Humanoid

Huh, I had no idea Viconia was in BG1 (unless that's an EE thing).

Because I didn't get around to it when it was new. Trying it only once the more recent, shinier Infinity Engine games were out meant that it was a huge downgrade from the likes of BG2, PS:T and IWD2 (never played IWD1 either) and I couldn't be bothered sticking with it. I'm not sure if the various mods to improve the resolution and other QoL changes were out at the time. I'm sure it's a lot more playable these days, but it's too late because I'm just done with RTwP, and with big party-based (but single-player) RPGs in general.

I'm down for some Xancest. (I actually have no idea who Xan or most BG1-exclusive NPCs are since I quit about two screens out of Candlekeep) ________ EDIT: Polished off Solasta. I have nothing of interest to say about its closing stages, it just is.

I ended up "solving" my CK3 de jure drift problem ...by maximising my de jure drift. The size of my primary kingdom of Galicia was too far gone to ever be able to realistically convert it: hell, large swathes of Morocco and southern France are now fully parts of Galicia. So instead of trying to do anything about that, I encouraged it by manually trying to shrink the Kingdom of Andalusia to be as small as possible, then once it was down to a measly eight counties I had pre-converted to my culture, I would be able to finally end this silly struggle. But there was another stupid problem in that I needed to be in the Hostility phase to be able to end it, and one such phase had just concluded. It's like if I need to do something by midnight, but it's now 1:00 AM and I need to wait out the entire day for midnight to roll around again. Except the problem with that analogy is that progress to the next phase is dependent on actions by all characters involved - specifically hostile actions. And with full control of the region established amidst centuries of peace, that meant such progress was glacially slow. So began a long and stupid grinding phase, where essentially my only valid hostile actions were to upgrade every single castle in Spain over and over (worth 3 points), and to turn full puritan, spying on everyone to expose their love affairs and other secrets (worth 10 points). I need 1000 points to advance one phase. And I had to do this cycle twice over to get into the correct phase, so that's 2000 points required from spamming those actions. The game started in the year 867. I had essentially "won" by around 1040. It then took until around 1260, mostly sitting around waiting for progress bars to complete, for this torture to finally be over. So yeah, that's Fate of Iberia. The struggle system has potential in that it's an interesting journey, turning the Reconquista into more than just Holy War spam like it used to be. But the destination is idiotically arbitrary, requiring the player to jump through a series of hoops that bear little relation to sensible gameplay, and instead turn it into a grind-fest of nonsensical actions. I suppose that's better than the other way around, in that I imagine either modders or a future patch can fairly easily update the "win" condition to be less stupid, and that the mechanical changes that lead up to it are in fairly servicable condition. I don't necessarily think I'll ever play this particular struggle ever again, but if they ever port the system to other regions of the game, then it's fairly clear what needs to be improved.

Yeah, I do make sure to appoint the right culture dukes under me, but the game's been running for 200 years with probably 100 of them under my iron rule - hasn't happened yet. I mean it has the diagonal shading indicating a transition period but no luck yet with actual flipping. Waiting for them to conquer Francia on my behalf would probably be quicker. It's always been weird how it takes the player as long to convert the religion of their holdings as it is their culture, but for vassals the religion switch is almost instantaneous, partly because of the weird loophole where a converting ruler can instantaneously flip everyone with them, but I swear there's another factor at play too.

Ugh, the recent patch seems to have messed with Solasta's behaviour when tabbed out. Used to be I could freely do it while my co-op partner was taking their turn, but now doing so causes the game to have a seizure and stop responding until a few seconds after I tab back in. And it makes the Alt key stick until I hit Alt again too, so instead of moving I just spam waypoints on the map. The game has always had some odd behaviours with task switching, mind you. Like graphically it proceeds just fine while you're elsewhere, but the voice lines don't trigger until you're back, which if you're in a cutscene usually results in multiple characters talking over each other. On the plus side, the game actually has an icon in the Xbox app now, instead of a generic placeholder that it's had forever.

