Zoraptor

Congrats. I was surprised how easy it was and how consistently the results were good from home brewing. It's also really satisfying when it turns out well. Strangely enough I decided to try my cider from late last/ early this year tonight, and it was really nice. It obviously just needed a few months of being left alone to mature properly. Guess I have a few months of cold weather left to source some bulk apple and pear juice so I can do some more, pressing my own was nice in theory but a real mess for not much reward in practice.

I would have liked to see more single-threaded performance benchmarks: there were only two. Of course 32 threads is likely to beat 20 threads in tasks that actually take advantage of a huge amount of threads...but the reality is that most things that aren't synthetic benchmarks aren't really equipped to handle even close to that many threads... As the article says, you aren't going to be getting a 10 or 16 core $1000 processor and $400 mobo for single thread performance when you could get a premier i/r7 equivalent for less than half that. Plus you can always do multiple poorly multithreaded tasks simultaneously with more cores and save time that way. i9 and TR are also theoretically* the same as standard ryzen and skylake/ kabylake just with more cores, so we already know what their performance is clock for clock. *Having said that, Broadwell-E actually beats the new i9s in a bunch of tests. That I find hard to rationalise since the i9 should have better clock speeds and IPC. 1400 and 1500x are intrinsically different, as the 1500 has more (2x) cache. I don't really have a problem with AMD's binning of Ryzen, if you don't plan on overclocking and for market segments where you don't expect overclockers to buy (eg preassembled for retail or corporate) they make sense, or if you already have a cooler and want a 'better' chip for not much more money. Certainly on a pure value for money basis x chips aren't the best there is for the enthusiast market.

B&W The nookie mention also reminds me; I don't particularly care about whether or not there are sex scenes, but I'd definitely prefer there to be no sex scenes at all rather than near DAO style grundy wearing ones.

Finished B&W 172 hours, 73% achievements on Galaxy (though having a look through there are at least three I should have got but didn't so Galaxy's tracking is off) and a rather satisfied feeling. Not a perfect game by any means, but then none of my favourite games are perfect- and I feel the immediate urge to replay a game it took me 170 odd hours over about 8 weeks to play. I'll buy the inevitable sequel (prequel/ paraquel/ whateverquel; who cares if Geralt ain't the main character) sight unseen. Just please, please don't be an MMO.

HoS B&W

HoS

HoS spoilers. B&W spoilers. Only main game spoilers below.

To me Bronn will always be singing cheesy duets with Robson Green, which makes him a little hard to take seriously. Seems like everyone's military leadership takes turns being hilariously incompetent in GoT. Robb was the only consistently decent commander, and he was as bad at politics as he was good at fighting.

Finished Heart of Stone expansion. Overall... yeah, I liked it a lot. If someone described some of the quests to me I'd probably think it sounded pretty silly, but it's done with charm and panache. Currently in Blood and Wine and it really is quite beautiful.

As above, EA did offer more time. I haven't played MEA so can't judge for myself, but I've got the distinct impression that the game needed more than 6 months worth of reworking anyway. I can't really criticise them for not picking an RGB ending to be canon either, whatever they did there would be a potential disaster with Deus Ex: IW perhaps the case study of complete failure to please anyone. The ultimate problem is that if Bioware Montreal stuffed up around 60 months of development you can't really rely on them fixing that with an extra 6 months. Things like the animations should not have been in the state they were after 5 years so you'd have to either hire a bunch of new animators which costs and is risky, co-opt Dragon Age/ DICE/ other Frostbite animators from other studios which hurts their projects or hope that the ones you already have get competent. In the end EA did the best they could (for themselves at least) from a bad situation. Perhaps they should have outright cancelled it, but the impressions I get is that it isn't technically unplayable nor unplayable due to being awful, it's just kind of... mediocre.

They had plenty of time and enough staff though, neither of which would be provided if EA was trying to tank the IP deliberately. Game was poorly handled, but everything I've seen suggests it was poor oversight and bad immediate management that was the ultimate problem rather than stuff EA could directly influence like budget and time. I'd also have to say that I heard the same thing said about DAI, especially with the Bioware old timers who left at the end of that project, and that IP definitely isn't dead. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's another ME game in maybe five years time, it's more flexible than Star Wars since they don't have to run everything past Disney/ LucasArts plus it can't disappear off in six years time as the SW licence may. Something like alternating titles with Dragon Age seems a likely approach.

