IndiraLightfoot

More on the meteorite temple theory: What we see here is very consistent with large iron meteorites, which are composed of iron-nickel alloys. The thumbprints on the surface are called "regmaglypts". These are formed when materials of the meteor get ablated as it passes through the Earth's atmosphere. From the wiki: "Iron meteorites were historically used for their meteoric iron which was forged into cultural objects, tools or weapons. With the advent of smelting and the beginning of the iron age the importance of iron meteorites as a resource decreased, at least in those cultures that developed those techniques. The Inuit used the Cape York meteorite for a much longer time. Iron meteorites themselves were sometimes used unaltered as collectibles or even religious symbols (e.g. Clackamas worshiping the Willamette meteorite)." Since this could be a huge iron meteorite, or rather a few of them gathered together (from one and the same meteor), it would attract any kind of magnet extremely well. However, these meteorites are not magnets per se.

Same! Lets see if we can walk on it. Hey, wild stab-in-the-dark question: Is this one of the entrances to the mega-dungeon? I don't know, but what I do know, since I'm a bit savvy when it comes to meteorites, that what we see here is in all likelihood a temple built around a huge meteorite! It's a huge meteorite body, mainly composed of metal, and it's characteristically thumbprinted (so most likely, it's having iron as its main component). Any ideas what kind of cult this may be? And what are the implications for the clash between science, magic and superstition? Compare, for instance, this to the largest meteorite in the world - the Hoba meteorite:

I must commend you for that brilliant running animation on that Aloth?-figure with a fluttering cape in the last seconds of the video. I always thought my characters looked akward when they were running in NWN2, but this running animation is simply brilliant - one of the best ones I've seen. Kudos to the animator! :D

Thank you for the "sneak peak", Adam! Perhaps it's a building that's part of a complex like an acropolis, situated on top of a hill or a mountain! That screenshot is absolutely amazing. It's definitely a place worthy of exploration and adventure over and over again!

Precisely. The world of PE is made up of several interwoven cultures and societies, with different languages and varying tech level and religiosity, and that's just for starters.

I love the D&D Ravenloft setting, and in many ways that's almost Georgian/Victorian, sometimes even with light steampunk automata and apparatuses. I really liked Spelljammer too. Just think of the myriad of cultures that co-exist today, or fifty years, or 250 years ago, etc. Even without magic, almost everything makes sense in creating a new world. even if we do go on our own world history as source for templates, and not even mere inspiration. Barbarians (literally Greek for people that go blablabla - that is, any societies that didn't speak a language they didn't understand) have always lived side by side with quite different cultures. Druids are no different in this regard. They are also CRPG-tropes in their own right, so anything goes in making a game, and in fact it would work just as well IRL, right here, right now, or way back when.

Here's an interview with two out of four true Canadian heroes who actually found and led the police to a kidnapped newborn in just a few hours. The baby was stolen by a person dressed as a nurse who said that she was going to weigh it, and then she just walked out of the hospital. The hospital/police/parents up-loaded a picture of the kidnapper and info about a red car. Four bored Facebook teens set out looking for red cars, since one of them had been a neighbour of the suspect two weeks earlier. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOeEW8mF9fg

You're dead on! I do adore character creation, almost obsessively. I had more fun with the pre-release DA:O character generator than the game itself. In my many playthroughs of NWN2, I did it all: RPG light (as in a Warlock that refused to help anyone - CN taken to the extreme), RPG heavy (i.e, a van Helsing-gimped crossbow-wielding oldie-Rogue that had bad stats and equipment on purpose. MotB turned out to be really, really hard), munchkin solo builds, munchkin builds that pumped up the power in the entire party. The more races, classes, talents, skills, prestige classes, epic levels, and cross-breeds of whatever, well, the merrier in my book. What excites me the most is all the god-like combos. I really liked the Genasi in NWN2, so I won't be able to restrain myself. This game will hopefully shred all my work planning and leave me in a dark cellar with nothing but a computer and chocolate in droves 24/7!

Sorry... And I saw a weird typo in my text. It should read "For each patch, this mission has stacked this scenario in the favour of the AI so extremely that being wiped out after 15-20 minutes is a given".

