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--Mood: crabby, pessimistic, avoidant yet paradoxically also confrontational --Physical state: ok/adequate but maybe typical aging, post-menopausal and other such woes, 57, and oh hey am I finally starting to get slight eye bags and slightly droopy cheeks? Bummer. --Mental state: rut, exhausted, withering --Hubby's health (physical and mental): nothing super dramatic, but not great either. I think a lot about "what if's" lately. --Reason for writing/sharing: not sure. Just felt a brief need. That is all. I will aim for happy thoughts this week. And I will be replacing the awful kitchen faucet the house came with tomorrow. It'll be the 1st time trying it on my own - watched hubby twice over the years, and he can advise. Something small but mentally satisfying/productive, at least. Maybe I'll try fixing part of the shower's tile grout, too. Wish me luck.

Right, well, I'm a customer too, and this customer says "Great job Obsidian for ditching stupid, useless romances in your RPGs." Their developer resources are much better spent on pretty much anything else.

The original had a fantastic romance between Pavarti and that other lady, so I guess you just mean your PC can't be a horndog with multiple companions. Oh no.

No need to apologise! But thanks for providing. I'm not a dev or anything, but have spent most of my adult live involved in technical support or troubleshooting of one kind or another, so I know this info is helpful. If we, the users, can establish any kind of pattern to these things happening, then that might help the devs identify what part of the code/flow is having issues, and get them to a fix faster. : ) So thanks to you and MushRoomQueen -- we now know it's not platform-specific. If this keeps happening, and if you're able to discern any pattern, please post again! For example: o Does it seem to happen coincident to combat? If so: does your health bar status change at all? (My first thought is, "is the system is automatically consuming your food and drinks once you come out of combat to bring you to full health, instead of that being an action that you as a player are deciding to trigger?") o Do you have a sense of "it happens after x minutes/hours", such as, at some point, you think, "it's about time to check to see if my food/drink has disappeared again", because you've started to notice a pattern in time? o Did it seem to start happening after some point in the game? If so, do you recall what you were doing around that time -- did you complete a particular quest, for example? It's interesting that MushRoomQueen reported that this happened halfway through the tutorial. That's pretty early and an interesting data point, thank you. : )

Im about 80 hours into Cyb2077 and Im about to finish the last mission Its been fun but not fantastic, firstly the game gets a 60/100 on the globally respected " BruceVC game rating system ". Thats not a terrible score, anything higher than 50 is still worth playing I found myself getting bored with the game and most of the missions and the main reason for this is because Im not a big cyberpunk fan. So its not like Witcher and fantasy which is my favourite RPG genre First what I liked about the game very stable now. No serious bugs or crashes, maybe 3-4 CTD and I was using loads of mods I liked the hacking and braindance mechanics I liked the details with Night City and the NPC. It felt like a living city NPC and companions had interesting side quests I completed Phantom Liberty in the middle of the main quest and that was an interesting diversion There were some unique side-quests and choices I had to make like should I support the guy who wanted to crucify himself on live TV The races were fun and hunting all the cyberpsychos added some challenge to combat What I didnt like about the game Combat becomes too easy, nothing really can kill you on higher levels the city doesn't really have much to do outside of a few common activities the lore didn't motivate or interest me. not enough Romance or adult content. This is suppose to be a city of depravity and corruption and you were limited around what you could interact with despite extensive crafting available I ended up just using 3 weapons all the time I didnt end up using most of the special abilities as you increase in levels because I didnt need to use them in combat. Its a strange mechanical implementation in a game if you dont need to use something you have levelled up towards? As I mentioned my main issues with the game is because Im just not a cyberpunk fan Overall, fun game but nothing like the Witcher games

For me personally, I am finding the writing in this game to be some of the most honest emotional writing in a modern RPG than I can remember. And relationships are extremely complex and varied. The amount of time and effort that it would take an entire dedicated writing devision to do it to the standard that is set by the writing now would be immense and not very realistic. The amount of variables, variants of playstyles, the vast array of the consumer base, that they would have to consider would probably honestly take hundreds of thousands of working hours which would have delayed the game and increased their running costs which would have effected the sell price or the quality in the end which either way would have been a loss for us, the players. That is my personal thought on this though and I know my view is not the only one and all are valid.

