Zoraptor

If they have DLC plans they'd probably do any voice work for that at the same time, so they aren't necessarily all related to a redone ending.

Strewth. WL2 only exists because of EA 1) They published the original 2) They didn't IP squat (as most other publishers would do) once they decided they weren't going to use it but sold the rights to BF/ inXile Passing up 90 days of royalty free sales for the sake of some nebulous eCred would have been stupid and, again, it's not like it's using 'Originworks' and there's going to be any obligation whatsoever to buy from or use Origin.

Big companies always do negative stuff, but EA hasn't done anything particularly egregious- perhaps excluding some of its server shutdowns though I'm unclear how many people play Sports Franchise Iteration Year Number multiplayer once it's superceded. They're a favourite whipping boy because of the accumulated ills of Bioware (Jade Empire and the NWN OC suggests the herp was strong in Bioware even pre EA), spyware FUD and OMG being mean to GabeN!!! I might even register WL2 on Origin if they do it that way, though it would be after making sure I had it DRM free as well. That's a zero loss proposition for everyone. It is pretty ludicrous seeing so many people going purple faced over WL2/ Origin when No Steam No Sale (Steamholm Syndrome?) types demand steam keys and would be appalled if it were not available there. If it's just another place to buy it, or register it, then nobody should really care.

A million seems a reasonable estimate for KoA. But even if EA weren't distributing it and taking a cut that would be in the ballpark (ohoho) of $20 million in revenue. Fine, except apparently they're burning through 4 mill a month in expenses. Given that EA was the distributor their cut might be only half that. It does look rather like mismanagement and if the MMO is really still a full year away there was no way KoA could have saved them unless it sold in the ~5 million range, which would be hopelessly optimistic for a new IP from a relatively unknown studio.

A monopoly is not in any sense free capitalism. Monopolies are a perversion of free/ perfect capitalism as they have both means and motivation to maintain their position against better products that would theoretically, in a perfect system, supplant them. Might as well start talking about perfect communism as perfect capitalism, they're both as practical as each other. Really though, off topic. If you're really interested in a more protracted explanation it would be more appropriate in a new topic.

With HBO it's certainly easy. They sell the internet broadcast rights along with the satellite/ terrestrial broadcast rights. If you wanted to see GoT here on the internet you can (for about a week) but you have to have a subscription to the satellite provider for it (Sky). That's all written into the contracts. If they had HBO webcasting as an option that will significantly impact on the money they get from selling the rights. Whether they'd make more or less money from directly marketing to other territories I do not know, but it would be considerably more difficult getting their message out since the external rights holders do a lot of the marketing themselves and hence drive demand for things like DVDs. Otherwise you are largely relying on 'word of mouth'- which is not as bad now as five years ago, but you still require a lot of talk to get the hype train running.

Waterloo was after the Prussians had been sent running again, (props to Blucher for countermanding Gneisenau's full on retreat order once he got back in the saddle though) and with an almost entirely scratch anglo dutch army. Boney might have won if he'd still had Davout as a field commander instead of Grouchy but then again the allies might have won easier had the Peninsular veterans been available- it's all historical conjecture. Eylau, Friedland and Borodino would be the largest one-on-oneish set piece Russian French battles. Generally the Russians fought as parts of coalition armies and under their command- as at Austerlitz where the battle plan was Austrian and carried out against Kutuzov's objections. It wasn't so much that they won, but they made the French pay heavily even when they lost, and when they got a chance to kick the asterisks out of the French they took it in emphatic style. I don't think it is fair to criticise them for using the winter (especially since the autumn was actually unusually warm and the French were in total disarry even prior to the snows really setting in) as one of the basic tenets is to use local knowledge and terrain to your advantage. Napoleon was certainly a bit of an idiot, but then people don't tend to downgrade Hannibal/ Nelson/ OKW by saying that Varro or Villeneuve or Gamelin was a bit of an idiot. The story would probably be different if Karl had followed up Aspern-Essling and starved the French out on Lobau, but he didn't and then lost Wagram and the war a few weeks later. I'm not a big Napoleon fan though. If he'd stopped in 1807, OK, but he didn't. He made mistakes and more importantly didn't learn from them (see Egypt and Russia in particular), fought unnecessary wars and ultimately got huge numbers of people killed for no net gain.

