marelooke

Scrum is a development methodology based around short iterations (sprints). One of the hallmarks of scrum are short (~15min) daily meetings with the team where everybody gives a short status update (what have you done yesterday, what are you going to do today and what problems are there, if any), this meeting is often just called "scrum" or "daily scrum". There's a lot more to it if you're interested.

Ditto. I'll be pledging in the next day or two. Edit: I also love that they're going to add Weresheep into the game. You really started something there, LordCrash. Hehe, I must admit that I did not expect that when I started that little cult... But hey, it had worked quite well for PE with the OOoE, so why not for D:OS? I wouldn't be surprised if you ended up in game, it wouldn't be the first time

Well, we'll see about that. Imo the game should be stong enough to attract way more poeple than it has so far. We only have to spread the word and communicate the game and its concept in the right way. Must admit I'm baffled it's still not hit the funding goal yet, everybody must be broke from Torment, P:E and Wasteland I guess... Or have been living under a rock and have no idea who Larian is... Or both maybe?

I've been willing to give that game a try but I still haven't finished any of the original Divinity games. I finished D2 before ever touching the first ones, starting on a playthrough of Divine Divinity now (meaning I'm concurrently playing through Fallout: New Vegas, Planescape: torment, NWN2 and Divine Divinity, switching as my fancy strikes me). I should add the UI is still the one thing that keeps me from playing NWN2 for any length of time, I actually had a setup that worked well for me way back in the day, but then they patched the game to "fix" the complaints about the UI and I've never managed to really configure it to my liking again. On that note, PS: T has a pretty bad UI as well, I'll take the one from BG/IWD over the one from PS:T any day. I actually switched it to easy once I had to start fighting in the flying fortresses (i don't think I ever have done that before), the huge number of stuns and knockbacks combined with the sheer amount of enemies turned those places into a really un-fun experience for me on normal, maybe if I had invested more in summoning it'd have been more doable, I dunno, winning/surviving fights just seemed too random. Btw, the "overpoweredness" takes on new levels in the expansion.

Finished Divinity 2: Flames of Vengeance. It was decent, though the total lack of any dragon flying action before the ending was a bit of a bummer, especially since said ending wasn't particularly easy (well, the dragon bit wasn't, the bossfight was). I know they didn't manage to put in a few areas due to time constraints (I have the anthology lying here with the developer's journal ), wonder if those are somehow accessible with the developers console... So now I've returned to my PS: T playthrough, just managed to become a wizard so still not exactly far in I'd think. Wonder if there's any use putting more points into intelligence past 19? Or should I start upping my charisma? I went with maxing int/wis at character creation then stuffing the leftover points in charisma fwiw.

Cool update. The fact that they mentioned that you can play as two male or two female characters hopefully also means that I can change their roles. Hopefully this means that rather than having a buff dude warrior covered in armor and a sultry vixen ranger showing skin and cleavage, I can have a female warrior covered in armor and a dashing male ranger showing of skin and ... I'll leave that to the imagination. Anyway, if the system is anything like Divine Divinity, then the starting "profession" won't have much bearing on the game other than starting stats and I'll be able to build both characters any way I want to, that's what I'm expecting, anyway. Hopefully the armor sets for female character will include actual functional armor, rather than just leather bikini, chain bikini, plate bikini, and Princess Leia style bikini with comically massive single pauldron. There actually was some uproar over the female's cover art clothing on Larian's forums. I haven't played Divine Divinity (yet) but in Divinity 2 female characters have "real" armor. I guess it's a bit unfortunate they decided to go the populist route with the cover art. Then again, I always think of leather thieves "armour" more as comfortable clothing than real armour, and some cleavage is definitely going to pay off when running into a male guard... (better hope he's not gay though might just backfire in that case) On a related note I always think it's funny how people really can't roleplay a female character but have no issues roleplaying orcs, demons, elves, fae or whatever...as long as they are the same gender as the player playing them... A discussion about this is what resulted in the "you can play whatever gender you want" announcement. I'm not sure I'm really happy about them giving in on this front, it was already possible to have the "other" character be controlled by the AI (so it'd just be another henchman in dialogues etc, still fully controllable in combat of course) and I worry that accounting for two same gender characters might have an impact on storytelling.

