Humanoid

Bought myself the Moza Trucking Bundle and add-on stalks with the intention of playing the new Nordic Horizons expansion for Euro Truck Sim 2. Alas, stock for the stalks was delayed and I won't get it until next year. Using the wheel by itself has been a big change from the old Logitech G920 I was using, mostly due to the wheel being approximately double the size. However, I don't think I could recommend using it in this mode without the stalks because the missing inputs stick out like a sore thumb. There simply isn't a conveniently accessible button binding for gear shifts (no paddles on a truck wheel obviously) and indicators. My feedback as it stands, therefore, is to buy both the wheel and the stalks or to buy neither.

And also on the smaller scale

On the other hand, the existing Forgotten Realms worldbuilding can get in the way of immersion as well. I did not find the existence of the Act 2 area being left cursed for the past 100 years to believable for example, in a similar way perhaps to how Bethesda Fallout games would have you believe people still live in bombed out ruins full of debris 200 years after the war. And that's to say nothing of how the story interacts with access to restorative and resurrection magic in the setting. But yeah, mechanically the D:OS games were weird with the extremely steep level scaling essentially funneling the player into a fixed path through the zones. BG3 didn't have that issue at all, but in some ways had the opposite problem inherent to modern D&D which unbelievably still has things like empty level-ups where you don't do anything but click the confirm button, and the continuing insanity of only every second stat point increase doing anything (seriously, a quarter of a century of this nonsense). Thankfully Cyberpunk did not level/stat/perk-gate silent takedowns so I could still merrily ignore every single mechanic complained about by that YouTuber. Healing? Grenades? Stamina? Never heard of 'em.

I could see them simplifying the name if they're making turn-based RPGs their signature and just soft-reboot the naming scheme. The name Divinity: Original Sin is a bit of a mouthful otherwise. But it's also fully possible that gameplay might resemble Divinity 2 (third person new Witcher-like), or less likely, Divine Divinity (isometric Diablo-like). I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's got no chance of resembling Dragon Commander.

BG3 doesn't split XP, you're on the same levelling curve whether solo or with a party of six and XP is synced such that any party member with less XP than your main character will be brought up to match them. Note this doesn't work in the reverse, so it's possible to get companions that are higher level than the player character (though this is only really likely to be seen when speedrunning). For the most part, it also attempts to prevent double-dipping on XP, in that if you kill an enemy after talking your way past them, they won't award any kill XP. Yeah, this catches out a few people and is a bit of a silly outcome. I think it's an engine limitation - enemies can't go through zone transitions so the ones outside can never reinforce the ones inside and vice versa. That limitation also means the optimal solution is to fast travel out from the indoor area so you can engage the outdoor ones from a safer distance. (It's also a bit dumb that two of the leaders can be assassinated properly with the camp remaining neutral, but one just sets an unavoidable faction-wide aggro flag) Speaking of engine limitations, the text-only "books" in the game are a pretty glaring one. The system doesn't support graphics so even if you're looking at a map or a drawing, you just get text saying stuff like "this is a map showing an X nearby". The D:OS engine has done good service over the years and has seen some nice upgrades, but it's time for Larian to move on.

Haven't tried Museum yet, but Hospital and Campus were good but somewhat limited games. By that I mean the core gameplay loop was solid, and the aesthetic and humour are well done for anyone looking for something like the old Bullfrog games. Definitely no regrets in buying the base games. However the limits become apparent once you consider the expansion model, where each new thing added isn't ever going to be truly "new". Any new disease they add in Hospital for example is functionally the same as any other disease, just with new graphics on the patients, and a matching new "new disease curing room" to go with it. Hopefully the reports on it improving on is predecessors is true. I get mentally tired already just thinking of the arbitrary "increase room value" goals from both Hospital and Campus, where the supposed challenge of the later levels just involves spamming decorative items inside each room.

I think hiving launch clans behind DLC is a deal-breaker for me even if the game miraculously isn't a complete car crash.

It's a weird mix of styles, both in terms of setting and in gameplay. Ultimately I almost always preferred it when the game allowed for emergent gameplay, and was least happy when the game tried to be cinematic. It was great for example when the game let you bypass an early boss fight by means of a trivial QTE. But where was that kind of freedom later in the game, and in PL? It's almost a bit of Bethesda-itis. "We put a lot of effort into this awesome content, and you will experience it.

Back in the late 90s, I bought a PC Gaming magazine (not sure which, I think it was a British publication) that contained a full walkthrough of Resident Evil 1. I have no interest whatsoever in Resident Evil or frankly anything in the horror genre in general, but I read that entire walkthrough start-to-finish. After all, I paid for that magazine and I'll be damned if I didn't get full value from my allowance money. So yeah, that's the sum of my experience with the series.

Wasn't that because they made the game freeware?

While I haven't played the game myself, there's an in-game option to turn off QTEs when the player attacks, which solves half the problem. However it doesn't affect the QTEs for when you're defending, which I assume is a game balance thing - if you succeed every single time, you never take damage and thus the game completely breaks. Fortunately there's already a mod to tweak them by increasing the window by 50/100/200%.

My unholy trinity of bad games I've had the misfortune to purchase are Oblivion, Mass Effect 3 and Civilization Call to Power.

Scratched my Civ4 itch for now by going one world size up (to standard), which only validated my usual preference for small planets. It felt a bit easier but that may have been just down to RNG, and it was only on Monarch difficulty anyway. Anyway, for the past few weeks I'd been thinking "I haven't played Rimworld for a few patches now, let's see what's new". Turns out that was a pretty big understatement: based on my old saves, the last time I played was a pre-release build, albeit the final one before 1.0. For context, it's at 1.5 now and four expansions have been released in the interim. Incidentally, while those old saves do load with some warnings, the UI ends up broken so they're not really playable. I still haven't finished Avowed and right now I'm kind of in "wait for the announced roadmap" mode. I also see KCD2 is now out on GOG and I'll buy it at some point in the near-ish future, though I don't know if I'd wait for a token-ish sale price.

Weirdly, both of the major bugs in Avowed that I encountered happened on my second day of playing, within 15 minutes of each other. Firstly there was a hard CTD when looting the chest in the watermill (the one which acts as a tutorial for upgrading your gear). Then shortly thereafter, while walking past the ruins of the wall on the way to rescue the mayor, I noticed various assets had stopped loading in, stuff like lampposts, enemies, then I fell through the world. That said, I've been so consumed by a Civ4 binge that I haven't finished Emerald Stair yet. I also kinda don't like how gloomy it is relative to Dawnshore which might play a part in it.

*Missing characters 12* Cadegund