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The Outer Worlds So at this point I decided what to do with Rockwell. Considering the increasing body count of the party (how many random guards and pirates, not to mention the wildlife, were dead because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time), the party could be quite desensitised to violence. And there were no negative consequences, mechanically or narratively, for it. Quite the opposite, in fact, - loot and XP. I like the environmental storytelling, though, I would like the companions to comment on it. That's a quite direct explanation of the just-world fallacy. He had some sense. Got a fancy hat. The ability to kill NPCs at will without loudly announcing it is greatly appreciated. I was trying to avoid harming the sprats. One somehow got into the elevator, so I reloaded. It would be great to be able to avoid accidental combat more easily and have more feedback for choosing not to murder random lizards.

Version 4.0.1 is live. Basically 4.0.0 fixes. Deadfire Balance Polishing Mod at Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com)

Also, I am against the air shows already due to the environmental impact and fuel costs.

Then you'll wake up missing organs.

It seems the lady texting me may actually be a real person. We may have lunch together next month...

Obsidian said that there is no numerical system for relationships with companions but your decisions will affect them. As for the other systems : You have attributes that modify aspects of combat (damage, speed etc), those can be increased with items and during level-ups. You have active and passive abilities, some of them are percentage bonuses (so vertical progression) but others unlock gameplay options (like parry projectiles for example). Grimoires have four spells each, when you have one equiped you can cast the spells but you can also invest a skill point to learn of the spells permanently (and so you can cast it without the need of a grimoire). There is an upgrading system, to boost damage, stun and others aspects of armors and weapons. There is an enchanting system, we've not seen much of it. There are numerous unique weapons, armors and accessories, they can give passive abilities and (I'm not sure of that because it was mentioned in only one preview) active abilities. We don't if it's like in Deadfire, with a mini-skill tree for each unique. Beyond that each companion have a skill tree with four active abilities, that can be modified further, we don't know for the passives. These companions can be used with the combat wheel. I think that's all we know for now ? But all in all pretty deep for an FP-RPG I would say, it will heavily depend of the nature of the different abilities and bonuses imo.

My issue with the combat is that it's either way too easy, or if I pump up the difficulty settings, frustratingly hard and tedious. You'll just end up hammering on bullet sponges. There does not seem to be any middle ground.

