Humanoid

On the condition that they provide more hotbar space in which to place them.

So we're doing this thing huh. I omit strict numbers because the order in itself is already pretty fluid, they're only vaguely ranked. Spoilered just to reduce clutter and for plausible deniability for taking the thread off-topic.

The Banner Saga is now on sale at GOG, so I trust that the keys for backers will be distributed shortly. (It should be automatic since all backers get it regardless)

Well yeah, I assume it randomly rolls every round to determine whether you break out of it early. But I don't like the mechanic, especially combined with the loss of XP for being stunned if an enemy dies. I mean, I found myself just healing and defending every turn until that character woke up just to make sure I got the XP....

Wish I thought to look it up before playing. And that more game devs would put their mechanics in a plainly obvious text file (config.txt in this case). Most of it is self evident, but there's some useful comments from a helpful poster on the official forums. [gametime] dawnStartHours = 8 (time of day that the sun comes up, DAWN) dayStartHours = 10 (time of day that is considered day) duskStartHours = 18 (time of day that sun goes down, DUSK) nightStartHours = 20 (time of day that is night) minutesPerTurnOutdoor = 5 (should be obvious, NOTE!!! setting this LOWER decreases how often over world shrines reset, if anything I would set this higher) minutesPerTurnCity = 1 (same as above) minutesPerTurnDungeon = 2 (same as above) (NOTE2 = you CAN set all of these to 0 for no time change, but I DO NOT RECOMMEND IT) minutesPerRest = 480 (how many minutes pass when you rest, can be any value, though I don't recommend going higher then 10080 which is ONE WEEK) I'd set dawn to 5am, day at 7am, dusk at 7pm, night at 9pm. Basically just moving the transition periods so that they eat into the night rather than the day. (Then moved everything back one hour, because, erm, because Ashan hasn't invented Daylight Saving maybe) Anyway, 16 hours usable per day is so much more convenient than the 12/12 split. It was even worse because the dawn and dusk periods have annoying lighting anyway, so they were only semi-usable (and sometimes laggy), reducing fully usable daylight hours to 8 hours a day, which is ridiculous. I might chop them down to 1 hour each actually. Not sure on the rate of time passage, maybe 2 minutes/step outdoors, and 1 minute/step in cities and dungeons. [gameplay] maxLevel = 50 (SETTING THIS HIGHER WILL NOT LET YOU LEVEL UP BEYOND 50 UNLESS YOU ALSO EDIT THE LEVEL CVL FILE TO INPUT NEW XP/LEVELS) inventorySize = 50 (How many slots you have in your inventory, havent adjust this personally, so no idea what it actually does) rewardXpMultiplier = 1.05 (how much BONUS XP the party member who gets the KILLING BLOW gets - NOT HOW MUCH XP ALL ENEMIES GIVE) actionLogMaxEntries = 50 (how long your log is) startSupplies = 6 (how many supplies you start with) exploreRange = 3 (how many spaces are cleared on the map around your party) brokenItemMalusNormal = 0.9 (Adventure mode, when a weapon/armor breaks it will be 90% effective IE 0.9. Setting this to 1 is no change in effectiveness, higher then 1 makes them MORE effective) brokenItemMalusHard = 0.25 (same as above, but hard more. So in hard mode, when your gear breaks, its only 25% effective) itemPriceBrokenOrUnidentified = 5 (Broken or unidentified items are worth a set amount.. 5 gold) resistancePerBlessing = 5 (no idea) itemResellMultiplicator = 0.25 (items are sold for 25% of what they can be bought for, setting to 1 makes items sell/but at same price) scrollNoviceMagicFactor = 1.0 (multiplier used on novice scrolls) scrollExpertMagicFactor = 2.0 (same as above) scrollMasterMagicFactor = 3.0 (same as above) scrollGrandmasterMagicFactor = 4.0 (same as above) rangedAttackMeleeMalus = 0.5 (how much damage a bow does in melee range, in this case 50%.. I HIGHLY RECOMEND SETTING THIS TO 1 to remove the ranged damage reduction in melee, since as we all know, bow users are screwed in this game already.. so why double screw em?) The only obvious things here that I'd want to change are: rewardXpMultiplier = 1 brokenItemMalus[Normal/Hard] = 1 rangedAttackMeleeMalus = 1 So yeah, disable all those dumb mechanics. I'd totally double inventory size, but someone reported it might break stuff. The other headings there are sometimes interesting, but not in terms of making obvious changes. Stun duration maybe, 5 turns is a little silly since it's more than the duration of most fights.

