I didn't like NWN nearly as much as I expected to. I don't really like the "henchman" party system and I didn't really find the story or characters as compelling as some of Bioware's other offerings (i.e. Baldur's Gate, KotOR).
Try the HoTU expansion. Skip SoU, its rubbish, HoTU is much much better though. The campaign that shipped with NWN was lackluster, primarily because if Bioware had their way, they wanted to just ship the DM Client and Toolset as a game building program, instead of a game, so the campaign was pretty much a tech demo of what you could make in the toolset. The user community pretty quickly surpassed it.
its a blizzard game released by blizzard created from blizzard original content. i'm pretty sure they get 100% of the money after the initial store sale. unless their parent company takes a cut.
The only reason Vivendi Games (Blizzards Parent Company) is currently in the Black is because of World of Warcraft. Full year 2005 saw a $243 million Euro turnaround, from about 200 mil in the hole to 41 mil in the black. They get alot of money. Ontop of that, you have WoW China, which is run by The9. WoW China has something like 2 million+ users, they are the largest WoW market. Rumor has been that Blizzard still have not agreed who will get the rights to The Burning Crusade in China, as they are wanting to get more money from the local operator of the game. It was estimated some months back that about 98% of The9s revenue comes from WoW, and in the last 6 months, they pulled in a touch over $420 million in revenue (overall profit of around just under $124 million). So The9 is doing very well for itself from operating WoW.
Also, China does not have the same subscription based setup that the rest of the world has (or at least, at its launch it didn't, as can be read here. According to that article Chinese players buy Points cards for 30 Yuan (a touch under $4 US), which are used at a rate of 0.45 Yuan per hour played (about 6 cents US), so all up a not quite $4 points card gives you about 66 hours of play time. Also, in China, they only need buy a CD-Key for the game instead of a full priced box copy, so Blizzard arent raking in the cash from Boxed sales over there either.
Suffice to say, the amount of money WoW makes isnt all going to Blizzard, not by a long shot.
World of Warcraft would be highly pirated if non-sanctioned servers were allowed. The only reason it's not pirated is because of this and the subscription service, period. Good games get pirated just as much, if not more, than crappy games.
Go to any torrent site and you will find WoW on it. While nonsanctioned WoW servers are not allowed, they still exist, though as you would expect, they are usually a patch or 2 behind the official servers. The problem is, official servers regularly have thousands of players on at any one time, non sanctioned servers usually only have a few hundred, depending on whether it is public or private.
In regards to that, I have a copy of Night Watch, purchased at full price, installed and ready to go with one small problem.
Uhhhhh yeah, alright. Im going to assume that after you installed the game, you went and manually removed the Starforce drivers, since any game protected with starforce silently installs the drivers during the games installation.
Will this turn the Census from an anonymous snapshot into one connected with name-identified information?"
Errr, the first 2 questions of the census is "Whats your address" and "Whats the name of everybody at this address on census night". They dont need some card to tie the data to particular people. They can already do that if they want, and have been able to for many many years. I am sure it would not take too much effort for them to find out how much money i was earning 4 years ago, whether i have moved house, and what phoney religion i put in last time.
It means alot, actually. Nintendo have sold over 20 million DS/DS Lites since its release. Thats to the stores and out the doors in the hands of customers. Sony have so far only release details on how many PSP's it has shipped. All that means is that Sony have delivered them to someone. Walmart might have 500,000 sitting unsold in their warehouse, but Sony still count it, whereas Nintendo dont count it unless money has changed hands between customer and retailer.
I'm not sure why so many slashdotters are proud at having been duped out of their money for pirated music. None of that $200 has gone to the artists, it's all gone to Russian criminals. And you're happy with this?
The way i look at it, you have a choice.
a) Buy music from American Criminals (IE RIAA), and be forced to pay prices way higher than they should be, with reduced choice (But i only want 2 songs, not the whole album! Sorry buddy!)
b) Buy music from Russian Criminals who offer as good quality music as the americans, for far less and far cheaper, with much greater choice, or
c) Don't buy music at all
Option C for me is out, so its a choice between American Criminals pretending not to be criminals or Russian Criminals that are pretty open about the fact what they are doing is illegal everywhere except Russia.
This happened in Runescape after any skill release (farming, runecrafting), this will happen in World of Warcraft when Jewelcrafting comes out at expansion, etc. Give it a few weeks, prices will stabilize, and we're back to the status quo.
