybe, but that's arguably neither a classic nor truly horrible in the way a Ruins of Myth Drannor is. *shrug* Yeah, there's a massive difference between MoO3 'bad' and PoR2 bad (though to be fair, the most infamous PoR2 bug was actually a bug in the 3rd party installer software rather than the game itself). I actually liked MoO3 well enough, personally, as I hadn't played the first two games. OTOH I disliked Jade Empire strongly, though it's technically absolutely fine and a lot of people like it and found Rebel Assault 2 to be boring and have rubbish gameplay, but again some like it and it wasn't technically poor or anything. GOG does sell a few games which are broken in certain circumstances- eg The Saboteur won't work if you have more than 4 cores- but they are labelled as such. I can't think of a single genuinely bad old game that is on there, and several newer but unsupported games have even been culled from their catalogue recently. About the only thing that seems to get you culled from Steam's catalogue is being mean to Gabe. There's certainly no way those 5000 odd 2017 games are all going to be supported and stable now, let alone in a year or two's time. If anything GOG can be criticised for keeping things too up to date- which has led to some games losing support for legacy OS like XP.

There's likely to be 5000 (!) games released on Steam this year. That's nearly 15/ day, or GOG's entire catalogue every 4 months. I suspect the number of worthwhile titles has not quite seen the same inflation.

While it's paid for by Paradox it can't be all that expensive, perhaps even cheaper than conventional advertising. It could just be for BW and console PoE which have both released in the last weeks or so. No- Eurogamer aren't going to say "and next week we have something you won't be interested in", after all, they want people to Read And Find Out. It's the journalist equivalent of a Batman episode ending with the Dynamic Duo about to be cut in half by the Penguin's laser and being told to tune in same bat time, same bat channel. I'd expect some minor 'new' information, maybe something more substantive if Paradox is publishing it, but very well short of a reveal.

Stardew Valley's romance system is pretty much identical to those found in most RPGs though. You'll get relationship points mostly by giving people specific(ish) gifts up to twice a week and on birthdays, and the rest is dialogue choices in cutscenes, quests and clicking on them once a day. It's certainly a more involved and longer process overall than most RPGs, but its basic building blocks are very similar to, say, Dragon Age Origins (minus the small bonus if you do bother talking to them every day).

GOG version of FONV is near rock solid out of the box. Or off the download or whatever the equivalent is. I had 2 infinite load loops- no save game corruption though, just one off loops- and that's it barring some minor scripting type bugs. Considering the number of crashes I had with (retail) F3 a couple of years ago even with fixes and using older hardware (e6400/ 5770/ win7 vs 1700/ 580/ win10) it was a massive improvement. I'd usually presume that most GOG fixes are publicly available ones like presetting the executable's LAA flag, but there certainly seem to be some intrinsic stability improvements as well. Which is not much use if using the steam version, unfortunately.

Not sure that attributing made up stories to him is a great tribute, Mr Tucker. (That story is apocryphal and usually attributed to a random Polish or South African or Scottish pilot due to their accent making mishearing Fokker more believable. In the more well though through versions they even use Focke (Wulf) since they were actually used by the germans in WW2, or have it be a WW1 pilot's story instead. Of course in this case the fighter FW-190 was used only after Bader was shot down anyway, so it was 100% bf)

BioWare games are pretty horribly guilty of the second offense, going all the way back to Baldur's Gate 2. In Baldur's Gate 2, most characters of the opposite sex will literally not talk to you outside of a few pre-scripted one-liners (interjections) sprinkled throughout the game unless you commit to a romance with them...and if you try to demur, welp, that's the end of all of their conversations. Most of the characters period will not. The romance dialog series (which fired off randomly and created some really bizarrely timed conversations) were pretty much the only extended dialogs. To be fair, they all had an extended dialogue associated with their personal quest line whether a romance option or not. So you still got the personal quest of the female romance options (Viconia, Aerie, Edwina) even if female yourself and you still got Anoarth Skyden's personal quest if you were male. You could even still drive the annoying git insane, iirc. Ironically Bioware 'fixing' their spontaneous banter chains to be either '__ wants to talk to you' prompted or 'chat by the fireside' style led to far more chance of ending up accidentally ending up in a romance/ boinking by just being polite. My problems with game romances are similar to other people's, ie they're not often done well but more done because a certain subgroup expect them to be there. I did like the approach in Witcher 3 though, with the possibility of you being dumped- best result for all concerned, so far as I'm concerned. Witcher 3 has the big advantage of being done with predetermined characters with backstory in the books and previous games though, which is obviously rather difficult if you're doing a blank slate character.

