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Got me in the first half.

I always liked how Obs handled diversity in Deadfire, i.e. they just put it there along with world building for it to make sense, no fanfares or shining a spotlight on it.

Did some x-mas shopping. Got my wife the fully automatic espresso machine that she's been wanting and also got her a bread maker so that she can make her own rye bread because 95% of all the rye around here is 95% caraway.

Finally got rid of the walker orthrosis boot and got the ok for walking without it. I'm probably going to have to remove the screws in about a years time though because they are screwed into the bone just right where the tendon is, and I can already hear/feel the clicking as I do certain movements Tomorrow I'm going to try and drive my car, which will be a trial

One of Neketaka or Crookspur shrine gives +2 RES and might trigger the encounter, to give a chance of praying without resting. It's said to be the Poko Kohara one, but I believe it's only possible on Neketaka or Crookspur.

Hubby took the whole holiday week off. Me: "What cha gonna do/what do you wanna do? Day trips? Anything?" (his back thing limits activities a lot now) Him: "Kinda, maybe, dunno. It's winter. And I'm cold." ...he's currently watching TV lying on the couch, cocooned like a burrito in giant fluffy blankets. So cute.

Ascendant/any Priest has a good synergy with ascension + Salvation of Time. If you have a source of Brilliant you can keep being ascended and cast Cipher spells and Priest spells "for free". Unfortunately a Cipher cannot use Ancestor's Memory (Brilliant) on himself. But something like Least Unstable Coil + an empowered Storm of Holy Fire will almost always give you the Brilliant inspiration (plus a bunch of other ones). Priest/Livegiver(Cat) can also form a great healing synergy with the Spine of Thicket Green (+2 PL to Rejuvenation and Restoration). This also fits the Nature Godlike best thematically I think. You can prolong the Spiritshift and its cat flurry with Salvation of Time. Livegiver's Spritishift does +5 PL to all Restoration spells which is a huge bonus. Cat Flurry lets you cast extremely quickly (no armor recovery, too). As soon as you drop out of Spiritshift your Rejuvenation spells will suffer -5 PL (actually only -3 bc. of the staff's +2 PL), but now you can use the Priest's Restoration spells with no drawback (and the staff's +2 PL). Priest of Eothas has the best healing auto picks iirc. But any Priest subclass works. The spell cycle might most likely be: buffing, shifting for healing/buffing (Moonwell etc.), healing without spiritshift. Later one can also keep up the Spiritshift longer with Salvation of Time. Of course any other Spiritshift form works, too. It's just that the cat form has the best benefit for casting spells (speed).

My regret: I couldn't find a nice old set of scales to put the gargoyle's quest cartridge on one side and chocolate on the other.

Lenovo L41 I think. Works well, 64 GB RAM, enough to run AWS Console, barely. Good to know, time to start smuggling into Serbia. First laptops, then AKs, move over Bout.

I'm really looking forward to seeing it! I'm not surprised about unlikeable protagonists, a number of Charles Band films have that issue. lol.

Some... something? As someone said in some comment, a Dutch singer, a Finnish band, singing English for a German audience of 820000 From Wembley...

Experiencing something in a different time and place has always been one of my little musings of life: how would you feel about something (or even someone) if you experienced it right when and where you were supposed to? What might be some of your favorite things if they were given the perfect opportunity to impress themselves upon you? Alas.

I recall something similar, so you can't be far off there. I've been fairly lucky so far, and have only experienced the same thing a couple of times yet, but atleast they throw alot of resources out there for you to recover with. I've got about 40 deaths so far, and 90% of those have been from environmental deaths trying to wiggle into or onto places I shouldn't be. Gunfights usually lead to me being overloaded with meds, vodka and sausages, what I struggle with are those goddamn packs of mutants. Not anymore granted since I've modded the game already, but those shotguns with buckshot felt very anemic. I don't know how much I can fault them there in that they use UE5, but I noticed that too. What really irks me is that their recommendations for hardware apparently was calculated with upscaling, and the upscaling artifacts definetly aren't helping me one bit. The latency feels really off at some times, and with framegen it gets worse, plus you get ghosting. And then there's the eye adaptation bull****. But the HDR looks amazing! Yeah, using the Ukrainian VO's was quickly apparent to be the better option for me aswell, but that is the true STALKER experience I had a much better experience with CP2077 at launch than I am with stalker 2, but I am having fun with it still, but I definetly wish it was better. That said, it didn't take me many hours to start using mods to fix some of the more annoying stuff like Skyrim day/night cycles and damage scaling. I've got so many hours into all the different stalker games at this point, with and without mods and standalones, that it has all blurred into one big mess, so I can easilly believe reddit being the toxic ****hole that it normally is whatwith how humans really don't like having their memories questioned. There is a nightvision mod out, sort of, but yeah there is no night vision in the game, which is monumentally dissapointing. I'm in the same boat as you generally, but I don't have the same attachment to the Stalker series as I had towards Fallout, so I can call it the Fallout 3 of the series.

