Zoraptor

Oddly enough the 'West' didn't give a rat's secondary fundamental orifice about mass rape, murder and torture on a far greater scale in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo, Rwanda, Somalia etc etc. How many dead in Congo and hardly a peep for the whole time, let alone any action? Countries talk morality when it's in their best interests and to get their populations to go along with whatever their geopolitical aims are. That's true for China, Russia, the US and its proxies, everyone; the Chinese and Russians just dress it up in a different form of morality, that of the doctrine of non-intervention. Which isn't appealing to westerners who've been conditioned to respond to a different set of stimuli- but only in selected cases and situations of course. The why was asked for, and got the answer. Don't like it? The only solution is to go back to 6372 BC, get yourself appointed God and redesign human nature so we're capable as a collective (or even as an individual in most cases) of putting moral considerations above economic, political or practical ones, that's the only thing that'll 'fix' it.

The Russians and Chinese don't want another US proxy in the area, Russia doesn't want to lose its military base, and the west utterly asterisked the pooch for intervention by its treatment of Libya where it turned a theoretically even handed protect civilians mandate into "Regime change here we go- we'll protect civilians on one side, other side please feel free to level Sirte while we help you out because those civilians don't count!". Might as well ask why the west doesn't knock over the government in Bahrain despite it being a despotic dictatorship that likes to imprison and torture doctors for treating injured protesters and relies on foreign mercenaries (Saudi army) to prop itself up- it's against their national interests, would likely result in a more pro Iran country right on SA's doorstep and bye bye large US naval base in Manama; human rights/ freeeeeeedom considerations are secondary, end of story.

Dunno really, there's usually blame on both sides but I don't know about the balance. Activision belatedly paying out bonuses suggests they were being withheld and later realised their position was untenable, and the treatment of the general IW staff around the time was dreadful and probably would have been criminal if done by an individual rather than a multi-billion dollar company. Then again I'm pretty much always going to back a developer over a publisher on this sort of thing since it is clear that IW were delivering a good product (even if I don't personally like it it sold like hotcakes) that should have been rewarded commensurately. As a casual observer I'd laugh, loudly, if Activision actually lost Modern Warfare to W&Z since it's the flagship Activision Yearly Iteration Franchise game but I suspect that claim is just leverage.

Tried going back to CKII and try out Wiz's mod. Got bored very quickly, same old issues. Somewhat baffled as to why I like the original so much and now find the sequel to be quite so tepid and unremarkable. Have been slowly going through StalkerSOC over the past couple of weeks, just completed X18. I think the game goes up in my estimation every time I play it which considering how much I liked it originally is really saying something. It's got more sheer atmosphere than a year's worth of standard titles.

Edmonton = 'old' Bioware, Mass Effect/ Dragon Age and the ilk You're thinking of EA Ireland.

May 30th, at their conference is the date for an important announcement so that may be the new IP reveal. Or it could be PS3 version of TW2, or an expansion, or TW3, in increasing order of likeliness.

In all seriousness, there are forum posters I trust more than Pachter when it comes to games industry analysis. No confirmation so far as I am aware, no. There is minor precedent- Karpyshyn went from ME to TOR- but sufficient to suspend or significantly slow DA3's development? That would require dozens of transfers. If DA3 has been delayed, which is believable, I'd suspect that synchronising it with the NextBox/ PS4 is actually the reason.

I'm sure no company with any regard for its employees really wants/plans to let them go once a project is finished, but there are plans and then there is reality. The majority of projects result in some layoffs once they're completed, that is the reality. I'd also note that it is bad for morale if you're saying "yeah, once we ship we'll be firing a bunch of our employees". We don't actually know who has gone, so far as I am aware (beyond the community manager?). If they're stripping out the core team it would be a sign of Trouble, if it's just a few it may be natural attrition or more minor and rational cuts. As I said the whole TOR thing is a bit confusing at the moment as you supposedly have firings- but almost simultaneously people from Edmonton getting shifted onto it. Which is a bit... counterintuitive.

Oh, it won't be only QA and testers, for sure. It is exceeding likely that some designers and more core types have gone too. No business likes having people sitting around twiddling their thumbs and that is to an extent inevitable after any project of the scope of a large MMO wraps as it's very unlikely you will have enough extra work for everyone involved in the principle design to be involved with unless you're immediately starting work on a new project, and even a full on expansion would require more limited resources than the core development.

That did get mentioned for ME1, though it obviously was not a huge concern given its review scores. I do really dislike bullet spray complaints though, especially when they're dressed up in realism arguments since it's actually very easy to miss what you're aiming at but lots of people seem to think bullets = lazors!!! in real life and always go straight and flat, direct and directly for what you aim at.

The carve up of Czechoslovakia- under the aegis of the UK, inventor of the concentration camp, and with Poland (and Hungary, for virumor) getting a forgotten chunk of the spoils- would be equally as good. Doesn't quite go to the same narrative, though.

