This is a good move, and might require a second look at the game. I played in the head-start pre-order program and cancelled my order before launch. Beyond the initial character set-up, there's simply nothing for a solo player to do, quest-wise, and since all advancement is tied to questing, there's no game here for the solo player.
Of course, the premise of the game is to form a group and go questing together -- One of the "M"s in MMO stands for "multiplayer," you know. But even hardcore players, and casual players more so, will want a breather from team play every now and then -- especially when the majority of players with which you can group are interested only in grinding through the same quest over and over again.
Should you play DDO 100% solo? No. There are other games for that (Oblivion, Neverwinter Nights, etc.). But to have the option to succesfully play the lone wolf from time to time? That's a facet of gameplay that DDO was sorely missing at launch. This is a good thing.
The hell are you talking about? In the US, movie theater chains set admissions prices, not the "movie companies," and as far as I know, none of the movie theater chains are owned by the studios (maybe one--I think United Artists theaters still around. And I mean direct ownership, not "Studio A owns stock in Theatre B"). If anything, ticket prices are artificially low, and the difference is made up by high-priced concessions and on-screen advertising. In that sense, movie tickets are a loss-leader.
So what about the home video market? In the VHS days, "rental pricing" ensured that new releases were artificially high so that if you wanted to watch Pulp Fiction at home, you could either buy it for $100 or rent it for $3.50. But the DVD direct-to-consumer model broke that all to hell, which is why Blockbuster and friends hated DVDs for so long. Are DVDs "artificially high"? When you can buy a DVD for less than $20 -- cheaper than seeing the thing in the theater with a bag of popcorn, in most cases -- how is that artificially high?
Monopoly on the industry? Independent films are made every day, and some of them even get distributed to art houses near you! The only difference between the "movie companies" and your film-school buddy from college is that only one of these entities can afford Brad Pitt's 20-against-20 salary requirements. Anyone can make a god-damned movie, but because a select number of organizations can afford to so correctly, you cry "monopoly"?
"Informative" my aching ass. Can we mod the parent "ignorant and deluded"?
I hear you. On a poorly-managed XP system, you have a 256MB memory footprint at logon, before you actually start performing useful work. If Vista makes this footprint 1GB, after loading Windows services and a selection of 3rd party additions, e.g. anti-virus, a well-equipped PC with 2GB of RAM has a severe handicap when it comes to actually running the apps that make all those OS-integrated bells-and-whistles useful.
Clearly it's not the Vista kernel that requires all this RAM, it's the Windows-dressing, most of which can probably be turned off -- but a poorly-managed Vista system is going to crawl, and a good number of machines are going to be poorly-managed, because the users are going to install the same crap they would have installed under XP, all jockeying for the same dwindling amount of physical memory.
Maybe a post in another thread is right, and the steep req is to ensure plenty of headroom for applications, but since I haven't installed any of the CTPs MS keeps sending me, I don't know for sure.
We're talking about requirements for a desktop OS, here, not a server, so yeah, 1GB is kind of insane./Applications/ should have high memory requirements, but not OSes.
That 1GB in your laptop? It's not the OS it's "barely keeping up with", is it?
Maybe it's because I'm not "typing challenged," but I can't fathom how it's easier to replace spaces with dots than to "find the shift key" twice to enclose a phrase in quotes.
And for a bonus, demonstrate the "dot-technique" using an example that doesn't even work. Priceless.
Maybe the 3rd edition will have a chapter about avoiding the pesky space- and shift-keys, but till then, the reviewer should maybe stick to the Google-stuff that's actually in the book.
Palladium bet on the wrong horse. I would have to guess that the company was doomed at about the point it became dependent upon a royalty revenue stream from a video game for its survival. This is a company with, what, 20+ years as an RPG publisher -- and incredibly prolific years, as well -- if you can't cut it with your primary business, which is publishing RPGs, then you're sunk.
You can't make it perfect, and there's considerable difference between "rushing the game out the door" and "developing routine patches after release." Without seeing the release notes for the patch, you can't tell which is the case with Oblivion, but if I had to guess, I'd say that the forthcoming patch is simply routine.
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This is a good move, and might require a second look at the game. I played in the head-start pre-order program and cancelled my order before launch. Beyond the initial character set-up, there's simply nothing for a solo player to do, quest-wise, and since all advancement is tied to questing, there's no game here for the solo player.
