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Dark Souls, which was a replay. I replayed on Steam after trading my Switch cartridge for a Steam key with a friend. First of all, in spite of doing a whole lot of grinding to find out whether one can make do with the Greatsword of Artorias if you waste all the stats for it (short answer: yes, but it is not worth it, outside of making it really easy to beeline for the Rite of Kindling after starting a new cycle), it only took me half the time to achieve everything in the game, compared to Dark Souls 2. Which is to be expected, Dark Souls is a lot smaller, and on new game cycles a lot of the game can be skipped. The achievements and the game systems were also designed to waste a lot less time compared to Dark Souls 2 while playing offline, but between completing all Dark Souls, Dreck Souls 2: Scholar of the First Suck and Sekiro achievements, one thing has become abundantly clear: FromSoftware has no idea how to design interesting achievements. They are all just either related to playing the game, achieving all possible endings and looking for equipment. Contrary to the usual edgelord opinion, achievements can be interesting, the ones in FromSoftware games, so far, were not. I think I might have found the reason why Dark Souls feels better to play - for me - than Dark Souls 2 did. The recovery animations are a lot shorter. One can - more or less - smoothly transition from an completed attack animation into a roll in Dark Souls, while in Dark Souls 2 there is a recovery time between finishing the attack and being able to roll away. Combined with the boss attack patterns of Dark Souls 2, that makes it a game of baiting out an attack and punishing it or dodging through a combination and then get an attack in. While Dark Soul's combat cannot be called fast paced and frantic, it feels a lot less slower than Dark Souls 2's: the bosses have more openings to attack and their movesets are not employing as many two or three hit combos. I got lucky in my early game, getting the Black Knight Halberd right at the start, and while that meant playing most of the game semi-naked due to the rather hefty equipment load requirement of the Black Knight weapons, it never limited me to hitting an enemy once and having to prepare a roll because the follow up attack would just end with me being hit. Now, having played the game again, and a couple of times at that, and having listened to lore videos while playing to break the monotony of the grinding and replaying the more annoying parts of the game, I can say with some confidence that, lore and story wise, the only two really interesting parts are not related to the player's quest, which will always be the quest of someone else you just happen to accept because you have nothing better to do with your time anyway. I am, of course, talking about the two NPC related quests in the game, of which Solaire's might be less involved and harder to miss out on, but is the better one, so it is fine. There's some personal tragedy in Siegmeyer's quest, plus some statements by Sieglinde that make you question what happened (girl, what exactly do you mean when you say you have to kill your father again?) but the two outcomes of Solaire's quest are simply fantastic. He either finds his sun, and loses himself, or you help him fail his quest by finding the Sunlight Maggot first. It is the consequence of Solaire failing his quest that is most poignant and which elevates it: he becomes disillusioned and depressed because he did not find his sun, which is what he became an undead for, out of his own volition. He then can be summoned to fight Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight Cinder, and he's so ludicrously strong that he can basically solo the boss for you. Not only can you summon him to fight the very lord he worships, but his rage is strong enough to overcome him without much of your input. Not that Gwyn isn't more of a jokey fight, I wonder why people complain about Nashandra and Aldia in Dark Souls 2 being a boring pair of bosses to end the game with. Gwyn certainly is not much better, even if you do not or cannot parry him, you just need to stay close to him so he misses half his attacks without you having to do much, so is that sort of complaining coming from players working their way backwards from Dark Souls 3? So, anyway, back to Solaire, I found his personal story to be really on point. Was it all lies? Why, yes, it was, although that does not come out as much in Dark Souls, I suppose. It is a part of the game that was made retroactively better. Still, and there we are back at something I already wrote about, at lenght, is how much Dark Souls did not live up to the hype for me. The story is not that great, and while it is undoubtely genre defining in the sense that there is now a "Soulslike" genre, I am not sure if the combat system alone is what defines a whole genre, and even that is blurred with additions like Bloodborne and Sekiro. It is a "difficult" dark fantasy third person action adventure game that just seems to have come out at the right time. I put difficult in quotes because replaying the game just cemented my opinion. The game is not that difficult, outside of a few areas that are not really well designed, and gimmicky fights that are more frustrating than fun. Yes, I'm looking at you, Bed of Chaos. Then there's the issue that Dark Souls falls apart after the first half. Everything that comes afterwards (well, and in the case of New Londo, technically before, because it is possible to complete it before getting the Lord Vessel, as long as you're willing to kill Ingward for the key) is just terrible, with the worst offenders being Lost Izalith and the Tomb of Giants, which one could easily consider to be contenders for the worst areas in any game, period. The forced death to Seath and the run through the Crystal Caves would be high on the list too, if Seath wouldn't be so easy. Well, once you have cut his tail. Cutting his tail is the worst. It is even worse than the Kalameet tail cut, which is annoying becaus you basically have to bait it out, but at least one can bait it out. Seath can just move in a way that makes it impossible to hit his tail - for long, long stretches of time. Now, well, I cannot say anything about the state of gaming back in 2011. That was a time when all I did was play MMORPGs. Maybe Dark Souls really was the moment that brought actual difficulty back to games. Maybe that was Demon's Souls already, and maybe all of that was just Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3, both games that were a much greater success than Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2. As far as my experience goes, it certainly would not have been, because the game is just not difficult enough to count. Lastly there's the dopamine release and adrenaline rush aspect of the game. I understand that being stuck at Ornstein and Smough for a longer while makes one feel really good once the challenge has been overcome. I just did not get if from Dark Souls - but also not from Dark Souls 2 or Sekiro. Having to fight a boss, solo, for a handful of times to understand its moveset and find counters is nothing next to having to deal with your raid group and having difficult raid encounters lasting up to fifteen minutes. Pulling them over, and over, and over, and over and over again. Not five times, ten times or even twenty. Hundreds of times, in the case of the really difficult ones. I realize that does not apply to a whole lot of people, given the MMORPG population that usually partakes in its most difficult content, but, yeah, this is relevant for my experience. Insofar, well, Dark Souls is a good game with a terrible second half, but with me not really being interested in the world, unlike in Hellpoint, I can say that Hellpoint, while being the much worse game in terms of combat and movement, was still the better experience for me.

