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https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/189270621926/its-become-a-bit-of-a-meme-lately-that-obsidian I can understand where feeling comes from, and I think a lot of it has to do with the relative ages of people in leadership positions. Depending on the specific game we’re talking about, it’s a type of game that some of us have already iterated on 2, 3, or 4 times. And when it comes to things like dialogue structure and quest design, there’s even more structural commonality between our projects, regardless of the underlying genre or camera perspective. I’ve been a game developer for 20 years now. Regardless of my intelligence or creativity compared to a junior designer, I have seen enough quests move from idea to document to alpha implementation to beta to launch to have a pretty good sense about how certain approaches are going to go. There are some quest concepts or details that are - and I stress that I do not mean this pejoratively - naïve. The quest designer does not, and could not, understand the technical implications of what they are trying to do. When it comes to quest design (especially) a little bit of knowledge can be a very dangerous thing, because as with learning any discipline, it’s hard to comprehend how much you don’t know once you get the basics down. One of my favorite bicycle frame builders is Richard Sachs. He’s been essentially building the same type of brazed steel frames for over 45 years. I have one of his 1978 frames and it looks very similar to the frames he builds now. He’s one of the higher-profile living frame builders and he’s vocal about his opinions. In an interview, he recounted interacting with a talented young frame builder who had been working for a few years, built several dozen frames, and concluded he had pretty much learned everything there was to it. Sachs’ reaction was, “You don’t even know how to make the right kind of mistakes,” This is one thing for a craft like frame building, where it’s often (today) one person working alone as a hobbyist. It’s another thing in a big team environment like game development where 30-100 people are trying to work together on a big, interconnected project. More experienced leads tend to be more conservative and critical about design, not necessarily because of some ideological stance, but because we have seen things go very wrong and we want to prevent the kind of collateral damage we have seen play out in the past. Players remember quests like Beyond the Beef, and rightly so, because it’s a very fun quest with a lot of interesting ways to approach and resolve it. What players don’t remember, because they weren’t there, is how long Beyond the Beef took to complete, and the impact it had on the designers’ schedule and the project as a whole. And players don’t remember the cut content, some of it the product of months of a designer’s time, because it was hopelessly broken or inherently not fun to play through. When I write this, it’s not to put blame at on the quest designers. It’s my responsibility to review their work and to approve or disapprove it. On a game like F:NV, which was almost half-my-career-ago, I very often said, “I don’t think you should do that,” or “I wouldn’t do that,” with an explanation of why and some suggestions for alternative approaches. These days, I am more likely to say, “Don’t do that,” because I have seen 10 out of 12 soft warnings go ignored and yield some really tremendous headaches and heartaches. In contrast, when I see young teams (and by this I mean inexperienced developers with inexperienced leads) working, I am often pleasantly reminded of what naïveté can produce - as long as you have the time and money to burn through your mistakes. I talk with and visit a lot of teams at other companies, and there are some high profile developers I’ve visited where their design process is less of a process and more of an ad hoc “fling **** at the wall” experiment that goes on for 3-5 years. Sometimes the cost of this is just time, which is money. Sometimes the cost is polish. Sometimes the cost is burning out half a generation of young developers. Sometimes it’s all of these things. If you’ve never been at the helm when your project goes so over-budget that the company is in serious peril, this might not seem like a big deal. If you’ve never been in charge when the game comes out and gets slammed for being sloppy, buggy, and messy - when a reviewer straight-up says the team that worked massive overtime to get the game out “phoned it in” - this might not seem like a big deal. And if you haven’t watched the people on your team, people for whom you were responsible, get burned-out or laid off because of crunch, or stress, or a project cancelation, it also might not seem like a big deal. But if you have been in that position, it’s hard to see the consequences of inaction and not try to mitigate them, consciously or unconsciously, by pushing for more tried-and-true approaches to design. I’m not saying it’s an objectively good thing, but it is, I think, a natural reaction for leaders who see things go wrong over and over. Personally, I do hope we take more chances at Obsidian in the future, whether it’s on big projects or small ones. Some of this will involve putting less experienced people in leadership roles. Limiting the project scope itself also helps. Small projects and DLCs are easier to experiment with in good conscience because the impact on the company will probably be low if it fails. But when it comes to our big projects, our more experienced leads will have to be more open-minded about letting certain things wander a little bit. There are additional layers of experience and perspective that I will (hopefully) gain if I remain in the industry another 5, 10, 15 years. Hopefully that will allow me and other people working in leadership positions at the company to let people take more risks in good conscience. I want to help people make the right kinds of mistakes.

