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Quoted for truth, and true for much of the entertainment industry too, and it includes video game developers and artists. Not that long ago there was an article about Blizzard paying their teams so little (note: for they area the company resides in, and compared to their profits, not in absolute numbers) that they basically had to share appartments because they could otherwise not afford them, and we're talking about an industry giant that sees insane revenue from existing IPs that barely any other company on the planet can claim to have, and they can get away with it because they are Blizzard, and people topple over each other to work for them. It really is a disgrace, but exists in all sort of industries. When one looks at a certain major supermarket player here, for instance, one would find a corporation that could raise each of their employee's annual income by 10,000$ (which would amount to a 30 to 40% increase for cashiers) and cut sales prices by 10%, and would still be left with a nine figure profit per year after any and all investments they deemed necessary for expansion. They do not, of course, because they do not have to. There are only two major companies who split the non-discount market amongst themselves, and as a result our grocery prices are roughly 30 to 50% higher than in comparable areas in the European Union (particularily compared to Germany). It is pointed out regularily by employee and labour interest groups, but nothing really changes, and any and all inquiries into their market position come back with 'no evidence for price gouging or rigging can be found', which is also true for gas stations, who all seem to miraculously have the same prices in our little corner of the world. Granted, one will not find evidence of price-rigging when prices are set automatically by machine learning algorithms based on real time telemetry. There is no need to rig a price, or talk to the competition. That just happens automatically. That said, and in light of the posts by the usual clowns here, I want to reiterate that I do not have any issue with her demanding better pay for VAs, but simply the way she expresses herself: spur of the moment videos or not, that is just not any way one talks about her colleagues, particularily not when they are Jennifer Hale, a high profile industry veteran who is still part of SAG-AFTRA and in the past has taken the side of smaller VAs.

Considering they got Jennifer Hale to replace her, who almost certainly commanded a much higher asking price given her experience and fame in the industry, it would suggest that they simply wanted someone different and the lowball offer was their way of trying to shift blame ("we tried to get her back, but she refused the offer"). I haven't played the game or heard her work, so I can't comment on the wisdom of this. Yes: one should perhaps instead look up how much travel nurses are paid in the U.S. - it is substantially higher than regular nurses for short-term positions to cover staffing deficiencies, either because of simply not having the normal manpower for whatever reason or because of temporary situations that require more (e.g. surges in covid). Even that's still not exactly analogous to true contract work like you'd find in the tech industry, where e.g. external computer architects and engineers can get paid literal hundreds of dollars per hour for a job that may only be as short as 4 hours...or possibly much longer, depending on what it is. Point is, you don't know when the next job will come in for contract work, since by its nature it's irregular and unpredictable employment, so if your skills are valued enough for people to hire you for contract work, it necessarily has to be a lot more so the person can afford to stay afloat; if they can't, then it wouldn't be sustainable and it wouldn't be a thing.

Gedonia - Pros (at least in my opinion) ---rather charming to explore around. Nothing special, but still charming enough. ---there's an alchemy pot for respec talent tree pts but you cannot respect attribute/chr. points. Thus you actually have to replay if you want to try multiple min/max type builds, if that's your thing. ---skill trees are totally up to you/build your own class, altho attribute points affect what you can do/how good you are, beyond just dialogue or quest options. Example, 0 INT means no crafting, 0 Agility means no Dodge mechanic for u. The layout/structure of the talent/skill trees remind me a little of Grim Dawn. A little. ---There's an option to turn off enemy respawning, which I'm using. It's nice to not have to fight/avoid anything just to go "back" long distances. I may turn it on and off periodically, dunno. ---the usual skills like alchemy, cooking, weapon/outfit crafting, ingredient collectables and nodes. ---one magic tree eventually gets Flying. I...must...have...it... Cons ---combat, especially melee, feels clunky and a little unresponsive or with little "impact" feel. It works but... ---companion/summon AI follow is glitchy at times. There's a button combo to teleport them back to you and I find I have to do it constantly to make them effective. Creep up to enemy, hit those buttons to make them appear next to you so they start a fight, then use a bow myself. Twice they've gotten totally stuck but an exit/reload fixes it. ---the horse riding is clunky, no surprise. I prefer walking but default walking is pretty slow and I don't have 10000 staminia potions yet, so the horse is useful for long treks to towns or whtaever. ---one of those games where if you explore/battle randomly, a lot, early on, you start getting rep with factions that you know nothing about or whether the rep is something you even want. I would guess it doesn't matter tons tho, outside of when you finally choose a faction. Initial summary: ----reminds me a little of a cross between Elder Scrolls and an ARPG like Grim Dawn or Torchlight, perhaps ---there's a plot but don't know much about it yet. Good light fun if you like such gameplay, probably decent replay value if you like trying different builds/options. ---for a one-man developer, not a bad game for the low price. eg, so far I like it.

