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Hi there! Longtime lurker here finally engaging with all you lovely people. I'm coming back to pillars after a while and am trying to choose what to play. I generally have a huge problem constantly restarting to try different builds, and then reading everything about them and then starting something new. It's annoying. So after much consideration I've narrowed down what I want to play to monk, priest or druid. This is for the first and second game. I will probably be using community patch and the balance polishing mod btw. I've beaten the first on hard and played through much of it on potd. I haven't played the second game as much but plan to go through it (after the first) on potd as well. But I just can't decide on a class to take all the way through both (for roleplaying reasons). Like I mentioned I settled on priest, druid, or monk. I know these are all good and strong classes in both games and I enjoy vancian casters as well as the monk's wounds system. I think I'd like to stay single class since... well I just like it more conceptually I guess? I don't know. Does anyone have any strong opinions on what's most fun or engaging for both games, but mostly the second? I think I'd go with priest of berath so I could mix damage and support if I went priest but I'm open to other options. Druid I'm less sure... Fury for blasting? Ancients for dots and summons and heals? The flexibility sounds nice maybe? Monk seems fun too but again I'm caught between mortar monk and forbidden fist tank monk. Serious decision paralysis. So ya, I'd love and appreciate if anyone could weigh in with what they think to help me decide.

Full VO is EXTREMELY expensive. Good voice actors aren't cheap at all and especially RPGs usually have a lot of text that would need to be recorded.

The general problem is that if you try to satirise something you hate, you almost always just end up ridiculing it instead. Which may appeal to people who agree with you, but to others just looks nasty. (The thing about someone like Cohen- not really my cup of tea, but still- is that he'll give bad people rope to hang themselves with satire wise, but in the end the vast majority of the time they make themselves look bad- and you get the occasional person who comes out of it looking like an absolute legend. It's also the difference between something like Airplane! where the writers clearly loved disaster movies for all their faults and the majority of movie 'satires' whose purpose just seems to be to hate on everything they're satirising)

I hadn't even noticed the influx of guests - my bookmark (or my general "click first" after login) is the Community section, not Home, so I don't often see the stats line of users-online. Too much traffic can definitely be a bugbear for various reasons. I'm still getting the slow page loading response just to say, both page loading and when trying to login/logout. Sometimes it's not too long a wait, sometimes it's quite long (as Bart. mentioned).

DEX has linear returns, not diminishing. Even when recovery is zero the returns from DEX are linear. But it is debatable if the small changes in animation speed (counted in absolute frames) is worth the hassle to stack DEX into the sky while other attributes suffer. Remember Rakhan Field only applies to FoD. It is actually a copy of the original FoD attack that has an additional corrosive lash. Most abilities and their upgrades are hard-coded copies with adjustments. Upgrades or talents for abilities usually do no "latch" onto basic abilities or so. Instead when you pick an upgrade/talent the basic ability is removed and the new, improved ability is added to your character. An exception is Scion of Flame - that does work with FoD and also Sacred Immolation. Spirit of Decay also works with the corrosive lash of Remember Rakhan Field. What they do is to improve the lash by 20% (so 25% becomes 30%, 50% becomes 60% and so on). For a Bleak Walker I guess two Bittercut sabres (cloned with the Helwax Mold) could be the best FoD option. The sabre itself does corrode damage and profits from Spirit of Decay, the lash on the weapon (fire or corrode) profits from Scion of Flame or Spirit of Decay, the FoD lashes profit from Scion of Flame and Remember Rakhan Field profits from Spirit of Decay. It's a nice weapon anyway (bc. sabre with dual damage).

There are two major ending branches, with different sub-endings for each. The first branch I got was the one you mentioned (where you attend Hugo's birthday party - this is the 'normal' one), but there's a second branch that veers wildly off into a different direction that reveals a lot more about the Sintra family (you must discover where the ritual dagger, the Athame, is hiding and take it before the birthday party happens). I feel this is intended to be the true ending, though interpretation may vary depending on exactly what you value (also, I think it probably works better if you've already played the first ending, as I feel it builds off of what you learn in the first ending branch). Yep, I've also played both of those. Though very different, DDLC is a pretty cute/horrific game and one of like...maybe four visual novels I've ever played all the way through, and The Count of Lucanor I quite liked as well though it didn't quite match the highs of Yuppie Psycho. Thanks for the other mentions. Yeah, finding quality games that really hit the mark can be difficult...there's always stuff where it's similar-ish and kind of alright, but it's usually pretty clear when a game really has its claws in you versus when it doesn't.

