algroth

Sounds pretty cool! I'll have a look at the album.

One for injurai, but others may enjoy:

This is one groovy record:

I'm okay with that, to be honest. Pillars features a very different setting to the Forgotten Realms games - the tone is generally more sober and downplayed across the board, even whilst Deadfire probably leaned more to the high fantasy side of things than the first game (and a little too much in that direction at times, in my opinion). I welcome more nuanced voice sets as I feel they fit the overall tone better.

Been streaming Neverwinter Nights 2 for the last two months or so, and made it last week to Mask of the Betrayer. Combat aside, I've always held this game in very high regard but I forgot just how good it can be. And Kaji <3

This makes me very sad.

Mandy

To add to what Amentep and the others said, I recall seeing an interview with Josh or Feargus where they also spoke about the tech for Icewind Dale II already outdated and so the devs were working with the engine knowing that it was its last hurrah so to speak. It seems to me that knowing that the tech was on its way out and with the time constraints and financial woes and so on, the game was created more as a quick salvage than anything else, with no real plans to make an expansion to it. I could be wrong though.

They do. Their organic remains. The pawn shop will accept them for 1 gold piece.

The thing is, though, that there are other people who play this game. That you don't mind the narration doesn't mean that many people wouldn't benefit from and enjoy the option to turn it off. I said the above to state my opinion about the narrator, not to argue against there being an option for turning the narrator's voice off. More to the point, though, I was going on a bit of a tangent myself, as you are about full voice-over (and which I generally disagree with too - I think it added a lot of immersion to the game and was by and large very well performed - and whilst I see the value of leaving much to one's imagination, I also believe there is great value in a performance as a means of delivery for those lines), and was actually addressing my one gripe about the narration which are the unscripted "they say" lines that follow each of the gods' dialogues. So, more on this minor gripe of mine since I was writing from my phone in bed yesterday... I'm struggling to figure why they felt the need to add these lines into the voice-over and not to the text itself, this feels like a last-minute addition perhaps driven by a feeling that the enunciator of said lines wasn't clear enough? Though it's strange, because not only does the writing present each character pretty clearly, but the identity of the enunciator is further corroborated by the very distinct voice performances for each and a solid visual aid, whereby the enunciator is always in colour against an otherwise monochrome illustration. It is especially jarring too because unlike any other piece of dialogue or narration in the game, these moments are unique in the game inasmuch as they are the only situations where we have voiceover but no written text - so why not add said text if the devs felt the need to further clarify the enunciators and so on? This is a weird choice all around, not to mention a superfluous addition, and which feels distinctly out of place with the decisions taken throughout the game regarding text and voicing otherwise.

Personally I don't mind the narrator at all, actually I rather like her tone and delivery. But if there is something I'd like to see removed, it's the "He says" unwritten lines that follow the gods' dialogues. I find it jarring and unnecessary myself.

I'm pretty confident that the film will be just fine as most MCU films are, but I'm getting heavy middle-of-the-road YA adaptation vibes from this, the likes of Ender's Game, The Maze Runner and Power Rangers. It feels rather cheesy and unspectacular despite all the obvious spectacle in it.

New film by the director of the Raid films. Looks very intriguing!

On an Elza Soares binge of late. At 81 years old she sounds like one of the freshest voices in rock all around, really great stuff.

I need to watch that. On my side I really enjoyed Masahiro Shinoda's 1971 version of the novel, and would definitely recommend it.

So the same date as the release of Pathfinder: Kingmaker? Not sure how to feel about that, it feels like an odd move to release it in the same date as what's likely Deadfire's most direct competitor all year.

Tony Leung is daddy material though. <3

New Drew Goddard film, looks rather good!

New film from the director of Ida: Looks pretty cool.

I disagree, on the sheer grounds that the John Carter *film* is not the same work as the novels it was based on, and thus as a new adaptation or transformation of that source material it could have looked for ways into making the story feel fresh or surprising to its audience, and simply didn't. Furthermore I'm pretty sure the critics were well aware of the source material's influence on sci-fi and were not calling the film "unimaginative" based on its story or clichés but merely in the utterly non-descript and formulaic fashion it was brought to the screen - the film didn't do anything to really stand out from the slew of typical sci-fi epics and that is especially what made it suffer, and what ultimately made it such a bland film. Personally I found it enjoyable enough, but I can definitely see how this could be and even *should* be labelled as unimaginative because as an adaptation and as a film made and released in 2012 it is just that. This is a good review of it too, and the preliminary listener comments are spot-on:

On the bright side, this would mean we can sacrifice Jar Jar to Skaen. I could live with the -1 to intelligence his Effigy's Resentment would give. That is a good point. Even benevolent characters would do it. *Especially* benevolent characters.