Drowsy Emperor

You seem to care enough to keep writing walls of text how crappy Blizzard games are. Diablo 3 is so far the best Diablo clone I've played since Diablo 2. Probably sunk 100 hours of time into it. The last time I bothered to spend so much time on a game was F:NV I think. HoTS is excellent. God bless Blizzard for still making big PC games. They're not crappy but they're not as good as they once were. I played D3 for a little while (watched people play more at an internet cafe) and I think the game is complete ass. None of the horror atmosphere of the original and the SP is so short as to be non existent. I completed Wings of Liberty and while the gameplay is pretty good, the campaign was overproduced crap which I blew through in two sittings on the hardest difficulty level without repeating a single mission. And the missions themselves were training sessions for the unit they give you in that mission. And everyone says HoS is even shorter and the story is weaker so you'll forgive me if I take your words with a grain of salt. The original SC could be crushingly difficult particularly towards the end and it actually had a decent story. BW was even better.

Meh who cares anyway. ARPG junkies have Grim Dawn to look forward to - D3 is old news now. I don't even play that genre, I was just curious how Blizz is doing. Obviously they're still a money printing press, but I think they spent some of their reputation with D3 and Heart of the Swarm. Even the major gaming sites, all paid advertising by default, struggled not to comment on how silly the HoS campaign is and how poor D3 single player was and the rest of the changes don't bring much to the table either. A lot went into the promotion of SCII as an e-sport but the game's staying power is surely not going to be like SC. WoW isn't going anywhere any time soon but its on an expected decline. Legacy of the Void is a single player disaster in the making. I'm willing to bet good money that its going to be the recycled endgame of Warcraft III where all the races band together against the hybrids/big bad. I expect that exact outcome, and even the same/similar last mission. All the plot threads are pointing in that direction, with the Zerg becoming the good guys now, much like the Orcs did in WCIII. If that happens I'll be majorly disappointed that they lack even that ounce of creativity to make a truly new product. After all, they once had the balls to end Brood War with zerg victory. From that to the cartoon Zerg of SCII is facepalm worthy. The new casual MMO is an unknown so that might shake things up a little.

Because the PC has an overall larger catalog of games? I'm not arguing, just saying. A major damper on my console buying enthusiasm is that I have to buy an LCD/Plasma/LED TV. So I can't fork over a couple of hundred euros for a console and have piece of mind - it'll end up close to a 1000. When you put it like that its either a 1000 for a top of the line PC or a 1000 for TV+console. Console might last longer on account of not needing to upgrade, but is harder to fix overall when something goes bad. Also console games are more expensive. And apart from playing games I wouldn't watch that expensive TV much.

Bombed after release obviously. As in - multiplayer abandoned by players. I know a few people who have it and no one plays it. I'm don't believe Blizz numbers.

I don't think the US/NATO should have the right to intervene halfway across the world (that's what the UN was created for after all, and its the only collective entity that has legitimacy for those type of actions). That's what the post WWII world agreed, everything else is abuse. However, I don't think leaving will change anything regarding terrorism. As a phenomenon it has grown into a sort of self justified crusade in the eyes of those who commit it - regardless of the actions of US/NATO forces, where they actually are and what they actually do. So, I don't think its going to magically stop even after Afghanistan is empty of foregin troops. Its bigger than Afghanistan - and certain other conflicts (the impending one with Iran, the "forever war" between Israel and Plaestine etc.) will keep the justifications for terrorism fresh for years to come.

You think you're special or what? People from my country were being carved up for spare parts and sold on the black market by the dozen by these same types - and are still murdered and harassed on a daily basis for over a decade - men, women and children. All the deaths from terrorists acts in the UK in the last decade are a drop in the bucket compared to all the misery those people have inflicted in these parts. Just because it goes unreported, and in the long run its just some people you don't give a toss about - doesn't give you even the faintest right that you can go about accusing people of "agendas" ,because you have no idea what it means not to have the luxury of playing progressive democrat because your choices in life boil down to either leaving your house and your land and saving your skin or staying and likely suffering a fate worse than death. When your life comes down to that, then we can speak of "agendas".

Lol, its practically the same thing in two different boxes. Just found out by skimming through Zavvi - preorders for XBOne have turned up - priced at 400 pounds. Likely to be 400 euros then. Guess the PS4 could be around 500 then.

and heard the lamentations of their women?

As a game developer you find everything that makes people in the industry work more unreasonable. That's very reasonable of you, but I as a gamer think of it like this: If the PS2 (and 3 to an extent) could do it, if each Nintendo console could do it, then everyone should do it and not invent bull**** reasons not to. Gaming history is the history of pressure by publishers and developes on the consumer, justified by anti piracy measures. Each new generation is locked down tighter in more annoying ways, and offers less for the same amount of money. You'd have to be blind not to notice it.

