Magnum Opus

Seems strange. I didn't have to pay COD. I do live in Canada. So i'm thinking maybe its import fees? Unless you do as well in which case i'm baffled. I'm in Canada, yes. I suppose my ultimate gripe here is with the presentation/wording. To my mind, that pledge on the backer page is a contract. I pay X, they deliver on Y and Z. That's the contract. The contract included a shipping charge, so that's what I paid. They don't get to rewrite that contract without my consent -- it was a mutually agreed upon contract, after all, with two parties signing off (they when they took my money, I when I paid it) -- but that's what they did. And not just WTR shipping, too; my description of the product I bought included a physical copy of the game. I got a code card instead. It's a well-made card, but still just a card. It is by no means the physical copy of the game that I ponied up for. Now, I'm happy enough with the game (I've played it to completion once, and begun a few more times with different characters, and fully plan on playing more when the updates have settled and the DLC is complete, and I know I'll be even more impressed with the game than I was the first time around) that I'm not going to DO anything about it, but again... what else do the words "physical copy of the game" mean other than a disk or a flash drive or something physical that you plug into your system to install the game? The words "breach of contract" kind of leap to mind on this one, so to Obsidian, I would just say that watching your language when putting together your offers is absolutely critical. I'm no lawyer, but changing the terms and conditions of contracts you've already accepted payment for... well, is not a best practice in business, let's just say. Tends to foster mistrust, and justifiably. Incidentally, I'm quite happy with the product I received. I don't require the physical disks (though I can easily see how others would), and everything arrived in pristine condition.

I got to pay COD as well in the email I received from the postal service today. Count me down as a third; sent an inquiry to support at Obsidian, a day ago. No response yet. paying more than double what I've already paid for shipping through the campaign pledge strikes me as either a gross underestimation of the actual shipping costs of the final product (in which case, that extra cost should have been absorbed by the company making that promise), or at the VERY least communicating that the costs we've already paid were more in the way of a downpayment on shipping, rather than an accurate final total. Not impressed with the way this whole fulfillment promise has been handled, to be honest. I have yet to see the actual package so I can't comment on what condition it'll be in, but I'm definitely going to wait before buying another Obsidian product. And backing? I think that's a thing of the past, frankly. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

I'm having a blast with the BT1 remake as well right now. It seems to be a hybrid of the entire previous trilogy; spells from the second game have made it into this one, the traps are a complete *%$&^ to deal with (in the PC version of the original, traps might have knocked off a point or two, and didn't leave behind many critical effects, IIRC; these ones are nasty pieces of work). There are ranged enemies and weapons, but they don't make a big deal of that, not like in BT2, a couple little bits of lore that I don't remember from the first game, a few messages scattered about, and there doesn't seem to be a "99 limit" on the group size any more, though I've only seen that limit broken on one occasion so far. Am slowly penetrating Mangar's 5th right now. I think it's just as difficult as I remember, which is to say that I'm running away a lot, and half of my party is either Old, Poisoned, Drained, Stoned, or just outright Dead... and usually a combination of all five. It's glorious.

Unfortunately level 42 will still sound old and lame. You are dead to me, sir. Good day.

Hm... not much incentive to switch even there, then, with AI shouldering much of the load for NPCs. I'm thinking that it might boil down, in part, to time management; people managing all characters manually simply won't have as much time to fiddle with grimoires on Wizards as someone who's only controlling the Wizard would. Is more to it than just that, though, obviously. Whatever the reasons, am simply not much a fan of the current Deadfire approach.... not least because it takes the "acquisition of knowledge" aspect away from the wizard profession. Spell hunting was a big thing for me in Pillars 1, along with the odd moral quandary that went along with it (do you get a slew of new, unique, and otherwise unattanable spells, or do you let the wizard confronting you actually destroy the evil immortal skull floating around behind you?). In Deadfire, it's just random: Do you luck out and find a book that has spells you want to use, that you don't already have, and that you're even able to use, or do you just... make do with what you choose at level up, with the bonus spells from your grimoire being just that: bonus. Nice to have, but nothing to worry about?

