Sweetz

Just an update that Firefox 21 is out on the release channel and has H.264 support enabled by default. Reminder: this is only on Windows 7 or above because Firefox uses Windows' built in H.264 decoder which is only provided with Win7 or later.

There's still the problem where you have to hit play twice to get the video to load, but they still play fine.

Meh, when I think of which of any of the big publishers I'd like to get the license, I don't come up with any clear winner.

To be honest, I don't even know what I want in a Star Wars game anymore - or that I want one at all. Since Mass Effect and appealing potential that Prey 2 seemed to have, I'm much more interested in developers coming up with their own sci fi IPs at this point. Star Wars has too much baggage anymore.

Am I crazy here; is this not ridiculous to anyone else?

They're charging $50 for a manual. $100 for a manual and the "privilege" to test the game for them. A game for which they've shown some pretty concept paintings and absolutely 0 game footage, not even a single screenshot. When did indies start acting worse than big publishers?

@ssully: To be honest my own concern isn't with the variable quality of their past games, it's more due to their lack of experience with the genre, and that tonally I just don't think they're the right studio for the game. Gearbox makes bombastic games and they have a bombastic studio head - that in and of itself is not bad, but that is not Homeworld. Homeworld is serious, serene, and classy. I mean, it opens with the song below. Even if Gearbox can make a good space RTS, I don't feel like they can make a good Homeworld - unless they get some of the original key staff involved, which is extremely unlikely since they're basically off working for their own indie studio.

You're working under the assumption they had that much credibility to being with. Again, even before Aliens, no one out there was saying Gearbox was an awesome developer. Also regarding Aliens, it's not just that it was a bad game, it's the whole situation surrounding it. In case you're not aware of the (alleged) story, what happened with Aliens is that Gearbox basically used money that Sega paid them for Aliens to fund development of Borderlands 2 and then outsourced Aliens to several different contract studios - which accounts for its especially low quality. That's not a "misstep", that's indicative of shitty company leadership that cares less about the quality of the product with their name on it than they do revenue. That is not the kind of studio you expect to treat a beloved IP well. Just look at how the other classic game IP they bought turned out...

If you look at Gearbox's entire catalog, it's pretty middling. I personally think they made only one notably great game, Borderlands 1. Borderlands 2 was fun, but after a single play through I was done, unlike Borderlands 1 which I spent over 100 hours with. I believe that Jeff, who was also a hugeBL1 fan, had an experience with the sequel that mirrors mine. Brothers in Arms 1 was good (I would not call it great) and the series goes downhill after that. After that you've got a couple bad games that were called in to finish or do contract work on (stuff lke Duke Nukem Forever, CS: Condition Zero, and the Halo 1 port [which had atrocious technical problems upon release]). I would not call them a good developer; I would call them an average developer that does a poor-to-average job more often than they do a good job.

They are not the right developer to handle a beloved, hallmark RTS - a genre they have no experience with. They also tend to make bombastic games, so just tonally they've established themselves as a different kind of developer than you want handling the sequel to game with an appreciated serious and serene tone.

Regarding the gore, the skyhook executions did seem over the top. However, I'm not sure if most people notice this, but they had Elizabeth make some kind of gasp or shocked remark every time you performed one. As a result, I pretty much never used them, because I felt bad every time due to Elizabeth's reaction. So her admonishment did have an affect on me, by only regards to the over-the-top executions (which were never really necessary or beneficial unless you had a certain item equipped) and not fighting in general (which was necessary of course).

One thing to note, I've found after initially clicking the play button it can take an oddly long time for a video to start, sometimes upwards of a minute. However, if I click to advance the video to some spot and then back, it will start playing after just a second or two of buffering. So it appears that FF's H.264 support is not 100% trouble free yet and this is probably why it's disabled by default, but once the video is playing it's fine.

---edit---

Like Dolphin_Butter says, it turns out hitting the big play button, and then the little play button down in the loader bar works. Minor inconvenience.

Well technically he's the COO (Chief Operating Officer), not the CEO - that position is still open since John Riccitiello left.

I concur. His soapboxing here is less about some silly internet poll than it his about him saying that he wants to lead the company (and speak for it).

Update 5/14/13. Firefox 21 is officially out today and has H.264 enabled by default, so you can skip the steps below.

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Fellow Firefox users, Firefox 20 is out and finally supports H.264 video (provided you're on Win 7 or above)! This means you can finally watch Giant Bomb's HTML5 videos. I tried it out and it works absolutely fine.

For those wondering why they should use the HTML5 video player, it's because it allows very high quality (unlike the streaming player) and yet also still allows skipping ahead without being fully downloaded (unlike the progressive player).

Note that H.264 is disabled by default in FF20 (technically, it's still in testing, but it works fine). To enable:

1. First, make sure you're on Firefox 20. Click the Firefox button -> Help -> About. If you're not on 20 this should trigger an update.
2. Type about:config into the address bar.
3. Say you'll be careful (i.e. click past warning message).
4. In the search box, type foundation, you should get back one result named: media.windows-media-foundation.enabled
5. Double click the row to switch the setting to true.
6. Close and reopen Firefox and you're good to go.