Humanoid

Second best mod behind coloured education icons. I'm out again after a short-ish India game. The last straw was that the AI exploits a bug where if multiple titles are held, each with their own custom inheritance law, it bypasses Partition for that title, and that way realms are artificially kept together on succession. For example, if you hold the Kingdoms of England (primary) and France and have two sons, normally the firstborn would get England and the second France. But if you assign a custom inheritance law for France even if it's the same law as the rest of the realm anyway, France will also go to the firstborn. So just assign the Male Preference law to all your titles and voila, effective instant Primogeniture. The AI doing this particularly sucks if you're playing an intrigue character and are trying to split up your enemies via murder. Meanwhile in Europe, some random Emir successfully took Rome in the first few decades of the game. The Pope, who easily had more men and more gold than his conqueror, responded by calling a Crusade for Jerusalem. Then one for Syria. Meanwhile, that Emir (who wasn't particularly strong) just quietly continued gobbling up the Pope's lands over the next decade or so essentially unopposed (presumably the Pope's men were preoccupied in the Holy Lands), and around 50-100 years after the game started there is no longer any Pope. Yeah, no one in Catholic Europe cares even slightly about Rome falling, big brain move by the Pope there. My intention was to play in India to let me avoid most of the stupidity that is the game's broken religion system (since all my neighbours are some variant of Hindu, religion becomes irrelevant), but it does get kinda dull because there are no interesting special mechanics that apply to India. It's just the vanilla CK2 experience of fabricating claims and installing the occasional claimant. Time to take a break.

I did think it was a horrible hat. Turns out it's her hair.

Yeah I'm pretty sure I'll pick up a physical copy not long after launch, should be 10-20% cheaper than going directly through GOG and get some minor trinkets (map, postcards, stickers, booklet apparently). If I were to pre-order now it's like $74AUD from Amazon versus $90AUD digital straight from GOG. Even if they do a 10% launch discount that's still an unreasonable premium to pay the devs directly. Would have seriously considered an upgraded version if they had one between the base edition and the ridiculous $429 CE. I do, after all, have the CEs for both their previous games. TOW on the other hand, I have to ask myself if I want to commit myself to having it completely on the Microsoft Store before buying the Season Pass. With Game Pass for PC now at the full price of $10/month, it's less clear cut than it was before. It might depend on whether I end up buying a new XBox this year, because if I do I'm 100% certain I'll go with Game Pass Ultimate and therefore it'd be safe to buy DLC on the platform.

The truce time is halved from what it was in CK2 though, feels pretty good to me. Murdering the guy you just defeated works as well as ever, of course.

Putting CK3 on hold until the first major patch comes along. I tried the More Game Rules mod (which fortunately was easy enough to install on Game Pass, no harder than Steam to be honest) but it doesn't go far enough. Tried Wasteland 3, but stopped pretty early due to a combination of my being out of SSD space, meaning it was installed on an external spindle drive with excruciating load times, and because it didn't seem like low-manning it would have been a good time and I can't be bothered playing a full party. Aside from that, I just tried out the new additions to Nintendo Switch Online thingie, but nothing kept me going for more than five minutes. I bought Disco Elysium fairly recently, might try that next. Might also research how Bannerlord Early Access is coming along.

Biggest quibble I had with AP was that reloading didn't actually restore the same game state that existed when you saved. Can't remember the specifics as it's been so long, but enemies might have just outright disappeared and stuff? As for the Xbox Ses, hopefully there's a way to transfer games not actively being played to an external drive. @LadyCrimson I believe the Xbox Sex is 1TB and both versions of the PS5 are 825GB.

Maybe the new DLC should have been titled Gorgon in Peril. EDIT I prefer the alliterative approach myself. Can't wait for the upcoming Alarm on Amentep and Fear on Fionavar DLCs.

I've probably put in a similar amount of time, but I think I'm either about to put it down until a major balance patch comes along, or get deep into the modding scene (difficult but not impossible with the MS Game Pass version). The fundamentals of the game are good, and it's easily one of the more mature Paradox games in terms of its release state - not that that's saying much. The good thing is that I don't think it's any specific new mechanic that's fundamentally broken, it's just that the numbers (such as fervour loss/gain, religious/heresy conversion rates) seem way off in terms of balancing, to the extent it feels like they launched it with the same numbers they put in on the first pass and never bothered iterating on them for balance. However, the more I play, the more the problems are evident and I just can't ignore them for much longer. War and Religion are obviously the two biggest themes of the game, but sadly they're also the most broken currently. The 867 start date is a complete write-off (to the extent it's hard to believe it was tested at all), and 1066 is merely tolerable with cracks widening into chasms as each game progresses. War simply consists of the AI bum-rushing your capital, even from the other side of the world, and they spam boats to run rings around you because they'll happily do so and pay for it despite being hundreds in debt, all the while your allies twiddle their thumbs. Crusades? Forget any long term impact, they're there for you to get a share of the loot (~1000g on average is no joke) and game the Crusader trait. Within a year the newly-formed Crusader Kingdom will have flipped back to the old religion because the bloody peasants somehow convince the Queen (and it's always a Queen) that spontaneously converting to Islam is a good idea. Cue the next crusade targeting them in a vicious cycle.

