majestic

I saw that one too. Warning, some spoilers ahead while I rant. The first part of the movie in the future way okay. In the original movie Reese tells us that mankind already won and sending the T-800 back was Skynet's last ditch effort to still win. So the entire "in the future" part of the movie was pretty good. Then Connor sends his father back in time and everything falls apart. We end up in 1984 where Emilia Clarke firing what looks like a Steyr HS .50 (which, uhm, went into production in 2004), destroying the T-800 with a single, well-placed shot, was the first big "uuuuh... WTF?" moment in the movie, then they do things and some more things, Reese remembers things that never happened because THE TIMELINE CHANGED, they dispatch a T-1000 with acid and go forward in time to stop Genisys from going online. Oh, Connor shows up, being transported back in time after having been terminatorized by Dr. Who Skynet. Then some more movie stuff happens, old-Arnie fashions a portable magnet weapon from a PA speaker and finds some other magical magnet stuff that is never used except for the RPG-ish things, but whatever. And then they blow up Skynet Genisys by putting the terminatorized Connor into his half-finished time-machine - because, as we know, only organic matter can traverse through time. Cyberdyne goes boom again and yay, future is saved. Sort of. Then they go and make those memories that Reese suddenly had. Eh... How did Skynet manage to send the Connorminator back in time when he actually goes BOOM enough to level an entire block in the time machine? How the hell did Connor and Reese survive in the bunker with that explosion going on not too far away? How did old-Arnie's memories and programming be transferred to the T-1000 liquid metal while everything exloded around it? Why does the sequel-hook Skynet look like HAL 9000? And finally... Daenerys Emilia Clarke was one striking miscast. Not because her performance was poor (well, it wasn't great either, but what can you do with that material) but because she's a terrible Sarah Connor. Blargh.

The money they made off PoE may or may not be "plenty" - we don't know any true sales figures and we really don't know about the actual game budget except for a few rumors about it being 6 million dollars (or more - but definitely ABOVE the Kickstarter budget). What we do know is that Obsidian was in financial dire straits before the Project Eternity Kickstarter and close to having to shut down, so it's not too unreasonable to expect that some debt was settled by the income - but that is just speculation as well. The one spreading misinformation here is you. You bemoan that people apparently don't understand your simple and reasoned post, but you did your best to misunderstand mine. I said that if you want to add multiplayer to Pillars of Eternity it would either have to increase sales enough to recoup the development cost or, if it would not, add some other way to reap enough cash to justify the resources spent, for instance with microtransactions. It is a financial risk insofar as there is little to guarantee that the added multiplayer will ever amortize itself, let alone actually turn in a profit. That's the way how business works if you do not have a steady source of income capable of buffering losses from high-risk projects (think of Google and their myriad side projects) - that is also why Pillars of Eternity was largely funded through Kickstarter instead of the usual publishing system. Oh, and by the way, stop lumping the Infinity and Aurora engine games together - especially when you consider that NWN was designed from the ground up with user-built single and multiplayer modules in mind. If anything, it makes you look disingenuous.

Also, you can kind of count on some of the features never making it into the final add-on or sucking completely. Oh how they talked about the "Path of the Titans" feature for Cataclysm and all that was left in the end was rework of the existing glyph system. Oh, yeah, and archeology certianly was fun. A bit like ball tortue. Except with dig sites instead of stilettos.

Jupiter Ascending. It's always a bad sign when I have to force myself to sit through a film, let alone coming veeeeeeery close to actually turning it off - that's a feat only Torque managed to do so far, and I have seen and sat through a lot of crap, including the D&D movie, so my tolerance level is fairly high. Damn I don't even know where to start ranting, so I won't even bother. Utter shice.

Indeed, DS9 is the best of all the series. Well, except for Vic Fontaine, he's almost as bad as Wesley. Who was absent for season 2, and the replacement had the charisma and cast synergy of a burning pile of old tires. *shiver*

