Humanoid

Diversification relies on identifying which abilities scale with what attributes/skills and how. It's not always in an intuitive way. In a physical party you need to identify which spells can be useful with baseline intelligence, and vice versa. There are some traps like how summoning doesn't scale with anything but itself - a pure summoner can stack strength just as effectively as intelligence. Even summon spells that are not linked to the summoning skill use it for scaling: things like the Fire Slug and Bone Widow still require you to stack summoning to be effective, not Pyro/Necro as you might expect.

I always thought based on how the title was styled that Kathy Rain was a spinoff of Alan Wake. Apparently this is false.

DHL continue to be an easy counterpoint to the stereotypical notion of German efficiency, but my CE box finally arrived today. Heard some horror stories about poor packaging, but I guess I'm fortunate in that because I bought some extra apparel as add-ons, they were packed in a larger box alongside the box containing the CE. As a result, though the outer box was banged up a fair bit, the merchandise is in pristine condition. Gotta say it's the best Kickstarter CE I've seen thus far, and it's up there with the Witcher 3 CE as the most premium game package I own. The Fane statuette is very well constructed and is the kind of thing that retailers would sell for $100+ alone and the two hardcover books are lovely too with embossed covers, better than your typical D&D sourcebook or whatnot.

It's fully reasonable to put enemies in intelligent places, particularly when they're expecting to ambush you. However it's still somewhat unfair because often the enemies won't actually spawn until you trigger the ambush so there's nothing you can reasonably do to counter them - other than cheesing it by pre-placing explosive barrels and such. Why not instead have the enemies stealthed but let you detect and counter-ambush them? In the grand scheme of things, it's just a minor annoyance to me on medium difficulty, but it does take away from immersion a bit. Most of the time there's no problem initiating an encounter on your terms, and I do appreciate being able to initiate separately instead of the whole party being forced into combat simultaneously. It doesn't tend to resort to the tired trope where the bosses go invincible and force you to fight mooks, or where they unilaterally declare a fight over and just escape unchallenged (though I've heard of a couple edge cases where it happens). Nonetheless, there are a few annoying gaps though where scripting overrides your actions, such as the execution and the purging demonstration near the start of the game, where it would have been interesting to see alternative outcomes. EDIT: Top of my wishlist for any further sequel is proper Z-axis handling so that you can do things like throw enemies off cliffs and climb on stacked crates to get over walls (Ultima 7, after all, is cited as a leading inspiration for the game).

And the counter is that the player is effectively made to take single points in Warfare and Huntsman regardless of actual role, just so they can abuse the mobility options. This is made even more obvious because by and large, these utility spells do not meaningfully scale with actual skill level. This is often true of civil skills too, Telekinesis can lift infinite weight with a single point investment. Loremaster gives complete information on enemies with just one point. (Incidentally, enemy units design abuses this because even generic level 1 mooks always come with a point in Loremaster, so for pretty much every single encounter in the game, they will automatically be able to exploit your weaknesses and avoid your resistances. There's a mod - No Psychic Enemies - that restricts Loremaster to enemies who would reasonably have it.) This weird behaviour is incentivised by the weird design where learning new spells is tied to very low skill requirements, such that with a mere three points in a spell school you can learn pretty much everything. You'd think there'd be more benefit in specialisation, but often this is not the case. When the correct advice when trying to build an archer, for example, is to take three points in Huntsman and ten in Warfare, it's plainly obvious that there's a fundamental flaw in the way skill points work.

Yeah I admit I don't know how stealth interacts with the turn order. e.g. if I open an engagement by sneak attacking with a rogue, does that count as the rogue's first turn? Likewise if another character initiates combat, then you move the rogue in real time and then join combat using backstab, where do you join in the initiative order? Unfortunately since you only get one character in the tutorial unless playing multiplayer, you have to go a fair ways into the game before being able to test the mechanics.

Doesn't make sense that loot is randomly generated when the levels aren't, but that's how it is, which is a shame.

