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Ah "spiritual successor", now where have I heard that before? At least now its known that it resembles the original in name only.

Why even call it Bloodlines 2 if suddenly it is not like the first game anymore? The whole draw of it was to get an immersive sim experience in a vampire world... if it's not that anymore, why even bother.

Dandadan ep 2 - Attack of the Sumo Alien-Ghost Still going strong. It's very kinetic and stylish, it would have been easier to make the banana pilfering alien a cgi monstrosity out of a 10-year old videogame like many anime do, but by god this looks so much better. And going to black and white is a power move so I'm happy. Also feels like they did a speedrun on Shinji's multi-saga arc with The Other Ken Takakura in like 2 episodes. We'll see how things go after he reclaims his......manly essence from the Turbo Granny. Given that they're made by the same studio that isn't surprising. Ngl, I very much enjoyed both on a visual level but I did not reccomend Dandadan to you because if you had a seizure I did not want to be held liable or get drug to hell by a demon you summoned.

I never expected anything good from that developer, but not even trying is worse than I thought.

Yeah, gold, platinum, diamond that's a music means, but if I remember correctly what each category means differs country to country. In gaming it refers to development milestone https://news.ubisoft.com/en-us/article/P8R9SX3LGlQrlXuTuwAfQ/games-explained-from-game-engines-to-going-gold

https://www.engadget.com/gaming/steam-now-tells-gamers-up-front-that-theyre-buying-a-license-not-a-game-085106522.html?guccounter=1

Time to check if the jeweler area in Kurast Bazaar still crashes after a couple of seconds standing in there. Got stuck there yesterday because it kept crashing the moment it loaded the game, until I got far enough away to get out of the crash zone. Man, you know, back in the day, Blizzard made games where half the mechanics wouldn't work or don't do whatever they were supposed to (one of the funniest was the Earthliving Weapon glyph in Wrath of the Lich King, which read it increases Earthliving Weapon's procc chance by 5%, which it did - raised it from 20% to 21%, a proper 5% increase ), but at least the game ran well. Nowadays half the mechanics and half the game don't work... edit: Well, no crash in Kurast yet. Looks like they fixed it. Good job, now, can I have my quest reward back that dropped on the ground moments before the game crashed on me the last time I was there?

I gave up on this a while back but can't say I'm not enjoying watching this somehow get spectacularly worse with each update

Been a minute but I've been loving the new DLC. I didn't even have to Miracle Max it as it was only slightly broken at launch and there have already been a handful of patches to fix everything.

Grinding along in Rogue Trader, curiosity sure taught me, checking out random stuff because am conditioned by games to check every icon when surprise! Herald of Tzeentch spawned. Getting too old, this combat is tiring me out.

I went to watch it but I could only rent it for 25 tax non-inclusive warbucks or buy it for 30 tax non-inclusive warbucks. It was free on the plane ride home from Germany but I wasn't in a position to watch it because I was in the middle seat with a baby on my lap and a wife on one shoulder and a son-a-tron on the other.

It's my mom's birthday and we can't even go to Red Lobster like we usually do. Maybe I'll make shrimp at home.

So I watched the new Deadpool. Not really great, but not the worst movie ever. I did not fall asleep while watching, which already makes this one of the better super hero movies. What I enjoyed about it was that it felt like reasonably fresh content. Even chuckled a bit here and there. One thing is for certain, though: I'm really, really, really damn tired of the multiverse.

The Internet was a mistake.

I bought Two Worlds 2 when it came out. Never really played it. Something bothered me in the initial feel. Maybe I'll have to try again after a full BruceVC rating has been given.

I don't know if you like to look at videos, but More Perfect Union on youtube has quite a few videos about those subjects, they're quite good. You shouldn't necessarily go vegan though, the farming practices of the big producers are wrecking their soil, and have other bad practices ontop of that. It's better to ensure that what you buy comes from sustainable farming practices. Alot of vegan foods are ontop of that highly processed stuff, so if you go down that route you should be wary of that too.

To add to the ecology-related articles: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2024/sep/24/where-does-the-uks-fast-fashion-end-up-i-found-out-on-a-beach-clean-in-ghana The reinforcement of the gender stereotypes aside, it is interesting, though unsettling. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/08/earths-vital-signs-show-humanitys-future-in-balance-say-climate-experts Not sure whether the acceleration to the hard-to-recover point is overestimated, but even now, the climate change is noticeable. I was trying to find an article about the effects of animal farming (aka those torture-murder factories) on the environment (very negative, including air; the prices of the properties around also go down by up to 75%), but the search engines did not favour me today. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/23/long-shadow-life-under-the-veiled-grasp-of-factory-farming-in-europe This one. TLDR: go vegan, use less bandwidth, buy less physical items, recycle what you can, and do not reproduce, so maybe we will not die from the global warming.

