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The socially ingrained pursuit of happiness instead of contentness is relatively new, and with so many things, was driven by corporate greed. If people would be content with being, well, content, then what's the point of buying ever more stuff? Imagine people just buying whatever they actually need to live out their lives, the economy would collapse. There's a surprising number of things we take for granted that were invented and had the need for it manufactured after the fact, by commercials and therefore commercial interests. When Edna Murphey invented the first deodorant, mankind had survived for hundreds of thousands of years without it. Nobody needed a deodorant. Nowadays, after a century of dedicated marketing left us with the impression that body odor is bad, can you imagine a world without deodorant? In German, we have an idiom for finding someone intolerable, that literally translates to not being able to stand their smell. It makes no sense in modern parlance, as humans basically stopped having much of a smell, unlike in times past, where this had a very literal meaning. You found someone's actual smell disagreeable, so you did not like having them around. Anyone who is content with their lives please realize that this is perfectly fine.

Japanese lawmaker is considering to start an investigation against Ubisoft, due to the cultural appropriation and other cultural inaccuracies present in their latest checkbox simulator. https://nichegamer.com/japanese-politician-investigation-assassins-creed-shadows-inaccuracies/

God is real, but He hates us.

"Where did it start? How did it start? These are questions I asked myself when I made this post. The question being “my love of fantasy and fantasy RPG PC games? And why not Sci-fi, why fantasy as my favourite genre?" For me it was the late 1970’s, I was young and don’t remember much but I do remember my dad reading to us Enid Blyton’s “The Magic Faraway Tree” and that’s where it started. I was absolutely enthralled and mesmerized by this idea of a tree and portals that led to incredible and fantastic lands. You never knew what creatures they were going to meet or what place they were going to discover and my love for fantasy only grew from there. In the 1980s I also started collecting comics with Conan being my favourite and to this day I still RP my characters in RPG on Conan’s personality and world views. Basically, Chaotic Good but someone who helps the downtrodden, wanting wealth and never saying NO to a damsel in distress. It was also in the 1980’s where I started playing the very popular and loved Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone books and I was given my first D&D Red Box ruleset with that indelible image of a fighter and dragon and a new world opened up to me. The world of tabletop RPG. I still consider D&D ruleset and the various D&D fantasy worlds my overall favourite because that’s where my journey on RPG really started. Due to Apartheid sanctions, we had limited access to general fantasy paraphernalia and goods, but my dad was an investment banker and he travelled 3-4 times a year to the UK and sometimes the US and he would buy us things we couldn’t get in South Africa. But we were generally behind in IT and the advancement and creation of the PC, and this included Internet access and connectivity speeds. I used to read Dragon magazine and they had these adverts and stories about games called Ultima, Wizardry and Might and Magic and I always wondered “it looks and sounds amazing … imagine an RPG on a computer.” But in the late 1980’s that started ending because Apartheid was ending and suddenly people had PC at their homes and that meant PC gaming was also coming to South Africa. And in 1989 at my uncle’s house was the first time I saw a PC game and it was one of the classic Sierra games, Kings Quest 1. The PC had monochrome graphics and was incredibly basic, but I still was blown away by the concepts and how you needed to type actions to advance the game like “open door” or “push witch into fire “ . It was a life changing experience and my love, enjoyment and passion for PC gaming never ended from that moment like my love of general fantasy. I stopped gaming from 1995-2007 because of RL responsibilities and I was travelling overseas a lot, but I bought my first real gaming machine in 2007 and PC gaming has been an active hobby of mine since then. I play many different genres like action or RTS games, but fantasy RPG are still my preferred choice and it’s because of my childhood connection to the Magic Faraway Tree books. The idea of what waits behind that door, what lives in that ancient temple, what strange beasts await me are still the most exciting design themes of RPG that I treasure and appreciate. And Obsidian has created many games that align with my core expectations of what I want to experience in playing any RPG. These 3 Obsidian games are all in my top 10 of “best RPG of all time “and it’s tough to think of a top 10 or 20 list because there are so many excellent games out there. Lots of competition which is a good thing for gaming. NWN2: MoB: Brilliant D&D setting with an exciting and fascinating narrative that takes you on this epic journey to the Planes with memorable and interesting characters and companions. I love the entire NWN2 series, but this expansion was my favourite with the whole Spirit Eater curse and then the choices you need to make about the Wall of Faithless Fallout:NV: It’s my favourite third person\first person Fallout game outside the first 2 isometric games. I love open world and sandbox games and I like the concept of exploring anywhere you want and F:NV provides that reality. I had the single most appreciated moment in F:NV and that is the most appreciated of any game I have ever played. To get to NV I didn’t go directly and went through small regions and areas of interest, and I remember I reached a point where I was wounded with no ammunition, and I was being chased by brutal and indefatigable Deathclaws. I had a sniper companion who bravely stood his ground and died while I fled. But the Deathclaws continued to pursue me, and it was night and then I went around a corner and saw something … incredible bright lights on the horizon. I had reached NV finally and I was saved. I have never been so relieved in any game to find my destination as that single experience. PoE2: I thought Obsidian created a fun and worthy alternative to standard D&D ruleset and the whole PoE mechanics worked for me. I thoroughly enjoyed the overarching and depth of the narrative, the lore of the game world, the companions were interesting, and I appreciated the whole naval exploration of islands and open world design PoE2 created. So, in closing its easy to support Obsidian and love their games because Obsidian is not just a name of a company, it’s a world-builder and creator of so many games that resonate with me and the mystery and allure of The Magic Faraway Tree from my childhood.

