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@melkathi@majestic@Hurlshort@LadyCrimson I just got word today from Guard Dog that he is well now, and really happy together with Gail! And he sends his best wishes to y'all!

Hey Everyone! I was trading emails with Azdeus and he said I should come see you guys. It has been a while hasn't it. The beginning of last year I think. I didn't even realize how long until I signed in and couldn't remember my password. I really hope all you fine folks and your families are doing well! 2022 and the first half of 2023 were a pretty rough time for me. I was dealing with lymphoma but with the help of early detection, some really great doctors and medical folks I'm almost as good as ever. Please don't ignore symptoms. If you feel off please see a doctor. After that experience I decided to retire. Much earlier than I was planning but life is beautiful, and short. It's meant to be enjoyed. Gwen (her real name) and I are still together and doing well. I don't know why I didn't want to use her real name online. It probably made sense to me at the time. I am so lucky to have met her. She is semi-retired as well and we are currently wrapping up a road trip to visit all the national parks in New Mexico. Eventually we will visit all the US & Canada national parks. 21 down, 90 to go. And forever to do it. Bri is graduating from college next week and we will be there to cheer for her. She is an amazing young lady with a bright future. So proud of her. I made peace with my brother I'm happy to say. I never really understood what the resentment was about but dealing with a serious illness changes your perspective on things. That's pretty much it. I do miss talking to you guys. After a career in tech I'm doing retirement decidedly low tech. I barely even use the internet anymore. I hope all of you are happy and healthy.

I'll bite. Avowed underperforming = realistic. The Outer Worlds 2 doing the same = realistic. Obsidian being turned into Bethsoft junior / Fallout game factory liners = a possibilty. At least they'd be working on an IP they like, hey. In particular considering how freakishly long it takes to churn out these games these days -- and that delivering BIG IP blockbuster product corporations care about becomes slower and slower a process. Who was Football World Champion back when the last Dragon Age released? On which console did the last GTA game first release? When did the last Elder Scrolls main game come out, discounting re-releases? Does anybody even remember the last Mass Effect, for that matter? If you can positively answer these, chances are, you're a pretty old fart.

