Mac and Linux support is now part of the base goal. Great news!

 

Aha, now there's a reason for me to up my pledge above the minimum (I have a rule for myself that I never pledge more than the minimum to get the goods for any game that doens't provide a version for an open platform, so basically Linux as I don't expect game companies to start caring about the BSDs anytime soon )

 

Time to work through the updates to see if they said anything yet to alleviate the technical concerns I had concerning the feasibility of what they want to do with the budget they have.

Mesa encourages you to be 'Murkin'.

 

 

Couldn't resist with a cowgirl-themed suit.

 

Still haven 't gotten Mesa, such a horribly time consuming and RNG frame to get *sigh* I probably also should start to care about the Void some more, really wish you could just grab randoms for there without having to go through the annoying recruiting chat (or make a decent market so I can juts buy the stuff I care about rom the void). Oh well...maybe one day.

A few months back, I decided I was going to play through Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, Throne of Bhaal, Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Nights 2, and Mask of the Betrayer with the same character.

 

So having finished Throne of Bhaal, I went directly to Neverwinter Nights, and then I remembered why I can keep coming back to Baldur's Gate again and again...and why I never touched NWN for years after finishing the original campaign:

 

- The OC is bland and banal. It consists almost entirely of fetching MacGuffins (Waterdhavian creatures, words of power, etc) via quests that are totally straightforward, and without any alternate means of solving them. With the exception of the Charwood quest, nothing in the campaign is particularly memorable and compelling. Worst of all, the game never really establishes any sort of motivating factor to your character. In BG, you had the murder of Gorion and sorting out the iron shortage to compel the PC. In the sequel, you had Irenicus torture you and abduct Imoen. In NWN, on the other hand, your character is just some random academy student with no background and no personal stake in the conflict.

 

Another thing that bothered me was just how frequently the solution to your quests involves mass slaughter of human beings. For instance, there's one sidquest wherein your character is tasked with stealing pieces of an artwork from noblemen who have offended the local whorehouse madam. Each nobleman's estate is guarded by someone who says that he really doesn't like his job and won't stop you from entering. Since my character is a wizard with no real stealth skills, but with good Charisma and several ranks in Persuade, I thought I might try to bluff my way past the interior guards.

 

Nope! The only real solution was to violently murder all the guards. And these people weren't evil, they were just doing their jobs. The most ludicrous example had to be the quest where you must free some animals from a zoo because the local druid believed they were being mistreated. The only solution offered to me? Kill all the guards in the zoo and murder the proprietor!  There's this odd dissonance in the game where my character is 100% good-aligned, yet I've racked up a body count in the hundreds, with many of those deaths coming under circumstances of extreme moral dubiousness. And no one ever calls you on it!

 

- What? Do you mean to tell me that the character who was incredibly rude, abrasive, condescending, and unhelpful in every single conversation with me....is EVIL? My god, I got whiplash from this UTTERLY SHOCKING AND COMPLETELY UNEXPECTED PLOT SWERVE!

 

- Playing as a mage is highly tedious. As in Baldur's Gate, a low-level wizard has a pitiful amount of HP and can only cast a few weak spells per day. They need some sort of melee support if they are to survive. In BG, this wasn't a problem, because the game gave you decent melee fighters near he start (Khalid and Jaheira in the first game, Minsc and Jaheira in the second). Not only that, you had full control of your party members.

 

Not so in NWN. Instead, you are allowed to have one "henchman" who is completely under the control of the AI. Unfortunately, the AI is utterly brain-dead. For instance, they can only attack targets that they have a direct line of sight to, otherwise the target may as well not even exist. So imagine my character is standing in front of a door to a room filled with monsters who could tear through her puny amount of HP in a heartbeat. In BG, I could order my melee fighters in first to deal with the enemies, while my mage stayed back and cast spells from a safe distance. In NWN, my henchmen will often stand just to the side of the door, meaning he can't see the monsters inside and will thus ignore my attack orders. The only way to get him to attack is to walk into the room first and hope he follows me inside, which is far more dangerous, especially if there are archers in the enemy ranks. You could cast invisibility on yourself, or summon a creature inside the room to aggro the enemies, but I should not have to waste spells just to do something that would be trivial if I had full control of my party!

