Zoraptor

That was allegedly the plan, but ToEE sold poorly. Personally, I really disliked its engine for some reason, same with Arcanum. No real idea why.

Played a bit more BG2. Did some stuff in Athkatla without much problem, tried Umar Hills with SCS2 and the (re)designer could troll for gold with the Shade Lord's infinite immunity buffs/ finger of death/ instadeath chromatic orbs/ moveable blade barriers and the level drain field (which, of course, strips the magic users of the means to counter the infinite buff spawn). OK, so the dude was a bit of a pushover in vanilla but that's just a slight overcorrection and while adding just about every annoyance possible in BG2 combat. Might come back and give it another try after defeating Melissan.

Henry Blake (God Rest His Soul) was a Lieutenant Colonel, not a Lt. Commander? Coming from a generally brit background it's always a bit weird seeing 'army' ranks used on board ships, was for BSG as well.

Nah, K2 'stealing' from PST is a no brainer (Vhailor/ Nihilus; Kreia/ Ravel; Atris/ Trias etc etc etc) for sure, and there are certain thematic similarities in MOTB too. But Annah and Neeshka are female rogue tieflings and that's about the end of the similarities.

That's a (western) cultural distinction though where a single subset of 'honour killing' is taken to be the whole, it's not really how the concept is seen in places where it is actually practised. Oby's usage of it is technically more correct as it includes the whole concept (though when I saw the comment my immediate thought was WTF? as well, and that despite knowing the concept was more broad).

Yeah, the problem would be that the parts of making a game that are most important- getting the correct gameplay systems set up, graphical fidelity, organising game development efficiently- are things which do not have direct equivalents in general software development. You can bring people in for those tasks of course, but unless you're building a whole new team you'll at minimum have potential integration problems. OTOH I'd think that a specialist database software writer could be very useful, as there is a lot of database manipulation and usage in a typical game, for something like Homeworld you'd have lots of ship classes and weapons as examples.

The trial and keep management were better than anything in the NWNOC and alone would have made a better experience, and other bits were pretty good as well, like Jerro's Haven- though the overarching storyline and most of the characters were pretty cliche and there was a lot of unnecessary padding both of encounters and storyline. I certainly would not rate it as a top tier RPG experience for the OC. On the other hand I have never been able to think of a single redeeming feature of NWN1's OC. Even the 'the game was meant for multiplayer really/ the expansions were better' argument doesn't work for me as it was so bad that I never felt even a twinge of desire to try them.

You shouldn't feel ashamed about how your government handles Zimbabwe, because there isn't anything that you can do about it. I don't like my (New Zealand, we get a fair bit of SA news since there are a lot of ex pats here) government's ambulance at cliff bottom attitude towards children's health much at all for example, but since I neither voted for them nor have given them any support on the matter whatsoever I put the blame where the blame lies, with them not me. If it really were true that you could not even show dissent in Russia then there's even less reason for Russians to feel ashamed of what their government does as it is (even more) unrepresentative and they don't even get a theoretical say in what it does.

No individual should feel ashamed of what their government does, unless they support it- in which case they won't feel ashamed anyway- as there's nothing any individual can do. Do you feel ashamed of your government's wholesale and unconditional support of Mugabe, having the worst war since WW2 (that's Congo, minimum 20x the deaths of Syria and still rising) practically on your doorstep, your police shooting strikers, your cricket team losing to New Zealand of all people, because you shouldn't unless you condone them. You'd also get a very long list of all the times leaders killing their own people is perfectly fine, because the leader happens to be supported by the West and uses the dehumaniser du jour- communist, terrorist, anarchist whateverist the current boogeyman ist.

That rather depends on the contract though. Not buying FONV would have had ~zero net effect for Obsidian since they weren't paid royalties, for example. I wouldn't worry anyway, gamers as a collective tend to have zero spine when it actually comes to following through with not buying stuff.

Eh, you wouldn't have been buying it anyway since it is/was steamworks. Might end up buying it if the steamworks gets nuked since I couldn't care less about Uplay so long as it isn't the always online variety, else won't, but that's status quo ante.

NWN2 had far too many trash mobs, and playing with the party AI on at higher difficulties or with lower patch numbers/ no expansions (iirc they added the 'scaled casting' option that stopped people Abu Daziming a stray kobold later) was... not a great experience. One of the games that would have been better if it were about ten hours shorter, so long as that ten hours was chopping out all the trash mobs in the orc caves, warehouses etc. Having said that it was technically flawless for me when I played last year on Win7/64 and my specs are an order of magnitude behind those of the op, and it was overall an enjoyable experience though not a patch on MOTB in either gameplay or storyline. Obligatory, NWN2OC >>> Paint Drying >>> NWNOC, FACT!

Yeah, I don't think anyone should have concerns about the setting, those involved have shown they're very good at that part- it's mainly that the writers for this were mostly involved in the Plansescape part of PST, not the Torment part, so there's still the possibility of having a good setting but poor story execution.

