Zoraptor

I don't see anything on the BGEE improvements list that I'd pay for on PC either. When I finished BG1 I didn't think "Gee, I wish it were longer, had more NPCs, romances and an arena"- in fact I thought it was too long and had too many NPCs as it was. Most of the stuff I'd consider useful is already available for free, otherwise.

I think it'll probably do OK commercially because of the iOS/ tablet ports, and my cynicism is largely confined just to the PC side of things with its limited improvements and hefty price tag. The tablet type versions are a rather different kettle of fish, but also irrelevant to me, as I have no interest in them. I cannot see any reason to buy on PC though, and strongly dislike the idea that you should buy anything just because you may get something more attractive later; that's a mug's game. I put money down on WL2, but I didn't do it primarily to show that there is a market for those types of games (else I would have put more money down), I did it because it looks like a potentially good game that is worth the price tag. I wouldn't pay a cent for a Wasteland 2 that I didn't have any confidence in just on the off chance that I might end up with a better WL3 further down the line, or to show some sort of RPG solidarity.

Glad to see "I wonder why they don't make RTWP RPGs any more... and I sure as **** am not buying the only tentative attempt at making one!" crowd here in full strength. Pft. They aren't making a RTWP RPG, they're reissuing a decade+ old one one with marginal improvements and a 200% mark up. At the moment it looks and smells like a cash in, and supporting that will end with is more cash ins with marginal improvements, not a new dawn for RPGs. Yeah, I know they've talked about doing a BG3 if the EEs succeed, but you have to have confidence in the team making it for that to be desirable. What I've seen and heard about the EEs leaves me with little of that confidence.

Wiz8 is one of my favourites, and not just because the original was the first CRPG (or maybe the more obscure "Dragon's Eye", I'm not sure which came first) I played. Make sure to get Wizfast though, else you can cook a five course meal during combat, and make sure to use the terrain in combat so you don't get surrounded. MMVI is a weird one as if I wrote a list of its properties about 90% of them would be "rubbish" or some variation thereof, but I really liked the game overall. I've been playing some ME2 as I was going to do a renegade playthrough of ME3 but had negligently managed to kill about half the crew in the ME2 endgame without even noticing, the first clue I had was their names on the Normandy's wall. Also some Victoria 2 + A House Divided + PDM mod. Jolly good fun that.

Well yeah, I'm sure the win8 app store and native Live integration has nothing to do with it. If MS goes full Apple- pretty much inevitable now that its closed system is so successful- steam is dead on windows medium term and Gabe knows it. I do wonder how many steam fans would actually switch to Linux if told to.

I'm less than convinced that developers think that, it's more of a marketing/ management thing to make sweeping generalisations about whole genres. In any case any remake is almost certainly a lose/ lose situation so far as classics go- albeit far less so for xcom than something like the recent Syndicate remake. Bottom line is, if it fails then it's proof there's no market but if it succeeds then it's proof that classics only succeed when 'reimagined' to broadly comply with a set of mass market appeal 'modern' criteria. If Syndicate had succeeded we wouldn't get a 'proper' Syndicate out of it further down the line, you'd just get fps sequels and more classic brands refurbished for it. Chances are that if xcom succeeds they'll look at the bits they changed as being the reason it sold, not the bits that stayed the same. Considering 2k was originally starting with an fps reboot just like Syndicate, rather than a quasi faithful adaptation, I'm not that keen on cutting them much slack.

That's essentially been its problem with me too. It started out sounding great and they did a very good job of not immediately alienating (ohoho) the existing fans which was their largest mistake with regards to the fps* but the more information and detail that comes out about it and the more that has been fundamentally changed or excised the less appealing it sounds. *I always thought that if they wanted to do an xcom fps first they should have piggybacked Bioshock's success. As it was they annoyed most existing fans enormously while getting no brand recognition and making a game that looked like Bioshock's 50s retrofuturism.

They aren't really comparable to a dedicated large scale desktop GPU, probably closer to integrated solutions and the like used in laptops or cheap beige boxes. You wouldn't use a cellphone type device for its raw power anyway, that's all about convenience. They'd be 'good enough' to compete with consoles, but still nowhere near PC for high end stuff. They're unlikely to be competitive on genuine performance with PC at any stage as a PC (even a laptop) is designed primarily to be plugged into mains. A cellphone or pad becomes a lot less convenient if you start doing lots of high power draw stuff on it, and starts requiring recharging every few hours.

