Zoraptor

If bought direct from steam it's automatically added to your account, if bought retail (and probably other DD vendors) you need to enter a code into GfWL to access it. If it's been used you need to know the original owner's login details.

You leave Loc Muinne in the end, which is on the border of Kaedwen and Aedirn. I expect the third game will be set in Dol Blathanna and Lyria and be about dealing with Wild Hunt/Nilfgaard invasion. That way CDPR can still peruse some major Sapkowski creatred characters not previously seen in Twitcher games, e.g. Francesca Findabair and Queen Meve. Either way your decisions aren't likely to have major effects on the sequel, at least not in the way that the Triss/ Shani situation should have had. The big events at the end which are likely to shape the sequel occur no matter what your choices are with only peripheral (for the purposes of a sequel) stuff like who will be leading the countries and whether the rebels succeeded being based on choice, and there's one leader who is indestructible if you need to meet the northerners again. Most of the choices could be shown by having Redanian/ Temerian help for something in the sequel, having minor cameos or references to people who may be dead/alive or similar- much like Adda or Thaler were treated in TW2. Certainly there's no obvious gotcha like starting up TW3 to find that Shani has appeared in your bed, unless they decide on a canonical chapter 2 path/ companion.

I've been to visit Germany, saw Danzig and Stettin? (I'm noticing a distinct lack of Rabid Ukrainian Nationalism on this forum)

Yeah, you've just admitted your 'method' has failed you and yet it doesn't effect your point at all. Perhaps a smidge above "Ubisoft > kickstarter FACT!!! r00fles" on the cogent argument stakes, but only a smidge.

TW2 is far better set up for a sequel than the original in that regard- you're pretty clearly leaving the north at the end so any developments there ought to be peripheral. Resolving Shani/ Triss was always going to be a problem for a sequel, hence bad planning. For the lulz actually describes my solutions to the Henselt/ Dethmold problem pretty well.

The thing which CDPR really did well with regard to inter game choices was to get the really big choice out of the way right at the beginning. I guess the closest analogy would be those occasions in AP or an ME where you make a conversation choice and Mike/ Shep says something completely different to what you expected- not a big deal really, just a bit immersion breaking.

So, how's ME3 working out for you?

I tend to agree on balance and it didn't really effect my enjoyment personally, but I can certainly understand it having an effect. All the big choices in TW1 were pretty much disregarded in the sequel- minor mentions of Adda, whether Siegfried survived being maybe the biggest to make it through. The 'path' picked has basically zero effect beyond Siegfried, the sequel disregards the 'wrong' choice of ladyfriend and all the talk about the nature of monsters and Geralt's attitude to society and his place in it is either ignored, or rebooted. I tend to put that down to changed priorities and bad planning and leave it there but it certainly is a significant potential annoyance and may well detract from the overall impression of the series, all those factors arguably should be if not explored at least acknowledged better in a sequel. My copy of ME3 would have gone sailing out the window if Bioware had arbitrarily decided that Carth was still alive (let alone a romantic interest) after I'd taken such satisfaction in having him nuked on Virmire and that isn't that much different a situation.

Their intra game C&C is one of if not the best of any game. I might even describe it as masterful. The inter game C&C on the other hand makes Bioware's handling of it look masterful.

I don't really have a problem with the grouping issue, despite disliking that sort of thing a lot in other games. In certain circumstances it is a definite disadvantage, but it encourages good tactical usage of the terrain- fight in a narrow constrained area and you will always have all your party members available for combat while the oppo may have as few as one or two and have reduced ability to use their status/ area attacks too. Area effects (especially status effects) are a real pain to be sure. I've always tended to run away from them unless I have good level protection spell up or I can get in close and kill them very quick.

Finally got around to sticking some money in, will be interesting to see how the promise ends up meeting reality. Will be hilarious if it ends up being a multi GB behemoth and I'm still on suckful internet.

It does have backing, of a sort- it's the global reserve currency, so it's in effect backed by every other currency on earth. Which is precisely why they can get away with a lot more than other currencies with regard to 'quantitative easing' (printing money)- so much stuff is US denominated that dropping its worth too much stuffs everyone else up.

This, if they fixed the dreadful combat from the last one. Whatwhatwhat, Wiz8's combat is coolness personified! Wizfast is mandatory though, else you could read write War and Peace in between rounds thanks to the slow animations.

Said it elsewhere but I think the best approach would be generally Fallout style- 'isometric' (probably proper 3d though as it's more flexible), classless, focusing on the stuff Obsidian does well like skills and storyline/ convos. That would be adaptable to a lot of different types of play- TB/ RTWP/ PB/ RT are all plausible- and it would have good scaleability for graphics and the like, for budget flexibility depending on how much could be raised. I don't think additional programmers would be the big cost though, it would be additional designers/ artists as more areas are added or graphical fidelity is improved. Most of the programming (presumably, assuming Onyx were used) would be geared towards integrating gamesystems and the like, and that would have to be done pretty much whatever budget were being looked at or attained. The main exception would potentially be things like releasing dev tools or a sdk which really is in genuine bonus territory. D20? Don't actually know what it's status is to be honest, but it has been used previous and is/was free? Given the history of the people at Obsidian I wouldn't imagine it would to too hard for them to come up with a good custom rule set in fairly quick order though, were it necessary.