I finally did it!!! There is this holy grail of achievements in Company of Heroes 2, at least after a certain patch in September last year. It's in a theatre of war pack called Case Blue. As the Germans in this scenario, your mission is to defeat an absurdly large force of Soviet partisans that call in tanks, flamethrower infantry and machine gun trucks. And you, well, have nothing at the beginning but an engineer and some basic resources. For each patch, this mission has stacked this mission in the favour so extremely that being wiped out after 15-20 minutes is a given. And you will get overrun and won't even be near a victory. I've been trying my hand at this scenario for months this year. My total matches and losses stacked up to 20, when I now, today, finally scraped up a very close victory. The huge rush of adrenaline and the huge joy of finally beating this mission (and this is Conscript level, mind you - Captain and General levels are basically impossible since Sep 2013) is greater than great!! It's well up there when games used to be really difficult, and I still was young and elated over beating a game after like half a year or a year of hard trying and lots of failed attempts and regrouping and new tactics devised. Just wow!! Here's my shiny and most well-deserved medal! For once, an achievement was indeed an achievement. As you can see, you need to be much better than the AI to even stand a chance in this mission. Still, one faulty move on my behalf - just one - and the Ai would have snatched the victory from my hands yet again. Look hard at this screen, coz there ain't many people that have seen what lies beyond the victory screen here!

I finally did it!!! There is this holy grail of achievements in Company of Heroes 2, at least after a certain patch in September last year. It's in a theatre of war pack called Case Blue. As the Germans in this scenario, your mission is to defeat an absurdly large force of Soviet partisans that call in tanks, flamethrower infantry and machine gun trucks. And you, well, have nothing at the beginning but an engineer and some basic resources. For each patch, this mission has stacked this mission in the favour so extremely that being wiped out after 15-20 minutes is a given. And you will get overrun and won't even be near a victory. I've been trying my hand at this scenario for months this year. My total matches and losses stacked up to 20, when I now, today, finally scraped up a very close victory. The huge rush of adrenaline and the huge joy of finally beating this mission (and this is Conscript level, mind you - Captain and General levels are basically impossible since Sep 2013) is greater than great!! It's well up there when games used to be really difficult, and I still was young and elated over beating a game after like half a year or a year of hard trying and lots of failed attempts and regrouping and new tactics devised. Just wow!! Here's my shiny and most well-deserved medal! For once, an achievement was indeed an achievement. As you can see, you need to be much better than the AI to even stand a chance in this mission. Still, one faulty move on my behalf - just one - and the Ai would have snatched the victory from my hands yet again. Look hard at this screen, coz there ain't many people that have seen what lies beyond the victory screen here!

More on the word "Caroc". Possibly, it's using Old Norse roots instead, and then it would mean an islet in a marsh or some wetland. In Yorkshire, you often see place-names with "Carr", which is a word that many Scandinavian languages still use today for smaller marshes or marshy woodlands. Compare Swedish "kärr" and Icelandic "kjarr".

Don't forget that Josh is very well versed linguistically, especially in the tongues of the British Isles. And so was of course Tolkien, as you all know. He, too, had a Carrock in his books, but there it was a stony eyot in the upper reaches of the River Anduin, to the north of the Old Ford a few miles west of Beorn's farmstead. During their journey to the Lonely Mountain (Erebor), Thorin and Company were housed there overnight by the Eagles before they went to see Beorn. Gandalf states that the steps from the base of the rock to the flat top were made by Beorn and that "Carrock" is Beorn's name for it. "Carrock" is somewhat of a linguistic joke on Tolkien's part; in Anglo-Saxon carr means "rock" and in Welsh, carreg also means "rock, stone". So, basically, Josh's Caroc most likely means stone-stone, that is, something super-duper-tough!! Devil certainly increases the possibility of a godlike, but I'm not so sure it's a death godlike, but rather a nature/stone/earth-elemental godlike.

Well, the release date for Unrest has been pushed to July 23.

Exactly the opposite with me!

M stands for Master in this case, but it's also alluding a bit to stuff like MC Hammer - all in all, a mighty cool dude abbreviation-thingie.

