Zoraptor

There isn't really any way that a sequel could realistically end up being publisher funded- if it does well then Obsidian don't need the money to make a sequel, if it does poorly then publishers won't be interested anyway.

Like many others though I'm replaying NWN2 at the moment, though I expect to lose momentum around the orc caves and some of the other sloggy areas. Finished my ME3 replay a couple of days ago. Reactions pretty much the same as first time, found most of the bad parts a bit less bad because I expected them. End Game Slog was even worse playing on insanity though, mainly due to the combination of context sensitive controls that would seemingly randomly stick you to cover rather than sprint or jump an obstacle and bullet sponge insta-kill enemies with regenerating barriers.

Fanboys tend to bring an almost religious zeal to things and blur the differences between fact and opinion. It's rather difficult to tell if you're actually a fanboy yourself because if so you think your arguments make perfect sense. It's one of those things where thinking you may be a fanboy probably means you aren't really. Personally I always try to be critical- point out the stuff I like and the stuff I think can be improved. Going on interminably about how much I hate something or how much I love something I do try to avoid. The Revan novel was written by Drew Karpyshyn who was K1's main writer and a significant contributor to TOR itself. Given that Lucas infamously doesn't care about the EU I don't think he can really be blamed for that, though there certainly is plenty you can blame him for.

All of these make combat seem like a punishment that only comes up when you've failed at the "right" way of doing things. As a general rule, do you enjoy doing things that are associated with just having failed? I don't know anyone who objectively enjoys cleaning up a dropped and broken glass, for example, even if life forces them into that situation. To some extent combat should be a punishment for failing, if you're not primarily set up for a stand up fight, at least. It's a kill or be killed situation and it is eminently sensible to either avoid it, or stack the odds in your own favour- pen is mightier than the sword/ don't give a sucker an even break. And of course, should you happen to fail in your attempts then you're in a more sticky situation and actually get 'punished' for not using a straight fight tactic. It's also not applicable to all encounters- trying your diplomatic skills on a shambling zombie is unlikely to get you much reward and you're likely to have to use more traditional solutions on them. The examples were to show that you could get negatives from alternative methods as well. If you want to fight because that is how your party is set up or simply because it's fun it remains an option, it's just that there are alternatives with similar rewards so that combat is not automatically the 'best' solution 90% of the time. Indeed, most of the options I outlined still involve fighting, they just involve using some imagination and making sure that that imagination gets rewarded. And yes, I actually do rather enjoy failing at games because I find constant unrestrained success boring. Personally I would like a challenging game that rewards success and punishes failure and allows and rewards a variety of different approaches, so long as the distinction between success and failure is not arbitrary I won't complain.

There's no need for combat to have risk and non-combat not to have risk (or have lesser risk) though. Consider a situation where you find a bunch of bandits, you might have the options; attack them, ambush them, talk to them or avoid them, with XP given for the objective "remove the bandit threat". So trying to ambush might use the "survivalist" or "stealth" or "tracking" skill, fail your check and they notice you and it turns into a standard attack with your characters in poorer positions or worse, they ambush you. Talk to them and you may be able to get them to leave without a fight or even something elegant like employ them for your stronghold. Or maybe they decide they really want to stick lots of arrows into you instead since you've conveniently come out into the open and talked to them. You might even have more elegant solutions- steal some stuff off one group of bandits and frame another group to get them to fight, of course if your thief gets caught in the act... It's all a question of implementation really. There should be no requirement for absolute balance, as noted combat will usually result in loot that you wouldn't get for a more pacific approach for example but there ought to be situations in which the peaceful or elegant solutions do result in greater rewards. In the above situation you might get marginally more experience for successful skill use- or just an easier fight- or a different type of reward along with the base experience (more guards for the stronghold). Then again, ex bandits probably don't make the most reliable guards either, so who knows what problems might arise in the future.

You hear quite a few arguments that he should be tortured and executed from people in the US. There's also the treatment of Manning where the "protective" measures are obviously designed to cause personal discomfit and sleep deprivation rather than be for his benefit. Assange is simply a whole different kettle of fish compared to McKinnon.

Should have gone for 2072. Then the last mission could be hacking a corporate AI for a corrupt executive with your reward being an R-grade cyber rig.