Killjoys is far cheaper to make which is almost certainly the deciding factor- only 3 leads, very little CGI, almost all the sets/ locations being generic industrial/ Canadian Countryside. I liked Dark Matter a fair bit, but then I'm a sucker for all the other Blake's 7 analogues like Farscape and Firefly as well.

As for the White House staff, Tillerson doesn't seem very competent, so, at least someone who knows how to structure a State Department properly. Tillerson seems fine, considering the limitations he's working under. No worse than Kerry or Powell, far better than Clinton or the later GWB offerings. Kind of lol at WoD's idea of Bannon and Bolton in the same White House with Bolton as SoS. Their foreign affairs ideas are almost completely incompatible, and nearly everyone outside the US (and many within) loathes Bolton with utter passion.

Yes, and to continue... Grain/ cereal fed cattle/ meat farming is horrendously inefficient as the energy conversion is only 10%, you need to harvest and transport the grain etc and it's far more efficient to just have people eat the grain instead of feeding it to a cow since cow energy also has a 10% efficiency when turned into human energy (so there's a 1% overall efficiency from grain to human instead of 10%). As practised in the US it's also a giant sop to subsidised corn and the like, and is perfect for double dipping agricultural subsidies from growing the cereal then from farming the cattle. However, if you stick a cow in a paddock and it eats grass that is fine. Not all land is suitable for grains, and where it isn't Mr Moo gives you a 10% energy conversion you wouldn't get at all otherwise.

In France they don't even bother being polite to tourists most of the time, unless you can speak french pretty well. Realistically wherever you are you're treated a lot better if (1) they want money from you andor (2) you speak their language.

Littlefinger situation sums up the recent writing, relying on an unsubtle deus ex machina in lieu of actual plotting of either sense. Better pacing otherwise, but the series is basically a painted eggshell at this point, it's very pretty to look at but if you want an actual egg with some substance then you're out of luck. I wouldn't be surprised if the show and book were fairly similar in that respect. Arya clearly isn't going to go full/ permanent faceless man in the books either, and one obvious way to break her out from that is to have run into someone on her list whether it's Meryn Trant or someone else.

Who are you to tell me I'm thinking like ISIS? In order to do so you must be yourself thinking like ISIS, to know what they think like and what they would say. Quod erat demonstrandum. Don't. Don't think like ISIS. Though fret not Volo, there's a huge difference between called them 'bad' muslims and what they do which is decide people aren't muslim at all based on their belief of what makes 'good' muslims. So neither you nor I are really thinking much like ISIS unless we justify killing them by saying they're infidels/ apostates// nusayris/ kuffar etc etc instead of murderous nutbars but actually still muslim.

Yeah, they do. They also include converts from christianity and even former atheists though. In any case, a profile isn't a hard diagnostic in anything other than tv shows, it's a soft one based on probabilities and the most likely characteristics of a group or individual. For that, disaffected, drifting, purposeless 2nd gen immigrants are the most common western jihadis. That also makes it rather hard to say that they are hiding in or tolerated by the muslim community at large, because the partying, drinking, womanising 20 year old who seemingly randomly goes off to join ISIS isn't a 'good' muslim (and realistically, ISIS isn't good muslims anyway since they rely on a ludicrously narrow interpretation) and on the face of it is a better candidate for apostacy than going full jihad, similarly most of those in prison aren't good muslims either, and the converts who do it certainly aren't. If one wished to be facetious, one might observe that the christian/ atheist community doesn't do a good job of turning in their former people who joined ISIS. Fact is that some level of muslim extremism is tolerated outright by western countries not because of free speech- Teresa May doesn't give a run through the wheat fields about free speech- but because if they didn't Saudi Arabia would be mad and not buy their bonds or weapons or contribute surreptitiously to their re-election campaigns or bung 700 million into your bank account 'accidentally' (lol, Malaysia) and all the other soft power tricks. Until that changes you'll still have the people who do the real damage free to do so.

