Quoting: BeamboomThere's nothing wrong in wanting and expecting a good introduction/tutorial from a game when you start it. Nothing wrong at all. To say "hey the info is on the internet - others have made it" is not a good excuse for a poor tutorial in a game.
To get the gamer started is indeed part of a good game design.

To be fair, both CK2 and EUIV have tons of tooltips and if you hover above anything you can usually learn more about it. I think that PDS should update their tutorials more often and have them hold your hand a bit longer. I think that these days a lot of newcommers get into games thanks to lets plays and whatnot that usually cover the basics and paradox is pretty good at promoting itself digitally so maybe that's their strategy. It doesn't help things that patches sometimes change mechanics wildly, especially stuff like rebels. You have to skim through patch notes/go to their forums to stay up to date.

At any rate, Paradox is the publisher here so tutorials and design decisions are mostly up to the devs, I'd wager. On that same note, the only thing that dampens my enthusiasm is the less-than-stellar track record the devs have of bugfixing. My hope is that Paradox will hound them to improve. After the disaster that was Sword of the Stars 2 launch, I think they'll be pressuring the developers to polish up things before release.

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Quoting: BeamboomSo it's written in Java? Interesting. Anyone know what framework/devtools/IDEs/libs are used?

I'm sure if you asked Phr00t (the dev) he'd tell you. He strikes me as the type. Try either his facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/phr00ts.software or the steam forums.

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It'll be Napoleon: TW since it's closest to Empire, engine-wise, if I had to guess. Would probably take the least amount of effort to port. Though I would love it if it was the Tomb Raider reboot instead.

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Quoting: ZeitgeistMy hope is that the VP guys doing the port without eon. I guess they they can do a native port.

That seems highly unlikely since VP has invested a lot of time and money into eON. Basically, they've committed to it as their solution to port games. If they get it right and working as well as they, they can then offer to port games for less money than the competition and with less effort. A sort of one size fits all solution if you will.

Quoting: srlsboyBorderlands 2 is from an older engine and that was handled properly. Why no just ask Feral or Aspyr to port the mac code?

My guess is that it boils down to either two things. A) Money - VP offered to do it for less (iirc the VP employee in question once made an offhand remark about how they usually take lump sums instead of % of sales) B) Aspyr - who did Civ5 and is working on BE - is too busy. Feral is working on the Total War games full time too apart from their other mac ports and stuff.

You have to remember that most of these porting studios aren't that big and so have limited resources.

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Quoting: srlsboyBut Bioshock Infinite is a UE3 game. With a linux client
for the engine why would eON even be necessary?

Not all versions of UE3 support Linux. Only the newer ones. It was a highly modified engine with various iterations - afaik a lot of companies made their own modifications for their own particular needs.

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Quoting: maodzedunI've yet to play properly CKII: Charlemagne but this is also on the agenda, probably for December(ish). Hopefully Paradox would have cleared any major bugs by then. Unfortunately their expansions tend to be somewhat broken on release - Charlemagne was just another confirmation of that.

Art of War is virtually bug-free compared to most of their major releases. I haven't encountered anything in my few hours played and the forums seem mostly subdued. There was a multiplayer bug that's been hotfixed but that's about it I think.

Charlemagne had a rocky launch but they fixed most of the issues that I cared about in the beta patch about two days afterwards. Which isn't ideal, but hey, sadly better than what a lot of devs do these days. It's always worth it to scan the forums first before buying anything anyhow.

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Quoting: oldrocker99Europa Universalis IV, which I certainly consider an AAA game, did come out August 13,2013 for Windows, Mac and Linux on the same day. This native port was developed in-house by Paradox Development Studios. NO slagging of Aspyr or Feral (who are freaking awesome) intended here.

Just sayin'.

I'm a huge Paradox fan (been playing since the early 00s) but they aren't 'AAA' insofar the industry is concerned. The term isn't really an appellation for the game's quality but its budget and production style. Dozens if not hundreds of people are involved and millions of dollars are spent. PDS has grown since the days of Vicky and HoI 1 but it still numbers at less than a hundred people in their studio and they frugally (and wisely IMO) spend their budgets in the development process. It is nothing compared to the bloated budgets of games like Destiny or the Battlefield series (coincidentally also by Swedes, though they're on the other side of the Old City in Stockholm maybe that's the difference).

I also wasn't able to confirm it at launch (because I was too busy playing :D) but the game is also available in most of Asia, not just the Americas, according to steamdb at least. I hate regional release dates and regional pricing myself and remember suffering at the launch of Civ 5 and its subsequent expansions for two whole days while others were already enjoying the game.

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Oh, I had been thinking of picking this up. Might wait until it's on sale because recent and upcoming releases have been tough on my wallet (the free key would be a nice solution :P).

What makes the NES era and games like Megaman (which Shovel Knight was clearly inspired by) special to me is the fact that devs had a lot less power and tools to work with and so had to find creative solutions to make their games stand out. It meant tight controls, creative sprites and, most importantly, beautiful music that still stands the test of time. Just look at all the remixes of NES music still being made to this day. The Castlevania games did a great job too but I have to state that Mega Man 2 just is timeless, musically. Nearly every video game fan I know can hum at least one of the songs - Wood Man, Metal Man, Crash Man, and especially Dr. Wily's 1st stage. To me, the fact that they managed to make such great music while working within a lot of hardware restrictions is simply mindblowing.

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It's "Warband", Liam.

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I'd very much enjoy it if the second game got ported, since I haven't played it yet. The devs don't really seem to care much and I don't know if badgering them will solve anything.

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