majestic

Whoever writes Discovery's scripts has no sense of scale. I realize that most sci-fi writers - well, most people to be fair - have no sense of the scale of space but this episode was just ridiculous. Starbase 1 is 100 (in words: one hundred) AUs away from Earth, and a bit over a light year from Discovery's position, and it'll be a perlious journey for Discovery because the area is swarming with Klingon ships. Eh, what? 100 AU is roughly 2 to 2.5 times the distance from Earth to the Kuiper belt, give or take a few AUs. Why would a starbase be there? And why does it look like Starbase 1 is orbiting a planet when Discovery gets there? Even accounting for the fact that every Trek show played it fast and loose with the warp factor scale the journey of a light year is so short that it can't possibly be a problem. Even the NX-01 could get there in a matter of hours. Pfeh.

To paraphrase RLM a bit, I CLAPPED WHEN I SAW THE STAR DESTROYER! I wonder if they're going to shoehorn the driods in or if they're going the way of the bad feeling.

Oy, I'm definitely going to watch it, because I'm a sucker (especially for Stargate), but some part of me can't help but rather have a nice ending to Atlantis and Universe than this... action buddy comedy version of Raiders of the Lost Gate. =/

...and a disagreement between the director and Harrison Ford (backed up by virtually everyone else) about whether he truly was a replicant or not. Anyway I saw I don't feel at home in this world any more - what a mouthful of a title. Genuinely good and it's nice to see everyone's favorite stalker in a movie, and even if Frodo's character sometimes feels like failed expy of Walter Sobchak he's actually trying to act for a change, instead of just looking wide eyed.

This looks so bad that the only proper way to describe it would be filtered. Looks like a ****ing cluster**** of ****ness, and cheap to boot.

It's well worth watching. Especially the intro (the first 5 minutes).

The short version: Going by your post, no and no. The slightly longer version: The second season and the first half of the third season is great entertainment. The first half of the third seaon does get a good deal of social commentary, but it never becomes techy sci-fi in the way of Stargate or Star Trek, and after the first half of the show the Chris Carter Effect comes into full swing. The writers never had an idea how to deal with the storylines and they increasingly become less sci-fi and more space magic. And in the end you'll find out that...

Humm. Discovery had a strong run of actually good episodes after its hiatus, which probably was because all the moody, edgy lighting and Not!Trek stuff fits the mirror universe to a tee, but this week's episode was a dumpster fire. Well actually the dumpster fire started last week at the very end with the reveal that *sigh*

Nonsense, the Nazis are on the moon:

Guilty as charged. Silly me assuming the blurb was accurate.

Well what do you expect from a hive-mind?

Uh, sure. That wasn't at all about Blizzard mishandling what could have been a decent response to class necessity in raid setups. Not sure why you sound like you're disagreeing while repeating what Ion said about it verbatim. Probably because I'm disagreeing with the reasons given, not their conclusion. I do agree with what they were saying - just not the way they came to said conclusion. ghostcrawler was often stubbornly refusing to acknowledge issues. That's not being misinterpreted... Edit: Changed the wording to make it clearer.

Uh, sure. That wasn't at all about Blizzard mishandling what could have been a decent response to class necessity in raid setups. Party only buffs weren't an issue way back during Wrath and that was before "bring the player, not the class" started. Bring the player, not the class substituted certain class based raiding slots for parsing based raiding slots. Or in other words, why bring a shaman if a mage can bloodlust as well, is more mobile and does more dps? Except for the cases where encounter design "fixed" that. Our hunter once had to flop out his undergeared rogue for Valiona & Theralion heroic. Cuz bringing the class to that encounter trivialized it (well technically it trivialized the added mechanic of the heroic difficulty level).

Careful with the flamethrowers lest you end up like Anthony Peter Coleman:

Meh. I'm getting a little envious. I have a ton of vacation credits that I can't use at the moment. I'd like a job where nobody would miss me for a week or two.

That would fuse Origin, the Windows store and Steam into one massive market behemoth over night. The prospect is as terrifying as it is hilarious. But Microsoft + EA + Valve = 1 + 1 + 1 = 3. HL3 confirmed!

Here's one for Ben, assuming he actually reads this thread. Eh well, something for everyone else: Have "fun".