the hand mortar-style blunderbusses should apply weapon/rogue abilities in aoe, though i haven't tested it recently, i know it got buggy at some point but the final patch should've fixed it. @Boeroer is probably the resident expert on WotEP mechanics, so i'm tagging 'em for visibility.

Good thing their girl cartoon games apropos of nothing.

Investigation into what? Does Japan have a law against historical inaccuracies and loose adaptations? Shake in fear, Hollywood.

As a grumpy early adopter I still have to chuckle about the idea that AI killed the worthwhile internet that consists of Fecesbook* and the hellspawn that crawled out of the underworld in its wake. People glorify a time period where the internet was already dead because corporate interests had taken over, i.e. some supposed golden age between 2010 and 2020. The actual golden age of the internet died at the turn of the millennium** - if not even earlier. Still, good video, as usual. Kyle makes good stuff most of the time. *The actual progenitor is probably MySpace, but nobody remembers that nowadays. **The YouTube microcosm is a little different as it took a while for hardware and users to catch up (making videos is much more time consuming and resource intensive), but the downward slope started when Google turned into the Umbrella Corporation, and generative AI making videos is just the nail in the coffin.

Nice, that explains a lot. Kinda funny that apparently after the anime, the sales of Les Paul guitars spiked hard in Japan... and shortly after the 2nd hand market with resale guitars spiked. Well yeah, playing guitar is not so easy and even the anime comments on how it took our main character 3 years of playing every day to get where she is. Also watched The Rising of the Shield Hero last week. It started off not so bad, but then just developed into the same issue as all the other shows like that have. I'm really tired of this genre.

I binge watched Bocchi the Rock! over the past 2 days. No isekai, no harem, no video games. Very nice. Also thought the visual presentation was good too. Got no recollection how I stumbled over this one, but I'm happy that I did.

Shadowrun Returns was a disaster of mismanaged funds and lack of experience in basically every area other than the setting. It was a fun little Shadowrun game though and the story was good. It would have been better as an old school novel. In print. On paper. Dragonfall was the good game they had promised in the Returns Kickstarter. I wouldn't mind a AAA open world Shadowrun... Just directly the director's cut and three years of post release bug fixing that make that kind of game playable.

I did play, but frankly I don’t remember much. Yes, first Shadowrun had a “tech demo”’feel” to it. Dragonfall was pretty light on plot - it was quite like opening of BG2 - you have intro, and overarching goal to gather money to progress main story and you do self-contained side missions to do it, and main story progresses in small revelations along the way. I felt that Dragonfall did world building best, and I really liked the cast of the companions (especially with extra content from Director’s Cut).