Maybe eugenics isn’t such a bad idea after all

Such a stupid production, apparently from the start. If this went the right way, they may have had a real success on their hands, released in the times of BG3, KCDII et all (unless Warhorse bust the launch, they may be the next in line for larger success after Larian and FromSoftware). What's more depressing is that Bloodlines turns 20 in a month. TWENTY. That's also twenty years since the last major horror-themed RPG. You gotta be kidding me.

Huh, Diablo IV needed stability improvements? You don't say. In the past few days the game servers have crashed several times for me, especially while loading into new zones (i.e. getting endless loading screens without timeouts). Well, maybe that got better, it is pretty tiresome to lose your seething opal buffs because the servers keep dropping games.

The whole gold/ platinum sales thing never really seemed to catch on much in gaming as compared to music. (IIRC the reason for the term is that the master disc they used for duplication in gaming used to be differentiated from 'normal' silver discs by being coloured gold instead. That would then be sent to the fabricator)

I guess this is what I deserve for trying to be polite for the folk currently enjoying the show instead of going "this is the worst thing I've ever seen in my whole life" as would typically be more my style, so let me be a little more clear: I liked what I saw of Frieren a bit more than the first episode I saw of Dandadan, and I rather disliked Frieren. If it in any way proves helpful, here is a short and simple rating system of a number of modern anime shows I've seen thanks to some of the fine folk on the Obsidian forums: Season 1 of Spy x Family: 7/10 Vampire in the Garden: 6.5/10 Girls' Last Tour: 6.5/10 Season 1 of One Punch Man: 6/10 Season 1 of K-ON!: 5.5/10 Some episodes of Frieren: 4.5/10 Mostly fast-forwarded Devilman Crybaby: 4/10 Episode 1 of Dandadan: 3.5/10 Don't mistake me not acting a petulant bastard as feeling in any way positive towards something, some things just merit stronger words on my part more than others, .

paradox would give up on bloodline after 2 there are some tiny hope obsidian will get chance to make 3

That's a big negative for me. None of Bethesda's games needed bigger maps, they needed more variety in what's already there.

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.

Wrong. Boy, arguing on the internet is easy. Okay, but really, I'm reading your reply here, and all I'm hearing is "you have to do what players consider to be the worst and what might objectively be the least-played content that nobody wanted to do even once multiple times...but you have to do it in more complicated and time-consuming ways". Great, fantastic, that's exactly what I want to do with my life, . If I want to play and beat Dark Souls at level 1, I can go decide to do that of my own free will, and there's nobody that has to award me some "congratulations, you are a total dip**** for doing this" award in order for me to feel rather pleased with myself for doing so. Nor for doing any other number of arbitrary goals that I might decide I want to do, because if I actually love the game and there's something like that which I actually want to do, I can just...go decide to do it. With achievements that I cannot disable tied to an always online account like Steam, there has been a non-zero number of times where I've got through the first area or tutorial or something of a game, had an achievement pop up for completing that or for something else completely minute, I go look at the achievements and see that there are seventy distinct achievements for this stupid ass game that I'm playing, I immediately think that I'm probably not even going to finish the game - much less get all the achievements! - so I close the game, I use the Steam Achievement Manager hack program to reset the achievement that just unlocked, I uninstall the game on Steam, and then I go download the game from elsewhere and play my downloaded copy instead - blissfully free of any thought for achievements or stat-tracking or time-tracking or any other unnecessary meta garbage that's not really actually part of just playing the damned bastard ass game that I'm supposed to be enjoying. No, I'm now able to just play without thinking about any of that, just like I used to be able to do when I was a kid and put a video game into an SNES or an N64 or when I loaded up a Baldur's Gate or Age of Empires save game. Just let me play my video games exactly how I want to play them, it's all I ask. What are they going to come up with next, achievements for watching the entirety of a 10 season show at half-speed with French audio and Chinese subtitles - on top of all the progress-tracking and "MAKE SURE YOU BINGE THE ENTIRE SHOW IN A DAY OR TWO OR WE'LL CANCEL/REMOVE IT"-itis that streaming services already do? Get me out of this hellhole. I've had this .gif that I once found on the internet saved to my imgur for years and years But I decided I needed to make my own higher quality version to mark this occasion, and the ability to record and make good quality 100 MB gifs that even play at the correct frame rate in under a minute is one I don't abuse nearly as much as I should Feel free to use as appropriate, @ShadySands I never found even one weapon that I liked in Dark Souls 2, so I ended up using the Lost Sinner's Sword for most of the game. It comes with this lovely unique ability where it slowly kills you as you use it, which I thought, if I'm going to be stuck using some crappy greatsword because I can't find even ONE weapon in this entire game with a good balance between speed, damage, and move set...well, at least the fact that my own weapon is literally killing my character feels thematically appropriate. Some of my fondest memories of Dark Souls were with the PVP - both being invaded and as an invader. Especially with some of the weirder places I got invaded, like in the Abyss right before Manus in the DLC. Impossible to see more than like ten feet, big area that you normally only explore once, and where the hell do invaders even spawn in this area? Ended up being some jerk dual-wielding electric Avelyns (the unique repeating crossbow) taking burst-fire potshots at me from in the dark, ended up murdering him with my trusty Great Scythe. I loved the Great Scythe in DS1. Yeah, some people like thinking about that sort of things and trying to connect dots, basically fan theorizing. The original theory for a long time was that Solaire is the disgraced son of war, who's on his rather inexplicable quest to "find the sun", whatever that actually means. Though it never directly plays into the plot, he interestingly happens to be the one who is summonable for challenging Gwyn if you use the Chaos Servant shortcut to prevent him from going hollow. Always being explicitly told everything can get a bit boring, and though I never really got into it myself for Dark Souls, that stuff really reminds me a bit of my younger days when I'd get excited thinking and talking about games (or movies or books) with other people who were super into whatever I was into, even when it was over relatively minor details, so it made sense to me that people would do so for something that caught on like wildfire like Dark Souls did. But online communities and fandoms for even the things I love are always ultra-toxic these days, so I never have much desire to go out of my way to interact with them personally. Like I said, I never got super into either the story, lore, or characters of Dark Souls personally...I think it's because while I find a few of the characters charming enough and I don't mind some more indirect storytelling and world-building, the connections between the world and its characters and its story all feel way too loosey goosey for me, and it doesn't end up feeling quite like a properly constructed universe/world that I can really project my brain into. I tend to do better with real world settings, even relatively extreme alternative reality ones (like SU, or Undertale...or even NGE, the latter of which has some very tenuous plot and world-building itself, which probably plays into why I really don't much care about the world-ending plot stuff of that series except insofar as it affects the characters and plays into the themes), as I have a better frame of reference to work with so that I can try to make sense of everything. But I have gotten into other things before, especially when I was younger, and even though Dark Souls doesn't fit that way into my brain, I think I can at least understand how it did for a younger generation of gamers experiencing something new and different that they clearly fell in love with.

