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Dog fights are terrible. I can't believe there are sickos out there who get some perverse pleasure in watching that.

We finally got a bit of fresh air in Melbourne to clear the smoke.... Australia fires: Victoria braces for severe storms https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-51165032

I've got Steam keys for: Niche MagiCat Evergarden

BBC America is doing a complete run of ST:DS9, something like 18 episodes each Monday and Tuesday beginning 6 am tomorrow. I've got my DVR set to record, though I'm concerned I won't have the time to watch them before I run out of recording space.

I got Shadow Tactics through Epic's free holiday game giveaway and it's pretty darn great. I had never heard of it before. One mission can feel like an entire game. A lot of experimenting and reloading. I also got TABS and Bad North through that same holiday giveaway which are pretty fun to mess around with. Nothing I have to heavily concentrate on so good for relaxing or beating boredom. Other than that I'm playing through Pillars of Eternity to make a good save for Poe2. I got a new PC about 8 months ago and I didn't bother transferring game saves. More fun to just make new ones.

A guy from Nordland, in the northern parts of Norway, finds roman coin from the time of Marcus Aurelius. It's the northernmost finding of roman coin in Norway. He also found a 1000 year old viking sword. Apparently metal detecting has become a big thing here lately. https://www.nrk.no/nordland/nordligste-funn-av-2000-ar-gammel-romersk-mynt-pa-donna-1.14862482 (google translate needed)

Just finished Dolemite is My Name and it was the best thing I've seen in a long while. Maybe it's because I grew up watching Rudy Ray Moore movies and listening to his albums but my wife really enjoyed it too so maybe not. Thanks to Hurlshot for the recommendation!

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/04ffb743-17d9-4aa9-b12c-537dafca1a0d#rJY8NIGZZL.copy

Oh Allah (Peace be Upon Him) yes. They have a catchy name ("The Network", would probably work better in arabic though), neckbeards like true salafis, preaching in their places of worship (reddit etc) etc etc. Haha yes. You can add lazy and feckless- and overly sensitive- to that list as well. The absolute state of the PC gaming market can be summed up by comparing 'Good Old Guy' GOG's turnover vs 'Evil Gommie Spywar'e EGS turnover. Exclusives 100% work, outrage is 100% useless and good will is about 95% useless unless you're a corpulent ex Microsoft Seattleite with a knife obsession (and even then it's 99% inertia rather than actual good will). Anyway, for some 100% genuine and true random news, since exclusives 100% work CDPR is making Cyberpunk2077 GOG exclusive which is why they're delaying it for 6 months. In a shocking twist they will then make it EGS exclusive for the next 6 months.

My new 55" tv arrived. It's... pretty awesome. Need to rewatch a bunch of movies now. Fury Road, Interstellar, etc... it's like being in my own little cinema.

PC Gamer Master Race; loudmouthed and weakwilled.

@vyvexthorne @melkathi I loved Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, it was my 2016 GotY. The team that made that game is currently working on Desperados 3, which is one of my most anticipated upcoming games.

I wanted to grab this on PC as I also have a 2080 Super but the thing is I've already beat on Xbox so I kinda spoiled it already. 'Tis a shame.

I grabbed it as well. Keyrock had been playing it a lot when it came out.

... you can't get fooled again?

Fair enough. I liked Aloth in both POE games, so you'll get no complaint from me. 😉

More Pillars of Eternity. I have moved more around Durgan's Battery, got asskicked twice (once by golems, once by Meztla 😛 ) and then kicked her ass myself. After a while and two new Soulbound weapons, I have moved back to Caed Nua and finished 3 more bounties. Someone is planning to attack my Stronghold, so I am planning to defend it by myself

Achtung; Naughty word

Someone rolled a 1.

Yes

Afaik he used Blade Cascade from Scordeo's Edge (gives you 0 recovery for 5 sec base) and prolonged it nearly endlessly with the help of Brilliant + Salvation of Time. You can see the tiny sabre symbol besides his portrait - I think that's it. Once you have the buff you can switch weapons to whatever. You cannot reach 0 recovery with several stacked recovery or attack speed bonuses. The attack spped mechanics don't work like in PoE. Have a look here:

Well I wasn't really demoted because I was never promoted. I started out here as a political hire. I was the only veteran to apply and was hired for a job I wasn't really qualified for because hiring veterans is a priority. So I started out as a glorified number cruncher auditing public works projects for cost overruns and materials compliance. After two years of demonstrating that I could see lightning and hear thunder, and possessed an advanced understanding of mathematics and data analytics I started to find myself with much more interesting work. Last year I was managing my own projects. So, now we have a new director who took one look at my resume and education and decided (presumably) that a knuckle dragger such as myself has no business managing projects for the TDEC so I'm back to being a glorified number cruncher. I was a little put off by the whole thing. In fact I was quite upset about it. Then I remembered it's just a paycheck.

