Bartimaeus

I don't recall the better drops bit - perhaps because drops have always been relatively worthless regardless, so I'm not particularly concerned - but in regards to backpack space...yeah...so spend the $1 or whatever that it took to unbecome a "free" account.

Could you expound upon this? Back when I actually played, the complaint was that the people who BOUGHT the game were being shafted, not that new players were.

I bought a Samsung 850 EVO 250GB for $85. My previous PNY drive died recently, and it was a good enough deal, so why not? On the other hand, PNY just shipped me a 240GB drive in replacement of my 120GB for no apparent reason, and now I'm unsure what to do with this one...It's also apparently not SandForce based, unlike the previous two, and is...Silicon Motion-based? Don't know if that's better or worse. http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/5720/silicon-motion-sm2246en-ssd-controller-preview/index5.html The controller in question. Better, I think? http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1243?vs=1396 Comparison of the two drives (the ADATA drive uses the same controller). Not very different in most regards - besides sequential write, where the PNY falls behind a bit. But that hardly matters.

This reminds me so much of the Diablo 2 soundtrack. Though Diablo 2's music's more intense bits were usually more intense thanks to drums, not heavier orchestra in general.

I played through roughly 99% of Amnesia...man, a while ago. Four years back, maybe? Then I reformatted for some reason or another, and forgot to keep my saves. I never saw the ending, as I couldn't make myself go through certain parts again. I did play through and beat Penumbra rather recently, though, which is pretty similar. Isn't this more appropriate for the "what are you playing thread"? (edit) Also, I've heard news that they're finally, FINALLY fixing the durability bug for Dark Souls 2 on PC for the un-"remastered" version. Apparently, it wasn't a feature all this time after all, contrary to what they claimed at one point! Here's the grand total amount of money that I'm willing to spend on FromSoftware games in the future: $0

Not a bad idea. What class would be best for it, do you think?

Generally, people upload them to third party image hosting websites, like imgur, or puu.sh, or photobucket, etc. and then post the links to them. Imgur would likely suit your needs best.

Ah...yes, if I started up again, there's no way I'd try anything harder than normal. Hard is doable, no doubt about it, but such a chore. I don't envy anyone who played through on PotD. *shudder*

What difficulty are you playing on, Keyrock, out of curiosity?

Fallout 4 would be the logical choice, no doubt...but perhaps Bethesda will not wish to stick its hands in this controversy again. We'll see, I suppose.

Wolf Hall on Masterpiece. It's pretty great IMO, although often hard to follow at parts.

Also, try just one stick at a time. Motherboards can be weird. I've had new computers inexplicably refuse to boot after sticking both sticks of RAM in...then after taking one out, it booting successfully, and sticking the one taken out back in after shutting it down, and it never being a problem again.

Ah...I see. Interesting. I never picked that up because...uh, probably because I usually join Bodhi for optimal massacring (and also getting Aran's Elven Chain +1 for my Mage-Cleric, as well as the Ring of Djinni Summoning and whatever else you don't get if you join with the Shadow Thieves instead, ), which means I usually end up murdering the poor fellow. "Ahhh, I know a discerning eye when I see one!" Yeah, whatever you say, buddy - just give me your dumb glasses so I never have to memorize identify spells and you can die. @Oner: fair enough. Still not nearly the same as BG, though, haha.

Yeah, definitely. It's just...rather extreme in some aspects for SCS. But that's fine: there are many strategies you can use to counter what they do if you care to, which is exactly how it should be.