The deal with Wesley is a bit complicated. Not only is he a Eugene Wesley Roddenberry stand-in he was also written as an obnoxious Mary Sue because of that. To be perfectly honest, even if that sounds unappreciative and maybe a little callous, it is not much of a surprise that TNG only really picked up after Roddenberry couldn't interfere with the production any longer. He also features prominently in a bunch of episodes where he saves the day and makes the other officers look stupid, but that kind of was a side effect of the writer's strike of that time. Allegedly a bunch of scripts were submitted from which to choose one where Wesley gets to show off but they ended up filming all of them because of the lack of new material. It's been said before but the gets put on a shuttle soon enough and then there is this one sweet time later on where he gets what he had coming. Oh, and another minor piece of advice. Do yourself a favor - when you reach season 7, pretend episode 20 ('"Journey's End") doesn't exist. Those of us unfortunate enough to have seen the original run or watched it later without that advice are scarred for life, but maybe you can avoid it. No really, I'm serious. Don't give in and don't be curious. That's not entirely accurate. I think you're right about Wil Wheaton, none of the scripts were his fault at all (well how could they), but DS9 was, quality wise, leaps and bounds ahead of the other Trek series, and Avery Brooks could easily ham it up to Shatner to boot - and before you say anything about the lame first two seasons of DS9, seasons one and two of TNG were horrible as well. On the other hand DS9 was the least Star Trek of all Star Trek. Well, except those JJ abominations.

I never had problems with it. They only thing that always confused me, was the Arena-Button. What the hell was that for? It seemed to do nothing. The Enhanced Edition actually did something with the button I think, but I never tried those so I don't really know. The original button MIGHT have referred to GameSpy, a lobby/matchmaking system that many games used back in the day instead of creating their own - players needed to install the optional GameSpy client and create a login for it to work. It went kaputt a few years back and took some older games' multiplayer mode with them. GameSpy only shipped with the North American release of Baldur's Gate so I have no idea if that is it.

http://dulfy.net/2015/08/06/swtor-gamescom-cantina-tour-qa/#August_7_QA Heh. Chat bubbles, if they can solve the performance issue. That performance issue was the reason why they turned them off during closed beta half a decade ago... but hey, well, now that pigs can fly nothing is certain any more, right?

That is not very surprising. Belsavis is, amongst Taris and, eh, Corellia, the biggest character graveyard of mine. I loathe those planets with a passion. Although in the case of Taris that is mostly KOTOR's fault, and not SWTOR's. Also, you're probably better off with not finishing the Trooper story. While the ending isn't bad in the Mass Effect 3 sense it will probably make you pull out your hair. Heh.

That's true, but not because Obsidian or MCA didn't "quite get" the Sith, it's just that they/he used the game (and Kreia in particular) as mouthpiece for his critique on Star Wars' entire take on the black and white "good vs. evil" angle it has going - which of course is much better used in a typical Bioware storyline/setting.

I disagree - breaking Traya and leaving her powerless on her own is necessarily not sith-y enough. Arrogance is a trait exhibited by many Sith and all the more prevalent the more powerful they are. Not killing Kreia wasn't the most cunning course of action, but where ever have Nihlus or Sion exhibited any cunning at all? That's part of the reason why Kreia considers them as failures, aside from both being only able to live through - or because of - the force. Also the power-struggle between Nihlus and Sion is part of the cut KOTOR 2 content - a cutscene where Nihlus pretty handily shows Sion just how pathetic he really is.

I fetched myself Albion from GOG. Currently grinding levels, much needed cash and some gear. Took me a while to get over the antiquated gameplay mechanics (gold having weight, actually needing food, no context-sensitive left click, it's all so... archaic, somehow) but the game itself is pretty awesome. If a little unforgiving with the combat at first.

But wouldnt that money be recouped by people buying the game due to multiplayer? So basically it would pay for itself. The only factor implementing multiplayer would take up would be time. It'd take time away from improving single player by implementing multiplayer. Fiscally, adding multiplayer would only make sense if the market potential outweighs the financial risk of more post-mortem major feature adding, bugfixing, more patches and added testing overhead in a meaningful way by adding enough sales or if you plan to profit from microtransactions during multiplayer. I don't see either happening for PoE. The former simply because the target audience is too different and the latter would be akin to commiting PR-suicide.

A line of code here, new interface there... I'm sure it's something Josh could put together during his lunch break. Don't be silly, adding network functionality/multiplayer to a design never intended for it is so simple you can have an intern do it. Why bother JE with it at all? edit: To be a little more serious alexis13, no, adding multiplayer to PoE would not be trivial and most likely, given the target audience of the game, would not lead to enough new sales to justify the expenses and problems.

I enjoyed Cole quite a lot, it's too bad that he's an assassin. He has some pretty awesome interactions especially with Solas. He also is a walking spoiler, mostly in hindsight. Like his remark about Blackwall which pretty much reveals everything... and nothing if you don't know what he's talking about:

It's handwaved at some point by Solas. Generally... because magic.

