Humanoid

I'm going to have to make a decision between BG3 or the new Solasta campaign since both will be co-op only affairs for me, and with only playing an average of three days a week for maybe 4-6 cumulative hours, it'll be a long delay for the game that loses out. So the contest is between the exciting new game with a higher ceiling, or the more predictable, known quantity.

Morrigan wears more clothes during sex than she does while adventuring.

I'm sort of trapped in the middle of the RTwP debate because I want my party members to behave autonomously, but I also want to play in turn-based mode. Yet for some reason I can't have that blend of the two features. I avoid parties in general (in games and in real life), so generally speaking two units is the most I'm willing to micromanage. It's fortunate then that the likes of Larian games, Solasta, and For the King have co-op functionality that reduce the commitment for each player down to that level. Alas, that seems a bridge to far for the children of the Infinity Engine, so I haven't been able to get into the likes of PoE and Pathfinder.

Nope, all of them are just regular downloads, same as if you bought them from the Microsoft Store. Early on, the games were generally provided as UWP apps, which were closed-off to modding but were nonetheless still full local downloads. However these days they're generally just standard Win32 apps and in most cases can be modded in the standard way. Bethesda games on Game Pass can be modded with any mod that does not have a dependency on the Script Extender. Cloud gaming is technically a separate service they provide, but is effectively just an inclusion if you subscribe to Game Pass Ultimate. I've been subbed to Game Pass for years but have yet to try anything on xCloud.

If it would cost me actual money I'd obviously wait, but there's no reason to do so for anyone who has Game Pass. I suppose the only concern then is whether there are any modding restrictions on the Game Pass version of the game, like how their version of Skyrim doesn't support SKSE.

Having the posters read anything but just "Star Wars" doesn't look right.

I think it would be more accurate to say it's Gamebryo with 20 years worth of Bethesda bugs progressively added to it.

Basilllll!!! Probably something his mum kept yelling while he was but a wee tacker.

I can just about accept Roman numerals on an analogue clock face, but they have no place anywhere else.

FF7 was fine, I finished it and had a reasonably good time doing so despite it being the horrible PC port. But it never was enough to make me curious about playing any other games in the franchise, and when reviews of the next game came out saying it was clearly not as good, that was pretty much it for me. Well, until I played FF14 for a bit, but being an MMO that doesn't really count. That, and the storytelling pretty much devolved into standard single-player game fare almost immediately. The game teases you with freedom to be your own person for what, 10-20 levels, and then you're just forcibly recruited into the standard good guys club where you're nothing but a pawn following orders for the rest of the game. Blergh. It was the same feeling I had in my extremely brief time with Secret World, in their silence, the player character ends up feeling like a doormat.

They assign you a randomly determined bug every few minutes.

Hopefully someone makes a total conversion mod to turn it into Privateer.

And some of the gameplay DLC is eminently skippable too. Just about everyone skips Sunset Invasion, the fantasy scenario of an Aztec invasion of Europe. I personally disable Jade Dragon too because despite what the name suggests, it doesn't really add China, but only a silly and unbalanced off-map abstraction of it. Besides that, Rajas of India is very niche, and Horse Lords only marginally less so, get them only if you plan to play in those regions. Of the DLCs that add new bookmarks to the game, Charlemagne adds a new one a century earlier (769) than the Old Gods (867), but it's a very unbalanced game state that I recommend against playing. Note by default the game used to start no earlier than 1066 which made Old Gods the most popular DLC to extend gameplay, but just about the last thing added to the game (alongside Holy Fury) was a new bookmark of 936 which is one of the most interesting starts and in my mind is the better choice.

Yeah, Fail tends to imply a sort of graceful termination, like "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that". Abort just immediately drops all those plates you're carrying and damn the consequences.

Questions and memes are great and all, but have you heard Hocus Pocus by Focus?

Didn't even know there was colony building. But I completely ignored it in FO4, and I will do so again.

I only got 26 hours out of Fallout 4, of which none of them qualified as awesome. Hopefully Starfield clears that low bar, but if it doesn't, well, I'll have paid nothing for it specifically.

Huh, the impression I got from the trailer is that it was a continuation of the main game as you try to find a cure. I suppose it'd be interesting to try male V, but only if I also change my playstyle and forcibly make myself interact with the game's combat systems, rather than bypassing them all with stealth.

All I wanted is more main game, and it sounds like more main game is what we're getting. Pleased with that outcome, especially with it being a narrative sequel, rather than one of those mid-game DLCs where you're expected to load back a save from before the point of no return. Those are a pet peeve of mine as not only is it jarring to have to rewind time, it also ensures that the new content is ultimately pointless, a side-story with zero impact on the greater game world.

I'm a bit concerned about the followers as their existence tends to run counter to my preferred sneaky-sneaky playstyle. Rest of it seems fine to me, with the caveat that I never finished either PoE game.

To use a "dumb" multi-M.2 adapter like that, I believe you need a motherboard that supports PCIe bifurication, and the end result depends on how the motherboard splits the lanes, e.g. 8/8, 8/4/4, or 4/4/4/4. I believe this is how a card like the Asus Hyper M.2 works. If your motherboard doesn't support bifurication, then you would need a card that has the smarts included, and those things will cost many hundreds of dollars.

And you had to pay $19.95 for the privilege!

Wonder if AMD are regretting letting Sapphire release that oddball 10GB 6700 non-XT, because geez that card fills a really wide sweet spot right now. And for such a limited-release product, availability for it has been great.

The jankiness probably helped me. I can't play Valve/Source games because they give me motion sickness, but Bloodlines was generally fine. If they had launched with the finished, polished version of the Source engine, who knows if that would still be the case. I'm not even someone generally susceptible to motion sickness, I can't think of any other game that triggers it for me. Then again I don't play a lot of first-person games so the sample size isn't huge. It occurs to me that perhaps one big reason I liked the game is that there was no real faffing around with gear. A gun's a gun, a bat's a bat, and you get exactly one armour upgrade per chapter that's a linear upgrade over the previous set. Looting is the bane of roleplaying.

It's a mix of two things mostly. First and most common is simply substituting dialogue with wackier sounding alternatives, where the NPC then comments on before proceeding with their usual response. So it's just flavour dialogue and functionally identical to a standard run. It's like games where if you play a low-INT character, the NPC will pretend to be exasperated by your stupidity but give you the same quest in the end. The other is bits of foreshadowing, which yes, will go over your head if it's the first playthrough, but also doesn't really harm the experience in my view. I wouldn't really count the writers basically just winking and saying "see what we did there?" as content I'm not counting uses of the Dementation usage in dialogue as it's more just a speech check thing, same as if you had Domination on a Ventrue or whatever.