I don't care about D&D and what it inspired. I simply like it more to plan over the course of several encounters instead to view every one as an isolated event. Basically you can say that i'd like to see a reasonably sized dungeon (or other areas) as one big encounter or challenge - and not every fight as a singular one. It doesn't necessarily mean that there have to be per-rest abilites. It can also mean something else like PoE-health. I played a lot of The Dark Eye P&P when I was young and health as well as "mana" or other resource pools only replenished a bit during sleep. I mean if you drained yourself or got severely wounded it would have taken weeks (in game time) to be back to 100%. In case of priests you couldn't even go to sleep but had to properly meditate or visit a church or speak with a brother. Stuff like that. So you couldn't just enter a dungeon like a buch of drunk spring breakers and try to roflstomp its residents. I always liked that.

Amen, bruh! City bird here too and lack (or even total absence. Looking at you, Kingmaker, or should I call you "Village Elder Maker"?)of cities is detrimental to any RPG.

Pfff, it's only Sydney that is about to go up in flames, nothing important Fire fighting planes have dumped some pink coloured fire retardant on the outer suburbs recently, as the fires were getting that close. Grab the fish (Nemo) and run.

Have you guys tried raking?

Not a biased source at all. I guess vapers can rest easy knowing the damage they do to their lungs may take years to pop up, rather than just months. Victory!

Meh, RPG is only as good as it's city. Hubs are great.

I really like that you speak for the whole fandom when expressing your own disappointment. Some of us tend to play other games as well and not just crpgs. I for one had really good time playing Armored Warfare and I expect I will enjoy Grounded as well.

So, for no particular reason I decided to build my first character without putting a single point in any weapon skills; the goal was to beat the game without personally ending a life. Also no destroying any robots, no squishing any bugs, nothing that would trigger 'Enemy Killed'. That went for companions too. Sending robots back to their charging pods or putting enemies to sleep was allowable, however. The end result? A pretty big success, in fact. The main quest did not require me to actually kill anyone, and I was able to complete the vast majority of sidequests. There are points where killing might seem inevitable, such as the radio tower; but they are ultimately avoidable. Since I saw some other people interested in a 'pacifist run', I thought some might be interested what exactly you can and can't do, as well as what they'd need to pull it off. First, some tips: What you need to know In Fallout: New Vegas you had relatively little control over the companion AI; if you had them with you, they would shoot. It's important to realise that this isn't the case in The Outer Worlds: companions can be set into 'Passive' mode, which will prevent them from attacking under any circumstances unless specifically ordered to. This is good; companions provide massive buffs to your skills, so for a no-kill run they can be very important failsafes. To put it in perspective, by bringing SAM and Max along I was able to boost my Intimidate by 43 points, while still providing large boosts to Hack and Science. They're useful. Inspiration and Determination, though, are largely irrelevant beyond the level 60 Inspiration perk; double the skill boost from companions, which is very enticing, but maybe not worth the investment. I am unsure whether it applies to the Companion Perks that boost your skills further while a companion is in the party. It's also important to have a good understanding of the stealth system. Since you can't access terminals while in combat, it's generally going to be important to stay in stealth -- even ignoring that if seen people'll shoot at you. You can, however, still pick up items and leave/enter areas in combat, so the running wildly approach is sometimes an option. So: crouching in tall grass makes you virtually invisible, and inside you'll want to make good use of cover and enemy patrols to make your way through areas. You'd be surprised by the amount of back and alternate entrances; if going in through the front seems impossible, it's not a bad idea to scout around. Hacking/Lockpicking will open up routes and potentially save you from having to scour areas/bodies for keys. What quests I couldn't do What you think you might not be able to do, but can What I didn't do, but you probably can What I did, but you might disagree with Other notes The marauders at the start of the game, near your ship? They don't need to be dealt with, not even by talking the guards into fighting them; you can just stealth past them. ADA's fake-venting stunt will scare them away, as the two Spacer's Choice people will tell you. If you put out a fake tracking signal for Phineas, I wouldn't count it against the run but he'll kill a few people having prepared his defenses, which Sophia will wave in your face. I don't actually know if you lock yourself off anything by sending a real signal; and of course, if siding with Phineas you probably don't have to send anything at all. To my knowledge, Nyoka's companion quest cannot be completed; fortunately, everyone else's can be finished. Every quest I was able to complete by location, to my best recollection