 

Now, this isn't a hard game by any stretch, but playing as a wizard who has to rely on her henchmen more so than other classes at low levels is incredibly frustrating. Clerics blowing their Turn Undead spells on weak zombies that they can kill with one swing of their mace...clerics trying to heal themselves in close combat and get murdered by Attacks of Opportunity...a melee fighter who decides to ignore the five guys trying to hack him to pieces and run after that archer in the distance and thus get murdered by Attacks of Opportunity...you get the picture. There's a henchmen AI mod that does a bit to ameliorate the issue, but it's not enough.

 

- The graphics are as bland as the OC. Being 2D, the pre-rendered graphics of Baldur's Gate hold up fairly well more than ten years later. NWN's 3D graphics have not. The areas are visually uninteresting and very obviously constructed with tilesets as opposed to the more organic locales of Baldur's Gate. And bloody hell, who designed the armour for women in this game? Elder Scrolls modders? You know you've got a problem when this is the most reasonable thing any female fighter wears:

 

 

- So I gave up on the OC and started with the first expansion pack, Shadows of Undrentide. The story itself is nothing special, but there are some definite improvements here, such as being able to adjust your henchman's inventory, and the fact that the game offers multiple quest solutions depending on your class and abilities (such as the bit with the kobolds holding a woman hostage in the local tavern). But the henchmen remain an issue for spellcasters, because none of them are good melee fighters. You've got a Cleric/Rogue, a Barbarian/Sorcerer, and a Bard (there's a Paladin, but she doesn't join you). And this expansion likes to throw relatively tough opponents at you, and in larger numbers than what you faced in the OC. Later on, you start facing opponents who are not just spell resistant, but spell immune, at which point a wizard better hope that her summons and henchman can take them down. Otherwise, you're SOL.

 

Now I realise that the main draw of NWN was never its campaigns, but in the toolset and online play, which is a fair point. But surely BioWare must have realised that there would be a good number people coming into this game from Baldur's Gate who would be completely disappointed that it lacked almost everything that BG so good.

 

Tonight I'm going to try out Hordes of the Underdark, which I've never actually played before. I've heard it's the best part of NWN...we shall see.

 

NWN was one of the biggest disappointments I've ever had with a game and it seems I got the worst of it too by trying to play a wizard (as I generally do).

 

In other news, I picked up my year old XCom: Enemy Within playthrough, the game's still fun though I think I really should have started my second playthrough on Classis or so because after the initial few months the difficulty rather plummets. Now I'm trying to decide whether to drag it out to get the "shoot down 40 UFOs"-achievement or just use the Gollop Champer and get this playthrough over with...

I think the Molyneux thing is kinda sad, really. He obviously likes what he's doing (I cannot imagine anyone sticking with such a demanding "job" if they hate doing it and are rich to boot) and I don't doubt that he's got some great ideas. I think he should just have people in the company that can slow him down, I think that's the main issue at 22cans, that he is the sole founder, so his will is the law, this wasn't the case at Bullfrog nor at Lionhead (where they were two and four, respectively).

 

I've seen it before where an "idea-guy" gets to basically run a project without interference and while ignoring the feedback of the other people on the project, it tends to not end well for anyone involved.

 

http://forums.cdprojektred.com/threads/33354-Interviews-and-Articles-2015?p=1542435&viewfull=1#post1542435

 

• The game is “pretty difficult”, and you can die frequently even on easy if you’re not careful.

 

Here's to hoping that the "pretty difficult" isn't anything like The Wichter 2's "pretty difficult" aka "frustrating" (I am, of course, referring to the difficulty at release, not the current state of the game).

Still playing Guild Wars 2, found out I'll need to do a Dungeon to be able to complete the personal storyline, which kinda sucks as it ruins my idea of playing this as a semi single-layer game. Meh Also rediscovering a lot of the other annoyances that made me quit the game at launch now that I'm back in areas that pose somewhat of a challenge.

 

So figured I'd go back to Bioshock, which didn't last long. The hacking minigame seriously gets on my nerves, I mean it's bloody everywhere! The level I'm in (the theatre place) also just screams "filler content!", I mean, I really don't see the point of it storywise, so adding those up my motivation to continue was pretty much nihil. Still gonna try to finish it at some point, I mean, everybody's raving about the game so I guess I must be missing something...right?

