Humanoid

Yeah, if I ever get a real itch to play it, I'll buy it on GOG. Fortunately unlike the MS Store / Game Pass version, the GOG one is supported by SKSE.

The ridiculous thing was that back in 2015, Amazon had Dawnguard and Dragonborn for $2.50 each, and Hearthfire for $1.25. So I bought Dragonborn and Hearthfire, but I decided to skip Dawnguard because I wasn't interested in vampires and besides, it received very lukewarm reviews. Yeah that was a poor decision. But I still refuse to pay more than that for it today. Consequently I still haven't played any Skyrim for almost a decade now. Oh well.

I'm stubbornly refusing to re-buy Skyrim and it's really awkward because I lack the Dawnguard DLC which is in itself uninteresting but is required for some key mods. Can't buy it anymore but I also can't justify buying the Anniversary/Special/whatever edition they have now. Speaking of which, Paradox and Harebrained Schemes have just divorced. Probably for the best, but boy Paradox doesn't seem to be in good shape lately.

Yeah, healing (or more specifically, healing spells) is a trap. Both in BG3, and as I understand it, more broadly in 5E as well. Plenty of alternate sources of healing anyway, consider the following factors: - The plentiful amount of healing potions, the plentiful amount of gold you get to buy more, and the ability to make more with alchemy - Drinking them being a bonus action in BG3, unlike in PnP - The ability to throw them to (AoE) heal others as an action - The ability for any class to use any and all scrolls to cover any missing cleric utility - The lack of any limit to the number of magic items you can equip to grant extra healing or utility spells, plus raw power to increase your survivability in general - Functionally unlimited long rests, and consequentially, short rests - The ability to resurrect at camp in exchange for some loose change you found between the sofa cushions - The ability to respec literally anyone into a more support-oriented class if you insist on having one anyway - Up to two canonical druids or one canonical paladin as party members if you refuse to respec anyone - The (admittedly tedious) ability to temporarily switch in companions not currently in your active party to use their spells, including the hirelings. You don't lose buffs if you dismiss them from the party. So yeah, with all that in mind, it's easily better for the action economy to set up your party to just kill faster, be that with the cleric (many domains are pretty good at killing, just not Shadowheart's default Trickery) or with whichever class you take instead. EDIT: I mean, I initially started writing these items as just one sentence, but ended up having to reformat it as a list, that's how many ways there are to cover for the lack of a cleric.

Goes right back to PAL regions getting Probotector instead of Contra.

Fallout (2?) also had that Child Killer trait you could get if you did it the dumb way, which is a big but reasonable disincentive to do it without blocking off the option altogether. The smart way, of course, was to let the kids pickpocket that lit dynamite out of your pocket. This was the one where the European versions of the game had the kids "removed" I believe? And by removed, made invisible so Europeans had to deal with invisible pickpockets.

BG3 lets you force turn-based mode though. I don't think any of the other games do? JA3 included, sadly.

Yeah, fairly edge case because there are very few quests with the optional objective of not killing anyone, and in any other situation it would not make any mechanical difference whatsoever. There is some tracking though - at least a singular counter - because I think those containers have a finite capacity of corpses.

It enrages me and that's despite the fact I never even got to play up to that section myself, only seeing someone else experience the horror. Granted BG3 can result in a similar experience occurring with the Tiefling kids, but not as egregiously so.

I don't know what Lamplighters is trying to be, and I'm not sure the game does either. Early 20th century setting? That's good. Weird cartoonish 3D aesthetic? That's bad. Tactical turn-based combat? That's good. Real-time only stealth sections? That's bad. I dunno, maybe I'll go watch one of those long-form YouTube reviews to get more than that surface treatment of it, but the general discourse around the game isn't promising. Also, petty as it is, the name evokes the infamous Little Lamplight segment of FO3.

One of the odd little changes with 2.0 is that dumping bodies in a ...well, dumpster, is now explicitly lethal. Not that it makes any mechanical difference to gameplay as they were never climbing out of that dumpster anyway even pre-patch, but yeah, odd.

Bit of the opposite for me, I wish I could more easily filter out the useless orange/purple clothes and dispose of them, whether they be in my bags, my wardrobe, or are yet to be looted. Always a massive letdown to see the rare loot icon only to find out it's just clothes.

I'm taking it slowly, relearning the mechanics as I haven't played the game since April last year, and not seriously since the year before. Started by making a throwaway character to play part of the prologue with, going through all the tutorials and such with a blank slate. But there's too much content for me to bother re-doing to take this character seriously, and the advanced start likely skips too much for me to be able to build any sense of character, so it was always the intention for me to resume my old save. As of yesterday I've done that. I've probably split my attribute points too thin for the new system, but they're not refunded by 2.0 so I'll play around with it as-is for now. Doing a few base-game sidequests first to get my bearings (when I loaded the save up I was sneaking around my own apartment because I didn't recognise where I was) before I start the Phantom Liberty content.