Sumo November tournament - https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/sumo/tournament/201911/live_6.html

My interpretation of the difficulty is this: STORY MODE: I either don't want to really interact with combat, I play the game for the story alone EASY/RELAXED: I play the game to have a fun, easy time and enjoy what it has to offer without stressing about combat. This is the 'test-the-waters' difficulty NORMAL: I want to play the game so that there is a suitable challenge that I have to learn to overcome. I like both combat and actively pay attention during it VETERAN/HARD: I know/have experience and want a challenge. I read all the weapon and item descriptions and pick them according to my party. I'm flexible and can take on enemies with a variety of different tactics and party members PATH OF THE DAMNED: The name says to all. You want a challenge. Now you have one. I understand the game design and mechanics and know exactly how to build my party. My problem with PoTD is that it is borderline unfair in some occasions. Some fights feel like punching a brick wall as a non-monk. Take a game like Dark Souls (a stretch, I know). Notoriously difficult as it is, it is never unfair. All fights are balanced and are completely doable. Sure, you may need certain items to succeed, but you can succeed. Whereas Deadfire sometimes feels unfair. Most of the time, this unfairness stems from how HP-bloated and how high their armour rating is regarding bosses. Even on PoTD, facing the Oracle of Wael and hurling an empowered Minoletta's Missle Salvo directly at it should do more than shave off a fraction of its health bar. Certain elements mentioned above are applicable to Veteran, and that's mostly where my problem lies. SSS was not at all an enjoyable experience on either Veteran or PoTD. Again, this is just my opinion and thanks for taking the time to write such a long answer.

A REAL Path of the Damned would change the scripting of the initial conversation with Berath, to make her always reincarnate you as a small animal regardless of your dialogue choices. To actually progress in the game, you'd have to figure out how to hack around that scripting to get back into your body. Kids these days, getting coddled by their easy-mode "hard modes", I tell you.

hard disagree. i have to imagine it's some form of stockholm syndrome, absent imagining better alternatives. endurance/health was one of the worst, most unintuitive aspects of PoE1. it was an immense source of confusion to new players and it led to extremely bizarre outcomes and incentives in-game. (I have literally let characters get knocked out instead of healing them, because it meant the difference between unconscious-and-ignored-by-enemies vs permadeath. in certain setups, consecrated ground or other persistent regeneration is your own worst enemy for squishier characters. in addition, you could grind out fights you had no business winning simply because enemy health would slowly go down over time despite potentially infinite healing either in-combat or from deaggro-out-of-combat-regen; not gonna lie my poe1 ultimate won some fights like this.) of all elements of poe1, i would consider endurance/health the biggest design flaw. the only thing i would tweak about deadfire's wound management is to make it more like tyranny's, where simply getting low health would trigger a wound (iirc you had a higher wound limit and a knockout yielded more than one wound so it was still worse than falling low health). This would solve the "don't be careless" aspect better than returning to endurance/health. in practice in poe1 when you're high enough level, your health pools are so large that chip damage is ignorable, so i don't see how endurance/health solves this any better. edit - i would also make the change to make "wound" a less common-type of injury. it is by far the most punishing injury since it actively reduces the effectiveness of heals on top of a minor max health reduction and might lead to a desire to rest as soon as one gets an injur. iirc, tyranny's wounds all had the same effect that simply stacked, so it was less "jeez i should rest right now" and more ad-hoc decision-making about how much of a penalty you wanted to accumulate. i think there's virtue in having a diversity of wound types even if it is a bit murky (it's not like you really have a choice on how your character gets knocked out), so i wouldn't go all the way to tyranny style, just that there exists a happy medium between the two approaches.

Eh, couldn't care less about the multiplayer part. It probably won't be great anyway and quickly forgotten.