I actually have a fair bit more confidence in EU bureaucracy to make sure that loopholes are not exploited than I'd have in pretty much anyone else. They did, after all, force MS of all people to offer alternative browsers to people in the EU and they're past masters of regulatory avoidance. If it were anywhere else it'd be ignored, end-run or immediately relegislated but there's far less chance of that happening in Europe. I can't see them getting away with trying to turn software licences into 99 year leases or stuff that might work elsewhere. As for the DRM, steam* (as an example) already can remove games from your account under certain circumstances, so trading would not require any new functionality, it'd basically just require the ability to 'gift' games you've already played. And as I said earlier, if you're looking to rort the system then 2nd hand games is not a good target both because of the rapid drop in value and, well, for the dishonest there is aleady a well known 'free' alternative to buying 1st or 2nd hand.

Last day. Saved pledging my monies until the last moment, as is my wont.

I don't see how intangibility has anything to do with it really, there have already been multiple rulings about software being a product like pretty much anything else, prior to this one. The usual argument is that software does not 'degrade' as a physical product like a car does, but that's not really true, in may ways the value of software degrades at a rate that makes a car's devaluation look positively, er, pedestrian. This is a world in which it is not unusual to see a game being sold ®etail for half its nominal value within a month of its release and often for $10 or less within a year. And a lot of software simply becomes worthless within a decade or less because it is superceded, won't work on a new OS or whatever. Sure, you can duplicate software relatively easily which is not a concern for most physical products, but if you're going to be doing that you probably wouldn't have been buying your software anyway. Yep.

You can sell on stuff you're completely happy with, plenty of people sell on cars to get a new model for example. While the cash outlay is obviously a lot greater for a car the theory as to why you may trade up is pretty much the same. I think that people here are certainly not a representative sample- I'd never sell my boxed Fallouts, System Shock 2, Wing Commanders, Baldurs Gates etc, personally. But most people likely don't think about themselves as being 'completely happy' with games and view them as consumables, else there wouldn't be such a big market for 2nd hand physical media games already. If you've finished with a game and don't want to play MP extensively and aren't likely to replay it and want to move to the next big new thing then getting a discount on your next purchase is a sensible thing to do from their perspective. The Next Big Thing mentality is actively encouraged by publishers so they have to take the good of that with the bad. On the original post, at a fundamental level I see no compelling reason why designers of video games should be treated differently from designers of physical products, as the market exists now; and they (generally) do not get anything from 2nd hand sales. If there were a strong creative guild for gaming like the SAG they might be able to get some sort of residual set up and I certainly wouldn't object to that- but without that it won't happen as it isn't in the publishers' best interests, and the publishers have all the leverage. Best solution if you're independent (and lucky, almost certainly) is kickstarter or equivalent, so you get directly rewarded by its fundamental nature

Bro, Volourn. NPDs did suggest that ME3 sold through most of those 3.5m and probably sold about as much as either ME game did over their lifetime in that first month. Even if sales fell off a cliff after that it had already done enough to be profitable.

Apart from netflix (and other value added stuff MS offers/ wants to offer) there is also (potentially) OnLive style game streaming as well- if it's feasible for phones and tablets it's feasible for TVs as well. That's potentially a lot cheaper and more convenient than getting a set top box/ console, assuming you have the infrastructure to support it. That isn't the case now, but it will be a lot closer in 3-4 years time when console makers would ideally be looking at their consoles becoming profitable. It's also where a lot of game makers would like to go as (potentially) it would mean no console licence fees and no retailer cut so much more profit for them.

Everybody who cares enough about the games to analyse their respective plots and how they connect, I'd hope. There's something you can probably blame DA:O for. Played the Ultimate Edition and decided there wasn't a single bit of extended content I'd pay $10 for outside a bundle. Spare some blame for EA too, as I probably would buy (some of) the dlc if it was ever cheap, or bundled. But then while I did download BDtS I never even downloaded Zaeed, who was free, so who knows. Simply put, I'm just enough of a fan to talk about it on the internet but not enough to spend extra money if it isn't both cheap and convenient. Doesn't make it any less stupid if EA were putting crucial story information into dlc because the inevitable consequence of that is that the majority of people who do not play it will go huh? if it becomes important. Mind you, given that one of the big confusions about the ending of ME3 was caused by the last dlc implying that relays would take out entire star systems when exploding...

