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From a story by the author of "Let the Right One In"

Hi new player here! So i've been playing Pillars of Eternity for about 30 hours on Epic Games and I've realised I haven't unlocked any achievements for the game despite meeting the requirements. The ones I should have are Scribe, Alchemist and to complete 5 upgrades at the stronghold. I haven't entered any console commands as i'm aware this disables achievements, i'm just generally confused.

So is Biting Whip ever with taking in the Community Patch, or is it more of a "less bad" change than a genuinely competitive choice?

My full Ironman training is going pretty well. Since November I've done a good job of swimming regularly, and my running speed came back pretty quickly. I need to build up my riding miles, but I can do that as it gets warmer. The toughest part, as usual, has been the nutrition. Did you know that exercise causes hemorrhoids? So I was dealing with that for a bit. I am enjoying the gamification of all my training. I'm using Tridot for my workouts, and I'm almost level 17. I don't know what that means, but it's a fun carrot to chase. With the weather being bad, I did a fair amount of indoor rides using Zwift. I'm up to level 24 in that cycling MMO.

forgive me, I forgot to mention I also applied as well. Specifically for Area Design and QA.

Another body exchange, this time 1000 Ukrainian to 35 Russian. Definitely should have had the hundreds of Russians killed in Kupiansk this time, but the ratio i still in the high 20s to 1. Next time, the hundreds killed in Zaporizhia oblast maybe.

Could I also get a follow-up as well? Judging on past years, radio silence typically means one didn't make the cut but I would appreciate a follow-up if possible as well.

Draining Whip is very good in general - Biting Whip's original dmg bonus is a joke in comparison. CP just brought Biting Whip up to the power of Draining Whip. For a Beguiler I would always pick Draining Whip.

Playing Avowed on PS5, and the white arrows for the Wasteland Courier quest don't show up consistently. When I realised this I initially restarted the game, which allowed arrows near my character to show up, but not those farther away, then realised that changing the graphics settings between 'Balanced' and 'Quality' results in the arrows disappearing and reappearing, as shown in the video I've uploaded to YouTube:

So after a brief period of restartitis I am back to this build and I have another question: I have the full Community Patch installed, which means Biting Whip is a 20% Raw lash rather than just +10% Damage. As a veteran of PoE that seems extremely good: essentially a 20% multiplicative damage bonus that ignores armour. First, is this correct? Second, if so is Biting Whip a viable choice for this class combination? The way I see it, I should be able to generate a fair amount of focus by way of AoE Deception powers, so increasing my Focus gain isn't as important. Thoughts?

Don't know for sure, but that's certainly what I've heard as well. I don't think there's much doubt that Steam has added features which are designed to be addictive every bit as much as, say, Facebook has too.

Heya Wishtap, The new merch store is coming - look forward to letting the community know!

Rob Grant, co-creator of Red Dwarf

Hi Ali-Sama, Thanks for the affirmation and welcome to the community. Please reach out as you get your footing amidst the trolls, denizens, stalkers, and regulars

Hi there, I will follow-up via DM. Fionavar

I decided to buy Atomfall with all the DLC and Im going to play it next I have heard good things about this game 🤖

While I don't know, having never developed a game myself, I would strongly suspect making a 2D game with isometric presentation to be considerably more straight-forward, and has you using your hours on something that leverages your gameplay and not something that's only under the hood. Instead of x-y-z you only have to think in x-y. I guess the most direct analogy is maths when you have to add dimensions, as the product is non-linear: 2x times 2y is 4, while 2x times 2y times 2z is 8 -- double the total of what you had to take in account going only x-y. For example you can drop everything about 3D rendering, lighting, more complex pathing, etc etc. The Pillars games' presentation is rendered 3D, so it's 2D when you're playing the game. The only things still real-time rendered in 3D are basically the characters / NPC's, and a miniscule numbers of special effects, some doors et cetera. But because the characters are in 3D, they still had to add dynamic lighting on top of their 2D. The final product is as you know absolutely beautiful, but there's still considerable time investment to achieve it. But again, the gameplay is 2D. Again, I'm not a game developer so take my thoughts for what they are. But I hope they've given you some things to consider. Best of luck to you whatever you choose!

