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CYBERPUNK 2077. And Phantom Libery DLC Finished my 2nd (and probably last) playthough of Cyberpunk. In short I had a good time, much better when I first played it, and would recommend it now. The 2.0 didn't fix fundamental issues that I had with the game, but gameplay is much better, driving is passable, and the technical state is way better than it was year ago. While the game still has problems it became more "immersive" and as such I found it much easier to engage with the story. So couple notes: No has to accept what Cyberpunk is: it is mostly an act of passively watching cinematics with some combat inbetween. It not that disimmilar to Witchers. What makes me like Cyberpunk less is V. Lack of player agency means I am relying on V to fill in the voice, and he/she just isn't a compelling character. I am also not a fan of first person cinematics - and especially the ones that don't restrict your movement. Rather than more immersive they fell less immersive - characters I am talking to don't make eye contact as devs can't predict where I will be sitting. They do this weird acting pantomime with me watching them, which just fails to feel authentic for me. I also prefered Witchers more intertwined quest - Cyberpunks multiple linear narratives make it a bit more apparent how little agency the player has. It is not that much different than Witchers, who often gave you multiple tasks before moving the story forward, but it feels different. I also feel Johnny's relation ship with V lacks progression. Because his content is tied to quests rather V-Johnny relationship, their interactions feel erratic. When we end up best of chooms at the end, it doesn't feel like a natural progression of the game - maybe there is a set path which makes it feel ok, but in my experience V and Johnny kept switching between being comfortable with each other and hostile stragers throughout. DLC is good. Characters are strong, choices are interesting. Still, same issues with above. I never felt V was interacting with the characters you meet. More like I am an understudy watching other actors act on stage. And while I say good, it is also just more Cyberpunk. I might have hoped for an evolution - perhaps bigger complexity, and more intricate design, but especially main missions were mostly "on rails", making the whole affair rather passive. What I enjoyed the most was side content, as narratively new missions are much stronger than hustles in the base game, and they offer more freedom (or explore specific gameplay systems) more than story missions, which are leaning hard toward scripted events and cutscenes. I also appreciated repeatable car stealing events - reinforcing my feeling that Cyberpunk has more future as a GTA-like, and less so as an RPG. With DLC increasing V's personality I suspect Cyberpunk2 will lean more toward being an open world action game, with light RPG elements - even more so than it does now. CDPR did quite a job fixing Cyberpunk up. I still don't love it, but it is alright for what it is.

Getting rid of Twitter would make the world nicer.

Encased had an absolute plethora of options, indeed it was perhaps the highest effort RPG in that respect I've played. Far better than any recent big name RPG, at least those without a preset protagonist. Shame a lot of effort also went into reinventing the wheel mechanics wise and it felt at times that they were changing the usual way of doing things even if the usual was better.

Yeah, I know about the Bonfire Ascetic solution to the problem. I still have to go through NG+ and NG+2 to get all the spells required for trophies, so there is no Issue with Aldia not spawning for now. I am just angry, that my memory failed 😂

You can just throw a Bonfire Ascetic into the bonfire next to the boss room after killing Vendrick. It will respawn also the Watcher and the Defender, but you should be able to dismiss the summons and feather out at the start of Nashandra's battle (same for Aldia, the summons tend to burn during the second phase either way). This method also works for NPC quest lines (with some restrictions, but I do not remember at what point it becomes impossible to do so) and allows to get NG+ boss souls in NG. If I am not mistaken, some of the merchants have their inventory updated (I got the Butterfly set from the armourer in Majula), but not all. The partial difficulty increase is limited to the respective area and it was slightly different from the actual NG+ in the vanilla DS2 (e.g. no Freja appearing earlier, no additional red phantoms with the Lost Sinner). However, it carries over to the next NG cycle, so one must be careful. --- The Outer Worlds. Finished Monarch. Some thoughts on the area's main quest. Reached Byzantium. The streets are covered in trash, a lot of buildings are locked down, and the service bots are dusting holes in the walls. I've been thinking about Encased while playing. In particular, the non-combat skill checks and the writing for the low-int PC (I cannot tell if it was ableistic or not, so not commenting on that aspect). It feels like Encased had more options and supported more playstyles (a certain companion quest in TOW had an unavoidable battle against a mantiqueen, while my PC had the highest combat-only skill at 20), including a fully implemented non-lethal path, with the PC being reasonably motivated to avoid killing most people in-character. Also a low-int PC had most dialogues adapted, with several exclusive to them options available. As far as I know (haven't tried yet, will update if incorrect), TOW has fewer. On the other hand, TOW is more coherent in terms of narrative (the quality of writing is undoubtedly higher in TOW) and gameplay systems, even if, as mentioned, the systems are less developed. Though, I do like that I have only 4 slots (2 weapons and 2 armour pieces) to equip for each companion.

Great to hear, I always knew that CDPR would fix most of the main problems from the terrible launch of Cyb2077 I think its time I played this game 🥂

The last couple minutes or so, was basically how my 14y.o self+friends sounded during end of landline phone convos. Except a much more polite, calm, and robotic version.

@Noqn Thank you! That looks very clear! 👍 Hopefully, it could be implemented in a future update.