This is why you get the DRM-free version instead, both GOG and Humble carry it. Steam version is boobs only. I believe GOG is too. Humble version is the full monty including, um, fluids. I believe it should be fairly trivial to convert one version of the game into the other. what is point in porn game without, uhh, fluids xD You can choose to be male or female in the settings. You never see the player character ever, but the fluids are only drawn if you select male. You can change this setting at any time, however. It's also fairly obvious that the censored version was created later and the panties in that version are simply painted over the top of the existing images, such that it the images sometimes no longer make sense in context. EDIT: For those who just want to play the game for the articles and avoid the above sort of thing, the most expedient way is to simply avoid dating at night. You'll still receive sexts, but will never end up going all the way and thus be able to focus on the pure match-three goodness. It's genuinely unfortunate that there's no standalone "skirmish" mode where you can play the core game without the story elements.

I tried to start a new campaign since co-op times are limited and I want to play a little more I currently am. So I figured I'd try a full-party game, led by my usual thief character. Unfortunately this idea was halted pretty much on the character creation screen, because the developers in their infinite wisdom have classified Sneaking - y'know, that pretty iconic thing that thieves do - as a civil skill, and hence it conflicts with the usual practice of the player character wanting to be the Persuade specialist. This makes no sense, as no other class archetype (the novelty Barrelmancer build aside) has their core fighting functionality tied to expenditure of civil skill points, which are gained at a quarter of the rate of combat skill points. You gain so few of them (and they're not doubled for Lone Wolf unlike everything else) such that attempting to split your points will result in you being ineffectual at both. Put half your points into lockpicking and the other half into loremaster and watch as you fail to open every lock in the current zone, and fail to identify any level-appropriate gear ever. I've had a quick look at what values are available through modding and it looks like the only easy solution is to do something like grant a civil skill point every two levels instead of every four. But this of course means the whole party gets double civil skill points that can be used for anything, which is not the intention. Ugh.

This is why you get the DRM-free version instead, both GOG and Humble carry it. Steam version is boobs only. I believe GOG is too. Humble version is the full monty including, um, fluids. I believe it should be fairly trivial to convert one version of the game into the other.

Yeah, as an Australian I wouldn't have known of Amstrad at all if not for founder Alan Sugar owning Tottenham Hotspur back in the 90s (and who now does the UK version of The Apprentice TV show). I suppose it's ubiquitous over there.

HuniePop is a legitimately great desktop game (I think the term "desktop game" fell into disuse about twenty years ago, granted), but I wonder how a sequel would even work. It's like making a sequel to Tetris, you either keep everything the same such that it ends up a reskin of the original, or you make alternative gamemodes that people try for half-an-hour before going back to the original flavour.

These forums should implement a polite dislike button so that I can rightly express my dissatisfaction with this post. But; you do you, man and if you don't like it then it ain't worth it. You can like the post then revoke the like if you really want to convey your disapproval. As it is, I put the horror genre last on the Obsidian DLC survey, but if there was a superhero category, it'd be a close-run thing. Both would clearly be behind even first-person shooters *gasp*. On Sleeping Dogs, I absolutely loved the fake Hong Kong, but the game ended up getting too grim and depressing for me to go on with. I liked tooling around, doing side-stuff, and some of the early storyline which at least had some levity. I'd love for the city to be reused but for something more tonally similar to the Police Story movies.

I see they have the foresight to not ask for opinions about their in-house DLC.

Yeah, as someone who dislikes the superhero genre in general, I ended up quitting SR4 within a few hours and never looked back. For context, I finished SR3, though it took a couple bites of the cherry and it kinda petered out towards the end (zombies are stupid, they ruined Stick of Truth too). SR4's only improvement over its predecessor was the addition of the classic bob hairstyle.

Going down to 8 agility is pretty commonplace - the AP formula is 5 plus half your agility, rounded down, so at both 8 and 9 agility you get 9AP.