Between having the drift which actually benefits me, versus hobbling myself in order to achieve some convoluted "victory" condition, I'll take the former every time. I've barely gotten out of Confederate Partition, and am a looooong way away from anything better than standard Partition so creating the other kingdoms is a no-go, and I don't like to game succession *that* much with the usual tricks like disinheriting kids embracing celibacy, legitimising bastards, etc. I suppose my point in general is that it seems to be an oversight when a natural sort of playthrough ends up in a stalemate like this. There should probably be more options to end the struggle, covering more eventual game states.

So Fate of Iberia has this stupid catch-22 situation where completing the Reconquista - i.e. the resolving struggle system the DLC introduces and forming the Empire of Hispania, is tied to culture in your primary Kingdom. Actually there are three possible resolutions to the conflict, but the following explains how three options rapidly dwindled down to one, and then to none: 1) Peace and harmony and sunshine and rainbows and stuff. The condition for this one is to ally with everyone else in the region, which technically I fulfil because I am the only kingdom in the region. But I'm not eligible because there is a limit of 50% ownership of the region, thus having 100% ownership disqualifies me. 2) Calling it a draw. Once again there's a limit of 50% ownership, but now it applies to all rulers. Basically completely Balkanise the region and ensure everyone remains weak. This is a bizarre ending that like all fair compromises leaves absolutely no one happy. So with those two options out, I should be aiming for the third and final ending condition right? Well it's... 3) Domination. Which you'd think conquering the entire Iberian peninsula would qualify as. But the catch is, you must also establish a monoculture in your primary Kingdom. So as Galicia I must convert all counties in De Jure Galicia to the same culture. Except there's a problem: it takes 8 years to convert one county's culture, and you can only convert one at a time. Meanwhile, De Jure drift means adjacent counties gradually become part of the Kingdom. The maths end up working like this: In 100 years, I'll be able to flip 12 counties. Meanwhile, in those same 100 years, 20 more counties are scheduled to join the Kingdom and every single one of them will need to be flipped. So at the end of it, I'll actually have achieved negative progress towards the goal. Yeah... (Of course there's ultimately a finite number of counties in Iberia, but then there's also a finite number of years the game will run for, and I'm not sure that's a race I can win) ___________ So that's Fate of Iberia. I've essentially soft-locked myself from completing the objective of the DLC. True to the law of unintended consequences, it seems that what it's achieved is to lock out the creation of the Empire of Hispania - which requires resolving the Iberian Struggle - and anyone playing in the region is simply better off creating a custom Empire, or perhaps a neighbouring one like Francia instead, which is much, much easier. But for those sensible players, the icon in the bottom corner will remain, constantly and pointlessly cycling between phases of the struggle, an eternal reminder of the Quixotic task they set out to accomplish.

So I thought I'd finally try out the Fate of Iberia DLC for CK3. Ironically my prep game that I started prior to the DLC launch made me take a break from the game for a while and I haven't felt the pull to play it again until now. I started a game in Navarre and played for several hours, almost 150 ingame years, wondering why so little seemed different. It turns out, uh, I haven't installed the DLC. I own it, but I didn't install it. The free patch changes that shipped alongside the DLC made me think it was, but nope. Oh well, I'd say I'd wasted my time, but then I got attritioned down by the huge Umayyad blob as is usual for the 867 Iberia start, so the game was almost over anyway even if I didn't realise my mistake.

Yeah, I'm slowly getting through it in co-op, indeed very slowly because one or two sessions a week of 2-3 hours each doesn't get you far. But the design of the campaign feels very perfunctory, I daresay similar to how NWN1's was. And I can't help but feel it's getting worse as the game goes on, my last main story quest feeling like I'm just being guided from room to room and being told to fight whoever is in it. Even any notion of setup has been discarded, the last two questlines I remember simply teleported the party into a small room, the inevitable fight against the villain of the week plus a few random mooks starts after a couple throwaway lines of dialogue, quest ends, onto the next quest. In that context even the dungeon crawling part no longer holds, it's feeling closer to a few amateurishly cobbled together set pieces now. All sense of place has been lost. This may be because I'm fairly close to the end, probably. I think we've got maybe 5 of the 7 gems?

