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Continuing on with my Solasta playthrough with the Unfinished Business mod. The 6-person party is just so awesome! Exactly how the game should be played. I'm not using too many other features from the mod, mainly the option of removing attunement and including multi-classing. Difficulty has not been affected in any meaningful way. I've made a few tweaks here and there to keep the challenge balanced, and that's it. Only wish the game had more story and characters heft.

Yeah, healing (or more specifically, healing spells) is a trap. Both in BG3, and as I understand it, more broadly in 5E as well. Plenty of alternate sources of healing anyway, consider the following factors: - The plentiful amount of healing potions, the plentiful amount of gold you get to buy more, and the ability to make more with alchemy - Drinking them being a bonus action in BG3, unlike in PnP - The ability to throw them to (AoE) heal others as an action - The ability for any class to use any and all scrolls to cover any missing cleric utility - The lack of any limit to the number of magic items you can equip to grant extra healing or utility spells, plus raw power to increase your survivability in general - Functionally unlimited long rests, and consequentially, short rests - The ability to resurrect at camp in exchange for some loose change you found between the sofa cushions - The ability to respec literally anyone into a more support-oriented class if you insist on having one anyway - Up to two canonical druids or one canonical paladin as party members if you refuse to respec anyone - The (admittedly tedious) ability to temporarily switch in companions not currently in your active party to use their spells, including the hirelings. You don't lose buffs if you dismiss them from the party. So yeah, with all that in mind, it's easily better for the action economy to set up your party to just kill faster, be that with the cleric (many domains are pretty good at killing, just not Shadowheart's default Trickery) or with whichever class you take instead. EDIT: I mean, I initially started writing these items as just one sentence, but ended up having to reformat it as a list, that's how many ways there are to cover for the lack of a cleric.

She's not absolutely necessary, you can get a lot of heals with just short rests and the cart loads of potions you find. But she is quite useful. Also Guidance and some later Cleric spells are good.

There are some class unique instances, but for the most part at best it makes a generic skill check a bit easier than ususal. I didn't find the game made me "feel" like my character is of certain class in the way, lets say, Deadfire did.

I'm giving BG3 another go. Having trouble sticking with a main character class. I feel like you are kind of forced into having shadowheart around unless your MC can heal. She's my second least favorite companion so far... behind only Gale, who might be the most annoying video game character since claptrap from borderlands. Might just start over and leave him in that portal. From playing the first 45 minutes like 8 times I notice a lot of the interactions make you think your class matters but you get the same [class] dialogue option in all the conversations so far... it just changes what class it says before the dialogue.

Than I would encourage you to give dedicated Stealth game a chance at some point. In games that wear multiple hats, stealth tends to be rather uninteresting. My suggestion would be (in that order) Thief2, Splnter Cell: Chaos Theory, Mark of the Ninja, Thief1 (though from all mentioned Thief1 is my fav, but it's a fanscinating mess mixing stealth missions with something closer to first person Tomb Raider).

Miyagi style.

Well, to be fair, the absinthe had a kick... And of course, the wine had to be served in these:

