Triple - A Foxy Lad

im sure anyone would love to get rid of negative criticism of themselves and construct all kinds of excuses to do so. the problem is review-bombing is making one of those excuses legitimate. steam has created a highly visible and convenient way for folk to provide feedback, but its also created a system that can be subverted (competently or not) by people with questionable goals. even if ur a dev, nobly committed to facing the slings and arrows of internet criticism, u might want out of that particular quagmire.

Because Epic does not even have a review option, they have literally nothing. It's a vanilla steam and it will takes years to come close to the features what steam allready has, if they even plan to implent them. i vaugely recall some devs reporting the review bomb as a reason to want off steam. is amusing that some people have registered their objection by justifying such claims. bullet, meet foot, i guess. edit: regarding the leaving home thing. i was born on the divide between gen-x/millennial. i left asap, prob would have done so anyway due to personal tendencies but hand was forced as debt collectors were coming after my family. i got out of the way sharpish. have observed enough to believe that such flight was easier for me back then than it would be now. tbh, my main concern is not that people are living with their folk at advanced age, is that people are living with their folk and *miserable*. if someone remains with their parents and everyone is happy with the situaion, then all power to them as far as im concerned.

i only ever used steam under duress and most of its 'features' are of no interest to me. if gog or itchio aint options, everything else is second best. im already on both egs and windows store due to fortnite and sea of thieves so this aint something im gonna lose sleep over. tbh im still more annoyed at fact that i need a ps4 to play bloodborne lol, but whatevs.

her sidequest reveals that the republics' forward thinking made her life bearable. she might have taken her own life otherwise. it makes total sense that shed want that for the rest of the world, especially for other people in the same situation she was, so shes batting for the folk most likely to provide that. i dont think shes as needy as people are making out. I dont think she cares much for the approval of her peers and bosses - or anyone - much at all, only to the point where losing too much of it directly endangers her crusade. i dont think a sense of belonging is that high up her list of priorities. *purpose* on the other hand, deffo. I reckon she differentiates between the 'national spirit', that inspired the means to her salvation, and the flawed people she has to work with in order to promote it. She seems to believe in some kind of jungian collective unconsiousness that unites vailians rather than individuals or organisations. To nick a comparison sawyer might approve of, is like how cadfael remains committed to the cowl even if he butts heads with his superiors. Cadfael seems more at peace than pallegina tho, who'll need one hell of an arc to settle down, if she settles at all.

Ye, once vatnir joined my party, he never left. I was a big fan of that little chancer. I admired the way he played a godawful hand, survived in the face of everything and proved himself talented enough to face down the worst of eora. for me, he was the underdog and reluctant hero the setting needed. not a charming rogue, just a rogue like the rest of us. also, i like his stat spread and class choices. i havent really given zealot a chance but celebrant and priest of rymrgand felt pretty good.

i do quite like lodge, even if his world doesnt feel like mine. Ive only read 'thinks' and 'nice work', if im remembering the titles right. Also trying to avoid repetition (or pointless synonyms) when writing a lot of sex/romance is *really* hard. I feel its one of those where uve just got to make peace with ur own quirks and get on with it rather than trying to overcorrect.

think issue with sidekicks is that obs labelled something that peeps didnt want labelling. there characters in rpgs that are flavourful gun turrets since forever. baldurs gate is full of them. as is arcanum, fallout, suikoden, shining force, front mission, yadda yadda. Then obs put name to it and everyone moans. i feel is obvious why such characters exist - u can fk up major reactivity and still have a party. Also some players prefer to fill in the blanks and compose little adventures and exchanges in their head free from authorial meddling. minor npcs offer a springboard and a 'legitimacy' that wholly custom parties dont. Ive played through many games deliberately using the 'b-team' for my own amusement. And id be surprised if im the only one with this tendency. also if u aint dragged the sidekicks thru the dlcs, ur missing out on some good stuff. Most of the b-team have content in league with WM companions now.

