Zoraptor

I think the great philosopher Kryten could find three small problems with doing that. (There is no thief available, hence Nepenthe setting all the traps off rather than a thief disarming them)

Having recently played that area what Thax (to her friends) did to me was try and drain something like 10 levels a pop with her breath. Personally, I wouldn't dream of attempting her in chapter 2 in even semi ironman conditions.

Libertarians are fine. As with anything the problem is when they get detached from reality, but that is something that can happen to anyone espousing any philosophy, not just libertarians. Personally I would say that most people are 'brainwashed' into saying that what exists at the moment is anything resembling free trade, and I pretty much come out as an anarchist in all the political compass type tests. Free trade is a very good idea, in theory, it just doesn't really exist and everyone is happy to ignore it when convenient- CAP in the EU, similar agricultural subsidies in the US, China using dump/choke tactics to bankrupt competitors etc. Of course, describing as 'true free trade' an utterly subjective set of tariff criteria based on things such as OMG socialised education!!! is also about as far from free trade as it's possible to get. If a country has socialised education then that costs more and taxes are higher- all other things being equal- and there is thus no net advantage. Tariffs are fine to prevent genuinely anticompetitive practices like deliberately selling below cost to bankrupt competitors (a favourite of the Chinese) because those practices are themselves contra free trade and are deliberate attempts to distort the market.

I have no real interest in MMOs personally, but I've seen a lot of people wary of the combo of Cryptic and Perfect World quality wise.

You aren't going to pay full price for it because you feel entitled to a better experience than the console users? Bro', that is most indubitably entitlement. Nothing in particular wrong with that, buy what you want and what you feel is worth it is always the rule, just as they'll add the features they think are worth it. But it's not like they're hiding what they're doing, everyone will be able to make an informed choice which is better than something like the Bioshocks, where the advanced PC features included chopping the edges off the screen if using the wrong resolutions while insisting everything was tickety-boo. Dead Space 2 barely made it to PC, we're an utterly peripheral market. There is LA Noire and MP3, even Bully going back a bit further and iirc none of them were R* North. Not really disputing anything though, there were issues with the quality of the porting in 2/3 of those which would not speak well for the prospects of an RDR port even were the code in better shape.

Pft. Microtransaction based dialogue choices are the future, mere dlc is the past. Renegade/ paragon options at 0.50$ a pop, want to punch the Salarian/ Turian/ Asari councillors, $2 a pop. Far more potential for a paradigm shift in the market and symbiotically leveraging sales units whilst maximising returns.

RDR's code is meant to be in a shambles, and would take significant reorganising/ rewriting to work on PC. Rockstar have had a pretty good recent record with PC ports even if they're sometimes delayed, I'd tend to believe they'd do a port if it's viable. Have to say expecting lots of extra bells and whistles on PC for any multiplatform game is just a wee bit entitled, given that there's a prevalent attitude of "[anything even slightly negative] so will buy when it hits $5", better cost $10 less than the console version etc. PC Gaming Master Race vs unwashed consoler plebean masses doesn't exist for companies, they'll sell to who's convenient and will pay. Whole issue did give me a bit of a giggle with RPS's periodic search for extra page views by slagging off EA and the typical pavlovian barking. OMG Simcity can ban you for not reporting bugs! when any digital vendor can ban you for whatever reason they want whenever they want and they all have that written into their TOS. Ho hum.

A privateer/ ME hybrid game would potentially be pretty cool. I wouldn't have been surprised if they'd have opted for something similar as an MMO if TOR had done better. I'm not too keen on a straight TPS 'ME4' in the same vein as ME3. It'd need a more unique hook than just more pew pew and alien sexoring.

It's probably because archetypes are very prevalent in RPGs. Mainly thanks to Bioware ("Korgarous Wrexwind" "Anoarth Skyden") but Obsidian has done it previous since there are very notable similarities between- as below- the cast of PST and K2, and to a lesser extent MOTB. I cannot even begin to explain how much I disagree with this. I actually agree with it as substance, just not as criticism. The point does rather seem to have been missed though that the companions in K2 like those in PST are meant to be reflections of and bound to the PC as a fundamental part of their design and purpose. They aren't as much deconstructions as the companions in PST (might have got close if you had the intended option of Hanharr as a dark jedi) but their thematic purpose is almost identical.

That was allegedly the plan, but ToEE sold poorly. Personally, I really disliked its engine for some reason, same with Arcanum. No real idea why.

Played a bit more BG2. Did some stuff in Athkatla without much problem, tried Umar Hills with SCS2 and the (re)designer could troll for gold with the Shade Lord's infinite immunity buffs/ finger of death/ instadeath chromatic orbs/ moveable blade barriers and the level drain field (which, of course, strips the magic users of the means to counter the infinite buff spawn). OK, so the dude was a bit of a pushover in vanilla but that's just a slight overcorrection and while adding just about every annoyance possible in BG2 combat. Might come back and give it another try after defeating Melissan.

Henry Blake (God Rest His Soul) was a Lieutenant Colonel, not a Lt. Commander? Coming from a generally brit background it's always a bit weird seeing 'army' ranks used on board ships, was for BSG as well.

Nah, K2 'stealing' from PST is a no brainer (Vhailor/ Nihilus; Kreia/ Ravel; Atris/ Trias etc etc etc) for sure, and there are certain thematic similarities in MOTB too. But Annah and Neeshka are female rogue tieflings and that's about the end of the similarities.