Ok, I've put in about 200 hrs of No Man's Sky now, although I still have not finished the story line although I have progressed it farther. The TLDR would be: The game as it currently is in 2023, is a fun sandbox, but gameplay value - especially if not on a sale - is going to mostly appeal to a certain type of player. Even if you are the type of player it would appeal to, over a lengthy interval it might start to feel a bit shallow vs. some other more concise/specialized sandboxy games. Overall for sandbox genre I'd give NMS something like ... 6.5/10. Maybe 7/10 at most. Don't get me wrong, I am enjoying the game quite a lot, and it's great for mindless chill, exploring, self-goals/long semi-mindless mental distraction. The level of freedom is great. But outside of freedom to explore/look at quintrillions of procedural generated planets, everything else - bases, pets, settlements/fleets, all of that, feel more at an afterthought level. Probably a consequence of trying to please those who wanted more than system/planet exploration, but still make everything in the game not required. ------------------------------- Re: Questing ---The quest side of the game for me is maybe a 3/10 at best. The quests are extremely repetitive - not surprising or anything - and generally consist of perform scans on planet or check galaxy map for markers, go to a new system, land on a planet, find/click something, repeat endlessly, pattern. All the main and larger side quests I've done still feel like tutorials, with rewards mostly being access to new structure/crafting blueprints or maybe some tech mods and maybe making you build/use the new thing as part of the quest. So if you've already bought/upgraded a lot on your own, they are an especially pointless/annoying grind. ---being someone not hugely into strong narrative arc games, I'm often fairly tolerant of shallow quest systems as long as they're short/quick. My tolerance for the ones in NMS is really low. One or two of them, so far, have made me want to turn the game off for the session, in annoyance/boredom. They are more dull - and at times, RNG-irritating - than killing 30 rats in the basement. Just me tho. ---if one is the type who wants to finish the story, I would recommend brand new players to follow it almost exclusively. Save the sandbox or side lore hunting, if you like the game enough, for after. At least then they wouldn't feel as pointless as putting them off until later. ---there are a lot of nitpicky UI, controls, npc menu, inventory menu complaints I could make but eh.

There is one thing in the series that elevates it to a ten for me, the use of a Swedish song as the sombre music for Raftalia when shes heartbroken.

Really, CDPR? Really?

seems like another chance to say pathfinder 2e does healing better heal is the strongest spell in the entire game

Not gonna lie, I know some crazy peeps that wax their tailpipe...

It was the first and only CoD I played. Respawing enemies really killed it for me. I remember trying to be tactical in one of ther missions, and I kept killing enemies for 15 minutes, before I realised the game will spawn enemies infinitely until I move forward. Very much smoke and mirrors throughout. I on the other hand jumped back into Titanfall2, as its multiplayer has been resurrected. Campaign is really solid for what it is. Multiplayer is so very good. And I usually don't like those type of games.

Well, I did say we'd likely make the semis, and we've done that. We ought to make the finals now, I can't see even this team losing to an Argentina that has been as erratic as us but from a lower base point. Would be a laugh if it happened though. We played pretty close to our practical potential. Ireland didn't play badly at all, but were nowhere near their potential. Never winning a quarter final and coming up against the ABs --> bit of a choke, sadly, especially since they were a man up for 20 minutes plus a penalty try. Real shame for Ireland that the draw was complete crap, they'd have beaten Fiji/ England/ Argentina/ Wales pretty handily most likely and then the quarter final bogey would have been gone when they met better opponents. As it stands, the best four teams at the tournament are playing each other in the quarters which pretty much sums up the competence of international rugby management.

Brazilian style or more traditional style?

Just got back home after a week in New Orleans. Quirky to go to an American city where you can casually walk pretty much everywhere. 😄 Had the fun of landing back on Saturday, and then being told that around 150 pieces of baggage had been left at Heathrow. So I had to do the adventure of hit Walmark for basic necessities and some spare clothes while waiting on my particular baggage to catch up to me. Survived the Vampire Speakeasy.

Started playing some CoD Modern Warfare Remake. Damn did this game not age well. Graphics are fine, but the gameplay is so dull and boring. It's just one shooting corridor after another, and you have to progress asap or enemies will keep spawning. Crazy that this was the top of gaming back in the days. Also funny, if you don't aim down sights, your bullets will go all over the place, heh.

Demo Madness keeps rolling along with ARTIFICIAL. It's a physics-based puzzle game in the vein of Portal, minus the eponymous portals. It has a low poly aesthetic, it basically looks like a PS2 game but with modern lighting and particle effects. It's a good aesthetic, looks quite nice IMHO. Seems decent enough, if unremarkable.

