Zoraptor

Leading animation franchise and rumours of another KOTOR game? Must be KOTQRSLJYR based on the Clone Wars cartoon. Which would actually be quite a good idea, if done right.

They hate our freedom!!1!! was simplistic at best when GWB said it and it's still, at best, simplistic. AlQ was never an existential threat to the west. Never had the capacity. The only thing they've ever been capable of was, well, getting us to hit ourselves in the head with a frying pan while trying to swat the AlQ fly. Deciding to spend the last decade living on credit has done far more to erode the west's power than AlQ could ever dream of achieving. Fact is that there are rather a lot of people who don't hate us 'for out freedoms' but because one day Uncle Muhammad got blown up by a drone for being tall and having a beard. Generally such people aren't big on exporting the global jihad- which tends to be an embarrassingly middle class trend and from embarrassingly friendly areas- but they sure are keen on making a mess for 'our' interests and friends. And that's the primary reason why we've been months away from beating the Taliban, for the past decade.

I'm with you on that boat. Also the support for Settlers is abysmal, it's still plagued with the same bug it had from the start which makes the game unplayable on some hardware (textures flickering blue which leads to either app crash or driver crash within 5 minutes of playing, happens with both NVIDIA and AMD hw). Consider that they also delay the PC versions of their multiplatform releases and it does make you wonder exactly why their PC business has declined 90% while the PC is growing overall. Unfortunately given how poor Ubi are at communicating their DRM honestly (see: From Dust, where they ended up deleting their own forum posts detailing its DRM as they'd flagrantly lied about it) it's a matter of faith even on the odd occasion when their schemes are relatively sane.

Yes, and you could make similar arguments for a host of other things too. Depends on how you measure it as almost all studies are done by lobby groups one way or another. However, if wikipedia is to be believed smoking reduces life expectancy by ~14 years on average. Given the average life expectancy of, say, New Zealand (80.3 years) every single smoker smoker saves the tax payer around $140,000 in superannuation alone, which amounts to ~8 years tax for someone on the median wage, by my rough maths, and will have paid multiple 10ks in excise tax (it's now around $6.50 tax per pack, +17.5% GST on top, iirc). That's taking financial rationalism to the "best if everyone dies the day after retirement" extreme level though.

I think I've managed to find the point that I'm obviously not getting across at all (based on your post here and WUE's blatant strawman above). I'm NOT ****ING SAYING THEY ARE BAD! It's not a binary choice between God's Angels and, well, "bad". All I'm saying is that I don't think this "support" to be so wonderful, a golden standard for gaming companies to achieve given the circumstances. Now I understand that stances other than this game/studio/publisher sucks/is the best ever are uncommon on the Internet, they do still exist! OK, I'm happy to accept that's what you meant (and I always think I come across more aggressively than I intend anyway). To elucidate a bit better though, the problem is not so much whether you are antagonistic or neutral to their approach, it's more a question of what they realistically can do differently and whether it could even theoretically be done better. Seems to me that they have the three basic options I listed: only bug fix the PC version with zero additional content, charge for any improvements from xbox development or combine the two without the charge- assuming they wouldn't just abandon the PC version wholesale, of course. Given those options I think that it is clear that the best one for their customers is the one they have picked. And you really cannot ask for much more short of them... converting themselves to neutrinos and going back to May? So it's not just a question of whether any option is good in an absolute sense, just a question of which is best in the circumstances The PR thing is completely true, of course, they are in general very good with it and know how to massage opinion rather well. They're going to have all PC dlc free, awesome, but it just means that anything significant will be classed as an expansion pack (look PC gamers! we do proper old school expansions rather than nickel and dime you, aren't we awesome!) and charged for, of course. I expect that sort of thing from everyone though, it's just that CDPR generally has enough good will and has not mucked people around enough for most people to not object to it.

I don't think AP has many outright bugs either, and I'd agree that it really depends on what your threshold is between clunkiness/ glitchiness and bugs. I like AP a lot but I'd certainly have sympathy with anyone describing aspects of it (eg the floaty PC hacking controls) as at least clunky. The general perception however is that it's a buggy mess. In any case the illustration was of the silliness of bug fixing as a metric. I can't imagine anyone would argue that K2 or AP could not have been improved significantly by the kind of treatment TW2 has and is receiving, were it available to them.

