Humanoid

I wouldn't go so far as to say that the game was good in spite of the open world design, but it sure isn't good *because* of the open world either. Maybe at higher difficulties the problems come more into focus, but playing at default difficulty I find the common complaints to have no real bearing on my experience with the game. Things like gear being level locked, having to hunt down schematics/materials for the best gear, etc - all that I was able to ignore on default difficulty, and I certainly didn't feel I was suffering by wearing the same pants for 15+ levels, not putting runes into anything, never using any alchemy things except healing potions, etc. At no point did I go exploring for the hell of it either.

If they were left behind but not dead, they actually come back later as VIPs to rescue in certain missions (instead of rescuing a generic scientist or engineer for example). Ultimately though, the winning strategy in XCOM 2 is just explosives. All of the explosives. They have been nerfed somewhat since I played my one and only XCOM 2 campaign admittedly, but still can't beat that 100% reliability. It still baffles me how they possibly thought it was a good change to change the range bonuses so that point blank rookie shots only gain 20% accuracy for a poor 85% hit chance, as opposed to the 100% chance in the first game. The risk/reward planning out actual gunfire pales in comparison to the "solve" button that is explosives (and later, psionics). I don't think XCOM 2 is a terrible game, but it's telling that I have in excess of 500 hours playing the various flavours of the previous game (at least 300 of those hours in a single Long War campaign, granted), where I've only played the single 40-hour campaign of the sequel. I bought the Deluxe Edition, and so have access to all the released DLC, but still I have no desire to go back to the game anytime soon. As to what I've been playing, finally polished off the base campaign in The Witcher 3. The wrap-up was satisfactory, though the boss fights were somewhat too gimmicky for my tastes, especially the first two of them, who abuse their teleport abilities in a manner that can be described as nothing else but tedious. Shame about there being no post-ending world update, so it's a little weird being dropped back into the world with the status quo continuing to hold. Wouldn't matter much under normal circumstances, but I've got new content to tackle, speaking of which.... And so Hearts of Stone begins. To be honest, I wasn't too impressed at the first hour or so, the nature of which felt pretty railroady - not in a terrible way, but moreso than usual. I'll admit it's charmed me since then though, an impression no doubt helped by how little the new content depends on combat to pad it out. Other RPGs condition the player to expect DLC to contain new monsters to kill, more dungeons to clear, more things to craft. I don't care for any of that, and from what I've seen so far, this expansion, even if fully stripped of those checkboxes, would still fulfil its promise with genuine content. With no open world filler to contend with, this is the core that lies within the game that makes me love it. ...but to be honest, all it needed to include to get me was Shani.

Ended up completing DoTT remastered in one sitting while waiting for the downloads to complete. Didn't get stuck for longer than a couple minutes at a time, probably the only adventure game for which I can make that claim.

So GOG Galaxy managed to butcher my Witcher 3 installation, and as a result I have to redownload both expansions because Galaxy apparently doesn't keep the installers. No play today, just when I was planning to finish the main story, absolutely stupid. GOG is great and all with everything else, but stick with manual downloads and archive your installers - lesson to me to not use beta software for important things I suppose.

Yeah, few months ago I played a bit on my laptop, with the mobile Haswell IGP. Not only did it experience FPS drops at minimum settings, it also had a tendency to crash to desktop in open areas (but not, for instance, at the fleet).

Clearly he's just impersonating an Oblivion NPC.

The most important strategy to learn in XCOM is the overwatch crawl. It's a bit boring, unfortunately, but is pretty much the key to success at higher difficulties. In essence, the idea is that only the first soldier to move every turn is allowed to reveal any fog-of-war, and may only do so on their blue move. If there's no contact, then move up the rest of your soldiers in a conga line, right behind the first soldier, no cover required, and put everyone on overwatch. If there is contact, then your point man can use their orange move to find good cover *behind* where they are, ideally breaking line-of-sight altogether. The rest of the squad can then move up and attack (if the point-man is exposed to fire) or stay back and lay an overwatch trap. Breaking LoS completely is usually a good idea in general because the AI has a tendency to become a drooling imbecile anytime none of their active units can see any of their units, and they will often take up suicidal positions while they search for you. Another thing that you can use in your favour is the fact that the enemy count is soft-capped in both Easy and Normal difficulties. No matter how many aliens are active, only five of them will engage you at any given time, the extras will just run away out of sight until some of the ones engaging you die. It's also worth looking up the rest of the specifics of each difficulty level here, particularly the section showing how many aliens to expect on each given map type. For Exalt missions, ideally you will have an Assault as the operative. They're so much better at the job than everyone else that they should have the job exclusively. Run and Gun works for activating the relays, so you can often chain together multiple turns where Exalt cannot fire at you, excluding explosives. Exalt Heavies have the rocket launchers and Exalt Operatives have grenades so prioritise killing them in that order. For the Extraction missions, the enemy reinforcements are triggered when you stand next to a relay with your operative. Use this to your advantage by *not* activating the relay immediately: assuming you're not in immediate danger of being shot, just stand there and overwatch, then activate the relay after the reinforcements arrive. For Data Recovery missions, you have a lot more relays and often the most effective strategy is to stand a couple of Close Combat Specialist assaults in the capture zone and watch as the enemy idiotically bum-rushes you, because the AI has a fetish for occupying that zone if none of their units are in it, and will prioritise doing so above all else.

