Humanoid

Cast an ice spell on your potion before consuming it. In icy pop form it'd be so much more convenient to consume.

I didn't mind it, and indeed I'm forever disappointed at the 'fans' that caused NWC to backtrack on making the dark path in MM7 canonical and creating the Forge faction in Armageddon's Blade. Instead we got the last minute, half-arsed Conflux faction full of recycled units. But yeah, finished the game. In hindsight perhaps I needn't have bothered, it was a two-legged slog of a repetitive dungeon crawl that rivals the Deep Roads for tedium, and had about the same monster variety. If I ever do replay the game, I certainly won't be finishing it. Perhaps the strongest illustration of how much I wanted it to just end was that it was the only force powerful enough to defeat step-on-every-tile OCD gameplay; and I also completely dispensed with looting, leaving dozens of unidentified magic items behind with my bag full of white rubbish. So that's that, Act 4, completely soul destroying, and a bitter end to a decent game. If only they had given me laser gatling guns for that last bit so at least it'd be over more quickly. P.S. Blademaster did more damage per turn than the rest of the party put together. The Barbarian was bitterly, bitterly disappointing. Also couple numbers: ended with 630,000g and level 33 (and quite a long way short of 34), did not do Meow (will decide later). Careful management of XP had all characters within about 100xp of each other, ignoring this in the final dungeon blew out the difference to 6-700 in favour of the Blade Dancer.

Just got cursed by an Elite Facehugger. Clearing out the final dungeon now. Pretty standard fare so far, and repetitive enemies.

Oh god the air puzzle. It's perhaps the one thing in the game that highlights more than anything else the weakness of the grid-based system. Conceptually, on a piece of paper that they were designing it on, it might have made sense. But in practice, you can barely even see anything.

Ironically at a time the PnP is said to be more videogamey than ever. Can't say I miss it because it's just a set of behind-the-scene numbers - I imagine the various settings would be somewhat hard to recognise given the changes in the meantime anyway. What would be modern FR game look like? Probably half the cities destroyed, a majority of the gods dead, stuff like that?

Good on them for integrating DLC properly in Skyrim, but in the interest of fairness, it's the first time they've actually done that. Fallout 3's DLC is notoriously bad, and not just talking about the quality of the content, but how haphazardly it's bolted on. Hopefully the Skyrim way of doing it becomes the new norm.

Blarghraargh, the KS website itself is now falling into the trap of hiding information behind more clicks. One of the fun parts of visiting KS was seeing the nice activity indicator with a nice number next to it showing that there's something to read. Almost as bad as where MS hid the Shut Down function in Win8.

Fuji Golf in the Windows Entertainment Pack for Windows 3.1. But then Microsoft was also responsible for murdering the Links LS series. I've been informed that the golf game in Wii Sports Club (Wii Sports for Wii U) is mechanically superb and is arguably the best game to make use of the gamepad so far. You place the gamepad on the floor where it displays the ball on screen, and you can actually position your golf club head visually with it.

I am told Meow was in the very first game, so they've come full circle I guess. There's also been Eep and Yak along the way. And yes, there is a relic spear I've acquired normally.

Try dragging if right clicking to sell doesn't work. I've found that you can sell multiples of a scroll by right clicking on them, but if you want to sell a stack of one, you have to drag it over to the shop's inventory list (right clicking does nothing). EDIT: For those wondering why there's no relic dagger, well, there is one, it's just unobtainable because someone typed in a period instead of a comma in a plain text file. Fortunately as a result it's easily user-correctable, though being very early in the game, most have probably missed out on it (though with clever editing you can assign it to another quest that you haven't done).

For that Minesweeperish puzzle, you cast the low-level Light magic spell detect traps. After which I found you don't even need to avoid the traps. I walked straight down the centre, to the end - every step resulted in a prompt to select a character to disarm the trap. I guessed that it used perception, so I let my barbarian with a measly 25ish perception disarm all of them, no problem at all. It's ....it's probably not the intended design, no. P.S. Apparently the Water magic spell Liquid Membrane is broken in the player's favour, it reduces damage by massively more than seems intended, apparently to the point of near invincibility. EDIT: Was thinking of finishing the game today, but it's too bloody hot to do it. It's still 30°C+ outside at 9:30pm, hotter inside with residual heat, and playing this game, which is an insane power hog (especially on the store interface screens, yes that's right), would raise the temperature a fair bit beyond that. It's really the kind of thing that merits a hotfix.

