marelooke

Well, given that it's one of the games I regularly play a session of I figured I might as well share whatever I was running when I last logged out:

I am not building a new base in Conan Exiles. And I can stop whenever I want! (also, I mean, only, Destiny 2 since the current event allows me to rather quickly catch up gearwise with my characters)

Halo Infinite will deliver an "AAA player investment experience", which, as far as I can tell is MS-speak for "a sense of pride an accomplishment". Guess selling people subscription services wasn't enough for Microsoft after all.

You play on official? Not sure if I could stand that given my building urges... I just dabbled on official to compare it to the latency on my own server. Bearers do less damage than fighters though (didn't use to, but they got the nerfbat to the face once word about that got out), not sure whether their armour values got reduced, if they were then that extra HP might not count for as much (and even a naked NPC has some armour as that's what the multipliers work with). Generally speaking Thralls are the answer to every problem, if you can get them to actually fight as the AI is derpy as all hell. Haven't bothered with pets (got one from the cave my base is pretty much on top of), but they generally don't have a lot of armour and judging from what I've seen their AI is generally even worse than Thrall AI, so a Thrall with decent equipment will always outperform them (ofc, they're probably great early game, before you get access to all the good stuff), especially against armoured targets, I would imagine (so most humanoids). Might go back and see how a Thrall fares against the Arena Champion. Fwiw, I was using a T3 Sepermeru (Relic Hunter) Thrall in full Silent Legion with the Doom hammer (and then the Worldbreaker, once that dropped). The Named minibosses that can be enthralled are considered T4 Thralls btw and, if not counting Purge thralls, they have the best stats for their faction (crafters craft faster, use less resources, and often get special recipes. Eg. white/black dye for Purge Alchemist) Still, kinda proud of myself that I cleared most everything (until this dungeon), without using Thralls (eh, I did skip the dagger boss in the Dagon dungeon, that guy was just ridiculous). Wouldn't recommend it though and I might go back and see how much pain I could've saved myself by using a Thrall

Say "Hi" to the Avatar of Derketo: Sepermeru for scale: Bye bye *blows kiss* So long suckers, I'm outta here! (I did make a backup of my save before doing that) I don't think talking about the "Leave the Exiles Lands" step is spoilers necessarily, but just in case: There's supposedly a major update coming out in September, curious what that's going to be. I'd mostly love more areas to explore but that seems unlikely as the devs have said the current map is already pushing the limits of the Unreal Engine. Only thing I still have to do now is the climbing up high achievement. I'll probably see if I can't just climb the Volcano for that one.

Fighting this boss without cheese is a pretty sure-fire way to get killed. One hit takes off around 40% of my health as her attacks ignore armor entirely... This also means that having a thrall fight her is a really bad idea as she'd just rip through them. Nothing that can't be fixed with a little bit of stun-locking though (and running around like a headless chicken to heal up/refill stamina ;)) And this is how most of the dungeon actually went: get boss to engage my thrall, stand back and shoot healing arrows (or Snake arrows if not dealing with undead), the Arena Champion is the only boss I actually fought myself... Exit Warmaker And got me a new sweet set of armour for a Thrall (over 1000 armour on this one ...) Not sure but they might have overdone it on the items in this dungeon, aside from the recipes for the armour (which is really expensive, but hell, it's probably the best heavy armour in the game) I also got "The Worldbreaker" (what's in a name...) a warhammer that ignores all armour. It made my thrall just rip through these bosses like no-one's business since most of them have relatively low HP but massive amounts of armour...

Getting very, very close now... And yes, I did use the Wiki for this one, still took me quite a while, not because I missed so many places (I didn't, unfortunately I also didn't count them but it was well under 20, which isn't bad on a total of 237) but well, finding which markers you missed on such a large map was slow (didn't help that since the last major Windows update the game has started randomly freezing on alt-tabbing...) The ending... So that leaves the new dungeon and Avatar summoning. Since I know the altar gets destroyed in the ritual I'll just build a new one (ooooh, smells like a building project!) and sacrifice some more of those fools that dare stand against my mightthe will of Set. (oh yes, there's still that one achievement, ignoring the multiplayer-only one, to get up really really high, figure that means either building a humongous tower or climbing the volcano)

Well, the date of birth only suddenly got requested months after the forum upgrade, so I'm not sure the forum upgrade can be fingered as the cause. MIght have been some legal dude from MS stumbling over the forums and noticing it so some setting got changed, or somesuch. I'm also not sure what personally identifiable information a forum would collect that would require COPPA compliance (the Google tracking stuff, maybe), but ianal (nor a US citizen, for that matter), so I'll just roll with it. Suddenly asking for it with no explanation is annoying though and might be a GDPR violation (the no explanation part). Either way, if Obsidian needs my real date of birth it's probably in my backer profile, no need for the forum to have it.

What's up with the forum suddenly requiring my birth date?

