majestic

That's just the thing, there's nothing to pre-order. There's Early Access Grounded and Avowed which was just recently revealed.

Well... no. The game gives no indication as to what is happening, and it's not a quest. Just something that happens if you stumble into something that involves a tetradrachm, a defective toaster and a mysterious cave. "You uncovered the darkest of conspiracies." is just the achievement name you unlock when you find it. Which most people probably will not because it involves keeping an AI controller wet paper towel NPC alive for a long stretch of the game (or through some serious side questing).

I... uncovered the darkest of conspiracies in Wasteland 3. This game is so weird at times.

Ye pure shouldn't hae lit that damned connle.

Nah, I think he's actually trying to say that European women like Arab men because of their superior virility. That's some serious Beta cuck talk there. I'm not sure that's accurate though, that usually comes up when talking about the superiority of big black... male chickens. But eh. Maybe BBCs for Amuricans and Arabs are for Europe. Although technically they're North African, so maybe... who knows. Brown is brown. Also something, something Coudenhove-Kalergi plan, something. I hope @Azdeus will come along and post, because finding actual information on that Arab Party in Sweden is kind of hard. There's an article in a German online Nazi magazine and one from Russia Today, both extolling the Arab Party for demanding an immediate immigration stop in Sweden (especially from Arabic nations) and something or other about 80 something places in Sweden where the muslim invaders already established Islamic law.

It's midnight and there's a ruckus outside. Seriously, what do I live in a gentrified suburb for?

I'm pretty sure that @213374U is just laughing his butt off when the right wing brigade comes stomping in and demands government sanctions of private enterprise because they excercise the very freedoms they're usually arguing for (i.e. as long as it fits their narrative and said freedoms are not used to further some Jonesian conspiracy). Hence the "start your own platform" argument. I sure did. That doesn't mean I disagree. Doesn't happen very often but I think Skarpen's got a point here, apart from calling it an Orwellian nightmare, those were very much of an authoritarian government nature. The large tech players have undue influence and too much power. And yes, the government(s) should do something about it. They probably won't because money, but they should. Thanks, Obama! Right? edit: Wow, look at that @ callout not working. Hell... whatever. Ah, now it does. GG board software.

No, you don't. Gorth is Danish and simply migrated to Australia for the second time or so (not sure, he's zipping around the globe faster than other people are changing underpants).

Fights in Wasteland 3 are beginning to be a strange combination of RNGesus hates me. It's entirely possible to have a party wipe, then reload, do the exact same thing (or near as) and come out unscathed. Deployable turrets also seem to be really strong in the beginning of the game. Enemies really hate the things but can barely touch them and they deal some goodly damage as well. Especially with the mechanic perks. Also not sure if it is a bug or intentional, but there's a small arms perk called Draw! that allows for a free shot after reloading, but it's not actually limited to small arms. It also works with rocket launchers, effectively reducing the AP for firing to three per shot. Rocket spam! So go and grab some explosives skill on your small arms characters while it lasts.

Fun, random and useless fact of the day, I'm allergic to paracetamol. Got it once while I had lateral pharyngitis as accompanying pain medication. Spent most of the day feeling like dying (I mean, being sick is exacerbated in severity by being male :p), lying in bed and I'd only get up to take my meds and eat something easily swallowable, then lie back down and continue to feel like dying. I only noticed that it wasn't just the disease after I started waking up and feeling a lot better and getting worse again after swallowing the pills. Turns out that very rare side effects of paracetamol are swelling of the vocal cords and sore throat. Go figure.

I'm thinking about restarting and playing more of a law and order style game.

The save files also seem to have hash information and two file size values. If you play around with the files you might get... dunno, some sort of weird crap from the game when it realizes during loading that the save's been tampered with.

The third season of BSG was really marred by how obvious it was that the writers had no idea what to do with the show after exhausting whatever creative ideas they have had in the first two seasons and the opening of season three on New Caprica, which I would say ranks very high among the finest hours of sci-fi on TV. Afterwards the show fell into a hole of meh and finished the season with the most ridiculous revelation/plot twist in the history of ever. After that not even the ending of the show was a letdown, although it rivaled the nonsense ending of Mass Effect 3.

I may have invested too much into weapon skills too early. Not on more than one per character, but it really so far doesn't look like the party needs to push for high weapon skills that soon. I'm generally at level 6 or 7 but that does not seem to make much difference. It's not like you find weapons requiring that much at this point in the game. Still thinking about restarting. I'm not that far into the game yet and with a bit of meta information from the beginning it might be a bunch easier to construct characters that can handle what the game throws at them, check wise. Not sure yet.

I just searched for "does Covid-19 cause heart disease" and found pretty much a number of articles, including a scathing take down article on Russia Today (although admittedly on duckduckgo, not on google). https://cardiovascularnews.com/frankfurt-study-finds-high-rate-of-cardiac-complications-in-recovered-covid-19-patients/ Looks like the numbers of the study were off due to mistakes that should have been caught even before the first draft: https://www.tctmd.com/news/message-unchanged-say-researchers-criticized-covid-19-cmr-study Anyhow, while the original authors stand by their conclusions it's certainly not nearly as clear cut as the original paper suggested. Science at work, I guess. I mean, except for the objections you raised anyway about pre-prints being used to make decisions due to the nature of the pandemic and the media making a fuzz as if even a mild case of Covid-19 will kill you in the future (as if all instances of myocarditis end deadly or cause permanent heart damage). So, yes, flawed study by the looks of it, causing a media spectacle. As to why, anyone's guess as good as mine. Terror inspiring conspiracies, malice, greed... wanting some more clicks, leftist media attacks on our freedom, pick one. Personally I'd go with being greedy for clicks and headlines like "Corona is going to kill us all through cardiac arrest" are perfect in this day and age, yes? The conclusions of this study might shock you. Picture #5 is amazing!