Yesterday I managed to sneak through the Temple of Eothas, but was stumped at the last bit with the slimes around the pool. I couldn't get past them and I sure as hell couldn't defeat them (Solo PotD), so I devised a plan: Lure the nearby Skuldr family to the pool, run like hell (had the Fast Runner talent) and watch the carnage. I quickly discovered that this was nearly impossible, because they shoot corrosive gunk at you. Well, then I'll just craft a potion of Bulwark against the Elements and drink that before I run! What. Long story short, someone thought it made sense to have potions undrinkable outside of combat. You can chug all the beer you want, but drink from a vial, nope. Well, I've had enough of that. I refuse to jump through their hoops. I will bend the game to my will, using the power of applied computer science. Here's how you do that. Step 1: The file. Download a program called UABE, short for Unity Asset Bundle Extractor. You need that to edit .unity3d files (well, not edit directly, but look through them). You can also use Disunity version 4, if you find that easier, but for this guide I will assume you are using UABE. Go to the PillarsOfEternity_Data\assetbundles\prefabs\objectbundle folder. Boy, that's a lot of files. This is where most of the game's items, spells, abilities and such are stored. We need to edit one of these files, specifically the one for the Bulwark potion. Find the "potion_of_bulwark_against_the_elements_l2.unity3d" file, start UABE and open that file with it. It should say "CAB" followed by a lot of gobbledygook in the text field. Click the "Info" button. Step 2: The value we want to change. In the window that just popped up you'll see a bunch of different assets, representing all the various info the game uses for that potion. We're not interested in the Textures and particle effects and such, what we want to do is modify the potion variable that designates it as unusable outside of combat. That means we need to look at the MonoBehaviour types, scroll all the way down to see those. Well, that's not very helpful. They all look identical, apart from the byte size. But intuitively enough, the biggest one is the one that handles the potion ability itself, and that's where our value hides. Click on that MonoBehaviour, and then "View Data" Doubleclick the Monobehaviour Base thing to expand it. Hurray, variables! See an interesting one? That's right, "CombatOnly", and it's set to 1. Now we know what variable to change... but how do we do that? Read on. Step 3: The hex editor Download a program called XVI32. Copy the potion .unity3d file to a new location, and open it there with XVI32. You may think you just stepped into the Matrix, but what you're seeing is really just the bits and bytes of the file, and you now have full access to those, which makes you very 1337 indeed. Each block in the grid represents a byte. A number is stored as four bytes in hexadecimal format, for example the number 9 is stored as 09 00 00 00, the number 10 is stored as 0A 00 00 00, 12 is stored as 0C 00 00 00 and 20 is stored as 14 00 00 00. Easy! Now, you may be tempted to search for "CombatOnly" and edit the value next to it, but unfortunately it's a little more complicated than that. The variable names are stored at a completely different location than the values that they represent, so if you want to change the values you need to find out where they are stored. That's not an easy task, but one thing that's helpful to know is that they are stored contiguously, i.e. the values appear in the file in the same order that they appear in UABE. Speaking of which, go back to the UABE and look at the variables surrounding CombatOnly. You should see a Duration of 60.0, then a bunch of variables set to 0, then the CombatOnly at 1, another bunch of zeroes, a 7, a 1, a 0 and then another 60.0. If we can find this pattern in the file, we will know where CombatOnly hides, and then we can change it! But if we just search for 7, 1 or 0 we will end up with thousands of results. We need to search for the number 60.0, as it stands out a bit more. Specifically, the floating point representation of it. Step 4: Finding the value 60.0 is a floating point value, which means it can have decimals (integers cannot), But, where integers in the file are stored as 01 00 00 00, 02 00 00 00 and so on, floating point values are stored in a completely different way that is not intuitive at all. We need to find the hexadecimal representation of 60.0, and luckily this website will do just that: http://www.h-schmidt.net/FloatConverter/IEEE754.html If you input 60.0 in the decimal box there, it outputs 42 70 00 00. However, this is what is known as "big-endian" format. In the .unity3d file integers are stored big-endian, but floating point values are little-endian! So what we need to do is to swap the bytes, resulting in 00 00 70 42. This is the number we're looking for. Step 5: The magic moment Go back in XVI32 and open the Search -> Find dialog. Select "Hex string" and enable Case Sensitive. Remember that the MonoBehaviours in UABE were all the way at the bottom in the list? That means you should start your search a fair bit down, by putting the cursor somewhere roughly at 25% from the bottom of the scrollbar. Input 00 00 70 42 in the hex field, and press Search. It should take you to the next occurrence of that value in the file, down from where you started. Look at the hex values where you ended up, going from left to right and then to the next line. Does it look like the 60.0-zeroes-1-zeroes-7-1-0-60.0 pattern we found earlier? If not, press F3 on your keyboard to search again. If it does - congratulations. You are a master hacker. Put your cursor at the 01 that represents CombatOnly, and type 00. Do not use backspace, this will delete bytes and you do not want that. Just type 00. Then save the file, put it back in the folder where you found it (maybe backup the original one first), and launch Pillars of Eternity. You can load a saved game or start a new one, but the important thing is that you can now do this: http://i.imgur.com/rYfBZhH.jpg And that's something to be proud of.

Just one piece of advice: If you want to follow a specific alignment route, don't expect to find loads of chances to raise that alignment. You can skip the odd choice, but don't make a habit of it. Just don't pick heretic when you discover Foulstone and the Order of the Hammer

Bought the game on GOG. Now I just need to find the time to also play the thing

I knew there had to be an interesting story to your views, it makes sense considering your lived experiences And most people tend to relax there more extremist views as they get older. So when I say "you have anarchist views " I doubt its the same degree of anarchist views you had in your 20s

