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Math dealers.

I was thinking this morning: the South finally managed to sack the Capitol. Not really funny, I know. Dark humor.

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Strange FM signal discovered coming from one of Jupiter's moons Ganymede‐Induced Decametric Radio Emission Fascinating stuff. The radio signals from the four big moons have been known for a long time. But being frequency modulated means Ganymede has a magnetic field. Now THAT is unusual for a moon. On a lighter note what would a radio station on Ganymede play? Train - Drops Of Jupiter - YouTube

a minor quibble. the goal were to prevent biden from achieving 270 electoral votes. if neither trump or biden achieved the requisite 270, then there is a mechanic by which Congress could insert itself into the contest meant to be resolved by the states and decide the Presidential election themselves. one vote per state. at the moment, there are more red states. far more significant than the pga deciding not to have trump courses host their golf events, Deutsche Bank to Pull Back From Business With Trump and His Company The German lender has decided not to conduct any further business with Trump and his company, said two people with knowledge of the matter, asking not to be identified because the deliberations were confidential. Trump owes the Frankfurt-based lender more than $300 million. Signature Bank, the New York lender that’s long catered to his family, is closing two personal accounts in which Trump held about $5.3 million, a spokesperson for the firm said on Monday. It’s also calling for the president to step aside before his term officially ends on Jan. 20. oh, and... HA! Good Fun!

Whatever, I'll take my bonuses

Aaaaaand first game in 13th month of 2020 finished Second playthrough of Tales of Zestiria – The Strength of a Knight DLC on my PS4. Pretty quick run this time. Just went for all of the treasure chest, remaining trophies and some fusing and Lord of the Land Blessing upgrades.

Oh boy, you should really watch Josh Sawyers post mortem for Deadfire. He named the ship combat "quicksand": no matter how much money and resources you threw at it, it was swallowed and gave nothing back. Here (it's interesting - he's giving great talks imo) :

Meow Joking aside: I guess thats true. (I'd like to make a point against it but just found my old Lego pirate kits when cleaning up the basement :D) It was however a phenomenon or at least trending for a while prior to the release of Deadfire so it still makes sense to me. Although one might argue that Deadfire merely suffered from bad timing in that regard...

Hmm, that does sound promising. Hopefully there is like 95% less killing than the Wolfenstein games. I love the setting and the areas in those games, but I get quickly tired of the constant killing.

I'd say that they don't necessarily believe that he did win, so much as that he should be president regardless of his loss. Trump and Republicans will spend the next four years reinforcing this, and it will be an effective strategy in winning primaries. A significant portion of people will care as much about the MAGA Putsch as they did Muslim bans or kids in cages so there's a decent chance some Trump and cronies who incited the riot get elected to or retain positions of power over the next few years.

You're right on the money! We've already seen what Obsidian's capable of doing. Grounded was developed by just fourteen developers, FOURTEEN!!!! And that was a big, open-world survival game. If they're able to do that, then they can sure as hell develop POE 3 with much less effort

So 375k deaths over the course of a year in a region with 440M+ inhabitants, and that's the greatest challenge since WWII. Because the prospect of a few thousand Soviet tanks rolling up the Fulda Gap and nuclear war was a Sunday picnic. And let's not talk about the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate change either, which threatens to be a cause for as many deaths as all infectious diseases combined by 2100... from heat alone. Nothing compared to a respiratory disease that has a ~1% mortality rate and which threatens overwhelmingly the elderly and vulnerable, apparently. And now you're coming here to double down on that, when not even Merkel has. After all, if something hasn't happened, it clearly couldn't happen, and it's not going to happen, right?

I dont think I made my point very well. I know that the Pirate of the Caribbean franchise was dead by the time PoE came out but there were still lots of stragglers fighting over scraps. Back then I just believed that Deadfire was trying to cash in on a hype well beyond its peak and yeah...that seemed very lazy. Imagine they'd churn out another installment focused on zombies next week and you know how I felt

For the discussion points..

So primary contention is that there was voter fraud in Pennsylvania and Georgia right? So tell you what. Let’s do this. Let’s move Georgia and Pennsylvania over to Trump. Trump won forget the recounts Trump actually won. Guess what? Joe Biden still won the election. that’s why it’s so pointless to talk about this. No combination of two states gets Trump over 270.