Probably because I played Hong Kong after SR: Returns, the pacing, choices, and combat in Hong Kong felt good, though I think I spent quite some time on the ship talking to people. I know that the hacking system changed between Dragonfall and Hong Kong, but can't quite recall how. Dragonfall felt somewhat less personal and/or impactful than Hong Kong, not counting one companion quest where I chose the unwise option and it will be haunting until I replay it (eventually). --- The Outer Worlds. Started a new game with an approximately same character. Granted, it is mostly to poke things and see if I can write a coherent essay about them. Still, Emerald Vale is gorgeous and I love the writing. On another note, for some reason I was not able to remove the DLC, so now the skill checks mid-/late-game are going to be higher.

Even samer here. Dragonfall left me with eagerness to move on to Hong Kong. Hong Kong made that eagerness fizzle.

Just realized I've been a member here for 20 years now. 10 more and it will be 30 years, jeeeeeez

$20 a month for gamepass, next $30 and then $50, stop the price hikes or I'm out (I should already be out actually)

Made the most busted thorns sorcerer build in the elden ring dlc, and I'm 1 or 2 shotting many bosses who are vulnerable to bleed

1. What's funny is that smaller forums like these feel like one of the last few holdouts of the old internet where you could actually talk to other humans online. There seems to be fewer and fewer places like this out there as time goes on, and now they're even trying to infiltrate here! 2. Practically every content medium (be it movies, television, music, books, video games, news, artists, bloggers, video essayists...even increasingly niche sub-genres within mediums like "artists who make and post pixel art online") was already over-saturated to the point of it being virtually impossible for any one person to sort through all of it. Generative content threatens to transform that from a waterfall to an endless ocean. 3. I don't really have a point three, but you can't have a list of just two things to say, that's illegal. Form interests and hobbies that don't have much or anything to do with the internet (especially not anything that is brand new and therefore highly subject to online bot interaction and manipulation), because in another ten, twenty years...I just don't know. It's better for you, anyway.

I like Kyles stuff, and I kind of agree with this video unfortunately.

About 80% through V Rising. It's a bit repetitive. Constantly challenging, but it's mostly because everything is gated through the various bosses. So you're always with just about the same gear you fight a boss. There's various difficulties, so depending on how much you like the combat you should find a suitable difficulty. In settings, I checked the options that I keep my weapons and armor if I die, and that metals etc won't prevent teleporting.

V Rising - I was hesitant to buy it because of the combat, but I am loving the base building and crafting. It's a very fun survival game. The was you can move your castle to a new place is also pretty inspired.

I have nothing against the Sicken effect, CON isn't even the most resisted affliction. Forbidden Fist pays a high price for getting a CON debuff. It is a really neat effect to give to a DPS attack. You can put it on a ranged attack, or Full/attack, AoE attack, multihit attack, which FF can't do. Rogue has a less flexible 2 guiles CON inflicting status. Also the Acid KW can get benefit from the elemental talent, and Helm of the White Void ensures some build potential vs CON resistant foes for endgame. Really my biggest issue is that the lash value feels too low. Early game, the Sicken is enough but it needs a slightly higher floor utility vs CON resistant foes. Basically I plan to implement a 10+0,5xcharlevel lash. So it ends up as a 40% dual elemental lash. It is cost efficient for pure DPS. +10 accuracy and +20% (+40% with my BW change) and the PL scaling makes it the second best attack below BPM accurate wounding shot. FoD also has a lasting upgrade and is instant. Interrupt isn't in Paladin portfolio, and I don't want to change this to much. Anyway, let's talk about Darcozzini. It is a good fraction of a Lvl 4 Wiz spell. The only thing it lacks compared to it is a good scaling. Base 7 PEN + 0.25 pr PL is too low for a subclass defining ability. So I plan to rise it to +2 Acc/PL and +0.5PEN per PL. HOWEVER, I came to realize that flame shield is a meh tier 4 wiz spell as a whole. 10 retaliation damages isn't big, it isn't reliable (requires getting hit), it pales in comparison to everything that looks like an actually DoT and is rarely worth a slot. Wiz get a Tier 8 retaliation spell that deals 35-50 damages with crowd control included. OK it is Tier 8 but is still way too good in comparison. So basically I plan to set all fire retaliation effect to about twice their current values (so Flame Shield 16-24, Darcozzini to 8-12...) What do you think ? Now Goldpact. +4AR is great for Paladin, it works against the next 5 attacks (Iron Skin is 10 attacks). The neat thing is that Grazes don't count. Then why do I never use Iron Skin ? Why does Iron Skin feels so underwhelming ? Answer is simple : because Llengrath Safeguard is too good. +5 AR with a reliable duration, +20 all defenses, a relatively easy to get condition... I came to the conclusion that Llengrath Safeguard has to be nerfed. BUT this spell is really a basis of Wizard class, so I don't want to nerf it in a way that hits too directly Wiz build. I just want somehow to make Ironskin more appealing in comparison. So my proposal is to add 4s recovery (already has a 3s casting) to Llengrath Safeguard. No strict power reduction, just a way to feel quasi-instant Ironskin more convenient in comparison. Finally I admit being annoyed by the unreliability of disposition based effects for building a character. But it has nothing to do with Balance. So I plan to release another mod that replaces Disposition Scaling by a charlevel scaling for Faith&Conviction, Deep faith, Holy Radiance and Spiritual Weapons.

