. . . I wonder if the game will play differently if I greedily wait for a sale before buying it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: ShmerlIt's just a Tegra tablet with some Nintendo DRM mess attached. So once DRM is broken, Linux should be runnable :)

Can we stop all this talk of DRM on just about every topic that's posted? (not pointing the finger, I mean in general)
Scrolling down through the posts only to see DRM being talked about instead of the actual headline, is getting...well, a bit boring and disappointing.
Serious gamer's are not all that bothered about DRM anyway, it's all about playing and enjoying the game, so it's pointless bringing it up all the time.
There is a forum for that kind of topic.

Ironically, you would appear to have gotten the conversation about DRM going rather than stopping it. I would suggest partly because you couldn't resist the crack about serious gamers. The lesson is, if you're supposedly trying to stop an argument, don't take a position in the argument as part of your intervention.
Although since nobody was actually talking about DRM until you said this, another lesson is "If you're already ahead, 'quit while you're ahead' means 'quit before you start'".

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: wvstolzing

Quoting: tuubiNo. Make it stop. Please?

I don't see how anyone who experienced '90s Internet would want to remember it, let alone relive it. Dropsy was great, but I don't think my psyche could handle this one.

What's not to love about 56K dial-up, blinking text, and "Best Viewed with Internet Explorer"?

56K dial-up? Luxury. [External Link] We had to live in a paper bag in t'middle o t' road, with 28k dial-up from 10-12 PM, if we were lucky!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: etonbears

Quoting: slaapliedjeHa, using meters to represent your height reminds me of a ton of jokes that were in Super Troopers 2. Stupid USA needs to start using the Metric system like every other country on the planet.

They have been trying to go metric since 1793 apparently! It's not easy to change the frame of reference you acquire in childhood (which is why any given "society" tries to plant its ideas of religion/politics/patriotism as early as possible), so the USA has significant popular resistance to any metric change.

Even in the UK where we have long since decimalized our currency (the US currency was always decimal, of course), and officially adopted the metric system of weights and measures, we also still officially use miles for distance, and pints for beer. I grew up with both the Imperial and metric systems, and use them interchangeably, but generations older than mine still think and talk in Imperial.

In case we feel too superior about the logic/modernity of the metric system (which originates in the French revolution of 1789), consider that we all customarily use archaic measures of time (24 hrs of 60 mins of 60 seconds) and angular measure (one revolution/circle is 360 degrees of 60 minutes of 60 seconds) without a second thought. There are metric/decimal alternatives for both, but we continue to use the systems derived from the ancient Sumerian base 60 number system, some 4000 years later.:O

I'm Canadian, and we went mostly metric when I was a kid. So it can be done. But one thing I notice is that while some metric measures "took" fairly easily, some imperial stuff hung on. I think it's because, while the metric system is very rational and easy to calculate in, the imperial system (having grown up through habitual practical use by people) tends to give you numbers that are easy to think in at the scales people use. So like, it's easier to think "2 teaspoons" than "howeverthefuckmany ml", and so to this day cooking is dominated by imperial measures.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Mal

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: MalEven the controversial 2.0 release with all the feature scrapping and game style flattening ultimately had the purpose of simplify the game implementation so that it's easier to develop and test it (with... arguable success for now).

I don't really know whether I agree or not with the rest of what you say--I just have insufficient information to form a judgement--but I don't think this is really true. In some ways it makes the game more complex, like it tends to lead to more fleets running around. But mainly it seems like the key changes that simplify the game (mainly the shift to only hyperdrive movement) was aimed at impacting tactical gameplay. For the most part it was aimed at putting limits on the number of avenues invaders have to attack through, creating the possibility of chokepoints and making the idea of guarding borders at least plausible. This goes together with the new system of starbases which can be built up to seriously badass fighting power.
I'm not yet sure whether I think that's an improvement, but it does seem to have been a major motivation for the changes. They weren't all about simplifying the code.

