itsamoose

If you are satisfied with your story so far, I'd say just go with that character, but make sure you do all the other stuff you want to do before you start the DLC. If you want to play stuff you missed or enjoy the combat, starting a new character is probably the way to go. They've also added in a number of new items, such as runes that greatly modify stats (for example +100% mana capacity, -50% mana recharge) and all kinds of other goodies to play with. Overall the gameplay changes allow for much more diverse builds, and some of the trials (difficulty mods) smooth out the experience overall.

I just finished the Trespasser DLC. Jaws of Hakkon and the Descent were a little disappointing, though they did flesh out the lore a bit if you're into that kind of thing. Trespasser however was pretty fantastic-- a great end to the story, wraps up all the loose ends nicely and sets up the next game. They also added in a few neat features for the single player campaign like having enemies scale up to the inquisitor's level, the ability to sync collectibles across playthroughs, and now all of the abilities have a togglable upgrade that pretty dramatically changes their utility. From what I understand those features were just included in a patch, but if you enjoy the dragon age story I highly recommend picking this up.

It seems to me like the difference between the Star Citizen article and others is that SC was accused of violating federal law without proof. Certainly the poor management of Silicon Knights, and the alleged devaluing of employees by Konami aren't really defensible, but in those cases I don't think any specific allegations were made of laws being broken.

I'm not so sure about that. Sure a lot of it is xenophobia, but I don't think it's a coincidence that the rise of these movements have also coincided with massive deregulation all over the globe, particularly in the case of oil and telecom companies. I'm not saying necessarily that one is the product of the other, just that the two tend to go hand in hand. Then once those groups get into power, they tend to favor heavily pro-business or even anti-labor agendas. They tend to promote agendas to exploit national resources, and remove various regulations or costs that prevent such things from being done, usually under the guise of removing "red tape".

Thanks for posting Miffy, I really enjoy getting a local opinion of things I likely would never have heard of. The new right wing, hyper nationalistic movements that seem to be cropping up all over the world are terrifying to me, particularly in their effectiveness at gaining political office. That effectiveness seems to be largely based on corporate backing and lobbying interests, which makes it all the more worrying in many cases. I've even heard some talk of trying to go to more extreme measures in order to break logjams around projects like oil pipelines with potentially absurd political ramifications.

I don't know for sure, but I think the main issue with cloud computing and real time applications is rendering. Input might be an issue as well, but I think the ping times are low enough to where that isn't really as noticeable and hasn't been for some time. In terms of finances, I would imagine it only becomes a problem when the cloud is rendering the image because now your servers need all kinds of graphics power, which means increased network traffic, a higher latency, more expensive servers, and more power consumption. If the telecom companies eventually get their way and are able to charge different rates based on the type of traffic, I think that would be the end of cloud based gaming.

Isn't PlayStation Now (the thing where you can play PS1 and 2 games on your PS4) all done in the cloud? Either way, many games nowadays do at least part of their processing on a server somewhere, so the trend seems to be cloud assistance instead of the cloud taking over.

I feel like that guy just says whatever he thinks will piss people off the most. I read a few of his pieces in good faith, or at least tried to, and he doesn't seem to have any coherent opinions beyond "you're wrong."

ahh, ok. Well I feel dumb if this turns out to be nonsense. I saw so many posts about it that it seemed real. Anyway, hopefully the topic is still useful.

From my understanding they are pretty good at crisis response, minimally effective in peacekeeping, and an utter failure in public policy. I'm hopeful, but not holding my breath.

To piggyback on that, I would like to see civ style games take a broader approach to their resource systems as opposed to adding in more/different ancillary systems. I've never designed a civ game, so this might be a horrible idea, but I think you could model this in such a way that in creates a butload of emergence. For example, in civ you either have a resource or you don't, kind of like how a military unit is alive or it is destroyed. There isn't really a middle state, for example off active duty or routed. Similarly something like food can go bad, water contaminated, economies booming and busting, etc. Often in these cases I find the resources themselves aren't very flexible, so you have to start creating all kinds of additional resources to handle different systems. So you can have situations where lots of people are converting to my religion because I have a lot of religion points, despite the fact that most of my population is starving (as opposed to say Christianity spreading as a result of the wealth of Christian nations). This may result in a horrible game design, but I like the idea of a civ game where I'm more focused on the inner workings of my civ as opposed to focusing on others.

I wish I saw surprised, but this is a pretty typical Putin move. Find a situation, or create one, where some injustice exists, then play the moralist publicly while pragmatically advancing his agenda. From my understanding of the reporting on these bombings, they really have nothing to do with ISIL but are instead focused on keeping Assad's remaining territories connected.

I've only read a bit of the report, though I understand the citations at least are complete garbage. What bothers me about what I've read so far is just the typical UN cowardice-- they describe the problem in detail but never name names. There is a section about ensuring an open internet with unfettered access, but they don't take the next step and name the telecom companies that are responsible for this not being the case. The report is a lot of high minded language with little to no concrete, implementable policy suggestions. As much as it is nice to see the UN address this kind of thing, I have zero confidence in their ability to move the needle in terms of public policy.

Wouldn't the blurriness of the models have more to do with the aliasing on his Graphics card than the art style? In the video he zooms in on the model to show it doesn't get blurrier, which I assume was him referencing the edges.