Because then Putin wins.

This was my husband for ... 12+ years? Mostly the coffee. Now, he wasn't the only talent there, mind, and at the end he also had managerial duties, and it was a small company, but when he finally burnt out (60+ hour weeks) and quit, his boss sold/closed the company. eg, boss didn't want to continue without him.

Why isn't Chornoblol review-bombed into oblivion?

just watch monogatari as listening comprehension exercise anyway the quest for golden ball just recently ended in manga so it would be about 4 season of anime

Fextralife has them too. Though, a skill calculator would be awesome. Need need need. Edit: I may just write one. Hopefully I can get it hosted easily.

I find that is a general problem with writers. You even see it in shows like Walking Dead. The protagonist, Whatshishame sheriff in all the Karl memes, had as sole personality trait "protagonist". Writers seem to think audiences will care for the protagonist just because they are supposed to, then wonder why the supporting cast gets all the fans. Then as series progress, often you see secondary characters come to the forefront, because for those some interesting idea was used somewhere on an episode to justify the episode. Think BSG, where nobody cares all that much about the admiral's son, but everyone wanted to know what happened to the guy who gave up his spot to evacuate the scientist - to the extent he got written back into the show.

Priest of Wael/Soulblade using the Whispers of the Endless Paths greatsword seemed decent enough when I tried it though I didn't complete a full playthrough with it. The "offensive parry" enchantment on the sword (which get you free attacks when enemies miss you) combined with Arcane Veil from priest of Wael and Borrowed Instinct from cipher get your deflection quite high and let you generate a good amount of focus from automatic counter-attacks as long as there's melee enemies. You will need to switch weapons for some fights though too another two-hander (maybe Chromoprismatic Quarterstaff if you take lots of Metaphysics skill which seems appropriate for a mystic) since Whispers of the Endless Paths is very ineffective when there aren't melee attackers. For this build you would want max Intellect, some perception, and fairly balanced attributes are fine since you will be on the front line. Mid game you probably spend most time of your time casting buffs but later you can cast minor avatar -> arcane veil -> borrowed instinct and start swinging and blasting.

Eh, the problem isn't the Whedonite dialogue really, it's the lack of talent from the writers trying to do it. It's worked ok for Bioware in previous games, though the most recent was probably ME2 when they still had a decent cadre of writers. And it's not like, say, Buffy/ Angel etc retroactively have bad writing just because they've been so often (badly) imitated. I don't think the problem is the 'woke stuff' in particular, as above it's the way characters in general are written nowadays by bad writers. The best example I've found as comparison is Omar from The Wire vs I Can't Even Remember His Name After 4 (OK 5, but I skipped S4) Seasons But He Was Played by Anthony Rapp, from Star Trek Discovery. You can describe the entire character of the STD character in about two words: gay engineer, and for probably 95% of his screen time that's all you need to know because that is, basically, his 'character', over the 5 seasons. The other 5% is him getting upset about Gay Doctor (again, all you really need to know 95% of the time) dying. If you tried describing Omar as an equivalent like gay hit man... it just doesn't work well at all, outside of the most simplistic situations and interpretations. That's because one is a well written engaging character with depth who happens to be gay, the other has gay as his defining characteristic. Of course the problem with STD is clearly the bad writing, since most of the, uh, non woke characters are basic caricatures as well. The unfortunate thing is that often bad writers with good intentions think that 'gay' or 'non binary' is enough to make an inherently well written character when it isn't any more than 'heterosexual' would make a good non woke character. The net effect is the feeling that you're being preached to, and worse, preached to very very badly. Ultimate problem is of course that writing good characters whatever their skin colour/ sexual orientation/ occupation/ etc is is hard, and few people can do it. There also don't seem to be any consequences for those who are bad writers, so it's self perpetuating.

Depending of what do you expect from your MC, you can take many directions with your two choices : a cipher (psion or beguiler) / priest of Woedica as "Deceptionist" should be great, the woedica's unique spells complete very well the afflictions a cipher can give. In other hand, cipher can also help a lot the party, with some echo spells to increase the protecting potential of priest (all of them). Then, as a inspiration dealer, Mystic work very well too. These way to play doesnt require Might to be decisive, where a Cipher Priest of Berath can be a good damage dealer with this stat. For Universalist, again, you can dirige your MC in a healer-buffer side of these classes, or looking for more versatility with a combinason of what do you like, since there is significantly less Passives to get at leveling. Then within MinMaxing stats, you can have a very solid build. In my concern, for Mystic, it is important to have an idea of where do you want to go with the character, because it is easy to loose yourself in this deck of many things these classes can be, and so you can have some regrets however the re-leveling option at the tavern. With universalist you take a lesser risk. If that can help you to make your choice..

