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Hello , I've spent the last days developing these Avowed Interactive Maps, with locations for Pickups, Interactable Corpses, Loot Holders/Chests, and much more. It's not finished, but I am very happy about the results so far. Expect regular updates with more filters, better tooltip descriptions, and maps for the towns and dungeons. In addition, I am working on an In-Game app, which will track your player position and sync it with the maps (Overlay/2nd Screen). You can find most regions so far, including filters for the most important filters. I like to add monsters too soon. Track your progress by settings locations as discovered (right-click or click in the tooltip). This should help you to collect all the secrets! In case that you don't want to get spoilers about the game locations, you can disable all filters and track them by your own using the Add Node and Add Drawings features! Please let me know what you think and keep in mind, that this project is very new and some locations might be wrong or missing. I appreciate your feedback!

17 hours into Avowed. finished the first gameplay area. Felt like writing something. (Not sure how many areas total, they mention 4 settlements, so maybe 4+?) Generally, I feel it's good, but not great. That might still change, of course. + Story. I kinda feel like I know where the story is going, but we'll see. It certainly advanced a great deal in the first area. So far seems to fit in the universe well enough. + There's lots of decisions you can make about stuff. Quests resolutions, story etc. No idea how much meat there actually is behind those decisions yet, since I only played once. There seem to be two main dimensions you make decisions around, whether you want strict or more lax rule in the Living Lands, and about the fantasy stuff going on. Maybe it'll get more complicated in the end, dunno. + Exploration: Lots of parkour, but because the town layouts are realistic, it's fun enough. By default the game highlights treasure with both visual and audio clues, and the game is basically designed around it, ie. there's stuff you're very unlikely to find if you don't have the cues on. But due to the itemization (below), it doesn't matter much if you miss treasure. + Combat is fun. Very explosive, probably even if you weren't throwing around fireballs. I'm playing a pure wizard, wands and spellbooks and so on. I use the book of elements and book of greater elements, so it's fireballs and chain lightning etc. Bit of a glass cannon, I win most combats by killing stuff before they get in my face. I lose when there's too many coming for different directions. Thankfully the first companion you find has taunt abilities, so that helps a lot. Enemy AI often prioritizes the PC, and ranged enemies don't seem to ever miss, so that's hard for my wizard. Aiming AoE spells is hard unless you have the high ground. - Itemization. Because you're only equipping a single character and there's a upgrade/crafting system, 95% of what you find is materials to upgrade your items, so it isn't very interesting. - The starting area has only 2 companions, so it's either them or none at all. At least I didn't find either annoying. - Encounter design isn't very varied. First area has basically 4-5 different enemy groups, so it's always a mix of them, even if there doesn't seem to be any reason why Xaurips, spiders and bears are hanging together. It gets repetitive. Hopefully there's different enemies in future areas.

Parents: What's your New Years' resolutions? Honesty is only the best policy if it doesn't end up with your parents beating you.

It does sound impressive though. Maga cultists are not known for their critical thinking edit: I know I shouldn't, but I can't help but see the Trump presidency as the forerunner to the events in the movie Idiocracy

Avowed - It's fantastic. It looks great. The intro area is really well done. I just reached the first city.

Arcanum is the most underrated Fallout game.

I can't talk to the Apothecary during the main quest. This is most likely due to me having encountered him before. When I returned for the quest, I had to fight the big guy once more, but the Apothecary never leaves his "scared" animation. A quick search says this can be fixed by reloading a save before ever interacting with the NPC, but let's be honest, I'm not about to reload an 8 hour old save. Is anybody aware of another possible fix? Or do I have to wait for a bug fix to continue the main story? Things I tried: -Restarting the game. -Reloading the area. -Doing another quest. -Resting at camp.

Hey, playing PotD (I'm about 20h into the game) and just realised something-I-really-wish-I-knew-before regarding quality of dropped unique weapons (I'm pretty sure it works the same with armor, I didn't tested it though). Here it is : If you own a Fine quality weapon (unique or not, does not matter), all unique weapons you will drop will be Fine quality too !!! So you need to upgrade at least one weapon to Fine as soon as you can ! This will save you tons of materials (especially adra because unique gear requires adra to upgrade !) I was hoarding my materials while looking for all unique gear in the first zone and thought I would upgrade the weapon I like the most after I get everthing. This was terrible idea because now all my unique gear is common quality and I need tons of adra to upgrade it to Fine Quality ! As I said I only tested it with weapons, but it's probably the same with armors. Bad design imo but it is what it is. Hope it saves you some frustration EDIT after further testing : It seems that the quality of an item is set forever as soon as you display its tooltip. Even if you let it on the ground and come back later to pick it up, its quality will remain the same. On the other hand, if you manage to not "see" the item (i.e. to not display its tooltip), the game will not lock its quality and it will continue to upgrade as you upgrade your own items.

This probably also means those uniques will sell for more money too. I went back to Dawnshore to grab a unique I'd missed and was surprised to see it drop at Exceptional quality (worth 2k), knowing I could have gotten it at like level 3 if I'd known where to look. So in other words, uniques you don't need immediately should be left behind until you do need them for cash/reagents, because they will magically evolve if left alone. And you have to keep a list of which ones you've yet to collect, across zones. Yeah, this is no good.

This is me as well. If it isn't on GOG or DRM-free elsewhere then I'm passing on the game. I used to occasionally buy sports games but I refuse to give EA or 2k any money these days.

Great to hear - the lack of it in Outer Worlds made things really awkward. I'd be close enough to an enemy to touch them and then ...welp, guess I'll shoot them now.

