Humanoid

Apparently I haven't played Skyrim since 2015. Would be tempted to if I could maybe get the GOG version for less than a tenner. Unfortunately my Steam version is no good because I never bought Dawnguard, which in itself would be okay because I don't care about Dawnguard, but some interesting mods require it. And you can't buy it at all now, let alone for a reasonable price. And the Game Pass version doesn't support SKSE so that's out too.

Them launching a GaaS game earlier this year, having it score 41 on Metacritic, and now unlaunching it for good is probably just as good a reason to boycott the company anyway.

I spent a couple of hours trying to get my wheel to play well on Forza Horizon 5 but in the end had to surrender and just accept the gamepad. I suppose we're at the stage where anything but a gamepad is an afterthought on multiplatform titles, even devices specifically designed for the genre of that particular game. Probably still exceptions for the more hardcore sims, but not for more arcadey titles like this. I do sort of remember the backlash when Freelancer came out with no joystick support...

It looked like something out of a techy Onion-like article but nVidia really are withdrawing the crippled 12GB 4080 from their lineup, wow. Definitely the right thing to do, but it'd take a lot to make Jenson swallow his pride like that. It'll obviously return as a 4070-series card of some sort, but who know when. Many countries including Australia have zero allocation of FEs. Hell, I think we had about a dozen 3080 FEs, which were exclusive to one retailer who sold them by raffle. Essentially they only existed to prove that the $1139AUD MSRP was totally legit and not false advertising.

I like to use Skip The Fade in conjunction with Skip Everything But The Fade for the optimal DA1 experience.

So I finally got around to retrieving my old saved games for various titles from my old PC which was retired almost two years ago now. A few relevant titles there which I might explore in the coming weeks, such as Dishonored 2, The Outer Worlds and Tyranny. But all said, the Pathfinder talk made me launch Pillars of Eternity. Well, I was in some sort of building. I don't know what I was doing there, so I exited the building. As soon as I did so I was accosted by someone who apparently did not like what I did inside the building, and attacked me. The combat AI was on so I just let my party beat up on the three enemies until they died, even if one of my own got knocked out in the process. I don't remember who that guy is anyway, or indeed who most of my party members are. I then quit the game, because I was too tired to figure out what was going on. I figured I'd come back when I'm more of sound mind. But whatever happens, at least we're out of that mudhole, Gilded Vale.

I only played through that part once, and I've never finished the game, so admittedly it's not a complete point of view. But ditching the tedious combat and tiresome party members make it a win by default.

I can honestly say that the Fade puzzles were the best part of Dragon Age 1. *ducks for cover*

Sad thing is that base Skyrim actually runs okay, apparently all the paid mods included with the Anniversary Edition absolutely tank performance. Now these "Creation Club" mods are made by users, not by Bethesda, so you might think that it's just a matter of amateurs making poor-quality mods and poor vetting of those mods by Bethesda. Hah, that would make far too much sense, and therefore it's firmly not the case. So yes, the problem has to do with mods. But it has nothing to do with the content of the mods, or how they're coded. Due to how Skyrim fundamentally works, the simple act of enabling a mod reduces performance even if that mod is literally blank and does nothing. The Anniversary Edition has 74 mods included. The game would be broken even if all 74 of those mods were dummy mods with no content whatsoever. The most insane part of course is the fact that this problem would have been identified had someone at Bethesda literally attempted to launch the game just a single time after enabling all those mods. But apparently that was too much work for them. Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/xsebhw/dont_buy_skyrim_anniversary_edition_on_switch/iqkjth6/

I mean, based on the description of the other romanceable characters above, I'm assuming the threesome option is probably just romancing a two-headed ogre.

I looked into it a bit more and was surprised to see it has a turn-based mode, if only because I remember reading that Kingmaker had no such thing on launch (and now I've learned that it was added by a mod). That certainly helps sell it to me. Well, not in a literal sense, because I'll probably only try it once it lands on Game Pass, but yeah. Speaking of turn-based, I recently started Solasta's Lost Valley DLC, again in co-op of course. Seems to be a decent improvement, travel times are less oppressive, there's some limited choices now, and level design is a bit broader. Disappointed in not having access to any new classes compared to the base game, but no way am I paying for class DLC packs that add nothing else. EDIT: I know it's in a current Humble Bundle, and also on a fairly deep discount at GOG, but still too much for something that's probably a bit too hardcore for me. Incidentally the bundle made me roll my eyes a little at the BG "Faces of Good and Evil" DLC which is, uh, six portraits. I'd rather have horse armour...

