marelooke

Ahh, and here I was about to ask about The Purge, since the meter's almost at the first marker for me (my megalomaniac building tendencies might have something to do with that...) So yeah, now that I have some thralls, some decent armour and have sacrificed countless unbelievers (probably some believers as well, they should feel honoured) I felt powerful enough to do away with subtlety... I built a massive mess-hall/throne room next to my temple and added guard towers and a gate (I've since added stairs to the entryway): I like to think the view from the terrace isn't half bad: The area with the campfire at the bottom of the cliff is where I got killed the first time: View on my base from the humble cliffside housing I started off with: I've been exploring, mostly east, trying to find some good Thralls (archers to man my walls or craftsmen, mostly, especially looking for an armourer), but I ran into this sleeping...thing, and noped the hell outta there... I also ran into a boss croc (which promptly murdered the hell out of me) and a boss hyena (which I promptly ran away from) and I killed a boss turtle-thing by kiting it to my walls where my archers did their thing (need to figure out a way to keep mobs from getting right up to my walls, because that seems to confuse the AI) I also switched to medium armour for combat situations, still using the light for resource runs though. EDIT fwiw I play on normal and the only changes I made (so far) were halving crafting resource requirements and halving the time it takes to "break" Thralls. Interested to see what The Purge will bring...

Honestly I've doubled the speed at which Thralls break (I was just twiddling my thumbs waiting for it at some point, looked up the numbers and was like..."Errr, really? 8 hours of real time for a T4 Thrall?!") and halved material costs. Felt fair to me since the game is balanced around multiplayer (and mining rocks got kinda RSI-inducing, not even kidding). I considered halving XP gain too, but it's not as if I've been zooming through the levels so left that alone for now. I managed to acquire a bunch of Thralls now: 2 warriors, an archer, a cook and I'm breaking a Tier 2 Blacksmith now. First warrior was just an experiment I did to figure out how the mechanic worked before I attempted the second one which was the warrior that caused my first death (Holding grudges? Me?! Pffff!), the Archer I figured would be useful to man the walls. After those three I started actively looking for profession thralls, (warriors now end up with their hearts sacrificed to Seth and their hides turned into armour, for now), so first one I came across was the cook, then I got jumped by a couple, the husband was a warrior and ended on the altar, the wife was a Tier 2 Blacksmith and is enjoying the Wheel of Pain now Personally I've been dying a lot lately, it seems that as soon as I start bleeding I may as well prepare for a corpse run, nothing I've found appears to stop the effect and since taking damage cancels heals I can't even spam food, so RIP. Fighting someone with daggers means I need to do it close enough so I can get back in time from the corpse run to rip out their heart, flay them and nab the loot.

I might have meta-gamed the deity choice a bit (I assumed it was a permanent choice, it doesn't appear to be so though). Given how my main source of hides has been humans (hehe) Yog might have been a reasonable pick as well I'm pretty much directly opposite of that cave (assuming it's the one with the ghost lady running into it, got ambushed by two crocs bit further down so I heroically ran away), at the other side of the river. Iron has indeed been a pretty big pain to acquire but moving next to all the spiders isn't really appealing either. Need to get me some better weapons so I can just swat them and move around that area more freely. Or try to build a bridge so I can do away with the swimming across bit. Ah yes, I ran into a huge spider while I was trekking through the mountains, I decided to nope the hell out as well. Found a mega-croc next to a lake more to the west as well (left that one alone too, I'm such a hero ;)). So far everyone I've encountered has been hostile, so kinda avoiding humans until I can get some Thralls set up and some better weapons crafted (still using the stone stuff) Managed to craft me some Khitan light armor though: Went with light because I've been pretty good at getting into fights that are too tough and being able to run has saved my hide quite a few times already

Built my first house under a rock overhang I started out camping under: Figured easier access to the water below would be neat, so started building stairs, ended up building a bunch of houses in the cliff wall The gods need a proper temple (actually underestimated how much space those shrines required so stuff ended a bit bigger than initially planned...) Temple and initial house seen from up top (the cliff wall is behind the house Not sure how the location is from a gameplay point of view (mostly spent my time building ;)) but irl it would have been a nice hidden location (if we disregard the temple, hehe) since the cliff housing is hidden except when you look straight at it and the same goes for the initial house.

Conan Exiles is on sale on Steam right now. I might have bought it. I blame Keyrock.

Well, Warframe doesn't have lootboxes, although they did nerf XP gain some years ago, likely so they could keep booster sales up. Still, they just make stuff go faster and only affect XP and resources (not blueprints or anything else "desirable") so they're still mostly a skip-the-grind type of deal. That said, they do have randomly generated "mods" (basically stat-cards that you put on your gear) that are tradeable (sounds akin to Diablo 3's auction house, which I had no first hand experience with). They're gated behind multiple levels of randomness so getting a desirable one generally means trading with other players, which means acquiring and spending premium currency (which at some point obviously needs to be bought with real money, even if you get it by trading with others). Many players opposed them and the game is perfectly fine without them (so far), I expect that, should that even change many veterans will pack up and leave. They also charge stupendous amounts for user-created skins (Tennogen), I mean, 5-6 euros for a skin really no longer is a micro-transaction in my book. Still, you can just ignore those exist.