Most non-star VAs do have a second job: it is and has always been an underpaid and undervalued industry that preys on people's desire to be a part of something and be known for a role, possibly make it big. Regardless, it still doesn't take away the value of their work and impact whether they're being offered competitive rates for the roles they perform; replacing her with Jennifer Hale makes it pretty clear that it wasn't really about the money. Why Platinum Games seemingly wanted to replace her is a much more interesting question that we probably won't get an answer for. Personally, the little I've seen of those games makes me wish I could forcibly silence all voice-acting because of how gosh-awful the general voice direction is, so hey, if they really want to save some money, they could hire me so that I could fire everybody and just use text boxes that one hundred percent would be totally fitting and completely not clash with the style of the game at all, .

For the record, I do not really disagree with her take that she's most likely worth more than the offer she got (unless Bayonetta's lines in the game are doable in a single recording session), and that the offer may as well have been an intentional insult to make her quit or get good value out of her in an exploitative manner. It is all the rest of what she says that smells like hurt ivory tower ego much more than glorious champion of exploited labour.

There clearly were some issues with WoT that were more or less unavoidable due to covid and the actor for Mat quitting. The other two excuses of needing more run time and a bigger budget though... they didn't use the time they had well and they didn't use the money they had well. More of either probably would have ended up with a bad show that had 10 episodes instead of 8 and was more expensive to boot. You're not going to fix bad writing with more time, you just get more bad writing. Case in point, most of an episode being wasted on the utterly peripheral Stepin plot. (Ironically the one thing that may well have helped was if it wasn't an Amazon series. The Witcher was a far better show despite having similar problems, and so were the HBO shows (and I'd include stuff like the His Dark Materials there, not just the GoT series). The bad showrunner for WoT is 100% Amazon's fault, and ultimately most of the avoidable problems stem from him being picked and being out of his depth in pretty much every facet. If you're going to do a big budget complicated series nothing beats experience)

1200-1400 would definitely have been higher proportion wise thanks mostly to Temujin, Timur etc. There's also a cost in terms of the near 600% (!) mark up on US LNG being sold to Europe. A mark up so large that contracts with other buyers are being systematically broken because the penalties are far less than the windfall profits. Then of course there's bafflement about not getting wholesale support from those effected... The US is also, as always, leveraging its currency's status to protect its own economy while shafting everyone else's. Typical 'socialise the costs, privatise the benefits' from Yellen really; if we're all in this together that means not running everything apart from aid to Ukraine as a sole benefit to the US.

This episode was probably the best in terms of her reactions.

That's almost certainly how it is. I think we can apply Stephen King's dictum on writing, when it comes to what can be taught. You can't make a good writer out of a bad writer. You can't make a great writer out of a good writer. You can't make a genius writer out of anyone. What you can do, however, is make a good writer out of an average writer, and that's a very useful thing to do and worth the effort both for the teacher and the student. I am also quite fond of the idea that great talent hits the target that others cannot hit, whereas genius hits the target that others couldn't even see. It captures the nature of genius: it expands the realm of what is regarded as possible or sometimes even existing.

Yay, someone else here enjoyed RoP.

Is there? My sense is that super rich people themselves are inclined to assume they are experts in everything. This is much more prevalent than the phenomenon you describe, in my view. Of course, this would have to be thoroughly studied, so I don't think either of us really knows.

Elrond (and his friendship with Durin) is the best part about the show I think. They nailed the "kind as summer" Elrond from the books, unlike Hugo Weaving who is nothing like the character. People like his Elrond because they like Hugo Weaving...who's just being himself. He also looks just as much an elf as bloody Hugo Weaving with his receding hairline did. --- As for the show. The hate and unreasonable criticism it's getting is so over the top. I've read all of Tolkien' writings (including the obscure stuff) a gazillion times and the feel I'm getting is that these guys know Tolkien better than Peter Jackson did. While the showmakers take liberties at times, and invent stuff left and right they kind of have to as there are so many blank spots to fill in, in the second age. The dialogue for the most part is Tolkienian (more so than PJ - "let's hunt some orc!"), and he even had so much dialogue to pick from the books. I'd rate it a decent 7/10, with the expectation that things will get even better now that they've sat things in motion. Big kudos to them that they manage so much with so little to go from, AND with big constraints put on them in terms of where these characters have to end up. I especially loved the dwarven stuff, and the orcs looked better than ever. The dialogue was at times beautiful, and some scenes were much better than they could be expected to be (like the intense back-and-forth with the two Durins).