Oh, come on, I never said I was "against" upscaling, at least not in any black and white way. I've used DLSS-Quality plenty of times by now and I've said it's improved enough that Quality or sometimes, maybe, Balanced, is acceptable image wise. That's useful for extending life of a system. But going to extremes with upscaling just to play a game, losing tons of image quality, the ability for the image to look good on a larger screen, and all the artifacting/input delay/other stuff if you have to take upscaling/other too far = no. I'm just not that desperate to play those kind of titles on release. And I'm aware re: 2080ti. Never tried to imply my gpu is some total potato? Why do you think I haven't upgraded it yet? It still works for most titles/things. As to "surviving" AAA/UE5. lol. Having to build a new rig/system periodically is the way it is. Been doing that for decades now, of course. You're making it sound like I'm saying I never want to upgrade ever ever again. That's not it. I don't want to upgrade right now when it's obvious even current hardware won't last long/isn't enough for these games (even WITH upscaling), for the ridiculous prices of said hardware. The dev's will get better at using UE5 (and/or UE5 will improve, or another engine will take over in a few years, or), hardware will improve a little (probably not tons), and so on, if I wait. Or one can play some such games at 900p/30+fps on a 570 (saw a video with that, heh). That's not my style anymore tho - because I like bigger screens, not because I'm some mega-resolution or fps nut. If 1080 still looked great (to me) on a 55", I'd use it. But it doesn't. And if I had to upscale on top of that, even worse. Such is up to users preferences.

Yeah this happened to me half way through the tutorial and at first I thought I'd just somehow used them all but it happened again and was rather annoying when I needed to heal up after combat.

DF take (2080Ti is still a stronger card than the 4060, seems heavy on the CPU though): Re STALKER: The indie-Likes are coming here too. One is with furrys! The other has a demo still up. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1963610/Road_to_Vostok/

Went back to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 now that about a year has passed and we're on the 1.6.1 patch to see how far the game has come and...well, they've added Night Vision Devices, and the Mosin, and it does run more stable, but other than that very little seems to have changed about the things I disliked. In fact, one of my main complaints, enemy spawning, seems to have regressed since I last played, even at release with enemies obnoxiously spawning around you it'd take some effort to actually catch them "popping in", but on 1.6.1 I've literally had enemies pop into existence right in front of me on enough occasions that it's become rather bothersome. There's also generally too many, it's literally impossible to get from A to B without the game spawning a bunch of enemies around you, if you're lucky they'll be too busy fighting each-other (which, I suppose, is an improvement over release where they'd all go for you). To test whether it was the game or I was just imagining things it I decided to make the trek from Quiet to Azimuth Station (after the mission that takes place there) multiple times in a row, this is a short distance that has you cross a tiny strip of empty bog, of the 8 times in a row I made the corssing (4 in each direction) I didn't run into anything only once, every other time there was something going on in this tiny strip of land. That's ridiculous, especially since there's no realistic way for anything to get there. Missions still have the same issues they've always had with exposition but they've somehow managed to break in-world subtitles (which is a bit of an issue, seeing as I can't stand the English VO, but I also don't speak Ukrainian...) so I have to rely on memory for much of the context. Haven't had any main missions outright break though, which is nice. Worst I had was an early side missions for the Ward in the Chemical Plant that I had to reload 6 or 7 times to get to function correctly. So yeah...there's supposed to be an engine update in the next patch (1.7), honestly not sure what good it'll do unless it somehow also fixes the spawn issues.

Please fix it.

Stygian: Outer Gods. Still Early Access, with a final release scheduled first half of 2026 or so. But as I'm playing highest difficulty and really take my time, I've already clocked ten hours into it according to the in-game clock. Still not finished. Stygian's got Cthulhu, Lovecraft's Kingsport as a sort of hub world gradually unlocking, some RPG elements (including a skill that lets you talk with 'em dead), a bit of stealth -- plus Raphael Colantonio (Arkane's founder, former CEO and gaming's Last Action Hero) as the voice of THE SEER. Had to have it. The mood is already pretty damn spot on. Positive that this can be a better game than the ancient Dark Corners Of The Earth.

Honestly that sounds fairly sane given the state of the world.