Correct, if you play neutral you can't take a prestige class.

Intel i7 930 @ 2.8Ghz 8GiB DD3 Nvidia GeForce GTX460 2x1TB 7200rpm HDD (Win 7 / Gentoo GNU/Linux)

Just finished Divinity II: Ego Draconis and started Flames of Vengeance. Having some serious stability issues with the expansion though. I also made it to Old Owl Well in Neverwinter Nights 2, the goal is to finish the expansions this time (especially Mask of the Betrayer which I quit partway through the first time and I can't remember why...)

Larian was selling the Divinity Anthology recently, the boxed version certainly was worth it, whether the digital one is worth it is a personal choice of course. I do know their margin on the box was pretty much nil though. They're from Gent (en: Ghent) actually (the difference is ~150km ) a city you definitely should to visit if you ever find yourself in Belgium (disclaimer: I might be biased as I live there). Nice, I was in Belgium last year for Tomorrowland. Awesome country, great food and friendly people Awesome, that's like right where our company's office is (alas, no free tickets ... ) They're from Gent (en: Ghent) actually (the difference is ~150km ) a city you definitely should to visit if you ever find yourself in Belgium (disclaimer: I might be biased as I live there). I'm sorry, mate. But it was only a typo (though a bad one)..... I forgive ye this one time, blasphemer! But only because of the awesome sheep!

Close to none, WOD belongs to CCP and they make their own games (MMO). It is, as far as I can gather, also on the backburner at CCP, they are already running two MMOs (in the same, shared universe) one of which is due out soonish (the other has been running for 10years already). CCP is one of the few companies producing MMOs that can count on at least some interest from me as I consider them the least likely to produce another tired EQ/WoW clone and actually *really* innovate. They sure have the track record (EVE is unique as a MMO and one can hardly consider a MMO that is celebrating its 10th birthday and is still growing a failure...). Alas they also have a track record for writing pretty awesome lore and then utterly failing to do something with it ingame (though admittedly, they are working on it).

I think they patched the dvd check out a long time ago, at least I've been replaying NWN2 lately (from my original disks) and haven't had to put them in since the installation. Anyway, bought the GoG version for MoW

$11.99 here, kind of much for just MoW, might just go ahead anyway as I'm replaying NWN2's OC currently (never finished MotB for some reason, planning on rectifying that) These guys maybe? EDIT: put it in my cart and the price wend down by nearly $3, weird. Not complaining though

They're from Gent (en: Ghent) actually (the difference is ~150km ) a city you definitely should to visit if you ever find yourself in Belgium (disclaimer: I might be biased as I live there).

Wish I had $500 to spend, this would so be my pick for the Combo Designer... So many years without RPGs to really look forward to and now it's like pouring good stuff...

How about "An eternity of kittens" or maybe better: "An eternity with kittens". The best of both worlds: it has "eternity" and "kittens", win-win!

