Humanoid

Trying to play the Crusader Kings 2 tutorial. I'd heard it has issues, but by god, it's barely functional. I get the feeling I'd have better luck reading or watching a gameplay video than trying to make heads or tails of this mess.

I'd be curious what a collaborative Obsidian forums top-100 list, but I suspect I'd have no fewer issues with it.

A remastering of PS:T would involve throwing away all the game assets except the dialogue trees and coding everything else from scratch.

I imagine it just created a 500GB partition on your 1TB drive. Use the Disk Management tool in Windows ("Create and format hard disk partitions") to extend it.

Strictly talking the title in this context, but then I'm too young to have enjoyed the Gold Box games in the time they were released. I've since gone back to try a few though, and they did absolutely nothing for me. Not that it's any surprise, "old school" isn't a positive term for me, and hack and slash doesn't equate to RPG. I'll take the heresy even further. In the DOS era, only two good RPGs existed. Ultima, and Darklands.

I didn't like that it had a skull on the front of the box, skulls are scary. I'm only partially jesting, I don't actually know if I would have bought it if it had a more appealing box art, but as it stands I didn't get around to it until years later where it was no longer relevant except as a historical curio. Baldur's Gate is a perfectly servicable title in the context of prior meaningless or long-winded D&D game titles though. At least it's not as forgettable as say, Curse of the Azure Bonds.

The development of IWD2 is the reason I initially registered on the BIS forums, so I have history with that. It might seem strange then that IWD1 is the only IE game I've never played, not even for a minute. To be fair though, I started with BG2 and IWD2 was simply the next title in the 'series'. As for the other PS:T, by that stage, was actually pretty hard to find in stores, it might have taken a year or so to finally stumble upon a beaten-up copy at a K-Mart or Target somewhere - might have contributed to my never having finished it. BG1 I probably tried last, and by the time I did it had aged so badly that I didn't enjoy it at all.

If after 300 hours I'm not comfortable with it, then I probably should quit being a gamer. In all seriousness, Base Defense in the unmodded game was challenging and somewhat random too, but the way it was structured in the game meant you could somewhat prepare for it, as it wouldn't trigger until you completed certain events. The other thing is the extended roster of the mod, compared to vanilla where you had a definitive A-Team. Where you only have a squad of about 8 people (which was probably 6 + 2 spares anyway), distributed amongst only 5 classes, the game arbitrarily picking the first 6 of them in the list is no big deal - indeed there's a high probability it picked your most effective combination. When you have a roster of 40+, distributed amongst 8 (or indeed possibly 16) classes, picking the top 6 of that list is going to be inherently unbalanced.

The solution is to give everyone a robot slave. So you'd sort of be employed, except that you've subcontracted your job out to your personal robot.

Does it have romance XP?

My Long War game came to a sudden end, due to an unexpected base defense. I'm fairly confident that it was an unwinnable mission in my state, but that's why this is in beta I guess. Apparently the problem here is that all the variables are baked into vanilla code and the modders have not been able to change any aspect of the number of enemies, what type they are, how your own people are selected, or anything else meaningful. The difficulty of the mission is such that it can swing wildly from being comparatively trivial to literally impossible, and reloading a save from prior to the mission may generate a completely different outcome. While I do have a backup save (I play Ironman but due to LW bugs back up a save at the start of every month), it wouldn't feel right to use it, so I'm just going to take a break until the next beta, maybe some wild experimentation for the time being. For the record, I think the count was 6 Mechtoids, 4 Sectoid Commanders, 2 Berserkers and a Sectopod bum-rushing me in the space of two turns. With my own squad being automatically assigned as 3 Snipers, 2 Rocketeers who had long since run out of rockets, and a Scout, I had no chance, though I like to think I put up a decent fight taking down about 25 aliens before the bitter end. For what it's worth, it's not actually a hard game over, you lose a bunch of cash and other resources, your scientists and engineers are decimated, but the game technically continues - but it resulted in me being more than $900 in the red, so it is an effective game over for a campaign already on a knife edge. Still, I guess the disappointing aspect here is that, knowing the inherent technical issues around the mission scripting, the devs have somehow seen fit to nonetheless implement potential repeat base defenses in a given campaign, because that's how it was in the original UFO:EU/X-COM. Conceptually it's fair enough, but logically I'd say shelving the concept until it can be figured out internally would be the sensible option. Granted, issues like this are expected in a beta, and they do strongly recommend against playing Ironman, so I'll cop it on the chin. If it goes to release in this state though, then that'd be obviously unacceptable arrogance.

Not that I necessarily wanted this to happen, but finally, a Queen of my own. I'd posted a picture of someone else's Chryssalid Queen before ....but I like to think mine is somewhat larger.

