Humanoid

Every version from FM20 through to FM23 has been available for free at some point via Epic and/or Amazon Prime (which is only kind of free I guess). I expect the same of FM24 later this year, but it's definitely not something I'm interested in. If I ever do play FM21 Touch again I suppose I'd have to see if it can be modded to implement some of the new rules added since that season, such as expanded subs.

Developer Alderon games, who may or may not be one of the companies discussed here, claims an almost 100% failure rate.

You just reminded me that I never finished Dragonfall. Don't recall why, maybe I lost my saves during a computer upgrade or somesuch. I did finish the original campaign and it was a fine enough introduction to Shadowrun, which I'd no experience in beforehand. I probably need to do something else post-Cyberpunk before going back to something that hits the same notes again. Maybe after Avowed?

I'm paid up for the next couple years or so having loaded up on a bunch of cheap South American 3-monthly Xbox Live Gold cards. I think it worked out to around $7AUD a month for Ultimate once all's said and done. If I ever had to pay full local price for it, it'd simply be a case of only paying for single months now and then whenever there's a few games I want to try out.

Very much depends on the game. There's a lot of outdated information because back in the day, MS Store titles were distributed as UWP Apps which pretty much meant no modding at all. Those days are gone and the games are just standard Win32 apps now and most can be modded just fine, but the reputation persists. Bethesda games are a bit of an outlier because of their reliance on the third-party script extenders for the more complex mods, most famously SKSE for Skyrim, alongside F4SE for Fallout 4 and now SFSE for Starfield. This is a dependency for many mods, so mods that require it won't work. There's currently no official way to load them with MS Store versions of the games, but the good news is that there is some progress by third-parties who have now got it working (technical details here). Note that I've no knowledge of any bugs or limitations it may have as I haven't played Starfield since launch day and thus never actually tried modding it - I got a total of around 3 hours in before quitting of boredom. Anyway, the original authors of it have no interest in enabling MS Store compatibility and the devs of this side-project don't have the rights to distribute the SFSE code, hence the oddness of their release being a hex mod for the official SFSE release. Would be nice if they could come to an agreement someday to make it as easy as installing it on the Steam/GOG version.

While stealth archer builds are no doubt brokenly overpowered in Skyrim, it does need a bit more setup in Cyberpunk. Less true now that throwing knives automatically respawn in your hand I suppose, which wasn't the case for the vast majority of my time with the game. Regardless, I found myself not liking that approach in either game, I like my takedowns close and personal. In Skyrim that means stacking enough damage via perks and gear to one-shot enemies, in Cyberpunk there's no stat check involved. It's not as smooth as Dishonored's system, but it's certainly less silly than new Deus Ex's canned animations. The complexity is more down to how you use quickhacks to help set up your approach - distracting and luring enemies, temporarily depriving them of their senses, etc. Towards the lategame you do supplement the basics with powerful spells like Power Word: Kill, with both lethal and non-lethal variants.

Mostly yes, you can ghost the vast majority of quests. In terms of the base game, I think it's one mandatory midgame boss fight and the endgame one. There's a series of sidequests where it's kind of nothing but hunting down mini-bosses, but for all but one of them (there are over a dozen) I found stealth takedowns still worked fine. Occasionally you'll have minor sidequest content where you might be talking to someone and they pull a gun on you and you shoot them dead, over in a couple of seconds. Can't really call that a combat encounter, just a slight extension of killing someone via dialogue option.

Well, not hard at all once I turned the difficulty to easy (after around half a dozen deaths). Not the point though - that simply being that I don't want to play a spectacle shooter because I don't enjoy that kind of gameplay. Same reason I don't play FPSes at all, or watch Michael Bay movies, etc. Obviously CDPR can make their game however they like, and it was never promised that a full stealth style was going to be viable. However, I was really enjoying the Deus Ex / Dishonored type gameplay, so to be pulled violently out of that style is pretty jarring. The only major incident like that in the base game I remember was

I'm expecting FM25 to be a car crash because of the switch to Unity from their 15 year old homebrew, so waiting would likely have been a case of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Personally FM21 remains the final version I'll play until they reintroduce FM Touch. I just can't deal with the feature bloat anymore.

I'm sure it does get better, because it can scarcely get worse. The prospect isn't all that enticing at the moment since it resulted in me rage-quitting, so we'll see if I give it another shot once I cool down. That said, nod of respect to being allowed to abandon the main quest and just let fate take its course. Actually Aside, the intro's extended nighttime sequence has shown up the contrast limitations of LCD monitors as brutally as any game I've ever played. Doesn't help that LG's nano-IPS panels have some of the worst contrast around. So if there is a silver lining, it'll be that it accelerates my purchase of a new OLED monitor.