 

Oh, and I made it to the final boss in WH40K: Dawn of War: Chaos Rising, which is so horrendously overpowered compared to *everything* that came before that I'm just not going to bother (the way I built my squad doesn't allow for some of the cheap tactics people found to deal with him, unfortunately). Too bad because I really really enjoyed that game too, but they just had to ruin it with the final boss. I just hope Dawn of War II doesn't have the same issue, that would suck.

 

I'm afraid I have to agree with the other sceptics here, while I never played any of the Underworlds (or any other Ultima, for that matter) having a much improved TES-style game certainly appeals to me (so sue me for comparing Underworld to TES), but as a developer I can't help but feel that the scope they've set for themselves is pretty much impossible with the funding they are aiming for.

 

I suspect you're probably right. Has anybody successfully completed and released a Kickstarted FPS game?

 

Consortium was a first person RPG, but the scope was rather different when compared to UA, the graphics style was also rather stylized.

 

Judging by the "slow" backing (compared to say, Shadowrun: Hong Kong) I suspect quite a few people have their concerns about how they'll be able to pull off what they're trying to sell, at least I doubt there's that many who doubt there are cool ideas here. I'm hoping they go into the *how* in one of the next updates, if they can convince people that what they're proposing is actually feasible with the budget they have then I'm convinced the speed at which contributions roll in will go up rather a lot.

 

 

I finally decided to revisit The Old Republic and check out the housing.  Holy moly, they did a good job with that!  I bought a place in Coruscant and unlocked all the rooms with my stash of credits, and then spent awhile decorating it with my stable of characters.  I've got a lot of cool stuff, but it still feels pretty empty.  Definitely a welcome little diversion from all the story stuff.

 

I visited a public house in Tatooine just to see what other people are doing.  They give you a lot of real estate to work with!

How does it compare to the player housing in EverQuest 2 (still my measuring stick when it comes to player housing in MMOs...how I wish that game wasn't left to wither like it was by SOE, *sobs quietly*)

 

Anyway, still playing through Guildwars 2, made it to level 65 or so with my Sylvari Thief, currently I'm just exploring and completing areas to make it to level 70 (though I have a bunch of level up scrolls from rewards chests and such) to get access to the next bit of Personal Story content. Looks like my Bioshock playthrough might have stranded in the theatre level once more...

 

 

I'd say it is better.  While it doesn't have the absolute freedom that Everquest 2 had, it has a ton of hooks for items and you can change the templates to mix up small, medium, and large objects.  The houses themselves are brilliant, they are big and scenic with a lot of rooms.  It's also very easy to have all your characters access your houses, so I have an Imperial room with all my NPC's from that side, and a Republic room with the others.

 

Glad to see that at least some MMO developers are still considering player housing as more than a checklist item (though, actually your ship was supposed to be your house iirc from SWTOR launch, and it was rather a failure in that regard).

 

Guildwars 2's player housing sort of feels like one (a checklist item I mean), while it has some nice features (it evolves based on your personal quest) it ultimately isn't a place where I *want* to be with my character (at least not my Sylvari, maybe other races' are better, though I sort of doubt it) whereas in EQ2 I *always* logged out in my house if I had the chance.

 

I loved in EQ2 how your house was really *your* house and that you could display your conquests there (including some rare weaponry you acquired through sometimes very long and arduous quests even though the weapon itself was of no use to you, it was still a status symbol), it also made for a rather convenient way to keep players doing "stuff" without it feeling like a real grind (not to mention, that combined with a form of level scaling it managed to keep quite a bit of the "old" content interesting and avoided that certain areas ended up being entirely dead, a problem that WoW suffered from to a major degree before the Cataclysm revamp)

 

Anyway, looks like I'll have a deeper look into SWTOR's player housing, if that stuff is done right I might even install the game again.

I finally decided to revisit The Old Republic and check out the housing.  Holy moly, they did a good job with that!  I bought a place in Coruscant and unlocked all the rooms with my stash of credits, and then spent awhile decorating it with my stable of characters.  I've got a lot of cool stuff, but it still feels pretty empty.  Definitely a welcome little diversion from all the story stuff.

 

I visited a public house in Tatooine just to see what other people are doing.  They give you a lot of real estate to work with!