The BBC article does not mention, that the incident was religiously based (according to Russian and Ukrainian sources, which I read yesterday). It was not protest against mobilisation. Most likely some got drunk to much, started some xenophobic bull****, and someone decided to make a counter argument with their firearms.

I don't know if it's feasible for a video game voice actor to make a good living without a second job, unless they're Nolan North, Troy Baker, Jennifer Hale, or Tara Strong. Whether that's right or wrong is up to you, but the reality of the business is the reality of the business. A company makes you an offer for a contract, you either accept or refuse the contract, and then if you refuse they find someone else. That's the reality in most industries. Going out and putting out a bleeding heart interview in IGN will get you some attention and mobilize the social media outrage squad... For about a week. Likely approximately 0.1% of said outrage squad will actually do anything to benefit you financially then they will all move on to the next outrage topic du jour and that will be that.

Yikes on the UK wages. https://nursinglicensemap.com/resources/nurse-salary/ I won't speak to the differenced between an RN and NP, as I'm not in the field, but it still doesn't seem to be a good comparison to a contract voice actor who has to work for every individual contract. How many contracts do you think the average voice actor gets in a calendar year?

Yeah, I don't know whether $4000 is an insulting offer or not, I'm not in that industry, I could tell you what an insulting offer for a trucker is, but as far as voice acting... That said, I have zero sympathy for the woe is me I can't pay my bills spiel given that she, by her own admission, turned down a $4000 pay day, and, again by her own admission, had nothing else going on at the time. If you're really that hard up you take what you can get. Trust me, I've been dirt poor, I know.

https://www.ign.com/articles/bayonetta-voice-actor-hellena-taylor-says-she-didnt-reprise-the-role-in-bayonetta-3-as-she-was-only-offered-4000 Above quote from the IGN article, taken from a video of hers, apparently. Cannot afford to run a car right now, is afraid that she might end up on the street, but does not take a 4000$ contract and whatever she may or may not make from promotions, i.e. the later complained about possibility that Jennifer Hale could strut around pretending to be Bayonetta. Sounds legit. Even if she would spend a month in the voice booth and have no time to voice something else (now, my experience is limited, but something tells me this is not the case). Time for some google-fu. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/july2022 Sadly that's average income, not median, which would be a better figure to compare. She really is a right champion of the little people, is she not? Yeah, something tells me the 'new girl' doing the Bayonetta voice acting does not need to sign Bayonetta merch and most certainly does not need to pretend to be Bayonetta. Now for the conclusion, at a first glance, 4000$ for a somewhat iconic voice role for a 450m$ franchise does sound insulting. On the other hand, we're talking about the English dub of a Japanese game, and one where the second entry was considered a financial failure which was actually cancelled and only released because Nintendo picked it up for its ill-fated Wii U. It did have a stronger Switch re-release, but that came bundled with the original Bayonetta. Between writing directly to Hideki Kamiya, which he probably appreciated very much, Japanese (corporate) culture being what it is, the jabs at Jennifer Hale and the woe is me call to boycott the game, I shall be honest: this does not a good case make. Especially for a woman who has a handful of voice acting and acting credits to her name, and let us face it, at the end of the day, she is Bayonetta, not Commander Shepard. Well, but it worked, she has got the Twatteria raging for fair wages for her. Because, you know, that poor nurse at the food bank probably needs to put two in months worth of back breaking, physically and mentally exhausting work to earn that kind of money, while Ms. Taylor's work is sitting in a recording booth, wearing her pajamas and sipping on some coffee (paraphrased quote by Mark Hamill on why he does more voice acting than regular acting). Or not, because Jennifer Hale seemed to have no problems with whatever Plantium offered her. Which likely is more than what Ms. Taylor would have earned, but how much we will probably never know. I will agree that the offer is low and she probably has a point insofar as that her voice is probably worth more for Bayonetta 3, however, time and sales will tell. On the other hand, she went to an audition, got an offer, and was unhappy with it. The rest? The rest smells like hurt ego.

Vertical Half Walls would be a great addition and is a no brainer in my opinion. It would help so much for building.