"Chances are slim and none, and slim just left town."

I didn't specify under Obama's presidency- as you simply specified "since 9/11". GWB/ **** Cheney's the asterisks are tradition now) types were very big on justifying torture and there is a plethora of information on their exploits. While Obama has been far better in that regard he hasn't actually prosecuted anyone for using torture, so he's ended up- practically- condoning the previous actions. In any case, I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting McKinnon would be waterboarded.

Waterboarding wasn't condemned, it was reclassified as an "enhanced interrogation technique", officially sanctioned and publicly condoned when it was revealed. And that was for a technique that the US executed japanese soldiers for using in WW2.

I'm not particularly invested in the debate at all since I don't mind either per kill or objective based, or a mix of both, but I really don't see how this particular objection works. Nothing inherent to objective based rewards stops you playing any way you want- there's nothing specific to it which says that you cannot receive a quest reward then go back and kill everyone involved, should you want to. You just wouldn't be habitually rewarded for that approach. That is not restricting how you play nor penalising for playing a certain way, it's just making sure you do something because you like it or want to rather than because you feel compelled to in order to maximise benefits/xp.

Or you could try to not reduce everything in the game to a cost/benefit analysis and just play the game. In any well designed system there will be bad consequences for failing in non-combat situations as well as failing in combat ones. Hitting the trap that takes out half your party, walking up to a group of people and finding that actually you've failed to convince them to leave and now your talky man is standing right next to Thog the Impaler, that sort of thing. Again, you just won't necessarily get a special reward for- effectively- playing as a sociopath and slaughtering every virtual being that crosses your path. I have no doubt that will still be a valid approach and that there will be a fair bit of compulsory bloodshed, but if you like the combat would you really avoid it solely because you aren't getting a (small) thumbs up at every death? And yeah, it really should be 'best' to avoid unnecessary combat because it is 'best' to avoid unnecessary combat.

Skill improvement is somebody's theory, so far as I am aware, but given how certain perks and the like worked in previous Obsidian games (eg Alpha Protocol, FONV) it seems likely there will be some system of its like. Doesn't have to be a TES style system, something like TWitcher 2 had you improve against enemies by fighting them- if you didn't just go and buy the books to get the info straight off the bat. I really can't see where the people who think they're going to be forced to play a certain style/ that combat is going to be deprecated are coming from though. Wandering around slaughtering stuff will still be a viable approach, presumably- you just won't be specially rewarded for that approach. Just because you could avoid (most) combat in Fallout doesn't mean that you had to, and there's no real reason why someone who wandered the wasteland killing literally everything that moves should be 'better' than someone who achieved exactly the same goals but left nearly everyone alive.

My personal preference is I don't really care how it's done so long as it is done well, but I do think some sort of XP reward for killing stuff may be sensible on top of rewards for finishing objectives. Some people do need a sense of being rewarded for their gameplay choices, and as long as it is balanced so that there's no specific and intrinsic benefit to that approach it's fine. Small experience point rewards for killing stuff vs convince someone not to fight you and they give a quest later or help you out with something, don't genocide those poor innocent kobolds going about their business in their own part of the forest and maybe they prevent other nasties wandering through an area; that sort of thing.

I'd just point out that the update said "no known magic that can bring them back". Given the importance companions typically have I can certainly see there being some- probably/ hopefully non trivial- discoverable means of bringing them back, particularly since another part of the update deals with necromancy.

Monte, dude. You compared people who don't agree with you to Maoists, implied that people who don't agree with you only want snuggly wuggly bunny filled cuddle times and are busy filling your past decades' wardrobe with surplus cereal grain byproduct. That's being just a tad patronising yourself. System Shock 2, Deus Ex and Bloodlines all say that goal based systems work well. Looks far more that you are about justifying your own preferences as being Objective Truth and Basic Freedoms when actually they're just your preferences, and come across rather notably as, well, needing someone patting you on the back and giving you validation. You can still play however you like, you just may not always have the Great Hand of the XP giving you the thumbs up every time you put some poor kobold/ gnoll to fire and sword, and may get similar rewards if you engage some local rats in the wishy washy anarcho-socialist art of diplomacy rather than just blithely annhilate them. 28 replies added since I started, hoho.

yah ive never seen it available digitally It is available from Gamersgate as part of an anthology.

