Humanoid

Ideally robits would obsolete every single human profession at the same time.

As nice as the option to talk your way through is, I hope they don't roll diplomacy together with stealth, because well, diplomacy is not stealth. Ghosting a level and having the guy at the end grab your camera and force a conversation, no matter how peaceful the outcome, is no better than having an arbitrary boss fight at the end.

Well with Skyrim, Bethesda finally was able to make a game I could have fun with despite the fundamental shortcomings of their approach. So perversely, I think if they try to do Skyrim with guns, they'd probably succeed, and I'd probably have some fun just messing around with it, even if I ignore what passes as the plot. Conversely, if they try to make it a "proper" Fallout game, they'll probably fail in the same way Fallout 3 failed for me, and I'll skip it altogether.

I'm wondering why they're going with UE4 instead of Unity like the previous kickstarted games. Not sure if I'll be backing this as I have no experience with any of the Bard's Tale games. Back during the previous Kickstarters, Unity was realistically the only option due to its licencing costs being far, far lower than any of the alternatives. However in the last year, cuts in the pricing for both Unreal Engine and CryEngine means costs are now broadly equivalent regardless of which option you take, and so the choice can be made on the basis of technology and not on which happens to be cheapest. Anyway, backed at minimum for now, not sure if I'll up it before the campaign is done as it's not my style of RPG (indeed it's pretty much the complete opposite), no matter how physically enticing the boxed copies are.

Or that it's being ported to the Atari Jaguar by Penguin Books.

Figures that two days after I give up on getting a locally sourced CE and order one from the UK, they come back in stock here. But no matter, got the Xbone version with the extra bling (cloth map and Gwent decks) which is still out of stock, happy enough to pay the small price difference, despite neither owning or ever planning to own an Xbone. I might be a gullible fool now, but happy to support I guess. Plus I can give away the actual game if I ever find someone who owns an Xbone.

Y'know to be honest ....I would. But the point is whether or not I do shouldn't matter because I don't think one product's existence is necessarily linked to the absence of another. There were two XCOM games from different studios. Two Shadowrun games too. Cancelling the CDPR game wouldn't lead to the creation of a new 'traditionalist' Cyberpunk game, so I don't see a reason for it not to be made.

Fair enough that the fans of the PnP setting want something close to what their experience with the product is. Someone like me, on the other hand, who has never even heard of the setting, just want CDPR to make a new game, because they make good games and we want more of them. The ideal outcome is that the licence isn't exclusive and we can both have our cake.

It's interesting to me how so many are happy to accept "sure, FIFA are totally corrupt" but aren't willing to see that just about every top level pro is also doped to the gills. Frankly, they'd have to be idiots not to do it given the rewards for doing so, and the complete absence of consequences. For those who have reached a high enough level of celebrity, there's not even the slightest fear of being caught, having complete immunity due to commercial and political interests. It's no surprise that every major scandal originates from an investigation from the outside which have no investment in sports, be it the police, the FBI, etc.

Thats how I felt about a lot of the Walking Dead. I would have thought the opposite with the Walking Dead, with people feeling they've made choices only to discover that after talking about the game with other people (or just replaying the game), it turns out they didn't do anything to change anything.

For a moment there you had me thinking that it was just my imagination that I already had a number of Telltale games on GOG. (It does mean I do already have all the Telltale games that matter though)

Instead of more storage, I'd have preferred flat out having less available stuff to loot. I guess it comes with the territory of open-world RPGs, but I don't find gameplay systems like that enjoyable at all. I guess I just don't see the point for mundane materials for example being something the player should ever be concerned with. Crafting a sword for example, it's just needless complexity for Geralt to have to go out and supply the iron, the leather, plain old wood: all stuff that'd be trivial for a smith to acquire. Instead why not just have one rare part you need to give the smith, and abstract the rest of it by saying that the smith's fee includes the cost of him providing the mundane stuff. Herbs are trivially common and you trip across them moving one minute in any direction, why bother counting quantities at this point? Rusty swords, wolf livers, etc, I don't think any of that stuff adds any gameplay value. Still very much enjoying the game, just wish there wasn't all the side stuff that seemingly is only there because it's some perceived requirement for a game to be described as "open-world".

