Zoraptor

I'll let P.T. Barnum explain: "There's a sucker born every minute." "Hello, I am the honourable George Ndongo. I am the former minister of Games Devlopment in the Nigerian Govenment/ Please help me obtain funs to release best game ever! from IMF World Bank illegal holdings! Only $40,000US required! for bets game ever. Reward tier $100 (limited 419 of 419 remaining)"

I'll have to see how much I can contribute. Timing seems a bit off given there are two other big RPG kickstarters running concurrently. Supposedly they got a bit gazumped, but they probably should have waited the extra couple of weeks. They've also done a good job of engaging with relevant communities ('Codex, RPGWatch etc), and have a pretty good reputation- rather similarly to Brian Fargo- in terms of populist stuff like slagging off publishers.

No, it does sound really promising. It'll be interesting to see if it's actually a good game at the end of it but all the right noises are being made.

I also have glorious dial up at a majestic 55kbps 28kbps due to line quality as a backup! I have on occasion had better access via work or when I was flatting, ADSL is by far the 'best' option if available (slower, but caps are typically multiple 10s of GBs) but it is only available in higher population density areas than where I am now. The telecommunications/ internet stuff in New Zealand is monumentally stuffed though, through multiple government decisions and the monopoly lines provider doing zero improvement for nearly 20 years while making billion dollar annual profits.

My cap is a staggering 4GB (no typo) of 22Mbps* goodness which is one of the reasons I'd never use steam even if I didn't have a philosophical difference with it- one 'bad' update or deciding to install ex internet rather than from disk without me noticing and it'd cost me more in excess than the game cost itself. The info from TW2 sales was from prior to the launch of it on 360- after around 6 weeks of sales I think- so there's no platform breakdown there and I don't think they've released any info on 360 vs PC sales. PC sales are definitely higher though, it's 'only' sold an extra million copies since the 360 version was released. *Heh, except they sold me a 4G modem when their network is still militantly 3.5G, so it's 11.2Mbps for all practical purposes.

I'd argue that companion brokenness was one of the main themes of PST really, along with how the brokenness was generally 'your' fault in some way, illustrating how much damage the deal with Ravel had done. Nordom was a broken Modron, hence the reversed name- and actually having a name- and while it was not as explicit a brokenness as Fall From Grace was with respect to being a Succubus (ie celibate lawful good rather than, er, promiscuous chaotic evil) it was still there as he should have been a personalityless cog. I'd tend to parallel Ignus with Sion from KOTOR2 in terms of brokenness as well, more literally broken than figuratively so. He is, after all, a big vengeful ball of fire and pain due to your betrayal/ manipulation. Vhailor would arguably be the one who isn't broken- unlike Nihilus, his K2 counterpart- as he's just a logical progression of his type of belief in a place where to an extent belief does shape reality. Even there though he's the one who you can talk to death by showing the contradictions at his core and that he isn't actually infallible, literally breaking him.

Yeah, IIRC it lapsed because one of the big players (France?) started ignoring it, and since they were so big that was that. For those interested, there's a handy gif (er, png) at wikipedia showing debt levels. There's also historical ones (eg 2006 data) that really show the effect that the banking collapses and debt nationalisation had in places like Iceland, the UK and Ireland.

That article is just too long, point could be made with a lot less wordage. And to be honest I find anyone saying that NPD's biggest blind spot is steam rather than, say, not taking the rest of the world outside the US into account to be just a tad... overfocussed on one thing which they obviously like rather a lot themselves. NPD is good for what it is and so long as people know what it is that's fine. It's certainly better than, say, VGChartz which might as well be guesswork. I'm not surprised about how secretive DD sellers are, the information is commercially sensitive after all. You do sometimes get figures though, TWitcher 2/ CDP/R gave a breakdown of digital sales vs physical and to an extent by vendor (around 1 million sales total after 6 weeks; ~75% retail, 19% Steam, 5% GOG, 1% others) though of course this somehow ended up being reported as variations of "80% of TWitcher's sales were on steam" and not 3/4 of Twitcher's sales were retail. That does rather suggest that retail is not quite as dead as some of the more evangelical make it out to be.

Some CDPR info, including (re)confirmation of the two smaller titles that were talked about a while ago.

No, the same people who always benefit from unions, especially monetary unions- the strongest players. The Euro is brilliant for Germany as the weaker countries keep it low relative to what it should be if they were still on the DM, but it's terrible for a weak economy as it's artificially high for them and they have to compete against the Germans with their advantages. All Germany is doing with their current 'largesse' is returning some of the money they siphoned out in the first place, while making sure that even more money flows to them. After all, who's going to keep their money in a PIIGSCSBRHELL account rather than a German one when Merkel will feel free to dip into your savings there whenever convenient? Far better to put your money into a nice safe place like, say, Germany.

Well, it is a sequel so it's hardly going to be radically different. I thought KBAP was better than KBTL in generally the same ways that Fallout 2 was better than Fallout 1, ie a lot of the small niggles were smoothed out though it lost some of the storyline charm of the first. Crossworlds on the other hand I'm a lot more ambivalent about since it almost seemed like it hadn't been play tested or balanced at all, and some of its changes are much for the worse.