Impressive, but nothing will ever be impressive enough to make me take Anomen with me.

But, but what about my quadruple Barbarian party? I jest, but I'd probably prefer a simple forward-or-back toggle for each character. The example that comes to mind, perhaps oddly, is Final Fantasy 7, where you had a damage penalty for melee attacks performed from the back, but would also receive a reduction in melee damage taken. By the way, Rune Priests can GM Light I think. Didn't put a single point into mine since I had a Crusader though. None of the orc classes have access to either Light or Dark magic, so they'd be prime candidates for the supplementary Dark Magic casters. Below is my post I was originally typing up, the text above is a fake edit. Not recommending this rebalancing mod as such, but it's an interesting list of the various mechanics in the game that are fairly trivially user-editable. If I ever get around to playing again, I'll most certainly make a good number of changes to suit myself. Thinking specifically: - Redesigned classes, mostly to allow a more flexible party setup and wider access to different skills (link with detailed chart below) I'd definitely do something of the sort, especially magic-wise. I'd also think that giving all melee and hybrid classes the ability to GM whatever weapon they wished would be a reasonable change, as the restrictions appear to be as much due to archaic fantasy tropes rather than actual balancing. A mage with access to all the Fire spells and all the Air spells is significantly stronger than one only having one of those schools, but a fighter Grandmastering both spears and axes is not meaningfully stronger (indeed given the investment, will be significantly weaker) than one with just one of those skills. (Mercenaries might be problematic, however) -Slowed outdoor time passage by 1 per step Oh god, yes -Reduced enemy blocking by 20% Without a counterbalance, this runs the risk of making the game too easy, but as it stands, in the early game especially, block overly penalises non-dual-wielding melee classes (especially since Radiant Weapon is bugged and non-working). -Weapon penalties for medium and heavy armor reduced slightly (roughly 10%). Armour in the game in general I think is pretty problematic. In essence you're just spending points to allow you to wear armour without penalty, but that's a lot of points to spend for the relatively meagre armour bonus on said gear - especially noting how the non-armour stats on said gear are no better than what you can get by wearing cloth armour which requires no investment on skill points. Unfortunately I don't think making a balanced armour system is possible within the scope of user mods, it's just a fundamentally flawed design. -Damages for ranged weapons increased Obviously just a bandaid solution, proper viability for ranged combat is a long way off and would require at least one, if not both, of either allowing proper mobility in combat or proper firing arcs. -Damages for magic focus weapons slightly increased (less so than ranged) The problem with these is not the baseline damage but the fact that it scales exactly zero with the skill, until you reach Grandmaster at which point the damage is instantaneously quintupled. This is a nonsensical design, but I wonder if it's possible to have the scaling occur per point as per normal weapons. -Stat requirements for challenge walls halved (may lower even more, still testing) Mainly an artifact of ranged combat, and therefore perception, sucking. Wonder if it's possible to change all the perception checks to be spirit or vitality checks. It'd be a bandaid fix to be sure, but I don't like the odds of a total combat overhaul. P.S. One of my own proposed changes would be bumping up the evade points you get for the Dodge skill. For an already fairly limited defensive skill, it's marginalised even further by the single point of evade per skill point investment. Some testing has been done by those more patient than me, and 1 point of evade is completely trivial by midgame in terms of enemy attack values: you want the value to be in the ballpark of the attacker's attack value, but GM Dodge gives a pitiful 25+30 points of evade, against late-game enemies with around *200* attack value. I don't even know if doubling the evade points per skill point would be sufficient.

We need legislation to force defunct devs to release all their source code so people more competent and qualified can do that work instead.

