Starwars

I liked her concept. She has a nice aesthetic to her with the sickle and lantern, and it works nice thematically with her reaping of souls. I also like that they straight up went for a sorta psycho vibe coupled with her being naive. But in the end I had a really hard time accepting her as a character. Perhaps it's because her quest is set up in a very "this path or that path" kind of way, and it never feels like there is a real center to her I think. She can be superdark, sorta psycho and emo and yet she is super cutesy and naive in certain situations, or she will be carefree and free of burden but then say something that completely contradicts that in some other conversation. It's a bit hard to take her seriously and hard to get a grip on her really. I can admire that they really wanted to have a big decision for the player to make (though I will say I find it extremely heavy-handed how it's done) so her personality could really turn out differently but most of the time it just ends up feeling slightly confused and, at worst, like she belongs in another game compared to the other companions. It's my least favorite companion, and it's a bit of a shame since, like I said, I like the concept of her character.

Wow, that was certainly a blast from the past. Awesome, loved that game so much back in the day.

I did a playthrough with Ondra's challenge. I mean, I liked it more than playing without it but it's not a huge change. I did like that storms get a somewhat bigger role but they are still weird in that they're "setpieces" that just wobble back and forth. If they spawned randomly and moved around at random before disappearing again it would've been way cooler. The faster enemy ships is of no consequence really. I mean, it's only really a problem if you happen to get caught in the early game. But I guess I like it in the sense that I did get forced into a few more ship battles than normally and actually had to engage in those systems a bit more where my crew got injured and I had to repair the ship. So pretty small changes overall but I do like them a bit more than the vanilla experience I suppose though I'm not crazy about it. I'm pretty intrigued by Woedica's Challenge but I just wonder how it will feel in a game that is created with the per-encounter stuff as a base. I get that it will be a challenge but will it be interesting and fun?

Replaying Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall. There's something about these games that feels really refreshing to me. Even though they are very... simple in terms of how they are designed, they hit upon something really nice with Dragonfall especially. I think a lot of it is to do with how they approached the Shadowrun world and how they explore it through the characters. The writing balances right on that line between silly and serious, they really nailed the tone of it. And while I'm a big fan of sprawling RPGs, the mission design makes for nice sorta "bite-sized" playing sessions. And it also gives them a nice sort of focus, to explore particular aspects of the game world. I just did the mission for Glory and it really is... pretty unique even though a lot of the parts of it are recognizable. Again, the setting, the tone, the mood, all of that kinda makes for the sorta lackluster gameplay. I really hope HBS returns to Shadowrun at some point, and doesn't go all "let's try for a AAA experience!". I *love* that these games are all about the text, though Hong Kong felt a bit overdone in places.

I think that overall Deadfire looks better but there is a certain something about some areas in PoE in my opinion. I just love the look of areas like Ondra's Gift and some of the areas around Twin Elms as well. In a weird way, I think the more static areas kinda makes the actual art of the backgrounds jump out a bit more sometimes. Less visual "noise" if that makes sense (though noise is much too bad a word). But yeah, Deadfire looks fantastic overall. The weather effects is something I greatly enjoy and was one of the things I missed the most in PoE when comparing to the BG games.

There is one thing about Civ VI that frustrates me even more than the crappy AI. It's something that mostly becomes apparent when you've played the game a lot. And it frustrates me to the point where I will sometimes ragequit the game. And that is the incredibly crappy map generation system. Even when decreasing the number of civs in the game, it is all too common for the game to start you off with other civs like... *right* next to you. Now, this isn't always a terrible thing but if you play on higher difficulties, this can basically mean a game over because the AI starts with more settlers. And they can settle those cities in a way that makes it impossible for you to expand because of the loyalty system (a mechanic which I rather like otherwise). And that is of course if you survive until the AI declares war on you (because it *will* declare war on you in those situations). It's also apparent in how the game divides up its continents (which is important as it controls luxury resources, each continent has different luxuries available). Sometimes you'll start in a location where you'll have 3 continents within easy reach. Which is a *huge* advantage because you get access to a lot of different luxuries. Other times, the games crams nearly every civ into the same continent, with one civ on a big landmass on its own. Sometimes, random map scripting can be fun. But my god I really wish there was a "balanced start" option where it placed civs on the map with a reasonable distance from one another, where the continents are somewhat evenly divided and where city states don't get stuck in weird clusters. It's not as big of a problem on King difficulty for example but if you want to play on harder difficulties it can be absolutely maddening. The devs pride themselves on VI being the game in the series that has the most interaction with the map (districtplacement for example), so it's unfortunate that it's also easily the most random game when it comes to spawning the player on it.

I thought they went overboard with "lulzy" humor in some parts of it but other than that I mostly enjoyed it.