From a world history perspective "what was the greatest army?" is probably the wrong question. The on balance longest lasting and most extensive empires were the Roman/ Persian iteration/ British/ Mongol/ Chinese iteration ones, and really they all had military weaknesses to one extent or the other- the romans were resilient rather than uniformly militarily brilliant (had as many spectacular losses as wins- Cannae, Allia, Adrianople, Teutoburger, Aquae Sextiae, Carrhae), the mongols had a century of absolute ownership then more or less steady decline, the Brits had an excellent navy but an army that was usually too small to be globally relevant, and the Chinese and Persians tended towards extreme brittleness when outside their own back yard. The consistently good militaries all seem to be associated with more ephemeral entities, and they often fell apart at the first proper, sustained, defeat. Napoleon's first loss was Egypt- running away with tail between legs and leaving an underling to do the actual losing is not victory or even a draw by any sensible measure. Boney really didn't learn the lessons either, he repeated them almost verbatim in Russia 1812 to even worse result. Russians had a very good record in the 18th C to Napoleonic era- they had the best record against Napoleonic France of anyone whose surname wasn't Wellesley and irrespective of the winter, certainly better than the far more vaunted Prussians or any Austrian not named Karl, and if Elizabeta had lasted a few months longer they would have ended Fred the Gross's Prussia in the 7 years war post Kunersdorf.

Is LucasArts in the "everything developed internally" or "everything developed externally" section of its bipole at the moment, since I've lost pretty much all interest in them I haven't been paying attention. Swapping directions completely every 18 months has not worked wonders, to say the least, and they've been doing it since... 2007?

Plus you'd have to totally redo the narrative structure from scratch. I can understand wanting the entirety of content available in one playthrough but it's counter to how the game was developed- might as well say you'd prefer it as an fps, or with a player defined character. Perfectly reasonable things to want in theory but simply not part of the game.

Does it though? You've got free exposure, the photo is well known and you can still claim fees from anyone using it commercially- and even if that photo is lost to the great IP cloud in the sky you still have the publicity from it for any other photos you have taken, publicity you would have had to work hard to get for yourself. That is both the viral marketing model and the model a lot of up and coming music groups use- release stuff for free to get exposure and build up a following, at little effective cost relative to traditional methods. That may not be an ideal case for all situations, but neither is one where a cabal of large record companies decide what music should be produced in a vacuum and by themselves, which was effectively the case prior to the internet (and is still largely the case in gaming, for example).

OMG COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT SUMMON THE HOUNDS!!! AP hasn't had DRM since the patch. More relevantly to the argument at hand (and MC's rather emotive 'think of the children' argument) everything we know suggests that Obsidian aren't missing out since they don't get a cut of sales- it's been all but confirmed outright that the only bonus relevant to FONV was the imbecilic Metacritic one and AP would not have made a bonus level even were it in the contract. On a more general note there's precisely zero point addressing people who pirate because it's free. They'll always pirate, they'll never buy and as such are completely and utterly irrelevant- about as irrelevant as trying to sell pork to Saudi Arabia- and trying to affect them will only alienate people who are potential customers. The only people you can reach are people who pirate because it's convenient/ gives a better product/ lacks DRM/ sticks it to The Man, as those are concerns that can be addressed at least to an extent.

That's a touch, well, naive. Our 3 strikes internet law was initially shelved after massive opposition to it, democracy in action. It then got passed without scrutiny, in about six hours- it was apparently a vital response to the Christchurch earthquake as they used the emergency provisions stemming from that to pass it. It is, as with all those sorts of things, a monumentally dumb law which establishes conviction by fiat/ accusation, those voting for it clearly had not a single iota of a clue as to how it would work and what it would do, and there is literally zero chance of it being repealed no matter how much it is despised and no matter how vile the circumstances under which they passed it. If I sometimes seems like I have little sympathy for IP rights holders it's because of incidents like that. Politicians gonna politicise be vile gutter feeding pond scum with no integrity, honour or respect for a disaster in which nearly 200 of their countrymen died- it's what they do- but they only do it because MPAA/ RIAA(NZ) etc lobby them. Rights holders want to get rid of age old principles like presumption of innocence for their own gain and convenience? Goodbye sympathy, farewell goodwill, even vague consideration exits, stage left. Someone stealing a TV I'd stop. Someone copying an infinitely duplicatible movie or song? Much of the time it'sCry Me A River. I wouldn't cheer them on but if someone downloads Rihanna or something... quid pro quo, care level zero.

Counterfeiting is certainly a better comparison than theft, though from what I remember counterfeiting in most places would require a physical good- thus things like hacking a bank to get more money on your account while to most practical extents equivalent to counterfeiting notes is actually a different crime. I don't really see a need to go beyond copyright infringement or piracy as terms, people in general know what they mean even if opinions differ as to how significant they are as infractions.

Mainly military history for me too, though I don't have a favourite period. I've always liked military spectaculars like Cannae or Russia 1812 and interesting or underrated characters. I have a particular fondness for Thucydides for being a better historian 2000+ years ago than most historians are today with all the benefits of modern technology.