The developers' previous game, The Count Lucanor, is quite similar, though smaller in scope. I would say that Doki Doki Literature Club is close enough to being cute and horror as well, though it is visual novel. I have also played (have not finished) Kraken Academy!!, which was visually similar, but somehow less engaging. There is also Yomawari: Night Alone (have not played the sequel), which is technically both cute and horror, but felt rather shallow and underwhelming. --- Speaking of, the Immortal Cats mod for Fallout 4 (pre-"next gen" update) did not work for me. So, the only mod I am using is Full Dialogue. Got Fallout 4 on GOG shortly before Bethesda messed up the mods yet again (the sale was really convenient) and decided to try the expansions. Died in the first combat encounter at the Far Harbor 4 times so far. --- I think, I have finished Yuppie Psycho once with the best ending, though, I did look up the elevator code at the end.

Well, this depends on what it really means to be underbudgeted. IMHO PoE2 could fit into the definition of underbudgeted, or to have a more fresh example, look on Steam for Vivat Slovakia game. It has full VO, despite being absolutely unoptimised mess, despite it having a big potential for our domestic audience. after 5 years in development it hit Early Access now. Therefore for me, full VO in indie/AA games seems more like a type of mismanagement, as I do not see much difference betweem having it or not if your target audience is very niche in the first place. Which means it is almost impossible case to attract the mythical “wider audience” 🤷‍♂️

either/or. this unfortunately has been an issue since 1.0, believe me i've personally reported it multiple times. even without modifiers, the damage that seals do in practice is under what the base tooltip is. i think the root cause is that seals create hazard effects, and hazards are handled really really really weird in the game. Walls are also hazards and behave weirdly (like they get partial assassinate bonuses from assassin and don't break stealth), but seals in particular are very weird because walls at least do their stated damage. The biggest thing is that yes, they do a fraction of the tooltip damage, and I don't know why. For this reason they are mostly useful for their secondary effects (prone for repulsing, interrupt for warding, and blind for searing) and the ability to cast them from stealth outside of combat (which lets you refresh a spell slot).

Unfortunately, most of the time, you do not have the luxury to have both full VO and enough time for all the desired gameplay features. Unless you plan to burn 50M budget on yoir game. So I am considering it as a waste of limited resources in most of the games I’ve played. 🤷‍♂️

Yuppie Psycho, successfully 100%-ed! This time, I played through the 'true' ending, which actually properly resolved the central story once and for all... ...but it was personally much more horrifying for me. Steam lists these two game tags back-to-back, just like this, for Yuppie Psycho: It's honestly pretty accurate, and I think I'd say that cute horror is the best horror. The same developer is working on a similar game that I hope is at least 75% as good, and having now played this game twice (although really more like three times, what with the failed "no save" playthrough mentioned in my previous post having gotten me like 80% of the way there), I can now safely qualify this game as one of my favorite games of all time - it's stuck with me for years at this point, and I still love it. There's something about all the different little pieces that come together perfectly to make it a really personalized-for-me kind of game. Though I could probably play quality games in this genre (this kind of top-down exploration game with fun characters, world, and story) for probably forever if I had enough of them. If anyone knows of any more, feel free to recommend them to me. Though I've already played SIGNALIS, which was similar-ish and which I also really liked.

Interesting that from what I've read, "voicing every character in the game" appears to be either a feature that doesn't particularly impress players or seems like a downright mistake (for me, it's a mistake, because it seems obvious that it constrained the writing too much and too early), and the fact that "Sawyer was blocked from cutting a major feature" (assuming it's naval combat, which I'm pretty sure it was) looks like a big mistake to an awful lot of players (in my view, all time spent on this feature was time wasted). So, "Obsidian", whoever that happens to mean exactly, seems to have made two big mistakes or at least two choices that made very little positive difference in the game, and Sawyer knew it and just had to soldier on with it.

Yesterday I forgot to play games.

Didn't we have some Escape from Tarkov players here?

