Humanoid

It would, up until the point I found out the party AI doesn't work in turn-based mode. Massively disappointing for me since I really can't be bothered controlling a party of six manually, but nor would I ever put up with RTwP again, so I'm at an impasse now. Even four is a stretch for me, so I'm wondering how playing a small party of two, three at a push would work at lower difficulties.

Royal Blue in general is a great choice because it simultaneously leaves both fans of light and dark themes dissatisfied.

Probably more intimidating than the nominal spitting centipedes that did not spit even once, I'm sure. And yeah, I'd have had no way of knowing that the NPC is from a decade-old book, hopefully she doesn't come after me for stealing her portrait...

Figured I'd worry about the details later so I just made a thoroughly vanilla rogue and did the Temple of Trials. Nothing much to report in terms of gameplay but it does seem weird to me that they haven't tried to showcase any combat more complex than essentially 1-2 generic enemies bum-rushing you at a time, they may as well be rats for all the mechanics shown so far. Biggest complaint so far is probably the camera controls, as I can't find a way to satisfactory pan the camera around. Ideally I'd want there to be a setting to hold down a mouse button (especially since left and right mouse buttons are essentially duplicated functionality by default), but that seems a no-go. I've since looked up the mods available and there's one to assign such functionality to the middle mouse button, which doesn't seem ideal to me, but I'll try it out the next time I play. I'm a little confused why there was a temporary uncontrollable companion, who I guessed would die a few minutes into the game, but that hasn't happened. I'm now thinking it'd be cool if all my party members were autonomous like that.

Yeah, perfectly understandable. But for my purposes, I'm planning on a low-difficulty, high-roleplaying sort of a run where I'm not optimising for combat at all, and I have no issue dropping the difficulty setting way down. Fundamentally I'm just looking for a background that matches my concept for a pure thief with a middle-class merchant sort of upbringing, and so none of the backgrounds really fit, unfortunately. I thought picking "none" might give me a generic bonus, but nope, it looks like doing that is a strict handicap. So I'm going with Varisian Explorer which seems the best fit for a non-combat oriented character. I suppose in that context I'm overthinking things as I'm sure the game is perfectly playable even if I make a barely functional player character. I do still want the build to make logical sense though, and so I do still have mild concerns as for example, I'll probably start with a zero strength modifier, and it seems with their low base damage, thrown weapons really want to have a positive modifier. So then I thought I'd go with guns instead, because when skimming through all the regional backgrounds I did notice that one is for a nation known for its firearms. And yet ...no guns in this game. Figures. Kind of silly how the Alkenstar background is still in the game then. So I've packed it in for now, because after a couple of hours I still haven't been able to answer the simplest of questions: what weapon my character will even wield. I'll delve into some basic Pathfinder mechanics first before I can come to a compromise decision on that.

Thought I'd at least go through character creation today, but it's a good thing that I decided to do some preliminary research first because my plan of creating a rogue wielding throwing daggers seems to have been scuppered by, well, the game not having throwing knives. I could have been so easily tricked into taking the Knife Master subclass. Presently I'm having to look up the character backgrounds outside of the game itself, because unfortunately for the various Regional backgrounds, the game omits any sort of explanation of what or where these regions are. You'd think that these particular backgrounds would be the ones that would most benefit from a little one-paragraph blurb explaining them, but nope. Game, you don't need to tell me what a "Craftsman" is, but I'd sure like to know what the hell a "River Kingdoms Daredevil" is.

The Nomad start is the outlier in terms of not knowing Jackie before the events of the game I think? Not quite sure on that but that's the background I went with. I do want to go back and play now that throwing knives are viable (i.e. they don't disintegrate into dust after one use), but it feels I'd just be burning myself out before the expansion release.

Because of the German humour right?

I didn't even know it used cards, just the superhero angle turned me off as soon as it was announced. To an extent it felt like Firaxis becoming just yet another 2K studio since it didn't seem like something a studio making independent decisions would take on. Maybe I'm being too cynical or elitist but I can't imagine a weird superhero mash-up game being someone's - anyone's - passion project. I didn't realise the 10 year anniversary of the XCOM revival quietly passed in the last half-year. I hope I'm not being too revisionist in saying it remains the last Firaxis game I unconditionally enjoyed. In that sense I suppose I wouldn't have been particularly gung-ho about their future prospects, especially if 2K is indeed putting their foot down to a greater degree, and if moving away from Firaxis means greater creative freedom then I'd very much like to see what his next project is.

