Zoraptor

It's the playtester effect. If you don't tell people they can/ should do it they will presume they can't- see the feedback on Dishono(u)red and Bioshock's playtesters. And sexism.

Yeah, scratching my head a bit here, since obviously there's "publisher" between the two models they seem to be referring here, but it would appear that you're right. Obviously there's a lot of alternatives they have, no way they're letting anyone have an exclusive license to, say, Star Wars, anyway. That's certainly the way it reads, and given Disney's own less than stellar record in games it'd be sensible. But it isn't their modus operandi for just about anything else. Almost exclusively when they have made purchases they have internalised everything as much as possible and avoided licensing. They also have the very LucasArts approach to gaming where they change management and approach every two years. In 2015 the new head will probably be talking about going all internal again.

Yeah, they could hardly be better on the saying the right thing and showing the right things front. OTOH their timing is atrocious which is almost certainly the reason for the rather more tepid response than they deserve.

Is there even a single bit of concept art/ render for thiaf that actually shows Garrett's lips anyway, apart from about 1/4s in the trailer? Everything else I've seen has him wearing that ludicrous faux goth black gauze over his lower face. No wonder Squenidos is losing money hand over fist if they're squandering money on that sort of thing, and it doesn't even make a lick of sense. They're not Peter asterisking Jackson, Garrett ain't Gollum, and if they applied those standards in general then Bart Simpson would be a middle aged woman, Mark Hamill could not voice The Joker and a bunch of other similar stuff.

Heh, I can see why he disagreed with jtr7 a lot.

I am currently replaying Alpha Protocol since I mentioned it a few days ago then noticed my newest save game was from exactly two years (where does the time go?) previous. I may even get around to playing the complete asteriskwit Mike I've always meant to and see how low I can get everyone's reputation with me. I also have a game of IWD on suspension on the Barrow Isle which I will get back to.

Steam sells MMOs which was what I was thinking of primarily- Steam does not say they have 'always online' DRM and their justification for that would be that, well, they're online games, duh, they have to be online. Which is exactly what EA is saying. Simcity 4 was best part of a decade ago, and even Societies was six years ago- it took less time for WC3 to become an MMO. Why doesn't Blizzard offer an offline mode for WoW since offline MMOs do very well for Bethesda, after all? For all practical purposes it is for the exact same reasons as EA made Simcity always online or Valve has a client or companies love the idea of MMOs- DRM, captive audience, metrics, three things that companies love. I'm not defending EA in particular, I'd far prefer an offline Simcity personally and practically, and haven't (and likely won't) buy it due to the online requirement.

The hopes and dreams of LGS fans for a good thief sequel, at the least.

EA would say that is isn't equivalent to steam games in general though. After all, you don't need to be online to play Origin games in general either- and Origin's offline actually works consistently rather than randomly deciding to stop working whenever most inconvenient- but you do need to be online to play some steam games as well. Valve would say that they're games that are designed from the ground up as being MP games, but that is exactly what EA says about SimCity as well. ie both would claim that they don't use (always online) DRM but the games are fundamentally designed around MP instead. And in any case, any game that requires Steam (or Origin/ Uplay for that matter) to be running at the same time is using DRM whether it's always online or not.

They've obviously been learning from Paradox's "our games are DRM free. Oh sure, they come with mandatory Steam, but that isn't DRM, it's fluffy bunnies, waving daffodils and a warm breeze wafting off the Mediterranean, not DRM. Because our games are DRM free ergo anything that comes with them aren't DRM! Quod Erat Demonstrandum, fra'". They're both using spinning like a top.

The US ultimately supported the UK, tepidly. But they did try to persuade the UK not to respond as they were worried about the stability of Argentina's pro west dictatorship if it lost, and what would replace it.

I can certainly understand wanting shorter games in at least one respect. I like Gothic 2, it's a good game but I have never finished it despite getting a long way into it on three occasions. Each time it was because I had to suspend playing for a while due to time constraints and I completely lost the thread of where I was and what I was doing when I got back. If it had been 10 hours long instead of 80 hours long I would have finished it those three times. Not finishing wouldn't happen with a shorter game that gave me equivalent enjoyment, something like AP maybe, as there is a lot less chance to get distracted over that shorter time. Personally I don't really care that I haven't actually finished G2, I've played G3 so I know what happens, but there is a certain satisfaction is knowing that something is finished.

We've got it here as well, though apparently it isn't law and we were not supposed to know about it. At least our banks avoided the problems and the last one to fold was in 1991 (bailed out at around $600m, iirc It now makes that amount of money per annum off us for the Ockers). Unsurprising, our government is run by a banker and only really believes in the free market when it's small local firms getting run over by multinationals, as soon as it's a bank or Warners* or Rio asterisking Tinto** throwing their weight around they fold quicker than an Origami savant on speed. *"Change employment laws or we'll take our Hobbitses and go home" **"Give us cheaper electricity or we'll pack up our aluminium refinery and go home"

Neither did I. It wasn't the most memorable of experiences but it had new(ish) ideas that differentiated it from the base game in a more 'constructive' way than many of the ideas in DA2 managed. I might have felt differently if I had paid an expansion rate for it but since I got the Ultimate Ed it was a nice bonus at the end of the game. I did have a very annoying bug where the interface/ inventory stopped responding a few times though.