If you want large scale Christian terror attacks you can look at the CAR where there is widespread French sponsored 'ethnic cleansing' of muslims (following on from the France sponsored ethnic cleansing of Tutsis in Rwanda which everyone forgets about), and to an extent Nigeria. It's also not too far away time wise from Bosnia, and the unrest that spawned Boko Haram in Nigeria was not a one way street either. There's definitely a lot less, but there also some moral and logical chicanery going on to maximise the difference. eg, I'd suggest that if you reversed the position with respect to drones and it were christian westerners being targeted- even with an actual 100% accuracy against military targets- rather than various brown muslims then that would be regarded unequivocally as terrorism in the west. There is after all the tendency to label attacks by anyone against western armed forces, ie legitimate military targets, as terrorism even though they are legit targets and the aim is clearly not to terrorise civilians. A roadside bomb destroying a humvee or a Bradley is the direct equivalent of a drone strike, but one is terrorism and the other not with no actual justification for the distinction beyond us being the good guys. As it is a huge number of people live under the constant threat of being blown up arbitrarily by someone thousands of km away which if you take away the names is obvious terrorism; but it isn't terrorism because the government tells us it isn't and they're 100% getting bad guys with no repercussions, honest.

IIRC Shia don't have a practical potential Caliphate due to their doctrine difference to Sunnis. Iran also didn't issue any expansionist fatwas at all, indeed Iran hasn't invaded anyone in literal centuries. Hamas is Sunni, Houthis are Zaydis (separate sect sort of intermediate between sunni and shia, albeit sometimes included with shia) and aren't extremist in any meaningful way and certainly not in the 'jihad' way, PIJ is sunni as well. Hamas at least hasn't had Iranian support since they chose the wrong side in the Syrian Civil War either, their main backing is from ikwhan (brotherhood) sources, so nowadays mostly Qatar financially and politically Turkey. Qatar certainly buys weapons from Iran to support Hamas with, but that's a purely financial arrangement. In terms of 'jihadi' groups there basically aren't any shia ones without stretching the definition a lot to put Hezbollah or the PMU or IRGC in there, and if you do that then you end up including far, far more sunni groups as well.

The comparison does work to a point- the more extreme protestant sects (Westboro Baptist types) share much of their base philosophy with Salafis as much as they'd explode in apoplexy if anyone suggested it, still hate catholics etc. They aren't literally out for blood though, and there is little in the way of the more moderate and mainstream protestant equivalence. But salafism is actually an old philosophy, wahhabism is just the latest spin on it popularised by Saudi Arabia as domestic political pandering and a way to spread influence. For Sunni Islam, and those pillars come from a Hadith, not from the Quran. Shia have a very different interpretation of the source passage and follow the Usul and Furu al-Din. Which translates to the 5 foundation beliefs, and the 10 branches of practice. In the practices includes jihadIsma'ilis also have their own set of 7 pillars of which jihad is included. Jihad itself has multiple facets but is vastly predominated by it's references to actual warfare which is both physically and metaphysically a struggle against evil. Further, this aspect of jihad is Quranically enshrined, not just found in some Hadith or apocrypha. Another part of the Furu al-Din is forbidding evil and disassociation with it, infidels repeatedly referenced alongside jihad as part of that evil. That does show the contradiction between theory and practice though, since Shia are practically far less prone to going full Jihad than Sunnis despite them theoretically having a more extreme philosophy. Even shia 'extremists' like Hezbollah fight alongside and are associated with non muslim groups including both Christians and Druze in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon- can't say the same for their sunni equivalent extremists who have no tolerance at all for difference. Most salafi style extremists are also takfir (basically claim certain groups aren't 'real' muslims) whether they'd implicitly admit to it or not and refer to groups like Alawites as fire worshipers (Zoroastrians) instead of muslims.