Again, there's an elephant in the room regarding Deadfire's dip in sales that no perception of quality can account for, I feel. The dip the franchise saw in performance wasn't a 10-20% or a 50% even, or a lack of continued interest or whatnot. From what I understand, the first game in the series has already sold about 2 million copies whilst the new one has struggled to make it to 400k. That's a 70-80% drop right there, and one for a game that, despite assumptions of the contrary, is generally rated quite positively across all user aggregate websites out there, including a 7.8 metascore, an 84% Steam user approval and a 4.4/5 GOG rating. Moreover, let's consider some notorious sequels to popular franchises: Dragon Age 2: roughly 2 million copies sold by August 2011 (down 50% from its predecessor) Mass Effect 3: roughly 1.5 million copies in its first month (100% up from its predecessor), roughly 6 million total (down from Mass Effect 2's 7 million) Mass Effect: Andromeda: an estimated 2.5 million copes sold across its lifetime (down 60% approx from Mass Effect 3) BioShock 2: 3 million copies (down 25% from the 4 million sold by its predecessor) Fallout 4: roughly 14.9 million units sold (up 50% over the next highest-grossing Fallout game, Fallout 3) Batman: Arkham Knight: 5 units sold in the first four months (down 17% from Arkham City by the same point) And more. It's arguable that all of these examples were met with much more vitriol from the gamer community and proved to be way more divisive if not outright trashed by the fanbase than Deadfire, yet the latter's drop far exceeds even the worst ones here. What's more, some games that were deemed disappointing relative to their predecessors even went *up* in sales relative to their previous entries as well, which goes to show how much the insular jabber of the diehard community often matters in these things. To be fair, Deadfire is a smaller game and thus likely more exposed to such talk - but again, when the talk wasn't even that negative to begin with, it's hard to point out to it as a major factor in the drop in sales.

GOG code for StarCrawlers iffen any be wantin

Alendra, I made a character profile upon being inspired here. @Alendra should I post it here or make a new thread?

Obsidian lacks talent in both writing and programming to stomp anyone.

As a new 2019 player, I hate to state the obvious, but this visual table should really be in the game's Tutorials section. I read the short tutorial in-game and the game's manual, and would never have guessed what the image here explains.

Well Kevin Sorbo disagrees: Not that I would know anything about bourbon. I only drink beer and very occasionally fruit brandy, and the latter two only in very small amounts. I I've had only a handful of shots in the past 10 years. The last time I got drunk doing shots was... well, let's say, not very pleasant. Not even sure it was fun while it lastet, my recollection of the night is a bit spotty and it involved at least one bottle of extremely disgusting 60% ABV raspberry schnapps.

Deadfire was never going to have good word of mouth with such a garbage main plot. There were other issues, sure, but none of them killed my interest in the series like that did. Just dreadful.

FWIW, If you look at the Kickstarter it promotes Avellone, Sawyer and Cain - "Obsidian Entertainment and our legendary game designers Chris Avellone, Tim Cain, and Josh Sawyer are excited to bring you a new role-playing game for the PC. Project Eternity (working title) pays homage to the great Infinity Engine games of years past: Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment." Its pretty clear that Obsidian felt that these three developers had name recognition amid the people who were going to pledge for the game to be made.

That was before they realized that he's a lefty.

But it sold very good and Chris was just a bonus not main developer, so I don't know what your point is. If Avellone is such a noname why so many Kickstarter projects had his participation as a streatch goal? I did not see anyone having Sawyer as a bonus...

Enough to have made PoE the Kickstarter success it was. I think his departure and the things he revealed after that about Obsidian was big contribution to PoE2 failure.

What do you mean why would he be? He IS a legend and a household name. He basically was Obsidian and biggest reason guys got so much credit in the start. As to who is complete inept you can check who was responsible for both Pillars, it's not hidden knowledge.

It's not reasonable if it is the same character twice in a row. Like I said if you want to reset again, then enter a new character. The major issue with not resetting is that Obsidian never created a levelling system that was able to scale beyond the game they made in PoE1. And now with PoE2 they did exactly the same thing. Even the expansions give no extra levels or growth for your character. If we go to PoE3 we'd need to reset the character again. It's boring. Just go with a new character and have us experience something completely new. Having to follow the watcher again is not new, it's not surprising. The Watcher had impact on the story in PoE. In PoE2 The Watcher has like 0 impact on the story. Being a Watcher has no impact on the story either. It's only there so people can recognize you. It turned into a gimmick. So like I said, give us a new protagonist that I can actually feel invested in.

And I killed her in the first game. (Crazy cat ladies. Ew.)

The romances in Deadfire are horrible...Obs should avoid writing them at all costs haha.

Something like this?

Aloth's story was pretty much over the moment he burned Thaos' robes or took his place. His quest in Deadfire was pretty much meaningless and contributed nothing to the story. Also, it seems like he learned nothing from the previous game, which is unfortunate because he was one of my favorites. The only two characters that should've returned in Deadfire are Eder and Durance. Durance's story wasn't finished and it would've been cool seeing him interact with Eothas and Waidwen. I wanted to see him gloat about blowing up Eothas right to his face IMO, for POE3 It should be Eder, Rekke and Xoti.

I tried D:OS and its enhanced edition, but I gave up after a few hours. The humor, writing, graphics, combat (I really dislike that magic system), I can't seem to get to like it. Weapons and equipment are boring, the crafting ... - why the f. does every game has to have crafting nowadays? I can craft 1x stupid arrow by combining 5 different things, or I just don't do it and find tons of them anyways in some random barrels. I recently gave DOS2 another try. According to Gamestar, this game got an awesome 93% review. Even though, I lost interest pretty soon again, for pretty much the same reasons. That's why I don't play Divinty: OS