...I wouldn't dare! But the screenshot threads have been missing a certain something lately... I too can quit whenever I choose!

Wait, when did we start talking about Anthem? (I'll get my coat)

I've been collecting me some Wyrdstone... Gotta man up and finally get through that Sisters of Sigmar campaign (yups, still, my middle name might be "procrastination", maybe. I'll check, later.), but easing into it as I'm a wee bit rusty and I'd rather not wipe out my Warband at this point.

Making a note to figure out where Keyrock lives so I can plan my walking trips around that knowledge, literally Still playing Destiny 2 (with some Skyrim on the side), turns out the mission I thought was the end of the campaign (killed the "big bad" and all), well, wasn't. Unlocked an entirely new area now that I can explore, yay! On that note, I kinda like Destiny's setting (or at least the more grounded bits), this "post golden-age apocalypse" kinda does it for me, the combination of technology and archaeology is awesome when combined with the atmosphere, the feeling of nostalgia for what used to be, the lingering dreams of the inhabitants as to what could have been... A game in such a setting that allows us to just dig through stuff and uncover the stories of the places would be mint. I mean rather than deal with space magic and shoot bad guys I'd prefer to just stay on Titan and dig through the ruins of the floating cities, or the labs on Mars, or whatever is left of Earth... I'll accept that I'm just weird though, but a man can dream...

Finished up Destiny 2's Forsaken campaign, was good fun. Unfortunately the game's servers (or the game's networking code) appear to be terrible, disconnects are rampant and usually happen when the game tries to save state (iow it's not related to the P2P nature of matchmaking), like loot or mission progress. Having to redo 2 out of the 8 barons (which are solo things, so P2P doesn't even factor in) because the game bailed after beating the boss was...not enjoyable. Other than that trying to get better so I can keep up and contribute a bit more meaningfully in the Verdant Forest, unfortunately that event ends soon.

Resident Evil VII was on sale...

Turns out James Ohlen is now working for WotC in a new studio that is focusing on "creation of original IP outside the Magic the Gathering and D&D brands" (no BG3 here, folks). Pretty much no other information there but this could potentially be interesting. Source (linked at timestamp so you can skip the Epic bollocks):

Picked up my Shadow of the Tomb Raider playthrough. Story still hasn't grabbed me but some of the challenge tombs are fun at least.

Right, so after a day with the upgrade I have to come back to my point about the old "My activity" stream: it no longer appears to exist in this version, meaning I have to check all the threads I've replied to manually by just going through all the forums, which is rather inconvenient, to say the least. The "Profile" lists all threads a user has replied to, much like the old "My activity" that also was under profile, unfortunately it does not tell you which ones have replies. The activity streams just give you a stream (or flood, rather) of all the replies to threads you've subscribed to, if there's any large volume threads you've subscribed to that feature is just entirely useless. If there is a way to just see subscribed threads and whether there are new replies or not, then please point me to it, if not then at least for me, that is a major loss of functionality.

Sword in the stone Eep! Move over Lara, this tomb needs raiding! Dark places EDIT123532523412312: still doesn't show up in Firefox, works fine in Chrome, no more whining about insecure content on a secure website though so probably just Firefox being derpy. I must say adding that 's' to "http" was quite the nightmarish endeavour in the new UI.

Since Thin Bloods are counted as a clan that means there's another clan from VtMB that won't make the cut for initial release. Alas.

Looks spiffy. Upgrade seems to have gone smoothly as well, nice job! So on to the remarks: Another vote to get BBCode mode back EDIT: editing images is practically impossible in the new UI, something as simple as modifying the URL turned into an ordeal that almost made debugging multi-threaded code seem like fun, comparatively. Any way to get the "Content I Follow" in a more convenient location? This 2 level AJAX menu is kind of...annoying for regular use. Eg. back under the "My activity" in the Profile menu would be nice (and back to where it used to be before the upgrade), but just putting in the menu bar would be nice too. EDIT: looks like it might still be under "Profile" just that threads from before the upgrade didn't carry over?