Market cap of around 4.3b USD at the moment.

They should just follow the established naming convention: Switch Swiitch Swiiitch etc.

JK Simmons? Is that the person who wrote the Harry Potter books?

I think a big part of the problem is that Larian has chosen to change their approach from previous games, where none of your dialogue options were actually verbatim. It thus adds another layer of obfuscation between you and the game, where you can only guess at the intention behind the written dialogue line. Now in most cases it's fairly obvious: DOS2: *Ask him to tell you more about LOOM* BG3: "Hey, tell me more about LOOM" But when it comes to interpersonal relationship building... DOS2: *Flirt with him* BG3: "I don't want to kick your head in" Yeah... BG3 really needs to tag the lines where any interpretation other than the literal one is possible. [Flirt] "I don't want to kick your head in" Problem solved.

Character animations are probably the one thing where it's fair to compare BG3 and Starfield directly against each other. And it's no contest. BG3's motion captured faces are amongst the best ever seen in video games, Starfield's are just one step above using literal sock puppets.

Nope, it's literally only Anomen for female player characters, who is no option at all. Haer'Dalis is a mod.

So according to Wikipedia, The Chinese Room sacked all their employees in 2017 and at that point the company was down to just the two directors working out of their house. In the six years since then they've been acquired, released one new mobile game, and re-released one of their old games for mobile. Alrighty then.

Indeed, just classic Bethesda jank that will live as long as they continue to use this engine. It's just amazing to see a developer with such a pathological inability to improve on past mistakes.

I've seen fairly little gameplay so far, but the first few minutes of live gameplay I saw went like this (it was the Spiffing Brit on YouTube I believe): - Player is involved a dialogue with a quest NPC with psychotically exaggerated facial animations (I note that eyebrows in particular seem horrible in the game), player accidentally sits as well but that's actually unintentional good roleplaying as the NPC is seated adjacent. - Conversation turns hostile, NPC starts firing away while the game plays a 5 second canned "standing up from seated" animation for the player. I'm pretty sure it's the exact same animation they used in Skyrim. - Player retreats to an airlock and closes the heavy steel door of the airlock. The other airlock door opens shortly thereafter because they automatically operate in sequence, and it just clips through the player (otherwise it would have squished them against the wall). - The whole exercise was pointless anyway, as the bullets travel straight through the door as it it weren't there. Maybe people no longer classify the above things as bugs, but it's certainly not good gameplay, and it's four immersion-breaking glitches occurring in the space of a minute. It certainly feels neither good nor polished. Now to be fair, I watched for another 30 minutes or so and there was nothing else that came close to being as quintessentially Bethesda as that sequence, but it also shows that they've made zero improvement to that type of interaction in the 12 years since Skyrim. ____ Found the sequence:

20 years worth of accumulated bugs in the engine will do that to any PC. But yeah, also pre-loaded, but we'll see how far I get given I'm likely to be finally starting my BG3 co-op campaign tonight. I guess Starfield is going to be my default single-player game for a couple of weeks, up to the moment Phantom Liberty is released.

Yes, but people who pay for it get to play it on Day -5, so Microsoft are playing silly buggers here. That said, I'm not in a rush personally and am not even entertaining the notion of paying for it. I have however just paid to extend my Game Pass out to late 2026 by buying a bunch of 90-day Xbox Live Gold codes (that convert to 50 days of Game Pass Ultimate).

Nah, seems like he wasn't a gamer at all, and Starfield was just a tiny portion of the stolen goods he was selling. Seemed more like the world's stupidest advertising stunt. The "theft of goods $2500-10000" item on his charge sheet is a massive underestimate. His seller page is cleaned out now, but it was still up for a good few days after the arrest and the retail value of what was there had to be approaching six digits, if not over. He was selling job lots of games, electronics, perfumes, power tools, etc, like bundles of 10 Go Pros, 20 Bluetooth speakers, 50 copies of Just Dance (as one listing, not 50 individual listings), etc. Check out the Wayback Machine archive of just the first page (of nine) and it's probably already $10k+ worth of stolen goods there. He's a warehouse been apparently doing this systematically so even the total value of the stuff he's got listed *right now* would just be a fraction of his total business over time. Obviously I'm not saying it's worth 12 years, but your estimation of what he stole is probably out by a couple orders of magnitude because the retail value of Starfield would only have been a couple percent of the total of what he had listed.