Bartimaeus

I would say that this sounds like two (or three) separate issues, really. When I'm playing a sorcerer in Baldur's Gate, every level-up is a game-changer to some degree, every level up makes at least a moderate impact on how I play the class (not every level-up will be perfectly equal, of course, for complex reasons, but...). I would say that that feels like good game design - as Wrath of Dagon said, it gives a very solid and satisfying sense of progression, it makes me feel like every level-up is valuable. Again, some level-ups will be better than others - depending on spell choice (and what's available for choosing) and what new amounts of memorizations I will get for each spell level and the such - but yeah. I agree with most of the rest of what you said, though...I would just hesitate to call "game-changers [...] dumb" in a blanket statement. It depends.

It is the appropriate (and pretty commonly used) word for it in English, too.

This is the basic and essential problem that I have with the game. The combat is a slog, and it's in virtually every battle you enter, and there are way too many battles, and leveling up doesn't help alleviate the issue. In the IE games at the low to mid-levels, if you were just a couple of levels higher than your enemies, you'd rip the vast majority of those enemies to shreds near every time, with only a few handful of encounters throughout the game where you wouldn't. This, in itself (and in my opinion), is a crappy system - battles that are too easy feel like a waste of time, and feel like something you should be able to skip over after a while. Enemies shouldn't be pointlessly throwing themselves against you if they know they're going to get destroyed in just a few seconds, but they do, and they do it over the entire course of the game(s) at way too high a frequency. It gets old after a while. So what does PoE do to solve this issue? Through a variety of mechanic and system changes compared to the IE games (including not having levels mean near as much as they did in the IE games, not having a powerful spell system that allows you to mass disable/buff/damage trash mobs, making what would probably normally be considered "trash fights" many times more difficult than they would've been in the IE games, etc.), Obsidian made every freaking battle a gigantic pain in the butt to sit through...but didn't nearly enough reduce the amount of fights you have to endure through. I get it, you don't want so many trash mobs littered throughout the game that the player just immediately runs over - it makes sense, I don't really want trash mobs, either. But the thing is, if you're gonna make combat that much more of a chore to sit through, if you're gonna make every combat encounter that big of a pain in my butt, ya' also have to reduce the amount of fights there are...by like, a lot. Like, if you're giving combat that much gravitas, don't make it the main gameplay mechanic that your players are engaging with a solid 80-85% of the time they're playing the game (not accounting for just simply walking around in between locations). The combat system would be much more palatable if there were significantly less of it. I also imagine the game would then be significantly shorter, too.

Yeah, unfortunately, there's more than just HoonDing who think PoE is a giant steaming pile of pure unfun.

What do youmean- the thematic style? The lack of anything at all to look forward. The sale is here, and what you see on the first day is the same exact thing you'll see on the last day. No activities of any sort, either. All in all, it's just a miserable experience compared to the earlier years of these 'famed' Steam Sales.

I still hate this newer format of Steam Sale...

ok

BBC News says Brexit has won.

ITV News says Brexit has won.

According to Bloomberg, "Bookmaker odds of British Exit [have] advanced to around 90%".

Based on the results so far, with most of Northern Ireland and most of Scotland having been counted while the rest of England is still being counted (and England moderately favoring "leave"), and with the results already favoring leave by some, it looks like leave will be winning. (e): ITV News (whatever that is) predicts 85% chance of Brexit winning. (e): Sky News estimates 70-80% of Brexit winning.

"Leave" is pulling ahead...

switched back to remain now guess this isn't determined after 1% of results being in like most u.s. elections

I never play "real"* open world games, like, ever, so the new Zelda is very intriguing to me... *Real meaning like Skyrim or Fallout, not like Stalker or Baldur's Gate semi-open world.

All packed and organized for moving. My feet, my back, my arms getting everything into my garage ready to load up into the moving truck... More fun to follow over the next few days.

Pretty much my post is what happens when you don't proof read what you wrote. There was a missing "not" in one of the sentences. I'll leave it as an exercise for the viewers at home to work out where it should have gone. Its déjà vu all over again. Then again, and the be not fair, time has improved the argument. fixd

You know, I don't think it really has. Previously, Bruce accepted the points you just went over (again) and admitted that his line of thinking wasn't that great. Now, he's back to his original position and refusing those same points that originally made him change his mind. I really don't think this is better.

Am I having deja vu? Didn't we already have this discussion with (mostly) the same people on the same issue over these same exact points?

Darn.

I mean, personally, I feel like pretty much almost literally every game I've ever played could use at least a few minor tweaks (in terms of scope and how much work it'd take to implement such tweaks) that would markedly improve the game, both for the initial playthrough and QoL (quality of life - aka, replaying). Some games need more tweaks than others, and some games need bigger changes to make use of that 'wasted potential' than others... ...which is probably why I'm into modding all my games so much.