Loving the sort button! It was a much needed feature, but now that it is a thing i can't help but wish for a 'lock' feature. Allowing us too lock our tools in specific locations in our inventory's, so that when we press the sort button our tools and weapons don't sort and stay in said spots

I had to look: hoo boy, I do believe this helps explain a few things, .

sounds as if you got a new weekend (sunday through saturday kinda weekend) breakfast staple. HA! Good Fun!

I reloaded a game in Neathholm and got the same message, as if I had completed the "Kill the Giants" part of the quest. The bugs in act 3 are gone though. There were some dialogues triggering again and visiting the Azata's court prompted the dialogue to give the place a name. Twice.

no xp gain for us, but we do get the Banner Over The Citadel completion message. am positive on the xp 'cause one such save is from immediate before the start o' act ii, after gaining mythic powha. we went through the whole becoming lord commander bit and xp did not increase in spite have having received the banner over the citadel completion message. we had a save immediate following galfrey's speech as well, so were ez to compare xp. downside means while it ain't showing in the quest log, one suspects we wouldn't gain or be able to complete the quest in act ii. could be a serious game breaker in drezen... or maybe not. who knows with owlcat. hopeful a few bugs would be addressed sooner rather than later, we instead did an unfair inevitable excess run. our clever girl velociraptor coulda' solo killed inevitable darkness as she had the blind fight feat (so no concealment misses) and a 30 charisma at the time which helped lead to an ab o' 111. scroll o' trnasformation and a few other personal buffs were useful. didn't even have visions of madness active or touch of good from sosiel. had the raptor attack after seelah got off her mark of justice, so she technical did not do all damage, but it were a near thing as seelah got horrible unlucky with the concealment misses as we only had true seeing on her and forgot to do echolocation in spite o' fact she had more than enough umd to read the appropriate scroll. couple o' crits and bonus damage from spells such as sun marked meant the dino damage output were overwhelming. if we had a skald merc in the party (we did sans mercs,) the damage woulda' been even more extreme. court poet could push the raptor charisma to 36, which gets her 3 more ab. vanilla skald provides a bunch o' extra natural attacks plus lethal accuracy. 'course if owlcat ever fixes the unlimited smites bug for divine hunter... HA! Good Fun!

Loaded up a couple of Chapter 1 saves, got the same message. The quest does not appear in the list though. I wonder what's this about? Maybe they deleted those giants from the game at all because they were obnoxious cheaters with pinpoint accuracy and ability to reach you indoors and now this stage of the quest autocompletes because it doesn't find them? Would be nice.

Brain surgery is more common than thought.

Theres also The Sword of Balduran (silver weapon), which you get as a reward for defeating the greater werewolf boss. :doh:

Just played through the S4 mod today and have to say it was so good. The mod trims all the annoying **** out of the game like sailing around to buy all your items, uncharting the map, going between quest givers and just gives interesting battles for a more expedited experience. It's a great bite sized experience to try out classes, subclasses and items in. Super sick mod, only thing that'd make it better is if there was like custom arena battles afterwards. I suppose that'd be a bit different from maybe the design intent, nonetheleless banger mod!

I initially only added one of every common accessory because they have a max stack of 1 and would bloat the stores if I exceeded that. But it would be unfair if items like Ring of Overseeing that are plentiful in the base campaign would only have a single copy in S4, so making them replenish is justifiable imo. My true agenda is enabling the 5x Necklace of Fireballs party comp

Haha! Yes! Fist try: did a short crit-chain until Red Flag grazed and got +180% dmg for the following damage roll. Awesome!

Them launching a GaaS game earlier this year, having it score 41 on Metacritic, and now unlaunching it for good is probably just as good a reason to boycott the company anyway.

Believe it or not, Spider's Bane is only +2 and applies the spell "Free Action" to the wielder...but the general idea of "kill all the spiders before you can obtain the spider-killing sword that you can't really use for its specific purpose of killing spiders because you already killed all the spiders" remains, .

We have a guy with a full beard who always walks around barefoot. I'm hoping I'll slip under the radar, and also that clients don't base decisions on looks.