Not having outside threat would be existential threat for Netanyahu

Wrong. *laughs in Demon's Souls* Never mind all the "must obtain every spell, weapon, armor, and ring" achievements, it sure would suck if one of the weapon materials necessary to get the "Obtained Best Weapon by [Upgrade Material]" only has a sub-1% chance of spawning on exactly one type of enemy. I have a friend that farmed this enemy for about eight hours and never got one...their Demon's Souls achievements are still not 100% to this day. Not just for being able to move/roll: do a light attack in DS2 and try to follow it up with a heavy attack (or reverse the order, or try to cast a spell instead, or use an item, or...), then try the same in DS1. It's atrocious in DS2. In theory, DS1 has the slower, weightier, and more limited movement between the two games, but it didn't actually feel like it at all to me in practice because of all the inexplicable delays they added in between different types of actions for DS2 (not to mention the harsher directional limitations to prevent you from turning between attacks too quickly, which feel like they were designed specifically to help the noobs who never learned to turn off camera targeting while kneecapping those of us who did). You can either chain light attacks or chain heavy attacks, but not one off of the other, and don't try to do anything else because **** you. As I said before, I could forgive most everything that was wrong with Dark Souls 2 (and boy was there a lot that was wrong) except for the fact that the controls made me want to strangle someone. Dark Souls 3 mercifully reverts back to being a bit more like Dark Souls 1, thankfully. Yeah, it sure would suck if you were a player where you generally try to stay out of reach of a boss until you have some time to look at and comprehend a boss' move set before you try to take them on and tried to fight Gwyn that way...yep, it sure would suck. It would suck even more if you had defeated most bosses on your first try due to that strategy having successfully worked up until that point and then being unprepared on what to do when a boss just won't give you the opportunity to stay back and figure out how they work. I remember my first time with Gwyn not being very fun because of his sword being too long and his move set being too erratic - not to mention his inclination to suddenly fly at you when you're out of range. It wasn't until I actually tried to take him on properly - after dying a bunch of times while not really trying to fight him - that I realized that his bark was a lot worse than his bite, and that trying to not die to him was having the opposite effect intended. And then as soon as you learn you can parry him, it's basically impossible to lose. The infamous "we ran out of time and money" half of Dark Souls 1. Truly gaming at its finest. I kind of wonder if the love for Dark Souls' passive/environmental storytelling seemed a breath of fresh air compared to the long cutscenes, bloated exposition dumps, and "standing around" sequences of yesteryear. You don't have to engage with Dark Souls' world or storytelling at all...if you don't want to. Clearly, you didn't want to, so you did not, and that's fine...but a lot of people did, and they seemed to get a lot out of Dark Souls in that way specifically. I especially think of it in comparison to Half-Life 2, which was hailed for moving the medium forward in terms of characters having dialogue and the game telling a story while not jamming the player into unskippable cutscenes...contrasted with the fact that I personally much prefer to replay Half-Life 1 (or even better, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.!) precisely because I find Half-Life 2's style of telling its story to you (or maybe more accurately, around you) while you have to just impatiently stand around waiting for conversations that don't really involve you to end before you can get back to playing the game. I think Dark Souls is similar to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in the sense that it's kind of what you make of it, and some people will make nothing of it because they're not interested and some people will make a great deal of it because they are, but at the end of the day, if you're one of the people that don't want to make anything of it, at least it's not being constantly shoved down your throat at the expense of everything else: I maintain that there is nothing worse than a game/movie/book/show that has a terrible story that just won't get out of the way of whatever you do like that is making you keep engaging with it, whether it's characters, atmosphere, music, or gameplay.

