Humanoid

Moar powar sounds better than basically having the Consular basically just Googling WebMD. But yes, I'll be pleased when this part of the arc concludes (up to the final section of Coruscant, it's a slow slog).

I think the core of a good game is there. But it's hidden behind an introduction so painful I could no longer bear it. Everyone loves car analogies right? Fallout 4 is like going for a road trip in a rusty old van that breaks down every few miles. It doesn't matter how wonderful the world outside is when you can't experience it because of the vehicle you're saddled with. I want to play the game as someone, anyone else, not this excuse for a "character" that Bethesda has forced on me. Blame it on the voice acting, the dialogue wheel, the pre-war gimmick, anything. It's not any single one of those, but all of them. What I know is that the end result is just someone I have no interest whatsoever in playing. And who, despite my best efforts, can't ignore. The mechanics are largely fine. Someone could make a really good game with some relatively modest changes. Maybe it'll be a modder. Maybe it'll be another, subcontracted developer. And maybe then I'll play this game again.

Steam says I have 25 hours logged, but realistically I've played maybe half that because I've got the habit of tabbing out for hours and forgetting that something is running. Even then I don't feel cheated as such, in that I knew when buying it there was this very risk of the game turning out the exact same way as its predecessor. But I chose to take that risk because I wanted to be part of the discussion (and because I had an eBay voucher I needed to spend). For what it's worth, I've fired the game up maybe three times over that past week, and each time I stopped playing within half an hour. So I think I'm done with the game for the time being. If I had to boil the reason down to one simple sentence, the reason would be that I just don't want to play this character they've handed me. Let it be recorded that I perished in the blast rather than choose to go down into the vault, because that it the most appropriate end for that character.

So what happens if you just ignore attacks on the settlements anyway? I still haven't even built one yet because it doesn't seem like my thing from both a gameplay perspective and a roleplaying one.

I don't get what the goal of the game could possibly be. So there's open wilderness and you take down big game. But you can't eat them since they're made of metal and all that, so it's not a survival thing. Are you going to reclaim the Earth by destroying all of the robots, one-by-one, using handmade tools? Then spend the next 10,000 years or so rebuilding civilisation? Sure, maybe the world is just a backdrop to some more personal quest, like if someone murdered your husband and stole your baby, but that kind of thing seems improbable and doesn't really line up with what we've seen. But reclaiming the world seems about as improbable as it would be if the goal of Fallout was to restore the world to its pre-apocalyptic state, or if the goal of a Vampire game was to completely eliminate every single supernatural being in the world.

The only real thing that puts Double Fine offside with me is Spacebase and how early it was abandoned. Broken Age was late and Massive Chalice had no great depth, but neither I feel could be characterised as a scam or any other word the more vociferous critics may use.

Eh, he's not a complete lost cause on the scale of a Peter Molyneux, but definitely needs to be kept on a very tight leash.

I keep getting annoyed by stupidly designed mechanics in Darkest Dungeon, and the inability, other than for the Corpses and Heart Attack mechanics, to toggle them. But since we've long established that I'm an unapologetic cheating bastard, I'm happy to dive right into the game's plain text files to adjust the rules to my liking. Yeah, the net effect is an easier game, but I don't mind that at all, especially as the latest patch released a few days ago made it all-around harder. I like how easily tweakable just about everything is. On the other hand, I suspect all of these plain-text files being read in contributes to the game's surprisingly slow load times. The actual tweaks under the spoiler tag:

player.modav carryweight 1000

I have to admit I couldn't get into JE for the most superficial of reasons, the text on the UI and particularly the buttons were all stretched out and ugly. Granted it was probably a decade after the game released and likely was mostly because of widescreen stretching, but yeah, early 3D games didn't age well. Looked kind of like Mount & Blade's weird stretchy textures actually.

setav CA_affinity 1000

Depends whether the "Field Notes" is part of the clue, if he's actually scouting locations like he did for NV, then it might be something else completely.

It was like that for New Vegas for me. I've only finished the game once. and that predated any of the DLC. I've since started up to a half a dozen other runs, but aside from one clear of Honest Hearts, I never got around to doing the DLC as my games tended to run out of steam around the time I reach Vegas.

Being Bethesda DLC, it'll be level scaled to be doable at any level most likely.