Since this is a "history" post, I'll start with the oldest stuff first and work my way towards the current time, here and now on the Obsidian boards I often deny having owned a gaming console and that is technically correct. But... long unrelated story, I grew up with relatives who were "junkies" (heroin addicts) and they would often rob stores and homes for things to sell for mere pittances at times to finance their addiction. One day, the oldest showed up at my parents place (my mother, for reasons, had become their legal guardian) with a Pong gaming console they had stolen somewhere and no fence would take it off their hands. The original Pong console was among my first video gaming experience in the mid 70's. It was my parents though, not mine. (I would have loved to put an image of the console here, but I honestly do not remember what it looked like 50 years ago) Other sources of video gaming at the time was the arcade machines a various convenience stores and grill bars. Some were electronic, some were part mechanical, part electronic. I particularly remember a "Duck Hunt" game, where several layers of glass were used to create the sense of depth and a single glass plate was used to reflect a flying duck from a TV screen hidden out of sight. The shotgun was mounted to a stick that was effectively a big joystick. No fancy electronics at all. Other places had more modern games like Galaxy Invaders... I spent a fortune in coins on those machines. Jump forwards almost a decade, 1983 I was convinced I was going to end up studying biology after high school... until my dad came home with three page advertising pamphlet for the Commodore 64. It was so colourful and impressive looking. It used an elephant to symbolize the humongous memory it had (even though only 38k turned out to be available to the user in the end). I managed to raise the money for my machine of dreams as well as the associated tape recorder and two games. A game on tape called "Beach Head" and a cartridge called "International Soccer". First two games I ever bought with my own money. Never mind that programming the C64 got me hooked on software development and an impromptu career change, the games changed my life too, spending much of my free time playing games on the old "Bread Box" (Danish nick name for the C64). US Gold was a major publisher int he 80's and the football game? It took almost 10 years before a better game of its kind came out. Another decade later I raised the money for a Commodore Amiga 4000 and a hard drive. Gaming now became almost an art form. Bear in mind, in the early 90's, the Amiga completely outperformed contemporary desktop PC's, with the latters CGA graphics and built in tweeter for sound. Never mind the operating system, where MS only caught up with Windows 8 or thereabouts. But the games... sooo many, soo good. On the C64, I developed a love for strategy games and role playing games. SSI gold games, the Ultimas etc. were not just nostalgia, they were state of the art as each individual title came out. So many strategy games too, it was like paradise for a gamer like me. The Amiga added better graphics and real music to many titles. And they just kept coming for the next decade. This is where I almost get to the point... (skipping a list featuring literally a decade and hundreds of Amiga games here) Some of the newer PC games in the late 1990’s looked interesting and I could run them on a PC Emulator. One title in particular stunned with its atmosphere (because I'm a child of the Cold War and the end of the worlds was always present), the demo for a game called "Fallout" had me completely hooked. I bought the full game and... it didn't want to run on my PC emulator (even though the official demo did). Life as a PC gamer Building myself a PC, my first gaming experiences on it was Interplay’s Fallout. More games followed and Fallout together with the first Tomb Raider were my standout memories from the late 90's. Then I ran into a game from the now established Black Isle Studio called Baldurs Gate 2 (yes, I missed the first one) and I spent the next 12 months, day and night playing the heck out of that game, to the detriment of the rest of my life pretty much. Fallout 2 happened, I ended up buying Baldurs Gate 1 too, completing it a few times, nothing like the time I invested in BG2 though. Still, I took note of the name Bioware as well as Black Isle. That thing called Obsidian I was active on the internet too at the time, but I had little interest in this thing called "Forums" (some newfangled sofware that was probably going to die out in a year or two, so why bother?). Usenet was where things happened and many discussion groups (especially the alt groups like alt.games.interplay) were completely unmoderated. Calling it the wild west is being nice to it. Usenet died the slow death of entropy and forums stayed. By the time I had convinced myself to join the Interplay forums, Interplay de facto folded. At least, it ceased to exist as the Interplay I knew. That's when I heard about this "successor company" called Obsidian Entertainment which had plans for opening up a forum. Still not the fastest tool in the shed, it took me a fortnight to sign up. Despite being somewhat of a troll at times and getting into fistfights at times, I ended up as a moderator. Much to my own surprise honestly. I suppose the thinking at the time was something along the lines of using a troll to catch a troll. The discussion subject at the time was "Project Delaware", resulting on all sorts of crazy speculations and wishful thinking (and doom saying). Knights of the Old Republic 2 arrived and... good game with awful ending is the best way I can summarize it. An understatement of course, as the ending was completely missing for various reason... Neverwinter Nights 2 followed and was slightly less buggy the Kotor2 had been, but not flawless. The DLC's however... Mask of the Betrayer in particular brings back fond memories of a game I might not otherwise remember. The Sequel Maker Obsidian was developing a reputation of making buggy sequels to Bioware games that were all 132% perfect... at least if you were to believe the most critical voices. Of course, there is a lot more to how such thing happen, but gamers are a weird bunch, often prone to tunnel vision and confirmation bias, congregating towards echo chambers. Especially when it comes to likes and dislikes of games. Fallout New Vegas managed the impossible, convince a lot of people that Obsidian could actually make great games, that weren't necessarily direct sequels to existing games. It is probably also the only Obsidian game I feel like coming back to again and again, despite it's age. I know Outer Worlds offers a lot corporate humour and a feeling of living in dystopia, but something about the post nuclear setting just strikes a nerve because of my age (growing up during the cold war, expecting the end of the world every day). Playing through scenarios where humanity survives said war feels good I suppose? Still here Obsidian is no longer known in the business as the "buggy sequel" maker, but as a world builder, story creator and the maker of interesting characters. Like Obsidian, I’m still here. Still enjoying video games 40+ years later, still having a preference for crpg's and turn based strategy games. There are many more Obsidian games I could mention (take a look at the forum!) and would have loved to spend time on, but those are the ones that stuck out for me... -Gorth

