AwesomeOcelot

It's just a strange lie. Pretty sure Baldur's Gate was the first RPG to have RTS squad management. There were squad based RPG on the Genesis/SNES, they played a lot like JRPGs on the handhelds play now, turn based combat without positioning + direct control of one unit on a world map was common for the ones I played. They play nothing like Infinity Engine games. Does nobody remember Ogre Battle from the SNES? That's one of my favorite RTS games of all time, and it's actually a pure RTS that controlled well with a controller. On the map, speed and positing were two of the most important aspects in that game. In fact, you can move multiple units and switch units on the fly in that game. No, not well, not fast or precise. It's clearly not a well controlled RTS, selecting multiple units, with fast and precise movement. In Ogre Battle your units on the map are "squads" but they're not really multiple units in the way they control. Using the d-pad to control a cursor is even more horrendous than using an analogue stick.

It's just a strange lie. Pretty sure Baldur's Gate was the first RPG to have RTS squad management. There were squad based RPG on the Genesis/SNES, they played a lot like JRPGs on the handhelds play now, turn based combat without positioning + direct control of one unit on a world map was common for the ones I played. They play nothing like Infinity Engine games. As far as I know, apart from games that were meant to played with a mouse on the original Playstation, the only game that remotely plays like the Infinity Engine games on console is Supreme Commander 2 and it barely does. There's probably never going to be a RPG that plays like this because it works less well with smaller groups. Dragon Age: Origins on console is more like Mass Effect, rejecting the RTS style of control and the gameplay has to be changed, it becomes more of a 3rd person action RPG like Elder Scrolls games in 3rd person view, or action adventures like Fable and Darksiders, with a squad that can be commanded like in Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six games. Closest to the Infinity Engine games on console is probably Tactical RPGs like Final Fantasy Tactics and strategy games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown but there are fundamental differences, most stemming from these games being turn based.

No you haven't.

a) Time, it takes away time as you acknowledge. Doesn't matter how many players would play it, this game is for the backers, PC gamers, who play squad based RPGs with RTS like interfaces with a mouse because that's by far the best way to play these types of games. If they don't have another option because of circumstance they might play on a touchscreen or touchpad. b) I don't believe it's ever been done. I very much doubt it can with Project Eternity given the type of games it wants to emulate and the type of games the team have developed in the past. You can look at interfaces gimped by having both mouse and gamepad interface like Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Dragon Age 2. Then you have gameplay that's simplified to account for gamepad as well, e.g. Crysis 2, Crysis 3, Dragon Age: Origins. i) If you talk about consoles, phones, and tablets this is about PC games in general. Just because all those platforms are growing faster than PC gaming doesn't mean that PC gaming is dying, it doesn't even mean that PC gaming isn't growing. Console gaming has always been larger in the West and the richer markets, PC gaming has never been big in Japan. How can something be growing and dying? Why should it matter what other platforms are doing? PC gamers still want PC games and they're willing to fund them. ii) I doubt M&KB is dying, that's nonsense, if you look at the percentage of players on PC playing FPS, RTS, TBS, and Adventure the proportion playing with M&KB is probably roughly the same, it will remain the same, because playing with a analogue stick over a mouse given the choice is pants on head retarded. I mean, pants don't go on the head, that's clearly the wrong place to wear them. iii) M&KB was never the defacto standard for PC gamers, it was rare a PC gamer didn't own a joystick and later a gamepad, because for flight sims, 6 axis, fighting, and driving games for instance you don't want a keyboard with its digital input. iv) It's clearly the other way around, gamepads are compromising towards the mouse, Ouya and PS4 pads include a touchpad in acknowledgement that analogue sticks don't work, and the "Steam Machine" that you refer to has its own controller with two touchpads and a touchscreen. In the end it'll be the touchscreen and touchpad that dominate outside of the desk for these types of games, and Obsidian have already said they'll support touchscreen, touchpad, one-button mouse which means that the PS4 and Steam controller will automatically be supported. As this is the PC you should be able to map whatever buttons you like as long as the controller supports XInput or DirectInput on Windows, and the other OS APIs. That's enough future proofing and doesn't even need any work.