Of course, the premise of the game is to form a group and go questing together -- One of the "M"s in MMO stands for "multiplayer," you know. But even hardcore players, and casual players more so, will want a breather from team play every now and then -- especially when the majority of players with which you can group are interested only in grinding through the same quest over and over again.
Should you play DDO 100% solo? No. There are other games for that (Oblivion, Neverwinter Nights, etc.). But to have the option to succesfully play the lone wolf from time to time? That's a facet of gameplay that DDO was sorely missing at launch. This is a good thing.
The hell are you talking about? In the US, movie theater chains set admissions prices, not the "movie companies," and as far as I know, none of the movie theater chains are owned by the studios (maybe one--I think United Artists theaters still around. And I mean direct ownership, not "Studio A owns stock in Theatre B"). If anything, ticket prices are artificially low, and the difference is made up by high-priced concessions and on-screen advertising. In that sense, movie tickets are a loss-leader.
So what about the home video market? In the VHS days, "rental pricing" ensured that new releases were artificially high so that if you wanted to watch Pulp Fiction at home, you could either buy it for $100 or rent it for $3.50. But the DVD direct-to-consumer model broke that all to hell, which is why Blockbuster and friends hated DVDs for so long. Are DVDs "artificially high"? When you can buy a DVD for less than $20 -- cheaper than seeing the thing in the theater with a bag of popcorn, in most cases -- how is that artificially high?
Monopoly on the industry? Independent films are made every day, and some of them even get distributed to art houses near you! The only difference between the "movie companies" and your film-school buddy from college is that only one of these entities can afford Brad Pitt's 20-against-20 salary requirements. Anyone can make a god-damned movie, but because a select number of organizations can afford to so correctly, you cry "monopoly"?
"Informative" my aching ass. Can we mod the parent "ignorant and deluded"?
I hear you. On a poorly-managed XP system, you have a 256MB memory footprint at logon, before you actually start performing useful work. If Vista makes this footprint 1GB, after loading Windows services and a selection of 3rd party additions, e.g. anti-virus, a well-equipped PC with 2GB of RAM has a severe handicap when it comes to actually running the apps that make all those OS-integrated bells-and-whistles useful. Clearly it's not the Vista kernel that requires all this RAM, it's the Windows-dressing, most of which can probably be turned off -- but a poorly-managed Vista system is going to crawl, and a good number of machines are going to be poorly-managed, because the users are going to install the same crap they would have installed under XP, all jockeying for the same dwindling amount of physical memory. Maybe a post in another thread is right, and the steep req is to ensure plenty of headroom for applications, but since I haven't installed any of the CTPs MS keeps sending me, I don't know for sure.
We're talking about requirements for a desktop OS, here, not a server, so yeah, 1GB is kind of insane. /Applications/ should have high memory requirements, but not OSes.
That 1GB in your laptop? It's not the OS it's "barely keeping up with", is it?
Maybe it's because I'm not "typing challenged," but I can't fathom how it's easier to replace spaces with dots than to "find the shift key" twice to enclose a phrase in quotes. And for a bonus, demonstrate the "dot-technique" using an example that doesn't even work. Priceless. Maybe the 3rd edition will have a chapter about avoiding the pesky space- and shift-keys, but till then, the reviewer should maybe stick to the Google-stuff that's actually in the book.
Not very realistic at all, but if nothing else it helps with fretting dexterity and it tries to approximate the action of hammer-ons and pull-offs.
Ok, i give up. What's Bethesda got to do with NWN2? Obsidian Entertainment is developing NWN2, Atari is distributing.
Or better yet, Palladium should release all its own back catalog as OGL-compatible/d20-branded PDFs.
Palladium bet on the wrong horse. I would have to guess that the company was doomed at about the point it became dependent upon a royalty revenue stream from a video game for its survival. This is a company with, what, 20+ years as an RPG publisher -- and incredibly prolific years, as well -- if you can't cut it with your primary business, which is publishing RPGs, then you're sunk.
You can't make it perfect, and there's considerable difference between "rushing the game out the door" and "developing routine patches after release." Without seeing the release notes for the patch, you can't tell which is the case with Oblivion, but if I had to guess, I'd say that the forthcoming patch is simply routine.