As I said what I know of the Hero Engine and the way other games using it went (Faxion Online lasted three months) I'm pretty sure the problems run so deep that they are, essentially, unfixable. Not without what amounts to constructing a new engine anyway. Back when SWTOR was released and the game got a lot of flack for the engine IF (or someone from Simutronics, not sure) came out of the woodworks and claimed that BioWare licensed a very early version and insisted on finishing it in-house, blaming the poor performance on BioWare. Oh and yeah, we had a nice little "what could have been" in the dedicated SWTOR thread not too long ago. So much... wasted potential. Loved the raids though, every second of it. Asation and the Dread Palace rank among the most atmospheric experience I've had in MMOs. Mechanics and difficulty wise games like WoW were ahead, sure, but in terms of pure enjoyment and game world integration BioWare was just so much better than everyone else. You're also right of course, the first few months were difficult for players. Most quit, understandably. It certainly looked like EA forced an early launch to not miss the holiday season and to capitalize on WoW's somewhat dwindling subscriber base at the time (Cataclysm was a terrible addon). Also I once read an interview with some of game designers that worked on SWTOR where they thought they had two or three months before enough people reached maximum level and seriously participated in the endgame. Well reality ensured and players were 50 two or three days after launch. 's just another case of game developers not knowing how their own game plays.

Oh, BioWare can modify the engine, and they did, heavily so in certain parts. It's just a messed up pile of garbage that is essentially unfixable except by relplacing it - compounded by the fact that BioWare acquired it in a very early stage, but the current ones aren't that much better anyway, and IF who bought all the rights to the Hero Engine from Simutronics is in financial dire straits and has been for a while now. And actually BioWare has done an impressive job with it. It's just not noticable because hotfixing that requires some downtime is ridiculous in this day and age, especially when compared with Blizzard who can hotfix parts of WoW on the fly. Idea Fabrik, before their problems, offered the "HeroCloud" service where licensing the Hero Engine was relatively cheap for a cut of any future profit of the game - and hosted by IF, on their servers, maintained by their engineers. Patching something in the HeroCloud had a one week preparation requirement and always came with a downtime of at least 8 hours. And this was with the most current version of the engine, in 2015... with, uhm, 7 years after BioWare acquired the engine specifically because it was supposed to allow live game development (i.e. the option to change the game assets in real time while playing, which is why it makes for really good rapid prototyping, see TSO). Oh and IF promised DX11 (yes, 11) support for the Hero Engine years ago. As of mid-2017 it was still... on the roadmap. Go figure.

Now I have flashbacks of my reloading orgies in the Resident Evil games. "Oh, wait, I can do that using two less bullets." *reload* The fourth one was particularily bad. Finishing the game with 20+ Magnum bullets is a complete waste.

Oh, nice. That means I'm buying SteamWorld Dig on the Switch as soon as possible. Started Darkest Dungeon on the PC after getting it on GOG though. Okay so I'm 10 hours into my campaign and I figured out what the classes do, how the mechanics work and a bunch of my heroes died due to bad RNG (currently the game is really fond of making me eat three times on short missions, geez), and a bunch more due to bad decisions. I mean what could possibly go wrong exploring that last room even after finishing the quest? I just wish the upgrades weren't that expensive. Even with extinguished lights and on high risk missions the rewards appear a bit paltry compared to the costs. =/

A nice e-mail reminded me that I forgot to pay my motor club membership fee. Somehow slipped my mind. Must be getting old. *sigh*

There's also often some cutting involved. I remember discussions with fellow posters way back about Sailor Moon and I was a bit surprised in just how much content disappeared in the english dub (e.g. the first season finale going from a two-parter to a single episode where nothing much makes sense).

On one hand, realistically I'm with KP on the issue. We'll never see a GRRM written end to his series. The best we'll get is someone else finishing it for him (imagine for a moment the utter horror of Elio and Linda being allowed to do that). On the other hand, buried beneath the cynic lies the hopeful guy who started reading the series two decades ago. The one who actually hopes against all reason that HBO pushed the final season back to not come into conflict with the book release schedule. Oh, wait. He's submerging again... and gone. I'm not buying the book even if it does come out. FU, George.

q3dm17, when picked by utter b00ns. Ah, whole nights of joy.