So I was one of the people who genuinely enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077 even in its near-launch state, and thought that despite its issues, it was one of the best games of the year. Today, I finally started the Phantom Liberty expansion, and I now hate Cyberpunk 2077. Platforming, long linear sequences where you can't save, mandatory boss fights... yeah, it's made pretty much the worst first impression possible. Any pretense of it being an RPG are gone, and it's just moving from set piece to set piece in a completely unreactive way like I imagine Call of Duty does - with the caveat I've never played Call of Duty. It's a complete genre-shift into a genre I outright despise.

I'm not sure there is an Obsidian game where the gameplay (mostly thinking about combat here, although that's obviously not true for Pentiment) is strong enough to stand on its own. Closest might be South Park of all things. Hopefully Avowed has a more fleshed out stealth system than Outer Worlds. If it does it'd probably become my favourite Obsidian title mechanically as is. Not necessarily asking for Looking Glass level implementation, though something like Cyberpunk would be appreciated. But I'll settle for a marginal improvement over Skyrim.

Eh, yes and no. It's true of many things, and in the early game it's mostly a few rare events where an early game oversight might mean you need to wait an entire in-game year for the next chance. Often not a big deal since you're waiting on other stuff anyway, e.g. completing the Spring bundles in year 2 means just a minor delay since you're waiting for winter items anyway. However the time pressure becomes more unavoidable the deeper you get into lategame, initially mostly with the Skull Cavern content from launch (where losing all your staircases and bombs but failing to reach level 100 is a massive setback), but increasingly so with post-launch content like Ginger Island.

I feel the burnout begins for me the moment you branch off into livestock. While it doesn't really take much time compared to crops, the gameplay is much more repetitive and shallow. If I ever start a game fresh again (it's probably years away, maybe with the fan expansion?), I'll probably just skip that element and use cheats to spawn the required animal products in. 1.6 has added even more micromanagement, in that you now are actually incentivised to close the barn/coop door every night to maximise animal happiness. (Prior to this patch, it was a common urban legend that you needed to do it, but it actually did nothing) To be fair, I haven't used the super-popular Automate mod yet. Maybe if I was going to seriously try to grind out for the late-game items that cost seven digit amounts I would, but at the moment I'm thinking of doing the opposite and basically deleting everything but my greenhouse.

Playing Stardew Valley for the first time in several years due to the massive 1.6 update. I know the last time I played, multiplayer was not even officially supported and required a user mod to play. Looking that up, it was mid-2018, so it's been at least six years. Funny thing is that the major content patch was probably mostly in the 1.5 update, which was effectively a free expansion with a brand new major zone, but that passed me by for whatever reason. Realistically the new zone only becomes accessible in the second in-game year, so there's a bit of an issue where by the time it was unlocked, I felt like I'd almost had enough of the game already. Regardless though, I pressed on so I could at least see some of it. I'd never really bought into the idea of the game as a whole being an exemplar of the "cozy game" genre. There's far too much pressure in terms of both time and inventory management for that. But I could see where the argument comes from, and for most of the game's existence the argument has been fairly reasonable. That ceases to be the case with each piece of new content that's added though, mainly in the sense that it rapidly becomes overwhelming if you're the type to stick with the game's central theme of being a farmer. Instead you're very much incentivised to completely abandon most of the base game mechanics in order to even have time to engage with the new content. An element of this was already hinted at in the base game with the somewhat-optional Skull Cavern, the endgame dungeon that required you to heavily optimise an entire day's play to it in a pretty literal sense. To give a bit of context, the intended approach for it pretty much involved kitting yourself out the night before, praying the game's RNG generated a good luck day in the morning, then using a teleport at 6am and start mining with explosives until 2am, when you passed out from fatigue (which is optimal play, the 1000g penalty for not going returning home manually is trivial). But to be fair, this is something you only had to pull off a couple of times in an average playthrough before being set for resources. The new zone takes this approach and dials it to eleven. Every single day your new goal becomes to get yourself to the new zone as soon as possible at the sacrifice of everything else, and engage in the new major grind there. I admit that after a few days of this, I gave up and installed a cheat mod that allowed me to freeze time, turning the game into a more traditional RPG in which I could explore the content at my leisure. I thus wave farewell and good riddance to the game's central time management conceit, but it nonetheless feels bizarre that the intended approach seems to be to stop farming altogether, sell all your animals, ignore all your friends and their quests, etc. Now in mitigation

Bioware started it with a bull, Larian responded with a bear, so the next logical escalation would be something like a hippo or elephant.

