Keyrock

Grinding my way through Albion Online. I'm a solid tier 4 character wielding a halberd and wearing royal plate armor. You get to tier 2 gear almost immediately in the game. Getting to tier 3 gear is fairly quick. Tier 4 takes a bit of time, it's at this tier that you unlock the full complement of weapons and armor (Before tier 4 you can only wield a basic melee weapon, staff, or bow and wear basic cloth, leather, or metal armor). Tier 5 takes a long time to get to. I can almost wield a tier 5 halberd now, though I wouldn't be able to afford one at the moment, nor can I craft my own yet, though I'm starting to get within shouting distance. I imagine getting to tier 6 is going to take forever and tier 7 will take an absolutely absurd amount of time. I suppose I shouldn't expect anything else from a MMO, though. On the plus side, you're always making progress in the game, no matter what you do. Literally every action you do in the game gains you fame (Experience, basically) both toward the specific skill(s) you were using (fighting with an axe, chopping a tree, smelting ore) as well as toward the overall adventurer rating (Being a higher tier adventurer allows you to use higher tier basic items and services, such as riding higher tier mounts. Every bit of fame collected, regardless of what you are doing, counts toward raising adventurer tier).

Meh, while I won't give Beamdog any of my money because, one, I have no desire to replay these games, and two, I think they're cashing in on other, far more talented, peoples' work, I'm not too bothered by their "enhanced editions" existing. While the original content they add themselves tends to be of much lower quality than that of the base games, they make it easier to run on modern operating systems than installing the preexisting mods yourself. I do wish the original games were still available for sale by themselves, for those that want to play the games and don't want to give Beamdog money for their cash-in, but such is the way of things. Oh well.

He's definitely put in his time in the video game business. Can't blame a guy for wanting to relax and enjoy his life. I'd retire right now, if I could afford to, and I'm significantly younger than Brian Fargo.

Given that Miranda had some of the same problems as others in ME:A seem to, I'm not so sure that's the best example to make... As Malcador pointed out, it wasn't Miranda's face people were focusing on... neither was the camera much of the time.

It's not even so much that the faces are ugly... okay, some of them are quite ugly, but that, in itself, would be fine, as far as I'm concerned, I welcome characters of a variety of attractiveness levels. What bothers me is that the faces, particularly the female ones I've seen, all fall squarely in uncanny valley. It's that weird area between stylized and realistic looking where the faces almost look real, but there is something juuuuuust enough off about them to make them really creepy. I don't know how to describe it any better than that, but you know uncanny valley immediately when you see it and, to me at least, it's rather unnerving, which would be great were this a horror game, but it's not. Combine that with how good the environments look and it's a rather jarring juxtoposition. I can definitely see myself getting pulled into these wonderfully detailed and sculpted worlds they've created, all credit to Bio for that, then getting ripped right out the moment dialogue triggers slapping me across the face with disturbing faces making shockingly awful animations.

I would definitely use Real Weapon Names and Atmosfear for both of them. Neither mod changes game balance in any measurable way, but both make the experience more immersive.

Grim Dawn is getting an expansion this year which will add the Necromancer class, among other things. http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=52416

I'm hoping for a day where BioWare be becomes self-aware and elfroot becomes the standard currency in all its games. You will have to gather elfroot in all their games, regardless of setting. Plus, they change BioWare Points, or whatever it is, to elfroot so you have to buy elfroot IRL with real money then use the elfroot to ger DLC.

Adventuring and gathering with my ox Larry in Albion Online. Nice art style overall, but they need to add an anti-aliasing option in the full release, as the game has some pretty gnarly jaggies, especially when you zoom in all the way.

Besides my slow and leisurely playthrough of TToN (I want to savor it like a fine wine), I started playing Albion Online. Normally, I don't do early access (technically it's not on Steam so it's not early access, but it's beta so same difference) but I have an itch to play a MMO, and the selection on Linux natively is fairly limited. The closest comparison I can make to a game most people will know of is Runescape(with just a dash of Eve). The game is geared toward PvP (with full looting in red and black zones), but it does have PvE, just very light on story and quite generic. On the plus side, you can play any type of char you want, not just your standard tank, DPS, and healer. You can be a gatherer, a crafter, a merchant, etc. While every town has an auction house, they're all separate and different types of higher tier crafting components are rare, or even nonexistent in certain regions, making buying in one place then selling in another a viable way to make money, especially since everything in the game is player crafted. I'm having fun with it so far and playing the final beta gives me a chance to get a taste and experiment before the final wipe and full release in July. That way I can be focused and have a plan when I make my char that counts.