I'll let P.T. Barnum explain: "There's a sucker born every minute." "Hello, I am the honourable George Ndongo. I am the former minister of Games Devlopment in the Nigerian Govenment/ Please help me obtain funs to release best game ever! from IMF World Bank illegal holdings! Only $40,000US required! for bets game ever. Reward tier $100 (limited 419 of 419 remaining)"

I'll have to see how much I can contribute. Timing seems a bit off given there are two other big RPG kickstarters running concurrently. Supposedly they got a bit gazumped, but they probably should have waited the extra couple of weeks. They've also done a good job of engaging with relevant communities ('Codex, RPGWatch etc), and have a pretty good reputation- rather similarly to Brian Fargo- in terms of populist stuff like slagging off publishers.

No, it does sound really promising. It'll be interesting to see if it's actually a good game at the end of it but all the right noises are being made.

I also have glorious dial up at a majestic 55kbps 28kbps due to line quality as a backup! I have on occasion had better access via work or when I was flatting, ADSL is by far the 'best' option if available (slower, but caps are typically multiple 10s of GBs) but it is only available in higher population density areas than where I am now. The telecommunications/ internet stuff in New Zealand is monumentally stuffed though, through multiple government decisions and the monopoly lines provider doing zero improvement for nearly 20 years while making billion dollar annual profits.

My cap is a staggering 4GB (no typo) of 22Mbps* goodness which is one of the reasons I'd never use steam even if I didn't have a philosophical difference with it- one 'bad' update or deciding to install ex internet rather than from disk without me noticing and it'd cost me more in excess than the game cost itself. The info from TW2 sales was from prior to the launch of it on 360- after around 6 weeks of sales I think- so there's no platform breakdown there and I don't think they've released any info on 360 vs PC sales. PC sales are definitely higher though, it's 'only' sold an extra million copies since the 360 version was released. *Heh, except they sold me a 4G modem when their network is still militantly 3.5G, so it's 11.2Mbps for all practical purposes.

I'd argue that companion brokenness was one of the main themes of PST really, along with how the brokenness was generally 'your' fault in some way, illustrating how much damage the deal with Ravel had done. Nordom was a broken Modron, hence the reversed name- and actually having a name- and while it was not as explicit a brokenness as Fall From Grace was with respect to being a Succubus (ie celibate lawful good rather than, er, promiscuous chaotic evil) it was still there as he should have been a personalityless cog. I'd tend to parallel Ignus with Sion from KOTOR2 in terms of brokenness as well, more literally broken than figuratively so. He is, after all, a big vengeful ball of fire and pain due to your betrayal/ manipulation. Vhailor would arguably be the one who isn't broken- unlike Nihilus, his K2 counterpart- as he's just a logical progression of his type of belief in a place where to an extent belief does shape reality. Even there though he's the one who you can talk to death by showing the contradictions at his core and that he isn't actually infallible, literally breaking him.

Yeah, IIRC it lapsed because one of the big players (France?) started ignoring it, and since they were so big that was that. For those interested, there's a handy gif (er, png) at wikipedia showing debt levels. There's also historical ones (eg 2006 data) that really show the effect that the banking collapses and debt nationalisation had in places like Iceland, the UK and Ireland.

That article is just too long, point could be made with a lot less wordage. And to be honest I find anyone saying that NPD's biggest blind spot is steam rather than, say, not taking the rest of the world outside the US into account to be just a tad... overfocussed on one thing which they obviously like rather a lot themselves. NPD is good for what it is and so long as people know what it is that's fine. It's certainly better than, say, VGChartz which might as well be guesswork. I'm not surprised about how secretive DD sellers are, the information is commercially sensitive after all. You do sometimes get figures though, TWitcher 2/ CDP/R gave a breakdown of digital sales vs physical and to an extent by vendor (around 1 million sales total after 6 weeks; ~75% retail, 19% Steam, 5% GOG, 1% others) though of course this somehow ended up being reported as variations of "80% of TWitcher's sales were on steam" and not 3/4 of Twitcher's sales were retail. That does rather suggest that retail is not quite as dead as some of the more evangelical make it out to be.

Some CDPR info, including (re)confirmation of the two smaller titles that were talked about a while ago.

No, the same people who always benefit from unions, especially monetary unions- the strongest players. The Euro is brilliant for Germany as the weaker countries keep it low relative to what it should be if they were still on the DM, but it's terrible for a weak economy as it's artificially high for them and they have to compete against the Germans with their advantages. All Germany is doing with their current 'largesse' is returning some of the money they siphoned out in the first place, while making sure that even more money flows to them. After all, who's going to keep their money in a PIIGSCSBRHELL account rather than a German one when Merkel will feel free to dip into your savings there whenever convenient? Far better to put your money into a nice safe place like, say, Germany.

Well, it is a sequel so it's hardly going to be radically different. I thought KBAP was better than KBTL in generally the same ways that Fallout 2 was better than Fallout 1, ie a lot of the small niggles were smoothed out though it lost some of the storyline charm of the first. Crossworlds on the other hand I'm a lot more ambivalent about since it almost seemed like it hadn't been play tested or balanced at all, and some of its changes are much for the worse.