Zoraptor

The economic system is still working pretty much as intended- it's just that any benefits for the inhabitants has almost always been (and remain) circumstantial and limited to a favoured elite, and it's primarily designed to gain maximum profit for outside parties rather than benefit internal ones.

In terms of the changes of the first iteration I'd suggest the timeline of events suggests a likely reason, especially given that the previous attempt to use their UE3 licence had failed due to lack of a publisher. Whether that would be a matter of 'blame' or 'credit' really depends on what the first iteration was and how it would have been received, which we'll never know. That's pretty much what is meant, I think- since honeycomb is basically a bunch of minimum space hexagons it fits a branching 'cell' structure pretty well as an analogue.

Yo, RPGMasterBoo imma let you finish but the Mongols had the largest empire of all time OF ALL TIME! They also had two successor states make the 19th century, if only barely, blatted the east slavs badly enough that it took centuries for them to recover, conquered China, squished the arabs so badly that they never recovered, set the stage for Safavid Persia, etc etc. Better targets of ire, from a historical perspective are the Aztec and Inca, both important less than a century; Mali which lasted barely longer; the Sioux, the Celts and Vikings who were never organised 'empires'; the Holy Roman Empire (famously none of the three post Chuck the Great) etc.

The full length portrait? There'd be a lot of paintings like that. Wouldn't surprise me if there was a Bond villain with a similar portrait though (Dr No or whoever it was with the stolen Iron Duke portrait hanging on his wall). The equivalent Brayko painting though is a reference to Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' cover. (My immediate reaction was actually George Michael/ Club Tropicana, which disturbs me somewhat considering what Michael was wearing in that shot)

I think his point is that you could link AP to Steam as a delivery mechanism even without including it on the DVD. Which is true, to a point, but way more trouble than just including the middleware with the initial release like most every other title does- you'd effectively have to patch it (steamworks/ GfWL) in to allow DLC to become available.

IIRC even if they implemented a quota they be obligated to make it apply to all EU players rather than only English/ British, so much of the problem would still exist.

The Hagia Sophia does have minarets... ...since ~1453

There's nothing contradictory there in the slightest. I suggest a re-read if you're really bothered.

C'mon gif man, it's not like it's hiding on page 1 or something, it's about 8 posts up the page.

I don't know about not having faith in the project, it may just be that at a point you have to accept that some projects simply are not geared by their structure towards having DLC. Meaningful DLC for a primarily story driven game is a real pain to do well, as evidenced by the generally lukewarm reactions to a lot of the DAO/ ME2 stuff. How could you do meaningful DLC for a game like Alpha Protocol? Sure you can do really basic stuff like add items etc but integrating new missions? Very difficult to do well I would think, and if sales were good a quick turn around sequel would be a better bet IMO. Not on PC I'm afraid. DLC ain't a problem for the consoles because that functionality is pretty much intrinsic, but on PC you need a way to deliver it.

If they were considering DLC they would probably have shipped AP with either Steamworks or GfWL on PC, otherwise it's pretty difficult to monetise it short of going the EA route and establishing your own equivalent. And while PC certainly would not be the major DLC revenue stream it is pretty much 'free' money with either of those middleware.

The relevant quotes are "The publisher announced that Commander Shepard's spacefaring sequel has moved over 2 million copies this week." (They don't link to their EA source so it cannot be checked, but moved is almost certainly shipped given the quote below) "Mass Effect 2 – sold through over 1.6 million packaged and digital units in the quarter for Europe and North America combined and launched with a Metacritic rating of 96 on the Xbox 360" The only real question is whether ME2 launched prior to Q4 (can't find a definitive answer in the pdf, don't care enough to look elsewhere but it is certainly implied that it and BFBC both launched Q4) and how many sales it has had since then. The 1.6 million is a minimum and represents very good sales and a profitable title in any case. So I lied and checked Q3 as well: "BioWare’s Mass Effect 2 shipped January 26th [..] We announced the shipment of 2 million copies and the early read on sell through is strong."

As a clarification, this is in fact exactly how sales figures generated by copies shipped work. You don't ship more until the stock is low so you have huge first week 'sales' and then... well it depends entirely on how many actually get sold through. Ship 2 million copies and if they don't sell then you may not ship another single copy, ever, and rely solely on excess inventory stock. Or they sell and you ship/ fabricate more batches as demand dictates.

