Humanoid

I may not always agree with some of the core philosophy behind the mod, the numbers don't lie: I racked up perhaps around 100 hours of vanilla XCOM and its expansion, and 200+ hours of Long War and counting. Perhaps just as significant as the changes themselves is the vastly improved user-moddability that has been done almost as a side-effect of their changes. I remember having to do some hex-editing of the executable back in the day just to make a tiny change, nowadays the same change would literally take 10 seconds. (For those who haven't looked, most things you'd ever want to change and more are in plain text in DefaultGameCore.ini) So yeah, worth every cent and more. I donated $20 and it still feels like a steal.

We as people have to make judgement based on limited information because there are countless products out there all competing for attention and only so much time. I don't need to sit through the Star Wars movies to guess that it wouldn't be something up my alley. I don't need to play Metal Gear, or read a Stephen King novel, or listen to a Coldplay album. I can't say for certain that I'm correct in those judgements, but filtering products one is interested in has always been a probability-based process. Consequently statements like those I make about the Witcher are far from definitive, I'd call it educated guesswork. Like reading the synopsis on the back of a book, it's limited, but it is indicative. EDIT: Indeed in this case I went a bit further and explored the wiki, looking at direct full-spoiler summaries of past events, characters, places. Plus there were the lore bits from the in-game codex thingie which did a covered a lot of stuff not directly relevant to the game itself. There are a few unique things for sure, a fair few of which I surmise are inspired by Polish folklore, but in the bigger picture, what I found only just reaffirmed my first impressions. It's more of a chance than I've given the vast majority of products, so I'm fairly comfortable in my judgement at this point.

I'd accept it more readily if they just went ahead and made it their own instead. It's caught in this weird compromise where it tries to pay lip service to the old games while shoehorning those elements into the standard Bethesda Sandbox game. Bethesda sandboxes are fun to play: no one else makes games like that so I'm happy someone is doing games like that. But I really think it's the perfect opportunity now to just clear the deck: start with the post-apocalyptic 50s schtick but throw out every thing else. It won't be a "Fallout" game anymore, but it'd likely be one I could enjoy as something that stands on itself. Besides, video game reboots have been the theme of this decade so far, it'd hardly be a controversial thing. "Oblivion/Skyrim with guns" is a common pejorative used to describe Bethesda's Fallout games. But I say the problem is that they're not. Not enough, anyway. Drop the old baggage and turn it into a pure, wholly unapologetic Skyrim with guns and I think we'd be better off.

I have no love for LoTR, so I wouldn't know - I was bored halfway the first Jackson movie and that's my sum total experience with the LoTR property. It's besides the point though, which is that for most of the world now, the Witcher is a property defined by the video game and not by the novels, which I suspect many who've played the games don't even know exist. And while there could be an argument that the LoTR movies may have surpassed the books as a product, the books still loom large over the property. Yeah yeah, popularity is not quality and all that, but from what I can see reflected in the games such as the Wild Hunt motives discussed above, the backstory of Geralt's friends, seeing a few synopses of short stories that formed the basis for some quests - stuff like that doesn't exactly stand out from your usual high fantasy writing. Maybe there's some secret sauce that's only evident on reading the books, but what the writing in the games does for me is make me want more games, of any setting, done by these writers, and what it doesn't make me want to do is read the novels. I stand by my comment that the Witcher is an exceptional game created from an unexceptional IP, but it's not really any more of a controversial comment than expressing disinterest in any other book, movie or game.

It'll be the same cables, the only devices I know of that come with non-standard SATA connectors are slimline optical drives for who knows what reason.

Fallout 3 didn't really have an ending slideshow either. I mean in a literal sense there was one, sure, but it didn't actually show any outcomes, it was a direct account of your actions, along the lines of "the hero went to location X and did action Y, then went to location Z and did action 11" etc. Just another thing on the list of things they tried to carry over but didn't actually understand.