Personally I would love for PoE3 to go back to the PoE1 style of gameplay and push it even further into the per-rest realm than that game was but yeah, that's never gonna happen. Anyways, I'm not normally a huge fan of sequels continuing the story of a character. But I do think it'd be nice to get a final chapter in the Watcher's story, and see what happens after the events of Deadfire. I think there are a lot of cool things that could happen and it'd be awesome to explore the repercussion of the events of Deadfire among both kith and gods. Maybe have the tables changed on the gods somehow so that they are now put more into a place of submission rather than ordering people around like in PoE1 and 2, and you'd have to decide if you want to help them or not. I dunno, it could go to a lot of cool places. I would definitely welcome other stories in the Pillars universe as well, but yeah... I think it'd be great to have a good conclusion to the Watcher's story, as well as what will happen to Eora after Deadfire.

Just finished up a replay of the game with all the DLC. Did most of the content in the game though there were a few things I didn't finish, bounties and I forgot to finish up the Mapping the Deadfire quest for the dude in Queen's Berth. I also didn't do any of the SSS battles that weren't part of the main quest. So, how did you guys like the DLCs overall? Which one did you like the most? Do you think it compared favorably to the White March? -Beast of Winter. Prooobably my favorite of the bunch. Though, like in all the DLC's, it can be frustrating to play because battles starts to take forever. Like someone elsewhere says, it just doesn't feel that much fun when your supercharged mega empowered Missle Salvo just barely takes off a tiny sliver of health from the enemy. I also feel like the "popping enemies up behind you" or big bosses having additional adds things kinda grow stale in the DLCs. I also wasn't a fan of the "puzzle" gameplay of some of the areas in this one. Teleport puzzles and stuff like... ugh. They're not headscratchers, it just becomes busywork. But enough whining, I really enjoyed the lore and story that BoW explored. I think Rymrgand turned out to be one of the most well-realized gods both in terms of writing and acting. And I really liked the Bridge ablaze for the background it provided for Waidwen (very well done) as well as the bits in the Sunken Kingdom where you get the memories of how the Engwithans dealt with the king. It's unfortunately the most buggy DLC for me. I had to restart the final fight with the dragon when she tried to pull my characters across those chasms you can jump across, and the characters would just get "stuck" on one side and I got the blue screen crash when Rymrgand smashes the bridge if you fight him (reported in the bug forum). -Seeker, Slayer, Survivor My least favorite of the bunch. And I knew that coming in given that it was combat focused. Now, I still enjoy some challenging fights in this game but for me, everything just gets really hard to parse with realtime w pause when you get into the high level difficult battles. There's so much going on visually that I have a really hard time "taking it in" even if I play on the slowest speed (I always do) and pause a lot. So yeah, not a DLC for me. That said, when you finally get to the juicy storybits at the end, I really enjoyed that and was kinda sad that more of the DLC wasn't like that. Just more classic mix of story and battle. But oh well. -Forgotten Sanctum Really enjoyed the setting, am so glad they went into the weird territory. Has fun explorations of the lore, dropping cool hings here and there. And I really liked how it can tie in to the main ending of the game. I thought FS was a bit too... humorous. I liked that Deadfire as a whole introduced more humor but in FS I felt it went overboard in some areas, especially given the rather dark setting and situation. Seems like companions had a snarky or sassy comment to absolutely everything and there were a few areas where I even thought that I didn't have any appropriate dialogue choices for my character. Thayn didn't work for me as a character at all either personally. All in all, I do like the DLCs and feel they are worthwhile. I would say I personally prefer the expansion model of the White March. Just having that connected story in one package makes the whole thing feel a bit meatier rather than the 3 "separate" stories so to speak. I have no idea how they compare in playtime but yeah, WM just feels like something you can really sink your teeth into because of how it's set up. and also because it introduced new companions. I also like that WM is something you can start fairly early on. The DLCs for Deadfire feels like they're slotted in as endgame content which kinda screws up the flow of the main story a bit. WM did that also a bit with part 2 but I find it's more noticeable in Deadfire. After FS I was like... well, it's *finally* time to go to Ukaizo, which manages to feel rather underwhelming after all the crazy stuff you've done and accomplished. Sorry for the lengthy post there but just felt like writing down some thoughts. Deadfire as a whole is a tremendous game and I had a ton of fun replaying it.

The Bridge Ablaze is cool. I didn't like it gameplay-wise but it's maybe my favorite bit of story/lore exploration in the game. Even though the background you get on Waidwen is, well... pretty short all in all, it does wonders to put that character into context. I really enjoyed the writing there.

In Civ V (and VI for that matter) your archers can fire over a whole tile. How far would that be translated into real life? Not saying you're wrong of course but... it's not exactly a realistic series, neither in terms of how history plays out or how things work in general.

I thought Civ V's way of penalizing expansion is one of the most... downright boring things they could ever do to a civilization game. Best thing they did in VI is actually making it a good thing to actually expand beyond 4 cities again. There are optimal ways to play VI and IV as well of course but yeah... expanding is GOOD.

This whole thing just makes me feel old. Turnbased is now a way to attract more people and make more money... Back in my day (!) when Fallout 3 was about to come out, people always gave me the "turnbased is so outdated, it would never work" argument when we did the Oblivion with guns rants. Yeah yeah, it's different but still amusing. The new X-Com really broke that "turnbased is OLD" stigma.

