marelooke

They happily use the readily available alternative though: low wage countries. Encouraging addictive behaviour isn't exactly harmless either, and arguably leads to deaths as well.

The fact that Bayer and Monsanto were allowed to merge blew my mind, and not in a good way. I guess we should just accept that we're ****ed and playing video games until we drop doesn't sound so bad as a way of getting away from reality, so EA (and the rest of them) better not mess with my video games too!

Which is weird because most modern devices stop being usable once they are due for replacement (according to the manufacturer, aka the second your warranty is up), many get suspiciously slow all of a sudden (even if you reinstall them) or start suddenly wearing out quickly (proving it is another matter, of course). Not to mention that running anything unsupported that's connected to the internet is rather irresponsible in the first place as unpatched Androids, for example, are about as secure as going online with Windows 98 (probably even less secure as no sensible person that didn't just drop out of a time capsule is still looking for Win 98 systems to hack). Honestly legislation really needs to catch up when it comes to manufacturers' responsibilities security patching their devices in the long run. Guess we'll need a botnet of ancient consoles, fridges, light bulbs and other smart home junk to DDOS the Pentagon or something before stuff will happen though. But I digress. But yeah, if they're aiming at "old devices" then unless those are old PCs (and PCs haven't been going "old" at anywhere near the rate of a decade ago, a well built 7 year old PC can still run current gen games at good quality with some updates, notably the graphics card) I have no idea who realistically is their target audience, especially given that areas with the networking to support Stadia aren't exactly the "poorer" places in the world, so keeping old stuff around is only really done by people like yours truly who object to this consumption/throwaway culture on principle and still expect the stuff they buy to last.

Not to mention they have a track record of just killing popular products because they themselves don't see the value anymore (Google Reader comes to mind). Since apparently you'll still have the buy the games at full price on top of a subscription I can see that being a risk many won't be willing to take. The argument that Steam might disappear as well doesn't fly here as Steam is Valve's main product, the only realistic way Steam would go away is when Valve goes bankrupt (and if you're worried about that, buy your stuff on Gog and backup your installers). There's of course the obvious issue that most of those streaming services are extremely fragmented. Want to watch this series? Well better subscribe to Amazon's offering, this other one? Yeah, Netflix. I even regularly run into music I can't get on Spotify (or that the crappy search function can't find so I have to resort to a regular search engine, but I digress...). So are we now going to get the same problem with games? Stadia exclusive games now that Epic has opened the gates to that sphere of hell? So we'll need 3 or so subscriptions to be able to play the games we want? Anyway, as it stands now I expect Stadia might be competing in the console space, as the latency there is already higher than on a well built PC (so much closer to Stadia) and, depending on the console, they're already used to paying an additional subscription on top of the games' purchase price. From that point of view, if Google maintains a subscription price in the range of the Xbox/PlayStation offerings but with PC pricing on the games they might have a very viable way in.

Yup, no non-Epic Lemurian that I've found and I'm pretty sure that after my wholesale genocide of their race I'd have found it by now if it existed But I did notice there being a difference between the different tiers (normal, exceptional and flawless) as far as temperature resistance went, hence the question. On the topic of Lemurians (and to stay on topic): I made it to the end (after going back out and stuffing my inventory with water breathing potions), that is, I beat the final boss. But holy hell, was this place hard. Thankfully you don't need to beat everything in there to progress, so selectively killing bosses (or bypassing them) works (and I couldn't have brought enough healing items to do it in one go anyway...) Having a sandstorm hit while I was fighting one of the bosses was a rather interesting (and nasty) surprise, I mean, being under water and all that...

Wow, congratulations! Nice to know the Frost Giants are easy, I've shied away from dealing with them thus far. On a RP level, I think I wouldn't remove the bracelet and just keep the Keystone around, knowing that I can remove it should I so choose, because removing it would remove your ability to use the Map Room, which is kind of neat way to get around. You'd also lose the ability to understand any language, which might be a tad annoying to keep your Thralls in check On the cold damage front, do you have the Flawless Epic version of the Royal Lemurian Armor? I've so far managed to go pretty much everywhere in that without taking damage (at least no amounts that I noticed). The Lemurian T4 Armorer (Fia) is rather common in my experience (I have 4 as Thralls and killed another 2 so far, still no Blacksmith though), so might be worthwhile to get one.

"I am fire. I am ... death" "I have poison arrows!"