That's a (western) cultural distinction though where a single subset of 'honour killing' is taken to be the whole, it's not really how the concept is seen in places where it is actually practised. Oby's usage of it is technically more correct as it includes the whole concept (though when I saw the comment my immediate thought was WTF? as well, and that despite knowing the concept was more broad).

Yeah, the problem would be that the parts of making a game that are most important- getting the correct gameplay systems set up, graphical fidelity, organising game development efficiently- are things which do not have direct equivalents in general software development. You can bring people in for those tasks of course, but unless you're building a whole new team you'll at minimum have potential integration problems. OTOH I'd think that a specialist database software writer could be very useful, as there is a lot of database manipulation and usage in a typical game, for something like Homeworld you'd have lots of ship classes and weapons as examples.

The trial and keep management were better than anything in the NWNOC and alone would have made a better experience, and other bits were pretty good as well, like Jerro's Haven- though the overarching storyline and most of the characters were pretty cliche and there was a lot of unnecessary padding both of encounters and storyline. I certainly would not rate it as a top tier RPG experience for the OC. On the other hand I have never been able to think of a single redeeming feature of NWN1's OC. Even the 'the game was meant for multiplayer really/ the expansions were better' argument doesn't work for me as it was so bad that I never felt even a twinge of desire to try them.

You shouldn't feel ashamed about how your government handles Zimbabwe, because there isn't anything that you can do about it. I don't like my (New Zealand, we get a fair bit of SA news since there are a lot of ex pats here) government's ambulance at cliff bottom attitude towards children's health much at all for example, but since I neither voted for them nor have given them any support on the matter whatsoever I put the blame where the blame lies, with them not me. If it really were true that you could not even show dissent in Russia then there's even less reason for Russians to feel ashamed of what their government does as it is (even more) unrepresentative and they don't even get a theoretical say in what it does.

No individual should feel ashamed of what their government does, unless they support it- in which case they won't feel ashamed anyway- as there's nothing any individual can do. Do you feel ashamed of your government's wholesale and unconditional support of Mugabe, having the worst war since WW2 (that's Congo, minimum 20x the deaths of Syria and still rising) practically on your doorstep, your police shooting strikers, your cricket team losing to New Zealand of all people, because you shouldn't unless you condone them. You'd also get a very long list of all the times leaders killing their own people is perfectly fine, because the leader happens to be supported by the West and uses the dehumaniser du jour- communist, terrorist, anarchist whateverist the current boogeyman ist.

That rather depends on the contract though. Not buying FONV would have had ~zero net effect for Obsidian since they weren't paid royalties, for example. I wouldn't worry anyway, gamers as a collective tend to have zero spine when it actually comes to following through with not buying stuff.

Eh, you wouldn't have been buying it anyway since it is/was steamworks. Might end up buying it if the steamworks gets nuked since I couldn't care less about Uplay so long as it isn't the always online variety, else won't, but that's status quo ante.

NWN2 had far too many trash mobs, and playing with the party AI on at higher difficulties or with lower patch numbers/ no expansions (iirc they added the 'scaled casting' option that stopped people Abu Daziming a stray kobold later) was... not a great experience. One of the games that would have been better if it were about ten hours shorter, so long as that ten hours was chopping out all the trash mobs in the orc caves, warehouses etc. Having said that it was technically flawless for me when I played last year on Win7/64 and my specs are an order of magnitude behind those of the op, and it was overall an enjoyable experience though not a patch on MOTB in either gameplay or storyline. Obligatory, NWN2OC >>> Paint Drying >>> NWNOC, FACT!

Yeah, I don't think anyone should have concerns about the setting, those involved have shown they're very good at that part- it's mainly that the writers for this were mostly involved in the Plansescape part of PST, not the Torment part, so there's still the possibility of having a good setting but poor story execution.

They certainly do use them as political footballs and distractions from their own internal problems but it's difficult to assign too much blame to them, if they were added to the list even collectively I'd add them at the bottom, possibly after an ellipsis. None of the immediate neighbours are rich, certainly not rich enough to absorb 100ks of refugees without significant problems, they're still mostly now and historically almost always ruled by autocrats who don't care much for their actual citizens let alone refugees beyond wanting to make sure they don't revolt, Jordan's population is more than 50% Palestinian already which is historically and currently a big destabilising factor, Iran has no real obligation or reason as a distant shia persian country to accept sunni arab refugees and only really supports Hamas as an enemy of their enemy (with most of Hamas's money coming from KSA etc), and any settlement of refugees undermines the argument for repatriation/ compensation/ right of return, benefiting the one country they all regard as their enemy, Israel. Lebanon in particular is hard to blame as it was always a finely balanced ethnoreligious mix where suddenly adding 10% refugees to the population was always going to cause problems (unlike Jordan which got more proportional refugees but at least basically everyone was arab sunni) with almost no scope for flexibility and most of the really egregious anti palestinian stuff was carried out by non governmental groups like the Phalange and SLA. I guess they collectively can be blamed somewhat for fighting Israel though that was a decidedly two-to-tango situation and ultimately a response to having an artificial and fundamentally antagonistic state arbitrarily plonked down on land people were already living in.