Humanoid

D&D always had a problem where there were so many levels with no interesting decisions to make ...then 5E made it worse by making feats even less frequently obtained, and merging the ASI system into it, meaning the optimal feat to take often was just ...+2 Dex. Feels like I'm just levelling on rails. Funny you explicitly mention the rogue/fighter multiclass. I prefer to not take any levels in fighter, and to not dual-wield. However 5E punishes this heavily by removing native multi-attack from rogues. Unless I dual-wield, or get extra attack from taking 5 levels in a different class, all my eggs are in one basket. If I miss the one attack roll I get per round, I'm complete dead weight. (And as is often relevant in videogames, if I get pulled into a scripted combat setpiece without the opportunity to stealth and win initiative relative to the fighter, I'm semi dead weight. And then sneak attack gets outscaled the moment weapons with extra per-hit damage dice start appearing.)

Oh I absolutely agree on the financial aspect, and it'll be interesting how much of the success will carry over to their future projects. I just don't find D&D, particularly in 5E guise, very compelling. This is especially true for my preferred RP class of rogue, which I now find distinctly unfun. Coincidentally I'm currently playing the final Palace of Ice expansion for Solasta. It's ...alright, though as I near the level cap the delicate balance that used to exist has finally broken. Just a standard feature of high level D&D I suppose, even with the attunement limit actually implemented.

My sum experience with LoTR was getting bored watching the extended edition of the first (Jackson) movie and never touching any Tolkien stuff before or since. But I'll probably be happy to give this a go, especially if like KCD2 it ends up on Game Pass. I think Obsidian are still a bit gun-shy about bigger projects and are wary about committing more than around half the studio to any single game in order to dilute the risk. Certainly they're never going to go all-in on one singular project that Larian had, but then again Larian are privately owned and BG3 involved Swen sinking a fair bit of his personal assets into the budget. I do think the end result was great, but it was great despite being a D&D product, not because of it. Happy they've parted ways with Hasbro, and I would not have liked to see Obsidian (or any studio I'm fond of) picking up that poisoned chalice. It's interesting to see the big conglomerates being happier to licence out their hoarded IPs lately though - Might and Magic and Wizardry both ride again. Obviously this is no longer relevant to post-acquisition Obsidian but in another timeline it could have been something.

I also played a smuggler at release and did get to 50, but it was absolutely wild how they were absolutely set on making a melee spec for the smuggler, and so achieved that by forcing them to use a gun that only works at melee range. Yeah... To be fair, I have no idea how much of the concept of a melee gun was made up by the SWTOR team and how much is actual Star Wars lore. For what it's worth, I only ever got two classes to 50 because it took so incredibly long back then. One was the smuggler, solo, and the other was a consular in a co-op run. I think I got an inquisitor to around 30-40 some time later but ran out of momentum (and double XP weekends).

I've solved my own problem by just directly changing the (de)buff values. They're stored in plain text, to give credit to Supergiant for making things accessible and easy to change. XboxGames\Hades II\Content\Content\Scripts\TraitData.lua BaseDamageMultiplierAddition = 0.0, PerEncounterDamageMultiplierAddition = 0.0,

So I started playing Hades 2 yesterday and have just discovered that it has this ridiculous new mechanic where, if the game determines you're progressing through the game too fast (in terms of number of deaths), it will start applying a stacking debuff to you which increases the damage you take by an increasing amount for each subsequent level you clear. Supposedly the reasoning for this mechanic is that they don't want you to clear the next bit of content before the game has the opportunity to show you the various cutscenes and dialogue relating to the current biome/boss. But this is an absurdly ham-fisted approach to the supposed problem and it's definitely soured me on the game significantly even if it's only a temporary inconvenience. The only reason this isn't a bigger deal is that this apparently stops happening after you die 10 times in total, but that's 10 too many times putting up with this nonsense.

Whatever cookie policy gg.deals uses is probably the same one used by the Obsidian forums. 🤐

Both are great resources, which to use probably comes down to whether you're interested in buying from unauthorised keyshops or not. I'm generally not, and while I know you can turn them off in gg.deals, it keeps defaulting back to on.

Decided to launch the game again on a whim, noting that I had a save that was still in the tutorial dungeon from years back. Made a little bit of progress, tried out the turn-based combat, then quit because I got annoyed that the entire party only got one chance to make an skill check (that is, it only checks once against the highest skill modifier in the party). Someday I may look for a mod to try to resolve that little bugbear.