There seems to be a good response to the following tweak to adjust gamepad movement sensitivity. Meanwhile I'm still in the starting area, having reloaded my save from when I inadvertently progressed the plot (which in itself feels pretty goofy), and after having to borderline exploit the game to kill a level 10 drowner at level 3, end up encountering dozens of level 3-4 drowners elsewhere. Weird, but not the main point I'm trying to make: drowners are super, super glitchy. I see a bunch of red dots in the water showing where they are, so I try to get them to come ashore, but they ignore me. I take some random potshots at them with the crossbow, but I'm not sure they can hit under the water. No good obviously, so as I make to leave, a drowner just swims to the shore ....and keeps going. Swimming in the air. So being totally outclassed, I prepare for a super cautious fight. Well, it just runs around in a circle of about 1m radius. I stand about 2 metres away and plink away at it with Igni (~100 damage/hit) and the crossbow (<20 damage/hit), It has several thousand hit points, but doesn't even try to approach me. I'd have won this fight by default in time, but then.... a Nilfgaardian soldier on horseback rides by. A very slow dance starts as they circle each other and swing for very low damage to each other about once every 15 seconds, and as their movement becomes increasingly irregular, end up moving the fight to a small settlement where the peasants all cower. Eventually the drowner dies, yay. No brain, nooooo. Well that was an incredibly stupid encounter. As for the monster density, eh, my opinion is somewhere in between. I think without the stupidly aggressive wolf trope which is in extreme effect, it'd be about right.

Well the savings aren't huge as such, but for non-overclockers I'd generally just go with the lowest-spec quad-core option, which is to say, the i5 4460. You do lose a few hundred MHz but in practice it won't realistically limit anything you do. Or take the middle ground and just get the non-K version of the 4690, which is simply a non-overclockable version. As for the board, it's even more marginal in terms of savings, for the most part a Z97 board is simply a H97 board which supports overclocking, but the price difference is probably in the order of $5-10.

The only real quibble is that the 'K' series CPU is made for overclocking, so not doing it kind of misses the point, as does having a Z series motherboard, so if anything it makes the motherboard overbudget. The PSU is fine, video card will draw ~200W, maybe peaking at 250W, CPU 100W at most. And yeah, transferring the old hard drive is trivial, though probably easier to do it after installing the OS on the SSD to prevent any confusion.

Humble Store is weird with CK2, they don't' seem to carry much in the way of individual DLC, just the all-on-one pack. Which I guess is sort of just getting the cosmetic DLC bundled in "free" with otherwise so-so pricing for the 'real' DLC.

The ones that have been out long enough to be on sale. ...except Sunset Invasion. No one likes Sunset Invasion.

Are you saying you're not a tool of the Illuminati?

I think in the Witcher 2 blocks by default only reduced damage, but after some upgrades could nullify it. Might be the same here? I haven't really looked at the skill trees.

Tried playing with a gamepad. Griffin slaughtered me over and over for about an hour. I can see how it should be better, but it's taking a good long while to get my head around the mappings, rolling instead of attacking, using a sign instead of blocking, ugh. Now I was underlevelled for the fight, having now learned I should have sidequested first, but a level wouldn't have helped me press the right buttons (or see the griffin's attack frames). Oh well, try again tomorrow.

If you hit the block button as the attack happens, you counter. I'm bad at timing it though, I find that if I click it when the enemy nameplate glows, it's too late. And I'm not sure if certain enemies like the griffin are counterable.

An indirect benefit of rebadging old cards under new names, the HD7950 is still effectively a current card. Meanwhile Kepler is all but abandoned as it's no longer sold.

I would like to hire some tugboats to drag Australia to the Atlantic Ocean.

"Finally, the last thing I’ll say to ... the cynics and the sceptics: I'm sorry for you. I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles." - Lance Armstrong, 2005