Overall, I prefer the Pillars 1 model, I think. At least there, hunting for spells provided a bit of interest. Pillars 2 just had me tailoring my spell choices at level up around the grimoire that appeared when my character started the game. Whether they were "unique" grimoires or not, super-expensive or not, all of the books I found simply didn't provide enough utility -- with a subclass, you're can count on at least 1 spell per level that your character can't cast... out of only 4 or 5 spells total, we're talking a full 25%+ of any given book that's unusable by default -- or incentive for me to switch out anything. The real problem I found with restricting spell choices for wizards in each game, though, is that EVERY character in your party has so many spells and spell-like abilities that there's no point to switching grimoires for your wizard character. I either have the spell I want, or I'll get my fighter to do it for me. I'll get my rogue to do it for me. They're all balanced out anyway, so they're all equally valid. Heh. Essentially, I've already got five grimoires with me in this game; my Tome of Help and Harm (aka Priest), my Tome of Martial Masteries (Fighter), my Book of Shadows (Rogue), my Big Book of Forceful Attitude Adjustments (Paladin), my book of Plants and Animals: Not Just for Dinner Anymore (Druid), etc. They're more ambulatory than I usually think of books as being, and they talk back more than most, but really... clicking on each character is me choosing my set of spells already. No point to choosing a set within a set, not when the overall set will have something just as good. Am curious as to how many people who DO switch out grimoires are playing with Party AI enabled. I manage each of my characters without it (does this game have basic auto-attack, BTW? I recall my characters just standing around after their current foe was dispatched, instead of wailing on the OTHER guy that was beating on them already), but for those that DO let the party NPCs do their own thing, I can see how switching would hold at least a little more appeal.

... and the winner in the "Things Which Cannot Be Unseen" category is.... Two Angry Dinosaurs! Dammit.

Being something of a 1) dinosaur, and 2) hermit, I'll admit that this question caught me off guard a bit, not because I find it offensive or anything, but simply because I haven't given the options presented a lot of thought. And this has not so much to do with questions of gender identity but more the degree of roleplaying in which I engage when I play games. I'm one of those "roleplayers" who simply inserts themselves into whatever game they're playing. This is partly because I play games for the escapism they offer; if I can imagine myself off to a world where I CAN affect things for the better, where I CAN make a difference... great. Also, even if it's only for a while, I like to imagine myself being able to burn monsters to a crisp with my fingertips from a few dozen yards away. But, and this holds true even more strongly where the world being portrayed is all the more fantastical/off-beat, in such a fantasy environment, I find that in order to care about the characters and story in such a setting, I need something grounded in reality to make the whole experience more believeable/relatable. At times, my character as myself in the game is that very anchor. I end up caring more about the game world and it's characters, because I'm the one messing everything up for everyone! It's also partly because they games I like most can't be finished in one sitting: Any elaborate character backstory/personality that I come up with at character creation is going to end up forgotten three play sessions into the game. I don't have the determination to maintain a "second personality" that long, so I just use me instead. It's just easier that way. (Incidentally, this is also the reason why I generally prefer the more heroic sorts of fantasy, where there ARE happy endings every once in a while. I'm not going to play a game where everything I touch turns to ash and blows away on a bitter wind. I get enough downers IRL; I don't need my entertainment dumping on me as well.) For these reasons, I suppose -- there may be others, but I haven't examined things that closely, and this post is long enough as it is; these two are the biggies, anyway -- I always use my own sex/gender when playing games, to the point where if a game offers a choice between male and female characters, I'll choose the male 100% of the time. If the game only offers a female character, I simply won't play it. "Being female" is simply too far outside my realm of experience, and getting into that mindset for an experience that's supposed to be more fun than work seems like way too much effort to me. Interesting question, though. Nice. Edit: Long story short: Yes, it matters.

Sad times. The man will be missed, but he leaves one helluva legacy. Safe journey, Leonard.

Will throw my hat in the ring for Kuldahar, even if it was always more a hamlet than a city, or even a village. There were memorable characters in each of its iterations (IWD1 and IWD2) and many of those characters had a connection to the surroundings in the form of quests or just little bits of knowledge that fleshed out the areas you'd be plunderrrrr... wandering into later. Where it really stands out in my mind is in the area that Kirkwall attempted but didn't pull off so well: the passage of time. Kuldahar in IWD2 was still recognizable as the one from IWD1, but there had been new buildings added, old ones removed (or burned down); the characters that we knew from the first ones were still there, only older; and time had just... passed, the way I'd expect. Even the paths were still recognizable, but life had happened as well, both life in the intervening years as well as things that were the result of the material with which the game itself was involved. Was excellently done, IMO, and it's probably the best in-game example I can think of where a place takes on just as many of the trappings of a character as the NPCs. But Baldur's Gate was well done, too, as was Novigrad and, to a lesser extent, Vizima. The latter may have had a more distinctive character, but the completeness of Novigrad is what tips the scale in its direction for me. Thinking back, I find myself partial to Vivec in Morrowind, as well. Phlan, too: the PoR series was the first where I got a decent sense of "place" from a game, and was then allowed to revisit it in a subsequent game (tho Phlan from other entries in the Pool of Radiance series wasn't really recognizable as such: if it wasn't for the name, I wouldn't, for example, have known by the layout of the streets or the landmarks that it was Phlan, as opposed to Zhentil Keep). Detail, completeness, and continuity, I suppose, are my main criteria when it comes to gaming environments. If it's more accurately described as a "level", then it fails at whatever story-related purpose it was supposed to have.