Testers possible but I doubt narrative designers will be replaced until the time we will be able to create proper self-identifying AI. As narrative is very thin barely computable thing. Computer would need to have proper understanding of what narrative is or else we will have very dry by the number stories. Though looking on modern isekai anime... Maybe they are already doing it xD P.S Anyone know what happened to that foss project of "generate every music possible that was not created and put it under open source licence"? xD

True - but I would argue that it's better to have no VO instead of bad VO. Unless you want to support players with disabilities of course - for them text-to speech would be great to have whatever the quality is unless you can understand it well. But as I said: 10 years is a lot of time for tech, especially when it involves KI. With a smart enough KI and good training I can see that text-to speech might indeed be a great solution to this problem. Those Google Assistant phone calls were impressive. And at the same time maybe it will also replace lots of narrative designers, composers, artists and testers - depending on how well it can generate game content that players like. That will be weird... Maybe we will soon have a "made by real humans" label.

I think soon this problem will be fixed by development of voice engines. Already even foss one show great progress in both quality of line reading and range of possible voices. I think in 10 years max many indie devs would be able to make full VO for there game just by running text though such engines and recording it. Hell I even seen it done nowdays with engines themselves in mods for morrowind.

Afaik Stalker's Link works with all attack rolls. Also check out Takedown Combo. The one-time 100% dmg bonus also works with all sorts of damage. Especially interesting with high dmg single target spells like Killing Bolt and such - which makes it interesting for a Geomancer. It even works with DoTs. And if it's a DoT that hasn't a direct damage component (like Concelhaut's Corrosive Siphon, Disintegrate, Soul Ignition or some Druid spells) then the bonus of Takedown Combo doesn't even get removed after the first tick but keeps boosting the DoT damage until its duration runs out. Necrotic Lance doesn't work optimally because the initial direct dmg portion will remove Takedown Combo so that the following DoT will not profit anymore. Also a good thing is that Takedown Combo doesn't care who will cause the following damage.

Imagine all the electricity that just wasted. Digital currency always seemed like a quasi-pyramid scheme to me.

I doubt it will matter long term. Twitter will survive on the merits of the media platform it provides, not whether some twit is posting.

Goonies in Hawaii? I'm game.

That would at least explain why Deadfire sold significantly less copies than PoE without PoE nor Deadfire having bad user reviews. If disappointment and problems with Poe lead to such a massive sales drop it would have found its way into revies, I'm still convinced about that. Same as the "abysmal marketing" and "IE games nostalgia was satisfied with PoE" theories: All three don't contradict the fact that user reviews for both games were good. That's why I favor those explanations.

I would be very happy with an episodic form of PoE3. I mean multiple smaller campaigns instead of a big long one. You'd have a rel. small main game with one starter episode and then you can buy whatever additional episodes sounds fun. A bit like the old Hero Quest tabletop game (which was fun!). They wouldn't need to be played in a particular order (although maybe a certain level treshold would be good I guess). You wouldn't need such a huge team and once the main game's engine is set the teams could focus on story and quest designs and itemization and so on (see Deadfire DLCs). Also smaller teams could work parallel and it wouldn't be too risky to let somebody less experienced take the lead etc. Try something new... Maybe that's a stupid idea, but atm it sounds rather nice to me until you convince be it's not.

Initial Report Suggests COVID-19 Immunity Could Last for Years.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-to-block-backspace-key-from-working-as-back-button/ So very overdue. Happens a lot when I'm entering things in JIRA.

The bonuses are very minor though. They hardly make a difference.

I really doubt that Microsoft (who now owns Obsidian and therefore also the Pillars IP) would allow a Kickstarter campaign for PoE3. The first hurdle for a PoE3: the devs must be willing to do it. After the release of Deadfire and the low sales numbers the mood was pretty gloomy. But as I already wrote: several devs now came forth on Twitter and said they would be on board for a PoE3. Maybe Josh Sawyer still wouldn't be willing to direct it (too bad), but as things like Beast of Winter shows: other devs can step in and still deliver a really nice RPG experience. Imo BoW was excellent and Josh Sawyer wasn't involved that much. Then Microsoft would need to approve it and fund the development. As I said above they want a big portfolio - all kinds of different games - for the Game Pass program. Not all those games don't have to appeal to millions of players - as long as they don't burn money it's a win I guess. Deadfire could have been a lot cheaper if it didn't have Full VO and some quicksand-features like ship combat. And yet it broke even half a year ago or so (so it wasn't a commercial failure after all). Microsoft bought Obsidian in order to have more RPG expertise. Deadfire wasn't a huge financial success but broke even after all. Even such games can be a benefit for Game Pass. So while it still seems unlikely that we will see a PoE3 in the near future - mainly because Obsidian still really doesn't know what went wrong with Deadfire and seems hesitant to retry - it seems less unlikely than a year ago.