It's even smaller than Lothering, when you factor in the stuff that you can do there (ie. quests associated with it). Kirkwall puts it to absolute shame, which is funny considering how much hate DA2 got. Unlike Val Royeaux or Denerim, Kirkwall was the centerpiece of Dragon Age 2. It's only logical to make the explorable portion relatively large. Skyhold would be a much better comparison, function wise (much like the Normandy in any Mass Effect for that matter) and Skyhold's explorable area is way above and beyond Val Royeaux's. Speaking of urban centers, Kirkwall is about as large as I like them to be. Anything bigger and you'll usually end up with Baldur's Gate, really large but devoid of any real substance.

That's why modern MMOs have the "solo to max level" approach with the real multiplayer stuff happening afterwards, with various ways to help them to get into progression smoothly, unless the game is completely focused on player versus player gameplay. Games like Everquest have just shown that it's not easy to catch up with the general population character level once the game has been running for a sufficiently long period of time - it turns from fun into a job after a while. It also creates an environment that is incredibly punishing for new players and games that ran long enough to notice the population disparity tried their best to fix them - EQ introduced mercenaries, EQ2 came with a mentoring system and eventually remade leveling into solo-able content. WoW's unparalleled success came from being casual from the get-go instead of a second job. I loved Everquest, but back then I was a student and I had all the time in the world to play. It didn't bother me that there weren't any auction houses and you had to stand around at the market waiting for other players to come buy from you (no, really, if you wanted to sell your crafted things you had to actually "play" booth). But Everquest is still running to go ahead and check it out. The base game is free I think. Maybe you can even find someone to play with you, because there is literally nothing you can do without a group (or mercenaries I guess, I quit before they appeared).

I wasted tens upon tens of millions of credits and thousands of cartel coinds on finishing collections back when I still played all the time. That's not weird, that just makes you part of the target audience for free-to-play games.

Yeah, part of Classic WOW & TBC's difficulty came from having to fight the game as well as the enemies, especially with regards to tanking and keeping aggro and having to have a certain setup to get through the fights, or fights being unreasonably hard with certain setups or specs being completely worthless. Maybe it was the sense of being new and all, but the WoW still was more "fun" back then - before I completely burned out on it during Firelands in Cataclysm where they gameplay was the reason for the game being hard, rather than the game & class mechanics. *shrug*

The dungeons that came out after 5.2 were tuned down back to WotLK difficulty levels, but I'm pretty certain that if you could actually take The Stonecore heroic and somehow paste it into TBC it would come out squarely on top in terms of 5-man difficulty. Compared to that instances like the Shadow Labyrinth heroic seemed to be downright, uhm, reasonable.

Derek Smart has always been a nutjob and that will most likely never change, but I'm also quite afraid that Star Citizen will turn out to be heavily molyneuxed when it is released. I wish Chris Roberts all the best for the many, many hours of awesome entertainment he's given me and that everythink works out just the way he wants it to, but the pessimist in me somehow doubts that. Hope I'm wrong.

I wonder if that's retroactive, but somehow I don't think Kalyio would mind that much.

That is a simple issue of realpolitik - everything else would be worse from our perspective. This is particularily true for Syria's regime who more or less is beset by rebels of various factions and almost all of them extremists no damn sight better. We, as "the West", just supported some of the rebels because Assad also has the support of Russia and annoying Putin is currently all the rage, which is at the end of the day just a really silly reason to do anything and doesn't help any. A few years ago we thought removing Gaddafi was a good idea. Look what that has wrought, both for Libya, the EU and the people drowning in the mediterranean sea. Iraq is a mess. Egypt peacefully removed a dictator to elect Mursi (what a laugh) only to end up under the rule of the military after even more chaos and more protests. Given all this, why would handing over Syria to religious extremists the revolutionaries be any better? It's this chaos that allowed ISIS to gain a foothold in the first place, and between them and Assad, oh, well, I don't know, I'd freaking take Assad any day.

Warrior/Champion, but tanking is relatively boring and can be done well enough by the AI (standing in the middle of all the chaos is probably the only thing they're really good at). Knight-Enchanter and Tempest are powerful specializations. Artificer is pretty awesome too but requires very specific gear and one of the best companions is one anyway, so... go with Mage/KE for an easy first playthrough.