You could say that about just any type of relationship in cRPGa, including friendship. Building relationships with companions by doing quests for them is a popular approach to writing. And a friendship can feel every bit as forced if it is not player's choice but writer's insistence. I've actually had less issues with romances (as someone who rarely plays them) because usually there is a way to turn them down. One game where I've found the approach to relationshps interesting (even if the game itself was barely finished and not that good) was Dragon Age 2, because it had both friendship an rivarly. My character ended up with very different relationships with everyone at the end of the game, and it didn't feel like simply completing the companion quests meant everyone was now best buddies.

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/valves-latest-counter-strike-2-update-flashbangs-entire-skins-market-headshots-speculators-and-clutch-defuses-inflationary-market-prices/

Romance does not bother me either way. If there is, fine. If there isn't, fine.

I think there are just as many customers who don't care if the game has no romance. And some that would even prefer that it doesn't have romance options. I fall into the group of customers who don't care either way. I respect your opinion, but it's a little surprising that no romance is a complete deal breaker for you.

I get what you mean. Romance in a lot of RPGs feels forced, shallow, and almost like a checklist feature. You talk to a character a few times, pick the “flirty” dialogue options, give them a gift or two, and suddenly they’re in love with you. Then after the predictable “romance scene,” the story basically forgets the relationship ever existed. There’s no actual depth, no growth, no conflict—just a lazy mini-quest that pretends to be character development. If romance is going to be in a game, it should matter to the narrative, not just exist for a cheap reward or fan service.

I understand why people want romance in video games.. However, I've never been a fan of how romance is handled in most video games, especially RPG's. It's always extremely lame, takes minimal dialogue and effort and the main objective is usually just to get them in bed. There's then sometimes some idiotic reward for doing so and the relationship is never brought up again. It's just so stupid. Unless the developers are going to put real time and effort into an in-game romance, then there's no reason for it. And if a players imagination is good enough to find actual substance in past lame RPG' romances, they shouldn't need any prompting or hints of romance to create one themselves in any RPG. Just let your imagination go wild, create your own romance stories and dont' worry about there being no dialogue in the game for it. I mean, there are beloved companions from past games that seriously have no substance or backstory whatsoever, people just love the characters because of what they created in their head while running around with that character for 60 hours.

As somebody who enjoyed Baldur's Gate 3, I would argue that even that game handled romance poorly. Characters that I had given little to no focus where suddenly looking to jump my bones by the end of the first act. What started as a polite conversations with Gale and Wyll turned into these weird moments of sexual tension. I'd spoken to each of them an entire three times, including the time I met them. Then again, I can't say that I personally understand the fascination with romance in games like this. Were I in any way interested I'd just play one of those dating sims.

Everybody who uses Area of Effect (AoE) abilities of any kind. This includes nearly every class. Even Barb's Carnage is affected. Rogues may get the least out of it unless they are using equipment with lots of spellbindings (like a sabre with Fireball on it or something). Note that a Ring of Overseeing doesn't stack with Aloth's Armor (also Overseeing). One will get suppressed. You can only make use of one Overseeing item. But it stacks with the effects of Intellect (which also influences AoE size). It also staks with Voice of th Mountaintop (chanter item) which raises your chant AoE. So high INT + Overseeing + Voice of the Mountaintop = big, big chant area. There are also boots for Paladins which raise their aura AoE. They also stack with Overseeing and INT.

This is ridiculous Obsidian. This time your excuse for no romance in The Outer Worlds 2 is not that you don't have enough money but that it somehow detracts from the RPG??? (and I own POE 1 & 2 Complete Editions and The Spacer Choice Edition of the Outer Worlds) RPG's are about RELATIONSHIP's. That's why you develop a Role-Playing Character to relate to the game world in certain ways and not being able to romance NPC's you come across is just plain ridiculous and inorganic. You walk into a bar and see this pretty young lass across the bar and say "Let me buy you a drink" and one things leads to another and your in the sack. What the heck is wrong with THAT? That's the essense of RPG's. You walk around and interact with the world and the characters you meet including romancing some of them. I just don't get this AVERSION to Romance with Obsidian Now? Larian Studios is able to do it. Rockstar is able to do in MULTIPLE Games (The scenario I painted is straight out of Red Dead Redemption 2). You have the largest publisher in the World backing your work and placing a $80 price tag on The Outer Worlds 2 and you weren't able to any romance to it for that price?? You may not want to hear what I'm saying but I am a Customer and the "Customer is always right" because if we don't buy your games, your out of business, Period!