He's tagged as "Intern" on the comic's website, so I guess that.

"For about 6 minutes on a bright Tuesday afternoon, the world was a different place. A place of hope. A place of change. A place where maybe, just maybe, things might be alright. A place where players in the NFL received justified compensation for injuries. A place where wearing the wrong socks was not worth more in fines than an illegal hit to the head. A place where we didn’t have a 17 month scandal based around saggy balls. Because for those 6 minutes, Roger Goodell was dead. For those who missed the fun, on Tuesday someone hacked the NFL twitter account and posted the tweet seen in the comic above. The internet immediately went nuts. Including myself of course. As dumb and bad as twitter can get, it’s always entirely worth those moments when something like this happens, when you can participate in the chaos as it unfolds in real time."

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/06/09/hillary_clinton_sanders_brought_passion_but_hasnt_gotten_me_to_move_on_any_policies.html uniting the party

There are definitely a few points in Bernie's favor, including winning more of the typically Democratic states and some of the swing states, but overall, that seems like a pretty weak argument. On what basis are you saying that "Bernie's losses to Hillary were far closer than Hillary's losses to Bernie", anyways? From the way I see it, it seems like the complete opposite and is the reason the delegate gap is nearly 400 delegates wide.

Well, for me, it's because one, the style of gameplay is basically nonexistent elsewhere, with Pillars of Eternity being the first in a long time to come close. It's unfortunate, then, that I disliked some of the basic gameplay changes that there were in PoE, and furthermore absolutely despised most of the design philosophy changes in regards to the rock-paper-scissors-y nature of D&D and BG, which consequently affected the combat systems (including item and spell/ability design) in such a drastic and horrendous manner as to make the game as dull as humanly possible. There's also the matter of variety: there are so many different ways you can go with party makeup and philosophy, as (edit) Guard Dog, not Hurlshot (/edit) just alluded to. Even with the number of times I've played the game, there are still good items that I haven't really ever used that I could but haven't because I've never really focused my characters around them. There are also so many different types of enemies that all have different weaknesses and strengths...all sorts of special encounters that just feel so much more special and meaningful compared to other games. Fighting Firkraag, for example...it's just such a special optional encounter, and the game generally amply rewards you for rising to the challenge of those optional encounters, too. They say Carsomyr is the best two-handed sword in the game...but I've never even used it, because I've never really been much of a paladin person. ...But I could, and doing that would, again, introduce more variety into the rest of the game in a way I haven't experienced before, and knowing that I can easily experience the game again in different ways because of small changes like that is comforting in a way. It's just...good and rewarding game design in a lot of ways that I just don't feel like I consistently get out of other games. It's also all packed into a game of greater scale than we mostly would ever get out of a game today (the amount of characters, the amount of dialogue, the amount of little voiced lines from all the different NPCs throughout the game that give all these different NPCs at least a little character that you can remember them by, the amount of spells, the amount of items with lore written specifically for them...all the different monster types...all these different things...) in a mostly dead game type that just doesn't exist anymore that I would still love to see new entries for. The writing definitely has its weak points, there's no doubt about it...but it also has some high points, too. The modding community has definitely helped, too - Spell Revisions, Item Revisions, Sword Coast Stratagems...the former two take a look at all the different spells and items in the game and often redefine the ones that were completely useless, or relocate where you can get them so that they can be useful maybe a little earlier in the game - or sometimes the opposite, in cases where items were ridiculously overpowered and/or located too early in the game. After you've learned all the tricks and weaknesses of the AI and creature types and know how to abuse them, Sword Coast Stratagems revamps them to sometimes be just a little tougher in terms of stats and abilities (usually to just more closely match PnP if it messes with stats at all), but more to completely revamp their behavior to be smarter, to use their combat abilities more effectively than they were programmed to in the vanilla game (where enemies would often not take advantage of special abilities or use any sort of combat sense at all...). All of these different things help keep the game fresh even after playing it so many times. It's not a game that I feel will probably ever be replaced...sadly. I was actually just entertaining the idea of a no-reload challenge in a fully modded out game. I've never done one before, and I think I would play the game very differently from how I usually play it, particularly with my difficulty-enhancing mods such as Sword Coast Stratagems and the XP Reducer mod (which I normally set to only giving 50% of the normal values). I've never used potions, or any other limited-use items, in an IE game before (and generally don't in games period) - it would be interesting to see how much differently I treat my characters' health in even slightly difficult encounters when I know that them dying could actually be a big deal, and whether I would actually ever retreat from a battle when I think I might lose it (another thing I've never done). I think I'll probably try it, at the very least.