With the success of BG3, Larian has a great opportunity to strengthen their own IP. Their Divinity games were great but had pretty nonsensical world-building (to this day, I still have no idea how DOS and DOS2 are related plotwise), and one of the great things about BG3 was the fusion of Larian game design with an appealing fantasy world. If Larian can build up a coherent setting of their own, their future would be bright.

According to the article, that’s exactly what happened ;-)

It’s on Bioware not EA. This is the third flop out of Bioware, and the post mortems for the past failures have all indicated that Bioware’s management has a dumpster fire for years, with EA often uncharacteristically serving as a voice of reason to protect them from their own mistakes. For example, it was EA that got them to include the flying in Anthem, the only fun part of the gameplay. Unfortunately, in the case of Andromeda and Dragon Age 4, EA’s mistake may have been giving Bioware’s management so much rope that they hung themselves.

there may be strategic reasons for EA to keep supporting BioWare… In order to grow, EA needs more than just sports franchises… Trying to fix its fantasy-focused studio may be easier than starting something new.

Ironically, EA grew out of Origin, one of the original grand-daddies of computer RPGs and the maker of the Ultima series in the 1980s-1990s.

Looks like Alex Kurtzman has done it again!

Decent affordable Bandai kits when…

Trump has a fawning audience, true, but unfortunately he also is a pretty funny guy who can think on his feet. During the debate, his quip that “I don’t know what he just said and I don’t think he does either” was 100% perfect. You can really see how his entertainment background sets him apart from other politicians. (All this, of course, is in service of the worst policies, which is too bad.)

Whelp… Biden was insistent on running, now the Monkey’s Paw has answered. All the other plausible Dems who could have stepped in to replace Biden will be running for the hills, and being the Democratic nominee is gonna be the worst job in politics for the next four months. And at the end of the campaign he gets to be remembered by history as the loser in the worst landslide election since Reagan-Carter.

Also:

• Sonia Sotomayor’s decision not to retire during Biden’s term is looking like yet another D own goal. Very real prospects for a 7-2 Supreme Court.

• We’re going to be seeing an orgy of foreign governments jockeying to cultivate relations with Trump. Official US foreign policy is going to be dead in the water, and NATO and G7 will be leaderless, until next year.

• Trump is going to have an iron grip on the Republican party now, to an even greater extent than before. On various issues where other Republicans held positions contrary to Trump’s, they’re going to be brushed aside.

• For the above two reasons, Ukraine is pretty well fucked.

His trips to Europe were two weeks before the debate…

Anyway, I thought they were blaming a cold and/or being over-prepared…

The Federation’s ban on AI and GE also has tinges of authoritarianism that run counter to the liberal ideal it’s supposed to represent. Say some planet in the Federation takes a different view of these issues, and wants to create a race of super-Datas and give them equal rights, are we expected to believe that the rest of the Federation will show up to bust down their doors, like some kind of space-DEA?

There seem to be three distinct post-Trek futures:

• genuine big shot actor
• reasonably successful voice actor
• B-movie “star”, featured prominently on the poster and appearing for 5 minutes in the actual movie.

At the same time, the gravity systems are designed by the best engineers in the Federation because they never, ever, give out, even when the rest of the ship is disintegrating.

Just as well, given the state of Trek movies by that time. DS9 was never ruined.

Yeah, and the problem with the Picard and Data show is that those characters don’t really have a relationship, at least not an emotional connection like Kirk/Spock/McCoy. They basically just had a professional relationship, which was fine for the series where there’s a problem to be solved every episode, and it’s not necessary to have fleshed-out character arcs. But a movie narrative needs to make the audience care about the main characters and their interactions with each other, all within a very short period of time. Picard/Data simply could not provide that emotional core.

Another important factor is TNG’s reliance (sometimes over-reliance) on A/B plots. The B plots were often an outlet for the ensemble characters to come out and play.

I think you can even argue that in each case there are two main characters plus a third wheel (Riker/McCoy).

But McCoy never faded from view, whereas Riker almost became a background character during the second half of TNG. They should have written Riker out of the series after Best of Both Worlds; after the character stuck around, the writers seemed unable to figure out what to do with him.

This is the answer, unfortunately.

I recently had a pretty horrible experience with an AMT Enterprise-D. Bad plastic quality, giant sprue marks all over the place (including on panel lines), and terrible fit. It was like a blast to the past of what model building was during the 1990s, before modern injection molding technology.

Technically, all ships with a functioning command structure are dictatorships. It’s not analogous at all to systems of government for a whole society. In nautical tradition, the captain on his deck is more powerful than the king and pope combined. Things are watered down a bit more nowadays with military regulations, etc., but the point remains that it’s nothing like how civilian societies function.

If we go by historical analogies to the Age of Sail, some of the shenanigans captains got up to were pretty consistent with Star Trek (up to and including getting themselves killed by the natives, like Captain Cook). It’s only modern navies that care so much about the lives of senior staff ;-)