Humanoid

Unless there's a separate project I'm not aware of, this just seems to be the old game patched up just enough so people won't refund it immediately due to crashes after buying it.

Well Nintendo just announced that they're shutting down Mario Kart Tour.

Solo, or with optional party members, great. Mandatory pre-made party members, I begrudgingly accept. Manually creating a whole party, just about a dealbreaker.

We don't even know if the game is intended to be Fallout 5 as such, and I suspect much of the outcome is dependent on whether it is, or whether it's a spinoff. In the former case, I assume it could only be the Creation engine because that's what people expect from a "Bethesda" game. In the latter case, all bets are off, Obsidian could even point to BG3's success and argue to make a game in that style.

I'm not generally fussed about which IP they use unless it's one of the few I specifically dislike. I guess my greater concern is how much work will be simply thrown away now given it's not exactly a genre fit like adapting Van Buren content to New Vegas. Actually, whatever, just put the Avowed companions in Fallout 5 without modification or explanation. cue Jefferson Rhapsody

I should go back and finish Avowed before my Game Pass expires later this year. I tend to find I lose momentum in dark, gloomy zones and such was the case in the second region of the game. I do agree with the criticism that it's a bit formulaic though - I understand it's not meant to be a game with grand ambitions and multiple ways to tackle every quest, but precious few quests were resolvable with anything but combat, and stealth merely existed as a means to open combat, rather than to bypass it. I get that it's a lot of effort for a mechanic relatively few players even engage with, but it's the only reason I persisted with Cyberpunk, for example.

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.