They certainly do use them as political footballs and distractions from their own internal problems but it's difficult to assign too much blame to them, if they were added to the list even collectively I'd add them at the bottom, possibly after an ellipsis. None of the immediate neighbours are rich, certainly not rich enough to absorb 100ks of refugees without significant problems, they're still mostly now and historically almost always ruled by autocrats who don't care much for their actual citizens let alone refugees beyond wanting to make sure they don't revolt, Jordan's population is more than 50% Palestinian already which is historically and currently a big destabilising factor, Iran has no real obligation or reason as a distant shia persian country to accept sunni arab refugees and only really supports Hamas as an enemy of their enemy (with most of Hamas's money coming from KSA etc), and any settlement of refugees undermines the argument for repatriation/ compensation/ right of return, benefiting the one country they all regard as their enemy, Israel. Lebanon in particular is hard to blame as it was always a finely balanced ethnoreligious mix where suddenly adding 10% refugees to the population was always going to cause problems (unlike Jordan which got more proportional refugees but at least basically everyone was arab sunni) with almost no scope for flexibility and most of the really egregious anti palestinian stuff was carried out by non governmental groups like the Phalange and SLA. I guess they collectively can be blamed somewhat for fighting Israel though that was a decidedly two-to-tango situation and ultimately a response to having an artificial and fundamentally antagonistic state arbitrarily plonked down on land people were already living in.

Relic won't be shut down. They'll be bought by EA. 'Twould be a glorious whirlwind of butthurt.

Time is certainly a big factor, though it is possible to cook healthily and quickly too everyone loves convenience. I would add education as well though, lots of people simply do not know much about what food is healthy, and many do not know how to cook much at all. I'd dispute the other part though, at least here I could buy healthy food more cheaply than something like McDonalds even once a day. I'd reckon I could feed four people reasonably healthily for roughly what it would cost one person to eat at Maccas- they wouldn't be getting wine with the meal but I don't think you get that at the golden arches anyway. If it were something like a noodle based vegetable stir fry I reckon I could do it as quickly, too.

For obesity vs 'natural' height and weight growth there's the Body Mass Index and the like as normalisers, it isn't just that people are getting taller and hence heavier, they're getting taller but their weights are increasing disproportionately, ie they're getting taller and fatter. Glycemic index can be used to illustrate the overall problem with a lot of western food in that all too often it is very rich in energy but disproportionately poor in terms of making you feel 'full' after eating. Drinking a litre of coke gives you a huge amount of energy, but won't make you feel full for very long, as an extreme example. If you are doing lots of exercise drinking coke won't make you put on fat, but most people aren't doing that much exercise.

Practically, Hasbro. Else, NA Atari by the look of things- but the BG3 stuff mentioned recently wrt to Obsidian were with Euro Atari, so who knows. "© 2011 Hasbro, Inc. All Rights Reserved. © 2011 Atari Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Marketed and distributed by Atari, Inc., New York, NY.."

No really big recent successes, no guarantee of them getting royalties from continuing sales and I'd guess a fair bit was spent shopping Kings.. around to publishers as well. If the discontinuation of support for AOEO came as a surprise and at the wrong time it's easy to see how they could get caught short.

Everyone uses the news outlets that agree with them to prove their points, a logical dictat given that you can hardly use outlets that don't agree with you to prove your points. RT is a funny one as it is mainly designed to troll the western political elite, hence you have Max Keiser (more infotainment/ opiniotainment than anything on Fox, possibly even when Glen **** was still on air) ranting about metaphorically (more or less) dragging bankers out and shooting them en masse which is broadly left wing and lots of stuff on UKIP which is broadly right wing- the common factor being that it will cause delicious butthurt amongst top tier politicos who are antipathetic to Russia. The real problem from the 'mainstream' perspective about RT is that all it has to do is knock holes in their narrative to get credibility- they don't actually have to establish a proven alternative, just a plausible one. Ultimately the causes of obesity come down to too much energy in processed food and not enough exercise in compensation. The ubiquitous fructose corn starch/ corporate welfare subsidy is partly to blame in the US, but it doesn't adequately explain why weights are increasing throughout most of the west as well.

It's damn addictive!!! [/grammar troll, and not at all an excuse to play around with the new reply editor] Clocked FTL a couple of times. My playstyle must be fubared though as I still only have the three inevitable ships unlocked. Also very slowly playing through BG2, finding SCS to be a lot more enjoyable now I actually have spells like Breach. I'm finding that I'd really like to nuke Melf's Minute Meteors entirely though (ludicrously overuseful for a lvl 2 spell even with the nerf applied) and change Chaos/ Confusion to single character effect. Too many fights coming down to who gets chaos off first, whether I remember to berserk Korgan and the main character and given that you can guarantee a remove/ dispel magic is going to get cast using chaotic commands or similar prior is pretty pointless. So far my historic ranking of BG2 as excellent and BG1 as merely decent but a good springboard for its successor has only been reinforced.

Oh no, live action 3Dawg video leaked! What is that crazy dj laughing at? Steel be with you? Harold is a tree? Little Lamplight? Tune in to find out! (And sadly, gif animation >>> Bethesda animation for serious)

Yeah. Basically the Salafis hate Sufis because their interpretations of Islam are almost diametrically opposed in terms of philosophy- albeit the Salafi/ Wahhabi doctrine is dogmatically opposed to pretty much anything that isn't Salafi. They'll cheerfully enforce rules (as always,their cherry picked subset of specifically and specially interpreted rules) from the seventh century on everyone else whatever religion or sect because they believe it's what god wants. Practically though I rather doubt their problem is with 'idolatry' per se with regard to the Timbuktu mausoleum but with something that is identifiable with an alternative and more tolerant sect which reminds people that there were early alternatives to radicalism and that were extremely successful in peaceful conversion.