ME3 sold very well, and its MP did well too. Some people were very shouty about the ending, but that was only some people- and they played it to the end so can't have hated the game too much. Andromeda is the problem; late and a poorly run project, not well received from the beginning and while initial sales were OK it's already had a permanent 50% price cut for some time (here at least), always a sign that sales fell straight off a cliff. The closest parallel would be to Dragon Age II (albeit that problem involved too little dev time); give it a few years and it will be back as DA now is. EA ain't the SW studio by any reasonable measure if they've only made one (+ one phone game it seems) SW game in 4 years and the license is only for ten years. There are only a few other known titles awaiting release as well- BF2 and EA Motive's Jedi's Creed game may both release in the next year but the second is probably 18 months off and Respawn's title will take even longer. EA is what it has been for the past decade or so: The Sims, EA Sports plus some ancillary stuff of varying success and importance.

You can't sue here for much at all since we have a 'no fault' accident compensation scheme that covers most situations but that just encourages more regulation since the government has to shell out for, eg, car crash injuries caused by people not wearing seat belts. Seat belts are fine though, it's a matter of safety for everyone involved same as someone who is blind not being allowed to drive or not being allowed to drive when drunk. If people want to make stupid decisions that effect themselves only then fine, if they want to make dumb decisions that effect others then there's an argument to limit their freedom to be dumb based on the negative effects on others.

The 'typical' medieval noble family was a bit different from Victoria in the 19th century or Maria Theresa in the 18th though, while not modern they were far more advanced than 12th-15th century Europe where childbirth was frequently deadly to the mother and a majority of children died while young even in noble houses. Then you were very lucky to have three sons live to majority ('heir and a spare' was lucky) and if you did have more than two the tendency was to stick any extras into careers where they wouldn't breed- well, wouldn't legitimately breed at least- like the church. In a world without proper medicine even scratches could lead to death from infection so you could very easily lose the heir or spare, and then you did have a linear line. The history of the english royal family has a deviation from direct line on average about every 4 monarchs, and even if you amalgamate cadets like York/ Lancaster to Plantagenet you still get the longest run only being around 300 years. The GoT/ ASOIAF situation is certainly not realistic though except in not having massive families, only nobility I can think of that can trace its roots directly anywhere near even a thousand years are the Percys at ~950 years. Some of the talk in the books about the animosity between the Boltons and Starks makes it very unlikely that one or the other would not have been wiped out earlier, though presumably you just don't hear about the houses that did get historically roflstomped unless they were important to the narrative like the Raines of Castamere.

There should be more than enough room for Mass Effect and Star Wars though. EA has had the SW license for quite a while now and they've produced Battlefront and... nothing else? A Mass Effect game every 3-4 years ought to be able to slot into any gaps in the schedule for the sort of action/ adventure/ lite rpg and exploration genre, especially since it should only be a competitor to certain SW games rather than all of them. In any case, companies don't release crap products and run studios/ IPs into the ground for the lulz- and EA gave Bioware: Montreal 5 years to get it right and they couldn't. That's plenty of time. They definitely need to put some distance between Andromeda and any further releases though, and Bioware doesn't have any spare teams at the moment anyway. They will come back to Mass Effect at some point though, I'd bet on it.

I bought a 550W PSU because I decided 650 would be overkill and draws were going down... and it ought to be OK for any of the three consumer cards, if only just for the liquid cooled one. Might be moot anyway, the preorder pricing here is $500 more than a 1080Ti which is a joke plain and simple. Hopefully placeholder as otherwise you'd have to be mad to buy one. Quite marked the difference between AMD processor and graphics though, I cannot get my 1700 above 65 degrees (OK, it is winter) even with Prime95 on the default Spire but that temp could well be Vega's idle temp. Some leaked Vega56 leaked benchmarks, which do look very competitive. 2 years ago with FuryX I guess, it's kind of an AMD thing now since the prosumer VegaFEs had an option for it as well.

Everyone is nervous the first time they try brewing. So long as you're reasonably careful it will work absolutely fine, especially so if you're using a kit. Not great for the liver though. I'm sure my alcohol consumption has gone up since I started brewing, though overall cost has gone down a lot.