It's not just typos, some sentences were missing their second half. That's what happens when you rewrite a post to be less offensive. I tried really hard to not insult incels or use any slurs to agitate the pretty snowflakes who were bothered by my previous posts enough to actually report them to the moderator team in spite of being in support of the game and its content. *sigh*

Well, if DAVe became like this because of Fallen Order's popularity, then presumably the next DA game will be modeled after BG3.

I really love this board. Almost every day, I learn something new. Today, I have learned, that Bethesda has employees, who test their games for bugs. Who would have thought, that this is reality in this Universe

Great story Melkie, I really enjoyed it The eternal and industrious entrepreneurial gamer spirit never dies !!!!

@melkathi.... (left comment on the blog post)

I knew my expectations were justified! Awesome read @melkathi Yeah, some things haven't changed the last 40 years when it comes to how games are marketed. The games don't always match the box art (said the guy who stared at curvy women box art painted by Boris Vallejo on the old SSI and 3Do games in the 80's) Hope those cat forks pays your next games!

The absolutely most important thing to change in Windows 11 is the stupid new context menu on right clicks. Nothing else comes even close to being this essential. Whoever had that idea over at Microsoft should be shot to the moon without a return ticket, along with the other criminals deserving of such a fate, like Putin, Xi and Trump.

IStar Wars: The Old Republic Going Third-Party as BioWare Focuses on Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I'm sure that Bioware, now unburdened with backbreaking labour of updating SWTOR with 5 hours worth annual content, will instantly propel Dragon Age from concept art stage and Mass Effect from repackaging.