Semi-responses, semi-ramblings on various points above: - A formation system, unless it allows for custom formations, tends to restrict your options of class/role though. Want three or four melee characters? Too bad. A lesser concern is that it would largely obsolete the challenge/taunt thing they have going (a reasonable design with a mediocre implementation in this game). - Individual spells should scale with your character in all cases, yes - at the moment some spells and spell schools are marginalised by non-scaling, such as Dark Magic where essentially all you want is just to advance far enough to get the important spells and no further (and by that I mean, for the most part, Sleep). I mean, even if some things can't practicably scale linearly with spell power, they should still scale with mastery. Have Sleep last two turns with Master and be an area-effect with Grandmastery for instance (not nearly as overpowered as it sounds like given the three-enemy-per-tile limit and given that one has to be woken by attacking it anyway. - In general I do feel the magic system in the game was built pretty slapdash. Every man and his dog can learn Air Magic, Water Magic is restricted to specialists (indeed only three of them), and of course the whole Dark Magic problem. - The time passage system bothers me, both in this game and in prior ones. It might supposedly add 'flavour' if some things can only be done on certain days, but in the context of a video game, that just means waiting/resting in front of said interactable thing until it becomes available. (Talking about things like fast travel in the older games, and praying at the shrines in the current iteration). - The other thing is the night and day cycle. I'm not inherently against it, but feel the implementation in this game tended to magnify the worst aspects of this kind of design. There's no option to wait, even if it doesn't count as rest, in smaller time increments, nor any option to wait until specific points in the day (i.e. dawn). I do feel 12/12 hour split between night and day also throws away too much of the average day, especially since the dawn and dusk lighting is attached to the day cycle, diminishing it further while leaving the 12 hours of night completely static darkness. Let's just pretend it's summer all year long and line up the 'properly night' period with the required rest period. It'd also make any proposed NPC/shop availability restrictions far less annoying. - Final comment on the night thing - the various torch/flashlight type are useless during the night as they don't do anything to improve visibility as far as I can see. It appears they're designed such that they, instead of actually lighting stuff, just change the static lighting model in levels (i.e. dungeons) specifically flagged to be dark - i.e. it's merely a tool to flip from 'dark dungeon' mode to 'bright dungeon' mode in that subset of dungeons that support it. P.S. Random comment that doesn't really fit anywhere: I avoided using fast travel for most of the early-to-midgame because of the stated cost of 150g per passenger. It turns out it's actually the flat cost for your entire party. So yeah, 150g per trip, not 600g. I probably should have tested that earlier.

The guild-related quests are probably consistently the worst parts of Skyrim's writing. I'm told the Dark Brotherhood one might be an exception, but I wouldn't know because I murdered all of them (I was playing a strictly independent assassin) - and it's sad and lazy that the mass murder option isn't an option with the other guilds, since they proved that they could do that kind of proper choice when they can be bothered. The big quest in Markarth is also oft-mentioned as a badly written one, but I've never done it myself. In the end though, maybe the biggest praise of Skyrim's writing that can be is that it's not as idiotic as Fallout 3's, although probably a result of being relentlessly more generic.

Don't remember what monsters use curse, but I definitely cast the Light magic remove curse spell at various points. Not often though, not even sure it'd be double digits. And yeah, shadow blessing is pretty great in that it finally stops the tedium of, if you have a Freemage, casting the detect secrets spell every few dozen steps, or otherwise from having to cart around the dog NPC. That said, I'd grown attached to the dog so I still have it after gaining the blessing... But yeah, both the need for some sort of special NPC/spell/blessing to even see a secret, let alone attempt to get past it, added to the dumb decision to only let one class even access Dark magic, is a disappointing design. Buff maintenance in general is a tedious aspect in any RPG with it, and is something I'd be delighted to see consigned to the dustbins of history. It's not in any way an interesting decision, it's just busywork. An exception can be made for powerful short-duration buffs with limited usage that you can use tactically, but something used permanently may as well be a passive feature. But I digress. Where was I? Traps, eh, there's what, maybe two rooms in the entire game where you need to detect traps in the first place? Fire blessing is a mixed bag, it's useful to be able to tell where exactly enemies behind a corner are, but the increased detection range gives annoying false positives about monsters in an area.

Haven't encountered sleep, but have been cursed a number of times, though admittedly nowhere near as often as other effects. Also ridiculously unfair that they can stun you for five rounds and you can only stun them for one, but on the other hand, Burning Determination is ridiculously powerful and the AI isn't smart enough to notice that you're immune to things. I haven't finished the game yet but feel the same way you do about the closing stages, at any rate. MM6.... ah, MM6. Where ranged combat wasn't just viable, it was necessary. And where the optimal combat technique was to stay in real time and hold down the 'A' for attack key while constantly backpedalling. (Unlike in MM7/8, you can't move in turn-based mode in this game, making it strictly inferior)

Related to the historical accuracy thing, but actually as much as well due to genuine historic curiosity: were wandering bards an actual thing, as in, a legitimate profession? I mean obviously there's Shakespeare the bard, but he'd probably make a poor adventurer.