Have to say I saw the figure Volourn quoted as well so while it ain't accurate he isn't just randomly making it up. The 1.6 million has a link earlier in the thread- it's from EA via the Wall Street Journal, so reputable. There are two types of sales figures, one refers to the number of copies shipped to retail, the other to the number actually sold- 'shipped [to stores]' vs 'sold through' from stores. NPD are actual copies sold (not 100% accurate for a number of reasons, but generally pretty good), as is the figure EA provided. A 2 million copies shipped figure if accurate implies around 400k+ copies being held in stores as unsold stock, so both figures can be accurate.

That figure is rubbish, as alanschu said EA is obligated to give accurate figures. If they don't, it's fraud and people may go to jail, suffer fines or whatever else relevant laws say. In a battle between an unsourced press release from April 14 claiming an extra 5 million sales, and an official EA release from 31 March... it's EA 100% of the time. (At a guess the 6.6M is almost certainly a typo for 1.6 million and someone just has fat fingers)

Probably outside of patch scope, but being able to bind specific abilities to hotkeys, or have a next/ previous ability/ gadget set up, would be nice to avoid the frequent need to go to the radial.

The trouble with these sort of definitions is that, well... How do you exclude, say, Wing Commander IV or Privateer from being RPGs? By your definition I would have to classify just about every Wing Commander game, Privateer, Elite 2/3 as RPGs. And how do you exclude them without excluding titles that are RPGs? Arguably even something like Far Cry 2 (for a more modern example) would qualify too. 'Character' skill being more important than, or (strongly) influencing player skill is important because otherwise you end up with just about anything with a strong/ branching storyline and decision making becoming an RPG. NB: The questions I pose are mainly rhetorical ones- 'what makes an RPG' discussions are usually dreadfully banal and involve lots of arguing past each others opinions and I'm happy enough accepting any definition which works reasonably well.

Yeah, the BioWare Story Construction Template was firmly established with Neverwinter Nights, and the companion archetypes (Anoarth Skyden/ Korgarous Wrexwind, ohohoho) even earlier than that.

Plus almost everyone in game compliments you if you adopt that playstyle- even D'Arcy sends you an email saying how good you were for not being detected at the Arms Dump up until he started getting shot at with rockets, Mina compliments you on several occasions, you get bonus XP for taking out the lieutenant without being detected, Marburg/ Albatross compliment you, even Leland appreciated that approach. About the only person who doesn't like it is SIE.

The two armour mods that improve hacking are just about essential when playing on hard, and pay for themselves quickly by avoiding EMP use, though swapping them in/out is annoying. Having just finished a second hard playthrough I'd say that criticism of the minigames being too hard with it are probably justified, you really do need an investment in sabotage after a certain point. And it is a bit inconsistent to have somewhere like Brayko's which is supposed to have fairly useless security have 5 pin locks, 5 letter codes and 12 clips bypasses while the endgame has (generally) 5-6 clip bypasses, 3 pin locks and 8 letter codes.

Crusader Kings was awesome cheese. Best 15 USD I spent in 2008. Mind you I only ever played it with Deus Vult and a latish patch number. Nothing wrong with facebook based publicity despite my dislike for the site, I just find Paradox's marketing rather... quaint and a touch... cute. I tend to end up wondering how EA would market Paradox games, and come to the conclusion it probably would not be with John Riccitiello playing heavy metal in a trailer or having bets with his devs over whether a game would make a profit.

Ah, marketing. They will announce it even if it doesn't reach 25k, 25k will just get it announced quicker. Fortunate, as I loathe facebook every bit as much as I enjoyed CK.

I did the Surkov mission yesterday, hard, recruit. Bought the sniper rifle, got to protect Surkov part, used rifle, eight shots, ~thirty seconds, mission accomplished. I failed it once in my first play through, when I had the sniper rifle fully zoomed in from the start and forgot how to zoom out. On tutorials, they are poor almost without exception. I'd actually rate APs as one of the better ones- it's relatively short and much of it is skipable if you want, you get feedback on how well you've done, get introduced to some of the things which will be important and if you do well enough you can get XP/ info/ money etc as a bonus.

Direct hex editing on PC works fine for everything, so far as I am aware.

You can open saves in notepad (DO NOT EDIT them in it though). If you want to edit them you should either use a utility if one is available, or you can use a hex editor of which there are dozens available for free- I use XVI32 personally, but you can even use edit.com from a command line. If you do try editing them make sure you back up as there are a myriad of potential ways to break saves. The files for the weapons are on the DVD.