It already happens. The War Effort to open the gates of Ahn'Qiraj being the biggest example. On Proudmoore, stacks of wool shot up from about 40-50 silver to over 2 gold, silk cloth was even higher. Every resource required for the war effort skyrocketed until the gates opened, where they slowly returned to normal.
3 months? Are you getting your player reviews via snail mail or something? 1 week is sufficient for all but the smallest of game developers. If gamers get a game that is full of bugs and glitches, they are generally pretty quick to whinge about it on the official forums.
That is because it wasn't even a game when it was first displayed. It was a proof of concept of the particular progamming style he chose, and one that he admitted was very patchy and only just held together. EA didn't officially start backing the game for a good 3 to 4 months after GDC 2005, and it still probably isn't ready to set the hype machine loose on.
Problem is, after about level 30ish, you all end up going to the same areas, no matter what your race or class, and you can only see the same low level content so much before it becomes boring as hell. I have played in darkshore, darkshire and westfall so much, i can do it with my eyes closed
Get to level 30-32, you go to Stranglethorn Vale. Get to low 40's, you go to tanaris. Sometime after than when all your tanaris quests are orange/red, you go to feralas, then back to tanaris. Then Un'goro, then Silithus/WPL/EPL.
Of course if your horde (apart from undead) the battle starts around level 10-12 when you have to shudder your way through 6-10 levels in the barrens. Ugh.
If I am going for a short drive without acting like an idiot, why on earth must I wear a seatbelt? $AUD175 fine for not doing so is crazy.
That is really a bad example. What happens if someone that is acting like a total idiot on the road loses it and stoves into your car? You might not walk away if you arent wearing your seatbelt.
Blizzard's solution to this was to make AQ accessible only after a one-time server-wide event.
Also, with the opening of the gates, many new cenarion circle centered quests become avaliable. Most are in the form of 'get x number of these items' or 'kill x number of these beasts', but most can be done solo or in small groups. Each gets progressivly more difficult and do end in epic items. I did not play on the test server, but apparently virtually all of them can be done in a 5 man group.
Having said all that, though, I agree it won't be beyond the portal. For one, you have to be level ~55 to pass through the portal. And the assumption is the content beyond the portal would be geared for players of that level. Having a starting area there just wouldn't work, especially since they'd want to leverage existing content for new characters to level up in.
The Blood Elf starting area has 2 areas it links to. 1 thin coastal strip that hasnt been added in yet (which, incedently links to Western Plaguelands), and Eastern Plaguelands, the highest level zone in the game. Its not entirely unplausable that Draenei would have their starting area beyond the portal, but still very unlikely.
The media hates Nintendo. I don't know why, I don't pretend to know why, but they do, read almost any mainstream news outlet's report on Nintendo and it's always "child focused", or "younger gamer".
Read any mainstream new outlet's reports on anything to do with video games and youll realise very few of them have any fucking clue what they are talking about, so what mainstream outlets say doesnt hold alot of water in the internet days, and people are starting to realise this.
Now I'm in school fulltime with a lot going on, and I just can't bring myself to log on. My guild is probably pissed at me, but doing high end instances which take 4 hours a pop is just too much for me.
Am I the only one that got tired of WoW because it started to feel like a job that you didn't get paid for, but were paying for?
No your not, and i totally agree with your point. I got alot of quests in my log with (Dungeon) next to them, and i really cant bring myself to do them, because i know they are going to take me 5+ hours to complete, with no guarentee you will actually complete it.
Blizzard have really done a great job with WoW, and managed to hook alot of more casual players into it, but after level 40, there is either alot of grinding, or alot of instance runs. I would be a much happier WoW player if there were more instances that only took an hour or two to run, but were still tough. Im honestly not at all excited hearing about how long MC/Scholo/BRD runs take.
The big problem here is that this review doesn't tell us anything
about the game! Sure, combat and graphics. Nice. What about the menus?
The story? It only had one word about the story. Items, and item
creation? Is the UI frustrating? Does the game crash? Does it have
multi-player? Co-op?
1. I loaded the game and thought "Why is this menu so dark and why is there some pixelation?". Rest of the game looks fine, so i dont know.
2. What story? Oh, you mean the shockingly voiced dialogue between the mountain of boring hack n slash that says the same thing a dozen times? Yeah, it was ok, i guess.