I think Skyrim worked for me because all it did was dump the player character into the world, no strings attached: no silly backstory, no contrived motive, no one-note voice acting. You were free to play whatever character you liked. Fallout 4 completely failed because it effectively had a fixed protagonist. i couldn't shake the feeling the whole time I was playing it (for a total of 10-15 hours) that I was playing Bethesda's character, not mine. Fallout 4 might have been a good game if it abandoned all that pretense, and had simply gone "you're a visitor to Boston, have at it".

I suspect your problem is something else entirely. Those articles refer to a release from back in November where the fan speed was incorrectly capped, and yes, that would cause a thermal shutdown under load. This would not present a problem at idle, where the fan speeds would dip far below the incorrect cap (and indeed shut off entirely for some models) and the GPU would be generating very little heat by running at about 10-20W instead of 200-250W. Furthermore, there have been several driver releases since that problematic one, and I'm not aware of any systematic issues with them outside of rendering bugs in specific games. What you are describing is something completely different and it'd probably worthwhile looking for more information because it may be symptomatic of a different underlying problem, like a system-specific incompatibility, or worse, signs of hardware failure.

It does have a neat new feature:

BG2 to me is more important for what it did to my gaming habits rather than what it was as a game in itself. It might sound like I'm damning it with faint praise, but it's not my intention. It got me out of my comfort zone, where without it my RPG experience may have started and ended with Ultima. Even then they almost screwed it up, the skull on the box of the BG games kinda put me off, because I mean, what does that tell the prospective buyer? Scary undead monsters ahead? Yes, I was a big wuss back then, and still am today, but it could have been the difference between my being here today and being someone probably stuck playing strategy games forever. So yes, while there are better games around, and though I have no interest in ever replaying it, BG2 is important to me because without it, I would likely never have played, or even contemplated playing those better games.

I used a neat little random word generator and it gave me the words pale, crop, impact. I would stylise this as Pale Crop: Impact. It's a guaranteed megahit. EDIT: Feel free to generate your own commercial goldmine with it. I tried again and got Passion: Crew Mistake. I probably can't sell that one, as it'd essentially be a Mass Effect knock-off.

Sidequests are intentionally made worth much less XP than main quests, combined with them being vastly below your level, they're really only there to appreciate as little self-contained vignettes about Witcher life.

Maybe GOG shot themselves in the foot here by announcing GOG Connect before the sale. A quick look and most titles I'd buy are just ones I already own in some form and want a GOG copy of.

Sadly it looks like in the year since I've played, Geralt still hasn't learned how to walk down stairs. And, as far as I can tell, there's still no walk toggle for the gamepad either. It's unfortunate that in a game where I want to take things slowly and RP walk everywhere, actually attempting to do so is awkward and unwieldy. Anyway, up to the bit where I have to fight the title villains, so I should be moving on to the actual new content soon-ish.

One wonders how much more popular the Legion route would have been in New Vegas if they were still warmongering jerks, but equal-opportunity warmongering jerks. I don't know anyone personally who went with a Kaizar playthrough, and I imagine the whole premise of their societal structure put people off from even considering it at all. Just an example of how this kind of thing, even with best intentions, can have a detrimental effect on gameplay - dozens of hours of content that likely will go unseen by the majority of the playerbase.

No shortage of wide-eyed kids thinking "videogames are cool, so making videogames must be cool too" before the industry chews them up and spits them out a scant few years later.

A 70s character in 80s clothing rendered with 90s graphics in a 2010's game then.

