deanb

I've not called for any special treatment to non-NA countries. Midnight launches, or even 9am launches, aren't exactly "special". But evening/night-time launches are kinda shitty launch windows for a game. Oh no, turning up to work at 6am! What a horrible horrible endeavour, my god how could any human ever cope to do that! I would never wish that upon anyone, it's just barbaric to think of such things. Sure they're no Codemasters(incidentally doing a game coming out at midnight 20th September), but they're not some singular indie dude releasing his first game. They're a reasonable sized studio composed of industry veterans who have experience of working with Steam already. I highly doubt a midnight (or reasonably timed) launch is beyond them. Especially since they're a studio that's still planning to develop an MMO. Time management skills aren't that hard to develop.

First? Also why should non-American countries be able to play the game at a reasonable time? Maybe because our money is as good as (and in some case better) than Americas? You can go have a chit chat with Maritan if you're wanting to think that way on the whole "why give a shit about other countries?". And as noted, given midnight Sydney is 7am Seattle time they would be awake and able to carry out a midnight launch just fine and awake, unless they wake up at weirder times to everyone else.

They're not in their offices at 4PM? A rolling midnight launch would have had them in their offices at 7am local to them, and given them the whole work day to sort things out, with only NA left post-reasonable office hours. By which point you'd hope with a full work day behind them to fix the issues they're expecting to crop up, that they'd be sorted. And given a rolling launch that'd open the game up to just a slither of players at once, if they can fix any issues quick then no one else would be much the wiser thus given say 80% or so of the player-base a great launch experience. Thus they could clock off for the day safe in the knowledge that NA customers can sit back n launch n play their nice n polished game (or delay later launches to fix it up, maybe pushing back to a 10AM NA launch if shit really hits the fan). Whereas now if during the singular global launch the issues they are expecting do crop up, issues that could take a full work day to sort out, it means that they inconvenience...well every single one of their playerbase. And if it takes..well just a couple hours, to fix they may have well have not said it'll be coming out on 20th cos for most of the world it'll be the 21st instead. Wooh, go 21st century global launches. You'd think is some tidgy sea faring 17th century island could master timezones you'd think it wouldn't be so hard in the 21st century. Given their bravado in the face of Error 28 you'd think they'd want to aim for the smoothest launch possible instead of potentially looking like a group of hypocrites and maybe proving the folks right that questioned why a small time dev was being compared with the likes of Blizzard.

"Especially one that has an MP mode." is pretty much the main reason to not wait until you can flip the switch on all at once. It has had a fairly large beta test and many months of refinement since, this isn't a game they should have to sit and nurse into health on launch day. They should be able to just go "Launch" and away we go. Instead they'll go launch and then it'll crash the servers. So at least there's the bonus on it not requiring always online (but would negate the sequel having MP), though it still has to get past Steams launch hiccups.

It's a good reason to flip the switch globally all at once and thus, as we know happens with all games that flip the switch at once, it all crashes and then everyone has fun times? If this was a console release, even without the midnight launch(that Steam can do), it would still be able to pop out n get your game at 9am. By 6PM all the shops selling the game would be shut. It's 2012, it's a PC game from a studio with experience in launching PC games. Doing phased midnight launches on Steam isn't a new fangled arcane thing. I get worked up about stupid shit because it's stupid shit. This isn't some intricate issues of party politics and manifesto clashes and the balance of power within a coalition. This is a fucking launch of a game in the 21st century on Steam. It's not the complex rocket science that Runic seem to be thinking it is.

Yeah the pre-load went up some days ago. I'm just currently trying to seemingly pull teeth on getting a time out of them. You'd have thought with less than 24hrs to go they'd be able to be a bit more specific than "when we're awake". All I can work out from now is that I am probably not playing this game tonight.

Oh maybe it isn't. Huh says 23 hours for me too, but that'd mean it wouldn't be unlocking until 6PM, which is a fucking retarded time to unlock a game. edit(ish): Yup looking around they're not posting the game until they're up wide awake n able to fix anything that goes wrong. And of course instead of having a phased timezone related midnight release which means an hour for each timezone to allow things to have a nice gentle roll out they're waiting until everyone globally can all go onto their now MP-powered game all at once. Which of course won't lead to anything going wrong that they're wanting to avoid in the first place. And on top of that you've folks in Europe and beyond that'll have to wait until evening/night to be able to play, that's a fair chunk of the day gone. edit2: They're massively unhelpful on Twitter too https://twitter.com/RunicGames/statuses/248485764952899584

Anyone here getting it for PC? Would I have anyone to play with tonight maybe?