Yeah, one commonly overlooked thing is how good the Occultist is at the front. People tend to have the impression he's a standard RPG wizard and hide him at the back, but he's got the most reliable single-target stun in the game (Hands from the Abyss) and his melee attack has both a high crit chance and bonus damage against Eldritch (the most common enemy type in the game). Accuracy isn't great, but the general rule for every class is one accuracy trinket, except Leper where you take two accuracy trinkets. Don't forget Houndmaster who has the best Mark skill, with a big Prot debuff on the target. And of course he's the only one of the four Mark classes with a stress heal. That said, Mark isn't a universal solution to boss fights because of how the duration ticks down. When bosses have two or even three moves a turn, that means the Mark wears off two or three times faster.

Not quite there yet, but you're well on the way to discovering the fun of "dance parties". Maybe not with three Grave Robbers as such, but equip one with her best move, Lunge. Then add two or three more party members who also move themselves forward (and optionally backwards) with their best attacks. Grave Robber Lunges then Shadow Fades. Highwayman Duelist Advances then Point Blank Shoots. Shieldbreaker ...well, basically all her skills move her either forward or back. And while less explicitly dancers, the Jester (Dirk Stab/Finale) Crusader (Holy Lance), Man at Arms (Rampart), Hellion (Breakthrough) can also participate in this style of play. It's both very fun, and makes it so that you're far less vulnerable to being surprised by enemies. But yeah, the boring meta team is "Jestal", Jester and Vestal. Coldly effective but it's just so boring to play. You can easily complete the game with static parties where every member just operates independently, but dance parties and a third type of party, built around using Mark (using 3-4 of Bounty Hunter, Occultist, Hound Master and Arbalest), are great to keep yourself from burning out with the same old strategies.

I barely even got to start the Hinterlands, I remember getting to my castle, starting one of those missions where you have to wait in real time for it to complete, then decided to quit for the day while it completed. I never ended up launching the game ever again.

I never felt that dungeons ever actually went up in difficulty, and indeed you probably outscale the dungeons if you know which trinkets to farm, because that's the only place where you actually have decisions to make in terms of the power level of your units. The rest is, as you say, just farming gold in order to unlock and buy better skills and gear levels, no decisions required there. Rushing the bank district is a pretty decent idea, and remember to sell duplicate and junk trinkets regularly. They don't. All of the game rules are actually stored in plain text for easy inspection and modding, and as such is one of the easiest games to mod that I've ever encountered. The file scripts/map_generator.darkest confirms this by only having one entry for each combination of dungeon location, length and mission type. For example: Scouting is an incredibly powerful mechanic that's easy to neglect. The game doesn't make it terribly easy to understand how it works, so here's a guide:

For gaming it's really just either a 7600 non-X or a 7800X3D really. Occasionally the 7600X will be discounted to within say, $10-20 of the non-X, but there's only a few percent between them. Both are very efficient, cool-running chips so motherboard selection isn't all that crucial. Impossible to make any firm recommendations without seeing prices, but over here the best value mainstream picks will be boards like the MSI B650M Gaming Plus and the Gigabyte B650M DS3H. Upper-midrange picks will be the MSI B650 Tomahawk, Gigabyte B650 Aorus Elite and Asus TUF B650-PLUS. Depending on whether your current Intel board is a DDR4 or DDR5 version, you may also need new RAM. The general pick for AMD will be a 6000MT/s CL30 kit.

I like OLED have run an OLED laptop for a few years now, and especially post laser eye surgery, really appreciate the elimination of glare. But while I would happily drop the cash on the now-acceptable pricing on a solid OLED gaming monitor, the problem is that I have three monitors and I don't think just replacing one of them on its lonesome is going to help me much. Getting three of them for ~$3.5k is not on the table just yet, but with current Aussie pricing I think the AW2725DF is clearly the product that makes the most sense for me.

Finally pinged ol' mate Satya on Teams and asked to get on the sweet, sweet Azure presumably.

Darkest Dungeon finally has a new healing class to rival the Vestal.

They're generic 3D models (not just characters, any 3D modelled object really) that are purchased individually and imported into any engine. Useful for indie devs so they don't need to employ their own artists, though I suspect the reason it's most obvious in adult games is that they all buy the same base models and just drop them in with zero to minimal customisation. EDIT: Sorted by popular and the fifth result is a pre-fab Jesus for the low, low price of $243.99. If you were trying to spin a quick buck making a Christian edutainment game, it seems a pretty obvious route to take. Though apparently it's another $50 to put him into a videogame, or $1.99 extra if you wanted to 3D-print him. Hmm...