You're welcome. To be fair to this pile of garbage, which is really hard, that sort of creepy goes back to the olden days of pre-modern anime. This crap is a rather direct, unchanged adaptation from the source material. Actually, Sailor Moon Cosmos is so close to the source material that the best fan sub that is currently available was - supposedly - not made with the film, but rather with the one of the manga editions, and then just timed (and later retimed) with the film. If nothing else that makes the film a wonderful case study for what happens when you do not adapt source material, but transfer it 1:1 to the screen. It is a right mess. It was the music of the intro that caused the reaction more than anything that happened in the film up to that point. Why does this horrible version of Moonlight Densetsu even exist? There are two far superior versions of the old anime to chose from. No, no. This is what they used in the anime to flesh out the villains, actually. In this film and the manga, which is only explained later, and it was my mistake to assume that the original anime took that story bit from the manga (in hindsight, yes, that was pretty dumb, huh?), the Sailor Animamates (i.e. Iron Mouse, Aluminum Siren, Lead Crow, Tin Nyanko and Heavy Metal Papillon) aren't actually mind controlled Sailor Senshi. They're just mercenaries and traitors who joined Galaxia for the promise of power and have been granted the powers of actual Senshi through the bracelets they wear. Phi, Chi, Lethe and Mnemosyne are real Sailor Senshi who joined Galaxia. Just not through mind control or force, but because they wanted to. I hate Ami x Makoto more than Rei x Minako for the simple fact that it seems to be a fandumb favorite, constructed out of two freaking scenes of the original anime. One where Ami helps Makoto with studying for their high school exams and Makoto's rape episode from SuperS where Ami dances with her. You know, the episode where she waits ages for Tigereye (a man) to come back. That is the basis for this pairing, by far and large. Watch out, femoids of the world, the incels of the world will turn you into lesbians if you ever dance with a fellow femoid. That is not to say that I don't despise Rei x Minako for the terrible framing in the manga, and thus, the film, I just loathe it less than Ami x Makoto. These scenes with Minako in Crystal/the manga are pretty bad - the girls all have massively reduced character development due to the breakneck pacing of the chapters, and Minako being utterly boy-happy is one of the few things that make up her somewhat quirkier personality (as opposed to her earlier, much more serious version). Hinting at her hitting it off with Rei diminishes what little character development she gets in this. Arguably even worse with Makoto whose only wish is to be accepted as a normal girl in a world that shuns her for non-conformity (taller than normal girls, stronger than normal girls, wavy instead of straight hair). Fantasy-shipping her off with Ami is just a giant middle finger to everything she represents and has to go through. F*ck you, fandumb. Huh, look at me getting angry, I guess I am not completely dead inside from all of this yet. Go me! I don't think they are in there enough to matter. Just like everything else, they're an afterthought thrown in to fill chapters, even though they're more fleshed out than most of the villains. Ah, the framing of the post-credit scene was a little unfair on my part, but I needed to strike back at the film. This just looks like what it looks like and isn't really what it looks like. It is just Mamoru kissing Usagi in bed after waking up, but the implication still lingers. I mean, Usagi can't get pregnant without the intercourse part, but to be honest, the stylized sex scene from season two was a lot worse. I mean, scenes like that in the first three seasons is what makes this film the best out of the bunch. The worst thing that happens with the regular cast is that creepy Hotaru stuff and Seiya kissing Usagi without consent. It says a lot of the series and films - and the manga - that this is counting as the least terrible entry, huh?

I don't think that's true. Full VO seems like a rather coveted feature - no doubt you will find a lot of support on this forum (including myself, as I don't require full VO or VO at all to enjoy a game) but you will cut your self from a potential player base. There is also no evidence of "VO limits writing". Yes, Bioware games became smaller and smaller in scope as they wramped up production value, but there are also enough examples to the contrary. It seems that if one can afford it, full VO seems like a rather valuable feature to have - both for audience and marketing (aka. streamers) From what I remember (Josh mentioned decision to full VO in his Post Mortem) full VO was mostly a scheduling nightmare - as they didn't plan for full VO, having to fit recording sessions took a toll on the devs - it is not as simple as sending a script to a third party and having it recorded. Yeah, I also thing the "feature" he mentions was the Ship Combat.

Not really, Trump is a parody of a human being enough. Cohen I've never really found all that funny, but I've never watched enough of his stuff to judge I suppose. But that piece you linked is too much of a strawman. But I suppose is better than labelling them jihadis as was done by our Sun (so basically the same thing as a satire paper I guess..). Right wingers have some reflex hatred for protests sort of funny, given how many jerk it to the Gadsen flag essentially.

I swear, this forum has THE WORST ****ING SOFTWARE I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY ENTIRE ****ING LIFE. I have seen Geocities sites that were less of a pain to use. Whoever programmed this COLLOSAL PILE OF ****ING GARBAGE, I hope they were fired and never worked in software ever again. I put up dealing with this DUMPSTER FIRE for as long as I did because I like Obsidian as a developer and I like many of the community here, but I just can't any more.