Luggage

Most recent was Dishonored for me. Made it all the way to the end of the pen-ultimate mission, getting ready to head of to the lighthouse. As soon as the lighthouse level loads, it tries to autosave and returns a "There was an issue saving the game." error message. Canceling out of that starts the "on rails" part of the mission and the game freezes a few seconds later. Cue middle of this week, when they release patch 1.2 for the game. "Great", I think to myself, patch it and fire it back up. Now the game crashes as soon as the main menu comes up. Because of this, it went form GOTY to "rot in hell with D3 and ME3!"

I've had a frustrating error these last 3 days. The first time it hppened when I started to play that night, today it was after I had played for an hour already. The game just stops saving, so on quick, manual or auto saves, it just says, "There was an issue saving the game." Pressing retry lands me back in the same error screen, pressing cancel returns to the game, which freezes the next time a menu opens or after a few minutes of playing. Anybody encountered (and solved this) before? Things I've tried so far: - Set dishonored.exe to start as administrator - Confirmed full access privileges to the save folder - Had Steam check integrity of game files - Turned cloud saving off - Moved all saves but the latest out of the save folder - Turned cloud saving back on - Deleted local content and redownloaded the entire game Right now, I can basically load my latest saves (cleaned the Hound Pits from the Watch) and even resave. But as soon as I talk to Samuel to take me to the next (last?) mission, I get the error again.

Yup, WoW could gain quite a lot by ripping off the whole public quest thing. Also, the reputation grinds were a lot more rewarding in Warhammer. A good portion of the "old world" factions are worthless (i.e. Desolace, Hinterlands) or not at all adequate when it comes to work vs reward. The only zone they implemented that nicely was the Bloodelf starting area and the rewards were rather "meh". A cape with Stamina? Seriously?

The whole zone restriction thing is a bit odd. I played with someone from South Africa today, because they apparently are a part of Europe and we had no latency problems whatsoever. On a Sunday afternoon. And somehow I can't imagine the connection between Europe and Africa being better than between Europe or Asia and the US. I think the true reason is something along the lines of additional monetization. If they let me add a second SC2 copy to my BNet account, fair enough. A $20-40 one time fee would also be acceptable. But a monthly fee for crossrealm play would be pushing it a bit too much for my taste.

After the first maniac has unlocked all 64 achievements and beats the game once more using only the most basic weapon without dieing a single time, a trailer will unlock hinting the release date of Half-Life Episode 3. And at next year's GDC Gabe Newell will be like, "Yeah, we thought with fewer and fewer companies doing demos, we should go ahead and publish a free game to market our newest product." And minds will be blown. It's a long shot, but it's Valve after all...

Pretty much this. I think a substantial amount of quitters didn't stop playing WoW because the content was bad or boring, but because they got bored of the whole concept. Especially in MMOs like WoW, where cooperation has become almost non-existant outside of (raid) instances. For me, that's the key point why EVE is still going strong: interaction and cooperation is a must and basically makes for a better game. In WoW, guilds are special colored chat channels and an additional stash your resident fishing bot guy uses to store his fish. Even raids have PUG character now. This is not a casual equals noob rant. I am just trying to say that the glue holding my WoW experience together was my small guild of tight friends. When that slowly dissolved and the general trend became "guild/raid equals drama equals not a game anymore", I was gone despite all the great content they implemented during the Northrend expansion. That being said, I will probably do a horde playthrough (never got around to do this) from 1 to 80 during the last two months before addon release and then a Goblin Mage playthrough at some point after the expansion hit. Basically trying to have a singleplayer RPG experience in a familiar setting and then watch it being overhauled completely.

Splendid! That's a sure buy...

Having been listening to both casts for about the same time, I can relate to that. While GWJ covers a far broader range of games, I kinda like the goofy OCD nature and tangents like Chris talking about musical stuff a little more. Though the GWJ forums are way busier than this one, they are fairly relaxed as long as you're not trying to keep up with every thread. Nothing compared to SomethingAwful (where you don't follow the forums, the forums follow you). Then again a lot of people who paid the $10 registration fee for SA.com aren't in it for the madness, but because they have actual awesomely useful threads on a lot of real life related topics. If a child read nothing but SA.com for a few years, it would have more usable knowledge than an average highschool graduate. And the blackest kind of humor of course. Coming back from the tangent, I enjoyed hearing Chris on GWJ. And I had a similar sentiment as toblix had. It didn't come of negative though. Chris just made some informed guesses which tech or games will be there to stay and which will probably be DOA imo.