MoTB is listed instead of NWN2 there, so I'd guess the rules might be to include the best release of a particular game, yeah. Black Gate and Serpent Isle are both there, but not quite the same thing. I think the most notable omission is The Sims 2, for what it's worth.

Huh, definitely wouldn't have thunk it. It turns my opinion of the series from "no interest whatsoever" to "hmm, could be worth trying on a cheap instalment someday." Speaking of which, any specific recommendation on which game in the series such an approach would work best with?

I assume that a faithful recreation of the character will be available as a redshirt in PE then.

Is it actually viable to play Total War games skipping the RTS part? (Assuming there's an autoresolve function) Guess it'd be like playing Dragon Commander in a similar way.

The existence of GOG has kind of killed ownership of the games as a viable metric for me. For the majority I can say that I bought them because they were on sale with no intention of ever playing them. So restricting myself to those for which I own boxed copies, *and* were purchases when still relevant (as opposed to collecting for historical purposes), I've got 29 of the games, I've 'meaningfully' (by which I mean more than just messing about for an hour or so) played 18, and finished 7. But yeah, if I count stuff on GOG, in random compilations or random CDs I've bought second hand for the hell of it, I can say I have access to 47 of the 50 - exclusions being Dark Souls, Knights of the Chalice (only one I've never heard of), and Geneforge.

Progress isn't nearly as fast as it was early days, most of the current products bar the very fastest were release a full two years ago and perform pretty close to the halo products just released. So the answer to the question is "the same for most of the range, except the most expensive one will be maybe 30% faster." Can't say I particularly mind, though, leaves the cash available for more important things like storage. Dammit where are those 5TB drives we were promised last year?

Silvanus inherited Bhaal's murder portfolio in 4E then?

Lords of Magic was a 1997 spinoff so it'd fit the normal sequel timeframe pretty well, and I remember positive reviews from print magazines back in the day, not sure how similar the gameplay would be to its parent though.

Can't say I could tell because I it was forever after the cave cyclops that I found any other ones - primarily because I missed getting both the Water and Air shards when I was supposed to due to inadequate pixel-hunting skills. But I've heard that the purely physical damage cyclops do is relatively easily overcome by sheer armour rating, and that Defenders can reasonably early get to a point where they are completely immune to cyclops (cyclopi?). Not necessarily a good idea to solo them due to the silly XP lockout system, but still, an amusing thought - cyclops wailing uselessly at a little dwarf, the dwarf in return mostly whiffing at thin air and getting blocked but slowly landing enough hits to kill it. I've heard a few reports of people describing their first kill of the cave cyclops working out like that. I assume the hunter trap works like the rune priest's fire rune thing? I've, erm, managed to burn myself a few times with that spell, sometimes due to oversight, sometimes due to inexplicable (buggy?) placement.

Yeah, I like Caesar's idea of synthesis and god knows it might work but I can't get into the end justifies the means mindset required. No doubt I'll try the Legion one day, lack of quests was another thing that concerned me but the options for NCR sabotage open it up a bit. So Kaizar's ending was a green explosion? I only fairly recently had my first playthrough of NV in which I actually accepted his invitation, and started doing some quests for him. And even then I still wiped out his entire camp (sneak sniper rifle kills) except the named NPCs - he didn't mind though, and the game proceeded as normal. I could tell myself I did it for moral reasons, but in reality it was for the gold and XP. And the Ballistic fists. Especially the Ballistic fists. As for Lords of the Realm 2 - I've never played any games in the series. Were LotR3 and Lords of Magic bad sequels or something? Incidentally I've been thinking of playing Warlords 3 lately, a game I only ever played the demo of back in the day, but am curious about now that I have the capacity to understand its arcane-seeming rules. But I don't think it's available for sale anywhere. (And irritatingly, searches are polluted with a majority result for the Battlecry games, screw RTSes) And (geez this post is wandering all over the place in topic), I think I'm going to retain my Roche playthrough as my 'canonical' one. It was my first taken option, but I also felt it fit better into the game - a pressure-packed siege situation as opposed to the alternate path which felt like the "here's a town, go do some random sidequests" feel typical of RPGs for the past 40 years. Plus killing the fat king, which is to say, allowing it to happen, was one of the better moments in the game. I liked that there was limited exposition of what I missed in Chapter 3, including having no investment in not killing the dragon. I killed it, because it was some dragon that happened to try to kill me, open and shut case.