So I've heard over the years that FIFA's career mode is pretty barebones, sort of an afterthought to their money-spinning, lootbox infested Ultimate Team mode. I've heard of some stupid things like advice that you shouldn't train to improve your stats, because by doing so you increase your value so much that no other club will ever be able to afford to buy you, and thus you'd be stuck with your crappy starting team permanently. But I was not prepared to experience first-hand just how janky it actually is. For one, I discovered that the manager AI does not take injuries into account at all. To briefly explain, your stature in the team is abstracted into a single progress bar, which is a measure of how much the manager likes you as a player. Well, I started off a new game in the Australian A-League, and given that I'm starting on the quite easy "Semi-Pro" difficulty, I had no issue working my way up the pecking order. I filled the bar completely, was the team's star player, first name on the team sheet, etc, etc. Then I got injured - torn quad in the process of scoring a goal even - and am out for 3.5 months. The manager rating starts to drop over time, quite reasonably I thought at first since no one can expect to get straight back into it after a long injury layoff. But it kept dropping, below the first-team threshold, then below the bench player threshold, and with about a month left on the injury the bar drops into the persona non grata zone, the manager informs me that I'm no longer in his plans and I've been put on the transfer list. It's like no one actually informed him that I was injured and he assumed I was out partying every night or something. Oh well, I'm actually sold to a club in the Spanish second division, which is a step up from any form of Australian football, so whatever. Then for my debut for them, I'm subbed on in the 86th minute with the team losing, the game is over in the blink of an eye, and the commentators start talking about what a disastrous debut it was. Yeah... this mode is a disaster.

Things started going wrong for me with XCOM 2 when as a rookie in the very first mission, the hit chance against a standard enemy at point blank range was less than 100%. Very much unlike the first game. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty else I ended up disliking about the game, but the net result: - XCOM 1: four-digit hours invested. - XCOM 2: one campaign for under 50 hours played. So it was very much a conscious decision on Jake's part to increase the RNG in the sequel (and then wonder why everyone just used explosives instead of guns). Oh god, they're going to make 50% the hard cap in that Marvel game aren't they?

They can focus the camera anywhere they want on Miranda as long as it's not on her weirdly scanned face.

You'd need some kind of adapter if you motherboard doesn't have an E-key M.2 slot though, which most don't.

That's a good motherboard, although your earlier build had a WiFi + Bluetooth enabled motherboard, so is that something you actually needed? If so, the MSI B550 Gaming Edge is (somewhat confusingly) the WiFi version of the Tomahawk, and it's the board I personally run. The Gigabyte B550 Aorus Pro ax is slightly better specced though, shame it didn't exist back when I shopped. Minor at best, the advantages being ALC1220 audio vs ALC1200, and more USB ports. Mesh cases are commonly recommended these days unless you have a specific reason to avoid them, but probably not such a big deal in your situation as your chosen parts are pretty efficient. Front runners are probably the Corsair 4000D, be quiet! Pure Base 500DX, Fractal Design Meshify 2 (or Compact variant), Lian-Li Meshify II USB-C, Phanteks P500A, NZXT H510 Flow. EDIT: And in terms of SSDs, it tends to be a decision between older, formerly high-end PCI-E 3.0 drives and the new PCI-E 4.0 drives. Popular examples of the former include the Samsung 970 Evo Plus, as well as the WD SN750, Crucial P5 and Kingston KC2500. The latter is represented by the Samsung 980 Pro, WD SN770 / SN850, Crucial P5 Plus, and Kingston KC3000. Personally I'd choose whether I want a 3.0 or 4.0 drive then choose the cheapest of these drives in that category. I have an SN750 and KC2500 currently for what it's worth.

