Quoting: SalvatosWait, they support Icewind Dale 2 even though Beamdog said they couldn't make an Enhanced Edition for it? Huh!

From what I heard, the source code / assets of IWD2 were lost, and the EEs Beamdog did were all based on the original stuff.
GemRB on the other hand is a rewrite from scratch, so they never had the original code for any of the games to begin with.

Doesn't mean Beamdog couldn't have possibly reverse engineered the bits required to make IWD2 work on top of what they already had, but I guess it may not have been cost-effective, and if they got it wrong they'd piss off their paying customers.

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Sad for all those people losing their job in the current market situation. Might be tough to find something in games, and possibly in other software industries, too.

Though the thing I always find fascinating in instances like this: what did those 1000 people do that doesn't need doing any more?

Having myself always worked in smaller companies (or within smaller departments of large companies), where projects rarely had more than a dozen developers (and at times only one or two), I wonder how much efficiency is lost due to bureaucracy and coordination required between all those people. Though to be honest, in my current position as one of six, I spend about 80% of my time with coordination, reviews, meetings, presentations and support. The other 20% are then divided between coffee breaks and coding. I guess in a much bigger team, you'd have people specifically dedicated to coffee breaks only ;-).

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Aipreciated!

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That's one of the classics where I'm not sure if I'd actually enjoy it today.

The graphics were absolutely superb, and I guess that might have glossed over the glaring deficiencies in gameplay. The strategy part was fairly minimalist. Firing catapults at castle walls was fun. Sword-fighting was manageable, but don't ask what the best way to go about it was, other than frantically clicking away with the mouse. No clue how to pull off the tournament.

And the major selling point, the kiss scene, certainly hit different at age 12 than it would now :-).

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Improving on the Civilization formula is really not that simple. Change it too much and people complain it's no longer Civilization. Change it too little and people see no reason to upgrade from the previous installment.

Perhaps with some things there comes a point where they are as perfect as can be, and any change will only make them worse. Though I guess plenty people will argue that Civilization VI wasn't at that point yet.

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That's one the games I have on my radar for this year. Kingdoms and Castles was fun (even though I did not spend that much time with it), and it received updates for years. Nova Roma looks even better.

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I'm on Gnome, but I could swear that this also is a problem I had in the past. Haven't played many games with controller lately, so no idea if it's still an issue or not.

But even then it annoys me at times: screen going blank during lengthy cut-scenes. Or the opposite: screen not going blank when Firefox with Youtube is open, and no video playing (happens only on occasion, though).

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Of those listed above, I'm only looking forward to Star Trek: Voyager. That aside, there's Esoteric Ebb and that's pretty much it. Maybe a chance to work on my backlog ...

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I think it's good — looks like they made GOG private so they can pursue their own vision and not be pressured by shareholders of CDPR.

Haven't looked at it from that angle. So perhaps it's a positive, though only time will tell.

From the press release, it appears to me that the focus will be even more on game preservation (which is a good thing, though not sure it's also profitable). I'd rather hope they focus more on tools for game developers, so a lot more of the indies that are only on Steam right now might consider releasing on GOG as well.

I keep a growing list of games I hope will come to GOG one day, but in most cases I asked and got a response, it's along the lines that they're a small team and GOG is not worth the hassle. I guess Steam with their API (and in case of Linux, distro-agnostic runtime) is hard to beat.

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I mostly played CK III (89%) and then 4 other games share the rest. Also, 4 months where I didn't play a single game (on Steam).

I don't see any breakdown by OS, but I assure you it's 100% Linux :-).

Though if GOG had similar stats, I think they'd be quite a bit different ... (for one, 89% KC:D2)

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