I guess it's a bit of a cop-out but getting to Neketaka and exploring that whole place is superfun to me. The Fort Deadlight sequence is also a standout for me. Fun gameplay and the humor there works well.

IV is easily the best one I think. V is a bit of a snore if you ask me (though I did play it a lot when the last expansion was released) and VI has a lot of fun mechanics but is also the most broken. V and VI are pretty different than the ones before. The change to having one unit per tile makes a big difference in how the game plays out (mostly negative in my opinion). IV is definitely my choice overall.

I don't know, I think it'd be fun to have a "silly" sidequest for Mirke, and it'd be fun to explore in within the scope of a DLC. Though I guess in a way the whole Deadlight thing could be seen as her quest. I find Ydwin pretty insufferable and Konstanten is just boring... but alas, that ship has sailed anyways. Haven't seen what Fassina has to offer in the final DLC though, looking forward to it.

The biggest crime of this game is giving characters like Ydwin, Konstanten and Fassina a DLC of "their own", while Mirke gets none. Shame Obsidian, shame!

Continuing my Deadfire playthrough, greatly enjoying it overall, I'm excited to get into the Forgotten Sanctum eventually. Have to say though, my Beast of Winter experience was kinda bugridden which kinda sucked some fun of it. And I'm not into Seeker, Slayer, Survivor and... well, I don't think it will be for me, being so combat focused. I enjoy some of harder combat encounters in these games but there's a certain threshold I have a hard time getting over. I beat the fight eventually, but the Naga challenge was a good example of that, where there's so much stuff going on, VFX all over the place and a million things happening at once (well, taking out the totems obviously helped with that). That's when realtime w pause loses whatever charm it has for me, I just can't take it all in and get a good overlook of the battlefield, even if I slow it down to the slowest speed. Also, when they recorded the audio of the woman who runs the Crucible... same mistake as with Grieving Mother in the first game, those horrendous Ssss-noises tear my ears apart.

I'm also getting this. Using a r290x Raden card, latest drivers and game is updated. Getting the blue screen crash. EDIT: I mean, damn... we all know Rymrgand is a butthole but using his axe to blue screen my computer when I refuse him is a new form of blackmail.

Replaying Deadfire, greatly enjoying it overall. Into Beast of Winter now. I enjoy the lore but I must say they dropped the ball on some of the encounters in this one. It feels padded and with a few many "cheap tricks", as well as HP bloated enemies. I also think some of the gameplay gimmicks are so... old. Teleport puzzles... really? Kind of a shame.

I never had a connection with D&D prior to playing the BGs back in the day (played different P&P games here in Sweden) but I think those games are still pretty much unbeat in one area and that is the sense of adventure and atmosphere. Even today, when I have a hard time with the writing and characters in them, the sense of exploration and... I don't know, texture of the world is still amazing. It's a beautiful world, with a serious sense of danger to it. I prefer Pillars overall but yeah, even though they do a pretty good job of it I still don't feel like they hit that special note. Not even Deadfire which has the open world (which I love and is one of the best things about the game as far as I'm concerned). Even though there is the whole "well, just reload" thing that people do if they might lose a companion or something in BG, I still find that being able to die fairly easily creates a special tension in those games and something like Deadfire just lacks that. Party wipes can happen obviously but death just doesn't "loom" overhead like it does in BG.

I'm a huge fan of nightly music in general and I think the track is a fairly good fit but it is unfortunate that it's one single track used for every single city location when it's night. It does get fatiguing, even if you don't mind the fact that it's from PoE1. If there ever is a PoE3, I hope they will keep it mind and maybe do something unique for nighttime from the get-go. It's a huge thing for the atmosphere in Baldur's Gate.

Have anyone played with it significantly? It's probably the one I'm most interested in but I'm in the middle of another playthrough at the moment. How does it feel to play? I'm definitely a bigger fan of PoE1's bigger focus on per-rest vs the per-encounter stuff in Deadfire so it sounds exciting. But how does it work in practice? Have they just turned everything into per-rest? Does it feel somewhat balanced or just weird? Impressions would be welcome!

Congratulations to the Deadfire team, well deserved as far as I'm concerned. Though as always, I can't help but roll my eyes a bit when one of the people motivate the choice with the fact that PoE1 was apparently hard to get into and now that Deadfire has the little lore highlights, he can now enjoy what's being presented on-screen. I mean, I like the lore highlight feature, but... sometimes I fear this chase of player convienience will end up with games that require no effort from the player itself. Even in games like Deadfire which are all about the player. Feel kinda the same about the "recommended companions for this quest" feature. I mean, sure... it's nice and helpful, I can't deny that. But... for each feature like this included I think they kinda take away from the whole "exploring the mystery of the world" if that makes any sense. There is something to be said for games that just drops you in the game without constantly going "psst, we recommend this" or "pssst, here's some additional help with that". But I digress... congrats to Obsidian for this.

Back into the Deadfire for a replay. Haven't played Seeker, Slayer or Survivor either so now that the final DLC is out, seems like a good time.