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"Classes have been simplified to make the game more approachable for new players." What new players? Just go ahead and rename it to Star Wars: The Sims Republic, already. Couldn't be any worse than what they've been doing since 4.0 dropped. A 5 level cap raise because that's right what's needed to look even more fabulous while you show off your neato CM gear on fleet, or "play" through the monthly 15-minute cutscene snoozefest. And yeah, shank tanks were fun, but it's about time they did something about that. Jugg "tanks" topping DPS in regs was ridiculous, and this is from a jugg tank player. But instead of fixing how the #1 mitigation stat is useless for PVP, they just up and nuke the layer of complexity provided by stance dancing. Worst of all is I'll probably throw at least 12€ their way to satisfy my morbid curiosity. Bah.

I'm not sure it reinforces your point, though I wasn't necessarily disagreeing with you. Evidently it's players gobbling this **** up. That doesn't mean DAO players demanded further consolization and, uh... the rest of the changes that DA2 and DAI brought. It's like saying that fans of Ciudade de Deus would rather have more movies in the vein of Transformers 2 made. It's all part of EA's business strategy, and they've been doing it across the board. Aim for the absolute widest possible audience for all your product lines, and if that upsets long time fans of <IP>, well, tough. If you sell more copies than if you didn't, claim "SUCCESS!!1". If you don't, do it anyway, but can any sequel plans and dismantle the corresponding studio.

best game I never played

Meanwhile at Sony HQ... No, seriously. Why the **** would they do this? Bethesda games' only redeeming quality is their moddability. Who are these people?

Funny, that 2010 Bioware have them beat in this regard. In DAO you could try and fight your way through a party that was obviously designed to be, if not unbeatable, certainly overpowering. Defeating the encounter meant missing the jailbreak sequence. Beyond that, the consequences for your choice there weren't that far-reaching, but at least the game allowed for it, mechanically and narratively. Fast forward a few years, you have Biower producing a turd of an ending in three different flavors, and an Obsidz that wants to protect its players from "bad choices". DAO isn't spectacularly profound in its C&C, but when it does it better than your game, well, maybe some reflection is warranted. Don't do drugs bad choices, kids. (brb just signing up for a KKKodex account real quick)

Cool. So you can play as a Super Mutant in FO4?

I misinterpreted you, then. I assumed you at least somewhat care about AAA gaming, what with you posting that Jim Sterling rant and so forth. I'm in the same boat, myself. I built a gaming rig recently... but have close to no interest in any AAA titles. And I've tried. Couldn't stand DAI's MMO-lite gameplay for more than 3-4 hours. DOOM came free with my display -- still prefer Brutal Doom. The games I've enjoyed the most in 2016 are Age of Decadence and Fallout 1.5 Resurrection. I'm currently playing Fallout New Vegas with a bajillion mods, a game that came out in 2010. Need to check what all the hoopla around TW3 is about, though. @Ros: I am a late 90's consumer, and early 2000's. A ton of bells and whistles covering completely unambitious design a masterpiece does not make.

I don't know mate. While the video is informative if true, seems to me like management/the higher-ups/suits are just doing what they've been hired to do -- the butthurt is misplaced. You won't find (m)any people going "YAY microtransactions in my single player game!", but look at the profits these big name publishers are raking in. The market rules, and the market keeps vindicating EA/Ubi/SQEnix/etc, year after year. Might be time to find another hobby. Or just stick with the odd indie, once every few years.

Well. As Zoraptor said, blacklisting can only really be evaluated after a pattern. A single instance does not make a pattern. However: Bubbles is one of the two interviewers-to-be for the Gamescom event. Note, interviewer. Not editor, not "staff", not janitor's second cousin twice removed -- for those of you having trouble keeping track of who's who, whose personal info was asked for, and when. On the other hand, this from Brother None: Sorry man I’ve been slammed with GamesCom prep, but wow did that stuff blow out of proportion, haha. 36 pages?! So Brian and the rest of us didn’t get to see his schedule until a couple days ago, but he’s fully booked. It’s all tier 1 sites so I don’t know if Codex was ever going to be on the list but regardless our interview schedule is fully slammed, nothing we can do about that. Honestly though I know from experience both as a journo and a dev that you should be very careful with anything shared in confidence, better safe than sorry on that stuff. But just to clear up a couple of points of confusion, I don’t think your press demo was cancelled, I’ll ping Techland to clarify that – oh and you’re free to drop by our entertainment demo as well, of course! Also, what’s this about blacklisting? You’re not blacklisted by us or Techland, that’s just nonsense. I know what I've read from the Codex. So 50/50 chance it's bull, I guess. As for pledging, I backed W2. Wasn't particularly impressed, and didn't finish it, so despite liking TToN's pitch, I'm adopting a much more conservative wait-and-see approach this time around. Especially after the console release announcement. :smug:

These complaints, are they more or less petty than blacklisting a site for raising a stink about your PC-exclusive console release?

I read the whole post, and the problem I have is not with the tone or the message, but rather, the facts. Presenting facts impartially is apparently less important than railing, for the umpteenth time, against "the left". Here's the "freedom of expression against PC" that was being prosecuted: (much art, so freedom, wow) You won't see me defending hate speech laws. But I'm thinking the same response would have been triggered if an "artist" had begun posting "Behead those who insult Islam" posters around, much like what happened to Abu Hamza al-Masri in the UK. The "artist" is also apparently a PEGIDA supporter. But that's ok -- far left is a no-no, but we don't care about the far right. Seeing as how he didn't get committed or declared insane, I guess the prosecutor's request to have a psychiatrist examine him amounted to nothing. Note: it was a prosecutor's motion, not the court's. A single prosecutor being a tool is hardly proof of a far-left government conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids suppress any dissent against PC and immigration. And no. Raising concerns about immigration in Sweden is not an offense punishable with four years imprisonment. If it were, the whole Sweden Democrats party would have been thrown in jail. But what do I know, I'm not a "journalist" like Pamela Geller. Oh, crap. I guess that means I'm lying down grinning, and bearing it, right? Ah, why bother.

What's with the fascination with rape around these parts, anyway.

Try adding straight-leg deadlifts whenever you're hitting the back. For some reason, it's the only exercise that leaves me sore in the upper back. It's also a good idea not to deadlift on the same day you squat if you're already doing them, so you're hitting two birds with one stone. You could also try eccentric pull-ups. Great for building... your pull-up strength. Generally, don't bother finding different "exercises", but rather try different ways of doing the basic exercises you already are familiar with. Play around with tempos, rest times, eccentric/concentric focus, etc. Good luck.

Words are a medium, they are as restricted a medium as a strip of film or a marble stone or a canvas or a touch between two people or a motion before the eyes. There are things that can be done to express what you can via the medium and things you cannot. The medium will always bring its limitations, as will the artist as will the spectator, listener, viewer, feeler. This shouldn't be seen, in my opinion, as a devaluing of any medium, though, only an expression that all mediums are limited both in what they can accomplish and in the requirement of shared understanding of meaning. Yeah. Though, as usual, it's not as simple (?) as OP would suggest. Language is not just a medium. Language actually strongly influences the way thoughts themselves are formed. I'm sure this has come up before in these forums, but for anyone interested in how this seems to work, look up the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. OP is also wrong about scientists, of course. When trying to express notions that seem alien or impossible in the macroscopic world or otherwise beyond our normal parameters of understanding, they resort to math. The strangeness results from trying to put into common words what the math is saying. This is interesting, and tied to the previous point, because math allows us to progress and advance in fields that we do not "understand". Math is also a language of sorts, but not one that comes naturally for most people. For those to whom it does... it really is a ****ing marvel to watch, though. Humbling, too. edit: who/to whom, i cannot into words

Best Game Evar finally got a gameplay teaser and English(ish) pitch. http://collective.square-enix.com/projects/270/undungeon Looks interesting.

Well, we're going off on a tangent here, but from my limited non-software engineer perspective (I only took some CS classes in uni), I'm not sure it's so simple. If the data is encrypted or otherwise protected in memory (i.e. the game doesn't simply read a byte that tells it how many of X you currently have), Cheat Engine would not be able to do anything. Code/memory injection-type attacks are a thing, and countermeasures exist. You'd have to reverse-engineer the protection first and then write a custom application to inject the desired values. Essentially, a second crack. Did they even bother cracking the Keep thing for DAI? And that wasn't even "encrypted" AFAIK. Realistically, I don't know how much effort it would take to hide/encrypt/protect the game from such fiddling, especially if the decision to implement the microtransactions was more a management meeting thing after the basic design had been laid out. edit: yes, to lock you out, the game would indeed have to dial home.