I don't think the novels are really considered a literary achievement of any real sort, just a fairly middle-of-the-road fantasy series which probably had the advantage of competing in a relatively small home market. In a sense it's a big accomplishment for the CDPR writers to turn something so unexceptional in its prior incarnation into a pretty defining work in its new medium. At least it seems that they haven't been too badly hamstrung by the source material, as I guess the setting is less jealously guarded than say, D&D or Star Wars.

One of the earlier discoveries I made was when I wondered why I was getting so many more quests than my co-op partner was. Turns out I must have accidentally toggled the "exploration quests" option (above the quest listing) which reenables the quests that had been marked obsolete and were hidden. I'm wondering now whether it's viable to ignore all the quests except the ones explicitly marked as class quests, including skipping the core questline for each planet. I can see playing the full set of quests once on each faction, but I can't imagine playing each set of shared quests four times over.

Nothing too unusual. XCOM 2, Witcher 3 expansion, Mankind Divided. I'd have put D:OS2 there but I fully expect it to not release next year, and I don't really expect Cyberpunk until a year after that. I'm taking the thread title fairly literally in that the games have to be something I'm genuinely anticipating, most are in the "not hyped, will play" category instead.

It's interesting how many changes I didn't notice until I transferred my old character over to my current server and played it a bit. I've been playing a fresh character for over a month now and am almost level 40 but it didn't really twig at all. For example, I didn't notice: - Companion gearing, or lack thereof. Bafflingly all my companions were stripped of their weapons, helmets and ....pants, and those pieces were delivered to my mailbox. Also all of Bowdaar's clothes because I guess nudism is enforced amongst Wookies now. - Missing commendation stuff. I had no idea what this new "data crystals" stuff was meant to be, but I didn't realise it was a replacement for the commendation stuff, which I didn't really think about at all. - Crew skill revamp in general, which I only noticed when I saw pretty much all my existing recipes were in this weird "archive" category on my crafting menu. - Companion affection system changes. Well, actually I never knew how it worked, and I know even less now because it looks twice as confusing. Also when I visited my ship for the first time, every companion had about a half-dozen conversations queued up. I levelled twice in my ship from just talking to them repeatedly. - Removal of the class-specific stats. I have no memory of strength, aim, int, etc being things that were present on gear, I only remembered when I googled what makes Armormech different from Synthweaving. - All my old gear was pretty much orange modded stuff, which I don't particularly remember going out of my way to get, so I assume I got them as part of normal levelling. But my new character has pretty much no orange gear (aside from the starter lightsabre) so I guess that sort of gear has mostly been removed, as have mods and stuff like that, my old character has a bunch of them in the bank, but my new character has exactly one of them, awarded during the starter planet as part of the "introduction to modifying gear" tutorial. So yeah, it's a weird feeling just stumbling onto these changes and not even knowing they had been changed. There's probably a bunch more changed things I'll only notice in the coming months. I guess I'll just let myself find out organically.

Easy year of judging for me. Best Everything: The Witcher 3

Then I'd just question their judgement on this particular mechanic in the same way I'd turn a critical eye on any given mechanics in any other game. The difference here is likely just how specific that mechanic is, which makes it less likely to have been critically thought through. I'm sure there are some people who'd find that particular mechanic enjoyable - not talking about the game in general which I'm sure does many other things right - but I suspect they'd be few and far between. There would be countless directions any successor to X-COM could take, it doesn't follow that cleaning up relatively minor design decisions like that would result in X-COM inevitably turning into XCOM. There's no problem at all with Xenonauts attempting to replicate the "heart" of old X-COM, but some of this stuff is pretty far removed from that core gameplay, it's stuff at the extremities that usually isn't noticed at all, but when it does come up, oh boy, it gets noticed and evidently not in a good way. All I'm wondering is what gameplay value that adds, and how it could possibly be worth it.

It's not though, rather a case of poor information relayed to the player.You need to figure out the game yourself unfortunately, but when you do these things are effectively eliminated unless your concentration lapses. I'm not sure what drives a design decision like that in the first place though? What does it add to the game? I get that Xenonauts is a recreation of classic X-COM. But I'm not sure there's much to admire in uncritical apeing of old mechanics. You can excuse an old game, at the first pass of designing a mechanic, to get it wrong: such is the nature of designing something new. But when a developer opts to just recreate the mistakes of the past, what exactly can they claim to have accomplished?