Five seconds of google-fu says they MRI'ed 100 asymptomatic patients who tested positive for this study and found more than half of them (60%) having myocarditits. You don't need to study Covid-19 to know that having myocarditits can lead to long term heart problems. Covid-19 seems to cause a precursor condition for future heart damage or failure, therefore the statement "Covid-19 leads to long term heart problems" might appear to be sweeping and hyperbolic, but it's a logically sound conclusion given the data available. Whether or not the sample size was enough or one study enough to draw a definitive conclusion is an entirely different matter. But based on the data available there's at the very least an extremely strong correlation, and as it always is with health issues, it's probably better to err on the side of caution... I mean, sure, we could also have a study of Wakefieldish fakeness here, but meh. That's what peer reviews are for.

Given the file size of the save games I'm assuming that is some form of compression. I'm not sure that was such a good idea on inXile's part. I read a few posts about wrap around troubles with variables, like people suddenly having a negative 90% crit chance and fun stuff like that. Would be easily fixable with regular XML files. Kingmaker had easily editable save games (albeit terribly large ones) and that allowed me to actuall finish the game. I would have been stuck at a non-firing event at some point without the ability to simply set a new event date. Well "simply" as it is, but anyway. I'm sure someone will figure it out. Sooner than later. Also it seems I was wrong about combat always starting for the enemy. They all just seem to have ridiculous initiative values. Kind of love the humor in the game, and the item descriptions. "Goes pew pew pew when fired" for laser pistols and "It's a motherf'ing laser shotgun. What else could you want?" xD

Well you can't fail checks because you can't even try (in dialogues or with interactions), but the game tells you there is a dialogue option you can't pick, like in Pillars of Eternity. Based on the skills you bring you can solve quests in different ways. But at least Pillars had the good sense to often lock those options behind your character's race and background or give you multiple skills that work towards the same end. So no, so far there's no real branching from failed skill checks. If you don't bring the necessary skills you're just hard locked into the default outcome, but that default outcome has a good deal of choices as well, and presumably, consequences later. What caused me to write this post is that along the initial quests you'll come across a Barter 6 check while interacting with Brian Fargo Faran Brygo. This is part of a side quest that ties into a main quest in terms of rewards (i.e. the sidequests outcome is an object of a multi object main quest) and according to the quest log that handily tells you what kind of level you should be it's meant to be done before you start exploring the world. The other irritating thing is how combat initiative works. When you see a group of enemies down the road you can approach them, set your party up (up until you reach detection range) and try to talk to them. Many of the dialogues so far just always lead to combat. That's fine, but talking to the enemies first will always give them the first turn. So the powergamery thing to do here is quicksave, look at the dialogue, find out if there's anything useful in it and if no, then reload and gain the iniative by shooting first and not asking questions later. edit: I just realized something - for everyone that doesn't know why Barter 6 is a problem for a level 3 or 4 party at this point in the game, it requires you to focus on building up the barter skill on one of your higher intelligence rangers almost to the exclusion of everything else. It's okay to bring a skill mule. A necessity even. But those really don't have Barter. Nope. Eh...

So far the technical issues of Wasteland 3 appear to be thankfully limited for me. I'm not sure the resetting camera zoom on events is a technical issue, it probably is a brain dead design decision. Whenever you talk to someone or an event happens the camera snap zooms up close, which isn't the issue, it just stays like that afterwards. Which is supremely annoying for me as I always play zoomed out to the max. My biggest issue is how the hard skill checks turned the game from a save scumming fest into a metagaming fest of the worst kind. I find myself on the cusp of running back and forth to my Ranger HQ to swap characters in and out of my squad simply to meet skill checks in dialogues. It's... ridiculous. Oh, I know I could simply accept that my squad can't handle every potential situation but that's the mindset of quitters (and my brain just doesn't work that way).

See, that's Hurl immediately disproving that he's an overeducated Gen-Xer. No refinement there folks. (and no offense meant, promise! Not against Hurlshot anyway. Baseball not so much. Or at all.)

They at least seem to have gotten the priorities straight. So far none of the Dragon Age games had a particularily strong central plot but - love them or hate them - more interesting character interactions and stories. Especially in the otherwise much and probably rightfully criticised Dragon Age 2. The game was marred by being an interactive cave simulator, content recycling and Anders suddenly being able to blow large buildings sky high. At the very least I'll be getting some entertainment value out of the culture war nutjobs who're going to show up with proof that Cassandra is a trans woman because someone modeled her with a male skull. And I be laffing then, all the time.

Guess that'll give me the final push that I needed to read the novels, so it's not all bad... yeah. Looks like I was one of two people on the planet that liked season two. But what do I know, I also loved watching Dark Matter and it got shafted hard.

Wait a bit, an inXile release has techincal issues? Say it ain't so, what's next, a buggy Obsidian game?

Your basic premise is wrong though. Since everyone is Eldar, Eldar also is of course SonicMage117 and ComradeMaster.

I'm curious to see if being part of Microsoft helped inXile's QA any. So instead of the entire endgame not working as intended maybe it'll work, eh, dunno. Half the time?