Gormongous

Yep!

If so, it's a sign that Sony's much more international than Japanese in outlook. Japan's been very slow to adopt streaming in cases where it would compete with physical media, but the argument for no 4K drive that I'm hearing from Andrew House, Playstation president, is that it's cheaper to deploy 4K content via streaming than via hardware, which is... I don't know. It seems ambitious, considering that 4K streaming is mostly a whiteboard idea for consumer households.

This McSweeney's piece, although a bit purple and on-the-nose like all their stuff, was very popular among my fellow academics this week: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/welcome-to-our-university-were-delighted-to-have-you-but-if-you-think-were-going-to-cancel-the-ku-klux-klan-rally-youve-got-another-think-coming

Sadly, I don't think it's actually in response to adjusted expectations. I've seen this on 4chan and Reddit before: after a big scandal, "gamers" make a big show of not trusting anything remotely related to the subject of the scandal, explicitly to make developers feel afraid that they've poisoned the well and made all future games about whatever impossible. It's entirely a shaming/bullying tactic, as if Hello Games is reading the comments of every Greenlight and Kickstarter game on tenterhooks.

I'm not usually a "media conspiracy" guy, but polls at least are showing that most news companies are desperately trying to make this into a real horse race to keep the next two months of news from being "Seasoned politician destroys amateurish billionaire at politics." Case in point: http://www.politicususa.com/2016/09/06/nbcs-corrected-version-cnn-poll-clinton-four-point-lead-trump.html

As far as a lot of people are concerned, the game's already close to steampunk territory, since the overwhelming majority of the guns are experimental or even postwar models that are only included on the technicality of them being produced in 1918. Maybe DICE thinks they're toeing some line here, but it's definitely already fantasy, to some extent, and hopefully they recognize it with their DLC.

Also, building on Chris' comment about movies being made like marketing (or the press in general) doesn't exist, I think that spoiler-by-casting is one of the oddest phenomenons of modern cinema in the mainstream. As excellent as it was, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy had one of the worst examples of it. I think Kelly Wand on the Quarter to Three movie podcast put it best, paraphrasing John Hurt's line to Gary Oldman: "I am now certain that one of five people in the Circus is a traitor: Colin Firth, three other guys, and you."

Yeah, the patch is for everyone. This removes my last major caveat about recommending that people play without The Conclave. It sucks, you know? The child education system in The Conclave are really good, in my opinion. In addition to having its options more clearly defined, it fixes the two major problems of the vanilla education: you can now educate your own children in careers different from your own, and there's no longer this dichotomy of player-educated characters being geniuses and AI-educated characters being trash. The former's still hampered by the two-child limit for character education, and the latter still happens to some extent because the AI loves its Martial focus for female characters, but it generally makes a more stable and reliable character pool. But it's not really worth it, because the council and favor mechanics in The Conclave are ridiculous busywork. Like, they feel like they went from whiteboard to release without any intermediate stage. The occasional glory that is using a favor with your liege to press your claim in an impossibly difficult war is not worth the mandatory fifty-odd years that have to be spent every game defanging your own council, once you become an independent lord, so that you don't have to interact with the content for which you just paid a five-spot. Some players claim to love it, maneuvering against their own council to achieve their plans, but I think these people have more vivid imaginations than me, since "maneuvering against your council" means paying out favors or gold to three council members, initiating the vote, and then saving up for the next vote five years down the line.

Sadly, the council, voting on laws, and the favor system are all hardcoded... perhaps intentionally, since The Conclave is their most divisive non-joke DLC. There are workarounds on the Steam Workshop, but the medicine's typically as bad as the disease. Also, generally, Crusader Kings 2 has reached a level of feature density that makes mods less and less feasible as corrective supplements. If you don't like the vanilla gameplay these days, you're probably going to find your fix in a total conversation like CK2+ or HIP, which has a holistic design, rather than get your feature fixes à la carte.