Yes yes, and everytime someone equates copyright infringement with theft they're murdering logic, raping and pillaging reason, and cannabalising reality. They aren't the same, it's entirely an Appeal to Emotion. Copyright infringement does not involve depriving the owner of the use of and possession of something, ie the legal and actual definition of theft. If you steal a car or wallet the owner no longer has them in their possession and cannot use them. If they were duplicated the owner would still have use of them. It's also not a criminal matter (except in unusual circumstances), but a civil one, unlike theft. Ultimately you are of course free to consider piracy as theft, barratry, arson, libel, murder, DUI, terrorism, fraud or whatever but it'll only ever be copyright infringement. I also find it rather difficult to muster any outrage whatsoever that multiple years ago someone may have duplicated an infinitely reproducible virtual good that was not available for purchase at the time- I see little point to whiteknighting corporates at the best of times (frankly, corporates don't give a asterisks beyond what benefits them, so hey! reciprocal right back at 'em) and a situation where a product is arbitrarily unavailable due to geography is hardly the best of times- it's simply not anyone else's business but the copyright holder's and the infringers.

Difficult I do before breakfast, the impossible... I do when I have a bit of spare time, often in the evenings. KBM commands aren't perfect in TW2 but it's emminently playable without sullying glorious PC purity with dirty peasant console peripherals. (Now you can use not_sure_if_srs.jpg)

If a massage parlor gives legitimate massages, but doesn't stop its therapists from giving a little extra on the side, it can still run the risk of getting shut down. That's not a good analogy. The testing under the law for torrents was the same as for the earlier RIAA/ MAFIAA bete noirs, VCRs and tapes in the 70s/80s- they only require legitimate uses in order to be legal, not for all uses to be legal. It is somewhat different for sites that actually host files like megaupload if they ignore warnings, see below. Copyright also requires an active defence rather than a passive one (excluding large scale counterfeiting and other actually criminal rather than civil infractions), the copyright holder has to object to its incorrect use which is absolutely sensible, as in most cases there's no reasonable and intrinsic way to determine copyright ownership and the extent of fair use exceptions and the like. What TPB is doing is more like having a noticeboard saying "Wanna good time? Go to this address". Could mean drugs, could mean prostitution. Could mean bingo night or a course of cordon bleu cooking. Doesn't seem to work that way on the Internet. Read up on Kim dot Com's case, they were able to bust him because there's alleged proof that they not only knew that illegal **** was going on in their servers, but also actively encouraged it to make money. Megaupload is a different case from TPB as they actually hosted the files directly, rather than just directions to them. As such they were always more vulnerable since they were potentially making a direct breach of copyright. Having said that, there seems to be a fair bit of doubt that the charges will stick even there, and the procedurals have been an abject mess from both the US and NZ sides of the equation. Enough so that people are already speculating on whether we'll have to give all Mr .Com's seized assets back- amazingly, even if exonerated we wouldn't have to thanks to that grubby little fascist Simon 'ultimate' Powaaaaaah. I'm just thankful his convict by accusation law was too much even for our government and that he's buggered off to be a banker.

Since we're calling spades spades... TPB does not have any copyrighted content to remove as they don't host anything bar the torrent information. As such people cannot go there to get illegal asterisks, they can only go there to obtain directions to get (potentially) illegal asterisks. That's why they're still in business.

Yeah, EA will face financial difficulties if it keeps losing money forever, but it still has significant amounts of money in reserve. And everything I've seen about Nexon suggests they simply don't have the money for a takeover, they'd be better off going for a smaller and far more desperate fry like THQ. I'd suspect the only companies with significant interest in EA would be 'Activision' (via Vivendi Universal) or someone with a potential extra reason for owning them- MS, Apple etc. They're small, which helps with survival. It also helps with PR (underdog) and their games have personality and appeal to a certain sector with has deep loyalty. They also had at least two cancelled games- allegedly System Shock 3, definitely for EA; and The Crossing- and would have got part paid for at least the former title.

Don't really know how much of a loss it would be, almost all the pre release stuff on Stalker 2 sounded badly retrograde anyway. Given the persistent talk about needing a constant internet connection to play it may well have been envisioned as a MMOFPS effectively from the start. I'll lol if the rumours of the Stalker IP being sold to Bethesda are true.