If it helps, MM10 doesn't use the more draconian aspects of Uplay DRM: if its the only game you play on the platform, it's basically Uplay-lite which for mine is less intrusive than even Steam offline mode.

Maybe it's realistic, sure, but it's the kind of thing that'd make me not want to play a game at all either. Failure that's effectively completely out of the player's control. New XCOM's air combat system is bad enough and is entirely luck-based, and I'm tempted enough as it is to mod it to remove the randomness (by increasing chance to hit for both interceptors and UFOs to 100% but turning down the damage proportionally, making the engagements purely deterministic). Critical hits on top of the already stupid-random (as opposed to good-random shooting on the ground which is decision-based) just amplify the problem further.

I can't quite remember, is June zombie month? Yes, yes it is.

No, but I've only been able to detect two large landed UFOs total during the campaign anyway. One in March which I visited but retreated from (no way was I going to be able to take down 6 Outsiders with a team of Specs in default gear), and one Abductor which I did successfully raid late April/early May. To be fair, the two crashed UFOs in that block are skippable, but I'd really like the loot from them. Also a bit of OCD I guess, feels weird to leave them alone. EDIT: Got through that block of six. OH HEY IT'S ANOTHER SCOUT UFO. So that's the 5th UFO in 3 days, plus the Exalt mission plus the Bomb Disposal.

You could buy the GOTY version from Origin Mexico for $20USD at the moment. Still feels a bit expensive if it's only being done to get DLC though.

So, cleaned up those four missions and feel a bit of relief finally. For about one minute, that is, because no sooner than I had hit the "Scan for Activity" again, another UFO appears, a fighter come here to shoot down my satellite. I shoot it down so that's another mission to do, and my roster at this stage consists of three rookies and literally no one else fit for duty. I can send some fatigued soldiers of course, and I'll have to, but a couple will become active in about a day, so let's advance the time a little. OH HEY, HOW ABOUT A BOMB DISPOSAL MISSION COMMANDER? So yeah, that's six missions in three days. Bloody hell.

Having a serious "that's XCOM" series of events in the last day. Or more accurately I guess, "that's Long War". I have my first casualty of the campaign, which happens to be me (that is, Cpl. Humanoid, I use a custom namelist) to a suppressed, 1hp Red Fog debuffed Muton who had a literal 1% chance to hit*. Then my best Scout gets crit for 10 damage on a 4% shot on the next mission: fortunately had 11hp, but she's out for 42 days. That was on the first mission of a chain of four that will happen over the course of two in-game days: I had a small UFO come in low to land, which I let it do, but just as it did, another small arrived over the same country, this time scouting for my satellite. I shot that down. I did the landed UFO first since there's a smaller timeframe in which to do them. Then as I'm flying back from that mission, a medium UFO now lands, so I have to divert to do that now, but all my good troops are fatigued - I was going to send a weak group to the crashed small, but that group would in no way be prepared for the medium. So yeah, that was three UFOs on the same day. Finally as the icing on the cake, I have an Exalt mission due within 24 hours. Good god. * One of the new Second Wave option is to see the hit chance of every shot fired.

Maybe you're just thinking of Chairman Yang.

Perfect excuse to set up a NAS. :D

I have a HTPC but I'd be tempted to just try one of those Intel Compute Sticks if I was starting fresh. Wireless-N might not be able stream my Blu-ray rips, but other than that it looks good.

I placed two orders separately because I went to buy a subscription for my co-op partner too. One transaction I paid by Paypal and it completed instantly, with the product key shown on checkout. The other I paid with credit card, I got an "order pending" email and it took 51 hours to clear and I finally got the product key via email. They said to allow 24-48 hours in the initial email so they missed that window even, so that was a little annoying. For the credit card transaction I also bought a Sims expansion at the same time so I don't know if that would have affected it, or whether it was purely because of the payment method.

Even back when I liked the IE games, probably just after I played IWD2, I tried to go back to BG1 and found it unplayable. :|