The main problem was they replaced the not very good (and unintentionally hilarious) inflatable bouncy buggy exploration with not very good- and worse, boring- planet pinging. I also remember the inventory system of ME1 let's say 'less than fondly', plus the generic near identical mine/ ship/ whatever locations. OTOH I though that ME1 did a far better job of being part of a series than ME2, and that ME2 simply had too many NPCs and not enough plot progression and that ME1 was a better RPG while ME2 was a better 3ps.

The one unit type I've almost always used in any KB (if available) are Royal Snakes. IMO they're the best early to mid game unit by far, especially if used in conjunction with spells like slow. I usually go for minimum deaths rather than cheap and plentiful though.

Better get in quick, I hear he's going to call a crusade to liberate Las Malvinas from the hated heretics of Angleland.

5 million combined as of last month I'm fairly sure there are figures for the two individual games as well- from what I remember they're roughly equal now.

What, no "in knowing the teaching of Gorthimon I have become stronger"? (OK, Gorthimon sounds like some sort of refugee from a weird Japanese collectable game, though no doubt said game could be infinitely improved by the inclusion of a giant floating skull, as all games can be improved by the inclusion of giant floating skulls)

Dunno about that, either witcher game sold (probably) more than at least DA2 did, and they were PC only/ +360 for TW2. I wouldn't have thought there would be competition anyway as neither is likely to be a 'must have'/ saturation game which sells so much that it kills sales for other titles.

While Ubisoft is about the only big publisher this was even possible from it's still a lot more old school looking than I would have thought possible. Dev is a bit of a question mark but I guess there really aren't that many (available) developers around with any actual experience in the genre any more, what with it being 'dead'.

Can't say I have a huge amount of sympathy for Riccitiello, the Bioware/ Pandemic/ EP deal stank from an ethics pov considering his positions with both companies and I'd suspect the blowback from that and TOR is the ultimate problem. It's OK paying a lot of money to buy something with your new company from your old company if it ends up performing well and while the traditional Bioware staple has done fine for EA that was not what the high price was paid for. Gaben fired people too so I guess he's incompetent and should have found a way to keep them busy. Why do you hate Gaben, Morgoth? And the only one of those that was a failure was Syndicate. Well, and Simcity's launch. Even DS3 topped the sales charts.

Can't see any way it won't be 'rebooted'. I liked M&M VI/ VII a lot, but even at the time they were very much a greater than the sum of their parts proposition. They had poor graphics, inconsistent and exploitable gameplay, vestigial storylines, bad sound- pretty much everything about them was far surpassed by other titles. Ubisoft is pretty decent comparatively about making 'niche' PC games, but I very much doubt they're looking for something that niche.

My logic needs no work whatsoever, all that stuff was reported extensively at the time. The UN- heh, nice to see you defending them- report presents no actual prima facie evidence, didn't talk to the primary people effected, visited the site 4 weeks (!) late and ignores that both 'unofficial' Israeli sources said it was them and Israel said there were zero (Palestinian) missile launches at that time. The UN can speculate like a truther in a Montanan log cabin all it wants, when it comes to actual evidence its conclusions are clearly incorrect- or Israel lied twice for absolutely no benefit (and rather a lot of negative).

Wait, let me guess. It's the UN report saying that Hamas accidentally blew up a BBC reporters home based on... absolutely no evidence whatsoever and without even visiting the home at the time? The one where 'unofficial' Israeli sources actually admitted it was their strike (which I bet won't be mentioned) and Hamas/ other militants did not apologise as they do in all other cases of friendly fire? The one which occurred when Israel said there had been no rocket launches from Gaza at the time? That one? (Yep, it's that one, and no the WP strangely didn't mention any of the counter evidence. I'm sure it's an oversight)

Britain should have made the Argentines revoke their cores as part of the 1982 peace treaty. Rookie mistake not to*, they'll always come back after the truce has expired. *Unless they needed to invade and occupy 99% of Argentina to get the war score high enough to accept they'd lost. In which case it's just another thing to blame Paradox and their wonky algorithms for.

It appears that another new System Shock 2/ Thief patch has been released. No apparent involvement from the people who put it up on GOG, it's turned up on a french forum again.

I wouldn't have thought the most vitriolic DA2 opinions were from Witcher fanboys anyway, they're far more likely to be Jilted Bioware Fans or Professional EA Haters. Witcher may get used a bit as a comparison but if you have haters hating they're not going to be reasonable and say "The Witcher has some very good and well designed quests that require some actual thinking, but it does have a fair few kill x or fetch and carry quests as well which often involve trudging over the same areas", they're going to talk about the well designed quests and how DA2 definitely had none of those, nosiree, its quests were all complete asterisks, that nasty Laidlaw chap kept going on about awesome Bhutan too (been there, nice but not awesome so false advertising!!!) and my dog died immediately after playing- coincidence? I think not!