Mantle drivers and patch for BF4 is now available for those who want to be guinea pigs. For old times sake perhaps, they missed their January release date by a day. Early reports showing worst-case 7-10% improvements for combinations of high end CPU + GPU, scaling up as either the CPU gets weaker (30%+ for a 290X paired with a Kaveri CPU for instance) or with the number of cards. Compared to the speculation perhaps some may be disappointed. Not industry-changing at this point, but then again people do pay hundreds of dollars for upgrades of similar magnitude, and this is free. The value, of course then, will be in how ubiquitous support ends up being. As I have neither Hawaii nor BF4 I'll hold off upgrading drivers for now.

Yeah, Spirit Beacon is a trap, invites all sorts of bugs. Bizarrely there's a sticky thread called ETA 31/01 that you'd think would be in reference to a patch, but, a) there's no reference to actually releasing anything in the topic, and b) that date has passed. Weirdness. Some bugs of my own: a couple CTDs yesterday after a week of more or less fully stable operation. Eh. Also a bug after zoning that disabled all my movement and actions but left UI features accessible. And one where some buff icons started refusing to appear - i.e. I cast a spell, the combat log tells me it's applied, but no icon ....but only for some spells, or maybe all spells cast by one character. Being a very hot weekend here, the heat issue is coming to the fore too, my PC case feels like it's been left out in the sun, there's definitely some kind of rogue rendering or whatever going on here - indeed like Starcraft 2's famous uncapped menu screen, there are a few reports of borderline-adequately cooled machines or worse sustaining some sort of damage. I'm getting pretty close to the end, and have to say that the charm is kinda wearing off by this point. Just mazes of single tile width paths with monsters and dungeons and lots of dead ends with nothing in them, no cities or anything else interesting. And as a consequence the game is becoming a bit of inventory management hell - a lot more useless drops paired with long treks back to town to get rid of them. In the early mid-game I was definitely planning another playthrough at some point, now that's very unlikely.

I bought myself a CH F-16 Fighterstick USB a couple years ago for exactly that kind of thing (well, Privateer primarily). They still make the exact same joysticks that, along with Thrustmaster's FCS sticks, were the industry standard in the 90s - just updated for USB input. I think the ad for WC3 featured a kid using a CH Pro Flightstick, heh.

Had a bit of a tough time last session, found myself completely stuck twice to the point of having to cheat and look up a walkthrough, and both times for very similar reasons. Found myself at a point in the game where I literally couldn't find a single thing to do without getting either the water or air blessings, to the point I randomly did the Tower of Enigma in the hope that it'd unlock the next bit (no such luck, without a freemage it seems completely optional content), and the puzzles therein gave me a bit of a headache. Turns out I didn't properly clear out the Lost City. I was absolutely convinced I had, but I think what happened is that my bags got filled and I left it almost complete and forgot to go back, probably distracted by a break in session or something. Then after doing all the stuff that opened up, got totally stuck again. And again it was because of a shard I had overlooked in a place I thought I had completely cleared (and I was fully convinced this time). It's a timely reminder I guess, that as good as nostalgia can be, there's a good reason we've moved forward in many areas. Wasting hours because of missing one single tile might qualify as classic gameplay, but is probably something I could live without.

I'm a bit ambivalent, depends how much the limitations of the game are inherent to the game itself. While new content is in itself welcome, my position is that they've proven they can recreate the experience of the old games - now let's see them make improvements to the formula. Question is whether it'd need a full blown sequel to demonstrate that.

There's literally not enough experience in the game to GM four skills, I think the maths was such that you could GM three and Master one at best. That's capping out at level 33, and that already takes into consideration the +10% XP hireling. ...unless, of course, you find and exploit the respawn bug. There's a bug that involves some sort of interaction with the Lloyd's Spirit Beacon spell that can cause everything, including bosses, to respawn in the game. Without it, nothing ever respawns. It's weird then that there's actually an achievement for hitting level 40, which is currently impossible. Either an oversight, or a sign of some significant DLC to come. And technically the XP table already ingame supports up to level 50. EDIT: Just hit a bug where one of my portraits, including health and mana bars, disappeared, and nothing in its place but a grey rectangle. Loading screens or save-reloading don't solve it, restarting now.