Indeed, the game's not supposed to be a rush to endgame. I think a fairly big part of the "wow clone, lol" crowd just played it that way... Whether or not it's a rush to endgame (what is "endgame" anyway?) doesn't change the fact that if the endgame falls short then there's not much reason to keep playing a MMO, everybody gets tot their endgame sooner or later, and the vast majority of players gets there sooner rather than later (especially if "later" is 6 months to a year after release). While seeing all the class storylines is fun 80% of the content you go through while experiencing each one is shared for all classes of that faction. Also don't forget that classes are almost straight mirrors of the classes of the other faction, reducing diversity even further (iirc there are, or were, slight differences in the top tier ability, which won't matter before lvl40+ anyway and not at all if you aren't interested in ops/fps). The gameplay (combat mechanics, skill point system etc) are pretty much the definition of a WoW-style MMOs (even though WoW itself has now done away with the skill system, for the wrong reasons imo, but that's another discussion). On a personal note, I didn't skip a single quest and only one Flashpoint (Directive 7, which is a lvl45+ or so FP anyway) while levelling, if I levelled fast it wasn't because of rushing, it was because of playing a damn lot. Can't say I rushed to 50, at least I don't think so. I just spent a lot of time playing on release. "Rushing" to me means skipping things or going out of your way just to level faster. I never do that on my first playthrough, I'm a terrible completionist. While levelling my Sorcerer (my first character) I did every quest I could find and I've done all but one flashpoint while levelling. The inventory size limits are something I consider really severe, but I'm a terrible packrat, always have been and always will be. If you aren't and aren't a big fan of flashpoints or pvp then I guess it's a non-issue. Assuming you were referring to my post when you said "bored out of your mind", I'm not. I actually have a fun guild to run operations with on a casual basis, the problem is there isn't exactly much to do outside that barring logging off and doing something else (or grinding flashpoints/dailies or starting a new character). Maybe it's just me, but for example EverQuest 2, despite all its failings (one of them being trying to be more and more like WoW in the last few expansions) has so much content there pretty much always is something you can dig up and chase after. I've played that game for over a year and I wouldn't even dare claim I even *know* about all the dungeons (let alone, factions, quests etc) there are (and I'm a pretty avid wiki/lore digger on the side), some things are just so far off the beaten path, just out there to be (re)discovered. If you compare SWToR to that, well, if you didn't skip things while levelling the only thing you can do once you finish up your class story is starting a new character really, because there's pretty much nothing you won't already have seen while levelling, there is close to zero room for exploration and discovery. Arguably I'm comparing a bloody old game with a bloody new one though. @Nepenthe (but certainly not just directed at you) Maybe your MMO experience has been limited to WoW and its clones (not surprising since pretty much every 'new' MMO is trying to "kill" WoW by copying it, an approach doomed to failure imo, but I digress), but there are still games out there where you can grab a bunch of guys/gals (or just go at it on your lonesome), pick an area and go explore stuff. *That* is what I want in a *good* MMO*RPG*, there is sadly even more of that in World of Warcraft than there is in SWToR. The "endgame" doesn't have to just be raids (or whatever le nom du jour for them is), the fact that dailies (or some variant thereof) + raids are pretty much the de facto endgame nowadays is just sad. Give me back some sense of wonder, some "dude did you know about this"? I realize this is probably hard to pull off in such high profile titles as every little thing will before long be mapped and turned into a guide, but really it doesn't seem like anybody is even trying. BioWare most certainly wasn't. I will agree with you there. And yes the storylines I've seen are generally good. And as usual my post only contains my humble opinion, ymmv and it probably will.

Eternity: The Waiting Actually made that up as a joke name, but I dunno, doesn't sound half bad...

In all honesty I think they lost more people due to delivering a horribly unfinished and unpolished endgame. My entire guild kinda failcascaded after banging our heads against a broken boss in Karagga's Palace for TWO MONTHS, the game was released in January and in April or so that boss was *still* broken, in fact, pretty much *nothing* had been fixed by then. That's when our main tank (and guild leader) tossed in the towel. Pretty much everyone quit after that, me and one other guy kept sort of playing until the first major patch, which didn't add anything worthwhile to the game really, a few weeks later the Fleet was down from ~100 at peak times to ~7, which is when they merged servers the first time. I moved my character and let my sub expire. Came back to the game recently because a friend of mine picked it up because it's 'F2P' now (more like SubOrPayForEverythingAndThenSome, it's even worse than Lord of the Rings Online in this respect, if anything, consider it shareware). So yeah, since the 'F2P' limitations are stupidly severe I re-subbed for 3 months. So what has changed in those 8 months since I quit? suprisingly little. They got around to fixing the broken bosses (eh, yay I guess...), added one new flashpoint (Kaon was already out when I quit), two new raids (sorry, "Operations") and a horrible amount of daily quests (daily quests are the pinnacle of uninspired MMO design). Now the raids are well done, as are the flashpoints. And of course being able to swing a lightsaber, shoot lightning etc is fun as ever. But that's when the grind sets in, need better gear? Grind dailies. Want some item just for looks? Grind dailies or play on the $$ tombola. Wanna just explore? Eh, tough ****, nothing to see you haven't seen while levelling. SWToR's endgame is stale. It may fun for someone new to MMOs or die hard Star Wars fans, but I've been playing MMOs for a while and I'm not a big enough Star Wars nut to be blinded by that side of things, and really once you look past the setting I'm sorry to say it's a rather bland WoW clone certainly as far as the endgame is concerned (and arguably in a lot of other respects as well, not in the least actual gameplay mechanics). Now levelling is a different matter, the storylines are rather well done, unfortunately the class/companion storyline missions you care about are rather few and far in between meaning you'll spend a lot of time either running the same flashpoint over and over again for xp or re-doing the same quests you've done on other characters and quite a lot of these "shared" quests aren't exactly that great. Eh, guess I digressed a little bit from my initial point...anyway, that's my experience and my opinion, ymmv of course.

