Zoraptor

Secular, basically- more or less what you'd expect from a typical 'western' style set up. Named after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey.

The west only supported the Egyptian and Tunisian protests once it became clear they would win/ the cost of supporting The Hoz/ Ben Ali and keeping them in power got too high relative to their usefulness. Erdogan has certain advantages even over them (actually democratically elected and broadly supported, leading efforts on Syria, more strategic location even than Egypt), and has a certain reputation for prickliness where any support of his enemies will lead to repercussions. Basically he's unlikely to be toppled and will not respond well to outside interference. There's an english language source for the suicides (and bad conditions) at least. If there were something on resignations from him it would probably be in Turkish and require translation.

If it's the poll I've seen then it was general population, not internet population. Generally it would be the more committed ideologically who will comment on an issue online, and they're also the ones more likely to either swap position to support 'their' guy, or at least keep quiet so as not to undermine him even if they think he's wrong on the issue- as anything else helps the opposition. It's a general observation only in any case. I broadly supported Obama but don't mind saying that he's been a disappointment on just about every relevant front, and there are plenty of people on both sides who haven't conveniently swapped positions even if some fairly strident people have almost comically reversed or fallen silent.

I reckon his head is too small for his body/ he doesn't have a neck. ISTR Foltest and Radovid had that problem in TW1, though that was because they had rather large epaulettes when wearing armour.

There were two women that I can remember. One in the place Rhobar ruled that I want to call Temeria but it ain't, specifically the place with cows and you had to get grain and there was a windmill. Second was a dancing girl that you had to get for the ruler of a town in, uh, Varant. I don't think either spoke much if at all. I think that the fan patch added others as well, as last time I played there were a couple in the rebel camps that I'm pretty sure weren't there in vanilla.

To be fair, as much as there are Republicans who're up in arms mainly because it's Obama and who defended Bush for doing similar things there are also more than a few Democrats who would have been incandescent with rage had this come out during Bush's term who are either quiet or defending it under Obama because he's their guy. If it had been Bush bugging reporters and having the IRS 'independently' decide to investigate his political opponents the internet would be replete with Bu$Hitler's and the like every bit as much.

Nah. They can't have Space Captain Geralt explore the cosmos in his spaceship boinking aliens, they're limited to what the source material and their licence allows. That isn't a matter of argument, it's a matter of fact. FACT! even. They may be able to for TW3, but they certainly weren't totally free with respect to TW2- where they had Atari then NamcoB telling them to have things like securom on disk copies and regional pricing. That was very clearly and quite explicitly against the wishes of CDPR since they did pretty much everything they could to void it. Hopefully that will not be the case for TW3, but someone will be distributing it on disk and their on3 version at least will have to have drm on it, whatever they may want. And when it comes to comparison with Bioware, while they do have to answer to EA it can hardly be said that they haven't had plenty of time for DA3- DA2 was launched 8 months prior to TW2, after all. If both are released in their approximated window DA3 will actually have had longer in development.

A licensed IP cannot be original. The backstory, relationships, world building etc is done by someone else, and a game based on a licensed IP uses these things rather than creates their own. Sapkowski may have created an original setting (albeit with a lot of obvious influences) but CDPR hasn't. The reason to use the licensed IPs is to get name recognition and not to have to build a world yourself, after all. I'm not trying to be dismissive, I've enjoyed both Witcher games and have little to no doubt that I'll enjoy the third. It just won't be original, and CDPR ultimately has to function under the same limitations as everyone else (barring Valve, I wouldn't even include Blizzard to be honest) with respect to making a product that will sell rather than a product that is exactly what they would like. As an example, TW3 will have DRM on the on3- they may not like it to, but it will, if it didn't it wouldn't be on the system at all.

Don't be silly there is absolutely NO chance of a Third World War. I can't believe you actually think this is even a remote outcome? If the Russians do supply S300s they'll be crewed or supervised by Russians. If the west wants to set up a no fly zone (without UN mandate, given Russia and China will both likely veto) those S300s will have to go as they're able to hit targets at very high altitudes and very great distances, and that means the likelihood of dead Russians. As Rostere says, it's the economy that's the weakness. The US (and other western countries) are heavily indebted and only going more into debt, at some point putting the military on the credit card has to stop and at that point it may well become impractical to have quite the global projection that the US has been used to since the 50s. They may be going for more cost effective measures, but they're untested.