I cleaned up my large base. It's 99% for looks/fun of building ... the npc pilots still visit. You can go multi-story with the room modules but the auto-mount a ladder when you get close to them mechanic drives me nuts - and you must put those ladders in the center of the claustrophobic rooms - so I don't do that and instead "game the system" to spread a base over more territory then initially allowed. 😛 I have a few pets but I forget about them since they're auto-put away every time you get in/out of your ship. Plus per usual, they're just deco or the silly riding. Or you can try to breed new ones re:colors/size/shape I think. Some are cute tho. The brown one on the right tries to track/find POI's for me but isn't very good at it. Not all worlds are grassy biospheres. There's a non-organic lifeform in the below pic - in the game it's obvious because it's rolling around like a boulder. Pretty cool. This planet matched my ship pretty well I thought.

You know, I don't ever remember wanting to kill any children in BG1 and BG2, where you actually can, but all of these games where you can't, there's always at least one that I definitely did. Kind of feels like a chicken-or-the-egg situation: did they give children immortality because they realized their child characters were so annoying that they needed immortality to make sure that players weren't heartlessly slaughtering children en masse, or did they oh so smugly develop all these annoying child characters with the foreknowledge that there's absolutely nothing that the player can do about them? Regardless, I think it'd be a good idea for developers to remember that players will want to mutilate and butcher children if they're too annoying, incentivizing those developers to write them appropriately with that firmly in mind.

Next demo, The Talos Principle 2. It starts out looking like The Talos Principle. Not the worst thing in the world since The Talos Principle is one of my favorite games and IMHO the best game Croteam ever developed. But then... But also Greek gods? This game looks STUNNING. There are some wall textures I've found that look a bit gnarly if you try to lick them, but overall it looks spectacular. It's out in less than a month too. /rubs hands together

It also seems incredibly early to write off a medium sized game like Lamplighters. It's been a week, give the game some time to grow.

I think that was the part that made me drop FO3 for good and never return to it. Those *^^$@#$ brats were so annoying and I couldn't kill them. Not even with the mini nuke 😠

I don't know what Lamplighters is trying to be, and I'm not sure the game does either. Early 20th century setting? That's good. Weird cartoonish 3D aesthetic? That's bad. Tactical turn-based combat? That's good. Real-time only stealth sections? That's bad. I dunno, maybe I'll go watch one of those long-form YouTube reviews to get more than that surface treatment of it, but the general discourse around the game isn't promising. Also, petty as it is, the name evokes the infamous Little Lamplight segment of FO3. 😛

I may have finally found the "forever home" Paradise planet! All I need now is to make a bit of a base. Maybe I'll let this one be the one where I hire an Overseer, so I'll make it a bit bigger. ....maybe I went a little overboard, and not in the best way. I'll clean it up later. The funny thing is while I kept trying to place all those landing platforms (I had a temp-display-ships for screenshot idea - sadly 9 platforms is max per base), the random-encounter npc pilot/traders kept landing on them! That red ship below isn't mine, get off my stuff! So I then had to wait for them to fly off before I could move pieces again...I had no idea they'd use player-made platforms. Guess you need more than one, lol

I somehow decided to give Shield Hero another chance. The first episode looks a lot better than the previous season. Let's see how it evolves from here.

Suzanne Somers

Demomania continues with Star Ocean: The Second Story R. This is a remake of Star Ocean 2 and the second game in this latest batch of Next Fest demos that has me scratching my head at a bizarre design decision. If it isn't already obvious, they decided to marry 16-bit era sprites with fully rendered modern-ish 3d modeled environments. Why would you do this? The environments are fine and the sprites are great, but they clash. Why not just stick with one art style? Beyond that, this seems like your typical JRPG. It's been forever since I've played a Star Ocean game so I don't know how much the battle system has changed from the original, but it plays very much like a traditional JRPG with a real-time combat system.

https://www.eurogamer.net/paradox-declares-pulp-strategy-the-lamplighters-league-a-22m-flop Well that sucks

Next demo, The Inquisitor. You play an inquisitor investigating a vampire sighting in an alternate history where Jesus got all types of vengeful. It looks like a PS3 game. And runs like complete ass. They have a lot of optimization work to do. Still, y'all know how I love my Eurojank. This could be right up my alley.