Thoughts: - The cooler is vast overkill for a 65W 5600 when it's really more aimed at the high-end ~150W CPUs. I get the argument that you might want to get the best available, but at half the price of the CPU itself, spending may not represent the best spending at getting a quiet PC instead of improving other things. - One of these things is the unnecessary chipset fan on most X570 boards like this one. I would get a good mid-range B550 board instead, as for your purposes it would actually have *more* functionality. X570 just offers more of what B550 already offers, most pertinently perhaps being multiple PCI-E 4.0 M.2 slots for storage freaks. But you're not even running a single PCI-E 4.0 SSD, let alone multiple. At the very least, I would grab a board with a USB-C header for the front panel, since your provisionally chosen case has it. Asus unfortunately have been just about the slowest vendor at introducing it to their mid-range products. - You could probably get 3600C16 RAM for a very similar price these days, Kingston's Fury Renegade line has brought down the premium for these kits. - This system will consume in the region of 200-250W of power. It's hard to get a quality PSU that small of course, but your choices at 550/650W should be just as good as they are at 750W, e.g. the RM550x. The RMx series is slightly better than the plain RM series and is generally worth reaching for.

I did get maybe around 30-40 hours out of FO4, and I never even engaged with the settlement mechanic. It was only natural to not do so: I mean, the way the game sets it up, you've just set off on your big quest, and in the first town you go to, you meet some NPCs and you're supposed to go with them back to where you started? How does that structure even make the slightest sense narratively? It'd be like going straight back to the Vault after reaching Shady Sands in FO1. So yeah, I never went back so I never even learned how the base building even worked. Doesn't help I think that as a non-American, I can't think of a single thing about Boston other than it exists. So there was no sense of place at all as I trekked through what was for me, the ruins of a completely generic city. So much so that my entire experience was basically ended within a few hours of leaving Diamond City (which was okay, the best part of the game's low standards) because all I could see besides Diamond City was generic bombed out ruins. Just the traditional Bethesda thing of misunderstanding Fallout and setting it as if it was 20 years after the bombs fell, and not 200.

I really can't predict whether I'll like a Bethesda game prior to actually trying each as it arrives. So it's fortunate that I won't have to pay for the privilege of trying Starfield. I'd give Morrowind and Skyrim a low B, Fallouts 3 and 4 a D, and Oblivion an F.

Double post, but I guess I'll split out the non-RL2 stuff here. Started playing Shredder's Revenge, which is fortunately on Game Pass because it'd be a very marginal standalone purchase. As I believe I've said before back when first footage of the game was first revealed, I had a pretty deep sense of uncanny valley with this game, and that hasn't changed with the full release. It's like, these are the Turtles I grew up with, only, these aren't really the Turtles I grew up with - I much prefer the look of the classic Turtles in Time. The new voice actors, while unavoidable, contribute to this feeling as well. In terms of gameplay, I haven't delved into the more complex elements of the fighting just yet, so mostly playing it like a primitive two-button brawler using a combination of attacking, jumping and dashing alone. I'll look into the provided in-game tutorial when we're not in a hurry. It feels solid enough, other than impacts perhaps lacking a bit of oomph. Also had a pretty annoying bug where during a dual boss fight, one of them just vanished from my screen, but remained on my (online) co-op partner's screen. Couldn't hit or be hit by the invisible boss directly, except when he shoots projectiles, which very much can hit me.