NWN +expansions sold 3 million*, at least according to Bioware's old website, same for KOTOR. Up to their sale to EA they had sales figures on their site for all games (except those which sold poorly, like Jade Empire, where they just talked about how critically acclaimed it was). BG1/2 5 m NWN (inc expansions) 3 m KOTOR 3 m Jade Empire a bit over a million, given its NPD figures. ME1 2 mill (would have been after ~six months, so probably around 2.5 m lifetime) (DAO 3.5-4 m ME2 2.5 m DA2 1.6 m ME3 2 m+ after a month) Really though, all of the BGs/ NWN and KOTOR would have been highly successful financially. *Best guess for NWN2 would be 2 million+. Certainly sold more than a million in 2006 as 1 million+ was cited in their results by the german investors who kicked in a lot of funding (BVT; not quite so successful with their Arcania funding). Everything I've seen suggested that Bioware abandoned D&D because they hated the new morality clauses and nannying from Hasbro and had pretty much decided on Dragon Age being their owned fantasy franchise same as ME became their owned space fantasy franchise.

You can both be right, due to pipelining a lot of people doing art/ objects and the like would be moved (to DA3, presumably) once the initial stuff is done. 150 people total working on it over the 2+ years is feasible, but a lot of them would not be on it for anything near the full 2+ years.

Does Sega even have any money to do marketing? Last I checked they weren't that much better off than THQ and almost entirely dependant on Sonic/ TW/ FM churnware.

I think we need to get one thing straight immediately. This is probably the only time I will say this: Volourn is right. He may be using made up numbers which completely invalidate his 'ME2 sold 3 million copies r00fles!!! FACT!' shtick but on the important stuff he is right. ME3's sales are very good. Retail only, US only. You can approximately double them for worldwide and digital sales, especially since digital ~ 2 retail copies return wise. So 2 million+ inside a month, and crucially they're sold through copies (so there aren't 100ks sitting around in warehouses), since that is what NPD measures. ME2 sold 1.6 million including digital and PC, worldwide, in a quarter- 3 months- for a direct like to like comparison. It won't reach DAO's numbers but it will certainly outdo either previous ME title by a fair bit given it's already close to their lifetime totals. That's 40+ million in revenue, plenty more than enough to cover the cost of the game, though not really enough to justify the ludicrous prive paid by EA for Bioware in the first place. It ain't Halo or GoW or CoD or GTA numbers, but if you use them as a yardstick for success then there's maybe two successful releases a year and everything else is a failure.

Eidos/ Squeenix presumably, as Eidos bought Ion Storm.

Personally I'd quite like a Fallout style (~isometric, skills, probably straight TB or JA2 style combat, non post apoc) AP successor which I think would be feasible as a kickstarter type project. But I was more making the point that anything directly related to AP could not be on the cards kickstarter wise. Exactly what could be got away with- Omega Methodology, featuring a cameo from Stefan Hades and the evil corporation Telburton!- I really would not know.

I really do think that Bioware has a very large problem with planning, and it's a good point that it's more apparent as they have grown larger. And it's not just internal planning of the titles themselves leading to a certain amount of inconsistency verging on incoherence at times but of the series' storyline as a whole. Much of the background stuff is actually good quality and reasonably consistent over all three games- such as the whole Geth/ Quarian and Salarian/ Krogan issues- and it is telling that these are perhaps the best overall story bits of ME3 as well. The main storyline on the other hand seems to have been to a large extent made up on the spot one game at a time with major plot points (crucible/ catalyst) appearing from the aether at the start of ME3 with no foreshadowing previous. The whole plot of ME2 is only tangentially related to either of the others so much so that it might have been better as ME: Renegade rather than ME2* and while I do not have a fundamental issue with that, good storytelling does dictate that you really ought to set up important stuff relevant to the continuing plot in the previous title(s) rather than springing it with barely more than a "hey guys!" one mission into the final game. Even that refugee from a bad Dragonball Z cosplay might be a bit more palateable were he introduced better and it's not like ME2 lacked for potential interaction with Cerberus operatives. *And use 'ME2' to expand the build up to war more so that you start off with more war assets and with the Crucible under construction before the reapers hit.

I'd certainly hope they're going to address the UI, but I would presume that the UI will not scale with zoom. If it does then it would be exactly the same for all practical purposes as changing the screen resolution. None of that really changes anything though. In a 3d game you would often have quite a lot of redundant detail that can be enhanced by changing the POV/ zoom, if there's a potential 1 million triangles to be displayed yet only 100k are showing you can theoretically get 10x more detail by zooming and you have proper, er, scope for proper zoom for things like rifle scopes. The same cannot be said for a 2d game as a bitmap is by definition a 1:1 representation where 1 picture element displays best as 1 screen pixel. If you zoom into a bitmap you are not actually adding detail, if you try and turn a 1 MP picture into a 4 MP one you end up with two possibilities, a blocky 4 MP picture or a fuzzy 4 MP picture, you don't end up with a 4 MP picture with lots of extra information. In the absence of the original max builds of the levels (so no upping the pixel count via re-rendering from source) it's a pretty fundamental limitation.

For AP itself any discussion of kickstarter is moot given that that interview confirms Sega owns the IP. I'd just hope that they can bring the stuff in AP that worked well into whatever future games are developed

I am sorely tempted to break my pledge never to 'like' '+1' 'upvote' etc anything anywhere by that nailgun ad.