Something to wash off the bitter taste of Mimimi’s shut down.

https://www.remedygames.com/article/remedy-and-annapurna-announce-a-strategic-cooperation-agreement

Goal 6/2024 achieved. August 29, 19:00 – I have finished my first Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin playthrough on my PS4. This time, including all DLCs. In contrast to vanilla version of the game, you need also to clear the DLCs, to fulfill all criteria for Platinum Trophy. Unfortunately I have messed up the ending, as I have forgotten, that I need to defeat Vendrick before defeating Nashandra, and I have forgotten to backup my save . It took me almost 100 hours and 294 deaths. Almost the same as Dark Souls Remastered 😄 . The DLCs have been as much challenging, as I have anticipated, with few terrible areas like Iron Passage, which won my personal Worst Area Design Contest in all of the games, I have ever finished 😄 . The day before, I have also defeated the Darklurker. So far, the most challenging fight for my melee build. I died probably around 20 times or so while fighting him, with at least 5-6 attempts leaving him less than 5% HP. I have noticed to late, how much damage I can make to him, with my Great Lightning Bolt, so until then I have been asskicked pretty badly few times, as I tried to go all out melee on the Boss, but as soon, as he split, I was to slow to land enough damage on him, before they obliterated me with spells. Then as soon as I have started to use Miracles, almost every attempt was under 10% HP, but before landing the last hit, I have always made some silly move, like jumping into his spells or started to cast my spells almost at his melee range. Which of course meant a very quick demise of my character Anyway, I am angry at myself, about that mess up with Aldia, so I will not have perfect walkthrough on my videos with all quests completed. I will have to wait for NG+. Where I will probably skip most of the quests, as I have all of the rewards from them anyway, and I will probably try to get through the game without phantoms. We'll see how many bosses this will last 😄 But before that, I still need to defeat the Ancient Dragon and Vendrick. And one cheating "cleric" NPC as well.

I can't edit my post for some reason, anyhow here's the changes I meant to post: Old Vailia: Aedyr: Ixtamil:

Good point, extract this to your override folder: Subrace Cultures.zip

I am a Witcher. I have finally bought the Erdtree and redownloaded the Elden Ring. As I was waiting for it to finish downloading, the video popped up on my feed 😂. I will play the DLC first before Joseph convinced me that I actually didn't enjoy it that much. I need to decide now if I want to reload my old save and continue with the DLC, or replay Elden Ring.... I didn't consider replaying it, but than I booted it up and now I kinda want to. Eh, we will see.

Just the last handful pictures that I had on my phone... these are from the small island Fanoe, off the west coast of Jutland, a few Km from my old home town. The island is home to two tiny villages, which has supposedly lived in a mortal rivalry for centuries. At least up until the island got a regular ferry connection the to the mainland. The ferry trip to Nordby (the northern village, which is the one with the ferry connection) Looking at my old hometown from across the water... the power plant (the rather dominant white building with it's 250m tall chimney) is scheduled for being taken offline and demolished in a few years time. The previously shown windmill farms being able to provide the energy needed. It used to be a major fishing town with a lot of related industry, but now it's mostly servicing the offshore oil rigs and windmill parks in the North Sea The streets are narrow and the houses small. Doesn't deter the ubiquitous German tourists 😂 I wouldn't want to live here during floods though. No walls or dikes protects the people here... And lastly a bit of a time jump... back a few thousand years. The remnants of an Iron Age settlement. The green lines on the sign outlines where the houses were. Only the floor and larger stones making up the foundation remains today. Man... the sheer number of family picnics we had at this place. So many memories associated with it ☺️

Typical street picture from my old hometown. Can't really call it the "older" part, as it's not even two centuries old What Danish beaches looks like Note the offshore windmill farms generating electricity out on the North Sea! A notable "feature" of the west coast beaches is leftovers from WWII. German bunkers can be found many places. From simple gun emplacements to observation towers and command centrals Of course I had to crawl around inside one of them 😁 Part of the west coast (southern part) is protected by dikes. This is what the landscape looks like on the landward side. Often marshes and wetlands. Notice the absence of livestock. You don't really want to go wandering around out there, away from the road. Some beaches also have this legacy from WWII... an estimated 10000 live landmines that were never recovered after the war. It's recommended not to stray from the marked paths 💥

But they are upfront about it : https://www.ign.com/articles/obsidian-explains-why-avowed-only-lets-you-pick-human-or-elf And from this technical limitation they draw a lore explanation of why you can't play other races.

Looks like Windows 11 24H2 will bring a nice performance boost for Ryzen processors. Relative performance of Zen 4 to Zen 5 is not really improved though, it's similar gains for every generation, even Ryzen 3. It's more like a free boost for everyone who has Windows 11. Also massively game dependent. Gears 5 sees a chunky increase (even on the one Intel CPU tested for three games, although to a lesser degree) while Baldur's Gate 3 sees a much smaller difference, borderding on tolerance levels. So much for AMD's claims that the much improved branch prediction of Zen 5 depends on a Windows update not out yet, but it will certainly give Arrow Lake a harder time now. The boost is in the ballpark of projected, leaked and expected IPC gains for Arrow Lake over the 14900KS. Altough we've just seen what leaks and performance expectations are worth, so yeah, all we can do is wait. Either way, it's going to be hard to compete with Zen 4's current pricing for Intel - and ironically, for AMD just as much (sales of Zen 5 seem to be abysmal). If the 5800X3D was AMD's 1080 Ti moment, well, then maybe Windows 11 24H2 will extend that to Zen 4.