Your 'argument' is a case study in self defined victory, because whatever they do you can claim they're wrong to. Charge for any xbox improvements? Bad! Don't make them available? Bad! Make them available for free? Badbadbad! Pay attention to feedback? Bad! Don't pay attention to feedback? Bad! I have no idea what is it about CDPR that attracts this sort of rubbish but with TW1 there was a lot of 'oh noes, an enhanced edition, it'll take me days on my 9600 baud modem to download the free patch and how dare you publicise it CDPR you ripoff merchants badbadbad' so I can't say it's surprising. Using patch notes as a metric for bugginess is particularly bad too, as by that metric the two least buggy Obsidian games are... Alpha Protocol and Kotor 2.

The character of Vima Sunrider was part owned by the author of the (original, not the recent, and specifically IIRC 'Redemption') KOTOR comics, that's why she wasn't used. That's partly why the licencing for SW products is so restrictive now, to avoid situations where 3rd parties 'own' characters and would have to be paid if they were used. IIRC book canon always triumphs game canon so Bioware is free to rewrite the whole of KOTOR2 to their liking. Books and games are on the same level- check out the Wookieepedia entry for canon. That's why having direct contradictions is an extremely bad idea and is supposed to not happen as there's no mandated way to determine which is 'right'. The only thing a book trumps is gameplay stuff- you cannot, for example, argue that the Exile is more powerful than Revan based on R being capped at lvl 20 and having around 2/3 of them being Jedi levels while E has 30+ Jedi/ Prestige Class levels if a book says R is more powerful.

I'm sceptical too, unless they want to use Onyx. On the other hand LA is and has been such an absolute disaster for the last half decade with its volte faces on just about everything (we're doing internal development; no we have a new CEO and have fired everyone; nonono we're rehiring and have yet another CEO; we've just laid everyone off again etc etc) that just about anything is possible at this point. As for the retconning I'm not sure anyone knows exactly how it will work, theoretically you are not supposed to retcon by outright contradiction in SW and everything is meant to be canon so long as it doesn't contradict George mandated stuff but this is at least the second time DrewK has done it, his first Bane novel liberally altered its Jedi vs Sith source material. It's a shame, they really go out of their way to make SW as bland and unchallenging an experience as possible to the extent of retconning pretty much every character with more than half a dimension.

It should be possible to do that sort of stuff because textures must be loaded dynamically. I'm pretty sure that a lot of the stat based things like equipment (but not the ini based properties) is built into/ integrated into the exe, as that would explain the inability to change costs and the like by altering the base files.

[pre pmp10] Clarke's 1st Law of the Internet: "Any sufficiently advanced trolling is indistinguishable from stupidity" Clarke's 2nd Law: "Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from trolling" Paradox has been doing the mid tier thing successfully for years. It's just not really worth the while of any big publisher who wants to make their money in multi-hundred-million dollar chunks via GTA/ CoD/ Sims and the like. If there's one thing DD is very good for it's allowing people to get their stuff out there for relatively little cost and with relatively little reference to 'publishers'.

That is largely Internet Determinism at work- most people who post on forums are both more committed gamers on average and have better internet, on average. Thus you tend to end up with lots of people on internet forums saying things like "I've not bought retail in x years and download as much as I like on my 600MB/s connection" with the impression that that is the norm. The reality is that retail is often cheaper and lots of people do not have brilliant internet. Both DXHR and TW2 are very large games which will take time and potentially some bandwidth management for a lot of people. As a comparison, Paradox have said that something like 90% of their revenue came from DD rather than retail, which is almost the diametric opposite of those CDP figures. That may well be a combination of being smaller in size and more 'niche' in appeal, as well as a lot of their expansions being DD only until they get bundled up later.

It is Blockbuster Mentality, but it does generally represent reality for consoles- the first six weeks are absolutely crucial. Difficult to know whether that's inherent in the market or the result of how the publishers/ retailers/ consumers are (deliberately, for the first two) set up to function. The 2nd hand market likely has an effect too where consoles are concerned as more of the initial buyers resell their copies. I'd suspect that 2 million is roughly the break even point- big team, longish dev cycle, large PR budget, and that they would have liked a minimum of somewhere around 1 million+ by this time. Still, those reported figures are a bit suspect to make any real conclusions. To go back to TW2's figures, only 20% of their sales were download, and that was- supposedly*- for 15 weeks DD vs the retail 80%'s 6 weeks, and with significant sweeteners for the DD option. *I am personally less than convinced that this was the case as mixing reporting times would be a very unusual way to do a financial report and think both were for 6 weeks. But I don't speak Polish.