You get them if you own games from the same publisher/developer as well. I also got one for Foul Play last week without crafting or owning any related games so there is at least a one more kind of trigger.

Won't be upgrading GPU for at least 3 months, will wait until 2015 for a new system. I am waiting on delivery of parts for a fanless PC that I'll use as a server/htpc/???.

I thought most Macs were notebooks and ultrabooks that don't come with any mouse. There's not many Mac gamers, I doubt there's many Mac gamers who backed Project Eternity, and out of the Mac gamers there's got to be quite a few that have bought two button mice because the Mighty Mouse is bad. I guess Obsidian have good access to demographics and hardware surveys though, I'd be interested if I'm wrong.

For some reason they've given me 5 25% off Shadow Warrior, 3 valid until the 26th Oct, 1 the 27th Oct, and another the 4th of Nov.

I'll agree this tends to happen, especially with gamepads but also now with tablets, but it doesn't always happen. AFAIK you could use one button on a lot of squad based RPGs and RTS on the PC if you really wanted to, it was just much better to use keyboard short cuts and right click context menus.

I don't know why you'd abuse someone, messaging them, just don't buy their games. Also it's not exactly her fault, she clearly doesn't want to be in the games industry, she just needs a living and there are developers stupid enough to hire her, blame BioWares management if anything. One of the biggest problems with the games industry, and it was even a problem in the 90's, is people entering it that don't like games and would rather be writing books or making movies, the movie and book industries don't have this trouble. As for Phil Fish, he says the most stupid and offensive things to get people angry with him, they shouldn't take the bait but they do, then he cries about the response, he seems to want as much attention as he can get.

I hate iron sights, when you shoot in reality your vision, eye movement, ability to move your head means you're not tunnelled down a scope or barrel like you're using a remote turret with a camera, the best representation is to not have iron sights. Of course on console FPS your FOV is so narrow in the first place your vision is already tunnelled quite a bit so people don't mind. Scopes are for zoom.

I haven't spent much time on it, but I wouldn't build a PC without a HDD, it would always have a SSD+HDD combo. Being able to play games at 60fps is more important than them loading 4-5 times faster. Obviously with a bigger budget getting a SSD for the games you play the most becomes very attractive, it's great to not have loading screens just a flash of a bar moving across. AMD FX-6300 Stock Cooler (save $25.99) Asus M5A97 R2.0(I prefer to use ASRock or Asus) Vengeance LP 8GB Kingston SSDNow V300 Series 60GB (budget SSD for $55) Seagate 500GB ST500DM002 ($53 so $12 cheaper, 500GB should be enough for a game rotation) XFX Double D HD 7950 3GB ($180, take the 3GB because that's probably what the ports from the consoles will use) Corsair 200R CX500 (the non-modular version is $30, for myself always modular, for a non-builder, a budget, non-OC, take the $20) Asus DRW-24B1ST Win7 $751.86

I meant that it's expensive to get a second SSD or large 256-512GB SSD to put games on. I've never heard of someone just playing games on a PC, even a "gaming" PC but if it's only ever used to game from the HDD then there's not much need for a SSD. A 60GB SSD for the OS is $55, for me the faster boot is probably worth that, Windows updates with rebooting also.

A good SSD will load a game 4 times faster than a top of the line HDD, but getting a SSD for games is a luxury. Getting a small 60-120GB SSD for the OS on a desktop is a no brainer, clears up bottlenecks, the massive random access improvement of a SSD makes things like night and day. If you're doubting getting a SSD, you simply haven't used a computer with one.

My point is, you fully know, just because something is successful financially doesn't make it successful in being a game. I don't know why people assume "success" automatically means financial, retracing this thread it wasn't clear that anyone was talking about financial success at the start and when people did not everybody was. Also it's not like there isn't a lot of talent and craft that goes into these things, apart from The Da Vinci Code, excluding its marketing team, there's a lot of technical skill that that few other companies match, but they're also terrible for what they lack.

