Fenixp

Not really. a) Pirates are, thus far, the only group that actually gives a crap about preservation if videogames. If it were up to a good deal of publishers, we'd forget all big releases the moment next installments come out. (you know where, say, GOG gets a lot of working executables for their games? Yup, it's cracking groups.) b) Heavy DRM don't exist to prevent piracy, didn't for a very long time. Enforcement of regional restrictions, DLC distribution, usage statistics tracking - that's a large reason of why DRM is a thing nowadays. c) The news post is mostly just a cracking group whining, at this point, there's not yet such a thing as "uncrackable"

Pfff, I played Far Cry 3, I carried a wallet from skins of 4 Komodo Dragons, weapons holster out of skins of Sumatran Tigers (you can only use a few cm of skin out of an animal once I'm done with them!) and syringe kit out of multiple Tapirs. I'm the reason why pixelated endangered species are endangered species I do remember some people refusing to play FC3 because they need to kill fake animals to get upgrades tho. Not a sentiment I understand, but ... Eh, whatever floats your boat I guess.

Good news: You don't shoot any rare animals in the reboot :-P I guess you get to shoot some deer and wolves, but that's about it.

It has a story. People say it's not very good. I have no idea as I have only done a couple of story missions. A bit of a discussion over here if you're interested - along with a trailer a couple of posts earlier. And yes, the soundtrack is stellar.

I thought Gamergate was 2014

All right, so, Rebel Galaxy. I'm finding I enjoy the game more the more I play the damn thing. So anyway, travelling dark reaches of an extremely flat star system, I happened upon an unidentified signal. As any self-respecting space mercenary, I have decided to investigate. Turns out it's a probe carrying a message and there's a bunch of pirates who'd also like to get their hands on it. They greeted me by calling me an "Easy prey" and opened fire! I'll show them easy prey... After spotting two capital ships, I underestimated the situation and got the bright idea of engaging my ramming deflector and stick my nose right into one of the cutthroat vessels. See the beam? My starboard shields dropped about the moment it started cutting into my hull. So I engaged leftover boosters (never a good idea to spend all your booster power on initial approach) and buggered off, ejecting mines during my retreat. Sadly, those didn't do much and my opponents have hardly slowed down. I need to get better mines. Anyway, I was in a bit of a tight spot... My mines succeeded at one thing tho: They managed to penetrate hull plating of one of the capital ships, so I made a bold approach and covered from fire of one pirate behind the one without shields. It only took a few broadside discharges to take him down. Blowing up the last ship proved to be quite easy afterwards. Enduring heavy damage, I clicked trough a fast QTE to hack the now undefended transponder and found out about goods transport, containing some rare resources and potentially weapons. After docking with a station to make some repairs I departed towards the given coordinates. This was all I found at the destination: The battle ended nearly as fast as it started. After blowing up, the retaliator dropped a bunch of cash and weapons, including mk3 anti-fighter swarm missile turret. Look at what happens as the missiles encounter their target: Yup, the target blows up. Unexpected, eh? Heartwarming tho, bombers can be real pain. Setting the swarm turret to only target fighters so it doesn't waste ammo on larger vessels, I headed back to the space station to sell off my haul. I just made enough money to get this beauty: Slower than my previous ship, but sporting a lot more cargo hull space and and whooping 6 broadside ports which'll increase my firepower by about 30%. It also has turret mounts on top and on bottom, giving my ship a lot smaller blind zone for fighters to abuse. Yay! And thus I'll now embark to shoot some more pirates and find some more random stuff around the universe...

Not harder to program per se, it's just that when devs put a ton of development time into enemy AI, they want all of their players to experience it, not only those playing on higher difficulties. So increased HP pools/more enemies it is.

Hover over a spell and press a key on your keyboard. Most number keys and letters seem to work, aside from those limited to in-game functions. The spell will get hotkeyed and displayed in your 'favorites' (you'll soon find what that means after you start hotkeying)

Yeah, sticking stubbornly to some concepts won't really help the game in a long run, so it might as well get dropped. I know I'm setting myself up to "But engagements!", but I genuinely believe those to be an extremely beneficial addition to gameplay. Random chance that your protective buff quite simply won't work always seemed like a questionable design decision to me tho, since it adds little to gameplay, yet can add pointlessly to frustration. Feels more like a relic of old-school RPG design than actually beneficial mechanic. Isn't prayer against treachery a fairly high level spell tho? I'm pretty sure you'll meet a lot of enemies with the effect before you even get the prayer itself and I imagine the scrolls won't exactly be too common, so it's not like your tactic suddenly won't be viable.

Well... Not necessarily, producing content of decent quality is not simple. I've discussed this with a few minor youtube people - a big part of their videos quite simply ends up in the trash and never gets released because they don't meet the quality standard they're trying to set on their channels. Writing, proper video editing, not to mention playing and replaying the same thing to get good footage... Their working hours can get insane and that's in spite of it being work on sitting on your butt at home. Besides, I'd go mad if I had to spend 8 hours a day playing videogames. Not saying it's a difficult job per se, but there's a lot more to it than meets the eye. Then there are people like Angry Joe who I personally can't stand, but actually have relatively high production values for youtubers. Oh there's plenty of info in TB's videos, he does actually know his **** - however, he rambles on a lot, so it's pretty much impossible to watch his videos without doing something else in the process while filtering out the actually useful stuff. Funnily enough, he tried to do heavily edited videos and his fans hated it, so... Gotta agree tho, Beagle's coverage of XCOM has so far the best I have ever seen, and I have seen a lot of XCOM videos.