This point speaks to my only real disappointment with TW3: The fact that there's really no continuity between the games regarding Eredin. I should preface this by mentioning that I didn't read the books, didn't read any comics or watch any supplementary material that may or may not have been present regarding the backstory between the games' releases, so I know full well that there are plenty of things that I'm missing, but from that vantage point, the mere fact that we went from calling The Wild Hunt "the Wild Hunt" to the "Aen Elle" and the King of the Wild Hunt being referenced as "Eredin" was a major head-scratcher for me. I knew all about the first game and its sequel -- played them both multiple times and in multiple ways -- but... now who's this Eredin chap they're referring to? He's the King of the Hunt, you say? My goodness, Geralt's getting pretty chummy with a hostile ghost who's living counterpart's been dead for who-knows-how-long... wait, you say those ghosts were just projections of LIVING people? Elves, no less? you don't say! That's it right there. There were far too many instances where they DIDN'T say. Not in the games, anyway. Who is Eredin? How does Geralt know him? Geralt, it was said at the end of TW2, had fully recovered his memory, but no one let ME in on the joke. It was two-thirds of the way through TW3 before someone let it slip, and only in passing, that Geralt had actually ridden WITH the hunt. And Ciri herself had only been alluded to previously, and not by name, but now here she was the focus of the third game with the hunt for Yennifer being little more than a sidelight of the introduction. They did an amazing job preserving the continuity of the world -- Kear Morhen intact from the first game, Vesemir and Lambert and the other Wolf School Witchers all accounted for, and accurately too with no hand-waving rewrites that I could see, but Geralt's relationship with the Hunt and the information about the Hunt which Geralt now knew but I didn't... I think there was a LOT more room for the Hunt itself to have been expanded upon in that game. Particularly at the beginning.

Point of Lore: Sorceresses have no nips unless they're deliberately being "tantalizing". Immershun restored. You are welcome. But Ciri is not a full fledged sorceress. She's only partially Witcher trained (no mutagens) and partially sorceress trained. So.... half-nips, then? Or nips in unusual places? "Floating" nips, as it were? Although... in addition to the Sorceress/Witcher dichotomy, she's also of Elder Blood, isn't she? If so, there's just no telling what happened to them or where her nips ended up. Heavens above, they might even be temporally displaced, and will only appear on her 3/4ths of the way through the game! I'll admit, my curiosity is now piqued. Thank you. (came SO close to writing "peaked" there, but... I restrained myself, due to the seriousness of the topic. You're welcome.)

Point of Lore: Sorceresses have no nips unless they're deliberately being "tantalizing". Immershun restored. You are welcome. Nips. You're welcome, too.

If paid mods are the new reality, then all it really means is that I'm going to be looking to Bethesda themselves for all of those things for which I used to go to the modding communities. Bug fixes to keep major quest lines flowing, a user interface that doesn't make me want to quit out of sheer frustration because I'm only using two buttons on my keyboard to navigate my way though at least five nested menus every time I bring up a character sheet, little things like that. Am personally hoping they're up to the task.

Agreed. Much as I liked the second game, it DID kind of dribble, urinarily-speaking (mindful of language filters, here), all over the items they allowed you to import from the first game. While it might not mean much in the grand scheme of things, that's something I've missed in recent games, where the tendency is to just reboot the character wholesale on one flimsy pretext or another, rather than allowing a character to genuinely transition from one game to a sequel. A divinely bestowed weapon from the first game should simply NOT turn into trash in the second... just because. Part of me hopes they don't even allow for imported items anymore; instead of preserving the character, bringing a bit of lore along with you from game to game to add a little more cohesion or personality to the overall story/setting, all it ends up being is a disappointment. Geralt picked up some pretty hefty artifacts in Loc Muinne; to see them degraded (again) for nothing more than "balance purposes"... ugh. Not looking forward to that, even if none of the weapons in TW2 had much in the way of character to them, certainly nothing like Aerondight. I don't find it silly anymore, though, becoming attached to a virtual anything. If it's something that you worked for, spent time on, learned how to use, enabled your successes or even just postponed your defeats, then it's only natural to care about it, whether it's a character or a sword, virtual or not. The investment of time and effort is what matters.