Way imbalanced though. Gameplay sucks, especially the economy. No proper fast travel No quest compass- you can pay for one but only on some servers No respec- well, limited to paid and only certain servers Imbalanced economy, yep Arbitrary character generation No respawn (I've heard you get to generate a new character on death or actually get to play an entirely different game, but never seen proof. Might just be certain servers, as well) Given no respawn, the prevalence of arbitrary death is badly imbalancing and unfair Some servers suck and are really difficult to even grind your way to success, and it seems to be random as to which server you start on No magic No race selection beyond simple skin colour. Yes Volo, no proper dwarves Gender/ sex issues handled poorly, sex often reduced to minigames Access to cool weapons are severely restricted Different servers have different rules, and some of the player moderators are certainly products of unmarried parents Different languages on different servers. Sounds cool, but boy does it have practical drawbacks On the positive side there is no DRM and you can play it offline. TLDR game sucks, nobody should play it, demand refunds.

Meh, that always comes up. For better or worse EA has only continued Bioware's direction, not altered it. Bioware did dlc before it became cool (NWN) went console and RPG lite with no influence from EA and produced ME1 and most of DAO without being owned by EA. The only change was rushing DA2, and that was at least partly Bioware's own fault for having DAO take so long that ME3 and DA2 on a normal cycle would have been near synchronised in production and release date- and that seems to have been fixed for DA3. I like CDPR as much as the next guy, but it isn't like they just make the games they want to, they make the games they think will sell. They could have kept TW2 to the same formula as the first game and had (mainly) iso camera, vaguely diabloesque combat and the like, but went for a overhaul. Anyone who thinks that that was not influenced strongly by the decision to release on console need only look at the UI, and anyone who thinks that the decision to release on console was predicated on enlightening the unwashed console masses, cowering in the depths of their despair and degradation rather than making money is slightly naive- and if they really really wanted to do exactly what they wanted then yes, they would do original IPs. Cyberpunk and Wiedzim/ Witcher are licensed IPs with limitations to what can be done with them, their own IPs are more work, but there they could tailor stuff exactly as they want.

Your rhetorical construct is inaccurate- they weren't in any meaningful way 'blinded and crippled' before prism. It's a convenience, not a necessity, and it is arguable whether it actually improves things since it's not simply more data that is important, it's more relevant data. Problem is that you/ they are starting at a (n unachievable) solution and working backwards from there, ie we want (absolute) safety, so stuff done towards that goal has to be acceptable. My approach is deciding what is acceptable and then working forwards. Personally I don't have any problem with targeted surveillance with proper oversight, I have a very big problem with a blanket drag net and rubber stamp oversight because it will be- and for all we know already has been- abused. When coupled with a culture that classifies stuff because it's political embarrassing and targets anyone with the temerity to dissent to that classification there's huge potential for misuse.

Yeah, and last year the score was 1000+ to zero in terms of approvals to rejections, by that court, and there are zero counter arguments heard, ie the presentations are unopposed. The first part indicates it's a rubber stamp, the second shows it's explicitly designed to be a rubber stamp.

Nope, I was thinking of Bentham, the, er, designer of the Panopticon prison- where a single guard could theoretically watch any inmate at any time- centuries before Foucault even lived. Intelligence agencies don't do that yet, but by deity they'd love to be able to. He's being sued presumably over separation of church and state provisions so it won't be owning the book that's the crime. Think of it as being similar to being fined/ ejected from a theatre for using a cellphone, it isn't the phone that's the problem, it's it being in a theatre. Pretty sure there is an actual prescribed list though, things like the Anarchist's Cookbook* Wonder how long your company will keep using google, now that they know for sure that it's a click away from some NSA contractor having a look through everything. Hope nothing commercially sensitive is being sent. *g'day, NSA operator, hope you enjoyed reading my post

Hi. I'm. William. Hague. I. Try. To. Sound. Like. Churchill. But. End. Up. Sounding. Like. A. Bad. Impression. Of. Captain. Kirk Meh, the real Churchill would have advocated gassing the arabs for being brown and uppity, per Iraq.