I think I've said it before but the only reason I actually care about steam is its monopolism, else I really couldn't care less where people buy their games even if there are no circumstances under which I'd actually use Steam personally- much the same as I wouldn't object to someone else buying a Fiat but would strenuously object if the only thing being sold were a Fiat, even if you could buy your Fiat from a nominal 'BMW' dealer. I generally use GG because I prefer client free, they're equivalently cheap (probably not as cheap as often, but I think every game I picked up from there at christmas was cheaper than on steam especially given they had a 4/3 deal as well as 80% off) and they give me store credit for pretty much anything. I've used clients in the past (Impulse, Origin, even Steam for games I've been given) and they aren't definite deal breakers. But I simply will not support an attempt by one company to turn PC gaming into its personal fiefdom by bundling its software and store with every release under the sun. It's anticompetitive, exceedingly bad for the customer in the long run and especially bad for anyone who isn't Valve as they are losing the best thing about digital distribution- cutting out the middleman- for a system where Valve ends up taking the place of MS and Sony in the console world and charging their console licencing fee equivalent for 80% of all games sold. It's frankly embarassing seeing PC 'purists' who are also uncritically supportive of someone who is trying to remove the PC's strongest and best characteristic for an iStore/ XBL/ PSN style future because it is monumentally hypocritical, and would not be supported in any other circumstances or if it were any other product. It ain't the hardware that's the console, you can make a console out of anything computerish from ARM to Cell or Intel; it's the software, and always has been. In the steamworks future it doesn't matter if GG or GamestopImpulse or "Direct2Drive" or anyone else exists and retains their small market shares, buy from any of them and you still become a Valve customer. At the moment that may be an OK situation since Valve are warm and fluffy, and like kittens and want to give everybody a big hug, and their walled garden has pot plants and streamers and a fountain and pool table and Gabe tucking you into bed while singing lullabys at night; but it won't last, never does with a monopoly. They've already started leveraging their dominance to kill competition in the only place it counts, and that will just get worse.

DS1 is very good, though rather limited, dependant on your ability to put up with Advanced Monster Closet game design and with some annoyingly overlong boss fights. Some also hate the controls since Isaac is not a typical run and gun super soldier and rather shuffles around most of the time. I actually wouldn't have been disappointed had it actually been called System Shock 3, which is high praise from me. DS2 is DS1 with much of the interest and personality removed. I can't put an exact finger on why I didn't like it as much, except that it was more of the same but at the same time a whole lot less. Much as with ME3 I turned down the difficulty at the end since I just started finding it annoying. And the dlc handling is laughable since all the items (free on PC) are just dumped into the stores at zero cost so you can get the best stuff for free right at the start. There's zero G gameplay (around one section per chapter on average) and vacuum gameplay with an air supply timer in both games, though it's not really a big deal. The zero g stuff changes significantly between games, in 1 you have to jump from surface to surface while in 2 it's a more traditional 'jetpack' like system and there's quite a lot less of it too. If they're cheap both are probably worth it, if it were a choice of one DS1 is considerably better.

Yeah, the entire purpose of the steam client is to make sure that 'everyone' has valve's store installed on their computer ready, convenient and willing to sell stuff- that's been the basis of valve's business strategy since 2003. While it's certainly possible to make a game without the client linked habitual monitoring it is still needed for patching and dlc handling since valve changed its contract terms to exclude external patching and dlc handling (see Origin and Paradox Connect*). It's antithetical to a GOG like strategy no matter how warm and fluffy a fluff propaganda booklet makes them out to be. It's not that steam isn't important to indies, it certainly is as it has the largest market by far and there are all too many "No steam no sale" induhviduals out there to be ignored but it is important in the same way its direct equivalents are on the other non software consoles and walled garden marketplaces- captive audience, marketing, ease of selling. Most of the kickstarters I've seen list a Steam copy and a DRM free one in their benefits anyway. Best of both worlds, let's fanboys fan and h8rs h8 without there really being a big issue. *Anyone with the GG version of CK2 can see what the paradox based dlc handler would have looked like- its ingame store still refers to 'ducats' (Paradox's own virtual currency) in some places instead of 'blue coins'.

I finished Dead Space 2- another EA game with a deeply annoying ending gameplay wise. I really liked the original DS but DS2 never really grabbed me except when a good old friend turned up. Whoever wrote the story for DS clearly has some trust issues with women, you only meet four throughout the entire series and three of them betray you. Been playing StalkerCOP, which is pretty good even if it feels really weird getting a Vintorez on the first map and having nearly everybody friendly to you, and it hasn't had anywhere which has had the quality of SOC's X labs either. After you finish the game, whatever you think of the ending, you really must go to youtube and watch all the different ways Mordin's quest can play out. Hands down some of the best cut-scenes in gaming. Yeah, some of ME3 was excellent and almost all of the peripheral stuff was at least inoffensive if not decent or better. I didn't actually care much about the ending per se, by that stage I was thoroughly disenchanted with the post Cerberus Base gameplay snooze fest.