Good that they ended up cheaper than rumoured, though even the cheapest of the cards announced today is still ~25% more than I'm prepared to pay for any video card so I'll sit tight for 3060 news. That said, if it might be competitive for the next ten years and no viable option turns up in my price range, perhaps it would be okay - my current card was originally released almost seven years ago after all. It seems absurd to think of PC hardware potentially aging like that these days, but in no way is that a complaint. It's also admittedly heavily influenced by the type of game I tend to play, with ones truly taxing on graphics hardware coming once every few years at best. I mean, the most graphically intensive game I've seriously played is still The Witcher 3, which is over five years old now. So it's not one or the other, but rather a "fortunate" confluence of relatively slow hardware progression and my disinterest in the majority of graphical heavyweight games over the past decade which together has saved me a ton of cash on PC upgrades. If anything, the majority of my PC-related costs over those years have been for storage, which would have seemed an absurd idea in years past. Hell, I barely keep up with hardware-related news these days and just rely on you guys to give me the skinny on what the current mainstream picks are. (For context, the 3070 RRP is $809AUD apparently, I'm looking at more the $600AUD range which is where the 5700XT currently sits, but that'd be a silly thing to buy right now)

Apparently as an Australian I can't install, purchase or even see CK3 in the store, as it's yet to pass the classification board. This could be a pickle, or... Problem solved. Rare thumbs up for the MS Store / XBox app for being so trusting. If only it were that easy on other platforms. (I will, of course, be playing it on Game Pass)

And now I see the next expansion is a Star Wars crossover. Not that I really see myself buying any further DLC for the game, given that the well is, well, well and truly dry by now. I mean, the last DLC before this Star Wars one was based around knitting. Just knitting. Yeah...

I completed a university degree in The Sims 4 for the first time. And also probably the last time. Getting a degree involves completing twelve units, at the rate of 1-4 (your choice) per "semester". Each semester is one week, resulting in an overall duration of 3-12 weeks. After going for a maximal four units first up and getting overwhelmed, I scaled back to three, and even then it was a scramble. The issue as I see it is that for anything but the lightest workloads essentially for each of those weeks you're either: a) waiting for the Sim to complete the progress bar while they attend a lecture b) waiting for the Sim to complete the progress bar while they do their homework c) waiting for the Sim to complete the progress bar while they they write their term paper Actually that last one is a lie. I had to wait for them to complete it just like all the other tasks, except the progress bar was invisible. I also tried joining a sports club, this led to: d) waiting for the Sim to complete the progress bar while they attend soccer training So yes, attending university involves simply initiating each of the above activities then putting the game on fast forward for a few hours. Between all those activities (I quit the sports team after a few days), there's really no time to do anything else but attend to your most simple biological needs. At the end, the reward is that you get to start your normal career several ranks up instead of at the very bottom of the ladder. Consider the fact, however, that if you had simply joined at the bottom of the career ladder instead of busying yourself with university, you'd probably have been promoted up to at least that point anyway, and earned money while doing so, instead of ending up in debt. Well, at least the student loans are easily paid off within a couple weeks of graduating, which I gather is not realistic in real life. I suppose this is standard fare for the level of interactivity the entire mediocre history of The Sims 4 has already established, but disappointing all the same. Even the task of simply eating each day involved waiting for one of your roommates to magically conjure a roast chicken or lobster out of thin air because that's the only way to get decent food into the dorms.

Yeah, I'm going to force myself to use three pre-made characters this time around because as mentioned, last time around by the time I got a party together the mood to play the game had gone. I find these days a game has to grab me quick, like within an hour, or I'll probably end up indefinitely shelving it. To this day I've spent more time on character creation in W2 than I did on the rest of the gameplay combined.

Give them a taste of their own medicine and switch to hard tackling, get stuck in, etc, once they make all their subs.😈

I'll try not to burn myself out during character creation this time.

It's the board's fault for sanctioning the transfer anyway. It's always the board's fault. Dunno how it is with newer versions but for smaller clubs I always felt that if you played to the budget, the club would go broke, and if you didn't play to the budget, you wouldn't have enough players to even fill the bench. It's almost if they're designed to be stepping stones, to be managed to the brink of bankruptcy before you move on to the next club, to do the same with. Then again, they have the gall to complain about my financial management when they've hired me mid-season and there hasn't even been a transfer window yet, so I don't feel the least bit bad about it. SI probably just leave it like that because in the game the clubs always survive anyway so there are no long term consequences like clubs being poofed out of existence in real life. It's a little bit disappointing that I'm not actually an existential threat to the club. 😛

I've never played any of the Hitman games, though I inevitably own several of them. However I can still relate to the complaints as it's a good series to occasionally watch people bumble through though, and it does often seem that 47 treats the player input as sort of a mild suggestion rather than a direct order. 😛 Now, I wonder if any game has attempted to map walking to the D-pad and running to the analogue stick. It's stupid enough that even modern games can think it a good idea to have menus only navigable with the D-pad. I'm looking at you, Persona, you suck.