Yeah, augmentations-as-Islamophobia or augmentations-as-debt/wage-slavery makes sense, but the developers (despite statements to the contrary) seem to have wanted to tap the richer vein of state-supported racism, maybe because it was in the news, and it just doesn't fit on so many levels. Despite the culturally sublimated trope of Darren Wilson's "black demon," there hasn't been a plausible or substantiated fear that black people will rise up and kill all the whites since the days of Nate Turner, so the fifty million deaths from berserk augs makes no sense as a parallel. Maybe the Germans and the Holocaust, maybe the Transatlantic slave trade, but not racism in the modern West. Also, humanity's experiment with augs ends in a generation, as Chris says, but I haven't heard that the game discusses children born to aug parents. I guess they just stay in the ghetto, too? "This is just the way the world is now," says the game developer from Montreal. Finally, what's weirded me out the most about the consequences of the last game is that lower-class workers weren't the only people who were pressured to get augs. There was a lot in Human Revolution about how the military and the police were almost entirely augmented now. When the various systems of mechanical apartheid was put in place by political elites, some of whom were also augmented like David Sarif, who put it into effect at the local level? Did all the augmented cops and soldiers quietly quit their jobs and allow themselves to be put into camps or blacklisted or whatever? It feels like the first whiteboard session at Eidos Montreal was like, "First the augs were the future, now they're oppressed! What a twist, right?" and then they worked backwards from there. The review that best touches on the problems with Mankind Divided's world, for me, was the one published by Wired, which points out that Mankind Divided is a game that wants us to suspect augmentation actually might be bad, except we play a character who solves all his problems through augmentation, and that wants us to suspect that there are no good cops, except we play a character who's the best cop, in part because his augs give him a third option that the rest of the characters (and the real world) doesn't have. It all just seems really terribly unconsidered, and I don't really agree with Jake Muncy that Eidos Montreal wanted to make a more socially relevant and incisive game but were undercut by the constraints of AAA. From interviews and statements, Mankind Divided seems like exactly the game they wanted to make.

Well, laying aside that quality of writing is important, in and of itself, and the relentless devaluation of well-written prose in favor of "content" is one of the most unfortunate things to see the internet largely champion... No, I don't agree. I think that looking at Trump's campaign and writing an intimately framed essay about the experience of being Trump, especially since Trump's personal and professional lives are the main plank on which he's built his support, has value in the way that railing about welfare queens or Benghazi isn't. Really, what do you critique about Trump? His "policy" seems to be a mix of his latest briefing from advisors and whatever inbuilt preconceptions have floated to the surface of his subconscious. He'll contradict himself, talk about amnesty and building bridges with Mexico, and none of his supporters care. There's nothing to critique about Trump besides Trump, and Keillor does so unflinchingly and yet with a sort of weary compassion that makes for good writing, above all.

It looks like you're getting the verbose reply interface? I'm not sure how to switch back and forth, but in Firefox and Chrome there's just a button on the second tier of icons, a chain with a green plus next to it, that you click to get a dialogue box with not that many options besides a blank, cancel, and okay.

Garrison Keillor pens the most thorough savaging of Trump's candidacy that I've ever read: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-donald-trump-losing-garrison-keillor-20160831-story.html

You can pass on Rajas of India and Horse Lords. They're gimmick DLC that no one really players. You're probably going to need The Conclave, tragically, and Charlemagne has a few features that are useful, but that's it. If they'd fix the bug where children don't get education traits if you don't have The Conclave, I'd probably deactivate that piece of DLC and see if that fixes everything else I hate about the game right now...