End of the day, if you enter into a contract in any other field and find you're losing money you can't arbitrarily decide to cancel the contract, with no consequences. If your options are literally literally shutting down a server or going bankrupt... your company is figuratively literally in the crapper already. Otherwise you're just trying to dodge obligations that you don't think you should fulfill because now they're costing you money- and often trying to get people to buy [sportsgame_currentyear] instead of playing [sportsgame_currentyear--] they'd otherwise be perfectly happy with. Software companies have got away with a load of crap you wouldn't get away with if you were selling sandwiches, beds, cars or even service contracts like catering or cleaning just because it's software. So your Suicide Squad game released 3 months ago as a GaaS and sold appallingly? Tough noogies, that's the risk you take as a company, Warners. It costs you money to run the servers for the 27 people playing it you say? That's the risk you take. You can tell how hard up WBD is, Dave Zaslav only took home 300mn in pay and stock options over the past three years, wonder how many servers even 1% of that would keep running... [yes, I know it isn't shut down, yet]

Joyfully began the new Obsidian Community Blog feature ... 20 years people! https://forums.obsidian.net/profile/666-gorth/

Great blog @Gorth! My start in gaming was my (at the time) new step-dad's Nintendo Entertainment System with Super Mario Bros. 3 getting me into consoles. Not long after, my blood-related dad got me into PC games with DOOM and Wolfenstein share ware via the old hard floppy disks people shared (got ours from my uncle). I wasn't aware of Interplay or Black Isle, but I did play KotOR 1 for the first time on my friend's Xbox and immediately fell in love. Ended up getting it on PC and when I saw the sequel nearly died until I saw that it was made by some company named Obsidian instead of Bioware. At the time I was like, "Oh man, it's not Bioware? This game is probably going to suck..." To my surprise I enjoyed it even more. Being able to corrupt my companions, especially taking the time to corrupt Mira just felt epic compared to only seeing Bastilla corrupt in the previous title. Years later, I end up seeing South Park and the Stick of Truth and seeing Obsidian and saying, "Oh yea, I forgot about them." I played that game and looooved it, especially Butters as Professor Chaos. It wasn't until my old co-worker from Best Buy reached out to me to play a new game he was a part of developing called Pillars of Eternity that I would forever remember the name Obsidian. He is the one who ultimately helped get me into the gaming industry within Obsidian and I am forever grateful as it's allowed me to work with amazing, creative people both in the studio and within the community. After almost 8 years, I still can't believe the things I get to do and the people I get to do it with. Another thing that your blog resonated with me was your experience playing Fallout, as I started playing it a week ago and only JUST beat that game technically this morning around 1AM and continued to start up Fallout 2. I can't wait to continue the adventure tonight

The debacle around The Crew comes to mind. Also, might aswell drop this; https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ Short version Long version;

It's really depressing to see how people defend the megacorps for free.

Aww I’ve got a badge @Guard Dog yay, good to hear you’re Ok and enjoying life now

Long history of this happening. Recent example: Embracer. Older example: EA's Bioware deal also included Pandemic Studios, which they obviously wouldn't have bought if it wasn't a bundle deal since they closed it down in the first major round of layoffs post acquisition.

Yep, it's fine now.

Our first OBS Community Blog by @Gorth is now live: June and July are also written. Please DM if you have a musing in mind ...

Hey @mkreku, I'm sorry you've been running into this issue with the Authentication System. I'll have our back-end web developer look into that issue so that you and others have the proper ability to remove the two-factor authentication as needed. In the meantime, I've gone ahead and removed the 2FA from your account so if you would like, you can set it up again without having to use the recovery codes. Thank you for bringing this authentication issue to my attention and sorry again for all the inconvenience its been causing you over the past couple of years.

If there's no challenge anymore and if there's no meaningful purpose/reward, then it gets boring very fast...