How does it compare to the player housing in EverQuest 2 (still my measuring stick when it comes to player housing in MMOs...how I wish that game wasn't left to wither like it was by SOE, *sobs quietly*)

 

Anyway, still playing through Guildwars 2, made it to level 65 or so with my Sylvari Thief, currently I'm just exploring and completing areas to make it to level 70 (though I have a bunch of level up scrolls from rewards chests and such) to get access to the next bit of Personal Story content. Looks like my Bioshock playthrough might have stranded in the theatre level once more...

I'm afraid I have to agree with the other sceptics here, while I never played any of the Underworlds (or any other Ultima, for that matter) having a much improved TES-style game certainly appeals to me (so sue me for comparing Underworld to TES), but as a developer I can't help but feel that the scope they've set for themselves is pretty much impossible with the funding they are aiming for.

 

If they would have the budget of a modern Elder Scrolls game, then maybe I'd be more willing to accept that it can be done, but as it stands: nope.

 

There are also some other things that I have my reservations about (aside from the ones already voiced by other people): linking a single player/co-op game to what seems to basically be a MMO (which is why I didn't back it back then), how the hell is this going to work? Practically as well as technically (I mean, how are they going to manage the complexities involved with the small budget they have?). And how will this impact modding, or does this just mean no modding (which would be bad imho and is in my mind also one of the huge shortcomings of DA:I when compared to TESV: Skyrim)?

ME is a game with a fixed character that eventually fell into the trapping of its own system by having to resolve every situation through a binary choice.

 

Generally speaking I haven't found games that do moral system well, the consequences never reflect the player choice and end up diluting the main storyline. I much prefer games like ME where you're playing a character that has a small variation of choice but with depth rather than a bland character with plenty of choices. Plus I do hate it when games enforce their interpretations on you rather than giving you free choice, Chaotic Stupid can still be roleplayed in a tabletop setting for as long as the DM will put up with it. Games tend to be less forgiving of it, so there really is no point to having a choice that will end in a reload.

The problem with ME isn't necessarily the binary choice, but the fact that, at least in ME2, there isn't really much of a choice. You either play the shining knight or the douche, the game mechanics actively punish you for not sticking to one or the other (there is a mechanism in the "alignment" system in ME2 that decides based on a weighted percentage of paragon/renegade choices you've made whether you will be allowed to use persuasion/bluff so if you don't stick to your chosen "alignment" you at some point will no longer be able to persuade/bluff your way out of any situation). I must say that I was quite disappointed when I found out about this...

 

Also note that the above only applies to ME2, it wasn't the case in ME1 (because persuasion etc. were actual skills iirc) and I have no idea whether they did something about this for ME3.

 

And really, this is the general problem with "moral choices" in games. There are usually mechanisms in place that "force" you in one direction.

Blizzard simplified the classes and got rid of a lot of the redundant skills in this last expansion, so it is actually easier to jump back into the game than it used to be.  

 

Yes, but skills were only redundant due to their ineptitude, different builds used to be possible but Blizzard pretty much killed that option with Wrath of the Lich King (Arcane Power/PoM/Pyro anyone?). And a lot of the "redundant skills" would more accurately be described as "situational skills", cutting those killed the flavour of a lot of classes (but that's another discussion entirely).

 

Quite a few other games actually manage to do skill "trees" (they don't have to be trees at all) perfectly fine without the need to entirely revamp the skills and their associated tree with every expansion, Everquest 2 for example, were skills (or entire skill trees) are added with expansions and the tuning of abilities was generally fairly minor. Their splitting of "skill XP" ("AA" for Alternate Advancement) and "leveling XP" was also pretty neat imho.

Judging by how my class still plays the same (though I wasn't exactly that high level when I quit GW2) it seems ArenaNet also got things right, at least to a fairly decent degree.

 

Blizzard just did a bad job imho, and instead of fixing it they scrapped it, because apparently they assume their players are too dumb to handle anything but a cookie-cutter promoting skill system.

 

 

Ken Levine’s New Game Is Open Worldish Sci-Fiish RPG

 

What he’s got planned is an open worldish (“but not necessarily outdoors”) RPG, sci-fi, PC, probably first-person, chapter-like structure, brand new setting, add “ins” rather than add-ons, and a Passion System.

 

It definitely sounds interesting!

