Zoraptor

An alignment system is pretty intrinsic to Star Wars as well, and Mass Effect too, if more peripherally. It isn't just D&D. I think having an 'alignment' based dialogue system is an interesting idea, though I'm not convinced of its practicality for much other than minor choices and cosmetic stuff which (to an extent, though it's more often skill based rather than 'alignment') it is already used for- you wouldn't want the Big Choice in KOTOR to become the Big Railroad just because you'd been rescuing cats and building hospitals for bunnies since Taris; no matter how silly it actually is to do a 180 at that point not allowing the option would annoy people enormously. But if your character is an atheist, for example, and you chose at creation to make them one then you really ought not to be able to join a religion except under particular circumstances- one of those exceptions might be if you've been systematically undermining that atheism throughout the game. You'd have to lose the atheist trait as a consequence, but I'm all for that sort of 'alignment' shift if it's warranted.

Obs were looking at hiring someone with mobile development experience which could be related to a mobile WoT game. The dates for the contract seemed to suggest it might be for something South Park though.

The dlc for DAO is problematic to install full stop- I've got the retail ultimate edition and even that had significant problems. That certainly isn't the reason for DA2 getting blocked though, that's down to the changed tos.

Valve changed their Terms of Sale to exclude 3rd party dlc handling between the releases of DAO and DA2 which is why DA2 ain't on there. As such it was Valve's decision as if it was EA's they would/ could have pulled everything off of steam, and DA2 is available at most other vendors eg below. Gamersgate is selling DA2 cheapish at the moment if really keen on it, though it's been and no doubt will be cheaper.

I disagree- Bioware has never been about 'artistic integrity' for its own benefit, it's always been about money. They've made hard nosed business decisions like cutting off Interplay and produced utter tripe (NWN OC) without any input from anyone at EA/ EP. Almost everyone in business wants to make money, it's a matter of where you place your priorities, and from following what they said about starting to make "event games" and trying to appeal to a huge audience and similar quotes around the EP purchase, combined with the fact that's when they started to make crap games, I draw the conclusion that that was the breaking point. Also you normally wouldn't sell your company unless your goal is now to cash in. If they really wanted to cash in they'd have quit by now. They'd probably have quit as soon as contractually allowed to do so. On the other point, both KOTOR and Jade Empire were attempts to go with more mass market 'event gaming' types, and they were both well prior to EP. There's pretty much a direct line from the more trad RPGs to them, and to the Mass Effects. It's unfair to push stuff that was clearly decided upon by people at Bioware (like the ME3 ending) onto EA and even things like TOR being an MMO rather than a genuine K3 must have happened at the very least with LucasArts approval even if it weren't suggested by/ a condition imposed by them. EA can be blamed for some stuff like MP in ME3 or Origin (if it floats your boat) but that's comparatively minor. Even DA2's short dev time was at least partly because Bioware took so long to make DAO.

The legal shenanigans were not sufficient to stop games being made though, Neverwinter was in development pretty much throughout and Daggerdale was fairly recent and well post NWN2, though I would tend to suspect that the inability to produce games and specifically 4e games was why Hasbro were so keen to remove Atari. Of course, there still aren't any new D&D games in development that we know of but I'd presume that Hasbro are trying to shop the licence around. I guess if they have trouble getting any takers a 2/3e IE based BG3 could be a possibility to drum up interest and show it's (D&D) still a viable brand even if it's likely more retrograde than they'd want. Personally I'd get someone to make a 5e NWN3 with a SoZ style map as it would be ideal for a drop in dlc/ premium access based business model.

I disagree- Bioware has never been about 'artistic integrity' for its own benefit, it's always been about money. They've made hard nosed business decisions like cutting off Interplay and produced utter tripe (NWN OC) without any input from anyone at EA/ EP.

Why a pity? There's a new hole now that has to be filled. This is Obsidians chance. As much as I root for Obsidian, anyone who dreams of this will be in for a rude surprise if Bio does come apart. Yep, all it would show is that even large and successful RPG makers cannot be successful enough any more, and it would get even more difficult to get RPGs made. Don't think there's any chance of Bioware going anywhere in the short term anyway. EA has just finished rebranding a bunch of studios and despite the Angry Internet Man response to ME3 it was a commercial success. It'd be baby with bathwater to cull them, and it'd be the end for Riccitiello given the amount he paid for them in the first place.

He's not running the Austin studio any more, that's all that has been 'confirmed'. They have done some other stuff since 2006, they did at least the first level of Bioshock 2 for example. They were also (allegedly, though there was some pretty decent circumstantial evidence) making System Shock 3 at the time John Riccitielo took over EA and killed most of their external development.

I was none too happy about what they did to Fallout either- as implied by my rather negative implied opinion of Beth's games- but at least that was 4 (?) years ago. Got to let go at some point lest it end in madness, obsession, and playing KOTOR seven times.

My response to this (if true) would probably break the autocensor from over use. A Stalker game from Bioware couldn't be a worse fit, and I'd be only slightly more miffed if it were System Shock. Broad, Bland, Banal: Bethesda.

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.