It won't be profitable yet. Most of the Doom predictors are probably going by the (utterly ludicrous) $400 million estimates for cost. If it could hold a million subscribers for a year it would almost certainly have a decent worthwhile profit by that point. While I'm not really actively following the game it is fair to say that the negative spin has been pretty consistently inconsistent. (Part of) DA3 team allegedly moved to help TOR = Doom, people fired off TOR (almost certainly QA/ technical support people, given that they're always most in demand at title launch and demand for them drops off heavily once initial issues are sorted) also = Doom. Lots of arm waving about a 25% drop off when other titles like Age of Conan had ~90% drop offs over a similar time period. It's not a WoW killer to be sure, but anyone who expected that had unrealistic expectations. WoW is most definitively the exception, not the rule.

If they have DLC plans they'd probably do any voice work for that at the same time, so they aren't necessarily all related to a redone ending.

Strewth. WL2 only exists because of EA 1) They published the original 2) They didn't IP squat (as most other publishers would do) once they decided they weren't going to use it but sold the rights to BF/ inXile Passing up 90 days of royalty free sales for the sake of some nebulous eCred would have been stupid and, again, it's not like it's using 'Originworks' and there's going to be any obligation whatsoever to buy from or use Origin.

Big companies always do negative stuff, but EA hasn't done anything particularly egregious- perhaps excluding some of its server shutdowns though I'm unclear how many people play Sports Franchise Iteration Year Number multiplayer once it's superceded. They're a favourite whipping boy because of the accumulated ills of Bioware (Jade Empire and the NWN OC suggests the herp was strong in Bioware even pre EA), spyware FUD and OMG being mean to GabeN!!! I might even register WL2 on Origin if they do it that way, though it would be after making sure I had it DRM free as well. That's a zero loss proposition for everyone. It is pretty ludicrous seeing so many people going purple faced over WL2/ Origin when No Steam No Sale (Steamholm Syndrome?) types demand steam keys and would be appalled if it were not available there. If it's just another place to buy it, or register it, then nobody should really care.

A million seems a reasonable estimate for KoA. But even if EA weren't distributing it and taking a cut that would be in the ballpark (ohoho) of $20 million in revenue. Fine, except apparently they're burning through 4 mill a month in expenses. Given that EA was the distributor their cut might be only half that. It does look rather like mismanagement and if the MMO is really still a full year away there was no way KoA could have saved them unless it sold in the ~5 million range, which would be hopelessly optimistic for a new IP from a relatively unknown studio.

A monopoly is not in any sense free capitalism. Monopolies are a perversion of free/ perfect capitalism as they have both means and motivation to maintain their position against better products that would theoretically, in a perfect system, supplant them. Might as well start talking about perfect communism as perfect capitalism, they're both as practical as each other. Really though, off topic. If you're really interested in a more protracted explanation it would be more appropriate in a new topic.

With HBO it's certainly easy. They sell the internet broadcast rights along with the satellite/ terrestrial broadcast rights. If you wanted to see GoT here on the internet you can (for about a week) but you have to have a subscription to the satellite provider for it (Sky). That's all written into the contracts. If they had HBO webcasting as an option that will significantly impact on the money they get from selling the rights. Whether they'd make more or less money from directly marketing to other territories I do not know, but it would be considerably more difficult getting their message out since the external rights holders do a lot of the marketing themselves and hence drive demand for things like DVDs. Otherwise you are largely relying on 'word of mouth'- which is not as bad now as five years ago, but you still require a lot of talk to get the hype train running.

Waterloo was after the Prussians had been sent running again, (props to Blucher for countermanding Gneisenau's full on retreat order once he got back in the saddle though) and with an almost entirely scratch anglo dutch army. Boney might have won if he'd still had Davout as a field commander instead of Grouchy but then again the allies might have won easier had the Peninsular veterans been available- it's all historical conjecture. Eylau, Friedland and Borodino would be the largest one-on-oneish set piece Russian French battles. Generally the Russians fought as parts of coalition armies and under their command- as at Austerlitz where the battle plan was Austrian and carried out against Kutuzov's objections. It wasn't so much that they won, but they made the French pay heavily even when they lost, and when they got a chance to kick the asterisks out of the French they took it in emphatic style. I don't think it is fair to criticise them for using the winter (especially since the autumn was actually unusually warm and the French were in total disarry even prior to the snows really setting in) as one of the basic tenets is to use local knowledge and terrain to your advantage. Napoleon was certainly a bit of an idiot, but then people don't tend to downgrade Hannibal/ Nelson/ OKW by saying that Varro or Villeneuve or Gamelin was a bit of an idiot. The story would probably be different if Karl had followed up Aspern-Essling and starved the French out on Lobau, but he didn't and then lost Wagram and the war a few weeks later. I'm not a big Napoleon fan though. If he'd stopped in 1807, OK, but he didn't. He made mistakes and more importantly didn't learn from them (see Egypt and Russia in particular), fought unnecessary wars and ultimately got huge numbers of people killed for no net gain.