That's only really been a problem since games made it more convenient to level as tank by upping their damage, and adding multispec. That and communities getting bigger, or rather, there not really being much of one anymore on a per server basis. Basically in the pre-multispec WoW days you wouldn't blame the tank unless they were actually really, really bad (and then you'd likely try to get them to get better instead of raging at them). Getting on the blacklist of your servers' active tanks was a bad deal if you wanted to get into dungeon groups on a regular basis. Respeccing was costly and doing questing etc. as tank was horrendous , so tanks were relatively rare (source: leveled a paladin as tank during TBC. Basically ended up living inside of dungeons to do that. I was every leveling person's best friend for some reason, must've been my fabulous personality ;)) and many of the good or well geared ones didn't really deal with PUGs, so finding one of those and staying on their good side was kind of important. Tbh I feel in general people we just more patient/nicer "in those days". I think smaller communities tended to help against toxicity as you were bound to run into the same people over and over again, so being a jerk tended to backfire more often than not (I heard of people moving servers because nobody wanted to deal with them anymore) As to raids/operations being a job, it's more like playing cards with your friends every Thursday. Or playing football, or whatever. There's clans/guilds that make it feel like a job, those are the bad ones. Of course, as with all things in life, finding a guild with a good attitude is hard. As is maintaining such a guild, so they tend to be rather rare.

The cave that's almost underneath my main base that I only found like 200hours in... (is supposed to get an overhaul in the next content patch I heard): I started building my first base below a rock arch, now I've started building a palace on top of said arch and it turns out the beam from my Set shrine aligns almost perfectly with the main entryway. It is a sign from Set! Bring more prisoners, sacrifices need to be made! (and no, I really did not plan for this, at all) The epic version of the Royal Lemurian Armor provides enough cold resistance (makes total sense, less clothing = more hotness, so more cold resistance...) to survive in the North, so I've been exploring around there. Explored east side and re-visited the Mounds of the Dead (this time I managed to get an acceptable framerate) and made it all the way North on the West end of the map (did not mess with the Frost giant place though, though I talked philosophy with one), after that I explored the center, ended up in the Black Keep (see Keyrock's screenshots ) that I managed to clear in two goes (first attempt my weapon broke and I didn't have a spare, second time I had to resort to using a sword I looted to fight the boss as my Pike just wasn't working, really needed a shield for this guy) and then moved on exploring East, where I found these beauties, loads of them: Eventually ended up circling all around the edge on the East side and by accident found a way into the Volcano (fell down a ledge into a loading screen, which saved me...), I quickly started overheating (kinda didn't bring a heat resistance armor set as I didn't expect to go to the Volcano) but noticed the entrance I found was right across an obelisk, so I stripped down and made a beeline for it Then decided to mess with some NPCs fighting a boss, the combination of the Heatstroke and fighting tough NPCs kinda did me in so I got an express ticket home

Thanks for the heads up, Borderlands DLC also on a steep sale on Steam so I used this opportunity to just grab everything (can't go wrong for the less than 1.5euro it cost me to complete my DLC collection...)

It depends on the spawnpoint, but if multiple tiers of NPCs spawn there the likelihood of a named being able to spawn there as well is rather high, at least in my experience. Of course, there's a big difference between a spawnpoint that can spawn "any craftsman" vs one that can spawn "any armorer", though in practice I tend to just murder any camp I come across and just nab the T4s when I see them Lemurians are nice in that regard as there's only a very very small area where they appear so anything that's not a Purge-only NPC will spawn there. So I just set up a few Wheels of Pain outside there and raid those camps whenever I feel like it. There being gold in them shipwrecks there is a nice bonus. Btw, can I add Rhinos to the list of enemies that are horrible to fight? I tend to get "stuck" in them (can only dodge backwards, but not sidewards, which due to their charge is...not ideal) From what I've read that armor did get toned down quite a bit (aka. nerfed). It's probably still very good, and might still be the best in the game, but it's no longer as good as older posts would lead you to believe. I'm still not entirely sure how the heat resistance thing works, do the bars on your "Stats" page count? Or do you have to look at the individual armor pieces? In the first case some Flawless Epic versions of other armors should be suitable as well (eg. the normal Light set or Darfari.) So yeah, did some more resource gathering around my base, found a cave filled with crystal pretty much underneath my base that I've managed to miss all this time. That was rather...errr...embarassing... My crafting terrace is getting close to a finished state, so it might be worthy of some screenshots soon. Wonder if I can pull the amount of foundations I've used in this project from the savegame, I'm betting on it being very close to a 1000 T3 foundations (note: it's 1122 according to the magic I worked on my savefile). My smelters have been busy, hehe. That's also where a 2nd character comes in handy, while I'm playing that one, in the same save, time keeps running, so crafting still progresses for my "main" character, it's been especially great to address my Ichor shortage, since traps etc. only progress while your game is running I never had a lot of fish in my fish traps. Now I have loads upon loads. It's great! What was less great is that I ran into the infamous "disappearing shrine" bug. I upgraded my Shrine on my second character (from T1 to T2) only to have it vanish (along with everything that was on it). That was...nasty. Apparently it's common when you build Shrines inside so I guess I better prepare for the upgrade to T3 to go badly as well. Since I wasn't really feeling like tearing down half the building for a bug I just admin spawned a new one. Still lost everything that was on it though, annoying.

