I find it interesting that the achievements badges, while slightly buggy on Gamespot, have been offline now for well over a month. There is no reason for this at all, given that none of the bugs users were encountering were fatal ones.

Having had the job of server admin before, I am more than familiar with the concept of "staging servers". Is Gamespot not using them to test new code while live code is in use? If they were, there would be almost zero downtime of any feature before being fixed or upgraded.

I hate to say it, but it very much looks like someone dropped the ball here. Bugs other sites have irregardless, you could have kept the feature live and simply disallowed updates while it was being "fixed". Now we're going on five weeks, and it is still offline.

Someone might want to light a fire under the team responsible for the achievements, and see what they can do to resurrect it quickly, even if updates are disabled.

Adding fuel to the fire. /signed

Given the fact that you can connect controllers to the PC, and that PC video cards have digital connections for large screen TVs... oh, and the fact that PCs can have far more gaming power than most consoles.. and the fact that PCs are largely modular.. there is almost no advantage to a console when it comes to "best for" stuff. They are cheaper and lighter than a PC. But far simpler as well.

Recurring subscriptions are the "cash cow" for any retail model where you want to retain and rebill your clients. In this case, the gamers are paying for the ability to interact with each other across the software on the internet, and for updates to the product above and beyond patches. Many types of software qualify for this model, not just MMOGs.

However, the current rash of MMOG title after title is due in large part to the shoddy quality of most, and people's need to game together. They continually try one out, drop it, hop to the next, repeat ad-nauseum. It is a circular problem, in that the more people try, the more demand there is for new ones. It doesn't mean that they are any good - in fact many bomb within the first year, or struggle through with financial losses. Some with big titles (Age of Conan for example) have horrible launches, and still struggle through a reorganization. It is just one more game for others to try out, continuing the great MMOG circle of life.

When investors finally wise up and see that the chances of positive return on a MMOG are more negative than positive, perhaps we'll see some real improvements in the quality of games, and a reduction in their number.

No ... unless you like collecting hundreds of meaningless flags and enjoy extensive task repetition.

mkurts

Bingo. +1 for hitting the nail on the head..

It is about time developers started taking advantage of >2 cores. Given that most software runs hundreds of threads, it was just laziness until now they didn't. Can't wait to see how this runs on my Quad.

My #1 tip when playing Risen: make a new savegame (and I mean new - totally separate one) every 20-30 minutes. The game has a lot of consequences for actions that usually are permanent. In addition, some of the quests get broken fairly easily, which means either you won't be able to finish them, or other quests they are tied to.

It is a difficult, if rewarding game. I tossed up a review of it not long ago.

Bioware rarely (if ever) makes games that flop. They have a high level of quality, and almost always produce successful titles. So yep, DA:O should do rather well - both based on hype levels, and Bioware's history.