Didn't Valve only add the mechanic in this way to get around all the scrutiny that "regular" loot box gambling mechanics got?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/02/20/mamdani-nyc-budget-affordability-crisis/ Fareed Zakaria has written an article highlighting serious concerns around Mamdani's budget and plans to deliver on his promises to make NY " affordable " This is almost always the case with socialist promises, they end up with a massive tax bill because how do you pay for it? He also raises a trend around financial mismanagement seen in several Dem controlled cities I have included the full article below and I would encourage everyone to read it who is following Mamdani and his plans going forward "Zohran Mamdani ran on a promise to make New York City affordable. This week, he unveiled a budget that is, in a word, unaffordable. New York has been fiscally profligate for so long that the headline number — $127 billion — produces little shock. But for perspective, these are similar to the annual expenditures of a midsize nation (with all the expenses a country requires) — like Greece or Thailand — devoted to governing one city. New York City’s budget has ballooned in recent years. Mike Bloomberg’s last budget, adopted for fiscal 2014, totaled about $70 billion. In little more than a decade, the budget has nearly doubled, growing faster than inflation and faster than the city’s economic growth. And much of it has happened as the city has been losing the one thing that makes big government easier to finance: people. New York City’s population fell sharply amid the pandemic, with a 5.3 percent decline from April 2020 to July 2022. More recent reports show a rebound, but the city remained below its 2020 baseline as of 2024. The arithmetic is brutal: A larger bill is divided among fewer payers. Per person, the imbalance is stark. Using the Lincoln Institute’s fiscally standardized numbers, New York’s general spending in 2023 was more than 30 percent higher per capita than Los Angeles’s — and more than double Houston’s. And what do New Yorkers get for this? Look at New York City schools, the largest district in the country. The city’s education budget has climbed while enrollment has shrunk. It has risen from roughly $34 billion in 2019 to more than $40 billion, with per-student spending projected to reach nearly $35,000 in fiscal 2026 — among the highest in the nation. The outputs — graduation numbers, test scores and reading levels — are at best middling, often comparable to places that spend a fraction of what New York does. Now come the taxes — because every political argument in New York eventually ends up at the same curbside: Who will pay? New York City already sits at the extreme end of the American tax spectrum. For high earners, the combined state and city income tax rate reaches 14.776 percent. Add federal taxes, and the combined marginal rate can exceed 50 percent, reaching roughly 55 percent on certain investment income. New Yorkers pay tax rates comparable to those in European countries that provide, in return, universal health care, free college education and amazing infrastructure. New Yorkers get some 300 miles of sidewalk sheds and construction fences. On business taxation, the city is also off the charts. The Citizens Budget Commission reports that New York City business activity faces the country’s highest combined marginal corporate tax rate — 17.44 percent once state, city and regional layers are stacked. Mamdani wants to hike income and corporate rates even further, or else he says he will raise property taxes by almost 10 percent. Property taxes already made up more than 27 percent of the costs of homeownership in the city as of 2022, above the national average. New York is really the prime example of a problem Democrats seem unwilling to confront. Blue cities are out of control, promising more, spending more, delivering less and pushing off the fiscal problems to some future day. Take Los Angeles — another one-party metropolis wrestling with affordability and disorder. The city’s homelessness budget for fiscal 2025-2026 totals about $950 million. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported that in 2023 homelessness was up 9 percent countywide and 10 percent in the city, and a 2024 Associated Press account noted that homelessness has surged 70 percent countywide since 2015 (and 80 percent in the city) amid public frustration “despite billions spent.” An audit reviewed $2.4 billion in city homelessness funding and found that officials could not reliably track where it went or what it achieved. Or take Chicago, with a mayor whose approval rating is deep underwater and where the pension promises are so large that they will surely bankrupt the city at some point. What is the theory of good government here? If the answer is “keep adding programs,” the city will keep producing unaffordability — because unaffordability is what happens when government becomes a machine that grows faster than the society it governs. Mamdani’s basic instinct is right. Focus on affordability, especially housing. But not by providing government subsidies — these only seem to have driven up the cost of rent, as subsidies naturally do. (The city’s rental-assistance spending rose from $263 million in fiscal 2020 to $1.34 billion in the most recent reported fiscal year. That is a fivefold increase in a handful of years — and housing costs only got worse.) Matt Yglesias persuasively argues that the city should make it easy — and routine — to build abundant market-rate housing. That will bring in more people, expand the tax base, fill the schools and increase local GDP. And that will make the budget affordable. Democrats in city halls can make the right choice: stop governing as if the goal is to announce new entitlements, and instead make government work — safer streets, functioning schools, predictable sanitation and, above all, enough housing that the middle class can find places to live. New York does not need more soaring rhetoric. It needs more homes."

At the risk of sounding negative that gets harder and harder in an increasingly overcrowded world 😖 Social media doesn’t help either, as people have long since worked out negativity is more profitable

If we don't get a frog boss I'm rioting

This is Reduvius Personatus (or the Masked Hunter bug) I was thinking of the Playground area which is more than likely going to be like the sandbox from the first game. Obviously there will be antlions, but I was thinking of a bug that could replace the antlions in some situations. I present you, with Reduvius Personatus. They can attach things like sand grains to their bodies, and at night, actively hunt prey. If there's going to be a sandy area, there are more than likely going to be a ton of new bugs to help diversify, (example: Camel Spiders, new scorpion variants, and even the adult Antlions), but I wanna just throw this one out there. For how it would be likely encountered or fought, I'd imagine it be like if you gave a Northern Scorpion steroids. They're incredibly stealthy, venomous, and very fast. With them being mostly nocturnal hunters, traveling the playground area at night (to avoid sizzle damage) would mean you'd have to constantly be ready to fight one. I have no idea what tier they'd be put into, but I personally would put them T3 or above. The main issue in terms of combat however, is that they use paralyzing enzymes to rapidly immobilize prey. I don't know how this would work, because I feel like this would be largely unfair due to how quick you'd be able to die to one. A paralyzing effect could be added where it builds up like chill, slowing you down over time but with the added negative effect of that it damages you too. As for their size, since Obsidian has taken a lot of creative liberties in the sizes of creatures and the world around us, so I genuinely have no clue for how big they could be in game. If you have any suggestions for this, don't hesitate to add them in the replies

Valve getting sued in New York for loot boxes. Or at least, that's the headline version. Seems to be more about there being a marketplace for selling the results of loot boxes than the mechanic itself, which is why they're targeting Valve/ Steam specifically instead of other who just use loot boxes. IMO, should have happened way sooner.

Hi, I love the game so far it calms me down. So while playing the game I have told friends and family about Grounded2 and It would be cool to add more players to the game (More kids). And if you add more bugs could you add centipedes, monarch butterflies, flies, Daddy long leg spiders, frogs, turtles. And then with the furniture cis their a purpose or just for decoration? Can you also add more fruits and vegetables ? That’s all i have for now but great game!!!! I’m loving it.

Finished Norse: Oath Of Blood. It is a buggy mess. It could have a bit more content. The content it does have though is good. The story is well written. The world is fleshed out. Once you get to recruit people, you have way more hirdmen than you'll ever need to use in battles. Actually, on normal difficulty the ones you get while progressing the story are more than enough I really enjoyed it when I wasn't battling corrupted save games... Once they have sorted out the bugs it is a good tactical game.