deanb

Thing is I feel there's very definitely two Biowares. There's the Bioware Corp that ran from 1996-2007 making licensed DnD n Star Wars titles, with a finishing with their own oriental and sci-fi titles. Then there's the post EA buyout Bioware Group that expanded to 7 studios, making MMOs of old franchises, continuing trilogies of old, learning what DLC was, and now moving onto an RTS. Most folks in my experience when they say they like "Bioware games" they like the games by Bioware Corp, not Bioware Group.

Some of the in-store promotional material.

No, I lost interest in Bioware (Group) a while back. I was just holding out on this one to complete the trilogy, I'd hate to leave it hanging. It's a bit like you knew from Phantom Menace that Clone Wars n Revenge of the Sith would suck a bit compared to the old films, but you stuck by just to complete the story. DA:O was an amazing game. Just a shame that no one at Bioware seemingly saw this. If they could make more DA:O titles I could get interested again, even more so if they drop the lame DLC policy they have. Other than that, Bioware seems just...butter spread over too much bread. The growth from 1 studio for 10 years, to expanding to 7 studios in the space of 5 years has not been a smooth transition.

So first: http://www.gamefly.com/news/article/209920/mass-effect-designer-defends-day-one-dlc-says-game-developers/ I played without the DLC and by all accounts that I'm hearing it was in the realm of "Somewhat important and should have been core" with elements of "Ill thought out sub-par DLC plotline". From Ashes as far as day-one DLC goes is not so much disliked purely for being day one DLC, but what it represents to the series lore and Bioware cocking it up big time in the name of a quick buck. Completed the game. So yeah, ME series is done. In some years down the line I may do a full through DLC playthrough. Though it's yet to be seen if the "Mass Effect Ultimate Trilogy" will be released by EA, or other parties Other than that, I have little interest in the franchise/studio anymore.

Finished Mass Effect 3. I got bored very fast of being a cripple so I W'ed it to the end. It's a bit of a let down for the end of the series, but it's closure at least. I look forward to ignoring all other Bioware titles in the future.

It's maybe just you. Mainly because I don't think most of us read any more to notice if it's getting much better.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH DA FUCK WAS THAT ALL ABOUT? Rannoch stuff:

I have the more in-depth side quests with markers. (e.g meeting with the Salarian Spectre), but the fetch quests come up with nothing on the map.

I've a feeling I'm probably gonna take more than average mainly because I'm missing on how to set stuff as "Active quests" or whatever, making find quest givers again to be a right pain (especially when you pick up quests by walking past people so knowing who you got the quest off is even harder). In fact the whole mission system is a right cock up. The Journal list always loads with the scroll bar half way down, meaning as the game progresses I have to scroll further n further up. There's no stages to the quest, meaning if I have an item, I don't know unless I mentally note it down. The quests start and end as "A Salarian in Presidium Commons is looking for a Mark of Illium in the Blah Blah System". There's no way to mark Blah Blah system on my map, or no indicators I have a quest there. Then when I do pick it up there's no inventory so I don't know if I have it. When I do have the item it doesn't update as "Go back and give the Mark of Illium to the Salarian". And when I do go back to the Presidum Commons I then have to walk past the several dozen Salarians with no names trying to find one that lights up because the map only lists characters of importance. Liara "Hello Commander" T'Soni being more important that Random "Quest complete" Salarian. Also fuck the DLC having an affect on the game. I don't have the DLC to ME2. Fuck being bitched at because someone Brother died, or planet got wiped out or friend tortured because I never got the DLC . Those events never happened. If you've played the compete version of ME2 what happens is you take down the collectors and then....end up incarcerated on Earth. I've not played Arrival, I honestly haven't a fucking clue at why the Batarians are pissed at me. Supposedly I blew up their planet. I don't know, I never remember doing that. Yes, many pages ago I said it'd be nice to have your past choices and actions affect the ending of the game. It'd be nice to have choices and actions you never made to not be part of the game though. And when I wanted it to affect stuff I was thinking more than just it tweaking the War Asset number down because I had the human fleet save the council n other lame ass stuff. NPCs have actually reacted more to the results of DLC events than they have in-game events like having the Alliance fleet take the hit for the Council. Say some soldier/other maybe smacking me in the face for getting their friend killed and now sending more out to fight the reapers or something. In fact my choice for councillor in ME1 and (due to the save issue of "woops no end-game save") ME2 has had jack shit result on ME3 and that hasn't been explained at all and yet I still had to deal with the repercussions of a decision I didn't make.

360 users install games to their hard drive because then it means the 360 won't eat their disc. A problem that can be resolved with the tougher blu-ray let alone a flash drive. (Well and 50 cents buffers, but MS do need a profit...)

GAME are having a "Spring Clean" http://www.game.co.uk/en/games/xbox-360/spring-clean/ If you wait a few weeks you can even buy pre-owned shelving and spanish video game stores.

I think we're not entertaining the idea of it being carts because that'd be even more stupid of a move than going fully DD. We've already covered many times before that flash memory is not cheap. A Blu-Ray drive is like £40 to buy one, so buying in a couple million probably a fair bit less. Then a couple quid for the discs. A 32GB card, closest to a 25GB BD, will set you back about £30. That's 3/4 of a games cost. Carts make sense on a handheld because : 1. Don't need as large a space for the game so can get away with 4GB carts. 2. They're lower power draw 3. Hard to break. As a console uses large capacity to store those high rest textures n models they need a bit more than 4GB, they're plumbed up to 250W+(380W for first PS3) power supplies, so power draw isn't an issue, and consoles don't move or get sat on as often. An "Nextbox Go" is however a possibility. At least as testing the waters a few years down the line to see how console folks are dealing with DD before going full blown with 9th gen DD-only. If it doesn't have blu-ray (or something on-par, but MS has zero incentive to make a new media format unlike electronics/entertainment firm Sony) then it only makes it that much easier to skip on. Carts are too expensive, DVD is way too old, and DD only too new/fucked up business-wise/user-base prohibitive/experimental.

