Drowsy Emperor

http://www.pcgamer.com/elite-dangerous-refund-policy-detailed-after-offline-support-dropped/ Elite is being refunded for those that want it, but only if they pre-ordered it and have not played the beta. Those that have been playing the beta, regardless of whether they KS the game or whatever, can't get a refund.

Those faces actually look quite alive. They make DAI look like it was made by the Flintstones.

And I thought I had a chip on my shoulder regarding Bioware.

I always though that the damaged hardware claims were unsubstantiated. As far as Steam is concerned, its a very well working system with a few tangible advantages. That said, I have twenty something games on it and my primary motivation for buying them there was to take advantage of rock bottom sales. I could never get as good deals with Serbian retail prices being what they are. Steam is definitely a step back from the previous status of de facto ownership we had over our games, but if you treat it as a place to get disposable games at ridiculous prices, its not bad.

Divinity Original Sin I'm still in Act 1 and the game is really good. My gamersense is telling me the story isn't going to go anywhere interesting but I'm letting that slide on account of fun combat and good world design. The visuals are really pleasing too. I don't like the boring, Diablo like, randomized loot though. Still an 8/10 game.

Its not an issue if I'm asked to give an objective opinion about the game, but I personally find it annoying. ... but BW forums are even worse than I remember them. ...wait, they actually have respawning enemies in this game? Can anyone confirm this?

It is nothing, in a sense. The actual quality of the game overshadows and overwhelms those elements either way (which, like romances tend to be poor on their own merit, anyway). If DAI sucks, it won't be because of male companions wanting to pork the PC, but from other, important faults. I'm just annoyed by their SJW posturing BS, because it just so happens to be in a genre I like to play and on the very short list of such big name games. And because they're hypocrites.

Lol, tolerance is about the relationship of the "other" towards some group or other - if your lead writer is homosexual and your lead cinematic designer is talking about his man crush on his twitter profile then what you really have is them doing their own thing for their own entertainment/agenda. Which there is nothing wrong with in itself, unless you they try to pass it off as "tolerance", about doing the "socially right thing" when you're actually doing it in your own interest. Besides, a society in which a popular multi-million dollar game made by openly gay people with gay content can hardly be described as intolerant to start with, so there goes that BS out of the window too.

So, everything, Tale.

To explain the picture above and a lot of other things too. This is one of the people that works on DAI: https://twitter.com/eplerjc I rest my case.

WHY BIOWARE WHY

The more I watch gameplay videos the more I'm convinced that Bioware has finally lost it with the MMO combat, complete focus on the consoles in UI design and controls, and Ubisoft "open world" (lolololo). I look at Pillars of Eternity gameplay videos, and then I look at this and I wonder how we could go from tactical combat to Gauntlet, from a world as natural as you can get in a computer game, to a hotspot filled theme park, from a basic but PC friendly UI with split second complete control over a party of 6 characters to this slow, clunky mess. For ****s sake Bioware, decide which game you're making and who you're making it for. I mean.. jesus... Final Fantasy XII did this exact same thing better.. and that game is in the video game equivalent of middle ages now.

This seems to be a resurrection of the StarForce controversy. Piracy is a business and StarForce was bad for it, so a successful disinformation campaign (claiming hardware damage, among other things) was launched against it resulting in its abandonment. I expect a similar push now. The idea is to gather a critical mass of people to pressure companies into giving up on it. On a related note, I don't support DRM schemes, particularly online ones (and especially garbage ones like Origin and that horrendous Uplay) and will not pay full price for any game featuring one, particularly those games that depend on online servers for a fully functional single player experience. EA games is notorious for taking servers down on games that still have players but are under whatever the EA's acceptable numbers are. Therefore the most they'll get from me is 5$ and even that will make me wince. In general, I support running them into the ground and hope they go bankrupt, sooner rather than later for the good of us all. GOG and CDP however, have my full support and I will pay full price if I'm able.

I'm watching Pillars of Eternity Backer beta first look on youtube (old news, but I haven't been following development closely) and I love the parchment with black ink text boxes. I also love the way they're trying to get around rest-heal spam, making resting more strategic and less rote. I think they're really going to make something good here.

Could have built an aircraft carrier with all the man hours wasted on this pointless discussion.