I don't think there's too much to work on, since it appears likely that TW3 will not take place in the same area. I presume that there is a possibility of a ME3 (well, presumably) style meet up where your accumulated friends/ enemies show up to help/ hinder you at the series' denouement.

Matching VGChartz is not necessarily a reason for doubting them- VGChartz is quite often recursive (they'll retcon their figures if the publisher releases ones that contradict their own). Still, that's only about a third better than TWitcher2 did on PC alone in its first week and seem rather light. For such a long dev time and big team those figures would be a bit worrying for SE if accurate.

1st half 2011 = six weeks sales (from May 17th to June 30th). Or in other words: It's probably profitable after six weeks and without selling a single 360 copy.

Oh, wikipedia. Tyrannos, greek, per OED. And originally had no bad connotations.

I agree with Kaftan- the US has spent much of the last decade bigging up the Al Qaeda brand, which is fine if you're trying to motivate people for wars and the like. But it works both ways, it also lends Al Qaeda free exposure and an importance they don't really deserve.

I'd say that there is both subjectivity, relativity and definition (labelling) issues with determining scariness- I'd tend to use 'creepy' or 'disturbing' to describe psychological stuff and something like 'tension' to describe more gameplay focussed stuff for example; which others might describe simply as scary. Subjectively, in order for me to find something scary I really need a combination of both those factors plus a sense of immersion and objectively it's difficult to quantify why I rate the X-labs as scariest. I'd also add that it is relative too, because if I hadn't played Stalker I would likely rate one of those mentioned below as most scary. Not really, though it may well have been due to my playstyle- I didn't run short on med hypos or ammo as I was very careful from the outset, and my first playthrough was on normal. It has one of my favourite moments in a game ("the spoiler form is dead. What is it you fear? The end of your pitiful existence?.."), but I'd already guessed it was coming and like a lot of things in Dead Space and Bioshock I found it... a bit creepy, rather than scary. Both excellent and I suspect RtC would qualify if I hadn't come to Thief quite late (played it after its sequel and SS2). Robbing the Cradle I didn't find scary as I killed the killable enemies and, as with SS2 my natural playstyle was a good fit. Of the Jordan Thomas levels I'd probably rate Fort Frolic from Bioshock as 'scarier'.

The only game which has really made me think of survival horror are the X labs in Stalker. I absolutely hate them, in a good good way. Most other games though... oh, it's a monster made from babies; ah, those statues are people with plaster on them etc etc blah blah herble derble. I like Dead Space/ System Shock 2 etc a lot but they didn't really have the 'oh **** make it stop' factor. [Frictional totally sold out with Amnesia. Penumbra is where it's at :hipster:] Might warrant a second post but oh well, Witcher 2 sold nearly a million copies in six (?) weeks.

Nah, it would probably have to be "go and get it on Origin (or gamersgate/d2d/impulse/gmg and whatever other outlets have no problems with EA)" since Steam is such a special snowflake.

Yes, but that is true of all (well, can't think of any exceptions) large, successful, long lived tech companies. Certainly it's true for Apple and MS as well as Google. That is their greatest strength relative to FB, they can rely on successful products to provide revenue and to cross fertilise while knowing that failures will not bring down their company, while FB is- basically- a single product company. Should it fail, then they fail, and they would find it very difficult to arrest, let alone reverse, a slump.

They will presumably seek to get the momentum from leveraging their multitude of other products. In that respect it's far more of a marathon, momentum wise, than a sprint.

Yep, there are far worse things he could have done apart from EM. I have a fair bit of sympathy for Spector not going the 'indie' route as he has had his own company, and had it fail despite the titles he was primarily responsible for being successful. It's rather like the primary Troika guys going to Turbine, Blizzard and Real Estate once their company went under- I'm sure that in a perfect world pretty much everyone would like to be making the game(s) of their dreams in their own studio, free from corporate interference, and dream games almost always sound great. But sometimes one has to accept that reality trumps dreams and the prospect of working effectively for nothing for an unspecified time with an uncertain return is going to appeal to a very limited number of people, almost always those trying to make a name rather than those who have already made one. Good on them when they try, and certainly good luck, but I wouldn't criticise them for something I almost certainly wouldn't do myself.

I have to agree with Krez. Facebook is a brilliant candidate for a bubble enterprise and google doesn't need to be its needle, it just needs to be there when it bursts.