Yeah, Andromeda's main problem was clearly bad project management more than anything, they had more than enough time if they used it well. It's a massive game (as is DAI), but there isn't enough to hold interest. The fps gameplay is actually pretty good but it's hard to see how the RPG systems would have worked well on any other engine either, they're kind of disjointed in a way that suggests people were developing systems and even planetary narrative in isolation; and the characters, plot and antagonists being so poor is 100% not due to the engine. Plus despite Andromeda following DAI and theoretically having extra time to work out any kinks DAI was a far more consistent end product. Bad project management seems to have be Bioware's ongoing problem too given Anthem and DA4 clearly have had or are having a lot of problems too with development being rebooted. Supposedly they weren't forced to use Frostbite. ISTR they had to use the same engine for DAI and Andromeda but it didn't have to be Frostbite. Clearly the engine wasn't the sole problem, although at least in Anthem's case it seems the original concepts they had went out of the window because they couldn't get them to work in Frostbite. Which doesn't mean it's impossible, but something being possible means very little when you don't have people on staff that can make it happen. What I do have difficulty believing is the "they were not forced to use it" line. While sure, technically they probably weren't forced to, as in, nobody put a gun to their head nor do I consider it very likely they were outright told they "must" use Frostbite. But if a big corporation publicly states they want to standardize on something... then yeah, it's generally not a good idea to diverge from that, especially if you're a very visible part of said corporation, like BioWare is. EA management: "Hai guys, we're going to standardize on Frostbite which is this awesome engine that can do anything we want it to and doing so will save us tons of money, because we no longer have to pay royalties to outside parties!" Investors: "Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!" BioWare management: "Yeah, that's nice and all but that engine won't really work for us, we'll use something else instead." Investors: *confused faces* EA management: *very angry glares in the direction of BioWare management*

I though this quote from the Kotaku article summed it up nicely: On top of that its tooling is apparently seriously sub-par when compared to the competition and it takes ages to render something before you can test to know whether it actually worked. Add to the above that the thing wasn't built for the kinds of stuff BioWare has been trying to use it for. It doesn't support third person, for example, that's something BioWare had to hack in, with barely any support from the Frostbite team from the sounds of it. It also couldn't handle the map sizes of DA:I and I'm sure someone at BioWare has a very very long list of other things the engine didn't support that are basic requirements for what BioWare was trying to do. It might be a good engine, but if you use a tool for something its not designed for you're just setting yourself up for a lot of hurt. tl;dr: Frostbite + BioWare = round peg, square hole.

In a very real sense the video games industry seems over-saturated. Eh, if you remove all the exclusives that list might quickly become pretty manageable I'd expect, especially with the backlog I've managed to build up. Unfortunately. There's not many good MMOs around (and many of the ones that are/were decent are suffering from massive neglect and/or being sold to F2P cashgrab companies) and innovation is absolutely nowhere to be found in the genre. Barring a very few exceptions they're all just WoW clones in some form or other and WoW was already a dumbed down clone of what came before.

Honestly, the initial vision for the game sounded pretty neat. Closer to Monster Hunter World than the Destiny clone we got now. Bit of a shame that one of the major reasons it didn't get made was because the engine foisted onto BioWare just couldn't handle it (that and keeping it engaging over longer periods of time). Unless they somehow manage to modularize that engine so they can basically have multiple engines with the same underlying technology Frostbite is just going to stay the Achilles heel of EA, and probably ends up costing them way more than just licensing an engine that's actually fit for the task ever would. But it looks like a saving, on paper at least, just like outsourcing everything...

Well played Right in the feels, ouch... On that note are there any exclusives by company that tend to publish actual sales numbers? I'd be really interested to see the impact (even though financially their sugar daddy covers them so the publishers/developers won't feel it, at least not in their pockets). Note that the 2.5 times LL "numbers" from Epic are meaningless marketing bs since we don't have actual sales numbers for LL. Do we know if those 2,5 mils might potentially include the Steam pre-orders or is it explicitly Epic only? It's not 2,5 million copies. It's 2.5 times the amount Last Light sold. Given how LL was, at the time, arguably even more niche than The Witcher 2 and there was a bunch of negativity around the day one difficulty DLC I very much doubt 2.5times that number is anywhere close to 2.5million copies (in fact, 2.5million would be beating out The Witcher 3's PC sales in that same period, which I would consider extremely unlikely). To quote a thought exercise I did a little while ago: But, as noted: extrapolations on top of assumptions (I should note I've also been rather generous towards Exodus in the above). Hence why I'd very much be interested in an Epic exclusive company that provides actual sales numbers (I doubt there are any, but one can hope someone comes up with something ).

Well, Borderlands 3 will include xp and loot boosters in the "deluxe" and up editions (going up to a ridiculous 250 USD edition). Going to assume these will be purchasable with real money as well and until reviews roll in proving otherwise I'm just going to assume the grind is tuned to sell those things to people. Guess there should have been more outrage about the practice AC:O after all. If the Epic thing wasn't enough reason to hold off (and the fact that I never managed to finish Borderlands 2, ) this on its own would definitely be enough reason for me to toss this game onto the "wait-and-see" pile. Inside Gaming link for reference:

Well played Right in the feels, ouch... On that note are there any exclusives by company that tend to publish actual sales numbers? I'd be really interested to see the impact (even though financially their sugar daddy covers them so the publishers/developers won't feel it, at least not in their pockets). Note that the 2.5 times LL "numbers" from Epic are meaningless marketing bs since we don't have actual sales numbers for LL.