Humanoid

Woah, I turned on my desktop today after not using it for about a month. Just too busy doing other things - mainly nothing - and event viewer tells me that the last time I turned it on was the 25th of August. That's probably the longest voluntary break I've had in my adult life. Why did I turn it on then? Because I learned that hitting the spacebar on my laptop while playing CK2 is annoying. Currently trying to figure out the ideal set of rules for my playstyle because while I did a count-to-king run on the laptop over about 150 years, I found the China and Fourth Crusade default settings to be idiotic and immersion-ruining.

Yeah, bought a 570 for my sister last year and I ended up with the copy of Odyssey (because she couldn't be bothered making a Uplay account), not that I've played it. The launch incentives for Navi on the other hand were certainly weak, but understandable from a business perspective as they were hardly needed. I wonder though whether Ghost Recon is considered a higher "value" product (still available with the 570 mind you) and why I couldn't trade down to Outer Worlds if I so desired. Then again, maybe it's just as well if I want my copy to be on the MS store platform. Oh well, the weak AUD is heavily disincentivising any hardware purchases anyway.

New AMD bundles give you the choice of Borderlands 3 or Outer Worlds for a Ryzen CPU (or both for the top end models), but for a GPU the choice is instead one of of Borderlands 3 or the new Ghost Recon. (The 3 month Xbox game pass still applies to both) Goddammit AMD, why not just let us choose any of the three? Still, at least it's a competitive offer now, compared to when it was just the game pass while nVidia was offering permanent games. I believe their current bundled game is the new CoD. P.S. If you want a bundled Borderlands 3, look into getting a Samsung SSD instead perhaps.

If it's mission critical I'd at least get a 2-bay off-the-shelf NAS. QNAP or Synology products are the most common recommendations I see. If you're willing to get a bit more hands-on, you can build your own NAS of course, and it'd be cost effective if you had an old PC lying around to repurpose with the further advantage of being able to fit many more drives in future.

@melkathi I choose to believe the average Obsidianite is a middle-aged male nihilistic depraved occultist.

And that's only for the first character you level, after that you get the heirloom mount usable at level 1.

I'd sooner have them reuse the Outer Worlds engine to make Descent to Undermountain 2.

The LFG thing is mostly a sidestory for me because the opportunity for it to be relevant was closed by the time it was introduced. By the time WoTLK rolled around, I had long retired from the PUG scene and essentially did dungeons with guildies exclusively - the LFG tool therefore served the one (admittedly convenient) purpose of removing travel time. Yeah, yeah, I know the "it makes the world feel small" argument, but eh, manually flying there also does that. Actually though, I can see the difference it made to the social aspect of the game in my brief experiment at levelling an opposite-faction character, which I did back in Cataclysm. I made it all the way from 1-85 not just without getting to know a single other person, but by literally not ever talking with another person. Granted I'm a very withdrawn person naturally, and will almost never initiate a conversation. All my friendships in the game were initiated by the friend. I started classic blind, like many people. I never expected to do any particular type of content, or to even make a single friend. But I did make a few friends, and managed to build a decent rep (essential as a rogue) on the dungeon PUG scene through networking and (I hope) competent play. Taking this "natural" approach I went maybe 5 months before I felt I had run out of stuff to do, and I think I would have quit soon thereafter if I didn't make the conscious choice to join an established raiding guild.

^ When you mentioned the original my mind went to Spacebase DF-9 instead and thinking this was a reboot of that. Yeah, not a good thing either.

The upshot of this is that I've just learned CP2077 can have a female player character. I am pleased.

If the upgrade fails, there's a rollback feature that you can use within 10 days of the upgrade.

Yeah, I always had the impression that SimCopter Jane's Longbow series was considered the hardcore helicopter sim of the 90s and that Comanche was the more accessible arcadey game. Never played either of them, mind you.

Feels like there's a higher proportion of dodgy Switch ports than there is for any other current platform (no doubt due to its somewhat oddball hardware), so it's something to be cautious about before rushing out to buy it. Even ports of mature, stable games suffer. Not that you shouldn't check feedback about the game on any platform before buying, mind you.

Hope that's the case, it's been either 2 or 3 years since I last played.

I did all the sidequests in my first run as Smuggler way back when, and have now filed them under "never again". I also lost the use of the Smuggler because I lost my name when the Aussie servers shut down and refuse to play a pale imitation of myself. I'm weird that way. There really is no excuse for Star Wars, a series where just about everyone has last names, to not allow people to share first names.

Is the overcapping from doing sidequests? I remember doing a double XP Inquisitor run some time back and by just doing story quests, I ended up barely above the level curve, maybe 2-3 levels over by level 40. Then the double XP ran out and I ran into a brick wall, having absolutely no desire to do sidequests to keep up.

"Loot boxes are fascist evil" No. #ThisPostMayBePaidForInPartOrWholeByVolo

I regret playing Revelation. Partially my mistake to play it right after completing Conquest, so there was an element of burnout, but I also think it's genuinely the worst of the lot in terms of map design. Indeed a lot of the maps are recycled but with crappier, more annoying gimmicks put in.

RTS was the default game genre in the late 90s. If you were a game studio who didn't know what you were making next, you were making an RTS.

GOG's lowest price for it so far has been 28EUR so yeah, wait if you want DRM-free. (Lowest price at the moment is 25.20EUR but it's a Steam key from GMG, pretty much the historical low price though)

I also wish I could literally jump. There are a few places where I keep thinking I can go through some shrubs or whatever but nope, have to walk around them. (I'm only one chapter in so not much else to say about it yet)

There goes my expert knowledge of Horde mechanics. So, uh, how about that Sentry Totem boys?

Why would you ever give Bloodlust to group 1? But yeah, the day they added the combat pulse was a sad day. I felt like such a ninja when on our first Ragnaros kill I was able to vanish and use my jumper cables on a priest, and they in turn were out of combat for a short while too.

The worst evolution of WoW for me is the increasing push to make you do all the content on every character. Your power level is now dependent on many other factors other than just raid gear so if you want to stay competitive. You need to participate in all the auxilliary content to get your correct legendary gear (in Legion), power up your artifact, gain various currencies needed to upgrade your non-raid best-in-slot gear, etc. It's all designed to maximise the time investment needed, because that's what looks good in their metrics. Gone are the days where you can just log into the game for a couple of raids a week and be functional when called upon. The end result is you can no longer really hotswap different characters in unless you've invested just as much into them as you have on your main character. The game is now more alt-unfriendly than it has been at any point in its history.

Looking up the release plans right now, MC will be available at launch, and BWL will be available in "phase 3", so that probably leaves a lot of time to gear up reasonably well and negate some of the time gating. Dire Maul being in the second phase though will mean initial dungeon gear will be fairly unoptimised. Regardless though, I reckon the world "first" will probably just cheese it with an army of level 10 warlocks outside the raid soulstoning anyone without a cloak.