sparklecat

Every digital extra you're promised will be available to you via the backer portal, regardless of whether you'll also be getting it with your Steam or GOG edition. eta: don't be concerned, you are going to get your stuff, it's all fine

Your collector's edition copy is not a key, it is an actual game. On a disc. Like if it were the 90s.

Is your husband wanting the game on Steam? If not, redeem from GOG and install it on both your and your husband's rig. GOG allows you to install on as many machines as you want if it's in your household. Thanks for the tip, Ink Blot. I guess I wanted to leave the choice of platform up to him, but we can discuss it when he gets home. We live in the US, so I'm hopeful it won't be too long before the box arrives. That's interesting, though, because we've been buying separate copies when we've both wanted to play a GOG game. Isn't that expected? I don't think anyone expects that unless you're both playing at the same time. But yeah, my understanding is that GOG is fine with intra-family game sharing.

It'd be interesting to know what kinds of delivery, snack foods, etc. get an uptick from this kind of thing--from a purely anthropological point of view. I was thinking that, but there's always going to be some kind of event going on just about any day; unless you're talking something like the Superbowl, I think the effect wouldn't be large enough to notice. Also, re stock, have a recipe: http://wellfed.typepad.com/well_fed/2008/02/roasted-vegetab.html

Sure. But they actually have to develop a relationship. And this is where the whole thing usually falls apart. Take DA:I. It takes a great deal of pain developing the idea that your relationship with these various crazy people is as the second coming of their personal savior, their boss, leader and the key to saving the world. But on the side you can repeatedly sexually harass them until they give in and have sex. And this is the pinnacle of CRPG romance. Or take BG2. You can either get a whining crying teenage ex-slave pregnant, or randomly marry a horrible woman seeking to replace her recently mutilated dead husband after a matter of days. Or be 'edgy' with the S&M dark elf stereotype. Yeah. Pass. From what I remember of it, I thought the DA:O Alistair romance was handled fairly well, awkward sex scenes aside. Especially the part where he broke up with my character halfway through for political reasons.

Personally, I've never seen a criticism of the way romance was handled in Planescape: Torment.

In case anyone's confused like I was, it's 9AM PDT/4PM GMT/5PM CET. The US changes from PST to PDT on the second Sunday in March; the UK and Europe change from GMT/CET/whatevs to BST/CEST/etc on the last Sunday in March. So for these three weeks, it's a 7hr difference between California and the UK rather than the usual 8hr one. Hooray, timezones. This is the best news I've heard all week. I get to play an hour earlier than I thought!

Patches will be available for download through the backer portal.

You are getting two copies. One physical, one digital.

Personally, I support the inclusion of understated romance in games - if your character and a companion NPC get along well enough and you know your PC would be interested in them, often it can feel more unrealistic and immersion-breaking that there's no possibility of suggesting you'd like the relationship to go in a different direction. But too much development of the romance itself is not a good idea, simply because I don't think that's something that can adequately be done in this format where you're dealing with one character that's pre-written and another that's largely in the mind of the player. Leave it at flirting, at suggestion, at "one day after this is all over," and as an added bonus the relatively small amount of such content means you can make it available on more characters, where appropriate.

Going by GOG's previous history re patches, it'll take maybe a day or so longer than Steam for them to get them up. And no, the expansion's been in there since partway through the Kickstarter.

Scripted interactions; I'm reasonably certain there are, for instance, times where it checks the Athletics of everyone in the party for something you want to attempt.

LordCrash, people talking to LordCrash: it's okay, you can delete some of the quoted replies and only keep the last one or two in your post! We can still follow the discussion, I promise!

Bless you; I have been trying to find this out for some time.

I'm assuming that the only class I'd see CON as near-mandatory for are monks, since you can't use your abilities if a) you're not taking enough damage, or b) you're dead.

Which is, incidentally, awesome. There's nothing I enjoy more at tabletop games than, say, having my player's high intimidate check against someone important when there are guards standing five feet away backfire on them horribly :D High numbers shouldn't be an automatic "win situation" button.

So I have gathered, yes. As I just said in my previous post, though, I'm not really looking to get into a huge debate on the matter.

It's not a primarily moral objection, no. And myopia's a good word for it; I can play and enjoy a myopic, selfish, even downright evil character. But not one who supports and joins her would-be oppressors, if that makes sense. But I didn't really intend to get into some big debate on the subject; I was simply commenting/offering a bit of feedback about a problem I and a couple of friends had with getting into that part of the game.