So this popped up in my suggestions the other day. As you all are probably aware it has been widely reported that the UK says lootboxes are not gambling, of course the truth is a lot more nuanced and Bellular goes through the entire parliamentary hearing (of which most "journalists" read the first paragaph or so, apparently): The TL;DR could be summed up pretty accurately as "The UK doesn't consider lootboxes gambling (by their legal definition), but the UK Gambling Commission argues they probably should be."

Given how Epic basically bought them out (to the detriment of said backers) I doubt they'd be happy about not getting what they paid for... Working on something else would be pretty ballsy, I for one, won't support them again as their word has been proven to be worth about as much as that of the average politician.

I think I stepped through a portal into some Bethesda game... I was only going to build a small outpost to capture thralls. Got the capturing part down. Might have slightly failed in the "small" department though... The huge circular(-ish) roof was a nightmare to build. I still want to add a Set temple somewhere, at some point. Open roof over the Wheel of Pain and kitchen right next door for some added persuasive powers. Can't have Keyrock claim I'm a softie again! Since I have no real reason to start any new building projects in my single player save I've gone back to the bucket list: Killed the undead dragon, was a tad easier than I expected (but I expected it to be really really nasty, so there's that) The giant spider, on the other hand, was a lot nastier than I expected... Killed all the different dragon types (Red, Green and White). I mean, that's something you have to do at least once in our life, amirite? Killed the White Dragon a few times to get a head for a trophy, after a bit of Googling it turns out the White Dragon Head Trophy is not implemented yet. Whelp. Still to go: Completing the Warmaker's Sanctuary dungeon and dealing with some other new bosses added in that recent update (already fought the boss birds, those are nasty as hell) Craft the Heart of the Sands (so I can then create the item to remove the bracelet as I have all the other parts), which means I need to get past the whiptail cats that have shredded me each time I've tried. Different approach appears to be required (might bring a thrall to deal with them, for a change, I usually don't use them, except for bearers) Completing the last few Journey steps ("only" 5 to go....)

Kinda selective about which commitments they keep, aren't they? But I can't really argue against not working their staff to death either.

Messed around some more with the Conan Exiles dedicated server. My base got to a decent size and stuff got kinda really laggy. CPU was still bored and machine wasn't OOM. Load didn't really go over 1.2 (which is still fine for a dual core, but most of the time was between 0.6 and 0.8) either either so not sure what's up with that (I'll go with "badly optimized software"). Willing to open it up if people are interested but something tells me that having multiple players might not be a good time. In hindsight I should probably just have tried loading my single player save on the server, something tells me my archway base wouldn't go over well... Either way, got around to cleaning up the Dockerfile and put it all on Github here, so if anyone has some beefier hardware lying around, there you go

Right, had to look that one up since I haven't played through The New Colossus yet and I'd forgotten about the suit in The New Order (worn by someone else). Still he only needs it because of an injury, not because he's just not trained well enough to do what he does. Either way I figure that to be a minor detail (didn't even notice his focus on it, honestly), the stuff that interested me, personally was the RPG mechanics and the looter-shooter parts, well and the behaviour of the protagonists (which I, as I already mentioned, already abhorred after the announcement). Sounds a lot like a worse Shadow Warrior 2 to me, which I also thought was pretty bland when compared to the original reboot and was ill served (imho) by similar mechanics that are apparently being introduced here. Except Lo Wang was a tad more likeable than what I've seen of these two sisters. EDIT: in case you want a bit more of a non-funny, accurate review: In case it matters, I'm with Lawrence on this one.

If you mean the appearance of the protagonists, then I can agree (though I do see his point, which doesn't mean I *agree* with his point, let's make that clear here and now). Their behaviour, otoh, yeah, I do have a problem with that, it turned me off of the game as soon as I saw the announcement video. I feel the need to point this out again: I never claimed I agreed with all his points necessarily, I just thought the video entertaining. As I said, the protagonists' behaviour turned me off from the game immediately, so I am quite aware I'm not in the target audience, just enjoying me some schadenfreude (if nothing else, AAA titles tend to provide plenty of entertainment that way alone).

Ok, so unfortunately as I feared, no more fine grained control Thanks for the effort of explaining though!

BJ didn't need any armor though? I mean, doubt they'd have let him keep it when they locked him up and he was just fine. He was also muscular to the point he made the Governator seem scrawny. Either way I thought his point was more that they wanted to add girl power without wanting to "compromise" by making the girls look like they'd be able to do the stuff they're doing (which would mean they'd have had to be quite a bit more muscular than the, as the author puts it, "scrawny teenagers" they are). I would tend to agree on that point. Easiest way to make someone strong without making them look like they work out? Exoskeleton! Nano-suit! As for the "story" as someone put it on Steam: could have been a great story about living in the shadow of BJ and his accomplishments/reputation or merely the fact that he's killed thousands, instead they went with whatever the hell this cringy mess is.