To be fair, Xoti is not innocent of such descriptors either. I recall the game being pretty insistent on her rosy cheeks when I first met her in my playthrough. Lol this is why my 3rd/4th drafts always include a repetition check. also certain phrases just *cant* be repeated without folk noticing. Free bit of advice. Dont use the word 'harrumph' more than once every 50,000 words unless u want to hear about it from every other reader. learnt that one the hard way.

sounds reasonable. and ofc second-string npcs didnt exist before deadfire.

might i add the stinger that im a lit grad who learnt to proofread and edit using glyphs on hard copy lol.

im reminded that there was a precedent for this. kara from phantasy star III becomes an entirely different character depending on your choices in prior generations. obv implementing this in an obs style crpg would require herculean effort on devs part, while PSIII has to change relatively little. is still amusing that it once happened. there prob other, more recent, examples but this was the first that came to mind.

Lmao i follow ms love and asked if she were josh in disguise. Didnt realise hed retweeted it already. Shouldve known.

its a shame. scokel seemed like a promising candidate to head up a potential po3, what with their work on the dlc and audience engagement. vatnir was one of my favourite characters. narrative lead appears to be a poisoned chalice. i guess it burns people out and, for better or worse, u catch all the praise and criticism directed at a game. i imagine it involves less joyful creativity and more fitting cogs into a giant unwieldy machine.

mate, u straight up failed to comprehend that no one asked u to correct their copy. u might want to work on ur own communication skills before going in studs up on someone else. who cares. a clown wearing a bowtie is still a clown. on that note, uve spelt ur username wrong. its supposed to be 'circus'.

ye, i didnt mind it at all. was a fun little time-waster, similar to one of those jrpg mini games or the 1001 things u have to do in WoW these days. i did enjoy naming my ship 'the leng' and mindlessly sinking everything in sight with double bronzers. if nothing else it added flavour to the setting without getting in the way of anything important. dlc does force u to hit the books, but im sure you can get to grips with it and find enough wriggle-room to express urself and muck about. im an idiot, and i got through it all in the end. was able to enjoy combat better from what id learnt. im one of the first to get ratty when peeps lionise bg2 at expense of progress - and efforts of devs currently making a living from crpgs. regardless, i think bg2's a wonderful big-hearted game that id recommend with little reserve. its enthusiasm overshadows many of its peccadilloes imo.

think suikoden might be the arch-example of that. dozens of characters and no xp out of combat.

u know a couple of things have got me wondering - how useful is 'difficulty' as an unqualified measure? like games can test ur mechanical skill, metagame knowledge, strategical skill, tactical skill, memorisation, consistency, persistence, adaptability etc. Metagame knowledge is easier to acquire now. Internet far more efficient and accessible beast than it was at turn of century. what was hard then is easy now bcs u type problem into google and instantly acquire forum thread and exhaustive wiki. even unpopular games are likely to have their guts laid bare. im aware such information was always available if one was willing to put work in, but i might refer to own situation: had no personal broadband connection until about 2004ish? Could access internet through other means but it required effort. So i dont feel is possible now for modern game to replicate experience of playing, say, bg1 with no internet connection. The games difficulty is largely result of gated knowledge which is now instantly accessible for many players. I think is now much harder for (non-mechanical single player) games to be er... harder without properly twisting the knife and alienating potential audience, which is more fickle and has more options than in past.

i must have dreamt all those infinity/aurora engine games i sleepwalked through. anyone else here have that dream about PS:T? man, that was good.