My point was just on game implementation and testing not on game difficulty. Just with the mere FTL cut they removed a lot of code and a lot of edge cases from the game which ultimately makes it easier to develop (especially when they will enhance it in future) and test.

My opinion on 2.0 overall is that the game has been made more restrictive to the player. In the sense that either options have been removed entirely or new balance changes makes so that adopting a play style that diverges from the "meta" intended by the game designer is totally non viable compared to before. So yes: difficulty changed in the sense that several macro options have been removed. But the new play style enforced on the player does have a lot of new things to manage. So if 2.0 is more or less difficult is more of a subjective thing (how fast you can adapt to it and how much you are ok in doing that).

Yesyes. I wasn't saying that the FTL cut didn't simplify the code (although some of the other changes didn't, eg changes to discourage doomstacks and hence encourage more fleets and add an extra bookkeeping feature to fleets, their size cap--it's minor, but that added complexity rather than subtracting). I was saying that their motivation for doing so was less to simplify the code and more to shift the tactical gameplay in ways they found desirable due to some perceived shortcomings of how it worked before. And again, I wasn't offering an opinion as to whether that tactical shift was actually desirable or not, just pointing out that Paradox definitely did seem to find it desirable and claimed that as their major motivation for the change. So if you say the change had the "ultimate purpose" of simplifying the code, I want to say that while that simplification happened and I'm sure they were pleased about that, it would be at least an overstatement to say that was the "ultimate purpose".

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: MalEven the controversial 2.0 release with all the feature scrapping and game style flattening ultimately had the purpose of simplify the game implementation so that it's easier to develop and test it (with... arguable success for now).

I don't really know whether I agree or not with the rest of what you say--I just have insufficient information to form a judgement--but I don't think this is really true. In some ways it makes the game more complex, like it tends to lead to more fleets running around. But mainly it seems like the key changes that simplify the game (mainly the shift to only hyperdrive movement) was aimed at impacting tactical gameplay. For the most part it was aimed at putting limits on the number of avenues invaders have to attack through, creating the possibility of chokepoints and making the idea of guarding borders at least plausible. This goes together with the new system of starbases which can be built up to seriously badass fighting power.
I'm not yet sure whether I think that's an improvement, but it does seem to have been a major motivation for the changes. They weren't all about simplifying the code.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Maybe this should have been Early Access?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: cRaZy-bisCuiTWell, I'll definetly buy this one since I love the game and I do like Lord of the Rings! :)

The lettering style was a nice touch, I thought.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: slaapliedjeHa, I really shouldn't type things in on my phone... or in this case thongs.

Anyone old enough to remember the days when thongs were the things you wore on your feet?

Yup. Never really got used to having to call them "flip-flops".

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: MblackwellThe GOG ToS specifies that they have a right to revoke your access to their services for any large number of reasons. How will you download your games then?

The idea is that you download something after you buy it, and you legally can back it up (as long as you legally purchased it). As far as I understand Steam TOS, it doesn't say you can legally back up anything in DRM-free fashion even if you legally purchased it. They explicitly say, that the automatic installation is needed (I understand it as referring to their client). And their official back up tool in their client is DRMed as we established above. This leaves no clear option for DRM-free backup.

No, it leaves lots of clear options for DRM-free backup. Just no options which don't arguably violate Steam's TOS. But there is no technical, digital, measure blocking one from doing backups in unapproved ways. Thus, doing such backups does not circumvent any digital scheme. Thus, it is not factually DRM and doing the backups does not trigger legal penalties for circumventing DRM so it is not legalistically DRM either. This is practically syllogistic logic here.
I am getting to the point where I think you just want to keep calling it "DRM" because "Valve have some bad or at least ambiguous stuff in their TOS which they could theoretically 'get' you with if they turned out to want to" just doesn't sound nearly as dramatic.

View this comment - View article - View full comments