Bartimaeus

There's a component in the mod aTweaks called "Unbiased Rewards" that levels the playing field somewhat for a few particular quests for evil paths. I've always felt the game was too lenient in giving out huge XP rewards - if you do the majority of the game's content - so I currently play with a to-75% creature and quest XP reduction in a very vanilla mod install.

Just to be clear, I didn't mean the retail/release prices, I meant how which games are decided to be up for sale, during these mass sales or any sale. Does Steam send out blanket "sale promotion, do you want to be on it" letters that devs/publishers can opt in/out of etc.? Because sometimes I see sales on games that feel like odd choices for devs/publishers to want to have on sale. I mean, I get that sometimes cheap prices=enough extra short term sales to make more and that's the incentive, but dunno...just feels odd at times. When Valve was doing the Halloween sale, I recall hearing about them sending out some sort of mass message - not sure if it was an email or what - to all developers/publishers, asking for submissions for being featured in the Halloween sale. They stated that submissions had to at least be tangentially related to the "darker" themes of Halloween in order to be featured. Again, just what I remember hearing.

Yeah...I've noticed it on others before too. I often wonder what Steam uses as a sale barometer. Time? Popularity? Sales figures? Who knows. It doesn't, I don't believe. From all I've ever heard, (as well as screenshots I've seen), prices are completely set by the developer/publisher, not Valve - Valve only provides suggestions based on what they've seen work best, though they do have certain restrictions, (e.g. no releases on weekends).

Baldur's Gate II, with a variety of mods, including TobEx, Sword Coast Stratagems, 1PP, aTweaks, Spell Revisions, my own edited version of Item Revisions for proper compatibility with 1PP - I can't play with vanilla's default helmet animations... Additionally, using a creature and quest XP reducer mod; it's currently set to 75%, but I'm thinking of using maybe 66% or even 50% next time...as I still feel like I'm getting too powerful too fast. I'll see how that turns out by the end of SoA, though - maybe the first half is just kind of easy in general, even with my difficulty-enhancing mods. Rolled my own party a few times, trying to get a "good" blend. Currently, it's composed of a half-elf sorceress focused almost entirely on dispel, disable, and damage spells, (what else would a sorceress do?), an elf cleric/mage for utility spells, a human dual-class swashbucker (level eight) -> cleric for combat (the Swashbuckler THAC0 boost and proficiency specialization really comes in handy) and additional divine spellcasting support (as well as lockpicking, trap-finding, and illusion-detecting), a half-elf stalker (not sure if this kit is really worth it...) for archery and melee, and a dwarf dual-class thief (5) -> fighter for pure fighting (and backstabbing and pickpocketing). The weakest character seems to be the cleric-mage; maybe I should make them just a full-on mage instead, since I certainly don't need more divine spellcasting, but I really do need the additional arcane spells my sorceress can't cast, and additional arcane prowess is useful in almost any situation anyways. The only real issue in that is it would break the weapon-type system I have going, where I'm covering pretty much all of the good weapon types...which I don't really like the idea of. Spellcasters are really beating the crap out of me every time I come across a major one: the Guarded Compound in the Temple District was...very hard, to say the least, at around level 11. The mage in there - Sion, I think - was casting Timestops and Horrid Wiltings and summoning crap like crazy. Finally beat them, but it took a bit of effort and many re-tries. Ran into two liches in the Temple Ruins by the Umar Hills - without my sorceress, there's no way I'd have even close to enough endurance to take these guys down at this level. Need to use like 4-5 Secret Words and Pierce Magics per battle...then another few Breaches to get down their combat defenses while I pray to Jesus that they don't summon a Pit Fiend or Balor or something...

Yeah? It's a BioWare game: does anyone remember how terrible Mass Effect 3 looked when it came out? All the stupid close-ups they did of the super low-res character textures...bleck. And that came out two years later...

Yeah, I always use one of the default presets in "create-your-own-character" type-games and try not to think about it later. If I dislike all of the default presets, it usually takes me a few days of warming myself up to the one I dislike the least so I can play with it. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but it is what it is.

Reformat to Windows 7?

I love Sam and Fuzzy, but...something that's been bothering me is that there seems to be zero explanation of the actual game mechanics. Am I just missing it on the Kickstarter page? Pretty sure I've read through the entire page a few times to see if I've missed something, and there's nothing there.

The controls are horrible, but I think DS2's are, too - just a different brand of horrible. Hated them coming from DS1 - still like DS1's better, and I know a few people who played DS1 first that agree, haha.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_rLFcHtSBM

Have you tried the very bottom PCIE 3.0 slot? According to the newegg page, the board properly supports 40 lane CPUs, so while the middle slot seems to be designed purely for x8, I don't think the bottom is. (edit) Looking at the manual, it seems like the third slot is the correct one for dual x16 usage with the first. I am guessing the fact that you have a 28 lane CPU is the problem - even though the port actually supports x16, your 28 lane CPU seems to not be configured to do so. I'm not sure if Asus could correct that in a BIOS update, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. It's the first "enhanced" edition of a game that I can say I one hundred percent approve.