Topping KotOR2? I dunno, delivering a *finished* game would be a nice start. Sorry Obsidian, it's been so many years (nearly 10 according to WikiPedia) and I'm still bitter (which I guess only goes to show how much I cared). Much of the ending in KotOR2 didn't make any sense whatsoever with only the content available in the game (it did once I read up on all the stuff that was cut and available in the game files though). That I finished it (at least) three times in that state (light, neutral, dark) says a lot about the potential of the game (I think I only did 2 playthroughs of the first KotOR, light and dark). When I tried the mods that supposedly add back some of the missing stuff I couldn't keep the game stable, so I never played those much and given how BioWare has now utterly nuked, murdered, butchered and mutilated the storyline I can't say I have much interest in going back.

Having worked as a consultant for quite a while I can say Steam's DRM is pretty terrible. It occurred more than once that I'd arrive at my hotel (no internet connection) and Steam would refuse to let me play any games due to some Steam update it'd detected the last time I had used it. That meant 5 days without any Steam games, and lo, by then most of my 'modern' games were on Steam. Good thing I always brought a book as well. So I started to buy games on disk again, only to be betrayed (well, the words that actually come to mind won't make it through the filter I'm sure), because half of them require Steam anyway (I'm looking at YOU Skyrim, among others), without prior mention. The same goes for Uplay (Far Cry 3) and Origin (Mass Effect 3) for that matter. Anyway, I still avoid Steam if it's an option, alas it very often is not (unless you consider pirating an option, me, I don't). And no Steam or Origin or Uplay is NOT a choice, out of them three I'll take Steam any day.

Calling Elminster "that wizard dude" made me rofl and cry at the same time. That said I sort of started my cRPG career with BG2 (I actually played a little bit of BG1 in a cybercafe which convinced me to spend my allowance on BG2 when released, ergo, I finished BG2 years before I did BG1) so it has a special place in my heart. The main thing that set BG2 above (many) later attempts at similar games is the way they combine a rather linear story with enough freedom to actually take a break from said story without it all breaking down into aimless wandering à-la Elder Scrolls ("OOOOOOH SHINY" *clear dungeon* "Right where was I, oh yes, saving the universe from impending doom, let's get back to that... Oooooh, shiny!" repeat ad nauseum). In BG2 each sidequest was again a rather linearly focused well told story in itself, quite often taking you around a few areas as well. It is quite common for sidequests to feel tacked on, tedious, awkward (why the hell am I doing this when I should be doing *main quest objective*?) or an afterthought, I can't say I had that feeling with most of the sidequests in BG2. DA:O got the main quest part nailed down, unfortunately there was only the main quest, the few side quests there were boiled down to picking something up while resolving a main quest. No Windspear Hills or Trademeet-style optional quests. You wanted a break from the main questline? Well, better hope you got another game lying around. Which brings me to a second "issue" I have with many "other" cRPGs: the strict division in "acts", "chapters" or what-have-you. Now my memory might be fuzzy but I don't remember actually getting locked out of any major sidequests in BG2 when you advanced the main story. Firkraag will still be there, there'll still be a blind Beholder in the Sewers and people will still be dissapearing in the Umar Hills. In the vast majority (tbh I don't think I personally know of any exceptions, then again I have only played a limited number of games available) of games out there you better make sure you have rounded up pretty much everything before advancing the main quest, this for me creates a kind of pressure to round up things before progressing that I can't say I think is very positive for the overall experience. This is what I feel is the main thing setting BG2 apart from other games and something that I can't say I've ever seen mentioned elsewhere as a strong point of the game (it obviously has others, and weaknesses, but those have been discussed here and elsewhere over and over already and obviously "de gustibus et coloribus non disputandum est").