"Finished" Rogue Legacy 2, and by that, I mean I cleared the world ten times over to see all the content. Well, almost all the content. Technically it can be done in seven clears, because each iteration of New Game+ unlocks one "Prime" (hard mode) boss. But I'm a fairly cautious, thorough player, so I stuck to full clears instead of beelining bosses for quick clears, and as a result I tended to stay 50-100 levels ahead of the level curve. The good news is that the core gameplay is fundamentally good and I have no notable complaints about it. But as with all games I like, I'm a lot more critical of the problems it does have, which are all at the meta level of the game, and here are some I found particularly glaring. 1) The "upgrades" system, i.e. the castle building money sink that serves as the game's tech tree. It's incredibly cluttered yet somehow also incredibly bland. Here's a picture of the fully unlocked castle: Besides the incredibly high numbers and the absolutely packed grid that obscures everything, my biggest complaint would be the actual upgrades themselves. Take the five brain icons at the right side of the grid. Three of them act identically, where each point in brains increases your Focus stat by one. What does Focus do? It increases the damage your spell crits do. Then there's the brain icon with the little plus sign on it. What does that one do? It ...increases the damage your spell crits do. But for some reason it does so directly instead of by increasing your focus. Just... why? Never mind the fact that Focus itself is a trap for new players, it's a stat you should disregard entirely because spell crits (and indeed crits in general) aren't a meaningful mechanic for your first few playthroughs. Except that you do have to put one point in each of those tiles because doing so unlocks an adjacent tile. However you don't know what it'll be without looking up the wiki, and it may be something incredibly important like unlocking a new class, or it may be completely useless like being a more expensive duplicate of the thing you just bought. 2) Scar challenges. These are sort of preset scenarios where you might, say, re-fight a boss with a twist, or complete some platforming challenge within a time limit. I have quite a few issues with how this is done. These challenges completely ignore your progression, i.e. the "lite" part in rogue-lite, and instead hard-code your level and available upgrades. Used to having nice things like increased movement speed, extra double jumps, all that good stuff? Nope, it's all ripped away from you so despite 95% of your time playing with those upgrades, you're suddenly thrust into a fight with half your normal movement speed, and none of the usual movement utility skills you've gotten used to. There's a limited handicap system you can use that crudely scales your health and damage (for combat challenges) or gives you a few seconds of extra time (for platforming challenges) but they do nothing to address the feeling of playing with your hands tied behind your back. So with such a crappy system it might seem odd that my other main complaint is how hard it is to access. From your home base, you have to enter a building, jump up to the relevant NPC, navigate a poorly designed menu, start the challenge, tediously walk in and out of three separate rooms which each house a choice of two random "relics" (i.e. combat upgrades), click away the pop-up explaining what the relic you've chosen does, then manually enter the boss room proper. Just let me retry the challenge again without the song and dance, dammit. Furthermore, this functionality is locked out completely on the first character you use each time you start a new New Game+, so you have to intentionally die at least once. This is particularly egregious because these challenges - the combat ones at least - are designed such that you're forced to do them with multiple classes to actually get the reward. Got a perfect score on one with your mage? Well good for you, you get *nothing* until you do the same fight with several other classes such that your cumulative score is enough to reach the bronze/silver/gold thresholds. 3) The horrendous equipment UI. It's incredibly basic and refuses to show the information you actually need in terms of selection your loadout. The UI for purchasing gear and equipping it is one and the same, and it's remarkably inadequate for both. On the purchasing side, you have no way of knowing what tier of equipment you've unlocked until you've purchased the immediately preceding item. Have I unlocked the recipe for Leather Weapon (don't ask)+2? The only way of knowing is to first purchase Leather Weapon+1 and then seeing if the upgrade button is available next to it. And in terms of unlocking gear in the first place, there's a bit of a trap in that unlocking a higher tier of gear can be an act of self-sabotage. Hell, the NPC outright tells you to buy the unlock to get +1 gear immediately, but it's not necessarily good advice. You have the default Leather gear but have yet to find the Obsidian stuff? Well have fun having your drops diluted by Leather+1 instead of that more advanced stuff you wanted. In terms of equipping gear, it's not much better either. Notably while you have a maximum encumbrance limit that's shown straightforwardly enough, it's actually fairly key to know there are multiple soft limits before you hit that hard cap, you gain significant bonuses by "travelling light", i.e. progressive bonuses for only carrying 20/40/60% of your hard limit. Or it may be 21%/42%/63%. Or 24%/48%/72%, etc, depending on upgrades you've unlocked. But all you get in the UI is the straight hard cap and where you are in relation to it, so the game might tell you you're at 640/870 weight and leave you to figure out the rest for yourself. Armour rating is another trap where you have no way of knowing how much armour is enough, and how much is too much. By default you can only block 35% of the damage from a given hit (though it may be 39%/43%/etc with upgrades). Well, how hard can the enemies hit for? After all, if no enemy hits for more than 1000 damage, then having more than 350 armour is literally useless. So how hard do enemies hit in this particular iteration of New Game+? Have fun figuring that out.