Testing to see if I'm me again.

I have purchased this month's Humble Choice so I can now participate in the most popular thread in the Obsidian forums. It's the only reason I bought it, obviously. (Now to decide on whether to get the discounted season pass)

The Tomb Raider series is just a poor spin-off of the Lara Croft isometric games. Give me more of those, please.

GOG and Epic can both be set to quit the application instead of minimising to tray in the settings. Not sure about Origin since I don't remember the last time I used it. And this isn't about auto start-up, as I don't do that. I'm perfectly fine with launching manually and typing my password every time and don't want that workflow to change.

Today Steam disabled the command line option to use their old login window, which I was using because the new one always defaults the "Remember Me" checkbox. Ugh, I know it's only one click but I'm inevitably going to forget to click it one day, and I have to go through the unnecessary rigmarole of logging out (which is harder than it should be) just to get it to forget me. And after all these years it still lacks the ability to make the X button completely quit the application. Eventually the other clients are going to catch up not by virtue of improving themselves, but just by waiting for Steam to get worse.

I played the one session of DA3, got through the tutorial, got my HQ, and sent off the timed mission from the mission table. Reckon if I launch the game again that mission would be done? It's only been about 8 years.

Went through the Snow Bros remake on Switch. It sucks. Well, to be specific, the first 50 levels that are just reskins of the old game are okay. The extra 30 levels the new dev team added suck. Play the NES version instead.

Worth it if the weight of the game can be measured in kilograms, it's a big boy.

At the pace that actual meaningful DLC is being released for CK3, that's not going to be until next decade. And I use the word "meaningful" very loosely. Mostly the CK3 team has been just drip-feeding poorly scripted events that are pretty much thrown in by individuals working alone with no editorial oversight.

The 4080 has seen recent specials bringing it down from its $2219 AUD MSRP down to $1899 AUD, which would be low enough to start eating AMD's lunch if sustained. But it's only been one day so who knows? (For comparison the XTX MSRP is $1789 AUD, so the price difference is/was down to the equivalent of ~$70 USD) I suppose nVidia had more room to move here because they inflated their prices more in the first place. US price + tax + 15%, versus AMD doing US price + tax + 9%.

Or is it the exact opposite of that, lack of death?

I remember their Amnesia sequel was critically panned. Seems like they're good at walking simulators but have faltered when asked to do anything more complex than that.

RDNA 2 was reasonably clean, Navi 21 for the 6800 series and above, Navi 22 for the 6700 series, and Navi 23 for the 6600 series. And yes, the refreshes were simply clock boosts. For Ampere, it was GA102 for the 3080 and above, fine. GA104 though problematically started from the 3060 Ti through the 3070 series. Which left GA106 to serve as the plain 3060 and 3050. (None of these count mobile GPUs which are a complete mess that I don't even want to look at, let alone disentangle)

In hindsight, having a company name their motherboard the "LANparty" seems so absurd now, but that's what DFI were doing not much more than a decade ago, complete with bright orange highlights.

Yeah, I've been lucky to have avoided porch pirates so far despite dozens, probably hundreds of deliveries having been left at the front door - all day on occasion. Not that it didn't make me nervous, particularly when a couple of times it was for parts worth several hundred dollars. Probably even less risk now though as I have a new neighbour, an old retired guy, who spends all day tinkering in his garage with direct line of sight to my door.

So a 3060 Ti vs 3060 situation then. To be clear, I absolutely do think they should never have brought back the XTX naming scheme and that the XT should have been the 7800 XT. But I do think it's no more egregious than what the industry has already been doing for years. I get the sentiment, but I think $600 (or 60%) is more than "another few hundred". On the other hand, I have seen retailers here cut the 4080 price such that it was half the MSRP difference. It was a one-day special so it's gone now, but the equivalent of $1100 for the 4080 vs $1000 for the just-launched XTX did deflate AMD's balloon somewhat there.