majestic

Everything planned for KOTOR 3 more or less ended up crammed into the SW:TOR storyline. From the fate of Revan and the Exile, the death (or not) of the true Sith Emperor and the fall of the Empire by the looks of the new expansion. Even Kreia gets a horribly miswritten and mutilated cameo. That particular ship sailed a long, long time ago. If I might be so bold, creating a SW:TOR account and dropping 5$ into the cash shop generates an account functional enough to play the game for the eight class stories and while they vary in quality somewhat there are much worse deals out there as long as one accepts that it is an MMORPG with all the downsides that comes with, like not having any quest variety outside of the class quests, a lot of "fetch me that" and "go kill these" filler and... maybe worst of all, other people. Some of the group content is also quite awesome.

And for the same problems, same "solutions", it seems. They are going to start selling zero-to-hero level boosts. Apparently, for the expansion they are making it a single player-centric MMO-thing of sorts. Not that I'm complaining, mind. I never joined any guilds and pugged group content and PVP all day every day. Still, the lack of cross-faction play is disappointing given the direction they are going in with the story. I don't mind either even though I did do operations in the past. This is probably what Mythic Bioware should have done right from the beginning. It's hard, if not impossible, to out-theme-park WoW, so not even trying seems like a good idea, although some sort of treadmill has to come - it's too late to do anything else at this point. It's also really predictable. EA is heavily banking on The Force Awakens to draw in new subscribers, so let's see them try to keep them without some incentive. Hrm.

Proper dice are a wonderful thing, they can be truly marvelous with a wonderful look and feel, and you'll be using them quite a lot so it's a good thing to have an upgrade. Might not be flashy but I'm hoping that the dice stretch goal will be reached, but that just might be the p&p dice fan talking.

Finished binge watching seasons one and two of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I ignored it when it initially came out because I kept hearing that it's boring and of poor quality, and while the production and special effects are sometimes a bit on the bad side (especially noticable in the beginning where you can literally see which episodes the entire show's budget went into) I'm not sure what people usually watch when they think this is boring. It was easily more entertaining than the last two seasons of GoT, and the plot is certainly no less contrived or silly than that of other, similar shows.

I'll take that back...

Just to clear up for some people who might be interested what AES256 is and why this is more than unlikely. http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1279619 There is a reason why goverments and in particular intelligence agencies are not very happy with privat persons using encryption. There are a number of attacks that can break any encryption, but they have a few things in common, mostly requiring hardware access at encryption or decryption time - a very interesting one analyzes the sounds made by the CPU during key generation and encryption*, but if that is the case and such an attack was used to break the encrypted files than the fault cannot lie with Snowden at all and would have happened anyway. *Which means, whenever you encrypt something, listen to heavy metal amped to max for increased security. So yeah, that story has a real whiff of eau de merde and propagated by someone who cleared watched too much NCIS. 'Twas probably a russian and a chinese guy hacking at the same keyboard at the same time easily breaking into heavily encrypted files. Like on TV.

To be honest it's hard to say. I've read the books before they were made into GoT (except A Dance With Dragons obviously) so I was more affected by book spoilers in the show, or what I believe really are spoilers and not just detours or omissions made in the adaptations. Still struggling with the decision of whether I should even watch season six next near or not (season 5 also had a drop in quality and tension, but so did the book). Back to the question at hand the entire scene was handled a little differently in A Dance With Dragons and was a little bit more of a surprise, as much as such things can be a surprise after the first four books (or four seasons). The show telegraphed a little too much, I suppose to justify rushing through everything a sufficiently cliffhangerish episode ten.

Reaction videos on YouTube are again epic though.

While I wouldn't say that Guardians of the Galaxy was a better movie than The Avengers (the first one, anyway) it certainly had the most awesome soundtrack since Tron: Legacy, and unlike the Tron sequel the soundtrack wasn't the only good thing about it, although by now I'm really, really tired of origin stories. Oh, and I watched Dr. Horrible, for the... probably hundredth time.

Well, it is successfully funded by now so all is well for now, though it certainly did take longer than I thought it would.

The new raids really were kind of a letdown in terms of game mechanics, but the hard modes were hard for a change. At least in the beginning of 3.0, I haven't played since late february due to a lack of time (and some extensive guild drama), but the amount of guilds capable of killing HM Revan hasn't skyrocketed by the looks of it. I sure hope EA doesn't charge anything for the expansion (or at least not for subs) after 3.0 has been out for less than a year. That would be really ridiculous, so I'm really worried. Smells a lot like EA. Wouldn't mind jumping back into the occasional GSF match though. There's quite nothing like the smell of roasted noobs in the morning. Heh.

Not sure if I misunderstood what you were trying to say but the Ultima series started in '81 and they were definitely single player cRPGs. Hopelessly primitive by today's standards of course, but single player cRPGs nonetheless.

Ok, I confess. Like we all don't know what "Lexx" truly is. The most powerful weapon of destruction in two universes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olr48JgHzWo Pot, kettle, black, as the so inclined would exclaim.

The new XCOM game is... let's say, decent, compared to the original(s). Just like everything else these days it has simplified mechanics and the "core" campaign is a very linear experience, but after years of only having the UFO: Afterwhatever spiritual successors with real time combat it is certainly good enough. You may also want to look into Wasteland 2.

