majestic

Male gaze, something something. /thread

Galactic Starfighter at least was additional content. Strongholds was... yeah. A good way to teleport between planets and the fleet before they changted the fleet teleport cooldown.

Rise of the Hutt Cartel only had Makeb and Scum & Villainy (unless you count that instanced "world" boss as content). Very fun additions to the game, but not large. The other stuff like the achievement system in the 2.0 patch was by far and large what the game was supposed to launch with. Compared with the original roadmap that I posted in this thread at some point it's easy to see how BioWare's been selling normal MMO content patches as expansion ever since they had expansions. We're talking about a company releasing an additional operation difficulty level as content patch after all - after months of waiting. Still, wouldn't want to miss having played. I enjoyed the original instances and most of the operations and the things it does well the game does better leaps and bounds ahead of other MMOs. The most important one they kind of failed at though: Creating content at a pace fast enough to retain a healthy player base. I feel like having posted this before. It kinda rhymes, from one stanza to the next. /Lucas

By the looks of this picture, unfortunately, this looks more like it is going to be a rebuilding project:

As if that is any easier these days.

The top 10 happened when they switched to free to play before and after Rise of the Hutt Cartel came out. The cash shop made some 200 million per year. That's the point I was trying to make, SW:TOR sold well enough and had enough subscriptions to easily cover the development cost (and then some) until the switch to the free to play model. And that is assuming the 200 million dollar develoment cost wasn't blown out of proportion like everyone assumed when the number came up. I have no idea how well the game is doing at the moment. I'm just arguing that while SW:TOR did not become the cash cow EA wanted it wasn't a commercial failure for them.

You mean like when I thought it's ridiculous that - presumably Kylo Ren - speeds towards a lone Jedi in his TIE on the ground level so that Rey can wire-fu over it and slice it up neatly? To quote Luke: If you're not going to take this seriously, I'm out.

Breathtaking drama in this week's Discovery episode by the way. Breathtaking.

I'm hoping Mike, Jay and Rich are already working on a new The Nerd Crew episode. That way we'd get some quality entertainment out of the teaser. edit: For those that don't know. Here's the Solo teaser anylsis.

Meh is about the only thing I got from the teaser. And why is the subtitle The Rise of Skywalker when ever critic on the planet lauded the break with the Skywalker saga back in The Last Jedi, finally freeing Star Wars from the chokehold of Vader and his family? Also really creative. Back at some desert planet (but it's probably Jakku, not Tattooine, nyeh nyeh nyeh, like haha it's salt not snow) riding on a barge like craft, a semi destroyed Death Star shell and a surprisingly... bulky Billy Dee Williams flying the Falcon with Chewie. I guess Rich Evans was right when he said Star Wars is creatively bankrupt. There's no way to make a film in that universe that's going to be anything else than ridiculous pandering or a weird cinematic failure.

No, why would it? The game sold 2 million copies at launch. That's more than half of the supposed development cost right from the start. The game had 1.3 million subs after the first six months, if all of them bought the cheap six months plan the game had it's estimated development cost brough in after February. BioWare information at the time was that the game needed a stable 250k subsribers to keep it going, updated and turn in a small profit. And let's not forget EA sold already finished content that was supposed to be released to the players as free patches early in the game cycle as the first game's expansion. edit: And even with SW:TOR bleeding subscriptions like mad it remained the second largest subscription MMO on the market until it went free to play. Many players don't realize how small most MMO's userbases are compared to WoW at it's peak. The really sad part is that if EA launched the game in summer after some polishing instead of during the holiday season it would have hit the market in WoW's most dire content draught after a much hated expansion with a very nice base. Just imagine Asation and Explosive Conflict already in the game at launch. Meh.

I don't get the point about DA2. Origins and Mass Effect also only had an excuse main plot that barely - if at all - bound a few side stories together (and they are really similar. REALLY REALLY similar). That's okay of course because not everything needs a strong main plot. ME2 was all about the characters and Origins had genuinely interesting stories and lore to follow while you recruited help for the fight. DA2's problem storywise was the lack of interesting world building and forgettable characters - at least compared to other Bioware games. The copies sold and subscriptions retained for the first six months easily made up the development cost (and then some) of SW:TOR and the game was in the top 10 most successful online games for a time after going free to play. It wasn't very well received and the subscriber base dwindled at a record pace in the beginning but a commercial flop it certainly wasn't. By any realistic measure, that is. Applying WoW metrics to any MMO released after 2004 makes literally all of them flops. I'm sure that's what EA was expecting but they probably patted themselves on the back when the game made 200 million dollars per year with a development team on life support.

Finished Sekiro just now. Then I read this article and had a good laugh at the comments. Personally I'd rank the final boss below a few others in terms of difficulty. The only troublesome attack can be avoided with the firecrackers and all his tells and prompts work properly and he has the posture of a wet paper towel. Unlike, say, a certain big burning beast from hell where five times out of ten the kanji and sound effect for the perilous swipe attack just don't work and the attack itself looks fundamentally the same as a normal claw swipe that's deflectable. There's also never going to be a From Software game where hitboxes work like they should. All in all a really great game except for a few instances where it breaks its own rules (hello stealth deathblow not taking away a deathstrike counter on a certain mini-boss) or simply puts bosses in your way that make you do the exact opposite of what you've been doing the entire time. Which would be fine if adapting your play style to the bosses were a core element of the game, but it's... not. Not really.

Better times to be honest. Over at Winterwind (with Gorth now posting there every now and then) we had a fun recollection going as well, about the time - already on the Interplay boards - we had a little issue with the Fallout forums (bad enough to make Interplay want to axe them... or much more) and after a some back and forth posters accused the moderators of being nazis. You know, like Volo alwas does, except in all seriousness. Which lead to the moderator team adopting high ranking nazi officials as avatars and having "Forum Nazi" as forum title. Try that stuff today the mod team would probably demoted over night and the community manager fired.

Wait, what?

I hoped Black Mirror would stratch an itch that the end of Outer Limits '95 left, but... not enough downer endings.

Hoi guys. And gals. It's been a while.

Today I found out that David Firth released an 11th episode of Salad Fingers recently: It's been five years since the last one. Worth the wait? Yeah, you bet.

I take it you didn't like Brotherhood then?

Blizz used to make these fun things for free. Today they're inside a lootbox for Overwatch or Heroes of the Storm.

Well, the "plot" thickens...

The first game I played was Pitfall. The first PC game I played... depends a bit on whether one would count Windows Entertainment Pack games like Klotski or the ones that came with Windows, i.e. Minesweeper or Solitaire. Assuming those don't count as real games the first PC game I played was Red Baron, followed by Wing Commander and Alone in the Dark. Some History Line: 1914-1918 in between, which essentially was Battle Isle with WW1 units.

A real time tactics/turn based strategy space battle simulator set in the Warhammer 40k universe.