Done with the game. The game has two rather big problems, only one of which is Bioware's fault. Marketing. Well, what's in a name anyway? The first is EA marketing as RPG, while in reality it is Thedas: Fallen Dragon. It is hard to stress this enough. The Veilguard is not an RPG, it is a 3D action adventure that plays mostly like the Jedi series, with a different abilities tacked on to make the combat more flashy than it was in Fallen Order (I have not played Survivor, so I cannot commet on any advancements over Fallen Order). The combat has about the same substance as the one in Fallen Order, but it certainly looks, feels and plays a lot better. The other problem with calling this an RPG is that there are barely any decisions to make, and only two of those have consequences - and there never is an alterantive way to handle quests. Bioware really dropped even the pretense of having morally questionable options for the player to follow through. Even Mass Effect's paragon and renegade system looks inspired in comparison. Which, again, is fine for an action adventure. The ability/skill tree is a bit bigger than the one in Fallen Order too, with more variety and different playstyles. The exploration of Veilguard is also similar, with companion abilities substituted for the upgradeable driod in Fallen Order. The problem is that it still isn't that much fun, or challenging. It only very seldomly goes beyond PRESS X FOR AWESOME, and the exploration element is generally fun with a capital c Caveat, which neatly leads to the second really large problem of the game: pacing. We're on a record pace to... boredom, I guess. Sigh. The pacing is downright dreadful. The game opens with roughly four hours of not very impressive content. The abilities one can use are very limited, the combat thus highly repetitive and the areas are rather constricted hallways designed to funnel you from one main quest to the next. It is only after recruiting the first companion and finishing another part of the main quest that the game itself opens up, at which point your character has a few levels under their belt and has unlocked a few more abilities and passives that transform the combat gameplay from boring to good enough. It is precisely at that time, before the game opens up or starts playing well, where you're introduced to token minority elves, one of which is a companion that joins you. It is a sad testament to the times we're living in that the minority representation in the game (which was almost always a part of Bioware games anyway) had such a terrible reception, but there's no second chances for a first impression, as the saying goes. You're already not having fun at this point in the game, and then you see that Bioware wasted development resources on brown and east-asian looking elves. In an ideal world players would realize that for a project this size, no part of gameplay, quest design or writing (outside of Taash, who we will talk about later) has suffered a lack of resources because someone was tasked to make brown textures for characters, but the polarization is what it is. The game sucks because it is woke - but that just is not the case. The game (almost inarguably) sucks at this point because it is not fun to play, and that is not the fault of Strife the Brown Elf. It then proceeds to go on for too long, especially the exploration and parcouring part of the game. Fallen Order had the same issue - and neither game is very good at telling the player that certain parts of the maps are cut off until quest progress or the abilities of a newly recruited companion opens that part of the map. I probably spent a good five hours of my playtime (roughly 75 hours, which was enough time to experience all of the content) trying my damndest to figure out riddles and/or ways to reach areas and loot that just were inaccessible at that point. The other part that is badly paced are companion interactions. This is arguably the worst part, because at the end of the day, it is still a game (ostensibly) made by Bioware. For the first twenty hours I have played the game, the companions all seemed shallow and flat. Friends that played the game also agreed. The problem here is, again, the pacing of the game, as companion interactions and dialogues are interwoven with side and main quests, and often are contingent on reloading the Lighthouse (your base of operation) map, i.e. you need to go into the game world and come back for a new set of interactions to be loaded once they're ready to be presented. So if, for some reason, you have unlocked three interactions with a companion, you can do one, then you have to go back into the world and come back the Lighthouse for the next. This is such a dumb decision that whoever came up with the idea needs to be fired, because it means you're best off with going back to the Lighthouse whenever you have finished a quest, instead of just questing naturally in the game world. Gating was always there in companion interactions in Bioware games, of course, but they were usually also frontloaded with an enormous amount dialogue to be explored with them right from the start. With a few exceptions (most notably the Antivan Crow companion, who remains boring and flat throughout the game), the companions in The Veilguard aren't (much) less developed than those in other games. They're just not front-loaded in the usual Bioware manner, and that is much to their detriment. To recap, we're now a couple of hours into the game, it does not play well, it is not fun, there's no real sense of exploration, the main quest is on rails going through several limited hallways (of which most are out in the open, to make the contrast even worse), you had an annoying "nervous and talky scientist type" Korean looking elf lady foisted on you for a companion whom you could have exactly one really short conversation with and you have just reached Treviso, a city in an "RPG" that is basically also just a colletion of hallways (which kind of makes sense, as Thedas' version of Venice) where any and all exploration options are seemingly unreachable. To make matters worse everyone talks in a weird Italian style accent that the voice actors were clearly uncomfortable with and no one sounds in any way natural. Sprinkle your own character's somewhat dumb dialogue in this part of the game on top, and you have one recipe for a disaster. Where it doesn't matter at all that all of that gets better the more you play. I mean, who's still playing at this point? By now you're angrily shouting about how bad the game is on social media. Depending on your political and social leanings one might as well blame wokeness and DEI for everything that is bad in this game, ignoring that Bioware games were pretty "woke" all along. Taash And then there's Taash (Taash was born a girl, for the record, for anyone who has no intention of playing the game). Taash is Bioware's attempt at making a non-binary character, and while they had a wonderful setup for them, they never followed up on it. Taash is Qunari, but their mother fled to Rivia when Taash was little. So as Taash grew up, they were neither really Qunari nor Rivaini. There's also conflict with her mother, neatly established during the first companion quest, which is actually pretty good. Her mother complains that Taash dresses and behaves more like a man (for those reading this who are not familiar with the Qunari, they're basically fantasy muslims with a caste system) than a woman, which frustrates Taash. Taash is an accomplished warrior and dragon hunter - job reserved for men under the Qun. Can you already see how this might make for a decent metaphor for not feeling particularily like either male of female? Taash doesn't feel like adhering to the Qun, nor do they feel like being fully Rivaini. Naturally this looks like a decent way to bring a non-binary companion into a fantasy setting without it being immersion-breaking, right? As the player character, you can probably gently guide Taash towards understanding their place in between these two cultures. Right, except then it just stops, and the game and all other characters start using the term "non-binary" as if we were in a contemporary setting, crashing you hard out of any immersion. It eventually culminates in a really weird scene with Taash and her mother where Taash has a "coming out" as "non-binary" ("Hey mom, I'm non-binary!") that is so awkward that it leaves players facepalming hard. This is all handled about as well as Adira was in Star Trek: Discovery. Like, not at all. The setup falls of a cliff so hard it becomes a disservice. It's not just a case of bad representation, it is actively hurting the cause by introducing an element that strains the already tenous enjoyment of the game. What was that saying with the road to hell and good intentions? You know what's the worst part? Taash is a genuinely fun companion with lots of funny interactions. She also has the best apology line in any Bioware game when she's having a minor fight with Emmrich, the necromancer companion. "I'm sorry I called you a skull-f... liker. Skull-liker." Conclusion So, what's the conclusion? I liked The Veilguard, in spite of all the problems. Partially that is because I have an OCD-ish tendency to finish games I have begun playing, so I kept playing, and eventually found myself immersed in the game, started to like the companions and genuinely enjoyed the flashy combat and exploration. It takes a good eight to fifteen hours of playing the game to reach that point, and I don't blame anyone who quits well before that. If, for some reason, you still want to play the game, then make sure to rush through the main quests until you have gathered all your companions. Then you can explore, and make sure to return to the Lighthouse as often as you can, to check for companion interactions. That means those marked on the map as well as where you can see two or more companions standing next to each other. That means you should go there and listen to them talking. The game will be better for it, really. Oh, and I hope you're like me and don't care for exploring city-settings in RPGs. While the game does have two cities, they're not what you'd expect from one in an RPG. I don't mind, but others might.

Today I left the computer on so a download would finish while I was out. Came back and noticed I had forgot to unpause the download.