That would be true if Metacritic could not and would not be heavily gamed, especially in the all-important initial weeks after release. Unlike some imagined satanist illuminati conspiracy astroturfing is a real thing done by various companies. Heck, there are companies whose entire business model is giving products good PR. edit: Not to mention that the conslusion that 8 out of 10 possible points constitutes hate and a negative result is utterly inane. That's as bad as the guy over at the PoE general discussion forum that interpreted his 16% of people on the forum thought PoE too buggy for release to mean it should be called early access and everyone agreed with him. Posters started to make fun of him. Rightfully, I might add.

Somehow I doubt that'll happen for the base game. Maybe for one of the expansions. I sure would enjoy having a way to earn achievements without giving THE SAVIOUR OF PC GAMING BY ADDING DRM TO EVERYTHING more money than he already has, but that's just me and my unreasonable aversion to Valve Steam.

Class balance is swapping over from multiplayer games where it is somewhat necessary, and there only mostly due to PVP scales becoming ever smaller and honestly I don't really understand why it is necessary in single player games. All of the Infinity Engine games are a jumbled mess when it comes to class balance and people stll loved them and, well, they still play them to this day. They were popular enough to spawn enhanced editions and ports to other platforms. Yet, for some reason, we can't have a patch for Pillars of Eternity without it fiddling with some class element, and I'm not talking about removing obvious bugs like retaliation stacking with the fire godlike + barbarian AoE damage bonus or chants that say 20% increase but in reality double it. No, I'm talking about things like bringing down the nerfbat to ancient memories so hard you're glad you can respec Kana.

I remember that I got bullied because of Jurassic Park, awesome as it was. I just couldn't stop myself from telling the other students in class that, while the movie is really awesome, the dinosaurs were actually being from the cretaceous period and it shouldn't be called Jurassic Park. I mean the novel at least was called DinoPark (or at least the German translation had the title DinoPark, nowadays I know the original title of the novel actually is Jurassic Park). So there! Go figure. Reading books and paying attention in biology class at the age of eleven. Yeah. I had my lunch stolen among other things. Pfesh.

I guess the new Kickstarter update means that the (first) PoE expansion is going to be announced June 17th.

Oy, time to pull out the analyst hat! *dons* Zwiebelchen is the diminutive form of Zwiebel - which is the German word for onion. Proper article handling in the posted sentences also suggests no native language rooted in the slavic group of languages. Sentence structure on the other hand also pretty much rules out romance languages but rather a germanic one and combine all that with a somewhat excessive, but proper(,) use of commas. Conclusion: Most likely German, so no pitch accent (at least for standard or "high" German, dialects are another matter), just no sense of humor sprinkled with some bluntness. Plus Zwiebelchen posted about being German in the past so there's that. *shrug* I'm kidding with the last part lest I'm being accused of being discrepectful for using national stereotypes. Really. I promise. Honest!

if one genuine wishes to shiver... in the low-res videos, fabio kinda looks like weird al, so first time we saw this we thought it were a yankovic parody o' something we were unfamiliar with. regardless, the clip is great and terrible at the same time, much like so many christopher lee movies. HA! Good Fun! Christopher Lee was probably the only person still alive that could make even the cheesiest Rhapsody songs awesome. I had Magic of the Wizard's Dream stuck in my head the entire day after reading about his death. However, for anyone who thinks him talking in the black speech of Mordor is scary just listen to him sing Magic of a Wizard's Dream in German. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPpTEfEM-hc

I do agree with you regarding the dialogues. Personally I like voice acting if it is good and doesn't interfere too much with the dialogue (or rather the writing thereof), whether it is fully voiced like DA:O or only partially like PoE or Baldur's Gate. On the other hand Bioware's specialty are hero-saves-the-nation/world/planet/galaxy games, they have always been like that, and they moved towards a more cinematic display of these stories even before they were acquired by EA. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Bio has created a bunch of hits and a bunch of misses in terms of plot quality, but they almost always were told really well and set in excellently crafted settings. Sometimes the telling of the barest thread of a storyline is so great that you almost don't notice it. Like Mass Effect 2, which is essentially DA:O in space (just without the gathering the army part, that was rehashed in the third one).

Not to mention the originals actually getting an overhaul to run a little better on modern PCs. Not sure I'd call EA fine, upstanding fellows though, even with their agreement to let backers have them for free. I guess inXile will pay for the overhaul and EA gets to sell them through Origin later on.

That dumb wheel never gave a good indication of what your char says. That was a problem from the get got when they came up with it and my biggest reason why i don´t like it. It´s even worse in the Mass Effect series but Bioware seems to love it. Though, i guess i´m lucky that the translation team did a good job on that and it´s not that missleading as in english (which i also played...for like...2 hours..) The dialogue wheel is the logical consequence of fully voiced player characters. How interesting would it be to have your character just repeat the very same sentence you just picked out of the available dialogue options?

He can't. Just like every other computer science major who happend upon the forums in the past 15 years and complained about silly things not being fixed or parts missing that would have been oh so easy to create and would have made the game that much better. Being able to fix up some minor java program for your programming course at university simply gives one no perspective on how working a complex project really is and how easily a line of code is added and several seemingly unrelated modules broken in the weirdest way imaginable. It's the lack of experience talking, doubly so when someone prefaces his post by listing his qualifications and actually lists currently studying computer science as a reason why what follows is a profund analysis and everyone better heed the conclusions. To quote the ever awesome Tywin Lannister: But the poster's been called out on it repeatedly and has apparently left the thread almost two months ago, kept alive only by good-natured fun and some trolling by even more obnoxious characters.