Humanoid

MotB was unplayable because every single enemy in the tutorial dungeon was immune to sneak attacks.

The human noble origin definitely amplified this feeling for me. I tend to think that the origins were mistakes in general. You can't just funnel six entirely different prologue stories, each barely the length of a tutorial, and expect a smooth and believable transition into a one-size-fitz-hall story. The wildly disparate situations and motivations of each origin end up being left more or less unaddressed and handwaved away for most of the main story.

Just launched the game with the new content for the first time. Being able to have sleepovers is cute, but boy does Judy need to buy a new bed.

DA:O is an odd one for me. It kind of put me offside straight away because I resented being conscripted into the Grey Wardens and spent the first part of the game pointlessly trying to rail against it, but of course you have no recourse. After that initial resentment faded, I was able to reasonably enjoy the game for a while, but with steadily waning interest, up until one day I just couldn't be bothered firing it up again. Yes, I got through the Deep Roads. No, I didn't actually mind The Fade. I don't recall where I actually got up to, except that I know I never got to settle any of my personal feuds. And I've never really been able to enjoy that style of vaguely-tactical RPG experience ever again. If I want to manage a squad, I'll go play something like XCOM, thank you very much. I did not play DA2 and only tried DA3 through the tutorial. My opinions on Mass Effect are simpler. ME2 turned out okay because I played it first but the writing would have pissed me off a lot more had I played it in order. ME1 is fine as a standalone experience and I don't even hate the gameplay other than the inventory management. ME3 sucked and I ragequit less than a quarter of the way through it. ME4 doesn't exist.

Depends, did they accidentally cut the tables into hexagon shapes too?

Can't say I've ever used the Bethesda launcher so I know nothing about it. I used the UPlay client once, back when Might and Magic 10 released. That was... *checks release date* holy hell, 8 years ago.

The 980 sits between the 3GB 1060 and the 6GB 1060 so you're actually above the minimum specs and you'll be fine there. You'll be fine RAM-wise too, the requirements are for total system RAM, not free RAM. The average gaming machine built today even in the $1500-2000ish range still only goes with 16GB. Besides, upgrading now would be very questionable because the current generation is the last one that will use DDR4.

Ended up blasting through Privateer in one day, though I'm thinking the next time I do so I might just cheat my way through the Delta Prime exploratory section. Haven't decided whether I'll go on to Righteous Fire straight away, or maybe try out the new and improved Cyberpunk.

I resubscribed to FF14 for a month, messed around updating my hotkeys and fixing my inventory for a few hours. Almost a week since then, I've actually played the game for maybe an hour, so I'm thinking I probably made a mistake coming back. Still, I got to transfer my character over to the new Oceanic servers and I have 1/20th the ping I had before so if nothing else it satisfies my curiosity on how well the game plays with the right infrastructure in place. In hindsight the experiment was probably doomed from the start because I never could stand the story being essentially being forcibly told at me when I had lost interest some 40 levels ago. Besides that, nothing really happening. AoE2's recent patches have messed up my mods and I can't fix them. I still can't get ETS2's force feedback on my Logitech wheel to work satisfactorily and I'm not yet ready to implement the supposed solution of buying a Thrustmaster wheel. So after all that, I'm thinking I may just start a new game of Privateer this week.

I have the sincerely held opinion that, up to this point in the Switch's lifetime, the Wii U has still been the better console for me. In most regards they have pretty comparable first-party titles, except that Nintendo Land crushes 1-2 Switch, so that's the tiebreaker.

I had a Wii U, it was stolen. So then I got another one. That probably makes it worse. EDIT: Actually I misremembered. I didn't need to buy another one. I had previously bought a Deluxe one for my sister, but due to a shipping mixup they sent her two of them. My Basic one was stolen, but we had a backup all along.

I remember trying the first Hyrule Fire Emblem Warriors when it came out on Wii U* Switch and more or less having a small mental breakdown where I couldn't stop laughing because of how hilariously...nothing everything about it felt. It was a real "am I even alive right now" kind of surrealist/existential experience. Based on the evidence, I do not believe that the Dynasty Warriors games were made for me, and I think that is okay. *Yes, I am one of the ten people in the entire world that own a Wii U, so you can laugh at me for that one.

