Humanoid

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.

I was flip-flopping on whether to try 8.2 today since it marks the actual proper launch of the new content, and idly started the launcher so I could at least have the game up to date. Noticed I had a gift of 3 days gametime, which was super convenient (and clever of them I guess, I've only been away for about a month and a half) so I decided to check in and see if my guild was up to anything these days. The answer was not really, and I couldn't be bothered checking out the new solo content, so I just idled and socialised a bit. Ended up going to the new dungeon later on though - fortunately there were no unlock requirements - and it was pretty fun actually. Okay the trash is just random stuff scattered over the map and the landscape is just whatever, but the bosses were interesting. Cut the night short halfway through but it's probably enough to get me subbed for a month at least. And no, I still haven't even unlocked Nazjatar. I don't really care all that much about unlocking flying at the moment. P.S. I'm still active in FF14 at the same time, so the comparisons between them will be interesting. Still only level 60 there though, so I can't really compare like-for-like in terms of new content. I really did miss the feel of WoW mechanically though, it's just so much crisper in terms of engaging in combat. Part of it is obviously the latency difference: I'm connecting to WoW servers in Sydney at about 12ms, and to FF14 servers in Japan at about 120ms, but it's also the simple and to-the-point attack animations so you know exactly when your attack has hit, as opposed to seeing your character perform a series of pirhouettes and having to guess at which point of the animation your damage actually lands. The other thing that leaps out at me is that the sound design that's so, so much better compared to FF14 bosses which are almost all mutes. I could play an encounter in FF14 with the sound turned completely off and it wouldn't make a lick of difference to how I perform. Now to be fair, WoW mods means there's a lot of additional explicit feedback that you don't get with the game natively, but even without any mods, the bosses yelling cheesy taunts at you corresponding to whatever's happening makes a huge difference. On the flipside, I am swiftly reminded how obscure and indistinct WoW ground effect abilities are, especially since bossmods still have to catch up with the mechanics somewhat. It's like they're intentionally trolling you with where the edge of the 'fire' is, which may vary between two identical looking fires in different encounters..

I haven't really followed developments for a while, but I'm reasonably satisfied with what's being offered both sides of the fence at the moment. Unfortunately it's a terrible time for the Aussie dollar to have tanked, and the XT starts at over $600AUD, who knows how much the ones with proper coolers will cost next month. I've never paid more than low-$400s for a video card in my life. On the other hand, we just got a tax cut here that means I'll get about $1000 extra in my tax return this year. Hmm. No rush at any rate, could even wait for a CPU + GPU bundle deal like they have in the US at some retailers. While the price/performance numbers speak for themselves, the deciding factor might be the rest of the package. A large part of the selection these days would be which adaptive sync (G-Sync/FreeSync) ecosystem someone has tied themselves to. Or maybe simply the games bundles. Nvidia is offering the new Wolfenstein and some title called Control I've never heard of until looking it up just now. AMD, on the other hand, have gone for a 3-month Microsoft Game Pass subscription which is a lot more ephemeral, but buying a custom card in August would mean it lines up with the Outer Worlds release, heh. Personally while I'd normally prefer a bundle to give me games I'd actually get to own, I'm also sure that there's approximately zero chance of my playing Wolfenstein while Control is a maybe. I think that makes it a tie for me bundle-wise.

Yeah, when I posted that, there'd been recent news about a possible Middle Eastern oil buyout of the club, but I guess that's run into some obstacles.

The main story was a bit too grim for my tastes and I never got around to finishing it. The open world content however is an absolute hoot to play, and fake Hong Kong is probably the best open world ever constructed for this type of game. I see arguments that the banal dreariness of open worlds in GTA and Saints' Row is intentional, but be that as it may, they just don't compare to the fabulous ambiance of Sleeping Dogs.

Those studios wouldn't touch a faithful D&D adaptation with a 10 furlong pole. At best they'd accept doing a D&D title in name only, but they have much bigger fish to fry. WotC can only choose from the best available, just like they couldn't demand that a Spielberg or Cameron direct a D&D movie for them. Not that I'd mind a fully 3D, first/third person solo character open world RPG based on the Forgotten Realms...

If you've ever played Wing Commander Privateer, you know what kind of character I'll be playing. I'm just a tourist with a fragged nav console.

Original Sin combat is tedious in single player but a blast in (lone wolf) multiplayer. On the other hand Baldur's Gate combat to me today would be a tedious chore in both single and multiplayer. With that in mind, I'll take my chances with Larian. It wasn't always thus, but tastes evolve, and a faithful mechanical sequel to Baldur's Gate 2, a game I loved back in the day (hell, it's the reason I'm registered on these forums and its predecessors) would be unplayable for me today.

Which was more popular way back when, Balder's Gate or Bhaldur's Gate?

The actual Baldur's Gate was a wormhole entrance all along!

Nono, the space goes before the colon.

I'm a bit concerned about the potential difficulty of getting a key for the Microsoft Store since as far as I know they have no reseller partners. No doubt buying it direct will incur me the full $89.95AUD RRP which I'd rather not pay. Best bet might actually be an Xbone digital copy if the game supports the Play Anywhere scheme.

Queued reseeds have been a thing for 20 years, I think it might have been introduced in the Conquerors expansion. But the new thing is a toggle where the farms will just automatically reseed on expiry with no intervention or queuing required as long as you have a certain toggle switched on. Completely hands-off.

But AoE2 DE has auto-reseeding farms. Auto. Reseeding. Farms.