Better facial animations and less nightmarish faces than ME:A. 10/10 Would solve button puzzle again.

I've watched some Twitch streams and I just can't get over how bad the animations are. I mean, they're not Morrowind bad, but for 2017 they are AWFUL. It would be one thing if this came from some obscure little studio working on 1/10th budget, but this is coming from BioWare backed by EA's virtually unlimited resources. How is it possible it's this bad? Also, the dialogue I've seen is laughably bad, even by BioWare's standards, not just the dialogue itself, but also the delivery. The game, as a whole might be good, even great, who knows, but I can't get past how unbelievably bad the production value is. It's alarmingly bad.

I mean, Mad Max suffers from the same issues so many open world games suffer from, tons of repetitive, kinda dull activities littering the map. However, getting around the map in Mad Max is really fun, which helps alleviate the boredom of doing the nearly endless open world grind quite a bit. Plus, the game has car porn aplenty. Who doesn't love car porn? It also is a great looking game that runs awesome.

Bovine. Okay, its really Russian. The last Tomb Rader took place in Siberia. Russians again!? Dear lord, didn't she kill enough Russians last time? Lara must really hate Russians. Her lust for Russian blood knows no bounds.

Which nationality does Lara murder hundreds of people of this time around?

You know, Russ is going to win the MVP, and deservedly so, since the guy is averaging a motherf*****g triple double, something that hasn't been done in over 55 years! That said, my boy Isaiah started going ballistic partway into the season. At first, it seemed like a flash in the pan, a passing trend, then, a couple months later, my man is still dropping 30 regularly, and at a good percentage. You can't even compare it to Jeremy Lin's ridiculous hot streak, which lasted about 10 games, or Iverson's insane season, which had lower efficiency. What Isaiah has been doing for the last 3 months or so is ridiculous. Dude is flat out unstoppable on offense.

I might tire of them eventually, but I'm still relatively new to the game, this is only the second one I've had the chance at. One advantage I have over the previous target is that at that time I hadn't even played the level the targets were in previous to attempting the elusive target. Now, having completed the story arc, I've played all the levels, so at least I have knowledge of the layout of the level and general placement of different kinds of staff, guards, etc. I think before I try the elusive target I will run through an escalation or two in that same level as a refresher.

Aww yeah, another elusive target has popped up in HITMAN. Time for me to put my master assassin shoes on and... ... ...most likely fail horribly.

Welcome to the club. About the only thing Bio could put out now that could possibly entice me to buy one of their games is a Jade Empire sequel, and that's only because I love wuxia so freakin' much and I'm desperate for a wuxia RPG. As for ME:A being a good shooter but bad RPG, no surprise there. Ever since ME1 they've been systematically stripping out the RPG elements and focusing on action. Coincidentally, Bethesda has been doing the same thing with FO and TES.

I found Graven Ashe to be insufferable, but I liked Voices of Nerat, he was like a more crimially insane version of Q from Star Trek: TNG. Ol' Voices was my boy... until we had it out toward the end of the game and I ended him. It was inevitable, though, I knew he'd outlive his usefulness eventually and I'd have to kill him in my bid to take Kyros' spot atop the totempole.

Holy ****, that's a long video, I'll have to watch it at a later date. Anyway, for my playthrough, during character creation, I set a vision for my character, what her motivations were, her moral compass, how she tended to operate given a set of circumstances, and I attempted to best follow that path to the letter. To Obsidian's credit, I was, for the most part, allowed to play exactly the cold-hearted, manipulative, sly-tongued character I envisioned. Basically, my character was not psychotic, she didn't revel in killing people or making them suffer, in fact, she'd generally make 1 attempt at reaching a peaceful resolution, mainly because that could gain her favor and/or allies that could be used later. If, however, her mercy was refused or betrayed at later date she would bring swift and merciless retribution. There would be no second chances, accept my peace and fall in line, my character had no qualms about wiping out an entire population if an example needed to be made. A really good decision I made early on was turning the difficulty down to story mode, which made combat so trivial it removed all temptation to make choices based on gaming the reputation systems to gain certain abilities. I was able to fully roleplay and got really into my character. I don't know if this makes me a bad person, but I very much enjoyed the power fantasy of wielding power over people, including exacting horrible vengeance. I'd like to think I can separate fiction from reality while still getting immersed, so I don't think it makes me evil to thoroughly enjoy being ruthless in a fictional world while being invested in it.

Was there no one at Bio to say to the character artists "These faces look creepy as ****. Guys, is that really what we're going for?"

Mhm.

Hard to tell what the gameplay will be like from this trailer. Supposedly, it will have simultaneous turn-based combat. Visually, though, it looks amazing.