I'm afraid nobody would be able to top your post in that department. Since you've obviously never used GoG before, here's a quick fill-in: Your GoG downloads are tied to a person GoG account. You don't simply visit the site and download whatever you want without verifying that you actually bought the games. Similarly, Steam only lets you download the games which you have on your account. Now you know. No, you miss one very important difference, despite it being explicitly spelt out for you. You must download and install steam's client in order to install games. This is not an intrinsic requirement for any and all DD as purchasing the game is, since many vendors do not require a client. The client is a separate gatekeeper application designed specifically to check that you have the right to install- ie activation based DRM, same as SecuROM's launch control and others which are acknowledged by everyone to be DRM. In contrast, you do not need anything at all running (well, except windows) to install from GOG and you have your choice of any browser you want to download via, or their client if you so desire. If GOG had a compulsory client, or forced you to use 'GOGfox' or 'CDPR GOGzaic' or 'GOGle Zinc' to download, you'd have at least some sort of point- but they don't, so you don't.

Norway used to be cool, now they go around awarding peace prizes to not Bush Barack Obama and technocratic dictatorship the EU. Why, Norway, why???

No to your no. We're talking about a situation where someone wanted/ suggested a single version distributed through steam. As such there would be no separate retail version for there to be a separate patch for, only a steam version on a disk. Titan Quest is a poor counter example in any case- it's six years old and from well before DD really took off as a distribution platform. Steamworks wasn't available to 3rd parties at that time- it was even prior to SecuROM having online activation options.

No, there's a misconception that steam is not DRM. You have to have the- separate and non intrinsic- steam software installed and running to install and to patch your 3rd party application, and that's true even for supposedly 'drm free' steam games like those made by Paradox. In a proper DRM free situation you have to do neither. Or to put it another way, if you had to install the SecuROM or Tages client in order to install or patch your games I can practically guarantee that would be considered DRM by the vast majority of "steam is not drm" types. To answer your actual question though, PE will presumably use the 'full' steam drm option because they want achievements/ cloud saves and the like which require the client running.

Yeah, Yang and The Many are both broadly intended to be 'communists'- old school authoritarian collectivists- so a lot of their stuff sounds very similar. Yang's VO about returning to the vats (when you discover cloning? iirc) has almost a direct equivalent from The Many as well.

For some reason I read that in Sheng-ji Yang's voice. It's The Many from System Shock 2. I rather like it because it is appropriate for both extremes, nationalists who want everyone in their country to think as one mind and multicult types who also want everyone to think with one mind- just in a different way.

As WUE says, RPS is usually pretty good and well worth a read, which makes the times when any sort of objectivity flies out the window all the more obvious. In general they're rather better at not obviously buying into hype than most others. But they have a tendency to aim for the low hanging fruit (oh wow, another article on how some people don't like EA/ Ubisoft/ MS, or on another fantastic initiative from the other Seattleites; ta muchly) and a strong belief that somehow watered down versions of old genres will magically result in a panacea of great, deep, new titles. Which isn't how things work, if a reimagining doesn't work then management says it's because people just don't like TBS/ Stealth game/ fpsrpg hybrids of course; and if it does do well it's because of the changes/ streamlining/ action oreintation or whatever, not because of the elements of the old game. Hence Bioshock 2 actually being less SS2 like rather than more. Kieron Gillen's Bioshock Defence article (albeit done for Eurogamer rather than RPS, iirc) still has probably the most special pleading I've ever seen in a written article. And that's despite me actually thinking Bioshock is a pretty good game, overall.

Every time RPS hypes something I remember Bioshock and take it with a dessicated Atlantic sized grain of salt. Not that Bioshock was a bad game, in parts it was very good, but they grossly misrepresented it and we got months of pontification on how it was epoch making and everyone had to buy it and it would herald a bold new world of Awesomeness in gaming and how people who were disappointed in it Just Didn't Understand. Their coverage of xcom (especially) and dishonored has more puff than an obese asthmatic chasing Usain Bolt.