Annoyingly, a lot of the really interesting changes deactivate ironman, so I'll ignore those, even though it'd be interesting to play with open interfaith religions and unrestricted vassal theocracies and republics, the game's designers don't want that to be a "real" option, so... Anyway, here's my favored list of settings: "Major epidemics" set to delayed dynamic. I don't like waiting for a date, so this setting being "any time before 1100 with limited aftershocks" works best. "Minor epidemics" set to default. Some people might like it set to fewer, but it felt right how often my characters were getting sick, so I'm leaving it there in most games. "Mongol invasion" set to historical. I know I just said I don't like waiting for a date, but the Mongols clean house to a ridiculous degree if they come too early, so I'd rather not risk it. "Aztec invasion" set to off. It's dumb and, because of the geography of Western Europe, only really wrecks the British Isles and the Iberian peninsula, so I don't buy arguments that it's "balance" for the Mongol invasions. "Shattered retreat" set to off. The ping-pong of the old battle system isn't particularly fun, but neither is the enemy army turning on invulnerability and running hundreds of miles back to home base. Given the choice, I'll pick the one that makes already-long wars even a bit shorter. "Defensive pacts" set to off. This one's a no-brainer, the coalition system doesn't belong in Crusader Kings 2 and feels superfluous on top of the already-complex alliance and "religious defense" mechanics. "Gender equality" set to default. You're probably not going to be tweaking the laws to allow for women councilors and heirs until late in the game, but the other option just removes the mechanic outright, so why not leave it in? "Supernatural events" set to on. Same argument, why turn off more content, especially much-needed events, unless you're a deeply boring person? "Dynamic de jure drift" set to restricted. This is almost enough to make me fall in love with the game all over again. Duchies only assimilate into kingdoms and kingdoms into empires if they're physically adjacent or share a single sea zone. No more Duchy of Hereford being de jure Castile because of some random inheritance two hundred years ago! "De jure assimilation duration" set to default. I've thought about setting this to long, which is a three hundred-year duration, but I always start in 1066 and that means that basically nothing will assimilate, ever, which is boring, so... "Culture conversion" set to combination. This is basically a package deal of three good changes: culture only spreads by direct land borders or a shared sea zone, melting-pot cultures like English and Russian appear faster, and mean time for culture conversion to happen is multiplied by three. The two full games I've played, the Low Countries and Italy still turn German, but they do in the fourteenth century rather than the year 1100. Totally essential. "Religious conversion speed" set to long. Again, multiplying the time needed to convert by a factor means that counties flip religion in five to ten years instead of one to three, but it's better than nothing. "Matrilineal marriages" set to on. Duh. The other option exists exclusively for crypto-misogynists who want the "historical accuracy" of their views represented. "Custom realms" set to off. The mechanic is clumsy, the option clogs up the intrigue menu, and there's literally never a situation where you have three duchies, enough money, and enough prestige to create your own title, yet a historical title is out of your reach. "Charlemage events" set to on. I don't like them, they're railroading to the extreme, but the 769 start is a total mess without them, because the AI just can't handle the setup. Necessary evil, right here. "Pagan reformation" set to on. Again, I'd leave them out, but the rare occasions where they happens tend to provide much-needed buffs to the steppe nomads, so whatever. "AI Seduction" set to on. I'm on the fence here about this focus. It's fun to find out your wife is cheating on you, but it's not fun to discover that every AI character is engaged in nonstop infidelity, making your kingdom one big orgy. I'm thinking about turning it off for my next game, since cheating and bastards can still happen via event and it'll cut down on the number of characters with "lover's pox." "AI Intrigue" set to on. Again, on the fence, but AI characters rarely use the Intrigue setting. Still, maybe one bad experience would be enough to turn it off, since the kidnap and murder chains are really powerful if the AI happens to target you. I don't know! The rest are settings with only one option allowed on ironman, so I'll leave them alone. Hope this helps!

Does anyone in or near the CST want to try running a game? I'd do it, but I've literally had to run every RPG I've ever played, so I'm mostly interested in this thing as a way to be a player for once. Here's a guide on Fronts: http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/srd/dungeonworld/14-Fronts.html I'll say, Corps are easier to conceptualize in The Sprawl than Fronts in Dungeon World, but they seem to be mechanically similar things.

Hah, really? I feel like devs have the unenviable choice between paying people a lot of money to consult on cultural and linguistic authenticity, paying them a little and getting "Homeland is racist" written all over their game, or paying them nothing and embarrassing themselves with the results from Google Translate.