Discovered roughly 10 seconds ago that clicking the little thought bubble icon to the left of threads on here, ( - or just the white circle for topics I haven't posted in), lets you go the earliest unread post. This will make reading new posts in highly actively threads on here a million times easier.

I still don't understand why when you enable visible BBCode Mode, all the buttons are disabled. Other forums that are not this forum seem to be able to have the regular buttons enabled just fine when the BBCode text is actually visible. I hate non-visible BBCode Mode.

Haha, yeah, you're not really supposed to play in between patches with (major) territory changes...lol What do you think of the new/revised mechanics?

I'm referring to some of the guys that were like, "HEY, I'm/he's talking to you!". No, they weren't physically trying to stop her - not that I saw, anyways - but they did want her to stop, nonetheless.

e: can't read Hey, I'm a young'un and have been here since the beginning of the project. Stubbornness and ignorance is surely not limited to the young. On the other hand, I've actually stopped paying attention to updates because I was getting so worked about perceived major changes and want to judge the game on its own merits, not as a Baldur's Gate spinoff...so you might have a point even so.

Six pages is too much for me to read in one sitting - for this type of thread, anyways - so I'll just throw in my two cents. Some of it definitely comes off as harassment, or near enough. What gives these people the right to think that they can accost a person - any person - while clearly on their way to somewhere...for not answering some random "compliment" on the streets of a city where there's...uh, a great number of people in the streets? If you had to answer every random thing somebody feels obliged to say to you on the street, you might not ever get anywhere. Doesn't matter what the subject of the person bothering you is: you have the right to continue on your way wherever you're trying to go, and ignore those who you wish to ignore. Others...not necessarily. It is, however, nonetheless exhausting, I'm sure, to be one the receiving end of all those "compliments" - whether genuine or not. As the person complimenting, I can understand feeling insulted that someone won't even bother to acknowledge a heartfelt compliment...but, c'mon, let's be realistic about this. If you're the type to give out random compliments on the freaking streets, well...there's something to be said for the appropriate time and place, and the probability of such compliments being genuine and without expectation - either of which being present kind of ruins the positive meaning of the "compliment". And if you are the rare type of good person to just give out compliments to brighten people's day or whatever, then you should probably be conditioned and/or good-natured enough that you're perfectly willing to let it go with not getting any sort of [positive] response, anyways.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky. I remember why I haven't played this game since it came out. Can't get through it. Just can't. I don't know what it is about Clear Sky that makes it feel so much inferior to Shadow of Chernobyl, but there it is. I could probably think about it for a little and come up with a bunch of reasons why, but...that sounds like work.

I don't really get the hype about Civilization games. I've tried Civ 3, Civ 4, and Civ 5, all with their latest expansions...and I would say that I liked Civ 4 the best, but that all of them always feel pretty danged shallow, and have weird gameplay mechanics that don't make any sort of historical sense. I also hate randomly generated worlds/maps, so that might be a related factor. I wish they'd make some sort of official "Realistic Earth and True Start Locations" map. I've tried some of the mod-added ones, but they always feel really off and weird to play in.

VRAM is a pretty bad measure of how powerful a card is, anyways. Many "mobility" (i.e. laptop) chips have 2x-3x more VRAM they could feasibly use - if not worse than that. I have no idea why that is, but it's not very unusual to see some super low-end GPU have 2GB of VRAM with no way of ever actually using it - compare that with, say, the old 8800 GTX, which had, what, 256MB of VRAM, and still outperforms many of the lower end series cards that came out way later that have 4-8x as much and of a higher quality? So yeah.

Pretty groovy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5PxE9mDCGg

I must not be very smart, because I can't make head or tail of this flow chart one bit...where does it start, why isn't everything connected, what's going on

The division between "my own kind" and "not my own kind" is pretty arbitrary. Should I bother dwelling on and feeling empathy for someone horribly murdered who was my next door neighbor? How about someone in my district? City? State? Country? Continent? Some people go all the way, some even beyond. Others don't even do the first. Similarly, some are so concerned with political ideology they don't consider those of the opposite ideology to be their own kind. Same with religion, race, and probably a veritable plethora of other such factors. I think it's abnormal to presume everyone shares the same values of what constitutes as "their own kind". Why should I necessarily feel a natural affinity for all those born in the same country as me - a country that's larger than all of Western Europe with some parts of Asia thrown in? I don't think it'd be bad to, but...for some, national identity is trumped by other factors - or might not be a factor at all.