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For a while now, I've wanted to write something about me and Obsidian. About the history, about the community, about the games. From Sith Lords and Project New Jersey up to Avowed and Outer Worlds 2. I've been here for 20 years. If it sounds like a long time, it's because it is. I first joined the forums on the day they opened, along with a bunch of people who had come here from the old Black Isle Community, which I was never a part of. Western RPGs were at a bit of a low ebb in 2004, especially PC ones. Bioware and Bethesda were the major RPG developers at the time, and already responsible for some of my favourite RPGs ever. However, while both Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights had a lot to offer, and I was very much looking forward to them, they ended up not quite meeting my expectations. Bloodlines came out that same year, and while great, it did not do as well as it deserved. To me, at least, it kind of felt like Obsidian would be the torchbearers for the kind of RPGs I wanted to play. C&C was the key design feature: Choice and consequence. Or as some of us used to say back then, "The Chosen One must choose!" I wanted games with multiple paths, where my gameplay choices affected the storyline and the world around my character. I wanted the sort of agency I felt I got in games like Fallout, Planescape Torment, or Baldur's Gate 2, but more so. I felt that the CRPG as a genre was good but could move forward and improve, and even back then I already felt that wasn't happening. With game budgets already ballooning, the trend was not to make games with loads of essentially optional content but rather to create games with very rigid critical paths, or open world games with very little gameplay depth. RPG features that I thought should be standard were falling by the wayside, instead of being improved and expanded upon. And that was what I often focused on when posting here on the forums. Or maybe not. Sometimes I did do some substantial posting, but frequently my posts were little more than short jokes, trying to get a laugh out of people. More often than not I was just lurking, perhaps silently agreeing with posters like Metadigital or Baley, while disagreeing with posters like Volourn or Hades_One. But it was without noticing that eventually the community became a part of my identity. It quickly became a daily online destination for me, a way to connect to like-minded people across the world. And it led to slowly making sort of online friends like Role-Player, Darth Drabek, or Rosbjerg, by being a part in events and side communities. I even met some forum denizens in real life, and thanks to the coming of Obsidian loot, I now go around in my everyday life with Obsidian stuff, be it a pen, a backpack or a t-shirt. My wife knows that Obsidian games are my jams, my kids sometimes used to wish they'd get gaming loot like me. Nowadays I don't post that often on the forums. I still lurk on a daily basis and help out a bit with stuff as time permits. What I think about, sometimes, are the people that have come and gone. People that have been around for a decade or more that I feel are still new users, users that were here for a short time but left an indelible mark. Forum posters that I cherished and enjoyed, and others who were infuriating and wrong. Essentially, in some ways I'm not the person I was when I joined. 20 years is a long time, I said. In the time I've been here I left a degree, went into another degree, got a job, started a career in an area I never thought I'd be in, became somewhat good at it, moved to another country, acquired a whole new family, lost my parents, learned to enjoy myself, developed a serious comic book reading habit. It's a lot and it happened without me noticing, really. But I'm still the same person, as well. I'm still a gamer, with a healthy focus on RPGs, I still furiously devour music and books and movies, I still have a terrible tendency to want to be right about everything, (to my own detriment "I'm right and you're wrong" brings me joy), I'm still a nerd, and I still want to finish that first degree. I also sometimes still wonder what it would be like to work at Obsidian. Even if I'm really not a fit for the company, or Irvine, or SoCal in general. Pretty sure my family would have liked it though.

Got Rogue Trader, helps to be familiar with the PnP game from 2010 or so. My preload was a waste of time, have to download a 37 GB "patch".

Wait until you see their implementation of twice twice as thrice.

Quest designer: "How long should the Spiritborn class quest be in Diablo IV?" Design Lead: "Yes." For crying out loud, seriously, stop wasting my time game. What the hell.

I ended up getting the Dandadan manga. Finished the 2nd yesterday, about to start the 3rd maybe today. On the one hand, nice, on the other hand, I wonder how much of this will be in the s1 episodes.

I stink, therefore...

Well, to be fair, a full installation* of Diablo IV is like 150GB, so it's more like a quarter reinstall. *A third of that is the optional Diablo IV high res texture pack.

Tl;dr; 20 years is a life time I still think back to those days in 1983, when fighting my mum over access to the TV. I swear, she never cared watching TV before, until I got that Commodore 64 and didn't have my own screen (yet) It was the fight of the titans, seeing who was the most stubborn In the end, I made enough money to buy a 12" black and white TV to put up in my own room. Peace settled over the land and everyone could back to worry about total nuclear war (the real thing, not the later video game) But it's been a long journey, technologies come and go, concepts come and go, target audiences come and go. VHS won out over Beta MAX, but nobody today knows what the heck either of them are. Tapes were the original medium video games were sold on for home computers, whether they be Acorn BBC model B or Sinclair ZX Spectrums. Floppy disks followed and less floppy, floppy (3.5") followed and eventually cd roms. Even those eventually died out and everyone gets their fix from the internet. Scratching my head and wondering what replaces the current internet some day? All of that in 2x20 years.

Huh, what, how and why does Bruce suddenly have a problem with young people born into corporate slavery dying when trying to escape from their lot? It is their lot for a reason, and they should all properly slave away for because shareholders expect proper returns on their investment.

It gets much more wild in all directions.

May have to try this out when it is ready.

Gushing over magical girls is the best things thats happened to anime. Fact.

Latest 7th blog is live from our @Pidesco

Means twice more than it would cost if it costed only a quarter.

Lunacid So close and so far. Found a mimic. I was trying to shake off the giant skeleton. The thing clipped through the walls. A very suspicious wall. The rats won. Dustborn (demo) The combat is not good and the controls are not fully rebindable (presets for keyboard layouts available). The rest is fine.

Next week's 7th blog is being prepped for posting. Until then, why not checkout the contributions this far: https://forums.obsidian.net/blogs/category/2-community-blog/

Well it's the very first time I saw someone say Deadfire is pro feminism. Of the 4 major factions, one is a council so does not count, 2 are led by women, but don't forget RDC is just a tool of Ruauatai empire and I believe their ranga nui is a man. If you look at the smaller factions' leadership, I simply don't get how you can reach the conclusion that Port Maje: let's say 1:1 Tikawara: male Ashen Maw: the one giving order is male Junvik: female Dawnstar: female Temple of Gaun: female Temple of Breath: male Cult of Rymrgand: male The list can go on and on. I never noticed the game is yelling "women powahhhh" in any way. You also need to remember fantasy games have a long history of making women "not weaker than man" so that the can play as whatever character we like. TBH saying PoE, not any other modern RPG, is pro-feminism, tells more about yourself rather than the game. Imagine in a objectively gender-balanced world you find yourself annoyed by the fact that women have jobs.

So that's four people who like Dandadan here. Does that mean we can start the apocalypse now or do we need a fifth rider? I forgot the rules tbh.

Wow. Imagine being bothered by the very existence of women! In video games! Weird.