OP is obviously a really cool guy with no time for trolling. If super cool OP says it's bad, I tend to agree with him. Glad OPs not angry though. Else I'd be scared for Obsidian. Scary cool awesome OP nice post OP.

Every time I reached Defiance Bay in PoE I suddenly felt a sharp drop in my motivation to continue. I have played the first chapter many-many times. It felt like an adventure.

Every time I see the "hard wood and round holes" thread in the topic listing I always think it's about golf.

Your companions can die on super nova difficulty. Nyoka definitely seems to have problems with heights while traveling with her and Max she kept falling while I was getting the science weapon in the monarch lab. I will only play on hard as I find the restrictions with SN just an annoyance instead of adding to the game, so she popped up after I left the lab but she must of fallen at least 3 times while I was jumping on to the platforms.

Obvious troll. The game is 49 hours long if you do all the quests and go through all dialogue and reading. Only speed runs will be that fast.

I finished The Witcher 3 main campaign (again). I'm going to set the game aside for a while and play something else, something completely different, definitely not a RPG and MOST DEFINITELY not a 100 hour RPG. I'll come back to play Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine later.

Yeah, I am pretty sure you can’t access that screen outside world map. Hey, a real RPG, even in patched content. PS. Glad to see you too use the font ligatures. Josh would be happy.

Yup. Same thing happens on land and sea.

Getting to ~10 million while on a 6 figure salary for 40 years shouldn't be too hard if you're careful and make decent investments. I'd also presume that like our politicians here US politicians vote themselves a decent benefit package for transport and accommodation costs and people on decent incomes also tend to pay relatively less tax via having decent accountants. IIRC Biden as a senator was known for not being at all extravagant personally (used public transport etc up until being VP or something like that? of course checking that sort of thing is what google etc are crap at). Making decent investments could of course involve some privileged information use that isn't available to the random as opposed to specific Joe, but that's very much 'could involve', not does involve. If he'd just bought houses in New Zealand the capital gains would have tripled his investment over 20 years, let alone 40. As for Hunter Biden, he should never have accepted the position but it's on him that he did; neither Biden sr nor Obama could literally stop him, and I cannot see any way they wouldn't have advised him to refuse the position. It's an awful look for a country you were meant to be trying to reduce corruption in to have your VP's son given a random but well remunerated directorship for no discernable reason and if Biden sr had any future political ambitions it would be an obvious point of attack.

Not meaningless, as you won the battle and can move forward. I do get what you mean though. I just don't feel this is a design, which fits the strcture of the game. P:K has time passing buy, which means resting from skill drain isn't without consequence - which is potentially good, though I didn't venture deep into the game to know if it's done well. From what I have seen it was already a problem (played opening chapter only, till gaining your own land) as I would spend time traveling into the area only to discover that I didn't have required items or it was too high for my level: which meant reloading. So far I did find P:K tedious and not respectful to my time. I am glad to read that there was a spell to protect myself from draining. Sounds like very IE mechanic, in a bad way. It's a pain in the ass, until you cast this one particular spell, which makes it a none issue. That is not a good, interesting or indepth design to me. Fighting vampires in IE doesn't have depth or consequences. You just need one spell to make their ability not take an effect. Fighting mindcontrolling vampires in PoE2 on the other hand, did provide tactical challenge which can be counter in multiple different ways, and doesn't require foreknowledge. I love my roguelites and roguelikes (ADOM2 in production!), but I don't believe that IE structure supports that type of "consequence". Spend too many spells in a battle? Go to sleep without a consequence. Get your levels drained? Cast restoration. Don't have it memorized? Go to sleep and cast it. Can't memorize it? Use scroll. Don't have a scroll? Treck back to the temple and get healed. None of those are consequences to me - just annoyances, which either will make me waste gaming time, or reload. PoE to me cut the unnecessary fat, appropriate to the game's overall structure. Darkest Dungeon or XCOMs? Sure, characters getting handicapped or killed fits the game. PoEs? Not very much.