I do like quite a few of the classes, but some I've only used once admittedly. - Top five for me so far, in no particular order, are Fighter, Boxer, Chef, Valkyrie and Duellist. Versatile and no obvious weaknesses that make me wish I'd taken something else. - Barbarian, Lancer, Ronin and Assassin are a step below in my experience so far. A common theme between them is that their regular weapon attacks are a bit unusual, more than just the super responsive see-thing-hit-thing of the above classes (except Chef who is a bit slow). - I've played the ranged classes the least so take my opinions on them lightly. I had an awful time (once each) with the extraordinarily gimmicky duo of Pirate and Bard. Mage is disappointing because they have no defining characteristic and you may as well just play Astromancer who is simply a better mage. Ranger and Gunslinger are the two classes in the game where you have to aim every shot, and I don't have the patience to play like that at the moment. For context I've just taken down the fifth boss, so I've now seen all the regularly accessible zones.

Decided to stop quibbling so much over $20 and bought Rogue Legacy 2 with the stacking discounts on EGS. I've played it for like 20 hours over the past three days so I can say well worth it. Even if I do suck at precision movement and barely ever remember to use anything but my basic attack. Not also being able to play it on the Xbox when I want to is unfortunate but it's the type of game I wouldn't mind double dipping on a year or two down the line. I did try to install it on my NUC but it won't launch, I imagine because integrated graphics are good enough even on a primarily 2D game, figures.

Yeah, not their fault obviously but not even knowing when a game will release there until it does hurts somewhat. Compare with say, Epic Store exclusivity where even if someone is ardently against them, they know exactly when that exclusivity ends. Me, I have a pretty big itch to play Rogue Legacy 2. But I want it either on GOG, or on Microsoft Store with Play Anywhere support. I might even have gambled on Play Anywhere being added eventually if it was purchasable for PC from Microsoft, but nope. That said, $22.50AUD on EGS (vs $36AUD on Steam) is at least getting close enough to where double dipping in the future wouldn't hurt *that* much.

If the question was whether to pay for it, then I'd say CK3 is still pretty undercooked, but given it's on Game Pass, give it a try. The DLC at this stage is not particularly impactful and can be safely ignored. _________ Think I'm done with Football Manager for now. I won the Premier League once (by a solitary point) and with that done, it got to a point where I was well and truly sick of the match engine and just used auto-resolve for all matches thereafter. This approach did well enough, and getting through a few off-seasons worth of recruitment in rapid succession improved the squad so much that the league is an automatic win by ~20 points each season, and yielded a Champions League trophy too. Not the way the game was intended to be played, so I guess it's now Football Director of Football instead of Football Manager. The year is 2036 I believe, and the game is down to under 5% real players now, sold off my last one about a year ago. So this raises an interesting philosophical question: is it considered more successful to, say, micromanage for a full season and win one championship, or to speed through four seasons in the same amount of real-world time and win three out of four championships? i.e. success rate per opportunity, or success rate per unit time?

I must have played the game before the box was implemented, whatever the hell it is. Seeing the video title I thought it was in reference to that Peter Molyneux scam or somesuch. What I don't get is that this is the same developer who made it so that at the end of Act 1 in their previous game, they just instakilled all potential party members in the game except the ones you've explicitly put into your party, presumably because they didn't want to leave any loose ends.