algroth

I think it has an opportunity of being a big hit, but I wouldn't elevate the bar to 10 million units. It's an original series and I don't think Dragon Age or Elder Scrolls are the standard performers in the scene. Fallout didn't perform to that level, or Horizon Zero Dawn for that matter, or the Witcher games prior to the third. But even if it sells around 3-4 million units, I reckon it could mean good things for the franchise moving forward, and again, certainly attract some more attention to the Pillars games potentially.

I actually think it would be good to develop Pillars as the more niche side-venture to the Avowed flagship, actually. I think in this day and age isometric games will be largely a niche interest and if anything it takes pressure off the franchise to overperform whilst also potentially having a better gateway into the series for newcomers. My one issue about that would be if Pillars suffers as a consequence in the way of either feeling the need for Avowed tie-ins or seeing resources syphoned away, causing a drastic impact in scale, ambition and whatnot, or even leading to the cancellation of Pillars as a franchise in favour of more Avowed games - but if Avowed also renews interest for Pillars and the Eora setting, and we can see a Pillars 3 off of it, that'd be an absolute win.

Hopefully it *will* involve both things, but from a new perspective.

I reckon it'd be its own thing. It's be odd for Pillars III to be branded and marketed as something so completely aside from what the franchise has been so far, and I reckon that having direct narrative ties with the Pillars franchise would only hurt Avowed's accessibility with Eora newcomers as well as leave Pillars fans disappointed, being a pivot not many would likely be wanting to see.

The teaser feels a lot more medieval to me in aesthetic than what we've seen in Pillars, so I'd guess earlier. With all the burning forests and stuff I could see the story being based around the War of the Black Trees or the Dyrwood's independence, though some also suggested Aedyr as a setting.

Very wary of this from what I've seen so far. Nothing about the teaser struck me as an interesting or unique hook, mostly as a load of very generic standard fantasy fluff appealing to the gamer's typical power fantasy and so on; a far cry from the other recent settings by Obsidian games which rather cleverly and *meaningfully* defied the archetypical settings they emulated right from the get go. The fact that it's set in Eora makes me a little concerned that they'll be pivoting the IP towards a much more generic Elder Scrolls-like fantasy, effectively filing away the elements that made the setting stand out in the first place.

Little Richard

A superb player, and a backbone to the Africa 70. His solo stuff is also quite good.

Tony Allen

This is a pretty sweet album.

This is pure FIRE

This. This false equivalence argument needs to stop.

This is some excellent tango/klezmer fusion.

Looks very neat

New Moor Mother album kicks serious ass. This could be a Dischord release.

Been on a Sun Ra roll these last couple of days, mostly checking out some albums of his I hadn't yet gotten around to. For the most part they were... Fine. Not the best of his I've heard by a mile, and mostly consisting of novelties, experiments, and some stuff that was perhaps tamer than I was hoping out of him. That said, however, Astro Black was the clear highlight, and it is pretty damn great: And this tune is some great P-funk on his behalf:

You "don't like people or characters that don't like themselves and wallow in self pity" but the only character you liked was Grieving Mother? What?

New Fiona Apple album is very good indeed. Check it out, people!

Playing Fallout for the first time in over fifteen years, and oh boy, is this game a tough pill to swallow nowadays. To say it's aged badly is an understatement, there's things here that almost feel designed for the express intent of obfuscating basic mechanics and frustrating the player. At the same time it's somehow a lot of fun on that level too - it's fun to do something akin to a post-mortem run of it, to break down all the places where the game could be improved in the modern day and think about all these flaws. It's one of those cases that feel very rewarding as a case study of what not to do. Of course the game still holds in a fair few departments and is overall quite fun in spite of its age. Mark Morgan's score especially does a lot of heavylifting throughout.

Not Coronavirus-specific, but how about we add one more impending catastrophe to this ****show of a year? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/world/europe/chernobyl-wildfire.html

O, the Bronze Sphere and a few other things too. I recall there being more egregious references than either, however, but already these were a bit jarring. I'd have to replay it to properly recall the events or situations that left that impression on me, however.

Peak Coltrane. I feel sorry for that sax.

Oh, that's another point: the game doesn't do any favours to itself citing and recycling Torment in several instances. I don't recall all of them but I do remember some cases acting as very blatant references to the original game. It doesn't help things because to me Numenera works better as its own individual thing opposite to a spiritual successor, and yet it also never truly wants to leave its antecessor's shadow.

I found it to be quite a pleasant surprise myself. I went into it hearing about how it didn't stand up to Torment and how it fell off after a decent first half after Sagus Cliffs, yet my experience was actually the opposite. I thought the Sagus Cliffs section was alright but it was following it that the game really picked up steam, and whereas I expected to dislike the Bloom based on initial art and concept, I found myself quite enthralled with it. I went with middling expectations and they were easily surpassed. I played the game a while ago so I cannot recall the specifics right now with too much detail, but some general impressions are as follows: contrary to the rest here, I was expecting the game to be *very* flowery with its text, essentially trying to one-up Torment's writing and using word-count as a bar and the likes... And I was glad to find it wasn't really the case. I thought the text in Pillars, Torment, Tyranny or Disco Elysium was much more laboured for instance, and there were also some touches to facilitate comprehension that I quite appreciated, such as making a point to always offer a more succinct and straight-forward summary of what was being told upon asking for clarification; but at the same time these games are more effective at bridging the conflict and backdrop early on than Numenera is, thus making the exposition feel a lot less superfluous by extension. To exemplify: in Pillars you're introduced to the Saint's War and the meaning it has to the present day the moment you step into Gilded Vale and see the corpses hanging on the tree - as a player you are offered an immediate hook relating to a very current conflict, you're prompted to ask yourself why they're being hanged and why are you asked to move on, and the lore regarding the War, the suspicions that those being hanged aided Waidwen, the fears regarding Waiden's Legacy and so on is therefore justified as backdrop to that conflict; in Numenera you arrive to a massive town square and find this ancient soldier caught in time whose only real purpose is to stand around and explain why he's there and what happened hundreds of years ago - it's not until much later that you really connect the Eternal War to the Changing God and the Castoffs and start understanding its purpose or importance in the story. A lot of stuff in Sagus Cliffs is relevant but is introduced as flavour text and little else, making the game feel rather scattershot and indulgent early on. It's through the bottleneck at the mid point of the game that things really start falling into place and the focus feels that much clearer, and where the very Blade Runner-esque existential and humanist themes start to solidify, and from that point on I was very taken by it. Other small tangential bits... I love the area design and music in this, quite like the setting, the characters are rather memorable and interesting, the in-dialogue mechanics are very good and probably a better attempt at this sort of roll-based system than Disco Elysium's... But the turn-based mechanics and encounter design is a very mixed bag, which can at times be quite creative (like the heist sequence somewhere in the latter half) and at others plain horrible (most instances of actual combat). You might say it's not unlike Torment in that regard, but I'd argue that Torment's combat is easier to forgive because it's never really hard or prolongued enough to really sour the experience, whereas Numenera's can frequently be frustrating and excessively dilated through the sheer number of enemies and figures given individual turns.