Difficult question to answer. The modding toolkit won't be released until Q1 next year, so modders are limited in how far they can go to fix the game. On the other hand, it's probably more complete a game at launch that previous Bethesda titles and is easily played to completion without any real hassle. But then would you have the motivation to start over once the big mods to rival the likes of "Frostfall" in Skyrim are ready? Personally with the benefit of hindsight I might have waited. I'm burned out on the game already, and I'm barely into the double digits in terms of hours played. As a comparison, I picked up Skyrim quite a few months after release when it was a mature, stable product with a large range of mods I could immediately load up on, and perhaps partially as a result, I feel that it continues to be Bethesda's best game and one in which I've easily put in over a hundred hours.

Word of praise and a bit of a mea culpa: when the game first came out and I heard there were no more critical hits (sneak attacks and activated VATS crits don't count), I reflexively thought "that's stupid", in hindsight for no other reason because it's such an ingrained game mechanic that it seems weird to go without it. But y'know what, after both playing and thinking about it for a bit, I'm completely turned around. Crits are the stupid - or at least badly antiquated - mechanic. I've argued for a while that one of the most important rules of designing game mechanics ought to be that when you design something to be random, you need to go back and ask yourself "does this need to be random?" I'd argue with the level of simulation in modern games - and by simulation I mean things like location/hitbox detection, dynamic line-of-sight and even ballistics modelling - I don't think the crude tool that is random critical chance is no longer relevant. If you need the outcome of an attack to not be absolutely predictable, just use damage ranges which are an equally old but less stupid mechanic: 2d4 or whatever is still plenty of room for variation. So there's my epiphany, and I'm pleased with how it's working out thus far. On the other hand it does make it utterly baffling that, after ditching the arbitrary randomness of critical hits, Bethesda have seen fit to return random mechanics to skill/conversation checks after the strides made by New Vegas. And now for a bit of a tangent: I've been playing a bit of Darkest Dungeon lately which is often described as an RNG-fest, and it's very clear why, and even single actions such as trying to land an attack to cause an enemy to bleed goes through two independent all-or-nothing dice rolls. So in the same vein (no pun intended), it seems more rational to me to suggest that 50% bleed resistance should mean "half damage from all bleed effects" instead of "half chance of taking a full damage bleed, and half chance for nothing whatsoever to happen". So please, game developers, ask yourself that question. Why random? Another game I've recently played, Fire Emblem Awakening, has crits doing *triple* damage, which are almost invariably one-shot mechanics, both to the enemy, including bosses, and to the player's own party members. It's particularly egregious in this game because damage is otherwise completely flat, swing a sword a dozen times and it'll do the exact same amount of damage each time. The existence of critical hits just throws the rest of the game's mechanics out of the window, based on the outcome of a single die roll. On the other hand, another title I think is damaged by its complete lack of randomness is Long Live the Queen, which is purely deterministic and has no random rolls whatsoever. As a result, winning at the game is essentially the result of rote memorisation, or the consultation of a step-by-step walkthrough. You're not anticipating or reacting to some likely weighted occurrence, you just know you need skill level X on week number Y to progress. Imagine if Football Manager was just a case of memorising one certain tactic against each rival team, and if you selected that tactic, you would be guaranteed to win.

Well with a starting truck and a heavy load, speeding is likely physically impossible anyway.

Ubisoft tried it with Might and Magic. It was a competent game but no idea if it was successful enough commercially to warrant a follow-up. The same team was contracted to do HoMM7 which was received somewhat less well I've heard, so that might be the end of that experiment.

Heh, being a Thinkpad user I'm not used to non-serviceable laptops, but at a stretch you should at least be able to get close enough with the 'hose' of an air cleaner.

Played a little bit for the first time since my free month, if only because I was looking for a co-op game to play with my sister. I've heard in the past that the Jedi Consular story was the dullest of the lot, and oh boy, it seems all the reports were correct. Still on Coruscant, mind you, but I really can't get into character at all when compared to my smuggler way back when. Still, it's kind of fun to troll by picking irrational dialogue options during group conversations and I think that's been the saving grace of the game this time around. If I was playing solo I think I'd have already quit again though, mechanically it still feels as clunky as ever - indeed moreso because now I have to settle for near-200ms latency to US servers, as compared to ~10ms when they hosted some in Sydney.

Talking to bad guys here is generally a bad idea. Any fight that's part of the story is mandatory with all four options leading to combat, so all that talking first does is place you in the middle of a bunch of enemies when the fight begins. Better off ignoring the opportunity to talk (which will be counterintuitive to many of us) and just start the fight from afar.

Yeah, check your laptop's documentation for how to open it up and clean out the dust. Another thing that may help is a USB cooling pad, but personally I find them a bit bulky and inconvenient.

Did Bioware patent the ability to put six options on a dialogue wheel?

Every single romanceable character is bisexual, yes. Nick is asexual though.

Diamond City is as big as it gets, unfortunately.