The X3 in Inno3D products just means three fans, the number of slots it occupies or the number of power cables it takes is just coincidence. (While I'm doing the "um actually" thing, it's 16 lanes of PCIe 4.0 speeds because it's limited by what the CPU and motherboard. But that's only a ~1-2% performance loss so mostly immaterial.)

[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bold_and_the_Beautiful]The[/url] [b]Bold[/b] [u]and[/u] [s]the[/s] [i]Beautiful[/i] EDIT: Welp, none of those worked. Now looking whether there's a user-side option to re-enable BBcode.

As with every year, the holiday period is spent visiting my parents and playing co-op games with my sister. The wrap-up: [b]Kingdom: Two Crowns[/b] - Charming if obtuse design. Technically a rogue-lite I guess but so mild as to lose only minimal progress with each death. This becomes especially true in co-op mode as it becomes especially hard to truly die as it then requires both players to lose their crown at the same time. Ultimately there isn't a whole lot of content in the game, all done within a single-digit amount of hours. After getting back home I tried the Shogun campaign, knowing in advance that it's 99% a reskin of the standard European campaign, but all it did was confirm the game doesn't really have meaningful replayability. [b]PlateUp![/b] - If Kingdom was the mildest possible roguelite, then this is at the opposite spectrum. The only meta-progression really is being able to start with a couple of appliances in future runs. Anyway, while visually rather bland, that's obviously not the point of the game. Instead, its main selling point over something like Overcooked is the strategic element required in designing your restaurant before running it. You then are challenged to keep it going for 15 consecutive days without a single failure, and that's the standard way to play the game. There's another face to it all though, and that's a Factorio-like (I think, I've never played Factorio) automation challenge. This is one of those games where by design, you fail eventually because the volume continues to ramp up not just from days 1-15, but indefinitely. I only got the smallest taste of this side of the game, mostly because it only really becomes possible after the 15-day mark, in the optional "overtime" period. That is, you've "won" the level but choose to keep playing until death claims you. I suppose it's apt then, then the only way to stave off death near-indefinitely is to become wholly machine. [b]For The King 2[/b] - This is a game I heard had a really rough launch a couple of years ago, with many players questioning whether it could actually become a better game than its cult-classic predecessor. Just as well then that I didn't try it until recently, and it seems to have matured into a pretty solid product. There are still glitches and general UI jankiness that give a glimpse into its premature launch, but I'm happy to call it an improvement on the first game. The biggest change for mine isn't the limited positioning system added, where you are no longer three characters standing side-by-side, but four characters (plus a posse of optional mercs and pets) arranged in a 2x4 grid (though it's baffling that your starting position within that grid is mostly random). Instead, it's the revamped action economy where instead of simply having a single action per turn, but having a primary and secondary one instead. The main upshot of this is that your offensive moves no longer come to a screeching halt whenever you need to do something like taunting, moving out of a flaming tile, or simply reloading your gun. One recurring criticism I see is that the main campaign is now broken up into five separate ones instead. The sum of the five is of course a fair bit longer than the single campaign of the original game, but this means there is zero continuity between the campaigns in terms of your characters. Instead, you start each leg with a fresh new level 1 party, with the old level 8-9 party being forcibly retired each time. An odd decision indeed, but perhaps excusable in the context that the game scales poorly at high levels. [b]Hades[/b] - Yeah, unlike the others this isn't co-op, it's just what I've been playing solo this month. Day late and dollar short obviously given the sequel has been out for a while now, but I'm holding off on purchasing it until it arrives on the Microsoft Store. An odd thing to do you might think, but the ability to play the same copy and continue the same save between my PC and my Xbox have been invaluable. Anyway, it's a good game with great presentation, with my expectations perhaps set a little too high due to the pre-existing hype. I feel it's a bit too bullet-spongey and visual clarity can also be an issue, especially on smaller screens (and in this context, 55" feels small). Now I've only just cleared the game for the first time, and I'm well aware through genre convention that this is the point where the game truly starts, but I'm not sure I'm really willing to invest that much time into this "post-game" content given the sequel is apparently a "true" sequel which does mostly the same things but better.

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.