I admit to being a filthy skimmer, that has only read page three, but are there any rumors or plans on HotHeadGames' side to do a PC port?

While I agree in general, Activision has had a really bad track record in recent years. Now I won't defend the linked article as completely objective and rational, but by the time the merger went through two to three years ago, even well paid managers of the highest ranks with basically no connection to the lowest ranks (the players) should have been well aware, that with the advent of flat rate internet, entertainment companies wouldn't be able to pull off shady moves without their customers noticing. And stuff has been blown up in their faces a few times since then. Of course there were weaksauce moments like the "MW2 boycott", but in general the gaming community has aged pretty well. And assuming there won't be some outspoken community members versed in the legal, economic and marketing field seeing right through your schemes, was pretty arrogant and got them the negative attention they deserved. This has by no means been limited to ActiBlizz only, which doesn't remedy the fact that I personally feel the biggest disconnection between developers/publishers and customers since I started caring for video games almost two decades ago. And as of March 30, 2010, the (former?) Activision CFO Thomas Tippl has been instated as COO of Blizzard Entertainment, with Blizzard CEO and president Mike Morhaime reporting directly to him. I won't comment on the following statement from Kotick regarding this organizational change, because it would be pure speculation. Edit: My personal take on the recent activities regarding Battle.Net 2.0 and this one in particular is that they want BNet 2.0 to become the "Steam" of online matchmaking. The vision would be in a few years Battle.Net has twenty plus million users and they will be able to sell licenses to large and medium scale developers to use Battle.Net as their online gaming solution. The current attempts trying to provide this (e.g. GameSpy) are either outdated or just too inconvenient to use. But in order to make BNet to go-to choice, they have to make it desirable for the players to be part of that community. And anybody, who has chatted with more than a handful of strangers in WoW or WC3 or read the forums, knows that the average community member hasn't passed high school mentally. So I see why they would want some kind of leverage on the negative behavior internet anonymity generates, but sowing an atmosphere of defenselessness, distrust and paranoia is the wrong way imo.

Get rid of Kotick and his dollar-sign boxer-short wearing bullies - problem solved! (I know it won't be that easy... ) But they brought this on themselves and despite the questionable decisions made by Blizzard in the last one to two years, I still trust them with being able to differentiate between imbalance whining and resistance against irrational decisions destroying the developer-customer-relationship.

Hmm no, I recall watching the video of the talk and remember the respective speaker and this fact being mentioned in a podcast. Since I only listen to two gaming podcasts and Idle Thumbs is the more development and meta-gaming focused one, I thought, I should ask here too. Edit: Found it. I am such a goof. The guy was Will Wright and he said he's playing 15 minutes of Advance Wars on his DS to get his brain up to speed every morning. http://kotaku.com/5492761/guess-which-nintendo-game-spores-creator-plays-most-in-his-life

s7H7p80kZN8 Look at him go...

No loss really. It was quite unique and pretty but also seriously weird and unbalanced. On topic: The cancellation of the Warcraft adventure will always remain as the "Firefly moment" of PC gaming history in my mind. I don't mind the Duke disappearing, since I never actually saw much progress on that one. But as stated above, the adventure was pretty far along. I still don't get why they never released it. It's not like Blizzard is bad with telling stories, making the player think or implementing some humor.

I am not sure if I heard it be mentioned on a recent (as in "in the last six months") IT podcast, but it's my best guess. I am looking for a presentation from a recent games (dev) conference, where the speaker mentions himself playing a certain DS game during his coffee break every morning. When summing it up it turns out to be the game he has spent the most time on albeit only sacrificing 10-15 minutes each day. Must be something about social or casual gaming, but I can't for the life of me find it.