Your reply has inspired me to give the game another shot, keeping the above in mind does give an interesting take on Thornton and how to play him. I at least might finish the game someday, which is nice because I really liked the concept. I'm not sure how making the timed dialogues optional would be an issue for anyone though: make the defaults the way the game was intended to be played by the devs and let people that dislike it turn it off. It's a single player game after all, who cares how others enjoy playing it? Pretty much this. Then again it's the same bugs that were in Oblivion and before that in Morrowind. Bethesda is very protective of its bugs and is very keen to see nothing bad happening to them To be fair though I actually almost finished Fallout 3 before it got patched while I had to shelve NV for a few weeks before it was playable (in the literal sense, it would crash after ~10min, consistently) and I wasn't exactly alone. While this evidence is anecdotal at best I do think more people had more major trouble with NV early on (right now they're pretty much the same bug-wise and in fact a few of my F3 pet-peeves have been solved in NV). And let's be honest, neither Obsidian nor Bethesda have a reputation for bug-free games, having one work with tech built by the other was expected to be...interesting...at least As to journalists slamming Obsdian harder than Bethesda, well, they write what they're paid to write... Suffice to say that I consider most "major" review sites to have even less credibility then a politician in an election year.

Tried and dropped Afterfall: Insanity. Game looks good, story looks decent, but it just *feels* horribly clunky, then there are the "puzzles". Ran into this super annoying timed reactor puzzle and dropped the game there and then (turns out there are two more "reactors" hidden someplace that I totally missed due to the moving bag-o-potatoes that is your character, having to run stupid amounts and go through an annoying cutscene each reload didn't help any either) Oh and I also probably should finish PS: T, F1&2 and the IWDs (played all of them but never finished any of them). I thought back when I tried it first that PS: T's engine had aged really badly compared to some of the other games.

I quit early this year and haven't had even the slightest urge to come back, and as I recall I've been playing slightly longer than you have. That Annual Pass thing was a clever ploy, fortunately as someone with no interest in D3 I could avoid being tied up. Hypothetically, if I were to even try to come back, I think the attempt would burn out pretty quickly - my old guild, co-founded in 2007, no longer has the critical mass to even regularly do ten-person content: at its peak in 2008-2010, it was a fully fledged 25-person raiding guild. I have neither any inclination to attempt to rebuild (having quit any leadership roles at the end of LK) nor any drive to find a new home - which, aside, would involve paying the extortionate server transfer fee multiple times over as the old guild was the sole Australian/SEA guild on that US-Pacific time server. $250 to transfer them all? Good god. Mop seems almost built around burnout anyway. During Cata (the previous expansion for those who don't know) there was the issue that people felt like they didn't have enough to do. They fixed it by having all reputation rewards being based off daily quests, and had it so that you could do about 20 daily quests for one faction for 2 months, and not hit exalted. And there are Three full raids, with different levels of loot, and the "vault" boss is just a dunderhead that's parked out in the world. I'm sort of vacilating on it right now personally. I'm on the verge of quitting WoW, just kept playing for the raids and my guild basically, the rest I don't much care for. The MoP lore is uninteresting as is the atmosphere of the epxansion. It's well executed but it doesn't fit in the lore. Would have preferred to see some actual content (more Burning Legion would have made sense) instead of an expansion around an april fool's joke. The LFR system has imo destroyed casual raiding guilds, finding people that can be bothered to show up even half the time is proving next to impossible, basically the game is just continuing the decline it's been in for years, though I'm sure it will continue to do "well enough" until Blizzard finally decides to pull the plug. In my mind it all started to go downhill with the introduction of the LFG system and arenas, which destroyed the realm communities and battleground PvP respectively, everything added later was just adding insult to injury. That said, I've picked up Guild Wars 2, started out as Sylvari, so far the Sylvari lore seems to be heavily inspired by the Fae from EverQuest 2 with some typical Elf stuff tossed in with a slight twist. Started out as Thief, not quite sure if the combat system is for me. It seems to be rather erratic with the dodging etc, might just be practice though, weĺl see. Tried an elementalist first (big wizard guy here and all) but I'm getting rather tired of the lack of imagination MMO developers seem to have when it comes to mage-types, they are almost the same in every damn MMO and it's getting really really (really) old.