According to the rumors (based on wikileaks) she is taking the same medicine as people with narcolepsy, parkinson's and alzheimer's. But it can also be abused by people who wish to stay awake for longer periods of time. Of course there people trying to meme her of being really sick, unfit for standing during the upcoming debates. Lincoln is suspected to have suffered from severe mercury poisoning caused by some pills he took for melancholy. Mercury poisoning symptoms include tremor, fits of rage, insomnia, and memory impairment. Thankfully he stopped taking the meds shortly after inauguration. I'm sure Hillary is just following in his footsteps.

There is something that doesn't add up, though. You say taxing the rich doesn't work because they have the resources to avoid paying, and at their current taxation levels, it's cost-effective for them to do so. But GD says 80% of tax revenue comes from the richest quartile. Which one is it? A sovereign debt of $19 trillion is not as problematic as a household debt/disposable income ratio of over 110%, because unlike the Fed, Joe Sixpack can't print money or use personal sovereignty to declare all his debts null and void. And in a consumer-driven economy, if consumers are choked by debt service, who's left to drive the economy? Shifting a bigger part of the tax burden onto lower quartiles is bad because most of that debt is consumer credit and mortgages, which you'd see a massive default on. So rather than fight fiscal fraud, reduce legal loopholes, and cut back spending to sensible levels, let's just... tax the underclass out of existence. A government so overtly unfair, as you admit yourself, would soon be seen as an invitation for revolution.

Funny how that works. Because right now somewhere around 11% of all wealth in the US is in the hands of just .01% of citizens (.00025% hoarding a bit over 3%). And many of the ones who have the most are still bitching it's not enough. And by the way, the flat tax is the most regressive option out there. A flat federal income tax would later combine with state/municipal taxes for an extremely uneven distribution of tax/earning ratios, punishing the poor(est) the most. You like this idea, why exactly?

Well, reports on unappealable automated bans from GTA5 and Take Two issuing a C&D and using intimidation tactics against the devs of the unofficial MP mod give you an idea of how much big name publishers care about bad PR nowadays, when balanced against protecting their microtransaction-derived profits. I know, I know, apples and oranges. In other news, WH40K: Eternal Crusade is leaving Early Access in a month. While it's obvious that this will be no Planetside, judging by comments, the launch is shaping to be a total trainwreck. Anyone here plays it?

I don't know, lock you out of the game for disassembling the code or whatever. If they are pulling this and their engineers aren't completely ineffectual, the savegames and even the way the game stores in memory how many of X you currently have, will be encrypted to prevent people from giving themselves billions of dollars worth of consumables with Cheat Engine. Between this news and the previous comments about further consolization, you guys have effectively killed my interest in this game, saving me at least 10€. Thanks, Obsidian Forums!

Are there in-game cheats that allow you to give Praxis kits to yourself? It'd be pretty stupid to have that and then sell them separately. There's always trainers I guess, but can they ban you over that?

That doesn't describe the current situation for many people. It's not asking people to choose how best to get the policies they care about implemented (which sounds great in theory), but rather asking them to choose how best to avoid policies that they feel are unacceptable... only both serious* candidates advocate policies that are unacceptable for many people. So yeah, negative voting. The system as it is structured rewards corruption and backroom dealing. And what you're proposing by suggesting that folks only vote for candidates with "realistic chances" (as defined by whom?) is that the US remains trapped in a sort of twisted self-fulfilling prophecy.

Hmm. Ruthless Powermonger The Ruthless Powermonger treats her country and her people as personal possessions. She is completely unscrupulous and she will let nothing stand between her and her goals. Sometimes she can develop a streak of paranoia which will endanger friend and foe alike. Of course, the alternative isn't much better... Barking Buffoon The Barking Buffoon is a great political dramatic actor. People see him as a strong and competent leader who will save the nation and restore it to its historical greatness. But behind his mask of bombastic rhetoric hides a weak-minded, vain simpleton. Those who really know him, know he is an incompetent man.