Humanoid

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

Yeah, I'm only halfway through the second zone so it may change by the end of the journey, but at the moment I feel it's a good game that won't live particularly long in my mind. I mean, I suppose for me personally the ceiling was always going to be kind of low because of its modest ambitions - no matter how I build my character it'll always mostly be about clearing camps of enemies with very few non-combat exceptions. It doesn't even remotely attempt to be simulationist in terms of making a living, breathing gameworld, and that's fine - it just means it's not something I'd be looking to revisit in the future. The ideal Game Pass game, in a way.

There are more than five bandits but I guess exactly five of them drop the quest item, and the only way you know you need exactly five is that that the quest log updates when you loot the fifth. It's all very gamey in an MMO sort of way. The other bounties are thankfully more straightforward - run-of-the-mill "bring me the leader's head" fare. I believe the teleporting quest item is likely meant to be an anti-frustration feature. I had four of the items, couldn't find the fifth, went back to the questgiver anyway to see if there was any progress to be had there (which of course there wasn't). Went back to the bandit camp, nothing doing. But it turns out the item had been teleported to the floor of the destination fast travel point within the city, the first fast travel destination I had selected after wiping out the bandit camp.

On a related note, I can't figure out a way to fast travel to a camp site without camping, and that kind of takes me out of it. I also got annoyed by the WoW-esque "collect 5 Defias bandit masks" type quest, except that unlike WoW, the game doesn't even tell you how many you need. Apparently I missed looting one of the five, and then the quest item simply spawned at a fast travel point. Seriously? Still generally positive about the game mind you, and while the stealth approach has been disappointing, I don't dislike combat as much as I expected to. It's like the opposite of Cyberpunk, where I really like the stealth but hate the combat. P.S. Every NPC's eyebrows look kind of weird in this engine.

I kinda liked that the protagonists of It Takes Two are actually terrible, extraordinarily selfish people if you give it any thought. It was my game of the year. I liked A Way Out too, and will be travelling to Melbourne next month in order to play Split Fiction co-op in person with my sister.

I'd like to see a PoE match-3 game.

The intro cutscene put me in the mind of Lord British saying "I must send thee, Avatar, through the pillars to the Serpent Isle!"

I've only just finished the tutorial zone and arrived at the first town. Early observations: 1) The third-person camera feels like a bit of an afterthought in that it exposes the janky player character animations. Jumping looks weird, and the dodging animation ...well, there isn't really a dodging animation and you just magically slide around. But it remains my preference because I don't buy into the belief that first-person cameras are more immersive. At least, not while my viewport is limited to a narrow 16:9 window. 2) I like that so far I don't seem to be expected to loot random bodies and containers, but the flipside of this is that I hate that breaking random crates and pots is rewarded. I'm going to refuse to keep doing it, and the opportunity cost based on what I've seen so far doesn't seem to be particularly large. 3) I welcome the return of stealth kills, though it's weird that they relate it to some mystical godlike power instead of something more mundane. However it's ridiculous that performing one automatically cancels stealth, and you have to always remember to manually re-crouch after each kill.

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.

So I haven't been following the development of Avowed at all. Is using stealth to ghost encounters actually a thing (like say, Dishonored) or is it just a mechanism to front-load damage when starting a fight (like say, WoW)?

It was between Civ4 and XCOM Long War for me when I was looking for a filler game to revisit until Avowed releases. Went with XCOM for now, but only so far as to pick up my old perpetual endgame save. I'll probably have time to fit in a game or two of Civ4 after I've had my fill though, and for me it's still the undisputed king. Not a whole lot to comment on in terms of the XCOM campaign, just stomping on the aliens with a fully kitted out squad. It's frustrating though that the aliens just spam battleships at this point - I can shoot them down reliably enough but I just can't be bothered doing the loooong missions that result.

Yep. Darkest Dungeon was just to test out that Samsung Smart Fridge mod without messing with my GOG install.

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.

My 30 second attention span means I never played Gwent after that first time in the prologue.

I've always wanted to play as Roche, where instead of choosing to level up and use various Signs, you would level up and use various expletives and insults.

Would it be morally wrong to boink Shani as Ciri?

Won't affect nVidia because the 5060 will sell no matter how much VRAM it has, but hopefully we've seen the last of the 8GB AMD x600 cards.

Don't mind the approach personally. I know a fair few people wanted a new, fully customisable player character, but a more customisable character carries with it a greater expectation of more roleplaying freedom. That's not really CDPR's schtick. I don't mind nearly as much when Geralt's options for dealing with a given situation are limited to what's in character for him, but put V in that same situation and I'm significantly more disappointed at having the follow the same rails.

I was doubting that any place that uses a non-dollar currency would use the colloquial term "bucks" for their money, but then Wikipedia told me that South Africa does indeed do that. EDIT: I now have the inverse question on whether places like Singapore and Hong Kong ever call their dollars bucks.

Boy, that's a blast from the past. (So is Origin, technically)

Ah, I generated using a password manager then pasted it into the field, which provided no feedback other than saying it was invalid. I then reduced it to 16, but had to regenerate a couple of times to get one containing no illegal special characters, because again they don't tell you which ones are legal. Not as bad an experience as I had with Rabobank recently though, who accepted an invalid password (despite all the conditions coming up green) but then went to an error screen afterwards, giving no hint that it was even the password step that went wrong.

Attempted to log in to my account, set a new password, etc. Somehow over the years they've *lowered* the maximum password length to 16. That, and it doesn't actually tell you that or any other password requirements, it just tells you it's not valid so you have to look up the requirements separately.

Losing my character names when the Aussie servers were shut down and merged into the US ones was one of the big reasons I never bothered even trying to play the game again. And all that only to bring the servers back later...

I have a bit of an itch to try the character creator to see if the characters I see in reviews are outliers or if that's really the best they can manage with the tools. But it's not an itch worth burning 80GB+ of download quota on just yet. The EA Play trial will be there forever anyway so no rush. DA1 was earnest in that Bioware put in a lot of time and effort to make the best game they could while the company was still independent. For me it didn't hit, but I respect it. Conceptually another "save the world" story was not what I was after, and in terms of narrative the game made me actively not want to save the world with the way the origin stories are written. DA2 was the opposite, in that it was extremely cynical where DA1 was earnest. Conceptually I thought it was a great idea, a smaller-scale, more personal game with lower stakes than usual. The implementation though was just cobbling stuff together in order to meet EA's extreme deadlines and it's just a procession of reused content and waves of enemies spawning out of thin air. DA3 was a single-player MMO.