They're fixed for everyone, character creation is the only point where you can directly adjust your attributes.

There is Z-axis fighting, but your ship can't navigate Z-axis. In other words, your turrets can aim up and down, fighters can abuse Z-Axis and blind spots of your ship, but capital ships (and pretty much everything of import in the universe) is on the same plane. Good news is: It's not really an issue. In fact I don't think the broadside combat would function quite as well as it does with Z-axis navigation - it's quite obvious it was omitted for a reason. The game is generally a fairly casual arcady and fun romp trough space, fighting space pirates with very enjoyable broadside combat and ramming when your ship is upgraded properly (and no, you don't have a proper space-worthy capital ships when you can't ram pirates!) Combat has a surprising amount of depth - for how simple the rest of the game is. As opposed to other modern sci-fi games in which you control a ship nothing takes too long, the game is not much of a commitment, which is a definite advantage to me. Combat is a lot of fun and music works wonders for the game. Story is crap tho, voice acting's kinda bad, you can do trading but... I don't see why would you. So if you just want to fly a big ship and blow up some other ships, definitely worth picking the game up on sale. When you want a space sim, well... Elite: Dangerous is over there.

There were boobies. Sex scenes with polygon-based characters look extremely uncanny. Anyway, Rebel Galaxy is a surprising amount of fun. We need more games portraying capital ship combat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMZPVgycrAE&ab_channel=RebelGalaxy Yes, the soundtrack is amazing.

Thing is, absorbing souls itself would make PC a very powerful being, but not necessarily one to rival gods. Adra Dragon was sitting in its place, sucking souls for presumably centuries, if not millenia and while exceptionally powerful, it did not rival gods. Additionally, Engwithan gods are not just pieces of stone infused with souls that gives them power - I always interpreted them more as complex machines, computers if you will, powered by energy of the souls, and in turn being able to use these souls. The best case scenario is that PC would become a version of Thaos, worse is insanity and potentially eventually turning into something like a necromancer.

What was I doing today? Netflix arrived into Czech Republic and I was so excited that I immediately subscribed to the best quality subscription for the free month (not that I actually need UHD, but eh.) And my excitement was quickly replaced by disappointment when I saw what they're offering over here: About 700 videos of which about 550 are movies and 200 TV series. So I looked at US stats. Yup, over 5000 videos, over 4000 movies and 1000 TV series. But that's US, surely, rest of Europe is as screwed as we are. So... Germany? about 1800 videos. *sigh* Naturally, we pay for our selection precisely the same price as US users pay for theirs. But surely, the reason why Netflix took so long to spread to the rest of the world was localization, right? It would be stupid to push such a service into a multicultural environment without that! .... Oh. Apparently, it wouldn't. My wife can't speak english nearly as well as I can, so we watch movies/TV series with localized subtitles. Netflix didn't even offer that. All right, fair enough, at least it's going to be the best place to watch Netflix content, right? Okay, I chose highest quality and started watching supposedly HD Daredevil to make a comparison with my HD copy. Netflix is the upper screen, HD video the lower one. Okay. I don't think I'm subbing to Netflix. (oh, and then there's the story about Media Foundation Protected EXE when Netflix is launched via IE)

You mean you can't compare an older game to a newer one?

Assassin's Creed IV proved beyond shadow of a doubt that any crappy game can become good when it's about pirates

I know you're joking, but that's exactly the thing: Even if PC could, beyond shadow of a doubt, persuade everybody of being correct, gods would still remain massively powerful beings you probably don't want to mess with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8Y-JjWE3Rw&ab_channel=PheistEwon

This should probably go into the stories section.

I don't think it's about balance as much as it is about eliminating repetitive gameplay. There's nothing actually fun about prebuffing - you just sort of stand there, staring at your party as they cast spells. It's a fairly mindless activity, especially when you do it after reloading. And so PoE eliminated both prebuffing and any need for it.

Well more importantly pirates are present in Pillars of Eternity lore, you even meet some in Defiance Bay.

I agree 100%. We should also get rid of elves of human height. While we're at it, let's get rid of that newfangled ****e called "Halflings" and "Orcs", who needs these newfangled Tolkienish races anyway. In my days, we've had djinns, harpies and mermaids and we were happy with them.

I loved how not only quests, but even majority of texts and books directly or indirectly tied back to main storyline in one way or another - the pleasant consequence of Obsidian being able to work on original IP with original lore is how focused these things can be.

Starting combat out of an in-game cutscene is always a major annoyance. Thankfully, Pillars of Eternity does not have that many moments of that sort, but those which are there are that much more noticeable - to be fair at that point I don't even care about immersion or whatever, if you can't assure that my party arrangement will protect me, just don't ever take control from me. If you absolutely have to take control from me, feel free to warp my characters around to be in the default formation. Just... Whatever, but not this.

Just disable Steam cloud before you do that.