And I'm confident I'd love it, if only I could find a way to swap places with 90s me.

I'm stunned that one game has somehow managed to generate five threads so far due to length, it's like this subforum consists of the news thread, the playing thread, and a thread for a game I know next to nothing about. Impressive to say the least.

It's just the announcement for Skyrim launching on Epic, as well as the recent launches on GOG and Switch (where it performs abysmally apparently). Nothing new for Steam or MS Store users.

This is blatantly false, Wikipedia tells me that South Africa made the famous Genital Jousting.

Sounds like Long War alright.

I just take the bus everywhere.

3200C14 which is reasonably good stuff, more or less equivalent to 3600C16. One notch above the more common 3200C16 or 3600C18 for about 20% more money, and probably pretty representative of what a upper-midrange gamer might buy without going nuts.

I just feel it's a lot more natural for such a commonly used term to be monosyllabilic. Even "Eds" would do. Of course, this was a decision made decades ago so the time to complain would have been then I suppose.

I've been toying with the idea of a mild mini-ITX system for use with an ultrawide monitor for sim gaming, but this release doesn't really add new options. Was always a long shot anyway since any benefit would have to overcome the fact I have some good DDR4 lying around spare. That said, good B550 ITX boards are currently extortionately priced so if there's any opportunity for an alternate platform, it's because of that. The main motivation is that it's a right pain to set up specialist peripherals at my main desk, and my displays are unsuited for ultrawide gaming unless the games are low spec enough to happily run 7680x1440. Looks like if it happens this year I'll be fine settling for a 5600 non-X with whatever video card represents good value at the ~$500 mark when it happens. Unless of course I get into MS Flight Sim in which case it'd probably receive my current RX 6800 at minimum.

"Eddies" for me. I reckon if a substitute for "bucks" consists of more than one syllable, then it's a pointless alternative. For this reason, "creds" tends to be acceptable.

One of the biggest criticisms of the game that I recall is that it becomes trivially easy past the mid-game. Guns one-shotting enemies through walls, single quick-hacks, taking out entire rooms of mooks, etc. I don't know if this has been addressed by any rebalance patches since I last played a little over a year ago, but I think it's likely you'll have no issues. Hell, maybe it'll enhance your late-game experience by not having a game-breaking build. I can't really delve deeper into specifics admittedly because as a dedicated stealth player the game difficulty is essentially static throughout the course of the game.

The biggest advantage of stealth is that you can mostly ignore your gear. I hate micromanaging my inventory and therefore just rolled through most of the game without looking at it. Maybe every 10 hours or so I'll do a proper clean-out of my bags by equipping the best stuff I happened to have randomly looted since my last clean-out, and disassemble or sell the rest. Worked with no issue ...until the one forced boss fight 2/3rds through the game. Still, I managed to get through that by brute forcing it with the best melee weapon I happened to have in my bags and chugging health potions, despite zero points invested into melee. That said, the main reason I did it is because I always play RPGs as a combat-avoidant thief. I don't think there's any particular reason to force yourself to play that way. I'm no pacifist mind you, and the reason my body count was so low wasn't because of any overriding principle, but because back when I played, throwing knives were single use items and *expensive*. Nowadays they're reusable so it's a lot more viable to perform silent kills at a distance and I imagine it'd save a lot of time waiting for enemies to path just right to take them out.

Whatever happened to that 3E conversion mod for BG2 anyway?

Back in the early days of the GPU we had fairly sedate names and coolers but absolutely wild box art. Now that's been flipped around so much that for the RTX 3000 series you can't even read what card it is unless you squint - nVidia's standardised box design means the text that says "3070" or whatever is in white text on lime green, in tiny font, at the bottom corner of the box. It's insane.