Yeah, I've been running my 290X with an effective underclock (or more accurately, at -40% power limit) almost since I bought it. Had to remove the underclock to get a good framerate at my preferred detail level. I might try to optimise a bit more (say, best playable settings at -20%) if I have the time, but time spent messing around with that is less time playing the game. I regret not buying a good third-party cooler now, but it's probably too late in this generation to get one. Sometimes I wonder what's wrong with hardware reviewers' hearing, because their definition of "quiet" is a long, long way away from mine.

New displays arrived and set up. The thinner bezels compared to the gigantic ones on the old model are nice to have, and the anti-glare coating is much more sensible this time. Also pleased to report it happily does 1440p/60Hz through HDMI, a combination I could never get to work previously as all the elements in the display chain - graphics card, cable, monitor - need to support it. I didn't want to use the DisplayPort despite the monitor supporting daisy-chaining, as I'm concerned about potential issues with Freesync and the bandwidth required to push 144Hz. As expected, the new display doesn't quite match up cleanly with my surviving U2711 even after calibration, but fair enough because despite the names, they're fundamentally different displays. The new one is a more consumer-oriented model, whereas the proper successor to the U2711 is the UP2716D, being the model aimed at graphics professionals. I'm experimenting with the P2414H in portrait mode to the left of the two 27" screens. I'm not best pleased with the results right now, mainly because the much larger pixels it has (1080p at 24" vs 1440p at 27") makes it awkward to use as part of the extended desktop, and because the different viewing angle to the centre of the screen (which lines up with the top third of the landscape displays) means it looks a bit off in terms of colour and brightness. No big deal though as it's a temporary arrangement, the question to come afterwards will be whether I can reconfigure my desk to fit triple 27" screens in landscape orientation.

Had no particular reason to connect them, but did it anyway and it went smoothly. Nine titles in the list, but six of them I already owned on GOG anyway, so the three remaining were Trine, Shadowrun Returns and Surgeon Simulator 2013. Incidentally there doesn't seem to be a way to upgrade the GOG copy of the latter game into the Anniversary Edition, despite both editions existing on GOG. Presumably I'd have to spend the 59c to upgrade my Steam version then re-transfer, which seems a little silly.

Downloaded and installed Blood and Wine, dug up my old save game from the system drive of my previous PC, fired up the game and ....dammit, I'm only level 23. It's been pretty much a full year since I've played so I can't even tell what functionality is new, changed, or has always been there. Ended up just spending an hour or so just playing the tutorial from scratch to regain my bearings. Presumably next time I play I'll resume the old save. Probably. Maybe. I don't know.

The absence of the 480X from the announcement has people wondering whether Apple snaffled them all up for the iMac refresh. Shame, would have been interesting to see how close Polaris could get to the 1070 if they released a fully-enabled version at say, $300, but we might be waiting a little longer for it.

I forget whether I'd mentioned that one of my Dell U2711 displays is dying. I had held out on replacing it for a while since the flaw is only really obvious on relatively bright images. A month or two ago I got an Asus MG279Q to replace it, except that I had to get my sister who lives interstate to buy it from a bricks and mortar shop so I don't actually have it yet. Today I saw a nice deal on the recently superseded U2715H for $560AUD (~$405USD) delivered, so I ordered one (and was sorely tempted to order two), so once everything arrives I'll be running triple 27" displays. The Asus will have to be the centre screen because of the Freesync functionality, even if it probably has marginally inferior display quality. Trying to match up three completely different panels will be tricky, so we'll see how it goes. Just for the hell of it I also added a P2414H to the order, which has an identical panel to the U2414H, but being the "professional" series it has DVI instead of HDMI. I'll probably use it as backup, unless I have issues matching my surviving U2711, which is a wide-gamut display, to the standard sRGB gamut of my two replacements. Unfortunately one big issue created by multi-display setups is speaker placement. Even with my two current displays, my speakers end up being placed too far apart, almost to either side of me, which wrecks any sort of positional sense for games that require it. With three, I will probably have to build a couple of stands to raise the speakers above the monitors, which is risky in itself because they're pretty hefty at 5.3kg each, and I'll have to tilt them down towards me somewhat. Good ol' Blu-tack will help secure them to the stands somewhat, but it's still far from an ideal solution and is probably flirting with disaster. Clearly someone needs to come up with acoustically transparent OLED panels, fast.

I'm watching Galaxy slowly download Blood and Wine, does that count as playing it? (Going to have to be an overnight job, so it'll be almost 20 hours again before I can play it )