Dhruin

Proof? Gaider's comments. Game over. Period. Next. R00fles. Whatever.

I'll stick with Gaider's position on the required sales rather than some positive spin to the public, thanks. You know full well that BioWare are very good marketers and wouldn't publically admit any disappointment. Since I want BioWare to flourish (as I'm sure they will), I wish them much better sales on the next one. Anyway, that's enough for me as this thread goes to crap.

No, it's nothing to sneeze at. I'm still think they would be disappointed with 500k. I'll leave this discussion with David Gaider's comments on sales of "major titles": You can decide for yourself whether JE with it's dev team of 50-80 people is a "major" title or not.

I'm not "chastising" anyone other than pointing out the maximum retail sales value has little value - and I haven't responded to anyone else, so I don't know who the "others" are, Volourn. You said the sales hadn't bombed -- to which I agree -- but I pointed out the sales are modest. None of us know the production costs but we can make some reasonable guesses based on market averages. I'll get back to you on the rest when I have time, after work.

And most titles lose money, so that proves nothing other than JE might not have lost as much as other titles that did even worse (or at best made a very modest profit - we don't know the production costs). 500k is not much of a hit in the modern market and 1M is definitely not a "super duper" hit in the modern market, despite what the "Platinum Hits" sign at thr shop might say to convince you otherwise. You might have predicted 500k but BioWare needs to do much better to survive in the long run. Bottom line, JE did "OK", but no more.

Try remembering to take out the retailer's margin, publisher's margin and console licensing fees and then get back to me. $25M at retail has nothing to do with whether Bio made money or not. The simple reality is that 500k for a console title isn't a whole lot.

I've never seen anyone say it "bombed", but it's certainly modest sales at best. BioWare presumably has the resources to take a long term view and grow the brand but this time around probably lost them money, which is hardly a huge success.

I think these might be reasonably unique situations. If I was looking for a developer for HoMM 5, Nival would be near the top of my list. A track-record of critically-acclaimed TB RPG-related games and Etherlords is clearly inspired (in some part) by HoMM, so they have plenty of experience and some nice 3D technology...although I'm sure the price was right, too. For Dark Messiah, there's a rumour that Gabe Newel took a liking to Arx and/or Raphael Colantonio and really wanted to get a Source project going with them. So, with a nice shiny Source license they set out on Arx2. Problem is, I suspect JoWood might own the rights to Arx, so they were left trying to shop around an unnamed Source fantasy action-RPG project. Ubisoft obviously thought it was a good match.

Not really...what are you reading into it?

I assume that's your summary rather than theirs? Honestly, if they can't tell the difference between the "leveling" system in DS and Kult, they shouldn't review genres they obviously can't comprehend. "Extreme loads of bugs" is simply inaccurate and several of the other points are misleading. What magazine is this?

Ah, the irony.

Divine Divinity 2. Beyond Divinity was a separate game set in the Divinity world but was not a direct sequel to DD.

Just out of curiosity - which site do you value most and what makes it better?

No, no, no - that's not what I meant. I have never, ever written a review without finishing the game - I don't try to compete with those sites rushing to be first (or second, or third... ). I did, however, have some internal debate on a few issues and it took me longer than expected to finish the game and replay some sections. I wrote the article but didn't have a firm score in my head...in the end I rushed deciding on the score because I wanted to finish and move on to other projects. Mea culpa. If you read the article rather than just glance at the score, I still think it stands up. I'm sure others will disagree.

To be honest, I'm not happy with the Beyond Divinity score either, although I am comfortable with the text. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Despite the lip-service people pay to not liking scores (in general - I don't mean anyone specifically) -- they love 'em. So, I don't think we would ever get rid of the score but we did revamp the scoring system and get rid of the stupid category weighting we had, so I hope you will see improvements over time.

Ah well, everyone has their opinions. I would be pretty happy to stand my work up against anything written at the 'Codex but not everyone will see it that way.

You do realise the Top 100 is voted by the public, don't you? If you take a look, you'll see there are more votes for MW than any other game by a big margin - I would say someone from the MW community mobilised their supporters. In the end, it's just a bit of fun.

It has been released in Russia and the UK (not exactly "Euro" but that will do ). GoGamer imports it in the US.

It obviously depends on the definition of "downfall" that you use. With online distribution options increasing and maturing, it seems likely to many of us that the "indie" segment will have a chance to flourish in the future. They won't sell anything like the numbers of a retail console release but if they can make more profit per unit through more direct distribution (because retail sales only return a couple of dollars per unit to developers and then only after the publisher has made their break-even), the production values will improve and players will pay more attention. If you've only ever heard of Spiderweb, that's really only because you haven't really gone looking, right? I have spent much of this year playing games like Mount&Blade, FATE, Geneforge 3 and some Euro releases like Space Rangers 2.

I don't know DigitalNight, so I'll reserve further judgement until I see the details. The press release couldn't be less interesting, however, other than the ridiculous wording. I have reason to think it is unlikely there will be an Arx2, so don't hold your breath.

Being an Aussie, I import most of my titles rather than wait for them to be published here (and to get titles that don't exist here). So...I can't speak about US/Canadian stuff but I've never had a problem. I use shop.game.net for most of my UK orders and they take about 4 days -- can't imagine it would be longer for Canada. As EnderWiggin said, there's no CSS for data DVDs. You might have to pay attention to patch versions (UK or Euro patch instead or US patch) from time to time but that's about it.

Boiling Point is well worth a look - a very ambitious game with a lot of interesting ideas, even if Deep Shadows had trouble pulling everything off. The next patch has a pretty cool list of fixes. I also agree with mkreku -- you won't like it so so just stop playing now.

It got good reviews from the press, although players were less enthused by the buggy release. Still, everything I've seen about the Extended version has been positive and there's still some additional improvements to go yet for the English version. I don't think it will be a classic but I think there's a fair chance it will be a solid game. The catastrophe is completely specified. The story and quests have generally received the most praise.

They have released zero (useful) information about the game. Here's a quote from the only interview on the web: (6) A lot of rpgs actually has the feature to team up with other characters to form a party but in shooters the player himself in general is a one-man-show. How does it work in Grafan? Herb Marselas: We haven

Lots of combat - it's undeniably an action-RPG. There are a large number of dungeons and combat sequences that are pure combat. In between, there's a large world with several towns / villages, lots of farms, churches etc etc with plenty of NPCs, dialogue and quests. The whole game is much bigger than IWD2, so there's probably a lot more combat -- but also a lot more dialogue, if that makes sense. I'd check out the demo and do a couple of levels of the dungeon (don't do the whole thing or you'll have to do it again) to see what the combat is like. After this dungeon in the full game, this is the main overland area (this isn't all of it, but you'll spend the most time here)... http://www.planetdivinity.com/maps/map01.jpg You can wander this area freely talking to NPCs and taking on quests but no question many of them will end up in combat- but not always. Would it satisfy a FO fan? No. Stats don't have an impact on dialogue and the player is generally playing a heroic role. Really, though, can you name many modern games that come close to Fallout in this area? As a side comment, the first dungeon is simply too big, but then it's on with the real game. As another aside, although you wouldn't describe wiz8 as an action-RPG, I'm not sure there's actually less combat.