I wish we could I very much wanted to release it yesterday for you guys, but unfortunately with how Steam and GOG work, you can only have one official release date and time. The version press folks are playing is effectively a "locked" version that behaves in a more limited manner than an official release version (e.g., friends can't see you playing it, it's patched as a separate build, etc). This would still work differently than expected after the release date and would require us to send out a second batch of keys for the "official" version which we felt was very confusing. We definitely hear you guys though and had good intentions; we just couldn't realize them without a lot of strangeness for you. Aww, thanks for considering it even if it didn't work out, buddy; that was really nice of you.

Yes. Hence the sociopathic label. Fundamentally lacking in empathy. I've got nothing against people wanting to play villains; it can be fun, sure. You're right that my personal enjoyment is a part of what's being reflected here, and I don't find the Legion at all enjoyable or sympathetic, but I still also maintain that a woman who sided with the Legion would also have to be fundamentally lacking in sense. I wouldn't know, I've never managed to make it past my first vist to the Fort on an attempted Legion game! I can only judge based on what I encountered, and everything I encountered suggested to me that the vast majority of women (and, yes, a significant number of men) would run screaming in the other direction/whip out their sniper rifle. It doesn't really matter what Caesar's true personal opinions on the matter are; it's the impressions that the characters would get that are important in a roleplaying context.

Happy, no, but I don't like them immensely depressing, which is the only ending I can see for a woman in the Legion, Longknife's optimism notwithstanding. Plus playing a woman who's walking past legionaries at the Fort who are coming out with creepy comments about how attractive some of the new slaves are... her ignoring that and continuing to support the Legion just feels borderline sociopathic. If you all feel differently, that's fine; this is just some feedback from one female fan who informally polled a few of her friends and found the same - that we just weren't able to really get into a Legion playthrough because we found the misogyny too off-putting for one reason or another. Uh I think a male character who sides with the legion would also have to be sociopathic. The legion are straight up monsters. I mean what kind of person would walk through Nipton and think "yeah these guys have the right idea." I do definitely think that the misogyny is just one part of a larger problem that makes it hard to play sympathetic characters who side with the Legion, but I think it's a greater problem for female characters. It's easier in some ways to brush aside atrocities committed against people you don't tend to automatically empathise with, which means I could see a male "ends justify the means" character supporting them more easily; men who serve the Legion, going by the group's history, can attain glory and honour, and a man could convince himself that he'll be one of those because he's simply more worthy than those who fail or whatever. Deluded, maybe, and justifying some pretty horrible behaviour, but not what I'd consider sociopathic as I would failing to identify with the enslaved women in the Legion camp as a female character.

Cheers, Sensuki. Couple of questions: Do you know what the accuracy bonus to disengagement attacks is? Might end up just modding that part out if I can work out how. You mentioned you can cancel an ability you're in the middle of using and you don't lose it; is it the same if you're interrupted, you don't lose the ability you were partway through using?

Happy, no, but I don't like them immensely depressing, which is the only ending I can see for a woman in the Legion, Longknife's optimism notwithstanding. Plus playing a woman who's walking past legionaries at the Fort who are coming out with creepy comments about how attractive some of the new slaves are... her ignoring that and continuing to support the Legion just feels borderline sociopathic. If you all feel differently, that's fine; this is just some feedback from one female fan who informally polled a few of her friends and found the same - that we just weren't able to really get into a Legion playthrough because we found the misogyny too off-putting for one reason or another.

Well he did say enjoyable character. Exactly. eta: regarding the whole "ends justify the means" argument, sure, I could come up with a character who thought that way. But I like to imagine my characters get at least a somewhat happy ending, and I don't really see Caesar's favour lasting past her help securing the victory at the Dam. The existence of a competent, trusted woman in a leadership position for the Legion would be a threat to their power structure, and one "exceptional" individual is more likely to wind up meeting with a messy death if she doesn't fall in line and agree that Caesar knows best on this matter, not end up spearheading some social revolution.

LordCrash, part of the problem is that if we received the game earlier, before the day 1 patch was ready (and it inevitably ended up on torrent sites shortly thereafter), that'd be the unpatched, buggier, and less polished game out there that everyone was drawing their conclusions from - it'd potentially be less well received than the patched version, and thus could lead to lower sales.