Darkspore when EA shut down the server. It was always online even when playing single player. Yes, it wasn't a great game, but because co-op didn't do well, people couldn't relax in single player anymore? Any Microsoft Xbox live game when Microsoft decides to stop the live service on PC back in... Can't remember when. City of Heroes on the other hand proves that if the company is willing, it can allow the community to create the means to enjoy the game, even when the company has no more financial interest.

Turns out it was not worth it:

Just noticed I seem to be missing "male_human_e" watercolor from my Deadfire portrait folder. Anyone happen to have them to hand? Watercolors of everyone's favourite blond fighter companion from PoE1. Calisca! I've really enjoyed making them! It's a good excuse to noodle around with some filters and settings in Photopea that I never used before. Though I'm a bit frustrated to realise that pale elves, by default, can't have black hair... Which is a pain, since I was pretty happy with how that looked after floundering to change that portrait's hair color to white. As for the Aloth PoE1 portrait, your right he does look a little sunburnt in hindsight! I tried to match his face to his ears and hand in the vanilla PoE1 portrait. Which are likely that way due to the light passing through his skin. Anyway it's a simple enough to change that sunburn into a subtle tan! I didn't make any changes to the watercolors version from my previous post, but figured I'd including them in this post as well to save people having to scroll. Ooh that is a cool one! Through together an edit of the original portrait's watercolor to match.

It is indeed interesting to watch. Either the account requirement should have been enforced from the start (with the purchases being limited to the regions with PSN) or not at all. Curious if the digital distribution platforms are going to refund it. Edit. I've checked SteamDB. The game is no longer available for several regions. True, but the rootkit is less noticeable for an average user, while the game, as I understand, is online-only either way.

Bumping this as the campaign has only five more days to go. It is funded, and now working towards stretvh goals. I backed it at 50 euro purely because they were considerate enough to include an integral RTwP option.

You screenshotted the whole game?

Well, I would not say it was much different from other Beth games. Same engine, same bugs, just in space They should have put it into Starship Troopers universe, at least the bugs would fit into the lore

Psion/Troubadour is an example of being really good and lots of fun at the same time - at least for me. I think it's the versatility that motivates to apporach most encounters in different ways. You could go with one single set of actions every time - but it's much more rewarding to do the most efficient thing. So... summoning a bunch of X is always useful, but it takes a lot of time and steering the summons can be annoying - and it's totally not necessary if you can paralyze the enemies right away with a Killers Froze Stiff invocation - and so on. And you always have resources - but you cannot spell-spam high-level stuff right at the start of an encounter (which also makes stuff boring at some point). Mortar Monk is another example. It's gamebreakingly good - but somehow it still is fun to unleash the umphteenth Whispers of the Mortar Winds Mayhem. Can't even say why in this case. Maybe because one had to wait for it for a rel. long time and also maybe because it isn't optimal for single tough foes - so you have to interact differently in those cases at least. Maybe also because it's best if you assemble as many foes as possible in a rel. small area. So every encounter turns into some kind of minigame where I tried to lure, steer, force enemies into a certain spot before I started WotW. The Troubadour/Arcane Archer (see below) is a perfect party member for this (very high ACC and bazillion parallel pulses of Binding Web and Pull of Eora) Maybe yet another example could be a melee Bloodmage/Soulblade which is really good but also really versatile if must be. I'm not a big fan of Soulblades - but I read enough reports about this combo to know that several players did enjoy playing it. One-trick-ponies becoming boring to play is no secret. So maybe the takeaway is that versatile (and impactful) characters are more fun to play. Helwalker/Berserker with Saru-Sichr is very impactful in my game. Overabundance of wounds, very high chance for crit-chains, DoTs, great debuffing and CC and so on. Yet very difficult to manage due to the drastic self damage. It's a rewarding challenge imo. The good builds I had the most fun with (of course highly subjective): Helwalker/Berserker Mortar Monk Psion/Troubadour (solo & party) Steel Garrote/Bloodmage (solo & party) SC Furyshaper (solo) Stalker/Bloodmage (solo) Troubadour/Arcane Archer Furyshaper/Troubadour Streetfighter/Unbroken Assassin/Bloodmage Honorable mention: Assassin/Bleak Walker solo with Lover's Embrace. Absolute one-trick pony (or three-trick maybe... stack 3 everlasting DoTs on every enemy one by one, turn invisible, hide and wait) that I expected to become boring very quickly- but it carried the run for a sursprinsingly long time. Sometimes retreating and hiding was more difficult and risky as one might expect and sneaking past enemies failed often enough and things got a bit messy. Also sometimes it didn't work (Water Dragon, Huani O Whe...)