Judging by Alan Wake II, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and Larian's D&D game being critically and commercially successful, I would say that racists, homophobes, and transphobes claming that Concord's failure is anyhow related to "wokeness" are purposefully lying. The market oversaturation, combined with the price and the lack of marketing are more likely reasons.

Pathfinder: The Dragon's Demand (60% funded with 23 days left): "Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand is a single-player, turn-based CRPG that takes role-playing back to its roots with miniature-based characters and digital dice to recreate the look and feel of a tabletop RPG. But it opens up a whole new dimension by allowing miniatures to climb walls and trees, fly through the sky, and swim to underwater depths using an innovative three-dimensional grid system that delivers true 3D tactical combat. Developed by Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights veterans, Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand features a comprehensive implementation of the remastered Pathfinder Second Edition rules in a classic CRPG format. Players can create character builds from 7 ancestries, 16 classes, and more than 30 backgrounds, customizable with hundreds of different armors and weapons. They will also encounter a cast of colorful companions who will be on hand to join their party in exploring a wide, interactive world filled with hundreds of unique characters and dozens of rich quests. Based on the Pathfinder module The Dragon’s Demand by fan-favorite adventure designer Mike Shel, this expanded adaptation provides over 30 hours of immersive gameplay, where the world of Golarion is brought to life by cutting edge audio and visual effects, a beautiful musical score, and professional voice acting. Our goal in bringing all of these aspects together is to recreate those feelings of excitement and discovery that make the best tabletop campaigns so memorable." Developer is Ossian studios which members of this forum are probably familiar with as they made NWN2: Mysteries of Westgate and several NWN 1 premium modules as well.

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

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

'Bloodlines 3 [Will be] Done by Someone Else:' Paradox Responds to Future of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines After Sequel Debacle [Update] - IGN

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/hurricane-milton-misinformation-meteorlogist-death-threats-1235130352/

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/bloodlines-2-is-more-spiritual-successor-than-sequel-to-a-a-competently-good-game-by-2004-standards-say-paradox I must admit that my optimism was misplaced, and this person has not played VTMB. I played it recently and most of the ideas and implementations work just fine (could be better with more immersive sim elements, not less). Then again, abusing the IP worked well for Larian, but they at least somewhat improved the character creation and added more immersive sim elements (the rest was not exactly good). Edit. The developers may release something that can stand on its own, but it is unlikely to be a sequel to VTMB.