 

What is this fascination with open worlds lately? I miss the days of tighter and narrower sprawly environments, like say the Spencer Mansion in Resident Evil, or even more recently, the Asylum in Arkham Asylum. It carries the good parts about backtracking, where familiarity with the environment felt nice and intuitive.. the place environment became home. Most open world settings as of late feel very unforgettable and unnecessarily padded.. to keep it on topic in regards to Levine, I'd say BioShock 1 had it right with Rapture. I hope this open world thing is just another phase the industry is going through before the next big thing arrives.

 

 

You know, Skyrim happened, and now everyone wants slice of this pie. Same like it was with MMOs few years ago. Every single open world game I played was so boring after a while, and as you say, the setting of them and story is completely forgettable.

 

http://www.thejimquisition.com/2015/01/the-jimquisition-we-need-more-spencer-mansions/

 

He might be controversial sometimes, but this episode is exactly taken from my mind... I sometimes wish, that we could again get new Final Fantasy with HD prerendered backgrounds and static cameras. FF IX-2 made this way in collaboration with Sakaguchi-san would satisfy most of my wet dreams... Unfortunately this will never happen

 

 

There's a new Resident Evil: Revelations coming up, these games stick to the old formula a lot more (eg. Revelations 1 is set for 90% on a single big ship). I hope Revelations 2 will do the same (and maybe tone down the obnoxious bossfights, or at least give us filthy casuals a way to get past them without too much frustration without making *everything* a walk in the park.

I saved one of Keyrock's friends!

 

Trying to finish Bioshock (never made it through and I'm back in the area where I usually quit, so we'll see if I make it to the end this time...). The story isn't really grabbing me, but I gotta finish this, then move on to 2 and Infinity, my gamer cred is at stake

 

I also hit Mastery Rank 17 in  Warframe, they changed the test in one of the previous patched so my preparation was wrong, which means I needed two tries instead of acing it the first time around.

 

Aaand, I also picked up Guild Wars two again, my lvl23 Veggie Thief was still patiently waiting for me after two years (I got two "anniversary gifts" on login). One thing I noticed is that my build still played like it used to (in as far as I still remembered anyway), in World of Warcraft I probably wouldn't even have recognised the skill trees anymore after that much time... (*adding* to a character is imho *much* preferable over redoing entire classes with each bloody expansions. Did ya hear me Blizzard?). Edging closer and closer to lvl30 though I feel rather purposeless, I finished the last story mission I had at lvl23 and now I feel like I'm just grinding (by completing map objectives) to lvl30 so I can get more story...

I enjoyed DI1 co-op with a friend, not sure if I'd ever have finished it solo though. The game also suffers from a pretty boring (and pretty long) first area, the game only really got fun in the city and it became even better later in the jungle. Never got around to playing the DLC or Riptide though.

 

Can't say I'm very impressed with the graphical direction of the sequel. Curious to see how it turns out (same for Dying Light, which, at first sight appears more interesting than DI2)

Tried to get through Scourge: Outbreak, a third person cover shooter. Pretty awful imho, characters too similar and horribly bullet spongy enemies. Meh, uninstalled.

 

Still trudging through Wasteland 2, made it to Canyon of the Titan. Can't seem to really get invested in the game for some reason. Having fun when I fire it up but can't say I feel any urge to make it to the finish. Shame.

 

So after a bit of lugging through Canyon of the Titan I went back to my WH40K: Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising, game is still good fun, apparently now has steam achievements too (though it appears I lost all the GFWL achievements I had).

 

 

 

 

Maybe if it goes way overboard and they run out of goals they will do something else.

2.5 million stretch goal - Scrap the game and make a linear first person shooter with massive setpieces and an overabundance of QTEs instead. 

 

Nah. Action FPS-RPG with TWO branches.

 

Dating simulator with qte sex scenes and plenty of SJ issues.

 

 

so new game from David Cage

 

I think you got your Davids mixed up Trololol

 

They're only asking for 100k?  If there is any goodness left in the world they will meet that goal in a matter of hours.  Then they can open up PayPal support and I can toss them some moneyz.

 

I don't think they use Amazon anymore if that is why you are waiting for PayPal.. still need a CC though

 

 

Ah, that's why it's asking me for my credit card info instead of allowing me to click through to PayPal. Kind of annoying.