Nice, I think I only have one part of the Heart of the Sand (from the Croc), got the mask as well, poking her with a weapon with some range (I used an Ancient Javelin) using light armor (dodge distance is underrated) makes it fairly doable to stay out of her range. Some nice looking armor recipes as reward for that fight too. I've been mostly building my capital (which is basically my starting location still) with the occasional expedition. I've also survived two more Purges (both were Exiles) and managed to snatch 4 T4 purge-only thralls from those: Kheral the Tanner (tanner, surprising, right?) Hena the Survivor (fighter) Shala the Lust-slaker (arch priest, you get one guess as to for which god), this one was a really nice surprise. Grigg of the Desert (archer) As far as I can tell there's three T4 thralls per Purge, so I missed one each time (no idea which one it was on the first, but a T4 figher got killed by my guards second time around) I've been farming me some Lemurian Thralls, got quite a few T4 ones that way (among with 2 Armorers, yay!) and I managed to snatch a Set T4 named priest from Sepermeru (damn those Sepermeru guys are tanky). Accidentally ended up in the mines outside Sepermeru and got to fight the scorpion king (random spawn, I think) and queen back-to-back. Not particularly enjoyable to fight those. It just takes forever (I got respawns while fighting the queen...), and especially the king has nasty range on his attacks and his telegraphing is a lot less obvious than the queen's (needed 9 Aloe potions for the king, none for the queen). Tried to move north but the undead area made me turn around, they're so annoying to fight, I really need to figure out a technique that works and isn't overly tedious. I also found a tool that allows you to have multiple characters in a single player game (Mikey's Toolbox, also allows you to backup and/or juggle save games) it's pretty nice and confirmed my suspicion that in single player your starting location is random. Also if you die and go back to the desert you end up at a random location (not necessarily the one you started from), so I guess that can be (ab)used if you don't like your starting location. Anyway, made a beeline to Sepermeru and set up shop right outside on this character, been farming the chests there (hostile NPCs are not really an issue as you can just climb away from them) while nabbing thralls from the Darfari camps to the south. I also found the Set T4 priest again in Sepermeru, I had always assumed named NPCs had a fixed appearance, but this time he, was a she, so I guess they're randomly generated after all? Or at least some of them are... (my two named Lemurian Armorers look pretty alike...), didn't mess with her (and her friends) on this character though.

Most games still don't utilize the multiple cores of modern CPUs all that effectively as far as I can tell (my ancient first gen i7 doesn't get to really sweat all that often), meaning that a CPU with less, but faster, cores would appear to generally still work better than one with more, but slightly slower, cores.

Yup, my CPU is from 2010, so slightly younger than yours, but not by much. Did upgrade GPU in the meantime though, because it wouldn't run The Witcher 3 at all with what was in there initially... Currently I have the impression I/O busses are starting to be a limiting factor. On another note: Shenmue 3 turned on its backers and decided to go Epic exclusive despite prior promises. Another nail in Kickstarter's coffin.

No pre-order bonus bollocks for Cyberpunk. Heh, now I'm even tempted to preorder Minimum system requirements still to be announced tho (at least they're not on Gog), which is the thing that worries me the most about the game, to be honest... As for Bethesda, I don't get all the hate the engine gets, the engine isn't the problem, it's just a piece of software that can be refactored, the problem is Bethesda's engine programmers appear to not be up to snuff, changing engines won't help with that, I'm afraid.

Well, we also know what Swen has said in interviews, how that will translate to the final game is anyone's guess, of course, but it seems that he is trying to avoid BG3 being considered a direct successor, which is odd as they could have called it "BG: The White Dog" (I'm so witty it hurts), and gotten a free pass on that front, but for some as of yet unknown reason they chose not to do so and name it BG3 instead.

No, I meant the unreleased one (due out October) Swen referred to in the interview and which is the reason he won't say more about the story at this point. You missed one, fledgling.