I've played a couple board wargames that address this issue a little differently. First, when one unit attacks another, units within it's zone of control (usually one hex) get their power added to the calculation. Next, and I think this is the crucial part, losing units are removed from the board for that turn only. The next turn, the player can replace those units on the board at their resupply zone. I think the stacks of doom issue is a result of both the combat mechanics and the economy of a civ game, where when a unit is killed they are gone and you must go through a lengthy process of rebuilding them. The pincer idea might work, but it sounds like a rule that is a little too specific to some emergent behavior and could likely create other undesirable scenarios, or be entirely inconsequential outside a specific design.

I've played quite a bit at this point, and I think what the game really needs is a kind of beginner bracket where no legendaries are allowed, formats that don't use particular sets, and then maybe a puzzle mode (Kill minion X, Y and Z, with only cards A, B C). Getting some crazy legendary dropped on you that causes you to lose the game is really frustrating, but with a bit of experience you start to realize there are very efficient/inexpensive ways to get rid of most of them that aren't immediately apparent. If the game could create a space like that, which is more about learning the mechanics than getting the best cards, I think it would be a much better experience for newer or less experienced players.

Have you made it to the missions where you can only shoot the lady in the back yet? That was the rage quit point for me. I don't know if this is common in other genres, but strategy games in general seem to love throw in a puzzle level every now and again, which is almost always the point at which I stop playing. Anyway, if you want to make the game a little more tactically interesting, try replacing your scouts with shock troopers and snipers.

I've been playing this off and on for a few months now, and I think with the most recent expansion it has really come into it's own. Like others have said, the inspire mechanic isn't used too much, but some of the other cards have made a few decks viable that otherwise weren't. Whereas a couple months ago I would see the same 3-4 decks and nothing else, nowadays I'm seeing maybe 10 or 12 different decks. I haven't made it back to rank 10 yet, which is where you tend to start seeing mostly netdecks, but I like this game a lot more when it's less predictable.

That's actually a bit of a misunderstanding. The points on SAG's site list the current rate at 3300, which is the amount they are currently paid for residuals/secondary payments. I haven't found any concrete numbers, but residual payments would likely be far higher than this if movies are anything to go by. I don't know if this is still worth talking about since the strike vote hasn't even been taken yet, but I haven't been able to find any information regarding where this agreement will be applied (right now only the largest studios are listed). Edit: misspoke on figure

I'm not sure how useful this will be to people, but I found a pretty good primer on how to create a Lock-Step networking system in Unity. For those that don't know, Lock-Step is a way of aligning the execution of functions and input gathering such that networked computers can run the exact same instance of a program without having to send massive amounts of data over the network. They are pretty common in RTS games, or other online games that require a large number of objects to be simulated. The classic article on the subject is written by one of the programmers for Age of Empires, where he goes over the principles and theory behind the functioning of the system. It's an interesting read even if you never plan on writing your own RTS.

This gave me a good chuckle.

But changing the number doesn't address the fact it is a nominal value. The points on SAG's website say downloadable games start to turn a profit at 2 million sales, which probably wasn't true 2 years ago and likely won't be true 2 years from now. Sales make sense in movies because ticket prices and the like are basically the same across the industry, and there is a known shelf life. A game might sell half a million units at 60% off 2 years later in a steam sale, but that doesn't necessarily mean it went from unprofitable to profitable. That's why software has always considered relative measures like profit and revenue-- the industry is so fluid they are the only things that make sense. I mean look at how many remakes have come out in the last year, and how common they are becoming. Then consider the effect of different platforms, technologies, and steaming services. That article brings up other concerns as well like stunt actor presence at mocap sessions and the use of employees for quick fixes for things, but the 2 million mark seems to me the most arbitrary. From reading their talking points it seems like whoever SAG has put in charge of handling these negotiations understands film and TV development well and assumes games are more or less the same.

I'm not against it, but the idea that the residuals be based on a particular number of sales seems odd to me. Most agreements of this type, even the ones groups like SAG negotiate with film and TV studios, are based on either revenue or profit. Why is a sales number the thing here? What if a game is profitable that used a voice actor, but only sells 1 million units? Shouldn't the voice actor be compensated then as well? I'm not saying SAG needs to think of anyone but their members, but by making the metric an arbitrary, nominal figure they are not doing that. In other words, many of the demands seem like something right at home in movies, but don't make a lot of sense in games. Many of the demands are out of sync with how games are made, funded and sold.

Yeah I can understand the comparison to movies and the like, but movies don't have DLC, only last a couple hours, don't have optional content, and the list goes on. I'm not against voice actors sharing in the profits, but the 2 million sales number seems arbitrary considering they quoted some payout amounts given to executives based on the entirety of the company's earnings and not just one game. Plus there are questions like screen time and lines spoken that are easy to calculate in movies and TV that I don't think correlate directly to games. I see the precedent exists, but I don't know how much of that precedent can be applied. Take a telltale game for example, would this apply to each episode or total sales of the series? How do you quantify something like screen time? Again I don't know how it works in movies so these questions might be answered already.

I know very little about how voicework goes into games, so this might seem stupid, but what do they mean by residuals? I could understand a profit sharing agreement, which requires the game make it's money back at least, but in some cases the 2 million sale mark could mean the voice actors get some form of royalty payments when the developers don't. Also how do they plan to track the sales count? From what I gather this information is typically given voluntarily if at all. I'd be interested in knowing how they hope to police this arrangement (assuming it goes through) given how games are constructed. It's easy to know if ABC airs a particular episode of a show, but it's pretty difficult to make this comparison to games or even get the data to make such a comparison.