If there is a lot of whining about "woke" and "DEI", it is likely a good game.

I never engaged past the introductory battle with them in my relatively brief time playing FO4. There was no narrative reason for me to go follow them anywhere, and I proceeded to Diamond City with no hesitation. That's the last I ever saw of them. But yeah, the Boston setting in general may be another reason non-Americans might not engage with the game so well. I don't know anything about the place other than that the water may taste slightly of tea. I may not know much about the real Vegas but put up a few gigantic neon signs and it's pretty instant recognition. Washington has the White House and the obelisk, which is something I guess. The broader issue though is that if you design in-game locations that make sense as self-sustaining communities, it doesn't matter if they don't correspond to actual real-world locations. Is Shady Sands a real place? Hell if I know, but it's a place that makes sense and I don't question its existence in the game. If instead a location's entire raison d'etre is "hey it's this famous real world location, but ruined" with no thought put into it beyond that, then those locations better be notable and relevant to the potential audience.

So I hear there's some uproar regarding choices carrying over from older games into Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Or rather not carrying over. This is so big it has even reached Sports Illustrated now. For realz. Let me tell you: Bunch of whiny, entitled and spoiled Millenials and Zoomers! Imagine the pain of all us old farts shutting up Imoen forever the moment she shows up after Gorion gets killed by Sarevok. Giving Khalid&Jaheira the hard pass. Never clicking on the random NPC that may have been our Minsc in Nashkel. Finishing the job with a party consisting of purely evil aligned sons of 'em b*tches... ...and then booting up Baldur's Gate 2.

Full interview with Josh S that's been used not so long ago for Avowed's promotional paned during Pax West. Didn't watch it yet, but from the title it seems that Josh's Pillars Tactics game is still being thrown around:

Hey folks! @Boeroer and I recorded this discussion on 5 builds he made for Deadfire. I thought y'all might be interested! https://youtu.be/nEdI3x8qxGM

OK, and how much do you think the 5090 will go for? Dunno, kind of feel Intel has to persevere with the GPU division. Not for the GPUs themselves though.

not to derail boeroer's build thread, but i'm doing something a little different. instead of dual-wielding, i'm single-wielding the blunderbuss since mirke has streetfighter and can do single-wielding pretty quickly with the blunderbuss modal. that's +12 acc right there (+7 net of the accuracy penalty from distracted), also get one hand style for 20% hit to crit. then dance with death for up to +12 acc further, and dirty fighting for more hit to crit. with rogue side i pick up debilitating strike so i can distract over and over so enemies are constantly flanked/reflex penaltied regardless of where they are. my mainchair has the obsidian wurm pet which adds +3 acc to flanked targets on top of that. my mainchar also has nature's mark if i really need to land hits (which also penalizes deflection and reflex, stacks with distracted though can be iffy without the forum patch). maybe eventually i'll have enough enchants and gear to be able to spec out of single wielding, but this is how i manage to have decent accuracy so far early to mid game. i'm not even high enough level where crits on stunning surge matter (don't have the refund ability yet, but it is nice to do aoe stuns regardless, or have 4x chances to stun a single target with a normal blunderbuss) but the one hand style acc and flanked helps a lot, and the hit to crits help early on when PEN sucks.

these five hundred guests are outta control, who said they could browse my obsidian forums and make the whole thing lag? this is outrageous, it's unfair

The offer in the video still stands @Elric Galad I think a video discussing the community and balance patches would be fun! DM me if you are interested!

Well said! All of you guys can be proud of the great stuff you've done for this game!