The one with the animals? He's actually not in the Hobbit book, he's mentioned in Lord of the Rings though as sort of being partially involved (remember in Hobbit when Gandalf fucks off for a large part of the story?). He's Radagast the Brown AKA The Seventh Doctor AKA Sylvester McCoy. They seem to be expanding upon the whole

Yes it's Bon Jovi. Also: http://xkcd.com/1110/

The worlds wealthiest and most influential philanthropists.

It's the 75th Anniversary on Friday. So folks are doing "Elevenses" around the world. Oh also on a local scale, turns out Northumberland is as good as New Zealand. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/newzealand/9549670/Middle-Earth-moves-to-Northumberland-in-The-Hobbit-film-posters.html

And Mythic Entertainment and whatever studio is making Generals 2. I'm a big propopent of the "Bioware is a brand not a studio" so you're kinda preaching to the choir on that topic.

In other Bioware related news: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/177892/BioWares_founding_doctors_have_resigned.php#.UFjW7LXA8t4 I think we can all guess that given the recent changes of Bioware going from one studio to 7 and the consistent decline of quality they may be jumping ship before it fully sinks. They're going into consulting and beer interviews. (Which isn't as wild a step given they went from being physicians to game developers)

I liked the Origins system and there's next to no other modern games with that style. Was kinda disappointing they bowed in to marketing pressure n went action-RPG-ey.If I want an Action RPG then I could buy; Whereas if you want something like DA:O you either buy DA:O or dive into GOGs catalogue. Pretty much the only thing wrong with DA:O was the Fade.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...canada-19631430 A tape has been leaked of Romney speaking at a secret donor drive. Way to go n piss on a rather large chunk of voters.

I'm in the second Alpha (when is starts up). Got my username of deanb.

The PC settings menu. Not too shabby, but it's not something that should need to be made a point of in the first place.

It'll be uPlay I'd guess, cos that looks nothing like 360 styling (yes the achievement is on 360, but the %rate is not shown there). You can see % rates on Raptr too if you're into that stuff Gerbil. Though that only covers Raptr users, but it's got a fair enough sized userbase to be comparable with official figures (Steam shown percentage achievement rate too, so the two can be compared)

English Bacalaureat eh? I do agree that GCSE needs reform, and I'd have loved to have had a more vocational qualification. But I think the methods of the tories are suspect and badly fleshed out. They have ran this without any consultation with the rest of parliament, and as Blunkett said back in the 90's he was brought into the fold of the tories of the time for plans on GCSE reform. And there's still the issue that there's still the past plans of the two tier of O-level/CSE types and the current plans do have a sort of implication that the plan is to push in a two tier examination despite the assurances that's not the plan. I think the single exam idea is a crappy idea and most likely won't work in practice, probably screwing tons over tons of pupils. I also found it funny that he goes on about how in the 80's there wasn't IT and internet and that's part of a reason for the change, then promptly leaves ICT out of his "core" subjects. I think it would have gone over a lot better if it was compared with the other world leading education systems, as it stands there was no such comparison just pointing out the fact other countries have better secondary education examinations than we do. In other news I think the photos of Kate Middleton has been blown up well beyond the scope of issue it actually is. Not really a good plan to try to hide it by pointing out all the magazines and papers printing the photos and continually going on about it. And I think the photos are well within the right of law and it's only been made as big as it is because it's the potential future queen consort. Any other celebrity it'd be just a shrug n moved on. In other news (that I thought long settled, but turns out not) Simon Harwad has been found guilty of gross misconduct. Yet been found innocent of manslughter previously. So which is it? He committed gross misconduct in attacking a non-protester with a baton, yet was not involved in Ian Tomlinsons death...

Yeah I've seen that theory floating around and is pretty good. Explains his rather rapid change to ruthlessness. Also I have an urge to watch Farscape now.

Cos the mums shit during labour. Yeah, all you natural births got pooped on as your first experience of the world. "Life is shitty, here's an example"

Young babies are built to be dropped. That's why the skull isn't in one piece.