u can win every fight in that series by pre-buffing and auto-attacking everything to death. in BG1 u just give everyone bows. in BG2, u get keldorn to cast dispel magic occasionally. like, i cant dispute there are builds that can solo the game with minimal input. there are peeps here that spend all their time trying to develop such, but i think its fair to say most of these strats arent immediately obvious to us normal saps. Im unsure why u highlight the examples u do. The ciphers in sss can be dealt with using normal anti-caster strats + aegis of loyalty + intellect resistance. Theyre too squishy to be that hard a fight, nowhere near as annoying as splintered reef imo - those fampyrs take more of a beating. (Praise kyros for chill fog) u can interrupt anyone casting disintegration, and if one lands u can use barring deaths door/withdraw if ur regens not up to scratch. as for the soul mirror match, u alpha strike the back line, leave ur tank til last, debuff their defences and whittle them down. ai dont use the aggressive cheese strats available to a player or else something like bridge ablaze would be like pulling own fingernails out. Like i also find it odd that u could prep enough to stat check everyone to death yet not figure out u could blast every ship to smithereens with double bronzers. like if u crush the ship fights u can proper clean up early game and take advantage of some powerful gear. i dunno man, too much of what ur saying just dont jibe with my experience of game. I didnt feel ready to touch potd until id cleared the game veteran-upscaled and knew the craic. like if ud said 'game too easy, herald kill everything with zero input on highest difficulty' that would have at least backed up what people have been saying elsewhere on this forum but eh...

I cant agree with this, but u may have highlighted something ill get to at the end. Km waffles hella much and includes words and arcs that do nowt to further any particular theme, just take up time. paragraphs are frequently way too long. Could have slashed word count by good 20% i suspect. Outside of cutscenes, deadfire mainly hews to the bullet-point-esque structure used by baldurs gate 2, which km aint adopted yet. While poe's now jettisoned the overly exhaustive dialogue trees that marred durance and gm, those dialogue trees have migrated to km. valeries one of the worst offenders for this. u can ask about her whole backstory then her sidequest just replays the whole thing without adding a great deal. might as well have just had the sidequest and made her cagier in the beginning. i think the issue u may be describing with deadfire aint one of concision but *density*. It does cram hella information into small spaces, which is compounded by - as u say - unfamiliar terms and metaphysical/political preoccupations that km aint burdened with. Km easier to read bcs it conveys simple information at length. Deadfire much fussier and offers fewer opportunities for less invested folk to catch up. you take ur eye of the ball, u can have little clue about what flavour of soul shenanigans is going on. This does mean that poe's approach risks narrowing its audience where km casts a wider net. whether its worth obs doing such is kind of up to them. i guess theory is u offer specialised experience to committed, trope-savvy crowd, rather than more digestible experience to wider, but more fickle crowd. Sort of like difference between, say, Al Stewart and Coldplay.

Maybe shouldve copy pasted that horrible flesh monster from the end of akira. Thing something horrible and faceless in line with the librarians might have worked. If eyes are the window to the soul, makes sense that waels would be 'shut'. rymrgand benefits the most from overexposure imo. hes great fun, exactly the sort of thing the setting was missing up until now. Beraths incarnation works pretty well. helps that their appearance is kithlike and has been long established in lore.

u even have the 'newt' game mode (vela) in deadfire. is the third game going to be some divisive weirdness based in a prison colony.

would have been cheaper to implement as well. sometimes laziness is the best judge.

ur forgetting one of the biggests outliers, palleginas racial bonus, (resistance to PER/INT afflictions and defence against disengagement) which is worth like 2.5-3 passives. I dont think the companions should be mechanically incentivised too much. Theres already a compelling reason to take them (content/flavour) giving them too many unique strengths would further punish those who like to craft their own parties.

the oddwalls are a bit of a slog and full of annoying mobs. not enough to make me stop playing, but deffo not the games selling point. combat in generals a tad iffy. games written with a lighter touch than its premise and content would suggest. there are a couple of nasty moments, but for the most part it leans towards oddly cheerful w40k grimdark shenanigans rather than edgelordism. when its good, its very good. it couldve been more. part of me's hoping paradox poach a couple of the core devs to HBS and set them on a sequel, (what is Matt MacLean doing atm? aint seen his name mentioned since Tyranny) but i aint holding my breath.