Yeah, that was actually a reason I abandoned using BGT - because the game just became too unmanageable every time I wanted to fix something, and I want to fix stuff...a lot. Like...I see that the Ice Star mace in Item Revisions gives 50% fire resistance, and I can't help but think...why? Like the only cold-theme weapon in the game, and it's...gonna give fire resistance just like all the fire weapons instead of cold resistance? Why? I'll just patch that up right now...except with BGT and all the BG1 mods I would have installed in addition to the BG2 stuff, it's gonna take forever to load any of my game editors up, it'll make the game run slower each thing I edit (as files will be put into override instead of the .bif files), I'm probably gonna break stuff at some point and need to reinstall and I REALLY do not want to have to reinstall everything, especially seeing as how I install every manually as opposed to BWS or BWP. PLUS, it's Shadows of Amn that I like best about the BG series, anyways, so really, why bother? I do like aVENGER's stuff...just...don't care for things that seem out of place for no reason. Like...using IWD weapon icons for mod-added weapons. Please don't do that: they look completely wrong compared to BG's icons. Or using random portraits for random NPCs for little reason...I just don't like those kinds of changes - feel immersion-breaking, haha. In that sense, I'm a much bigger fan of his atweaks than RR. What changes did RR make to Arledrian? I don't remember anything special about him besides being a fence and having an Amulet of Protection +1 and the Glasses of Identification in the vanilla game - all of which is in the vanilla game, too, IIRC.

Yes...I recalled an additional detail about my encounter with Drizzt: I was playing my first and only playthrough of BG:EE, and it was the initial release. Probably had something to do with it, haha. I've never used the Chosen of Cyric Encounter component. I should probably check that out sometime, but I dislike in general how Rogue Rebalancing adds content that wasn't there originally - like the additional weapons the Shadow Thieves get, or the random portraits it gives to certain characters, or... It's a more hamfisted approach than I like. I edited the mod install files to have that stuff cut out, and so that if I need to reinstall further down the line, I have the files already ready. I spent like three to four hours editing Item Revisions to be completely compatible with 1pp...gosh, what a travesty that was. I would cry if I lost my edited install files for that, Is it Rogue Rebalancing that makes AI backstabbing so friggan' annoying? I figured it was SCS, but maybe not. Need like two or three different casters having True Sight/Detect Invisibility active on them to counteract that crap...so annoying. They're just constantly guzzling potions of invisibility, too. Oh, no doubt that offensive magic is capable enough...PoE has crowd control up the wazoo...but I find it really annoying that unless my fighters are acting as direct stopgaps between the enemies and my casters, my casters are in deep trouble. That's probably from years of playing BG where enemies besides other mages generally target your fighters instead of casters first, because your fighters are the ones actually doing most of the DPS...and if they tried to target your mages first, they'd be ineffectual in taking down Stoneskins and Mirror Images while being murdered by your own fighters...just for your mage to end up casting a dumb Shadow Door when their combat defenses finally break down or whatever. I think the management of movement in PoE is more annoying than whatever tactical elements it's supposed to add are worth, personally. But then again, I don't like the combat mechanics in PoE in general, so that probably doesn't mean much.

It's also really annoying that your casters in PoE don't have hardly any magic to protect themselves, and that the oft-annoying (dis)engagement mechanics are basically your only method of actively protecting them. No Stoneskin, no Mirror Image, no Invisibility...get your fighters to intercept every enemy, or enjoy having your casters more or less insta-gibbed. The movement "mechanics" in BG are extremely exploitable, if you so desire. But...I prefer that and exercising restraint as the player so you're not essentially exploiting the game's limitations versus what PoE does. There's probably a better solution in between the two, though.

NWN/2's combat was kinda dodgy in general, though. Thankfully, if you're playing on just core difficulty, you can get away with letting the AI control your party sans the main character probably 95% of the time without too much difficulty. Which is good, because if I actually had to really bother with combat like I do with BG, I probably never would've finished it. IMO, ToB is probably the weakest section of BGT. I do appreciate epic level gameplay, but with almost every enemy in ToB being immune to backstabs or crits it gets a bit boring. *shrug* I've never actually bothered with backstabbing in any of the IE games. There are so many different ways it can be exploited to ridiculous effect that I've never felt comfortable using it as the player. Seriously, if you have Boots of Speed and Cloak of Non-Detection on as a high level thief, you're basically invincible if you feel like it - just keep running out of sight of enemies, hiding in the shadows, backstab. Repeat until you win. I soloed Drizzt in BG1 as like a level 5 thief one time doing this, and promptly remembered why I don't backstab when he was completely and utterly helpless to my attacks.