3. Items. There are tons. Youll find alot of set items, and alot that you already have. Youll even find multiple uniques that are the same item. Item creation is enchanting, but the fact is, anything you can enchant sucks some major ass compared to just about everything else in the game
4. UI is actually fairly decent, except there is no button to distribute mana/health potions evenly between party members like in DS1.
5. Yes, it has multiplayer, it is co-op, but after realising how boring the game is, it matters little.
Seriously, go spend your 35-50 bucks on drugs or something. They will be more enjoyable:)
Whatever happened to suspension of disbelief? Games are generally supposed to happen in their own world - especiall online games... how can viewing a movie trailer for a real-life movie possibly fit in with the game world?
Advertisers are not bothered by that. More and more 12-40 year olds are spending their ever more limited leaisure time infront of a computer instead of the TV, so they are losing revenue from television advertising. Real world Advertising within games like we see on TV was always going to happen, it was simply a question of when. This will be a big market in the future, mainly for MMOG's, and eventually we will accept it just like we have done for television advertising.
Australia-like bans will be coming to a USA and Canada near you.
The actual number of games that have never seen the light of day in Australia is actually very small. In the US, usually when a game is given an AO rating, most publishers take it back and tone it down a bit to get a M rating because they know sales will be affected. In Australia, when a game gets higher than a M rating, the exact same thing happens in most instances, it is just in the US a publisher can keep the game on the shelves (albeit much fewer shelves) if rated higher than M, whereas in Australia they cant.
This site has a nice list of games that have been banned in Australia, however do note that not all the games on the list got banned, but have been provided as examples of the slowly changing attitude of the OFLC. 60 games are listed:
36 were outright banned
6 of those were modified and resubmitted, gaining a M15+ rating.
2 were initially released for sale and later banned
2 were never actually submitted to the OFLC for classification
It is also interesting to note that good majority of those games that were outright banned came from police raids in 1995 and 1996, with most games being stock standard puzzle games that reward you with a pic of a naked woman for completing each stage. Compare that to, say, God of War, which was passed as M15+ despite containing the following:
The nudity: Every woman in the game has breasts showing. At the end of the first level there are two females laying on a bed having sex (breasts are showing) when the cut scene ends they are still laying there.
The Sex: If you hop onto the bed you are able to have sex with them by pressing "O". The camera zooms away, but I have confirmed info that this is how the game is all around the world. You press various buttons, such as Square, Triangle and X to control the sex. If you succeed, you get orbs that increase you're magic powers.
In short, most of the games banned are either a) Avaliable online at most sex sites, often for free, or b) games that a large majority of people wouldnt give a fuck about anyway. That doesnt make censorship right, but it also isnt as bad as some make it out to be
Oh, you mean that shit that is out-selling every other OS by an absurd margin, right? And regardless of how you justify the horrible truth.
And that automatically means it is the best OS? Please, Microsoft have been re-releasing the same OS with a different skin for 10 years. The biggest change was a decade ago with Windows 95. It will be 2006/2007 when Longhorn comes out, 11-12 years since Win95 and 6-7 years since WinXp. If they cannot manage some big changes and enhancements to useability and the overall experience, there is something massivly wrong.
It will be the best seller, but that is just because most people do not know better or are scared of changing from what they are comfortable with.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, China does not have the same subscription based setup that the rest of the world has (or at least, at its launch it didn't, as can be read here. According to that article Chinese players buy Points cards for 30 Yuan (a touch under $4 US), which are used at a rate of 0.45 Yuan per hour played (about 6 cents US), so all up a not quite $4 points card gives you about 66 hours of play time. Also, in China, they only need buy a CD-Key for the game instead of a full priced box copy, so Blizzard arent raking in the cash from Boxed sales over there either.
Suffice to say, the amount of money WoW makes isnt all going to Blizzard, not by a long shot.
It means alot, actually. Nintendo have sold over 20 million DS/DS Lites since its release. Thats to the stores and out the doors in the hands of customers. Sony have so far only release details on how many PSP's it has shipped. All that means is that Sony have delivered them to someone. Walmart might have 500,000 sitting unsold in their warehouse, but Sony still count it, whereas Nintendo dont count it unless money has changed hands between customer and retailer.
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=200
Oh yes, im sure you'll be able to
a) Buy music from American Criminals (IE RIAA), and be forced to pay prices way higher than they should be, with reduced choice (But i only want 2 songs, not the whole album! Sorry buddy!)
b) Buy music from Russian Criminals who offer as good quality music as the americans, for far less and far cheaper, with much greater choice, or
c) Don't buy music at all
Option C for me is out, so its a choice between American Criminals pretending not to be criminals or Russian Criminals that are pretty open about the fact what they are doing is illegal everywhere except Russia.
