Be sure to get rid of that immersion-breaking, abysmal level-of-detail pop-in crap the first game suffered from too. Needs extending much MUCH further than they had it and use decent 3D asset transitions to so it's less obnoxious. Shouldn't be seeing that kind of cheesy, game engine nonsense in today's games.

As long as the visuals are built around a solid foundation of great gameplay, there should be no problems. Studios that think lush visuals first and gameplay second deserve to fall by the wayside.

Can we get some journalism going on at GameSpot and not 'churnalism' from press releases or the mouths of marketers. How about digging a little deeper into why this availability issue is happening. Doesn't anyone have any inside contacts in retail / digital distribution that they can squeeze for more details?

Firaxis hasn't done itself any favors releasing its XCOM demo on Steam because it has to rank as one of the shortest, most tight-fisted, no effort-spent demos ever. We can only hope the time not spent creating a decent demo has been spent making the full game even more awesome.

One thing's for sure. Given the blatent and obvious bugs and 'release week' and sometimes even 'release day' patches for the majority of retail game releases these days, this so-called science needs to get it's act together.

DO NOT install multiple anti-virus products on your system because this can cause corrupted files and system file issues as the two anti-virus tools try to deal with system infections at the same time. The same can be said of multiple anti-spyware tools that have 'real-time' system scanner engines that sit in memory and constantly watch for and clean spyware issues. As an example, Ad-Aware and Spybot both have real-time system scanner features and these will conflict. However, I believe the Spybot installer lets you choose whether to install its real-time scanning system (I think it's called Teatimer). Not installing Teatimer turns Spybot into an 'On Demand' scanner that should work okay alongside Ad-Aware's real-time protection system.

The poor performance situation with NWN2 is the tip of an ever-growing iceberb of a problem for PC gamers. The plain fact is that PC game developers are gradually becoming less and less motivated to create game 3D engines that intelligently scale to whatever hardware they find themselves running on. Console platforms such as Xbox360 and Playstation are FAR easier to push to the graphical limits because the developers only have to write and optimise their game code to one fixed set of hardware. That's why consoles are termed fixed-hardware platforms. It's also why many console games look and perform FAR better than those on a PC, even though the latest PC graphics cards are far superior in features to the hardware in console systems. The developers only have to code their game to this one fixed hardware set and can therefore perform all manner of optimisation tricks,knowing full well if it works on their development machines, it will work on end0user machines because everyone else has the same hardware. Developing a PC game to optimally target whatever hardware it finds itself on is not only trying to hit a moving target (due to ATI and Nvidia constantly releasing different video cards far to frequently), you also have to code the game so that it first detects what graphics features the PC video hardware has, then intelligently adjust itself to use those features - such coding takes a long time, and makes testing properly almost impossible because you can't predict what hardware a PC gamer has in their machine, or what driver versions they are running. The end result we all frequently see is a dumbing down of graphics qualities to the lowest common denominator...and sadly, the lowest common denominator conists of clueless PC owners who choose to buy PC systems with stupendously inadequate video card hardware such as integrated graphics chips. This is further aggravated by dumb-ass PC retailers looking to screw over punters by building PC systems with these ludicrously useless integrated video cards and saying they are good for games too. We also need to see drastic changes in how video hardware companies such as ATI and Nvidia produce their products. Both companies need to stop releasing graphics cards that differ so vastly in their features and consolidate their hardware lineup. They are only harming their own future sales in the PC market because eventually, developers may just find trying to develop a PC game to work across such a stupidly wide range of graphics hardware too much hassle, costing too much time and money. They will then likely give up on the PC platform and simply develop for the easier fixed-hardware console platforms. You won't find an Xbox360 suffering from video hardware with fixed-function and programmable pipelines as well as shader models 1, 2 and 3.