Zoraptor

I have no idea whether that is accurate or not, but it's been a widely distributed speculation, often with some Biowarism attached . Given the religious overtones of calling someone "Shephard" it would hardly be a surprise.

It's entirely possible (or likely, even) that those are default choices and that any branching is not implemented properly in the beta. If everything were working properly it wouldn't be a beta, after all. I haven't seen any vids (stuck on dial up until friday...) but my presumption was that the trial at the beginning of ME3 would be used to set up those switches for a new player, ie you'd get a bunch of "Why did you allow one of your companions to die" type questions.

It is associated with Stalin in the 'real world' but is misattributed/ apocryphal. Whether Westwood knew that or not I do not know.

I'm perhaps a touch surprised to say I agree with Nepenthe, at least if it is as presented. The reservation would be if it's some sort of stalking horse for "only 5% of people used RPG mode so we're cutting it in future". So long as it remains formalising pre-existing game play choices I see no reason to object- people already click through dialogue or turn difficulty to easy to rush combat, or turn on auto-levelling, after all. Heh, read that at the codex, couldn't be bothered replying. Problem is that by that measure any program at all that connects to the internet is potentially dodgy; which is true, but only in the same sense as saying that 100% of people who breathe air will die. It may not have done anything nefarious yet but it might in the future!!1!!! is a hopelessly shonky argument. My neighbour owns a rifle, he hasn't shot me with it yet but he might in the future, etc. All that can be shown is that there is no evidence of malfeasance now and that the original accusation of reading tax records was rubbish from someone who didn't understand what his monitoring software was actually saying. And that is how it remains until someone actually proves otherwise.

http://boards.theforce.net/literature/b10003/31667765/p48 They don't seem to have direct post linking enabled, so you'll have to scroll to near the bottom.

Cerberus Network etc were prior to Origin though. No reason to expect them to go back and retroactively integrate them all, same as you don't get Cerberus Network for ME1. I'd presume that in future they'll be integrated if only to rationalise support and development costs.

They don't, because their EULA is subject to their Privacy Policy. Most relevantly "EA will never share your personal information with third parties without your consent. We may, however, share anonymous, non-personal, aggregated and/or public information with third parties." If you want to you can make any EULA/ Privacy Policy look bad though. Valve exempts 3rd parties from any and all provisions of its privacy policy, for example. And 90% of its business is selling 3rd party stuff... I should probably also repost the link I stuck in the Random News thread debunking the current "Origin uploads your entire HD to the internet!!!" scare. What it actually does.

The german Origin snooping stuff has been thoroughly debunked now. Dude was clueless, and Steam also does much the same sort of thing, perhaps worse You didn't have much problem using Cerberus Network, as I recall. That's about as 'bad' as Origin. Really though, the most likely scenario is that it will be basically the same as that, with Origin only really required for the MP and DLC handling.

What, I presumed it would be an open world game playing as a rodent eating alien!!! You just lost a sale, Rockstar.

I'd say that customers either have an obligation to be informed or an obligation to not get upset if they make bad decisions through ignorance. You, as a customer, have to know what is needed or at least ask if you don't know, if you don't and make a mistake then that really is Your Fault. That's mainly true for genuine service industries though- it is another way healthcare is rather different from a standard 'service' in that you can only reasonably expect that obvious symptoms be acted on ("I thought blood in my urine was normal! Had it for years!") and otherwise it is far more consultative than, say, buying petrol or a burger.

There have already been Facebook etc games done for Bioware stuff, just not by Bioware but by EA's specialist 2d group. More "get to level 10, send out x invites and get exclusive Awesome Item for core game x!", probably. They'll probably still largely be made by the 2d people, but described as being from Bioware. EA certainly seem to be trying to, heh, 'synergise' their studios- dismemberment in ME2 came from Visceral, DICE has had a hand in ME3's multiplayer etc.

Sorry Jaesun, but if ME3 does not require Origin for at least the MP parts I will eat my hat. Man, where does this stuff come from? Steam pulled it. How can you tell, objectively? Because they definitively are not Origin exclusives- you can buy BF3/ C2/ DA2 from pretty much any other DD retailer, just not steam. The only one who ejected toys from pram on the matter was steam, ironicly since they've been getting their client bundled into products sold by other DD vendors for ages and don't expect anyone to have a problem with that. The only current origin exclusive I know of is the digital version of TOR which has been specifically stated not to actually need Origin to run.

A point in sabotage is also needed to get the option to use EMP, isn't it?

If it's TOR pre-orders then aren't they limiting the numbers who can pre-order to try and prevent any server crashing? That's the usual reason for charging extra for pre-orders, as an encouragement for people not to cancel in situations where it generates extra work and means that they have had to turn away other customers. They've had some good offers. I think they were giving away Mass Effect 2 for free at one point. I could be confused on that. It's been known to happen. There was a 'free Mass Effect 2 with a copy of Dragon Age 2!' offer, but that was vendor independent. You're probably thinking of Dead Space 2, which you could get free with a BF3 (?) pre-order for a while.