The gaming Vegas have been officially unveiled. Not as bad as some would have had it but they won't be giving nVidia nightmares, that's for sure, and are well below 1080Ti/ Titan. There's some fairly aggressive bundling on offer as well, which suggests they know that it's underwhelming otherwise. Links more links I'll probably pick one up towards christmas along with a new monitor- I don't want and would never pay for 1080ti/ Titan performance anyway so the very top end is completely irrelevant to me. If 580s remain massively overpriced due to mining and I can get one for effectively a hundred bucks by flicking on the 580 I may even go sooner, a bundle deal with a few hundred off a monitor would be extremely tempting.

I won't use spoiler tags since it seems nobody else has been even going back to the previous thread. Meh, seems a lot of people are playing it now for some reason so yeah, spoiler tags.

So, finished the main game. Around 110 hours, though that includes a couple of HoS quests (and some time I left the game paused). Overall, I'd regard it very positively. Anyway, some vaguely organised thoughts... Gameplay wise, they got far, far closer to what they were aiming for with TW2. The combat was at worst decent, fairly varied and needing somewhat different approaches and there not being any arbitrary difficulty spikes like the cursed battlefield or Kayran, nor dumb QTEs. It was also not really difficult, but you'd die easily if you got lazy or stupid which is the approach I prefer if there's a lot of combat. Character development was poor though, I think I ended up with a dozen or so skill points unused because I plain forgot about them. Itemisation was dumb as rocks and I probably found a couple of dozen unique one of a kind you need a multi part schema from Loc Muinne and Bras of Ban Ard to make Addan Deiths lying around in random chests. I liked the exploration, but generally ignored annoying POI markers. Overall though, I'd be confident that it will be one of my favourite games, probably top ten of all time. I'd definitely be hoping for another Witcher game, whether it involves Geralt or not.

This is how we beat the terrorists. Judging by the watermark and plane's markings it's how the Syrians and French beat the terrorists. Which is an odd combination. Maybe some Syrian media outlet mocking the whole thing? Or enjoying, yeah I bet that was it. I knew it wasn't french because it looks nothing like their planes, check the tail though and there's definitely a tricolour. I wouldn't be that surprised if the Syrians did enjoy it- they're reasonably progressive (very for the ME, especially in the big urban areas) so long as you don't touch on political reform.

This is how we beat the terrorists. Judging by the watermark and plane's markings it's how the Syrians and French beat the terrorists. Which is an odd combination.

As Gfted1 said, shady dealings. That makes him 14 years old when the Vietnam war ends. But we still haven't seen his long form birth certificate so we don't know his real age. And he has never done national service in Kenya either. Very shady (or sick!) guy.

THQNordic is showing a few games at Gamescom, and since they're one of the publishers that best fit my interests... The first could even be the unknown Obisidian project, though we know so little about it it does supposedly fit 'new IP' and 'post apoc'; plus THQNordic would seem to be a good fit with Obsidian and there simply aren't that many RPG studios that could do such a project which aren't already doing stuff. OTOH the Obsidian project is probably too early to be 'fully playable' except maybe as a vertical slice. Their second unannounced title sounds interesting as well.

Fookin' crazy. I have like 7 or 8 unfinished PS4 games, and my most anticipated games for the system: Ni No Kuni II, Yakuza 6 and Dragon Quest XI aren't even released. Then, I might pick up Kingdom Hearts III, and the hack games. I haven't even bought Tales of Vesperia yet. I have Indivisble pre-ordered (backed on IGG). (There are tons of other games that I won't even bother mentioning.) If I ever buy a PS5, it sure as hell won't be before 2020. Don't worry. "Rumours" claim PS5 will be backwards compatible. I won't believe anything until they give us any proof. Until then it's just analysts talking out of their asses. It's a bit more than just rumours, there's good inherent logic behind it- if they go AMD again there would be no technical reason at all not to have backwards compatibility since the chips used would basically be a specialised AMD APU as they are now, it would be like running a 2012 game on Ryzen2/ Navi instead of Bulldozer and a 7950 which is generally fine. My suspicion would be that both MS and Sony are happy with AMD as there have not been the problems either the 360 (heat, mb warping etc) or the PS3 (rather obscure and unique programming architecture) suffered from last gen. It's difficult to see either going ARM/ PowerPC or even Intel/ nVidia at this point. Given that both PS4 and xbone are now basically closed box PCs there's no real reason not to have more frequent hardware upgrades, and indeed both already have upgraded options.