Im outraged by what she said, she is just pandering to the SJW gaming crowd and hoping to find sympathy and drag this business matter into culture wars garbage But Im more outraged by her suggestion that " I am asking the fans to boycott this game and instead spend the money that you would have spent on this game donating to charity" ....I have never bought Bayonetta before but I am now going to buy 10 copies !!! And then she says "I decided to do it to stand up in solidarity with people all over the world who do not get paid properly for their talents" .....please, pass the barf bag. If she was getting paid what she wants we wouldnt be hearing one word from her about " people who do not get paid properly for their talents " But this grandstanding from her will be an epic failure because Japanese companies arent part of Western cancel culture so nothing is going to change

Belgorod shooting: Gunmen kill 11 in attack on Russian trainee soldiers I'm not sure what to make of that, other than internal opposition manifesting itself. It seems counter-productive though if it was intended to counter mobilization.

It does. If you press "esc" at the right time, you can get some pretty interesting results: Poor Minagho. The Knight Commander can be such a headache!

Spy x Family 15 Anya faces made me laugh too much with this one.

I don't know about being evil, but there is this weird thing where people assume super rich people are experts in everything. Clearly they are experts in some things, hence the success, but that doesn't translate into general expertise. In a lot of ways being incredible wealthy should preclude you from being able to relate to the real world reality that most people face. All of us are probably only experts on maybe 2-3 things. Unfortunately everyone here has used one of those expertise areas on obscure video games.

and also both eyes blue for the hell of it Edit: bearded Barik as well: You can recrop the portrait to your liking using this site: https://www.notra.fr/portrait/deadfire and swap out the background using this site: https://www.remove.bg/ If you want something quick, once the site has removed the background the click edit button in the right hand corner, then select a background and pick one of the blur options.

Spy x Family 15 Anya goes to the park.

Or activate Avenging Storm to allow the game to crash. By the way, the Seal without int-might-other multiplier (like legendary), are dealing 4-6 raw damage /reflex per 1s for 5s in a medium AoE (like Dire Blessing or Chillfog). If Chilling Grave can crash the game with 12 skellies, I dont know how the game can manage a chain-crit from Mahora with the Weyc's Wand (and Driving Flight).. I will make a try.

OK, so for next version : I might have gone overboard with Drake, giving it 5x of each abilities to promote its AoE damages might have been a good intention, but giving it a 5x AoE Knockdown made it too close from Wisp territory. So I lowered the number of Knockdowns to 3x (breath is still 5x) but rised the damages from 15-25 to 25-35. Sorry for the iterative tweaks, but finding a purpose for each of the Chanter Summon (who share the same ressource and Summon slot) isn't that easy. Pallid Fate : With all my BDD tweaks, I feared that +3 PL while Near Death has become unplayable (the new BDD applies a shield, so when becoming Near Death healing will heal you, while damages will go to the shield ; this makes maintaining the Near Death condition less easy). I will simply add a persisting +3 PL for base 6s (passive, so modifiable only by INT) after Death Godlike goes back from Near Death. You still have to "go there" to get your bonus, but at least you won't be cancelled by an undue healing (e.g. good synergy with Watchful Presence) I really wanted to avoid applying Pallid Fate on Bloodied (even with a value nerf), but I had to find a way to make it slightly more playable.

"the hell with it … even though starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we'll just keep funding ukraine govt for free" As if he isn't getting billions of taxpayer $

First off, those Bethesda offices are pretty swanky. Secondly, was that voice actress in the first two games? $4k does sound like a slap in the face. Even if it is a day's worth of work, she has contributed to a successful franchise. This isn't a hobby for her.

Completed the second DLC for Wasteland 3. Between collecting 3 McGuffins, infinite waves of enemies in every location, and quest markers, it was not impressive. I suppose, it is ironic that the worst aspects of the game, the DLC, had DRM, while the base game did not. The base game was complete, consistent, and trusted that the player is reasonably intelligent or prone to loot every container and corpse and talk to every NPC.

Could we get a togle in the options menu for 12 hour time clock along side the current 24 hour clock

I tried my wheel on FH5 also and it was horrible. Asseto Corsa Competizione, on the other hand, is awesome with a wheel.

I spent a couple of hours trying to get my wheel to play well on Forza Horizon 5 but in the end had to surrender and just accept the gamepad. I suppose we're at the stage where anything but a gamepad is an afterthought on multiplatform titles, even devices specifically designed for the genre of that particular game. Probably still exceptions for the more hardcore sims, but not for more arcadey titles like this. I do sort of remember the backlash when Freelancer came out with no joystick support...

At this rate, in a generation or two they're going to stop making computer chassis and you'll have dedicated computer rooms. Your GPU will come on a truck by itself and you will need a pallet jack or dolly to wheel it into the computer room to connect it to the mother board. The mobo will still be the same size as it is today, by the way, but the GPU will be 6' x 2' x 8" and weigh 230 lbs.