I don't really mind in what absurd and insane direction they take the story, but I wish they'd go back to basics a bit with the gameplay. I'd like to be able to, y'know, see things happening sometimes instead of being a supersonic dervish of unrecognisable motion blur.

Edit timer's out but I guess I shouldn't leave anyone hanging. Anyone who knows this map pretty much knows I'm at the bottom edge of it, so running wasn't viable unless I just extracted immediately. But death or glory and all that, so I decided to go for it. No chance in hell of killing the elite in addition to the berserkers, so I dashed my medic (selected in the screenshot, with a crappy laser SMG which might have done 2-3 damage to one of those things) to behind the door of that white car on the left, flanking the elite but being unable to be flanked in return, with the hope of scaring him away on his turn instead of having him shoot and almost certainly one-shot one of my exposed troops. And boy, were there exposed troops. Rocketeer and Sniper in particular I couldn't afford to move, because the loss of shots or accuracy would have killed me. So the strategy was stand and deliver: a Chem Grenade to lower their damage resistance, parked the Assault at the front right corner of the van, hit all the berserkers with a Shredder. Three Close Combat Specialist free shots with a Pulse Shotgun chewed up the HP like nothing else, and the Assault followed up with two pistol shots, courtesy Close Encounters, to finish two of them off. Unfortunately one survived, but fortunately, of all people he chose to punch my scout, who I customarily stack with extra survivability items (Reinforced Armor for +1HP and +1DR, and Alloy Plating for +2HP). The punch hit for 11, so 12 before the DR, which means that without wearing both those items, my scout would have been dead. Seeing all that, whilst also being flanked, the Elite booked it and ran straight back into the UFO. Later on a 20hp Thinman and 25hp Outsider turned up, but they were absolute reliefs after that initial mess.

So the very first turn of a landed Abductor UFO, this happens. To add insult to injury, them pathing behind the van means I barely get any overwatch fire on them. For added fun, this snow-covered town? Right in the middle of the Sahara desert, apparently.

Who's to say they didn't do their Ph.D in the field of witchcraft?

I guess removing Jack Keane balances out removing all the other stuff.

It's a shame CDPR games aren't more mod-friendly, I'd totally play as Geraldine of Rivia.

I've played the previous two Max Payne games, not extensively but for a few hours, but was fine - but yeah, never played the third because I didn't particularly enjoy them. I don't think it's any one special 'artistic' effect in particular, I have a suspicion that it's because of the way a particular engine handles player movement. In my case I suspect it's a Source Engine thing, with the caveat that the sample size is small. I don't even remember the context in which I played HL2 since I don't own the game, a demo or at a friend's house perhaps. VtM:Bloodlines gave me a bit of trouble, but nowhere near as bad, maybe the slow pacing and use of the third person camera at times helped. More recently it was just a YouTube video of HL2 that I couldn't keep watching after about 10 minutes. I don't think any other game has ever given me trouble.

Any number of reasons really, adding that I don't necessarily start, or even buy games, with the intention of finishing them. Game developers know this and tend to have half-baked endings anyway. Whether I finish a game or not tends to be a rolling target, any given play session with any given game might turn out to be the last, and I wouldn't necessarily know at the beginning of it. I've abandoned games where I'd estimate I'm 90% or more of the way through. I might get distracted by another game and leave it too long to get back into it. Maybe I get burned out by repetitive gameplay or relentlessly grim plotting. Or it could be sudden, a single narrative event or gameplay shift that totally loses me partway through. Perhaps I run into a showstopping bug. And don't discount that it could just a flat out bad game. P.S. Now that I think about it, if I count the games I've bought but haven't even started, 3.4% sounds even more accurate, heh. EDIT: In a sentence, I'd say the best explanation would be the inverse of the question. "Why should I finish this game?" It's up to each game to answer that question, and most of them fail it.

Not hard for me to believe, I fairly rarely finish mine. More than 3.4% granted, but less than 34%.

HL2 is one of the very few games that gives me motion sickness in its standard form - even watching a gameplay video of it sets me off. VR HL2 would just be cruel.

Multiplayer doesn't subtract from the game's budget, because if they didn't add multiplayer, their budget for the whole game would be zero, as mandated by EA policy.

For a short period, there were more women then men in my WoW guild, but that pretty swiftly regressed to the norm as we expanded from 10s raiding to 25s. This was back in 2007, mind. My take on it is that initially it was just a little group of friends and friends-of-friends where having women in that set meant the proportion was generally kept when those friends came in. But open recruitment the ratio was probably more 5:1, if not more, in favour of men.

Thought the Pikmin 3 DLC was terrible value, so good to see Nintendo have pulled their heads in a little. $12 for both packs together (who'd buy them individually for $8 each?) is more than reasonable - with the caveat that that's the US pricing, waiting to see what the markup is for other regions. Details up on the official MK8 site now.