 

As Bartimaeus intimated you should turn on file extensions as well, instructions here. That should make virus.png.exe attempts more obvious since the double extension should then become visible.

 

(stupid Microsoft with their moronic default options)

It's crazy, to me, how many people have them disabled. I don't understand how people get along without them - desktop, at the very least, would be unusable for normal file downloading and such - would have to view everything in Windows Explorer where it actually displays it.

 

You can enable file extensions in Windows 7 by opening any folder, clicking "Organize" in the top left, "Folder and search options", "View" tab, then unchecking "Hide extensions for known file types" in about the middle of the list. Vista is probably the same - don't know for 8.

 

It's even more crazy that Microsoft after all these years still thinks it's a good idea to turn them off *by default*.

 

Btw, do note that bugs in image libraries have been found a few times already meaning that malicious content could be installed into images without having to mess with the extension (see here for example).

 

Also, if you're not already use NoScript (in Firefox) I'd highly recommend it (though it makes certain websites tedious to visit, whether they are worth the effort if they're this badly built is imho, debatable), especially after the news of hacked (Flash) advertisements being served from Yahoo, resulting in infection of every single computer that ran those (see this comment).

 

Also do not open anything you consider suspicious without confirming with the person that seemingly sent it that they actually did send it to you.

 

I spent like 15 minutes wandering around in the library's vents, I'm absolutely certain there is no filter left in the vicinity, also the big mutants are very tough and I've run out of ammo. I dumped almost all my ammo into them only killing one and the knife really doesn't do anything. So I'm completely lost, choking, with no ammo while big beasts eventually hunt and kill me.

 

I actually think this would make a fitting canon ending for my play through.

Last Light I had to switch to easy difficulty eventually. 2033 I don't remember needing a gas mask in the library, I think I mostly ran from the Librarians. May be restart that level with a guide? Also I don't remember any Librarians in Last Light, or is that in an expansion?

 

Yes, it's one of the DLC, the exploration one named Kshatriya in the Factions Pack (which was really fun, wish they made a game around the concept though). I'd say getting the Factions Pack just for Kshatriya is worth it.

Two that I backed that were released and generally well received (to my shame, I haven't gotten to playing them yet, I know, I know ), both are RPGs

 

Consortium

 

Unrest

So Beamdog has access to a D&D license, I mean, to make *new* stuff?

 

Now I'd lie if I said the prospect of a BG(2)-style game weren't exciting, but I'd appreciate it if they left the actual Baldur's Gate name alone, the saga was pretty much finished (there were some interesting concepts in other threads/forums for post ascendance gameplay, but I don't have much faith in anyone but inXile/Bioware pulling those off properly), time for them to prove on their own they can create an experience that is as memorable as the BG-series was for many of us.

I spent like 15 minutes wandering around in the library's vents, I'm absolutely certain there is no filter left in the vicinity, also the big mutants are very tough and I've run out of ammo. I dumped almost all my ammo into them only killing one and the knife really doesn't do anything. So I'm completely lost, choking, with no ammo while big beasts eventually hunt and kill me.

 

I actually think this would make a fitting canon ending for my play through.

I just killed them in 2033 but afaik you don't have to kill the Librarians at all (and, as a matter of fact, they are nigh unkillable in Lats Light, on purpose, where they also respawn rather quickly to boot...). Pretty sure it's mentioned somewhere that you have to stare them in the face and they will bugger off (at least for a little while), though I seem to remember people saying that this was slightly dodge in 2033.

 

Then again, maybe the Librarians in 2033 Redux *are* the ones from Last Light, in which case staring them in the eyes *will* make them bugger off and actually trying to fight them is just a massive waste of time and resources.

 

 

Personally finished up the new Shadow Warrior game, it was good fun, though the controls were dodgy and sprinting down a flight of stairs is very likely to get you killed (*facepalm*).

 

I tried starting Dark Souls but, wow, is this a terrible *terrible* port (even with the fixes). Even the tooltips in the tutorial aren't adjusted for KB/Mouse, that combined with the outright sluggish movement means that I'm glad I bought this in a sale because I doubt I'll be playing much of this.

I thought Tomb Raider 2013 was an enjoyable game (too much annoying QTEs for any rating higher than "enjoyable"), but a terrible Tomb Raider game. It felt more like what I'd expect from an Indiana Jones game than a Tomb Raider.