Nitpick: You start as the *son of* a Blacksmith. Strict as the rules were, I don't think they banned blacksmiths from having daughters.

The game just expects you to stumble into your class promotion quest during the course of playing. You need to be promoted before being able to GM any skill. But the quest starter is: A few, but far from all GM trainers also have their own quests you need to complete before they'll train you in that particular skill. The arcane discipline one is a particularly big offender in its stupidity.

Hmm, so even Civ4 which is DRM-free these days (they patched out the CD check) is only being distributed as a key? Though it's a moot point since only Railroads! would be of value to me, and even then for curiosity more than anything (I know it doesn't even attempt to be Railroad Tycoon). Guessing the addon games if they happen would be Pirates 2004 and, er I don't know what a second game might be. Still waiting to pick up the new MPS games on GOG. But Civ2 and Gettysburg/Antietam still nowhere to be seen.

Spears are two-handed and do benefit from the two-handed skill. Also, they are awesome. The biggest downside to spears is that you can't train to expert level until Seahaven. Where do you get the relic spear? It's reported now that it only mostly works. Specifically, the Master bonus of 2H does not work. That is, you don't get the bonus 0.1% crit chance per point of Destiny.

I am pleasantly surprised by that (but not much, since I assume it'll be Steamworks), but on the other hand have also been pleasantly surprised by some of Uplay's functionality (but also have been exposed by some terrible brokenness) in the course of having just one game on it. + Offline mode stays offline mode, and doesn't bug you about it like Steam's prompt every time you start it. Even if you go online for a session, it'll start again in offline mode the next time you launch it. + Global toggle for cloud syncing, which is great because.... - Cloud syncing doesn't work for me. At all. Progress bar fills up a bit then it errors out. - Installing a game didn't even work until I ran the Uplay client in admin mode, and there's no obvious way of knowing this other than Google. It's at a level where if I had the choice of Steam DRM or Uplay DRM, it's a coin toss given the same price.

I remember being surprised at encountering a Kiwi in FO:NV. One of the Great Khans, I believe, don't often hear the accent in games (or more generally, in media other than the Hercules/Xena TV shows).

I feel the same, but am not so sure that it would have really impacted development all that much, for much of the game they seemed happy to just pay lip service to the setting, and the more finicky stuff probably happened post-review. The long-winded intro for example seems to be as much a post-hoc add-on when a suit somewhere cried out "this game isn't selling our new setting enough!"

Baa was pretty prominent, yeah, spanning two games. But they were well integrated into the game and didn't seem out of place, as opposed to the current free-DLC type implementation. I get that they want to be a lot more serious in the new setting, but eh, their attempts, earnest as they may be, are rather dull. And it makes the heavy reuse of the classic names feel a bit out of place. Sure, it's nice to see references to famous characters like Maximus, Kastore, Crag Hack, Kastore, Kilburn, Haart, etc, but many of them are both very prominent characters in the game but bear no resemblance to their predecessors in anything but their names and (sometimes) portraits. And in puts some weird preconceptions into play - like half-expecting Lord Haart to turn out to be a secret necromancer when you get sent on a quest to find him. Another old thing I wish they had retained was the animated frames from the old 2D engine. Back then, one of the gargoyle or whatevers that looked like frame decoration would animate if you were near a secret door for example, which is a handy visual cue. In the current game, all you get is one of your characters barking something like "hmm" or "what's that?", which is both unreliable and prone to getting turned off because their regular speech is annoyingly repetitive. Hint: Don't select the cynical voice in the current game, unless you want to hear the "who forgot to take a bath?" line every dozen steps or so.

Even in death, surely John Edward would have contacted you about it?

Yeah, for the shrines, each corresponds to a day of the week, the day being named very similarly to the god that the shrine is dedicated to. Can be done in any order except that the final one, the one near the Forge, must be done last. The reward is a relic armour, heavy armour I think? The best weapon in the game are randomly generated ones with the Relentless tag, which gives them an extra swing. Didn't find any myself, probably would involve a bit of camping outside weapon vendors. The extra swing from the Dual Wield skill is at Grandmaster. Barbarians can't GM it.