From a world history perspective "what was the greatest army?" is probably the wrong question. The on balance longest lasting and most extensive empires were the Roman/ Persian iteration/ British/ Mongol/ Chinese iteration ones, and really they all had military weaknesses to one extent or the other- the romans were resilient rather than uniformly militarily brilliant (had as many spectacular losses as wins- Cannae, Allia, Adrianople, Teutoburger, Aquae Sextiae, Carrhae), the mongols had a century of absolute ownership then more or less steady decline, the Brits had an excellent navy but an army that was usually too small to be globally relevant, and the Chinese and Persians tended towards extreme brittleness when outside their own back yard. The consistently good militaries all seem to be associated with more ephemeral entities, and they often fell apart at the first proper, sustained, defeat. Napoleon's first loss was Egypt- running away with tail between legs and leaving an underling to do the actual losing is not victory or even a draw by any sensible measure. Boney really didn't learn the lessons either, he repeated them almost verbatim in Russia 1812 to even worse result. Russians had a very good record in the 18th C to Napoleonic era- they had the best record against Napoleonic France of anyone whose surname wasn't Wellesley and irrespective of the winter, certainly better than the far more vaunted Prussians or any Austrian not named Karl, and if Elizabeta had lasted a few months longer they would have ended Fred the Gross's Prussia in the 7 years war post Kunersdorf.

Is LucasArts in the "everything developed internally" or "everything developed externally" section of its bipole at the moment, since I've lost pretty much all interest in them I haven't been paying attention. Swapping directions completely every 18 months has not worked wonders, to say the least, and they've been doing it since... 2007?

Plus you'd have to totally redo the narrative structure from scratch. I can understand wanting the entirety of content available in one playthrough but it's counter to how the game was developed- might as well say you'd prefer it as an fps, or with a player defined character. Perfectly reasonable things to want in theory but simply not part of the game.

Does it though? You've got free exposure, the photo is well known and you can still claim fees from anyone using it commercially- and even if that photo is lost to the great IP cloud in the sky you still have the publicity from it for any other photos you have taken, publicity you would have had to work hard to get for yourself. That is both the viral marketing model and the model a lot of up and coming music groups use- release stuff for free to get exposure and build up a following, at little effective cost relative to traditional methods. That may not be an ideal case for all situations, but neither is one where a cabal of large record companies decide what music should be produced in a vacuum and by themselves, which was effectively the case prior to the internet (and is still largely the case in gaming, for example).

OMG COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT SUMMON THE HOUNDS!!! AP hasn't had DRM since the patch. More relevantly to the argument at hand (and MC's rather emotive 'think of the children' argument) everything we know suggests that Obsidian aren't missing out since they don't get a cut of sales- it's been all but confirmed outright that the only bonus relevant to FONV was the imbecilic Metacritic one and AP would not have made a bonus level even were it in the contract. On a more general note there's precisely zero point addressing people who pirate because it's free. They'll always pirate, they'll never buy and as such are completely and utterly irrelevant- about as irrelevant as trying to sell pork to Saudi Arabia- and trying to affect them will only alienate people who are potential customers. The only people you can reach are people who pirate because it's convenient/ gives a better product/ lacks DRM/ sticks it to The Man, as those are concerns that can be addressed at least to an extent.

That's a touch, well, naive. Our 3 strikes internet law was initially shelved after massive opposition to it, democracy in action. It then got passed without scrutiny, in about six hours- it was apparently a vital response to the Christchurch earthquake as they used the emergency provisions stemming from that to pass it. It is, as with all those sorts of things, a monumentally dumb law which establishes conviction by fiat/ accusation, those voting for it clearly had not a single iota of a clue as to how it would work and what it would do, and there is literally zero chance of it being repealed no matter how much it is despised and no matter how vile the circumstances under which they passed it. If I sometimes seems like I have little sympathy for IP rights holders it's because of incidents like that. Politicians gonna politicise be vile gutter feeding pond scum with no integrity, honour or respect for a disaster in which nearly 200 of their countrymen died- it's what they do- but they only do it because MPAA/ RIAA(NZ) etc lobby them. Rights holders want to get rid of age old principles like presumption of innocence for their own gain and convenience? Goodbye sympathy, farewell goodwill, even vague consideration exits, stage left. Someone stealing a TV I'd stop. Someone copying an infinitely duplicatible movie or song? Much of the time it'sCry Me A River. I wouldn't cheer them on but if someone downloads Rihanna or something... quid pro quo, care level zero.