Both games had such horrible controls and lagging input (on top of ugly graphics) that I gave up on them. (PC version)

Probably the best part of the game too. The GTA series has become somewhat burdened with all the things you "can do" instead of sticking with the things that are fun to do.

You can't roll back the wheel of history. The IE type games had their run and they were possibly the best of their kind ever made - but they were also new and innovative at the time. Its important to notice that its two separate things: not only were they peak in storytelling (PST), world size, unique content (BG2) they were also new and extremely polished in all other respects. Not only can you not revive novelty (the design now being old, no matter how sophisticated it is in some respects), its also next to impossible to compete with the peak of anything. Particularly, if of all things, you're doing a sequel. That is why I said Fargo was full of ****. A decade of nothing then the major "new" idea he has is resurrecting an old game. It was doomed to be sub-par from the start. If he really had an idea he'd be doing his own thing like Obsidian, roll the dice and see what happens. Anyway, there's no going back (for us). I realized this after playing Shadowrun Dragonfall. That's a game that's very well made overall and I should have been thrilled about it. I did enjoy it... and yet... I too felt the magic wasn't there.

It doesn't matter, the user score balances itself out in time when the system has enough numbers to get a good average. I see more than a few legitimate criticisms among the low user scores, but it will take a week at least until enough people complete the game for the user score to be really telling, one way or the other

Yeah, I read a bit of Elite forums and the number of people attacking those who are voicing their disappointment is depressingly large. Its like they're personally offended that someone might not like being screwed out of a feature they bought the game for in the first place. If money had not changed hands I'd have said meh, but they took the cash, promised something and are now weaseling out of it a month before release. And they timed so they hope the proximity of release (hype and waiting) will pressure those who might ask for a refund into just going along with the flow. Its quite certain they knew there'd be no offline mode for quite a while. Apart from that, not a small number of people (beta players) are saying that the game is nowhere near complete enough for release. They claim there is zero story and flavor content, that the universe is very generic and lacking in variation, among other things.

This used to matter when typical cheap mice were garbage. Now that is no longer the case, most sensors are perfectly fine for anything. I recommend something based on Logitech MX518 ergonomics. In general, gamer mice are overpriced crap. I have three now, and have used around 5 total. All expensive, most of them a waste of money. Don't be dumb like I was :D

Yeah, the metacritic user reviews are polarizing to say the least. :D This one is... different. He gave the game a 10 naturally. The comedy value is off the charts:

the gay pirate? bio romances is terrible, but the biowarians ain't aiming to be insulting. the toee gay pirate were, at best, sophomoric. am suspecting that a troika developer lacking in maturity were angry 'bout having the toee brothel cut, so the gay pirate were added as a childish bit o' revenge 'gainst the publisher. is not as if we were particular offended by troika's efforts, but the gay pirate were not a well-written romance and it weren't funny neither. as an aside, juhani were in kotor, yes? is our recollection that kotor were released a bit before toee. HA! Good Fun! Its possible that it was the first game where gay characters could get married (yet another pointless feature that amounted to nothing in the game itself). I read it in some article ages ago and my memory is fuzzy. The only reason I remember it in the first place is because of how silly it was and how out of place it seemed in a typical DnD romp. There was possibility to get married with same gender character for male and female characters in Fallout 2, but Temple of Elemental evil was first tittle under D&D license where it was possible. ...Achievement unlocked.

Yes the endless ticking of the damage numbers in their hundreds is very much MMO style. And everything seems to take ages to die.

the gay pirate? bio romances is terrible, but the biowarians ain't aiming to be insulting. the toee gay pirate were, at best, sophomoric. am suspecting that a troika developer lacking in maturity were angry 'bout having the toee brothel cut, so the gay pirate were added as a childish bit o' revenge 'gainst the publisher. is not as if we were particular offended by troika's efforts, but the gay pirate were not a well-written romance and it weren't funny neither. as an aside, juhani were in kotor, yes? is our recollection that kotor were released a bit before toee. HA! Good Fun! Its possible that it was the first game where gay characters could get married (yet another pointless feature that amounted to nothing in the game itself). I read it in some article ages ago and my memory is fuzzy. The only reason I remember it in the first place is because of how silly it was and how out of place it seemed in a typical DnD romp.