The achievements can highlight unusual or unexpected by the player actions (as the developers are the ones implementing the achievements, the actions required are expected). The only game I remember where the achievements enhanced the experience beyond the possible points of interest is Wandersong. Though, it was the only positive quality of the game. Finished Moonscars. Generally, a nice Souls-like/Metroidvania, with the healing system allowing to travel a lot without returning to "bonfires", which was complemented by the game saving your exact location upon exiting (it also partially respawns the foes on reloading, which led to an interesting situation once). Surprisingly, almost all traversal abilities were unlocked from the start, so I was trying to jump-climb all walls. The only issues for me were the side quest design, with the triggers really obscure or time-limited (so I failed the cat-saving quest), there being only 1 ending, and the (lack of in-character) reason to murder the second boss (which I did after trying to go everywhere else; the ability was required to progress). Some side quests had several outcomes, but due to the above-mentioned design, the choice did not feel intentional. The story follows Grey Irma, who is not the Chosen Undead, but a Pristine Clayborn, which is technically different, and trying to find the Integral Vessel, which is supposed to end the plague of clayborns. There are no dialogue choices, but not counting the issue with the second boss and the MC's resulting reflection on it, the logic is fine. Edit. Review:

Well, if we accept the tit for tat logic and say what Isr@hell does is OK, then carpet bombing Telaviv would be fine. After all, the Mossad, IDF and their political leadership are hiding among civilians. A lot of israelis are armed and even have panic rooms (what normal civilian has one of those?) and isn't pretty much every adult a reservist anyway? But the pro-genocide hollowborn only apply that reasoning one way. No morals, no soul, no point arguing with them. They are Waidwen's Legacy at it's finest.

Bruce will cheer on any annexation. Nasrallah is confirmed to be dead. Hezbollah seems impotent, maybe Israel will try to enact regime change in Lebanon?

didn't lebanon and syria already lost part of their territory once west bank are liquidated lebanon will become the next target regardless colonizing never need much excuse before

This is quite legit given the amount of time you selflessly took to answer all of us, on PoE1&2.

Since CBS put the pilot episode on YouTube (free/anyone can view), I watched "Matlock." The show itself feels like a semi-generic lawyer/courtroom procedural, with a main character serial-motivation/mystery arc, but Kathy Bates is the bees knees. I would watch the show just to watch her performance. She is awesome - both humor and drama - and I'm so glad she decided to do this show before her retirement (so she says). She's like 10 planes of existence above every other actor in the show, imo. I showed hubby, he watched it, and he came in later to say basically that ("Kathy Bates is killin' it"). Now the question is can it hold quality through the supposed 18 ordered episodes. I hope so. If she's truly retiring after this, hope it's a great swan song for her.

You need to listen to more Israeli marketing. Have also had some amusing Hasbara types argue if Hamas and Hezbollah are not defeated, they'll somehow destroy Israel Maybe they'll carve a piece of Lebanon out after, heh, as per rules based order

What if I just call them nuts!

Woosh, I did not pay attention to the previews at all. It was in the fourth film and I actually do think the ending lands as being over. For me the village did feel like watching Evangelion, strip away the robots and religio-techno-babble and it ultimately is about the crippling loneliness that can result from the unknowable gulf that exists between people. And the village was sort of a more positive spin on it, with Shinji, Rei, and Asuka learning to accept that and grow in different ways. Part of what makes the last hurrah work is we get to see them develop in a way they couldn't in the previously cramped rebuilds....but I do think it relies on you having watched NGE to really vibe with as well. The ending where beeg tiddy waifu and finally adult Shinji run away from the hell of the Evas was pretty satisfying as an ending to the saga. It certainly works better than Shinji becoming (part of) a god or some definitive thing where both the Angels and HIP/SEELE/Deadbeat Dad were defeated by Evas. I actually like that the end is these people who have been stuck as teenagers for decades exploring a new world instead of doing an epilogue that showed us just what happened to the gang in the post-Eva world. Anyways I started watching Hells Paradise and....it's ok. I can vibe with the looks of the show and think monster design is good but it could teeter into dumb shonen quickly so I'll just have to see.

The looking for jr thing works for me. Or I can pretend it does. I can make the logical choice. But typical Bethesda gives you a drive then forces you to ignore it. "They stole your baby! Now ignore it because NPC X can't put down a mattress on his own."

I'd agree, if the hate speech laws weren't being abused. The above is almost certainly a response not to hate speech laws, per se, but the attempts to go after SM for publishing 'hate speech' that is defined primarily to suppress dissent.