Option B is the one for me.
It already happens. The War Effort to open the gates of Ahn'Qiraj being the biggest example. On Proudmoore, stacks of wool shot up from about 40-50 silver to over 2 gold, silk cloth was even higher. Every resource required for the war effort skyrocketed until the gates opened, where they slowly returned to normal.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=320829 .htmlh tm0 060531084202128
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060531-694
http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/business/14707951.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/8923
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=2
Want some more? I dare say they are easy to find.
My friend laid down a bet that his world of Giant Walking Penis' would be delivered to my computer before mine was delivered to his.
"Whats this mommy" "Oh, uhhhh, thats your wee wee Jimmy"
3 months? Are you getting your player reviews via snail mail or something? 1 week is sufficient for all but the smallest of game developers. If gamers get a game that is full of bugs and glitches, they are generally pretty quick to whinge about it on the official forums.
That is because it wasn't even a game when it was first displayed. It was a proof of concept of the particular progamming style he chose, and one that he admitted was very patchy and only just held together. EA didn't officially start backing the game for a good 3 to 4 months after GDC 2005, and it still probably isn't ready to set the hype machine loose on.
Problem is, after about level 30ish, you all end up going to the same areas, no matter what your race or class, and you can only see the same low level content so much before it becomes boring as hell. I have played in darkshore, darkshire and westfall so much, i can do it with my eyes closed
Get to level 30-32, you go to Stranglethorn Vale. Get to low 40's, you go to tanaris. Sometime after than when all your tanaris quests are orange/red, you go to feralas, then back to tanaris. Then Un'goro, then Silithus/WPL/EPL.
Of course if your horde (apart from undead) the battle starts around level 10-12 when you have to shudder your way through 6-10 levels in the barrens. Ugh.
Also, with the opening of the gates, many new cenarion circle centered quests become avaliable. Most are in the form of 'get x number of these items' or 'kill x number of these beasts', but most can be done solo or in small groups. Each gets progressivly more difficult and do end in epic items. I did not play on the test server, but apparently virtually all of them can be done in a 5 man group.
Having the faster card means nothing until they can get adequate volume to retail.
If your card is the fastest, but i cant go into any old computer store and buy it, why do i care?
Blizzard have really done a great job with WoW, and managed to hook alot of more casual players into it, but after level 40, there is either alot of grinding, or alot of instance runs. I would be a much happier WoW player if there were more instances that only took an hour or two to run, but were still tough. Im honestly not at all excited hearing about how long MC/Scholo/BRD runs take.
1. I loaded the game and thought "Why is this menu so dark and why is there some pixelation?". Rest of the game looks fine, so i dont know.
2. What story? Oh, you mean the shockingly voiced dialogue between the mountain of boring hack n slash that says the same thing a dozen times? Yeah, it was ok, i guess.
3. Items. There are tons. Youll find alot of set items, and alot that you already have. Youll even find multiple uniques that are the same item. Item creation is enchanting, but the fact is, anything you can enchant sucks some major ass compared to just about everything else in the game
4. UI is actually fairly decent, except there is no button to distribute mana/health potions evenly between party members like in DS1.
5. Yes, it has multiplayer, it is co-op, but after realising how boring the game is, it matters little.
Seriously, go spend your 35-50 bucks on drugs or something. They will be more enjoyable
This site has a nice list of games that have been banned in Australia, however do note that not all the games on the list got banned, but have been provided as examples of the slowly changing attitude of the OFLC. 60 games are listed:
36 were outright banned
6 of those were modified and resubmitted, gaining a M15+ rating.
2 were initially released for sale and later banned
2 were never actually submitted to the OFLC for classification
In short, most of the games banned are either a) Avaliable online at most sex sites, often for free, or b) games that a large majority of people wouldnt give a fuck about anyway. That doesnt make censorship right, but it also isnt as bad as some make it out to beIt is also interesting to note that good majority of those games that were outright banned came from police raids in 1995 and 1996, with most games being stock standard puzzle games that reward you with a pic of a naked woman for completing each stage. Compare that to, say, God of War, which was passed as M15+ despite containing the following:
It will be the best seller, but that is just because most people do not know better or are scared of changing from what they are comfortable with.