For you EU folks: why did you import millions of muslims into Europe again? Or fight a war on their behalf in Bosnia, Kosovo etc.? Do you even know? Because your policy makes obviously do not know. But they're not the ones being beheaded in the streets. ...Jesus christ, these people stood talking in the street and no one did anything until the police came.

Maybe they're lying to make the game seem more appealing? I don't know. People were bitching all the time how no one was playing it online. To go from that to the population of Mexico city is a gap that's hard to fill on pure bull****.

I always want BC because it gives me a reason to skip on buying an entire console just to play the half a dozen games I really want to play. If they don't promise me that I won't promise them I won't reach for the emulator.

I thought the game bombed

And if we ditch the marketing terms Oculus rift is really a monitor and a wiimote sellotaped to your head. I'm not saying its a bad thing, but I have doubts it will ever be anything more than a niche thing even among the gaming crowd.

Lol well, I never did mind the consoles much until they ate the better part of the PC market. But what I think will be the real downfall of this console generation is the unrealistic expectations that companies have cultivated in gamers, especially the less tech savvy ones. They expect quantum leaps in fidelity and visual pizzaz that just aren't going to happen anymore. They expect new gimmics and future tech that just isn't there. The new generation, apart from being decent machines in the hardware department just don't have anything really new to show. There are no new LCD/Plasma TV's to take advantage of, 3D has not and will not gain widespread acceptance. 4K is next to useless for everything but a movie theater sized screen. The new generation is much exactly like the old generation. PC gamers of course have a more realistic view of things since all changes are slow and incremental. The only real difference over the last 13 years is that we now have better looking games and better monitors. And we (at least the realistic ones among us) don't expect anything else. So, I think its reasonable to expect a gradual decrease in the console market and an increase in all other markets, PC among them.

It had a few rather tasteless sex scenes, but otherwise its okay. Sandman is better than anything else he made though (and not all of Sandman at that).

From what I read, the Xbox360 division in MS never made any profit either (officially). Who cares anyway, the only thing that's sure is that they're dead when they go bankrupt and it makes no difference to us as gamers either way. Development teams (which is what matters, not Sony or MS) will strike out on their own, be bough or sold or die off as its always been. Big deal. Either way, video games are here to stay and they're never going to be reduced just to what the ipad and phone can put out. I foresee good times for the PC.

Why is the PS4 crowd cheering anyway? Its not like Sony has anything more to show than MS at this point. There's the vague promise of backwards compatibility through streaming, but in all other aspects - its the same story all over again. Their biggest boast can be that the same games won't look worse on their more expensive machine like they did with the PS3. As for exclusives, the PS3 exclusives stable is a lot thinner than the PS2's. Even today, if you scan through metacritic, there are precious few good games that are PS3 only. Of course, the XB360 exclusives were practically non existent or not worth bothering about so the PS3 wins hands down - but that doesn't necessarily mean the PS4 will have better exclusives. Finally there's the question about the reason to upgrade. PS3 will still be supported for quite a while like the PS2 was - while the PS4 will need more than a year at best to get going.

Of course it could also be used for a horror film. You're away from home for a week, and you come back, plop yourself into the sofa and the XBOne mysteriously turns on, the words glowing on the screen: I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST WEEKEND

And the "I remember what you did last" is going to lead to some embarrassing moments. >Hey babe check out my new console! >TV! >Game! >Movie! OOOOH! AAAAH! AAAAAAAAH! >OFF OFF!

What stuttering?

I don't see your point. 99% of the time in cRPG's its obvious that a quest is either a side quest or a part of the main quest. In theory you could make a hidden connection between side quests and the main quest but that's just a possibility like any other. Its hardly obligatory to make the main quest a mystery. The only thing that makes quests interesting or dull is the writing and the events that transpire and that goes for all quests whether they be main or side. BGII is the actual proof of that, most of the quests there are by far superior to anything seen in BG1 - and they were far more interesting to follow.

But the real nail in the coffin for XBOne for me is that every "exclusive" is likely to end up on the PC anyway, so overall its better to invest in a PC and spare myself the misery of the new equivalent of RROD.

People are not really against having to be online, what they're against is the enforcement of conditions that exist solely for the benefit of the publisher. Companies are trying to present being online as something that will bring you certain benefits and all that does is make it blatantly obvious that its an undesirable feature through and through. As for Steam the best that can be said about is is that it works. Compared to the convenience and fairness of GoG though - its ****.

Its only natural that the two most hated IT companies would have a special relationship.