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Wandering the galaxy at last in Rogue Trader. That farm planet ambush was annoying, mostly the grenadiers. I need some more long range characters I guess (I assume that Eldar sniper they showed will end up with me potentially)

My understanding of Dark Souls is that the flow of time is not really, er...linear? Insofar as characters from different times and places pop in and out of existence as you go along your quest, which is also kind of handwavey for the player connecting with other players to go through areas and see characters or defeat bosses which they may have already defeated or interacted with. Like, I don't know that the player's tromping around of Anor Londo is really meant to represent what Anor Londo would look like hundreds of years after its fall or whatever...buuut I guess I don't know that it isn't, either. Also, on a side-note, I'm pretty sure the Warriors of Sunlight do not worship Gwyn but rather the disgraced and forgotten son (who, officially, actually turned out to be...someone else from Dark Souls 3, despite the fact that Dark Souls III would necessarily have to take place even later than the events of Dark Souls 1, so never mind Solaire and how old he might've been). I know people also liked to read into the placement of corpses of certain characters (e.g. Lautrec after you defeat him in his own world) and also how they like, instantly become ancient petrified corpses that seem like they must've always been there despite the fact that they weren't just moments ago, as if this also plays into the non-linear flow of time rather than the fact that making custom corpses for each important character would be wasted dev effort on a game where a hundred stationary dragon butts were copy and pasted in an otherwise empty giant lava pit. Maybe all that nonsense was actually a real thing deliberately designed that way, but I don't care: characters are what draw me to stories, but the motley crew of mostly passive and background-y characters a fully compelling world and story do not exactly make. The combination of jankiness and unfairness is a big part of the fun...but then again, one of my favorite things in DS1 PvP was invading someone and being faced with a team of three or four because they'd summoned gold and white spirits and had set themselves up specifically to murder invaders like me (and kept using the Dried Finger in order to draw more invaders in rather than suffer the usual ten or maybe fifteen minute invasion pause that would normally happen after you were invaded). The ensuing back alley knife fight to survive that ambush and take out the host using any means I could despite the long odds made it worth all the while. Or on the other extreme end of the spectrum, invading someone, realizing they're basically helpless, and just playing with them by trying to land a successful grab-and-kiss animation with the Dark Hand heavy attack before White Crystalling out... It doesn't even do any damage, it's just cute and funny. I suppose it does steal a Humanity if they've got any, but I usually dropped them a Soul of a Great Hero or something while I was doing an emote before leaving anyways. Yeah, I think I disabled my network adapter every time I played Dark Souls 2. I hated the movement in the game too much and just wanted it to be over with, getting randomly ganked by other players wasn't going to make it any better. Now I've been using simplewall for like five or six years on all of my personal Windows devices, which makes application and service white/blacklisting via Windows' built-in filtering only take like literally three or four seconds, so it would be super easy to just turn off Dark Souls' internet connectivity. Windows' default firewall controls are super tedious to deal with on an application-by-application basis, I'll never go back to it for my own devices when I just want most programs to automatically have their connectivity blocked (which simplewall enables you to do with a whitelist & notify system - you start up a program for the first time, simplewall automatically pops you a notification asking whether or not you want to add it to the whitelist, click yes or no, it'll remember your choice and not prompt you the next time, done...go into the UI and checkmark the box next to it if you change your mind; if for some reason you don't hit yes or no, it defaults to no, so everything is automatically blocked when you run it for the first time).

It's been a few years since I've played, but it appears the loot tables have shifted since I last played, correct me if I'm wrong. Back in the day I used to have access to gloves of manipulation on day 2 and 4 in Raedric's Hold, that no longer appears to be the case. These are arguably the most useful early game item for any solo playthrough so I thought I'd update you on my findings. 17 fonprima appears to be the earliest I can now acquire these from the Raedric's Hold Dungeon hidden floor tile. Let me know if you have another method of acquiring these in 2024, hope this helps someone.

Speaking of XCOM type games. I just started the tutorial of USC: Counterforce. If you don't hear from me - send help.

Just watched Alien: Romulus. Actually wasn't bad. Would say it's the first non-garbage Alien movie in many years. Some things were a bit annoying, like but what actually really felt meh to me was how ... That's just bs.

I ended up backing both but at the lowest tier that gets you the game

kickstarter have 10 day left hope this one get funded

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.

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.

1000xResist The dialogue "options" can be funny. The guilt-trip does not really work with linear experiences - no choice, no responsibility. Some scenes looked really good. In case it was unclear what the game was about. There is a plot twist in the middle, so these screenshots are somewhat spoilers. Ending, so obviously spoilers.