's an authentic BruceVC post all right.

have to remap a lot on a keyboard the default key binding is insane

So I was one of the people who genuinely enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077 even in its near-launch state, and thought that despite its issues, it was one of the best games of the year. Today, I finally started the Phantom Liberty expansion, and I now hate Cyberpunk 2077. Platforming, long linear sequences where you can't save, mandatory boss fights... yeah, it's made pretty much the worst first impression possible. Any pretense of it being an RPG are gone, and it's just moving from set piece to set piece in a completely unreactive way like I imagine Call of Duty does - with the caveat I've never played Call of Duty. It's a complete genre-shift into a genre I outright despise.

As newbie i am absolutely lost in the game because there is not enough ingame-help. Additionally the game itself seems to be broken right at the beginning: i solved the quest to repair and to free the laser and the quests are marked as "done". Although the game still wants me to free the laser (what i already did) and does not give me any new quests. So for me the game is over just after about 30 minutes. And for 30-minutes-gameplay it is much to expensive. I just wanted you to know that. I will delete the game now because with this fails right at the start it is too much negativity to keep on playing- it should be fun and no negative expercience and stress.

Yeah, sorry, for a moment I forgot who I am replying to. I'll just show myself out.

Fo3 is garbage, sorry but it's fact. Everyone who disagrees is either too young to know better or has no taste. Even if you remove the "Fallout" from the name and see it as a generic post apocalyptic game, it's mediocre at best, still bad in many areas.

Oh yeah, that always made it super easy - that, and if your site had it, filling out fields like ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, AIM Messenger, et cetera. Nobody in the universe ever filed those out.

Shadow of he Erdtree. It's completely glorious, best game they have ever made, and it's a DLC.

You guys really ought to watch homberguy's Fallout 3 video, if only to find out whether or not Tommy Tallarico made all the music and sounds for it.

Don't worry, I happened to leave a tab of this page open earlier and took an image of it. Learn to live with your mistake of approving AI-generated spam, you commie bastards! There's certain to be more of it that I'll have to point out anyways, with the way things are going: the least you can do is not delete our posts over it. And here I was, seeing that you replied in this thread, and thought to myself, hey, @Bartimaeus surely commented on a link to hbomberguy, but nah. Another spam bot got through the mod screening. I actually haven't seen this particular hbomberguy video yet, and I'm not too knowledgeable of Fallout 3 (or pretty much any other Bethesda game...or actually, any of the Fallout games for that matter). Anything that says a Bethesda game is bad is pretty much automatically approved by me, though.

Dragon's Dogma 2 is on "free trial" on steam until 18th of July. You can play for 2 hours for free.

