TrueGentleman

Blade Runner's pacing is far from perfect, especially given its multiple rewrites in adapting PKD's loosely structured, intellectually overstuffed novel.

Just read Clarke's novel - it's fairly straightforward science fiction. Kubrick's breakthrough was to remove all its exposition and slow down the narrative (he used this strategy this again with his adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining).

Down to the gaudy architecture, mega-rich elites, abused labor force, deportation of strikers, etc. The troubled would-be city-state got hit badly by the economic downturn and still has deep fault-lines in its infrastructure. The Disneyland of the Desert indeed.

Besides his much-revised Prometheus science fiction film, Scott's attached to produce eight different film and TV projects in the next couple of years - and the guys Alcon Entertainment sound like bozos - so who knows what twists and turns development for this project will take.

This would be a sensible and conservative approach - word-of-mouth from current subscribers and buzz from happy returning players is worth more than any marketing campaign NCSoft is willing to fund - but unfortunately, it's at odds with the push to hype CoH Freedom. We'll see how the bug-hunting goes in the beta, I suppose.

This can't be emphasized enough to the devs. There are a couple of object lessons in the MMO field of how this kind of hampered launch can hurt a game for a very long time. Many players still look at F2P and think, "You get what you pay for."

Thanks for confirming this in practice (hopefully it's not a bug).

Yes, you were right that Clockwork O1 tipped the devs' hand when he said that the October's Vet Reward would be taken care of beforehand - they were actually never planning on it at all.

Then again, there's still plenty of bug-hunting to be done in the beta, so CoH Freedom could potentially slip.

Good point. This needs clarification from a red name.

So, with new Trial program ending August 17th (and the Ski Chalet mysteriously reappearing until, coincidentally, August 28th), the evidence is piling up that the devs are looking for an early-September release for CoH Freedom. What odds do the forums currently give for a launch date?

EDIT: As has also been pointed out below, everything for CoH in the NCSoft store is now listed as "Available only until Aug 29, 2011." That's even more indirect evidence of an early September release.

Better yet, Thiel is on the Bilderberg Group's steering committee. He's only a pair of mechanical hands away from being cast as Ayn Rand's reboot of Dr. No.

Another colorful detail from the Details article: Thiel co-founded PayPal with the mission of "enabling monetary sovereignty".

Why do arch-Libertarians always wind up sounding like Bond villains the longer they talk?

And just to add to the colorful if nerdy details, he's an avid admirer of J. R. R. Tolkien and Howard Hughes.

That's the impression one gets from Blueside, but on the other team, there's a mission arc in which Hami carries on a perfectly intelligent, if megalomaniacal conversion with the player in another example of the devs awkwardly reducing an incomprehensible inhuman entity to an ordinary conversation partner.

And how. Your illustration shows how the baroque design on individual figures clutters up groups. It's reminiscent of how some herd animals adopt camouflage to confuse predators.



The original CoT redesign blatantly violated one of the cardinal rules of character design in animation and gaming - distinctive silhouettes for everyone. At least the new one has gone some way to correcting that, but there's still room for improvement.

At the very least, the Power Rangers color palette needs to be toned down.

Nice work as a guide. Those designs show a clear progression up the ranks to the more baroque bosses instead of starting off with minions sporting the spiked 'n' stacked look. (A couple of designs have reverted to the spandex look, though. Tell the force mage to put on some pants unless he's trying to score with a succubus.)

That's a solid job of play-testing. Unless the Oranbega maps are going to undergo a similar update in terms of color and design, the CoT redesign should complement their specific environment.

Tribute to an obscure Omega Men support character?

But back to the Brute vs. Scrapper discussion:

Brute: And for all the jokes about Scrappers going off on their own, Brutes feel the effects of slower teams right where it hurts - the fury bar. Similarly, maps with widely spaced mobs are much more of a nuisance. Brutes need the fastest travel powers to be efficient.

As for Scrappers' ostensible shortcomings: That's firmly in the "pro" category for anyone who plays Scrappers regularly. While Brutes once had to do double-duty on red side as tank and DPS, there's no ambiguity about the role of a Scrapper as killing machine. In a pinch, when an enemy has broken off from the mob to engage one of the squishier ATs, a Scrapper's targetted taunt comes in handy.

Be that as it may, I have several of each AT, and those chars are ultimately all enjoyable in their own ways.

The Mars Society is not a scientific body, only a "space exploration advocacy" association. Presenting a "scientific" paper at this venue (presumably to distinguish it from the science fiction they also host) is nowhere near close to peer review. If that's the best he can do, then he's one step from a monologue about how those fools at the academy laughed at his ideas.


A huge red flag went up with this testimonial:
If this guy is getting support from anyone associated with that fraud award-winning piece of cinematic New Age nonsense passing itself off as a scientific-religious documentary, then his credibility is only taking on water.


"SuperScience"? Seriously? Is this from the Venture Brothers?
What's most dismaying is his habit of making presentations to high school students, an audience in no position to adequately assess his claims but one in need of regular instruction in scientific methodology and the detection of BS.

It's certainly sentient enough to carry on a perfectly sensible, if portentous conversation with players during the Mender Ramiel arc by using Statesman and Lord Recluse as ventriloquist's dummies (another tooth-grindingly awful revelatory moment in recent plot developments). That ability to communicate puts it parsecs ahead of, say, VALIS or Solaris, either of which would be a better model for the Well than a cosmic Edgar Bergen.

The prevalence of typos, misspellings, and copy editing errors is a comparatively minor complaint, but it breaks immersion just as plot holes do. In the age of spell checkers and word processing, there's less and less excuse for this.

So the Well's trying to play both ends against each other, then throwing Primal Earth into the mix, even as The Coming Storm approaches and the Battalion threatens to, I don't know, turn it into a jacuzzi? For a deus ex machina, the Well doesn't work particularly effectively or efficiently. Doesn't this strike anyone as an overcomplicated narrative, dramatically?

Moreover, since players are unable to affect the developments of these clumsily overlapping plots anyway, why would making them harder to justify be more interesting to observe from the sidelines?

Many thanks - most impressive.