I hate to be that guy, but putting a game that hasn't been releases yet (or even shown much gameplay off) on a very specific place of your "Game of all time" list might impact the perceived integrity of your globally followed BruceVC game rating system.

"Hunters of Dune" Just stop. Stop while you still can.

Only book I have returned to the library the day I got it, got so upset I felt like destroying the book.

This thread is so old it is itself nostalgic. Just saying. =========================================== Caesar 3 - the map mission where you face Hannibal's elephants went extra well with the drum/fanfare combat music. I swear the (extra large) army/elephant pace of movement/marching match the music beats, somehow. >.> Note: I think the soundtrack is purposefully/heavily influenced by the 1959 Ben Hur film. Quite noticeable if one knows of that film. The composer was Robert Euvino, who also did the longer and more varied Stronghold/Crusader OST - which I like a lot more than C3's. But C3 is still one where I rarely have the urge to turn on other music while playing.

Yesterday I forgot to play games.

If Obsidian eventually gets shut down too at some point, I'm hoping for somebody to mod the **** out of The Outer Worlds. We've shut down the best. Now try the rest. At Microsoft, we cut corners so you don't have to. Who, who, whoa, it's Spencer's!

Sorry Obs, but I am not really interested in first person games so until we get another TTRPG from you no money from me

Xbox shuts down a bunch of game studios: https://www.eurogamer.net/xbox-shuts-slew-of-bethesda-studios-including-redfall-hi-fi-rush-developers So.. how long do you think Obsidian and inXile will last? Not exactly the cashcows Microsofts shareholders demand from them..

<disclaimer> I am not a lawyer </disclaimer> To me it is a bit like the different approach to garbage in different countries. In Germany, you pay for your garbage weight allowance. It is your garbage. You have your own bin. You have a padlock on the bin so no neighbour can sneak their garbage into yours and have you pay for it. In Greece, you do not have your own bin. You dump the garbage (ideally) in the city's garbage bins. You pay the city tax based on the square meters of your home, and the amount of actual garbage you produce is irrelevant. As a result though in Germany, throwing something in the garbage does not automatically relinquish ownership. In Greece it does. Taking this to gaming, does a permanent shut down of servers allow for the argument the company is relinquishing it's financial interests in the specific title and therefor a non-profit, community run server or a community coded removal of the always online system should be allowed?

How can this whole debacle be worth it for Sony?

This is a carefully curated collection of the best screenshots. That is to say, there are more screenshots, more game, and the game is rather beautiful.

I'm playing Fallout 4, but my son has been playing FO:NV, and I find that I am jealous of all the cool story stuff he is getting to experience while I deal with Piper and the Minutemen.

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

Yuppie Psycho. I played through this game once years back and loved it, now I came back to replay it and also to tackle all the achievements. One of the achievements is to play through the whole game without saving even once (howlongtobeat.com says it's an 8-10 hour-ish game, not including the extended alternative/true ending content that's a little tricky to get). I got like 80% of the way through the game and then died during a short (5 second or so) cutscene. I'd pressed a button that revealed a passageway, which the game panned over to show me, but the game didn't actually pause during said pan, and a zombie hyucked acid barf all over me and I died right as it came back to me.

He must make it to the Ultra Spice

I just beat the game on hard with a Shieldbearer paladin. Focused on two handed swords, didn't take any shieldbearer talents, and I had the highest single target, and total damage the entire game with a full party.