Playing Stardew Valley for the first time in several years due to the massive 1.6 update. I know the last time I played, multiplayer was not even officially supported and required a user mod to play. Looking that up, it was mid-2018, so it's been at least six years. Funny thing is that the major content patch was probably mostly in the 1.5 update, which was effectively a free expansion with a brand new major zone, but that passed me by for whatever reason. Realistically the new zone only becomes accessible in the second in-game year, so there's a bit of an issue where by the time it was unlocked, I felt like I'd almost had enough of the game already. Regardless though, I pressed on so I could at least see some of it. I'd never really bought into the idea of the game as a whole being an exemplar of the "cozy game" genre. There's far too much pressure in terms of both time and inventory management for that. But I could see where the argument comes from, and for most of the game's existence the argument has been fairly reasonable. That ceases to be the case with each piece of new content that's added though, mainly in the sense that it rapidly becomes overwhelming if you're the type to stick with the game's central theme of being a farmer. Instead you're very much incentivised to completely abandon most of the base game mechanics in order to even have time to engage with the new content. An element of this was already hinted at in the base game with the somewhat-optional Skull Cavern, the endgame dungeon that required you to heavily optimise an entire day's play to it in a pretty literal sense. To give a bit of context, the intended approach for it pretty much involved kitting yourself out the night before, praying the game's RNG generated a good luck day in the morning, then using a teleport at 6am and start mining with explosives until 2am, when you passed out from fatigue (which is optimal play, the 1000g penalty for not going returning home manually is trivial). But to be fair, this is something you only had to pull off a couple of times in an average playthrough before being set for resources. The new zone takes this approach and dials it to eleven. Every single day your new goal becomes to get yourself to the new zone as soon as possible at the sacrifice of everything else, and engage in the new major grind there. I admit that after a few days of this, I gave up and installed a cheat mod that allowed me to freeze time, turning the game into a more traditional RPG in which I could explore the content at my leisure. I thus wave farewell and good riddance to the game's central time management conceit, but it nonetheless feels bizarre that the intended approach seems to be to stop farming altogether, sell all your animals, ignore all your friends and their quests, etc. Now in mitigation

I have been playing a singleplayer poker game called Balatro recently. This short trailer more or less gives you the idea: As you win rounds, you earn money which can be used at the shop which you visit in between each round to try to modify your build (modify, add, or remove cards from your deck, add jokers that give various kinds of bonuses or change how your build functions)...but the more you win, the more points you'll need to win the next round. Anyways, I only mention all of this because after having played the game for like 20-30 hours over the last month or so, I was finally able to construct more or less the exact deck and winning hand, a High Card build (i.e. a single card and normally the absolute worst hand type that you can play), that I've previously tried to create a few dozen times but failed to, which I took a video of here: I only needed about 86,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (i.e. 8.6*10^43) points to win the hand, but I scored 4,283,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (i.e. 4.283*10^90) points, so I guess I got a little carried away there. Anyways, don't play Balatro, it's a pretty good but pointless poker game and you'll start go crazy from the possibilities that you can see but can't quite ever put together. I was finally able to build the exact build I had thought of like 5 hours into the game but couldn't ever quite get all the parts lined up for, and now I finally have no reason to continue playing it: though the game officially has no end as the required winning amount of points just continue to scale up exponentially (a build "wins" the game after defeating Ante 8, for reference - as you can see in the bottom left, I am actually at Ante 20/8 instead, and Ante 8 usually only requires around a score of just 100,000 to win), I think I can consider it "beat".

The day someone releases a mod, that allows you to nuke the brats at Little Lamplight (was that the name?) I might give Fo3 a second try

Sorry, double-post (kinda.) Still yesterday there was a SKALD AMA on Reddit with a few decent info. - Launch successful accross every metric - Postlaunch support will bring a new bard class and improvements - SKALD 2 a developer wish - The engine already supports deeper systemic interactions for more emergent gameplay (as can be seen already in the light sources you can manipulate, e.g. for stealth purpose) ALSO: Love. Love never changes.

I gave up on Troubleshooter two missions before the end of the second DLC. The difficulty in later content just ramped up too much, requiring delving into mechanics a lot more to counter all the defenses of various enemies with very specific builds. It just is too much hassle and the story has dragged on longer than necessary anyway.

elden ring dlc get destroyed by first enemy that throw rings 10 times really bad at this game