And? Doesn't matter if they make it compulsory to use Live to sell on PC- something they didn't do with GfWL. If they do that the entire reason for publishers to use steam goes out the window since they'd have to pay both MS and Valve for pretty much the same service- and the MS option would give them more cash as well. Wouldn't be particularly great for consumers, but would be great for both MS and publishers.

That's very common with MS. I got Win7 for something like $10 and got XP Pro for free, both perfectly legit. Their main revenue comes from large users who don't get those discounts, but they always offer some sort of upgrade incentive once the easy money from the early adopters is taken. Don't get me wrong, I think win8 as it stood/ stands was moronic, but mainly because it didn't give the bulk users any incentive (and quite a lot of disincentive, really, given the significant UI changes) to upgrade.

Steam actually had the same vulnerability. I wouldn't envisage them closing down the marketplace for general software, only games. The whole idea of win8 was to have, basically, the same OS running on xbox, phones/tablets and PC, might as well take advantage of it especially if your new xbox is, basically, the same as a PC anyway. They could let the publishers run their own stores via Live and charge only the console licence fee equivalent which is considerably less than steam's 30% cut is.

1984 has an excellent non speculative basis in the Panopticon theory as espoused by Jeremy Bentham- simply put, that you can control people by the belief that they are under constant surveillance. That theory has a very good basis in observation and behavioural science, simply the threat of observation is enough to get most to alter their behaviour to the form desired. For obvious reasons it is a favourite theory of any totalitarian state.

But it was the Bad Rebels using sarin, not the Good Rebels. And all arms will be going to the Good Rebels. (Whatever happened to John McCain? He used to be relatively cool in 2000, then he got curb stomped by Karl Rove and came back utterly bonkers)

And it will be pretty easy to go through caps as well. A single instance like what happened to TWitcher2 on steam- multiple 8-9GB patches inside two weeks- and it would be over unless the usage periods were fortuitous. Compulsory patching may seem to be sensible, but if you're on a cap it's a disaster waiting to happen since the result will be either throttling back so far speed wise that it will no longer be over 1.5Mbs-1 or lovely excess charges, $30 would be fairly modest, for me it'd be ~USD80 for a TW2 sized patch.

No, because the majority of them are also on steam. Yeah. There are only two things that will kill off steam or make it irrelevant/ bring it back to the pack; if MS decides to bring the closed Metro/ Live system to PC- which they ought to do, really, but won't since it's sensible- or if more publishers establish Origins of their own- which they really ought to do as well. If SimCity sold 1 million full price copies on Origin that's $20 million going to EA rather than Steam, no reason why Acti/ 2k/ Ubi/ Squee etc should not save themselves equivalent amounts. [don't think GOG keys will make much of a difference either, though it is certainly nice to see Larian offering them on their boxed copies as well as, presumably, CDPR]

That 'quote' from Valve doesn't ever seem to actually have a source- beyond recursion. It's not really relevant anyway due to the differences between the on3 and steam. But will rofl if steambox comes with a on3 equivalent scheme. I suspect some people may slightly alter their views on the matter if that were to happen.

I'm sure some would be as well, but I'd still be pretty confident most men do not think that way. Think of, er, another adult male fantasy fulfilment based entertainment from, where- so I'm told- the Mail Man or Pizza Delivery Boy regularly deliver their large packages to a Bored Housewife or Sorority House Having Party. It's very rare for Pizza Delivery Boy to be delivering anything other than the king size option or Mail Man to be delivering a postcard rather than a Big Boxed GrosserWurst, if you get my drift. Yet that form of entertainment is perhaps the most popular one on the planet with blokes. If most males did not feel comfortable with being represented by someone well blessed by genetics/ DietyName/ SurgeonName that form of entertainment would not be so popular as it'd just make them feel inadequate. It is also, of course, another entertainment form which tends to have somewhat unrealistic representations of women.

It isn't actually being done for the benefit of the player of course, but there are arguable benefits. It's the same sort of thing that people say in favour of steam- automatic always up to date games, ease of use, ability to integrate features that require online access, social features etc. Really though, they might as well have made it always online and got those 'benefits' locked in rather than making in so they have to cater to those who do only log on once a day. They won't pick up many people who are "it's an online console, but just once day so that's okay!" over those who'd just be ok with an online console full stop.