Nothing particularly weird there. Assuming what the Kurds say is true there are two explanations. 1) The incursion thing was always for domestic consumption alone. We got attacked, We're striking back, We've struck back, Everyone celebrate our great victory! 1a) The US or Iraq may have asked them not to and they may have agreed despite initially planning an attack, but still wanted it thought that They Had Done Something. 2) There was a fairly large earthquake nearby which may have changed plans either through logistical problems or from the troops being needed to help in rescue and food/ shelter distribution. Don't really know about the assassinations, chechens are extensively linked to organised crime as well so it could be a subtle "please stop selling our heroin on the side, ta muchly" situation. If it ain't, well, I had little problem with ObL getting taken out and see no reason to object to this just because it was done by russkies rather than blue-eyed corn-fed apple-pie-eating flag-waving red-white-and-blue patriots. The turks didn't necessarily have any solid prior knowledge about chechen terrorists (or 'terrorists') being on their soil since it's difficult enough to keep tabs on 50 million people.

I don't think anyone is jumping on pmp per se. He's undeniably correct on some aspects- the whole 'people of the book' aspect of Islam is basically an acknowledgement that Jews and Christians worship the same god as Muslims, but in a 'misguided' way (and yes, Jesus is an acknowledged prophet in Islam, just not The prophet), as opposed to dhimmi (if I remember the correct term) like Hindus. On the other hand a Jew would probably say that Muslims and Christians do not worship the same god as he does. As I said, the primary problem is with the semantics. Is the Jew right, or is the Muslim? No way of knowing but plenty of room for argumentation about exactly where the boundary between sect/ heresy/ religion etc are set. Short of finding out how a genuinely disinterested 3rd party (aliens, perhaps) viewed things there isn't really an objective right/ wrong answer. Personally I suspect aliens would bundle all the Abrahamics together, or think we're just weird entities looking for any excuse to kill and dominate others and nick their stuff.

Domsceit-Berg deleted a bunch of them before leaving wikileaks.

The same god/ different god thing does rather illustrate how the terminology of religion isn't really very specific, and there's no theological or practical way to tell who is 'right' with respect to whether it is the same god. There's a bunch of examples that don't really fit nicely into fixed definitions too; Mithras which was borrowed by the Romans from the Zoroastrians/ Persians. Same god, or different one? Part of the Roman pantheon (after all the Romans who worshipped him still worshipped their traditional gods too) or not? Was Atenism a wholly separate religion from traditional Egyptian polytheism, a sect or just some sort of supra Amun-Re heresy? Is Buddhism a religion or a philosophy? Where is the line drawn for religions- are Druze Muslim? Are Alawites? Who gets to decide? For that matter were Branch Davidians or Jim Jones' lot Christians? I'm not sure if the real world were a fantasy setting that anyone would believe it, or would find it a bit obsessive (in the why did Tolkien spend so long designing Elvish languages? sense) since in most fictional works religion is just a tool for scene setting or plot development and has very little thought put into it beyond those requirements. Even the trinity is disputed, nontrinitarianism has existed almost as long as Christianity itself- and at one point Arianism was very popular in the Roman Empire. There are very few tenets that are absolutely undisputed, pretty much just god himself and Jesus being his son/ prophet.

Russia is our (2nd) biggest market = lots of key resellers.

Are we sure that the 2d game and the 'animation franchise' game are one in the same?

There are some publicly available NPD figures for DXHR, 244K for August, 180K+ (as Resistance 3 sold 180K and was one place below it; grabbed both figures off the QT3 NPD thread) for September. Even if it sold significantly more than R3's 180K that's still not much more than one million worldwide. For What It's Worth (not much, r00fles) VGChartz has it at ~1.4 million SE has also released the shipped figure. Should really clarify that that isn't tanking by any stretch, but I'd imagine it would be well below their expectations.

It didn't sell well though. It would fit it perfectly. If you look at success WB has had with Batman: Arkham Asylum and the upcoming Arkham City, it really wouldn't surprise me that they wanted to launch somewhat similar title with some other superhero of theirs. But while it would fit the clues, it's more than likely WB has one of their own internal teams working on such project. I tend to agree on the likelihood, but they have worked with independents before iirc- I'm pretty sure they only bought out Rocksteady after BatmanAA's release.

At present, Origin works similarly to Impulse, ie you can download/ install via Origin then actually uninstall Origin without breaking the games. The strong suspicion is that all future EA titles will use it and that it will need to be running at least for MP, as I would presume that Origin will be used pretty much exclusively for things like matchmaking/ achievement handling as it gives a unified framework to work towards and should cut down on costs. Having said that, BF3 at least of their upcoming titles does use an external browser for servers. Randomly spew "You must be online to go offline" errors and the like? I'd certainly prefer a GfWL (!) style offline profile system where you don't necessarily even have to go online. The SWTOR clarification was on the download vs retail issue, iirc. The download version is exclusive to Origin but it isn't bundled with retail (I would expect some 'encouragement' to drive installs though). And it's just about exactly equivalent to the Valve/ Steam /HL2 situation, really, sans Origin needing to be running at all times when playing (at present). Bundle with popular game: instant market share plus more $$$ in future- also the reason for steamworks being used as loss-leader.

Hobbit RPG? DC Superhero RPG? All this speculation drives me crazy. In the end, Obsidian is probably not involved in any of these anyways.... While I agree that it isn't likely, 'superhero from Warner's DC Comics' would potentially fit with a number of 'leading animation franchise' s quite well.

One use code tied to an account- like a serial number for a PC game, basically. If you then want to reuse/ resell the code you have to sell the entire account along with it which is not really practical in most cases. EA does have a webpage describing it, this is the description for the PS3 version of Dead Space 2 which ought to be generally equivalent by the looks of things.