Yeah, yeah. You're right. It's nostalgia too. However, I reckon Planescape Torment is such a stand-alone CRPG in its own right that it was way ahead of its time. I really hope that there will be many more games of that kind, and perhaps less of the run-of-the-mill CRPGs (that statement belongs in the heresy thread). And yes, the execution is all that matters in a complex game like this. However, for the future of CRPGs, I can feel the tides turning...

You guys are clearly more innovative and humorous than me! While I love rolling up characters and tinkering with the prospect of them for hours, my naming convention is almost atrocious. I simply reuse the same PnP RPG characters that I loved the most way back when, and they get to inhabit almost all CRPGs. Sometimes I twist their spelling and such, but in essence, they are almost like Jungian archetypes (not that I believe in such stuff). But Rosa Luxemburg is a great one. I'm really tempted having her in my next RPG, perhaps along with Calamity Jane, and then they'll take it from there.

OMG!!! Every new interview about this game, every new piece of info, just make me want to play it even more! I love the prospect of PE, but it still rests on the premise of CRPG nostalgia and classic IE-games, whereas T:ToN is simply the future in all kinds of respect: it's futuristic, it's having new, interesting ethical-emotional tides that will have profound effects on your character's development (now that's a sentence that rarely mean anything in CRPGs), it's having nothing but meaningful encounters - including all of its combat (no trash mobs here!!), layers of history and culture make for psycho-social archaeological dig into the game and into oneself (it's almost a probe into your own mental landscape at a certain point of time - a mood check of supreme fun and quality.

Woldan: Bad luck really is a matter of a myriad of events that now and then burst into dangerous and sometimes flat out lethal situations. It's chaos theory in action, it's like them rogue waves at sea. Most waves can be small and ever so safe, but at a certain spot, out on the vast ocean, one wave gets ridiculously large all of the sudden. Boats have been engulfed in seconds. Or let's take war and soldiers as an example. You have an extremely well trained marine that makes every right move, but some tiny bit of angle from some roof top is enough for him to be taken out by a sniper. All that experience and physique doesn't help much then. Or why not the super-healthy non-smoker teetotaller vegan that gets run over by a car on a zebra crossing: equally absurd, but still logical in the weird world of chaos theory.

Absolutely. Your being in such a good shape certainly helped in putting the odds slightly more in your favour. However, I was referring to that ever present contingency of bad luck, which certainly reaps souls regardless of fitness, health, wealth, social standing, kindness, goodness or whatever you can come up with. And let's face it: luck was on your side. You just helped it along a little.

You clearly must have had a guardian angel or something breathing down your neck. I'm very glad you survived that split-second ordeal! Labadal: That's awful! It really seems to be a case of someone keeping track of your whereabouts and then grasping the first opportunity. Still, they seem to be pretty stupid. All your computers could have been set on recording or be linked to cameras. Had they been pros, they would taken them just to be on the safe side. I'm glad you weren't there when the intruders entered your place.

Volourn: Indeed. Nothing beats NWN as far as RPGing on computers go. So all old RPGs are just as shallow, empty and trivial as the new ones, and their richness and depth was just a shallow facade? You certainly got me there! Well, perhaps one can argue that inside that head it's always just code, scripts and ones and zeros, so it's empty anyway. Computer games are all about that cool façade, but in the case of good old CRPGs that façade wasn't shallow, but very deep and intricate, whereas in most MMORPGs, it's just smooth like baby cheeks.

I've finally been able to play The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II for a few hours, and it's a very nice-looking and atmospheric ARPG! So far, it outshines Torchlight 2 and Path of Exile - I have plenty of hours in both. It probably beats vanilla D3 too. But I have a soft spot for Titan Quest and D3 RoS, so I'd say those two are better. There are lots of small quests and RPG choices (which is rare for this kind of game), and the humour hits the right note, I think. Here's my engineer Indictus with a hairdo just like Frankenstein's brain-digging servant Igor! One quest was saving private Bryan, whose delicious chocolate cakes seem to have saved his life. And the game's rife with approaching steam-punk armies that need torching, bad! And this character likes to blow stuff up. What can I say? I have a weak spot for grenadiers and engineers with flame throwers after Company of Heroes 2!

On our PS3 here, Skylander became a great family game for us! We have played most content, but we stopped buying figurines when Skylander hybrids came out. The giants were great fun, though.