melkathi

I heard Hurls-h/n-o(r)t played DA: Origins a couple of months ago, and was surprised how well the graphics have held up. (People who have played Champions Online will also know that they have to shut down all those beacons. They emit a high frequency signal that drives the Qular crazy).

Have fun. But remember: Swooping is bad.

It says so on the internet. It must be true.

Toybox it

You can do all groups. You need to do planetary projects that give reputation, then sell a lot of crap for the last points. You don't really need any of the loot for anything else. Keep one stack of each just in case. The rest sell to factions. You need to reach max before the end of chapter 4.

It is tricky. You basically need to pick every choice of your chosen alignment or you get locked out, as later choices are progressively locked behind higher requirements. So if you aren't votary by a certain point, choices in chapter 4 are most likely locked. It sucks. You are supposed to do three playthroughs, one for each morality and always pick every option. Most annoying for Heretics who miss out on Foulstone that way. Very bad design. For Heinrix it really depends on your party setup. My Heinrix was a high mobility assassin who could easily reach faraway lights, while the spacewoof could plod off in the other direction. The fight was extremely unmemorable. Chapter 4 is known for the cut content. The frozen planet in Chorda's domain has it's whole questline cut and through console commands you can apparently teleport to the areas that are just sitting in the code but are disconnected from the live game.

Tried the Breachway demo. It seems like a good game if you want card based combat, move across nodes to encounter random encounters and eventually die and do the same thing again and again, possibly unlocking stuff on the way. Turns out, I am no longer all that into this kind of game. Which is a shame. It may have been more fun getting bored of the genre with this game.

Imho Dragon Age allowed for a great first play through of Origins. Very enjoyable and fun and some good moments. But BioWare did not have a good further Dragon Age game in them. The setting may have had more potential , but BioWare was not the company to explore it. 2 was simply bad. The experimentation in chapters years apart not working well, causing the player to stand still while the game moved on. The spawning of enemies was silly. The evil high Templar was comical in how bad she was written. Inquisition was a single player MMO with all the bad of an MMO without the potential benefit of sharing fun with strangers. And as in so many BioWare Games, in both 2 and Inquisition there was the disconnect with what your character should say, what you thought your character would say, and the soppy cringe they did say. They should have left it at origins and made that StarWars MMO a series of single player titles, one for each class in each faction. They would have made a dozen great games instead of a couple bad single player ones and a mediocre mmo.

I hear rumours that in less than a week we are getting the bestest blogpost evAr.

So is the tl;dr that Bioware heard people love Spider AA RPGs and are trying to copy that?

So dark = stale dirty brownish paint water?

It is the darkspawn brood mother encounter in the deep roads that was a lot darker than anything BioWare had done. Most other "dark" bits were not that tone setting. Yes there was racism, yes the mages were a copy of WH40K psykers under the constant threat of demonic possession. But the cringe dopey romance kept dragging you right back out of the darkness. Only in that one section was the atmosphere not broken by Liliana wanting to shop for shoes or Alistair licking lampposts.

I expect any forumite we chat here to let me know if they come to Athens. Who knows, maybe I'll be so rich by then, I'll even have a spare bedroom Thank you, I need it. Going to launch the forkcat brand for real now. Even hiring a marketing/fashion/branding consultant with fancy hairdo (if you are reading this: Γειά! Θα σε παρω τηλέφωνο αύριο!*) Selling the apartment I was living in the past 8 years. Standing to almost double my money because I bought it dead cheap. That will give me a secure cushion to concentrate on starting something new for a couple of years without having to stress. So feeling super excited and stressed and a bit of trepidation. But if it works out it will be awesome. Maybe it is midlife crisis, but I feel very privileged to be able to try to do completely my own thing. * translation: Hi! I'll call you tomorrow!

Me as well. Maybe by that time I will have forced myself through inquisition.

You will come round for dinner though.

Should I feel guilty?

If you don't have that party member you apparently get betrayed by the spy master on dargonus, who had been tortured by the drukagmhrimmm (ok, I give up trying to type the dark eldar name on my phone). Comorragh would have worked better without that long-winded trial and all the stupid skill checks. It also makes you appreciate Argenta, who basically keeps it together better than anyone else in there. "Hey Argenta, I am going to escape this place. You in?" "Does the Emperor $#!7 on his throne? Let's blow this joint!" Disclaimer: this may not be the exact wording in the game.

Find me some LGBTQ+ or feminist beer and I'll buy it even though I am teetotal. But me buying it has to annoy the right people. Then it is money well spend

I am progressing well with sorting the apartment. Moving is always strange. More so when you change everything. I closed the smallest hotel in Athens. I am out of tourism. Tourism turns you into a racist. Unless you only have Australian guests - Australians are cool. Clumsy and loud perhaps, but fun and friendly and happy to be here. So I have moved into one apartment myself and it is such a strange experience to be here and not be in stress to get things ready for check in. I took down the sign from the entrance and am having a new one printed with just my art and no text.

Welcome to the worst part of the game that nobody understands how they thought it would be fun for people. Also, welcome to the stupid betrayal that nobody understands how you can forgive other than "I don't want to gimp my party by having fewer characters". It is stupid, because if you never allow that character on your ship, there is a perfectly good alternative betrayal that works just fine.

My solution using 5th grade maths in Greece If 100%=X and 75%=16 Then 100/75=X/16 | multiply both sides times 16 => 1600/75=X

My money has been on Trump. But Americans seem to be deranged and will vote for any psychopath, so the Dems might surprise me.

I never played enough of the PF games to have an opinion, but in the 40K game what annoyed me was that they simply made all tests harder so you had to increase and increase the same skills. If in chapter 1 you needed to roll over 40 for a skill check where your character might have a value of 10-50, in later chapters that skill check would be 140, just to ensure your party never actually simply got good at that thing.

I'll keep it short then. Since 2014 Ukraine has been obstructing NGO work. Basically they forbade Amnesty to investigate anything they didn't want them to. That is why every report out of Ukraine on any human rights matter since then is "sloppy". After the 2019 elections the new government had originally promised to fix that - part of an attempt to show their European allies that they had cleaned out far right nationalist elements from the government. They didn't fix it, realizing Europeans didn't actually care. So spending 7 years sabotaging the work of NGOs to then come out and cry about "sloppy" reports?

That article is quite badly written. The publisher running that site also writes articles attacking Amnesty International. Ef him. *roll eyes* Mind, there are plenty of reasons to boycott most countries, including Russia. I scan all non-local products with a boycott app myself. (and my cat eats Ukrainian cat food)