So, Destiny 2 is: going (partially?) F2P, iiuc year 1 content will be F2P, which if I'm not mistaken means the base game. coming to Steam (and Google Stadia), alas not Gog doing away with lootboxes doing away with PS4 exclusives adding cross-play between all their platforms (this needn't be a positive, for Warframe it's mostly been a negative when they tried it as the certification process for consoles makes it impossible to respond to issues quickly, which was a huge issue during the first, and very badly received, iteration of their "Nightwave" battle-pass-thing) having a new expansion (which still costs money, hence the partially f2p) Laymen video: Nice touch to end a Destiny 2 video with Warframe's Fortuna song

Isn't that the module Larian mention in the article as their BG3 being a direct continuation of?

From the article: I thought BG2 was easy to learn, albeit hard to master. It having been my first RPG I had no trouble finishing the game without external help (which was good since I had no internet), something I cannot say from D:OS where I already got a headache at character creation (in a manner of speaking) Also from the article: Coming from the creators of D:OS1&2 I find that statement worrying. The type of challenge offered by those games was entirely different from what I experienced in BG2 (much more frustration in D:OS) and I rather have it stays in D:OS. Big focus on multi-player might suggest TB, which would really suck (for a BG game) So how does it compare to AD&D in BG2 (which I thought to be nice and simple) or what we got in NWN1/2 (where I found character creation to be an overcomplicated mess)

Swen already made it very clear what the thinks of exclusives, and unlike a bunch of others I expect him to stick to his principles. (as far as I know they've always delivered on their Kickstarter promises, despite sometimes rather major bumps (*cough* Linux *cough*), unlike many many others who just canned promises when things got rough)

Welp, hard to get hyped about this after all this time. The Saga was complete, after all, so I can't help but feel that this is just cashing in on the cult following this series has garnered over the years (not necessarily by Larian though...) Doesn't mean it can't turn out to be a great game, but tying it to the Baldur's Gate name sets extremely high expectations as far as I am concerned (BG2 is still the standard I measure all my cRPGs to and none have since matched it, in my eyes) But we'll see, we know nothing about the game right now (except that something called Baldur's Gate 3 is being made by Larian) but I find it hard to get excited ("dread" is a more apt description) and have a very hard time wrapping my head around the amount of hype the trailer is receiving. Companies have been trying to match BG2 for years (including people actually involved with the original), and none so far have succeeded to recreate the magic, the best "modern take" on a "BG3" is still DA:O, in my book, and that might be saying something (it's also been a while...) Anyway, I would have preferred Divinity 3 (not Original Sin 3), but we get what we get...

Installed some mods to avoid going crazy from some of the building limitations, so figured I might as well go over my (short) mod list and explain what they do: Pippi : mod to manage servers, allows setting up teleports etc. Only reason I have it is because it allows you to edit your character without starting over, picked this one because it's popular enough that it won't go away anytime soon. SP_Boss_HP: knocks boss HP down to sane levels for single player, only touches boss hp, so they'll still hurt like before Pythagoras Support Beams: ran into a whole lot of issues with stability that could have been solved by the vanilla support beams if the devs hadn't removed their stability transfer. This mod has the ability to be game breaking though as it transfers 100% of the stability. So I try to avoid it unless there really are no other options, well, besides starting over from scratch (the beams also aren't particularly pretty, so there's that too) Less Building Placement Restrictions - No NPC Camps (I switch between the normal and the Overlaps Edition): fixes a whole slew of issues with the building system, where the game wouldn't let you put stuff for no reason (eg. if you do it in a different order it does work). Doesn't fix everything, but god is this thing a QoL improvement. The overlaps edition also allows you to put stuff on top of each other, this is a godsend if you want to replace things (say you have a floor under a carefully positioned Wheel of Pain you'd like to be a foundation instead. The game will let you remove the floor just fine without destroying the Wheel, but it won't let you place the foundation (or, for that matter, re-place the floor) without removing and re-placing the Wheel, this mod allows you to do just that. And it allows for stuff like this for which there otherwise is no solution: While waiting for materials to be done I went exploring and found this fancy room: Wonder if this room's empty... My tower is nearing completion (at least the outside), if The Architect sounds like a Matrix reference there might be spoiler in the following screenshots. Put on the final roofing and took screenshot from the direction of the Aqueduct (but not from the Aqueduct because draw distance meant none of the lights were visible) Other angles, going around clockwise:

Just pointing out that bits do actually jiggle/dangle by default, though the defaults for the fairer sex are rather subtle, as far as games are concerned anyway (no breasts flopping about from a stiff breeze). Though "the trunk" doesn't "move", afaik.

People have been asking for a conclusion to the original Divinity as well, which would be Divinity 3. I kinda liked D2: DKS so I wouldn't mind that at all (probably rather have D3 over BG3 to be honest)