Yeah, PoE has some serious balance problems that steer the game towards long drawn out encounters and PotD makes it a lot worse. I've considered using console commands to buff the **** out of my characters and slide on through. Now I want to play BGT more, but my need to finish PoE is too strong. I more or less just finished my playthrough of BG2. 50% creature and quest XP reducer made it tough, but I was still able to pull through. I didn't finish ToB, though, because I got to it and a variety of glitches happened (including the world map not being updated for some reason, making myself unable to travel to ToB areas - as well as randomly losing my Bhaalspawn powers INCLUDING the pocket plane ability) and also I don't think ToB is all that fun in general - though I am curious as to how I would handle these end game fights without having hardly any HLAs and such. I fixed all the glitches via a bunch of different utilities, but then I lost interest as I usually do when I hit ToB.

The difference, I felt, between filler battles in Baldur's Gate and filler battles in P:E is that in BG most (outside of stupid trolls, which I usually just CTRL+Y because I seriously get tired of fighting those idiots) took roughly 10-15 seconds to deal with as you have such seriously destructive magic like fireballs and haste and chain lightning and horrid wilting...while it's always an annoying ordeal in P:E pretty much without fail.

I don't know how this can work without the game having a very action-y type of combat. If you're going to get killed in one or two hits, the player is likely going to want that to be mostly within their hands, not in hands of the dice a la BG. I like that kind of combat in shooters like Metro 2033 (on the hardest difficulty) or Stalker, where you die in one or two hits - but so do enemies - but it works because I have actual strategies I can use to make sure I *won't* get hit. With a CRPG like Baldur's Gate...what exactly do I do? Use stealth and hope the gods smile upon me for the first strike and there's never more than one enemy I have to fight at a time? Obviously, there'd be some things you *could* do, but it'd still boil down to mostly luck, and I don't think that'd be much fun. But hey, if a developer wants to make some great combat system where it does work, be my guest!

http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Mann-Conomy_Update Five years ago: this is when "community-made" content was first introduced and the TF2 store was implemented. I remember this update, because it was after this that I started to hate TF2, and substantially reduced my playing time and eventually quit.

The thing I've always wondered...what does Valve do with most of its money? I mean, seriously, they get a ~30% cut from all games sold on Steam...and control, what over an estimated 50% of the entire industry? Where does all of the money go? And why in the world do they need more? At this point, I'm surprised this isn't the situation:

Indeed. Baldur's Gate also has something similar: TobEx (Throne of Bhaal Extender), except obviously on a smaller scale, since this is BG we're talking about. A few major mods (Item Revisions and Sword Coast Stratagems off the top of my head) use it, though. I don't think modding can work as a legitimate enterprise. A lot of commercial software - modeling and texturing software comes to mind - is used in modding that software companies don't care about because it's not being used for profit - and nevermind straight up re-using other people's assets that is pretty rampant in most modding communities (regardless of whether permission is given or not). I hope any mods that require purchasing are closely scrutinized for legal issues, and dealt with accordingly. I also hope Valve gets its head on straight one of these days, but...I'm not holding my breath, since I can't think of any notable examples of that ever occurring to a large corporation in a truly meaningful manner. Oh well.

The established price for getting money for doing practically nothing is set by Kickstarter I should think. 5%. Eh. It really depends. Steam set the standard for games at ~30%, bandcamp set the standard for music at...uh, 20% or something close to that, kickstarter 5% as you said...it depends on how useful the service is, and how much power it wields. Steam, it would seem, unfortunately wields a bit too much for comfort. Kickstarter is kind of unique, though, given that raising money is the entire focus of the website...I'm surprised it's as high as 5% - I was expecting more like 2 or 3.