Humanoid

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.

It is, but a lot of it is only in hindsight. Legion had some terrible, terrible issues, and probably marked the peak of RNG reliance as a determinant for success - see the Legendary and Titanforging systems. I'd go so far as to say Warlords of Draenor would have been the better expansion ...if it wasn't only two-thirds the size of the average expansion. Can't say anything about Pandaria as I quit partway through Cataclysm and didn't return for 2.5 years. FF14 isn't the answer though, less than two months in and I'm already feeling fairly burnt out, though to be fair, going through three expansions worth in one go will burn anyone out. I only made it to near the end of the first expansion and haven't progressed any farther for over a week.

Old raids will be mowed down with trivial difficulty. Not just based on everything unknown then now being common knowledge, but the capability of the tools available now will also be much greater. That, and obviously starting at patch 1.12 means the players will be much more powerful too, with the classes having been reworked and thus all being at effectively full power. No more useless 31 point talents for one... I started in January 2005, though only playing for the included month. Got to exactly level 40 on the day the gametime expired. Only returned about three months later, spent a bit of time in the PUG scene thanks to a few friends I made along the way, eventually one - a druid - got into a serious US raiding guild, and I as a rogue managed to tag along, partly because of the nepotism of wanting to appease the new healer, and because they just happened to lose three of their rogues very recently. Latency back then to the US west coast servers approached 400ms. I like to think I was a decent player back then but imagine the performance gain from 400ms back then to 12ms today. That guild broke up at the end of vanilla, but almost by accident, I along with my Aussie/SE Asian friends founded a raiding guild of our own (or rather, commandeered an existing bank alt guild). I'm still in it today, albeit in a very casual, "guild elder" sort of role. We've got maybe about half-a-dozen survivors from BC which is probably pretty good compared to the average retention rate of WoW players these days.

While I have plenty of nostalgia for it, I don't think it's something I would enjoy today. If I'm subscribed when it launches I might try to recreate my original character and tool around a bit, but somehow I doubt I'd even get to double-digit levels. Even if I theoretically got through the slog to level 60, I doubt the old endgame structures would organically return in any way resembling how it was. Raids might be mechanically identical to how they were, but everything around them will be unrecognisable - guild structures, the PUG scene, the gearing process, etc.

I managed to be subscribed to two MMOs and be burnt out on both MMOs at the same time. I can barely be motivated to unlock flying in WoW and am just crawling along at the rate of a few daily quests a day (on a good day) and am barely 1/3rd of the way to the unlock. Meanwhile in FF14, I'm anchored at about level 60 because I stopped caring about the story and haven't left town for more than a week just occasionally doing some tradeskills.

I could never finish Snake Rattle 'n' Roll. Bloody ice levels. Random nostalgia: I remember as a kid that the magical key sequence to start up the PC (the 286) was T-enter-T-enter. I didn't twig until yeeeeeears later that my dad had simply set the username to T, and the password to T.

Yeah, the Diablo thing is wholly subcontracted for probably trivial cost, so there's zero opportunity cost in terms of what the fans actually want to play. Contrast this to when a company pivots entirely to do a completely different style of game with their core team - I imagine fans feel like they did when Jordan went to play baseball.

I've told the story before, but most of my sentimental favourites come from that time in 1994 or 1995 where we finally replaced the old family 286 with a shiny new DX4/100. The 286 was loooooong obsolete, bearing in mind that the 386 was released in 1985 and the 486 in 1989. With the PC we got a Creative multimedia bundle, which consisted of a Sound Blaster 16, 2x speed CD-ROM drive, a cheap joystick and speakers, and most importantly, the best bundle of games ever assembled, even if it was headlined by the exceedingly mediocre Rebel Assault. The other newish games included were Return to Zork, and a sci-fi survival game called Iron Helix which I never ended up playing as it sounded too scary for me. (There was also a Grolier's Multimedia Encyclopaedia which was rather handy for school assignments) What's more important though were the legacy games they also included, games that didn't really fit into the multimedia theme and some of which were quite a few years old at the time. There was a 4-game Microprose CD containing Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, F-117A Stealth Fighter 2.0 and Silent Service 2. There was a 4-game Origin bundle containing Wing Commander 2, Strike Commander, Ultima 8 and Syndicate Plus. There was SimCity 2000 too, but that wasn't new to me, strictly speaking. These games defined my childhood gaming and turned me into the primarily PC gamer that I am today. Before that, sure, I played some games on the PC, fairly primitive titles (though some are timeless) for the time like Alley Cat, Space Invaders, Pitstop 2, Epyx Winter Games. SimFarm, which is a game I've never heard anyone else talk about, is probably the most sophisticated game I actually played on the old machine, and I loved it. I also watched my older cousin (he had about 10 years on me) play some of the AD&D Gold Box games on it too, but I was never brave enough to try them myself - it would be a full decade later that I came into the genre via Baldur's Gate 2. But I digress - ultimately anything I played on PC in my pre-teens was very obviously overshadowed by what the NES and then SNES were capable of, given that I was restricted to 16 colour EGA graphics and PC speaker audio. But for whatever reason, I don't have nearly as much nostalgia for those games as I do for the PC games that came after. _____ HoMM2 is another one that was a bit odd, in that I remember renting it quite a few times from the video rental shop that was next to the family business we used to run. It would have been in that awkward period where it wasn't new enough to have a sequel just yet, but old enough to be somewhat hard to find in stores. Finally did give the big box Gold edition that also included the previous game plus the original King's Bounty.

It's 65% off right now at GMG which is a historical low. Same discount for the Gold edition.

No personal experience but there are plenty of free or paid data recovery tools you can use, though you'll probably need to be able to hook up the drive to a functioning computer, probably a desktop of some sort. Could be as simple as a corrupt boot record with the drive and data otherwise 100% intact. No guarantees it'll work though, and if it doesn't, the next step would be professional data recovery services, but do note that they may charge hundreds, or in some case potentially thousands of dollars for the job depending on how bad the failure was. Often this will be the only realistic option if the disk is physically damaged.

I know next to nothing about Conan Exiles but I do have a key from a Humble Monthly last year so I'd give it a go if someone started it up. Mind you, my gaming hours probably don't line up with any other active player here. Meanwhile, I've been subbed for about a week on WoW. During that time, I've advanced one reputation required for flying from Neutral to Friendly. Yeah, this isn't happening anytime soon. Went to the new raid a couple of times (on Normal) and it was fine, nothing exceptional. Cleared the new dungeon once, ditto. I think ultimately I came back a bit too early.

Odd, the button claims I have five things on my wishlist, but when I click it it only shows three. And I already own those three elsewhere. Deleted them and the button now claims I have two items on the wishlist, but also "There are 0 items on your wishlist, but none of them match the filters you have applied above." Good job, Steam. Probably games that were pulled from Steam or something. The most recent thing I could see was added in 2015.

I think I have some games left over on the wishlist back from when they had a promo where you might win some of the games on it. But in terms of actual practicality, I'd use the wishlist on a third party price aggregator site instead so you know you're getting the best price overall, not the best Steam price. gg.deals (yes that's a URL) is the hot new thing, or there's good ol' IsThereAnyDeal.