That sounds ridiculous. Fallout 3 was incredibly successful. You could totally argue that they are both not reboots because they don't follow the same gameplay style, look, and feel of the original franchises. But you sound silly when you call one of the most successful developers out there incompetent and bad at making games. Massive arrogance and stupidity does come to mind, but not for Bethesda. Just because lots of people play it doesn't make it good. The Da Vinci Code, Avatar, The Big Bang Theory, and Call of Duty. Good at making money doesn't mean good at making games. I know there are a lot of Bethesda fanboys here.

Tomb Raider Legend and Fallout 3 I don't see as attempts to reboot franchises, and their failure was down to incompetence. The original Core Design team had taken Tomb Raider down similar paths to Crystal Dynamics, and Bethesda attempted to make a game in the Fallout universe, they're just not very good at making games, plus it was massive arrogance and stupidity to call it "3", it's never a sequel to Fallout 2. I love Sands of Time and Giana Sisters:Twisted Dreams, successful reboots. Prince of Persia was rebooted again, unsuccessfully. XCOM: Enemy Unknown diverges a lot from the original, I can understand people being as pissed about it like with Thief or Tomb Raider. Human Revolution, isn't really a reboot.

It looks like exactly what you see with a touchpad. Not as precise as a mouse and limited range means quick long movements aren't possible. It is much better than an analogue stick and makes FPS viable with a gamepad, but it's not going to be as good and not competitive enough for multiplayer. I don't understand why you'd want to play these games on a couch rather than at a desk. I might want a gamepad that can act as a competent touchpad.

DDR4 is going to be super expensive next year for no benefit apart from power consumption, and Ivy Bridge-E wasn't great value for money unless you're running a server . It might be worth upgrading GPU in 2014, but I'll wait for Skylake (at least), faster DDR4, and PCIe 4. Also Intel might be releasing more Haswell CPU with DDR4 support soon after Haswell-E.

We'll know when Project Eternity is out, probably have a good idea when Obsidian release recommended specs. From what Obsidian, specifically Josh Sawyer, has been saying then the Surface Pro 2 should be able to run Project Eternity with that CPU/GPU. "Well" is a relative term, you're probably going to have to turn options like AA and AF off to get decent frame per second, also at native resolution you're probably going to get frame drops when there's lots of action on screen, so you may need to knock the resolution down. A major factor is whether it's plugged in or not, because the CPU and GPU will not run as fast on battery, it's probably going to struggle on battery. I'd be surprised if more than 4GB is required for RAM. If it's anything like the last Surface Pro Windows will take up a lot of the standard 64GB so you'd probably want the 256GB model at least, that's $1300.

Suddenly Valve's relationship with Piston makes more sense, they needed the component arrangement. Those GPU are pretty high range, but it depends when Valve are thinking about releasing Steam Machines, if it's the end of 2014 then GPU would have progressed a bit. Also, as others have said, Microsoft and Sony don't pay the same as us for AMD GPU.

Sorry, broken link. RimWorld on KickStarter

Not sure if anyone has posted this but RimWorld looks promising, FTL/Prison Architect/Dwarf Fortress inspired space colony sim. RimWorld on KickStarter

KickStarter donations are a reflection of the projects on offer, inXile, Obsidian, and DoubleFine can only launch so many projects... we still got Mighty No. 9, Shantae, Neverending Nightmares this month.

Nvidia would just match, create a low level API of their own, compatible with high level OpenGL and DirectX. Developers are still going to have to port from Mantle to DirectX/OpenGL because the majority of the install base (including me with a 3 year old AMD GPU, probably the majority of PC gamers with AMD) is not Mantle. What this would do is make things particularly difficult for Intel, I don't know how they'd respond. Intel are wiping the floor with AMD concerning CPU, their GPU strategy relies on DirectX/OpenGL.