I recall Josh saying they made the end portion of the game snappier as a response to criticism of the first game that the Twin Elms section dragged on too long. He contextually admitted they overcorrected.

I haven't seen one, but that doesn't mean much. (Frankly, I might not make such a statement if what you say was the case and I was Obsidian. I mean, it would be so embarrassing to have to make a statement to that effect.) The ending seemed extremely rushed, there's no getting away from that. Ukaizo was built up for the entire game in so many ways, and once you get there, it's one encounter with a nice-looking ancient beast and that's about it. It's such a disappointment. I suppose this feeling is quite common.

*badum tsss* Regarding the ending: Not over the moon either and a lot boils down to feelings for me too. To a certain degree because I cant always put my finger on the exact problem. What annoyed me the most was the last sentence. "You hope for calm weather" - what the hell? No outlook to future adventures or challenges, no recognition of past deeds just a bland lazy line. (Compare that with the ending of BG: ToB for example. Mostly text on screen but it had a huge emotional impact) The voice-over of the epilogue was an issue for me too. It was great throughout the game and all of a sudden its somehwere between bored and depressed. Given how easily that could have been avoided I wonder what the idea behind that was. Could also never shake the feeling that the game wasnt finished. (Which breaks my heart because so many aspects of the game were amazing.) I felt like I am interacting with the world in the beginning but more and more like a spectator towards the end. That "culminated" in the ending which also felt really rushed. Why was there even a map for Ukaizo?! Was there ever an official statement wether they ran out of time or money?

From the random category... Australian birds can be real bastards at times In case anyone feels sorry for the Kookaburra, this is often the sound that wakes me up in the morning, like between 3am and 4am

Lupin just started up on Netflix. Which is in French, so you'll likely need the subtitles to watch. Its a modern day interpretation of the story of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman Thief. The whole first episode is that fuzzy, not really showing the key storyline, letting you think you've seen something and understand what's going on only to have it peeled back in the last 15 minutes or so. I'm curious where it will go for the 2nd and then on episodes. So if you enjoy the concept of a highly skilled thief given to false identities, switch-a-rounds, manipulating people, and doing it all with that dash of style and French commentary it might be worth a try.

Maybe you have Open World Syndrome. PoE was more "guided" than Deadfire is, also because content was gated behind its acts. I personally don't like "Open World" and this whole "you can go where you want, yeah!" approach very much. It often leaves you felling lost - or not feeling compelled to really do anything. You can experience the same when you play TTRPGs and the game master just lets you run around without nudging you into the right direction. Open World is completely overrated and isn't necessary for a great CRPG - at least that's my personal take. Maybe other players like it but I feel that it takes significantly longer to really connect with a game if it follows the Open World approach. What saved Deadfire for me was Fort Deadlight. I entered secretly and did a "Thief"-like dungeon crawl in order to reach Benweth. It's such a satisfying part of the early game that I got hooked. So maybe try that one first?

Hey I completely agree with you. Even your first post I agreed with, but also thought it was funny. Yeah I backed BT4 only as a way of supporting inXile given it was at a time when we were not getting any old-school cRPGs, and the few remaining studios making such games were looking like they may go under. I had never even heard of the original BT games. Backing BT4 meant I got the BT1-3 remasters for free. I have them loaded on my machine, but don't know if I will ever get around to playing them. But I will definitely play BT4 at some point. I currently have a good-sized backlog of games to play in the face of not much time outside of my RL to play games. And yes, I have not yet given up on Bioware. I tend to be that way generally; unwilling to give up on something I once loved. I never gave up on Black Isle until the bitter end.

I'm certainly not against Obs making a Shadowrun game, but I'm with Hurlshot, I'd rather Harebrained Schemes made another one. I can't imagine anyone nailing the tone and feel any better than they did.

RIP. For those who don't know/remember Marion: Also RIP John Richardson (She, One Million Years BC, Black Sunday, War of the Planets, etc)