Except maybe MS.... MS = "platform holders". The ones that get hurt if they make several million consoles that no one buys because publishers refuse to make games for it and gamers refuse to buy due to not wanting to go purely digital. PSPGo was only a couple years ago. Like Dean said, you're looking at a totally different market. In fact, Dean's generous with his $7 price tag. That's the generous price tag EA puts on Sims :/ It does need to see MS and Sony adding on other DD platforms with next generation before they can go fully DD. Or they can say hello to extensive cracking efforts. Even iOS has Cydia, and Amazon/GetJar/etc on Android. edit: You've seen PC right? They actually started at $40/50. With DD many of the publishers have aimed for a $60 price point. Yes the price isn't fixed and can be raised or lowered, but as TN said in the Sim City thread you'd have to be a moron to price your games lower.

So the alternatives are: Release a game with a bunch of DLC clearly planned way ahead of time that could be included in the game anyway, sell yearly iterations of Sim City, or Sell Sim City with all the planned content included at a much higher price than normal? That would be nice, but it doesn't happen. Currently the lowest price EA/Origin is selling this for is £45. Which is not only ridiculously expensive as far as a PC game is concerned, but expensive even by console pricing too. It would be nice to see a £20 "Basic Edition" of the game, but this is EA, the basic edition will be £40, or maybe £35 brought physically, with the Origin exclusive stuff unavailable to you. Also did I ever tell you of the time it was cheaper for me to buy DA:U through Steam than to buy the DLC from EA Bioware? It was cheaper to own the game twice than it was to buy DLC on it's own. Just to throw this out there but CitiesXL, the game that provided a stop gap on the Sim City decade long hiatus, includes the IRL buildings in the base game (And retialers for £15 less) Yes I know it costs money to develop a game. It doesn't cost half the budget to develop a bunch of IRL buildings. (The British/French/German sets are the bonus items in the £65 Digital Deluxe.) And while Sims may have moved 100million units across it's base games and many many expansion packs and DLC trinkets etc, what works for one game doesn't instantly mean it'll work for any other game. Just cos "Sim" is in both game titles the market base doesn't instantly overlap. It's a bit worrying that $40 is what EA consider as "aggressively priced" for a PC game (Though they knock off $10 if you own prior games, which I guess is hard to do with the long gap since SimCity 4). Minecraft is priced lower than most because it's a much cheaper game to make and for a fair while it wasn't the complete game (which sold at half the price). Though it now has profits in the 99% range which I'm sure is something that'd pop boners in the EA boardroom. Though as the EA business model is pretty much stuck in "Sell it for as high as we can, and sell as much of it as DLC as we can" I've a feeling they'll continue to piss folks off and harm the bottom line even more. Looking at everything in purely a business perspective and not at a "How can we look like good guys" aspect is not the way to do it these days. You don't need to have played a few tycoon games to know that if your expenses is more than your income then something has cocked up. In other news, meant to post this yesterday but wasn't going to leave a response to TN hanging: http://www.hardwarec...m/tags/GlassBox It's camera footage thought, so not really that brilliant but it's all we have to go on atm. edit: Forgot about this point - What if say a friend has the Digital Deluxe edition, and I just buy the "complete" game. Will my friend be able to send over help in the form of superheroes, or will it block that action because I only have the complete game and not the complete game with benefits? Just like COD, this game is now running multiplayer. And if you have content on available for one person then those with just the base game will more than likely get locked out of hanging out with their buddies. Edit2: There's also this AMA on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/qmi0w/iama_maxis_development_team_on_simcity_amaa/ But it's not the best way to get information tbh.

EA and co would like to sell titles for $60 a pop. Not the $7 a pop they have for their titles on iOS. TN is right, only 2/3 of the console market is net connected (And not all XBL accounts = 1 Xbox each. We had 4 XBL accounts to one console back in the day, it's why I have random games like FIFA on my account, Jag couldn't be arsed to make his own so used whatever was loaded at the time). And not all of that net connected segment are going to be getting digital content. As Yantelope likes to point out, only 20% are picking up DLC. That's just cheap trinkets, never mind buying a full game through the service. And if Sony/MS have complete monopoly over the games retail channel you really think they'll reduce the fees that are incurred through physical retail where there's competition? It would just hurt everyone involved at this current stage; gamers, publishers, developers and platform holders.

The link Maritan gave seems to very strongly imply the "perfect" ending does require multiplayer. He has 3171 and a full bar, with half the readiness rating because of no MP. The IGN link says it requires 5000 points to get the perfect ending. Which would, without MP, require 10,000 points in war assets.

Ah, you're using the leather jacket too? Also Liara will be pissed, was almost coming around to her. Then someone else turned up.

challenge... accepted. Sheep don't count!

And if you take into account he's Russian and thus got about half a day on most of us.

"Buy one PS4, get one Wii U free"? Apart from Pokemon, and that's only minor, I've never had an affinity for their games, re-releases and rehashes. I'm also not too fussed for their controller gimmicks either. Constantly learning new control schemes gets in the way of enjoying the game. I guess they'd need to be the only console in existence for me.

http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/ Adds a "Start" menu to the Metro screen.

So those crazy kids over at MIT have made an LED bulb with 230% efficiency. http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-efficiency.html AKA they broke the first law of thermodynamics. But not quite that simple. Basically it reaches a point where it just starts sucking up surrounding heat as well. Problem is this cooling/lighting LED only does that at very low power levels. But if they could expand it, certainly interesting applications.