Probably talking about the ones before the reboot, which had dumb things like the context sensitive attack button making 47 get into shoving matches with enemies instead of properly attacking them.

At first my brain couldn't process how that fan would even move useful airflow. Then I saw the triple slot bracket. That rumoured price point is over four times the highest price I've ever paid for a video card. I'm resigned to the fact that I'm going to exceed that figure with the next one I buy, but I figure maybe by about 50%, not 400%.

I can wait 'til it appears on Humble Monthly, like all the other Hitmen Hitmans I own.

Based on CK3 releasing on Game Pass, I was relying on the fact that I wouldn't need to pay for it anyway,

A complete rewrite of the game perhaps? https://www.bloodlines2.com/en/an-update-on-the-organizational-changes-for-bloodlines-2 EDIT: Statement from Mitsoda provided to RPS here.

Remember how I complained two posts ago that the days in CSD2 really dragged on? Turns out that it's because the game engine, like many poorly-written DOS games of yesteryear, can only measure time by the amount of frames that have been displayed. Well, I have been exclusively playing this game on my Celeron NUC... The short of it is that the game is probably running at half of the maximum capped frame rate of 60fps - probably even less most of the time - and as a result each level ends up at least twice as long.

I finally made an EGS account yesterday so I guess their persistence finally worked. No reason to install the client just yet to so I have no idea how good it is. As long as it's more reliable at actually downloading games than the Microsoft Store app, I'll be happy, as that's all I ask of a distribution platform. I will treat it like any other non-GOG platform though, in that I'll buy from it if it has the best price. Based on my recent shopping that seems unlikely, since I almost always end up buying from the likes of Fanatical, WinGameStore, Voidu, etc. (I'm willing to pay around a 10% premium for GOG though) P.S. I didn't know it didn't have achievements, but that's a plus in my book. Hate 'em.

It's a Cook, Serve, Delicious cook-off as I compare CSD2 to CSD3. Whose cuisine will reign supreme? In one corner we have the 2017 title, which I am playing in single-player mode, courtesy of Oner. In the other corner, the technically-not-released-yet CSD3, which per an announcement just today is due to come out of Early Access in October. That one I will be playing in co-op via Steam Remote Play, as it is owned by my sister. In terms of the core gameplay loop, CSD2 has you completing a full workday, from 7am to 10pm, in a restaurant in an office tower. Each day is mostly fairly sedate, but is broken up by two rush hour periods of heavy activity. CSD3 has you operate a Food Truck, where every day has you make a few scheduled stops, and between stops you have to deal with pre-orders while also ensuring you have enough food pre-prepared for the rush of customers at the next stop. Overall, CSD3's system is significantly more fast-paced, but is counter-acted by having each day be considerably shorter overall. We're talking on the order of 20 minutes vs 10 minutes per level here. This is amplified by the removal of the "side dish" mechanic, which was essentially a mechanism to "stall" customers by making them significantly more patient if you have such dishes prepared. It feels a little gamey, in that somehow customers are somehow willing to wait twice as long for their burger if you also happen to have fries ready to serve, and three times as long if you also have salad ready, even though they will only ever buy one side (and will always buy a side if it's available). CSD3 inverts the challenge by instead providing you a couple of new tools to deal with the otherwise overwhelming rushes: the aforementioned pre-order system letting you know which foods to focus on while in transit, and a robot assistant which can automatically serve any and all ready meals instantly, at the touch of a button. In short, you deal with rushes by being able to serve food items faster instead of you trying to buy more time. Outside the actual levels themselves, CSD also feels a lot less grindy. In both games, completing each level gives you resources to buy more recipes and to upgrade your facilities, but CSD3's feels a fair bit more generous, and you are essentially never short of having enough cash to buy a complete new menu for the next level. In CSD2, completing a level might provide you with enough to buy one new dish on average. To be fair, a large part of the game involves being a chef-for-hire in other restaurants, where you earn a wage (and tips) while having no control over the menu, so the recipes you've learned for yourself are only relevant when working in your own restaurant. Aside, true to American dining culture, just as much of your daily earnings, if not the majority of it, will come from tips. This makes it particularly aggravating when some foods, and indeed some entire levels, make you ineligible for tips. When this happens, you end up spending just as much time and effort on a level as on any other, but arbitrarily find your income halved, increasing the grindiness of the game even more. CSD3 dispenses with the tipping system altogether, fortunately. It's one of the perks of the complete collapse of society that is the game's backstory: the whole thing is set in a sort of post-apocalyptic Mad Max version of America. Now to be fair, I've only played a few hours of each title at the moment, but at the moment I think the third game is the superior one, mainly for being more manageable in terms of time commitment. I feel a lot more comfortable finding a 10 minutes in my day or just before going to bed to play a short gaming session. And for the completionist players, of which I am not one, failing a perfect run near the end of a short CSD3 run feels a hell of a lot less infuriating than doing so at the end of a 20 minute slog. TL;DR: Feel free to just skip straight to the third instalment.