It's a long story really... You'll get the tl;dr; version First off, I'm out of your archetypal "working class" family. My paternal grandparents were a day labourer and a seamstress working in the textile industry and my maternal grandmother was a farmhand. The less is said about my maternal grandfather, the better Esbjerg at the time of my birth was a Socialdemokrat stronghold, only threatened by the libertarian party, because the industry was surrounded by farmland on the land side and independent fishing men on the sea side... But, that wasn't really what formed my world view, that was a number of experiences in my teen and pre-teen years. A friend on the street I lived in hung himself in his parent garage because he got bullied in school. Said school couldn't care less, trying to sweep it under the rug. Hear no evil, see no evil etc. I also mentioned at some point, growing up with my mothers half-brothers (only a few years older than me). They were left with an orphanage after their parents died and stayed there until the police raided the place and closed it. Systematic sexual abuse of the children, physical and psychological torture being the norm. At 14, I was convinced the world was inherently unfair and the 95% served only one purpose, being fodder for consumption by the 5% that wielded real power. Most people having little or no choices in life, many never getting a real chance to even get a foot in the door of life. At 15 I would have been a prime candidate for any orator able to channel anger against the world. I could have seen myself at that age being a member of Hitler Youth and Hamas. Anything destructive. Often wishing someone would finally getting their act together and finally push the button (the MAD button). I was also a bit disappointed when the cold war ended and it looked like the world was doomed to suffer the slow death of entropy and social media. Eventually I just resigned to let the world mind its own business and I went about minding my own business in return, not having any high thoughts about power structures and the way the world is run. For me, politicians serve themselves first, their party second and their constituency some distant third. You might have noticed one of my pet peeves is people in power being held accountable for their actions and resentment towards those who "game the system" to avoid paying for power abuse.

Started Songs Of Conquest and am a bit disappointed with no fault of the game as such. Reviewers made it appear to be something different: As you play a song for your faction is being written based on your actions. That made it sound as if there are different actions, different outcomes woven into a soundtrack. That would have been amazing. The actuality: the little story cutscene after each mission is a bard in a tavern singing about that mission. It doesn't help that the main character in the human campaign (Song 1) is not likeable.

Finished The Outer Worlds, while aiming for the more peaceful outcomes (still shot Rockwell without talking). I suppose, everything about the game has been said already, so in the context of Avowed releasing soon (2025?), I am unsure if I should hope for more gameplay depth. The shallow systems work with the satirical narrative, but more complexity for a high-/dark-fantasy epic would be welcome. As well as the less focus on the combat, which is not particularly satisfying* - something smaller, but with more immersive sim elements or stronger story branching. Regarding the environmental storytelling, on one hand, there are party members' cabins with items placed very thoughtfully, then there are level-scaled modern guns or Adreno on the Hope in the areas unused by UDL. So, as mentioned, smaller and with higher attention to details would be preferred to RNG. I guess, I have seen worse itemisation in Divinity: Original Sin 2, but that one was the worst - level-scaled colour-coded RNG'ed faceless trash with no story significance appearing in random crates (it got somewhat better in the D&D game - the unique equipment could be kept throughout the game, but there still was a lot of literal trash). *I can't tell if repeatedly failing to notice being hit in the back is an UI issue or just my low perception. I don't think that there are clear indicators of the direction where the damage is coming from and the first-person view does not exactly help. So, I am very happy that Avowed offers the third-person camera option. Still, TOW was good, because of the quality of writing and world building, not the combat or itemisation. The character creation and development systems were serviceable.

I would recommend finishing Phantom Liberty. The opening mission is indeed awfully long and artificially scripted but rest of the campaign is better. There is also a pretty good story branching, IMO much better than it was in Witchers, as divergent events are actually a natural consequence of V decision, rather than alternative universe where unrelated things change. I also like Phanto Liberty’s new ending the most. I found it most thematically interesting. and as you progress you will unlock more Mr Hands quests and I just found those to be most entertaining content in Cyberpunk. oh, one extra note - boss fights still suck hard. While combat got better, it is not good enough to provide “fun challenge”.

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.

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

Vampire Survivors gets more absurd each update.

A year since release, and they've now gone full circle and are making Diablo 4 quite similar to Diablo 3. https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/diablo-4s-next-update-makes-season-of-loot-reborn-look-like-a-hotfix-a-new-level-cap-of-60-new-difficulty-levels-and-the-return-of-runewords-all-in-season-6