Yeah, we seem to come from different schools of RPG Enjoyment, don't we. For me, going back to the initial state after the fight is a huge pro. Veni, vidi, vici, ite domum, that's my motto. Lingering annoyances only mean I will have to make time for something I don't want to do in the middle of my game session and that means "There goes muh immersion". Clearing vampirey debuff (aka hauling your ass to a temple through locations and loading screens if you didn't fork over for scrolls and then forced rest because this one scroll is very tiring to cast? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) is as scary as, say, the cat barfing on the bed while I play. Not anything serious, still I have to drop the game for a couple of minutes of something vaguely unpleasant. There's this other thing -- as most things in Baldur's Gate, vampires have something that trivializes them. Give the mace of disruption to Beefcake A, amulet of level drain immunity to Beefcake B, plug the corridor with them, summon a skellie or two between them and your ranged line if you want to be better safe than sorry, park a Sanctuaried cleric nearby to spook them if your rangeds shoot fast -- voila, you just defanged those suckers. Now those Deadire's toothy schmucks on the reef and in the cave, they don't have a "Lolcurbstomp or trip to a cleric" situation. They're nasty and wiped the floor with me more than once. So I was rather happy when I finally did them in and was psyched to push on, but had I trek all the way back to the boat, sail across half the world to cough up some hard earned cash to some priest -- that would absolutely have killed the momentum for me.

Seems more like an American anti-theft device.

I actually don't really get the prebuffing argument, either way. Deadfire and PoE1 still have lots of buffing, I guess the main difference now is that it's part of the fight and subject to the action economy so things can be balanced around that. (Also you can automate it a lot better in Deadfire.) Sure you don't have to lay on tons of buffs before each fight, but whenever I have a druid or priest (and sometimes a wizard), their actions at the start every fight are pretty samey. From a purely mechanical standpoint, you can still lay a delayed fireball or a seal or traps in advance of a fight. I guess because that's such a narrow thing you can do, people don't care or do that much? Or maybe it's saving us from ourselves. It was pretty annoying to cast Protection from Evil, Bless, Chant, etc. in advance of every fight and remember the precise order to maximize durations. But I still pretty much do that now (e.g. in my aforementioned party Tekehu pretty much starts off every fight with Woodskin, Nature's Fit, Moon's Light in that order), the only difference is that it feels a bit more "interactive" now that it's actually part of a fight where I have to worry about interrupts or circumstances that might get me to change up the order a bit.

You should give the games another go if the first game's beta is the last you'd tried of it. I think most here would agree that the game's gone through a lot of fine-tuning and changes all the way up to a rather polished and enjoyable state at patch 3.0.

Don't put words in his mouth - you are not doing yourself any favours. Starwars said his least favourite. He did not say worst. Big difference.

IN FACT, it is not. In all seriousness, it's one of my least favorite Obsidian RPG releases. I was very disappointed with it overall. Though I must say, while I didn't like the look of the visuals prior to the release, I really ended up liking how the game looked. I did not expect it to come together as well as it did. I just finished up a replay of Dragon Age Origins. Always kind of liked the game, and had been a while since I played it. It was kinda like I remembered it I guess. What I like about it is that it feels pretty substantial, especially given how it was a brand new IP. The world feels fleshed out, there's a fair amount of reactivity, you have the Origins, the dialogues are actually better than I remember. Some great choices here and there. It's a pretty impressive effort. Of course, on the other hand, you have a lot of really bad fetch quests and combat which is... maybe not horrible on its own but at times the sheer amount of just completely bogs the game down. Orzammar and the Deep Roads are probably my favorite location in the game when it comes to setting and lore but oh my god is there a lot of combat. It kind of saps my will to play the longer the game goes on, which is also how I remember it. Still, a good game and it's a shame what they did to the franchise. Oh well.

hwinfo64 is great, though it's a little overkill. Video of its sensors in action: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/prf7fw0bm6dmzdo/2019-11-20_22-48-09.mp4

wait, this is it? is this a joke? a checkbox (not even a slider) for stuff that is mostly voiced anyway? half of the text in the game is still tiny - especially the text that is not voiced and you actually have to read. i am sitting 3 meters away from a 40 inch flatscreen and i still have trouble reading messages, notes, wanted posters, logs, item descriptions, stats etc. without getting my eyes fatigued. by the way, terminal log are not easier to read, only the navigation option are. pretty disappointing considering i waited 2 weeks for this, hoping i could play the outer worlds without my eyes hurting. what a shame, seems to be a pretty amazing game otherwise