Seconded! It's a perfect way to kill thirty minutes or an hour with a quick, satisfying play. It's also one of those gross games that makes me chuckle happily to myself while I play. It's still getting support, with new missions and cards being released, so it's worth picking up for sure.

I think it's just as much that they redid the save system, which was designed for a map and variables that were maybe a third what they currently are now.

I think that the first Crusader Kings is a fine game, but its design was a mess and it's very frustrating to learn the interface and then discover that there's some arbitrary stuff there that's not explained by bad messaging. I would not even think about playing CK1 without the Deus Vult DLC (the only DLC and basically a paid patch) and the "Deus Vult Improvement Pack" mod, which is a fan patch of the paid patch. Once you've got all that, the game itself is reasonably straightforward. You generate prestige through events, through holding titles, and fighting wars, then spend that prestige to buy claims that you press in war. It's much less character-driven and there are plenty of systems that functionally do nothing (the peasant/burgher/cleric/noble meter in each county can be safely ignored, as can the friend/rival system) but I think the germ of what makes CK2 great is present in the prequel. It's also worth noting, this most recent patch for CK2 has drastically improved the game's performance. It's running twenty or twenty-five percent faster for me, with less hitching during saves, and some people on the official forums are reporting up to forty percent increases in speed. You might want to boot it up again, just to check?

It depends if you want to know what settings I prefer or what settings I think would make the most newbie-friendly game. I could do both! I will say, I'm very disappointed that there's no option to disable the "favors" sub-system from The Conclave DLC. It's the worst part of the game now, by far, because you're constantly being inundated with offers of favors and requests for favors when, unsurprisingly for a resource introduced in a late-stage DLC, favors are extremely situational, to the point of being useless. One of my characters got a favor from his lord, the Holy Roman Emperor, when they were both in their twenties and the former died in his sixties with the favor unspent, despite my best efforts and despite the emperor being the most powerful man in Christendom. If you don't want a certain law enacted, don't have an external claim to press, and are in no danger of attack from another vassal, a favor from your liege is literally useless. Worse is a favor from a fellow vassal who's not on the council. If you don't have an alliance with them and don't want to marry any of their family, you'll die with that favor unspent. If there were an option to replace favors with the council with voting based on opinion score, I would say that Crusader Kings 2 has never been better. As it is, it's definitely a good game, but there are caveats.

After Tim Kaine (pro-life, informed consent) and Ken Salazar (TPP), I'm just waiting for Clinton's pick for Secretary of State. If it's Victoria Nuland, protege of Clinton and scion of the Kagan clan, we can be sure that the Forever War will last another four years, at least, and probably open up some new fronts.

Ooh, The Sprawl... I'd be interested, provisionally.

There are a lot of good things about the new patch (moving d_flanders into k_france and d_brabant into k_lotharingia, reducing the stupidly huge and ahistorical k_frisia, for example) but one thing that everyone can appreciate is that there's now a "custom game rules" page that exposes about two dozen variables that people had hitherto had to mod to change. Check it out: What's more, the majority of these options don't disable ironman mode or achievements! Finally, someone in charge of Crusader Kings 2 isn't obsessed with making you play their game their way. Hopefully they can expand the system out and include even more options with future patches...

And, as I said, deterministic chaos (having too many variables with too complex determiners to be reasonably expected to track) is functionally the same as randomness in the overwhelming majority of board games, except those with heavy deductive elements built into the gameplay, and yet most games "fix" their randomness by replacing it with deterministic chaos, even though you can "predict" randomness on a dice roll much more than you can predict what card someone will play in a rocks-paper-scissors battle system drawing from a shuffled deck into a hand. It's clearly just to placate a certain breed of nerd who wants their board games, like most video games, to be power fantasies about absolute control and untrammeled cognition. They want there to be a version of the game where they track every little thing and make all the perfect decisions, even if that's functionally impossible.