Compare the Citadel Presidium in ME1 and ME3, for example. The entire visual language has evolved.

I think a lot of it really is lost in translation. A lot of these French devs like Spiders and Dontnod actually have quite decent writers, they just don't understand how English dialogue works and/or outsource it to some shitty translation agency.

Yeah, they've put a lot of work into the way they do lighting/shadows, which makes SUCH a big difference now.

One of the things that really disappointed me about the later Mass Effect games was that they went from this amazing, brutalist, concrete, 1970s vision of the future to the general 'white plastic and glass' future that can be seen in all sci-fi from Minority Report onwards.

I agree, it has been a little disappointing.

Care to upload a picture of yourself, just, you know, to prove you are who you say you are. You're welcome to leave out the face, just a post-it note with your username.

Yeah, Spirit/Ghost Watch definitely seems the most likely if they do a direct translation.

No engine is free. All the above have quite large royalty fees. If you're a major dev, you always negotiate a custom contract that (usually) involves an upfront purchase cost in the high six/low seven figures for a duration, and then sometimes involves a second payment if the title is released.

The fact is that even if Amazon released a AAA game every 4 months for a decade, something they have nowhere near the development capacity for, they've still probably overpaid if it's just for gaming.

How big are they though? 100? 200? 500? And licensing deals are never this large. If I license Unreal 4 from Epic for my massive, $200m, AAA game and I demand a set fee (ie. no royalties) the cost will still be less than $10m easy. I remember hearing somewhere that Bioware's entire fee for Unreal 3 for the entire Mass…

A Tea Partier or, indeed, an Anarchist. The Far-Left and Far-Right are remarkably similar in many ways.

I don't think Grand Theft Auto has any politics at all beyond general misanthropy. The creators are a couple of millionaire, upper-middle class white men who went to one of the most elite private schools in the UK. Not that that's an issue, so did I, but they hardly proclaim any status-quo-questioning politics in…

How long have you wonderful chaps spent on the game so far. I am (at least according to the only walkthrough I checked yesterday) approaching the end after about 35 hours, and I've done a lot of what was available and am in no way a speedrunner.

How big is your party. Make sure you hire other party members if you're not at the full six-man team.

Unfortunately it's also nerfing the magic spells that I have relied on on my easy-mode 'yes I am shit at RPGs' playthrough currently ongoing.

yeah this seems right to me.

Probably get funds from the UK government. Tonnes of the tiny colonies in the Caribbean get millions a year anyway.

It's a British colony though. And they'd probably defend it.

Actually Sega *did* commission the game back in 2005. Obsidian was busy finishing NWN for Atari which they'd also fucked up on so they didn't start on AP's main development until mid-2006. There was a big plot change back in late '07/early '08 (and it should be noted that entire dev cycles can be less than the two…

Bioware invented cinematic RPGs with Kotor in 2003 and that's what they named the genre.