Got 3 days of free gametime from Blizzard, not sure if nice or desperate of them. Anyway, mostly been alternating between playing on the Conan Exiles server I set up and an official (PvE) server for comparison's sake., and trying to tune the former, of course. Docker images appear fine and reliable now, unfortunately haven't been able to figure out the server browser issue, which is really annoying as it means you need to enter the server details manually, twice: once where it checks server mods and then it restarts with those mods activated (probably can skip this step if single player mods = server mods), fails to automatically connect and then you gotta enter the server details again and it actually connects. Either way going to clean up the images and then post them, might toss them into the official forums as well in hopes they're either useful to someone and/or someone can help figure out the Steam issues. As for performance, it's generally, ok-ish, occasionally it desyncs and harvesting appears weirdly laggy, mostly noticeable with skinning (first action generally appears to not register, so you have to re-harvest). It's slightly worse than on an official server (which still have issues with it) but it's playable (though I have not attempted any real bossfights focusing mostly on building to see how the server handles big builds so I might reconsider that stance when I get murdered due to lag spikes :P) Performance issues might be memory related (as I mentioned previously) since I play with the server's console on my other screen and CPU cores rarely spike to 100% but memory consumption is rather high. According to Funcom 8GB should be enough for a 10 player server but I have my doubts that's actually the case. I'd been considering getting extra memory anyway so I might see if I can still get some of the correct type and whether that improves things. Another possible cause is the game throttling maximum (network) throughput per-player. I've already increased these parameters somewhat with limited success but I might try and bump them up some more. On the positive side I noticed that when playing on a dedicated server rather than single player physics actually work properly, both cloth, hair as well as the various dangly and bouncy bits. Makes it hard to go back to the static clothing from my single player game now. On the negative side some bugs that appear also in single player are a lot more common (like corpses going invisible)

The game might be bad, but this review was comedy gold.

Can confirm for Origin, uses about 3MB in that state. Uplay actually appears to be gone though, so maybe they already fixed it.

Does this only work for DRM free applications, or does it mean it doesn't pop up the respective launcher but it's still running in the background? Just for funsies I had a look at all the launchers I have around when they run in the background (everything approximate, of course, and I gave everything about 10min to "settle" after launching them and/or waited for any upgrade and updates to complete): Bethesda.net Launcher: 560MB(!!!) Steam 150MB Gog Galaxy 150MB Battle.net 110MB (as a bonus, I updated WoW and that added another 400MB process for the duration of the update) Uplay 110MB Origin 85MB Kinda surprised Origin was the leanest one, honestly, it always looked so bloated, but it turns out that's just the UI being...not so great. Obviously there's nothing scientific about the approach (small sample size is the least of the issues ), just figured it was a fun thing to do. But yeah, running all of them eats up over a Gigbyte of RAM, half that if you are sensible and stay away from that Bethesda abomination (not to mention that quite a few of them almost constantly "do stuff" in the background and thus (lightly) tax your CPU as well). Didn't test Epic's thing because I disagree with their way of doing business, so I'm not doing business with them for the time being.

It's just software, if well maintained it can go on for quite a while. Of course most games (including MMOs) are not built to last. So a lot of them run into issues with spaghetti code or other hacks to just get things out the door. Blizzard spent a bunch of time refactoring WoW's engine to future proof it, for example. The ironic thing is that I'm sure many of them thought these games wouldn't last this long and that they'd then just make a successor. Then they discovered that creating enough content to keep players busy isn't exactly easy (or cheap), so now they're all stuck with games built on shoddy foundations that many of these companies don't have the will, talent, or money to refactor, assuming they even created or own their own engines (*cough* SWToR *cough*). A pretty good example of doing it right, imho, is Warframe, where they figured out that paying the up-front cost of creating a well engineered engine means they they just keep up with the times. On that note (and since you mentioned ArenaNet) Guild Wars 2 is still running on an upgraded GW1 engine, which, apparently is a huge blob of spaghetti code that they're afraid to touch. At least "spaghetti code" is the default reason they used to decline implementing any UI improvements (though they've announced build templates now). Probably depended on your realm, your guild (and its reputation) and how active you were (playing consistently around the same time kinda helped in my experience, as you'd just start running into the same people and thus build a reputation, meaning sooner or later people would just ask you to join). I never really had trouble finding groups once I got over the anxiety of joining PUGs (and I mained a Mage, so no tank/healer privileges). I loved running dungeons though so I spent most of my (game) time in them (at least during TBC, WotLK dungeons were mostly a snorefest, unfortunately)

Well, ESO can be played without a subscription, which is what I meant, you still have to actually buy the game and expansions (the way GW2 used to be). So I guess it's B2P. Without a subscription you don't have access to the crafting storage though (forgot the actual name) which just makes gathering and crafting a massive pain, to the point I'd consider it unplayable without (but ymmv), assuming you care about crafting, of course. If they changed that then maybe it's worth another look.

Was 1.12 the "TBC preparation patch"? I mean, I sure hope it is not, because if so then that's not vanilla, like, at all, that's like setting up a TBC realm and letting people start at the "WotLK preparation patch" (which would be the patch that added achievements), it made power levels go through the roof and many guilds that weren't able to get anywhere prior now could easily clear at least some of the earlier raids.