It's not like WoW, although I wouldn't say it is as developed as Dishonored. You can sneak around, and you have a silent ability takedown.

Kingdom come deliverance is Cryengine, and it looks great at mid-high settings at 1440p 60fps. No stuttering, no upscaling, no ray tracing, on the GOAT. the Gtx1080. 9 years old and still doing it. I think we are at a point where the graphics feature arms race is turning out to be quite detrimental to the overall experience, unless you are willing to pay an absurd amount of money you will be left wanting. They keep adding features that cancel out generational performance improvements and are themselves not as desirable as a stable framerate and frame time graph.

Just happened to me as well. Killed Thalla (normally) hours ago, now I need to talk to the apothecary for the main quest and I can't. When I approached the apothecary, Thalla spawned in, I killed him again, and he immediately despawned without the death animation. Reloaded, fought him again, killed him again, and he died normally and dropped loot this time, but I still cannot talk to the apothecary. Saved and then loaded the new save, and Thalla is gone, but I still cannot to talk to the apothecary. This seems like an issue you can stumble into pretty easily, hopefully a patch isn't too far off.

Ok, so I've played some more Deadfire and finished the first island. Have to say that the TB combat does really feel so much better. Seems like it's the first time I'll actually try to place my dudes in a tactical manner.

You people made me download Deadfire again to check out the turn based mode. Well, trying to download... for some reason Steam isn't budging at all and I'm downloading with like 100bps. /Edit: Finished download, made my character, started a new game. Damn, I forgot how good it looked. And I love being a pirate in a pirate rpg. Now I just wish the controls would be more like BG3, lol. Also love the TB mode so far... Always hated the RTwP blobbing. Also I honestly wish the dialog would be thinned down a little. There's so much clutter that could be removed ez and it would make for a smoother reading experience. Oh, also I remember that I hated the avatar selection back in the days... still do today. Nothing fits my actual character, which sucks hard.

My early thoughts are that Deadfire feels like Neverwinter Nights 2 and it's expansions in the Infinity Engine, in a really good way. I noticed that there are Critical Role portraits and voicepacks, I wonder if the popularity of shows like that and LA by Night had anything to do with Obsidian going so heavily for that pen & paper vibe with all the skill checks and little details like everyone reacting to you being a godlike. I think that's amazing by the way and I'm all for it, but it's crazy to think how much effort that must have taken, they went way above and beyond anything I've seen before in an RPG. It's super impressive to see how much work and talent Obsidian poured into Deadfire. I've made it to Neketaka and I'm overwhelmed and intimidated by the size of the city, let alone the rest of the game. I have a list of all the companions and sidekicks and where to recruit them, so I'm just ticking those off initially, so far they all seem like an interesting bunch. Did Obsidian say why they reduced the party size to 5? I'd guess it's because it's easier to balance the roleplaying side of things but for combat it's a bit like losing a limb.

Yes I found PoE2 improved on almost every level and PoE1 was a great game I particularly liked the open-world design of PoE2 and the whole sailing mechanics And great party members to interact with, my favourite being Xoti with her cute Southern accent

I completed Pillars of Eternity a couple of days ago. I had such a good time, I haven't played an old school RPG for a couple of years despite it being my favorite genre and Obsidian made an absolute banger here. It had a really good story, and not having the curtain pulled back until the very end made all the reveals very impactful. I was planning to play something that's totally different between Pillars 1 & 2 so I didn't get bored with the real-time and pause genre but after the last couple of hours of PoE1 I just have to know what happens next now so I've started playing Deadfire immediately. I've basically just started, I'm about to repair the ship and leave the first island. It was a bit jarring for the first hour or so with the new UI and going from a typical medieval setting to a swashbuckling pirate adventure but it's already obvious that the quality of the writing and RPG mechanics are so much improved here. I'm very much looking forward to seeing the rest of the game.

I love GoG and prefer it for purchases, but Galaxy still sucks for me. I mean it works, but it has some weird updating error that never seems to get fixed. It's also just not that easy to navigate. But I still use it for a couple reasons: 1. I love the preservation of classic titles 2. My son has taken over my Steam account.

Yeah, I personally don't particularly mind if a game has DRM for a few months to half a year - even if it's Denuvo. Mind you, I'm not going to buy it while it has Denuvo, but I understand its use for that initial release period, since initial release is supposedly where games lose the most revenue to piracy. But I very much like to see games eventually get a DRM or effectively DRM-free release. I prefer GOG for its actually fully DRM-free approach, but basic Steam-wrapping can be disabled by pretty much anyone if they look up how, and that's what's typically used for most singleplayer games on Steam. Ubisoft is one of a few companies that seem to never remove Denuvo from their games no matter how old the games in question get. I wouldn't play, much less buy, any Ubisoft games in the first place, but it's nice of them to to enforce that I don't.

I was slightly disappointed to hear about the delay until I realised northern hemisphere spring is like, as little as one month after the game's release date? That's basically a simultaneous release for my purposes. I too have not played KCD1 despite being able to see the Collector's Edition box right in front of me right now. I'll always opt for GOG if possible. And if not, I'll often just skip any game that isn't one of my very few must-haves. Games on the "maybe" list - I'll throw out Dave the Diver as an example - turn into a firm do-not-buy unless available on GOG, or possibly as an Xbox Play Anywhere title.

Don't look up

Navigating that the core temp tonight will be -40c!

Snow is irritating, running out of space to clear it to. 20 cm this week and maybe 25 cm this weekend. Guess will have to shovel it while it's still falling, chip away at the boulder.