Destiny 33⅓: The Final Destiny

Two Point Campus is a day one Game Pass title, 17th of May, noice. Getting it for "free" certainly softens the blow of their somewhat questionable DLC approach.

Stalling on D:OS halfway through the first act when I first tried it playing "normally" - i.e. single-player with a full party - then coming back a year or two later in co-op Lone Wolf mode (one character each) and absolutely adoring it was the affirmation that my CRPG tastes had completely flipped. It was a slow process that probably started with DA1 but which now I fully embrace. Never played any variant of Pathfinder and don't plan to unless they add co-op or design a solo adventure.

Despite at that point already knowing that that style of game was no longer to my tastes, I did give PoE a good honest go. Not on launch, where I got bogged down before even getting to the big city, but a few years later where I managed to will myself to the point I unlocked the stronghold. However that slowed the game down even more and I just stopped playing not long afterwards. Now, I believe I did this at some point after PoE2 launched, but before it gained the turn-based mode, or at the latest while it was still in the experimental build. I did play PoE2 when it launched too, in two phases, one where I tried to play normally for the first starter island, then I threw my hands up, set it to story difficulty, and tackled some stuff in the big city. Turns out in story mode you still die quite a lot if you try to let the party AI resolve combat while wearing starting gear. So that too, was the end of that. I have no strong opinion on the writing in either game.

Spycraft and Alpha Protocol? Interstate '76 and Forza Horizon? Monster Truck Madness and Shamu's Deep Sea Adventure?

Ironically in the non-sanitised version there's no violence, just two men and the woman having peaceful relations.

Plus more time wasted on the boring, boring superhero genre.

I believe Microsoft's market valuation is an order of magnitude higher than Disney's, trillions vs hundreds of billions, so the reverse would be more likely in a world where such a move is allowed to go through.

That's a completely different issue in that I just avoid zombie games entirely really. There is one exception, ironically being party-based, in Death Road to Canada. But then I have no problem with multiple units outside of the context of RPGs, even if you can argue DRtC has strong RPG elements, after all I play a *lot* of XCOM (which has zombies too I guess, ha).

Yeah, games like Disco Elysium, Gamedec and Encased are why I have no inherent issue with isometric games. I'm very happy they exist, and long may that situation continue. However, this is a relatively recent trend and for most of the industry's history, isometric and party-based has gone hand in hand (ARPGs excluded). And further, how would you ever design a game like that around a party of four or six ? It seems something that is theoretically possible but which no studio would ever really bother with as it'll probably end up horribly compromised. Obviously I'm not saying that party-based RPGs shouldn't exist. I'm just explaining why I, personally, am done with them.

Not always, sometimes I have a surge of bloodlust. Roleplaying means addressing the situation presented on its merits, and sometimes that means that violence is the most correct solution to the problem at hand. If I take a rigid approach at either extreme then it means I'd no longer be roleplaying. At any rate, I'm certainly not someone who obsesses about pacifist or ghost runs, or any other achievement-oriented measure like that. Now the problem with the majority of party-based games is that the devs design a ton of classes with a ton of abilities and give you a ton of gear that they want you to use, and all of that means the gameplay design ends up strongly skewed towards encouraging their use. Elements like stealth, on the other hand, fly out the window because there is no sensible way to design a large party sneaking around in concert. The result of it all is that while in theory it's possible to design a party-based games that can cater to my desired playstyle, it hasn't really happened yet and I can't see it happening. Meanwhile in lone-character RPGs, not only are you much more likely to get that kind of flexible, multi-faceted gameplay, those games already exist as a proven formula.

Nah, for me I don't want to take any at all and avoid the combat entirely. At worst I'll tolerate one temporary fully-autonomous companion like in New Vegas and whatnot but beyond that no, just leave me alone.

I don't mind whatever perspective an RPG is presented in, but please please please stop forcing me to babysit companions. The worst part of it is that the presence of NPC companions tends to indicate a combat heavy design to justify the existence of said companions and you're punished for not taking a full complement of some arbitrary number.