Then there's the Indian numbering system which groups numbers by two, except for the last three which are grouped together. So fifty-thousand is still 50,000 but five-hundred-thousand is 5,00,000 and fifty-million is 5,00,00,000. We should standardise on the videogame currency system. Instead of $50,000.00, we get 500g0s0c. Screw platinums though.

My completionist tendencies are ruining my enjoyment of Dishonored 2. I feel like I'm missing out if I don't collect all the things, but that usually means backtracking and taking every route through the level instead of the one that comes naturally. Don't get me wrong, the level design is great and I can see all the care and effort that went towards constructing them, but it feels wrong to be incentivised to faff around and explore every single inch of it rather than trying to accomplish the actual objective. It does bring to the forefront my irritation with 'collectibles' in this sort of game. The game lets you loot certain paintings which have nothing but monetary value, but at the end of each level it scores you on how many of them you found. There's really no reason for the game to score the player like this, other than to irritate people. Hell, it keeps track of every single gold coin obtainable on the level as if to taunt you over the ones you didn't find. I need to take a step back and recalibrate my brain, in the hope that I can get in the mindset of ignoring all that crap and just focus on getting from A to B.

Fortunately (and not necessarily intuitively), Summoning has zero interaction with the intelligence stat and as such is a true hybrid skill tree. Just need to remember to cast your summons on either blood or bare ground if you're running a physical damage team, or on any element if you need magic damage. On the other hand, the Warfare skills apparently do with magic weapons, which is good to know until you realise that the status effects likely won't work, so in playing this kind of hybrid you're reduced to mostly damage effects. Sounds like it'd be a really fun build if not for the armour system, what a shame.

Anyway, glad the free respec exists. It's probably a bit controversial with traditionalists, but frankly it was turning into a slog with my magic having essentially no interaction with any of my teammates' abilities. Might not be so crippling when fighting cannon fodder, but it's a big handicap with the tougher targets where we essentially have to expend twice as much collective effort. Going to experiment with both damage approaches during act 2: first as a fighter+archer duo, then the all-out magic spam. Might see if any mods exist to help with the issue as well. EDIT: Might have to do some economic exploitation to get back on my feet after spending all my gold on spellbooks for abilities which I can no longer use. EDIT2: Also came unstuck by a silly scripting oversight. One random book in a room containing a dozen random books is required to progress. But reading it doesn't trigger anything and the player is left none the wiser that that particular book is the important one. No, you have to pick up the book (which magically updates the quest log but otherwise is completely non-magical) to progress because reasons. Books being worth a measly 1 gold each encourages the player to read them where they are instead of picking them up, which becomes a bit of a trap.

Probably still do better then Ouya.

Very early on in DOS1, I kept getting party wiped very often with my dual lone-wolf co-op party while being able to take no actions whatsoever, so I understand where it's coming from. But it's an extremely inelegant "solution" that has a net negative effect on gameplay. I haven't played long enough to be able to decide what a redesign should look like though. Unify the armour types? Give effects a proportional chance of success based on armour values? I don't really want the extra resist stats from DOS1 back, so I don't mind if armour becomes sort of analogous to it, but not in the all-or-nothing implementation of it that currently exists.

Just implement the HuniePop minigame into all RPGs, best romance mechanic ever.

You just have to break the chains holding the dragon down, the anchors are right next to it but targetting them is a little finicky, at first I thought I couldn't do it and would probably have just left, fortunately my co-op partner succeeded where I failed. And yeah, the AI is omniscient when it comes to what you're vulnerable to. Even if you're a disguised undead it will immediately use heal spells to attack you. Glass cannon needs to be comboed with high initiative (wits) to guarantee that you take the first action every combat.

Well the other part of jumping the gun is that I'm only through Act 1, so I don't even know how I'll feel about it when I finish it, let alone a few weeks after when I've had time to digest it. (I'm also assuming the new Zelda game is favourite for GOTY. Not that I'd know - it would be nice to find out for myself once I can justify getting a Switch...)