Well... the minutemen thing kind of makes sense from a role playing/ character pov along with the settlements in terms of you 'refounding the US' amid the Fallout theme of hyper nationalism, especially for someone who has been frozen from pre apocalypse rather than brought up post so might realistically have bought into that hypernationalism. Same for looking for jr too really, you are told you care rather than being made to; but logically you would. I won't defend it any more than that since pretty much only the base idea is fine, the implementation is definitely typical Bethesda.

good digging! yeah i haven't had much time to dive into this more, but one thing i was going to try is just renaming the files boeroer found taht were being altered outside the save. edit: like i wonder if the act of loading my save alters some sort of game object reference in your local install, which causes it to break in other saves. but the mystery to me is why your save still has targetable twin stones at all if you load it first? my game is completely borked, no save i can reload lets me target that spell anymore. i wonder if stag's horn does something weird with game objects, using a similar type of targeting, that unstucks the targeting for twin stones. i should give it a try with stag's horn like you did. edit 2: i wonder if i start a completely new game, if that would also unstick twin stones.

fyi after me finally learning about blunderbusses and stunning strikes from this build, in this current run i picked up mirke (as a streetfighter/monk) to do a similar such build and heilige Scheiße she is absolutely carrying my party now. she's only been in my party for one character level and i think she's already party damage leader. can't believe i slept on this combo for so long.

Yeah, I tend to get a lot more out of steam reviews than any 'professional' reviewers, or those terrible people that make videos. I have a pretty small list of friends on Steam (maybe a dozen people) but if they review a game, it pushes them to the top. They tend to share my interests, so that's nice. Plus it is easy to scroll through a few and get a feel for if the review matches what I'm looking for. They are typically short and simple. The only games that tend to get skewed Steam results are usually the big AAA titles. All of the smaller indie stuff, which is what I tend to browse Steam for anyways, is pretty accurate when it comes to the positive to negative scale.

What I did today: Tried to figure out why I didn't have no internets. What my cat did today: Disconnect the network cable.

"Dicksite"

I feel like a relapsed alcoholic. My brain is on fire trying to optimize the best builds, party composition, skill synergies, ship crew and equipment, and consumables, and quests order, and stuff. I am nauseated by the starting Island and the Engwithan Dicksite after a bazilion restarts. I'm doing 3 playthroughs simultaneously. A blast, I say! X)

Heading home tomorrow. I've probably gained 10 pounds but also lowered my blood pressure because these people have not heard of salt or really many spices

they say player core class so alchemist would be decent instead of terrible at level 8 cap they would be handing out galvanic chew bubble gum before every fight instead

finally some pathfinder 2e game on kickstarter now https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ossianstudios/pathfinder-the-dragons-demand/description

Yeah, who knows, they might have learned a thing or two and released the DLC only mostly broken.

I actually just don't see why this discussion is going on. The original premise is a bit ridiculous.

Double post after struggling to save the first one.

To answer: hubby has just used the PT that Kaiser gave him. Which mostly meant some visits, some advice, some exercises to do and then they send you off with "that's about all we can do/say." He hasn't shopped for others. Edit: I am not sure at what point more PT would not be insurance covered. Hubby does his stretches/positions/ball exercises, sometimes a bit of the elliptical, always a couple short swims a day, walks, lies down for 20 minutes a few times a day, etc. He tried the gravity table but has been told recently maybe he should avoid it. Y'know, conflicting opinions from different docs or "experts." >.> He's not a big believer in chiropractors (there's a history from a period in his 20's) but since pain relievers/steroids do not work, he's kinda desperate I suppose. Just one of those "maybe it won't do anything but no harm giving it try for a while" things when "real" doctors tell you there's no hope. The first chiro. he went to basically told him they couldn't do anything more. Which is why he found a new one. They said they help others with similar conditions and might be able to help (with pain) but like I said, after more than a month (3 visits a week) nothing. Basically, imo, hubby would need magical surgery to replace the spinal discs. You can't pain-relieve the constant rubbing of bone on bone when those discs are essentially gone. I've read that disc replacing is currently kind of possible, but not really FDA approved or something, and/or has come under fire recently, and there is conflicting information whether it even really helps people in his degenerative spinal arthritis level. Anyway ... I get where hubby's at right now, and everyone's gotta do what they gotta do if it makes them feel better in some way, especially mental health. But it's still occasionally frustrating. Also, it's not cheap.

I tried giving Fallout 4 another chance but I loath the settlement thing so much that I just can't play this. Uninstalled and moved from the RPG category to the Junk category in my Steam Library. The terrible writing about the Minutemen didn't help. WTF would I want to join an organization that is non-existent so I can do things that I could do just as easily without this organization that in fact I am the only person doing cr@p for? Classic case of writers deciding people need to care because the writers want them to, not because they gave them a reason to.

Maggie Smith

I think it's a good indication of how content people are with the game. Sometimes it's for stupid reasons, but sometimes it's for good reasons, and you have to read the reviews to get a general idea why. For new games with no big franchise to bring a load of expectations, a review trends tend to be more informative of actual quality, I've found.