I'd agree that MS probably shouldn't shell out that much cash, but they're committed to consoles at this point- if they could build a time machine they'd probably go back to 2002 and kill the Xbox project and invest the money into tablet computers and shiny smart phones but as it stands a lot of people at MS have no option but to keep pushing the xbox until it succeeds. Best way to do that given it will almost certainly be a shrinking market is to get exclusives (kill the competition in the cradle) and diversify what the xbox offers as much as possible in preparation for TV makers starting to seriously go for internet capable TV which has the potential to eat console market share badly in the medium term.

I think MS could certainly find uses for WoW/ Blizzard- if they want to do streaming even as just an option (which they'd be fools not to at least look at) then things like WoW or Diablo become more useful to them on the console side as well. The strategic element would be to lock the games into prefering MS solutions and to use their biggest advantages by (groan) 'synergising' their product lines. There's a hint of that with the (non-Sega) Shogun game which is Win8 exclusive basically because that is what MS have told the devs to do. Putting MW/CoD onto Live would certainly give that a boost, and having a CoD as an exclusive launch title would given the nextbox a significant boost. Having said that THQ arguably would make a more likely targetas it is far far cheaper, even though MS is hardly short of cash reserves.

How many people actually played LotS though? There's nothing I can recall in either game they could be relatively sure everyone would have played. The only thing that makes sense for me foreshadowing wise is that the starchild is a VI of the reapers' creator race, since there are a fair few VIs around and the Prothean ones serve much the same purpose. I'm not keen on cutting much slack for Bioware here in particular. When they had a chance to explain and expand motivations and the like in the first game they copped out with "your tiny mind cannot comprehend our motivations", and the Prothean VI in the first game would have been an excellent point to foreshadow (or outright mention) the superweapon. That would also have given some much needed story ccontinuity between the three installments.

Apple, Google or especially MS might be interested as they have vested interests that might be served by owning a large game maker and all have a lot of usable cash. EA plain doesn't have enough money. Reckon they'd be about a year too late on unloading Actiblizz to get maximum return though.

Wrote themselves into a corner, probably, knew where they were going (in a general sense) but didn't know what to do when they arrived. The starchild- and the whole superweapon/ catalyst, for that matter- would not be anywhere near so bad if they'd done a proper job of foreshadowing it and it hadn't just popped up out of the blue part way through the last game in the trilogy. Hokey dream sequences and maudlin "OMG think of the children!!!" prologue sequences in the same game don't really cut it. It's marginally better than ending with "it was all a dream!", at least. But I'd still say that while the ending was not good the worse part was the overlong turgid gameplay slog preceding it.

Given the similarity of ending style we could probably look at Deux Ex Invisible War to get an idea of what any future ME titles may do to deal with the ending choice- pick whatever they think makes sense for the new story and continuity with the old can go hang. It's (to an extent) what they already did with ME2. If TOR had been more successful I think an MMO would have been inevitable, but now only if it could be done on the cheap.

Sounds more like a post apoc Men of War than anything else, unsurprising since it's the same companies and engine.

I ended up basically paying no tax at all (pretty much only VAT, think I even got NI contributions back) when I worked in the UK, but only because I knew someone who told me how to do it. It was actually a rather weird feeling, despite being completely legal.

I'd put money on both consoles being out next year. The market in consoleland is so shaky I cannot see how they can delay it further. It'd endanger a bunch of mid range publishers (not just THQ, if further R* titles sell like MP3 did 2k will be in very real trouble, Sega ain't in great shape either etc) and at the sales levels currently there probably ain't even generating that much in the way of tail end profits anyway. Realistically the 'home console' model looks like a dead duck medium term. As soon as streaming services become mainstream the console market will become (more) unsustainable.

SP the cartoon is designed in Maya, I would have thought that the game would be similar in approach so Max\ Maya whatever for character design. Most references to flash for PC/S360 games refer to the UI. I'd agree that the six month contract sounds very South Park related.