majestic

Watched After Life on Netflix. Language warning, lots of cursing: Well worth a watch. Bloody fantastic, actually. Final episode gets a bit too sappy perhaps.

It's simple, BruceVC is posting a little more in WOT. It's hard to get in character for two really similar but somewhat different personas so he's sticking to one over the other for a while. Or he's doing the method acting version of trolling.

Obviously, but only if you had the real version, not the lame censored one.

Assuming that information about the deal is the real, eh, deal. I can absolutely understand Snapshot's/Julian's decision. It keeps his people employed, the investors happy, even if the sales are virtual, and takes pressure off the development team. As good ol' Adolf once said: "There is but one moment when the Goddess of Fortune wafts by, and if you don't grab her then by the hem you won't get a second chance." It's still unfair to backers and those who pre-ordered for a certain platform. I still don't like it. Understanding it helps a bit, though. Plus I don't need to back or by any future Snapshot games. And at the end of the day Malcador's right: All that will be forgotten, like tears in the rain, by the time the game's released.

You get different ending slides and depending on how your game goes taking one over the other might leave you without a Councillor for a while.

Lessons learned: Just don't scale stats. It's annoying anyway and it really is okay if a level 3 player with super low level weapons can't compete in high level dungeons. Really. Le sigh.

They have clearly stated on the Phoenix Point website that backers will get the Epic Store key and then, after a year also a choice of either Steam or GOG. https://phoenixpoint.info/epicfaq?_ga=2.50455979.366310557.1552422198-21793489.1539077113 Heh. That passage: Wasn't there yesterday when I posted. That pretty much means they can keep my pledge and I'll just sit it out. It'll probably take them a year to work out the kinks anyway. As stated above - Snapshot giving out keys on other promised platforms, only later, is a newish addendum to their FAQ. They already backpedalled on that. Of course I didn't save the text but yesterday the FAQ read "I'm sorry if we lost you during this move, you can request a refund", I'm pretty sure the option to sit out the exclusivity period was added as a quick fix to all the complaining. Or all he refunding. Which means poor Julian underestimated the reaction to his revelation. The crowdfunding, uhm, crowd can be pretty anal about this. Grim Dawn only appeared on GOG after a lot of people complained to Crate that they still haven't delivered on their DRM free promise where the lead dev later popped onto the forum and explained that the thought the issue would be through with not having DRM on Steam and that he doesn't quite understand why Steam's the devil in these people's minds. I can only assume Epic is going to cover a lot. Regardless of it being the new hot thing on the market or not, the move is a risk for an indie game 40% funded by investors wanting to see at least some RoI (and Fig*'s flagship project Deadfire already tanked in that department). Limiting sales, possibly drastically, only makes sense if Snapshot blew the money and are hurting for more. Of course I know that Epic is trying to diversify, but Phoenix Point seems like a really bad choice. It's a niche game in an already niche market that most people only care about because XCOM was a hit for some reason. *Speaking of Fig, I presume that idea is finished. Deadfire sales didn't live up, Microsoft bought half their advisory board and now one of their better received campaigns is making exclusivity deals after the fact.

Okay, so what the hell? Well, now I've got 28 days to decide. Since there's no way for a backer to wait for a key on some other platform I'm leaning towards a refund. The other option I'm thinking about is something I can't post here, but it involves letting them keep my pledge and getting the game through some, uhm, different means of distribution. I don't get why. I assume it's about money, of course, but what are the parties getting here? Epic gets a game that the teenage wangsters on Fortnite wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole and Snapshot Games puts a game on Epic's store that nobody is going to buy there. Neither the backers nor the investors on Fig can't be happy with this move. I for sure am not.

He also got chased by Trent Reznor:

I feel arse. Got all the symptoms of lateral pharyngitis and a cold. Fun times. Will visit the doc tomorrow. It's been four or five years since my last sickleave, time to get someting out of my insurance.

While Kalameet isn't he boss that I needed the most tries for it was definitely the hardest boss in Dark Souls. That seems like a contradiction but that dubious honor goes to Bed of Chaos. Wait, what did you look at? Absolute Radiance? Or the way to get to her? Both? I'm currently stuck in the Pantheon of Hollownest. Individually the bosses aren't that much of an issue, but fighting them for 30+ minutes takes a good deal of concentration and more than a few tries are barely possible to get in before I start getting tired. Not sure who thought this was a good idea.

Wait didn't we already establish that they're working on a sea shanty singing Clippy addon to Microsoft Office?

Yea, I did. Godhome has heavily beefed up versions of the Hollow Knight and The Radiance, a few new bosses and increased challenges for the old ones.

It would help if fighting her wouldn't mean having to go through the Hollow Knight each and every time. Keep trying, it only gets worse from here on. Much worse.

Bernd is probably the most hilarious kid show character ever created.

Because it's popular to bash Anthem at the moment. Oh, wait, you were talking about the bug. That's an issue with level 1 weapon damage scaling in general, not a problem with the level 1 Defender rifle. The scaling breaks when you equip a level 1 weapon. It's a very Biowarey* bug like on hit effect stacking in Dragon Age: Inquistion where two +5 guard on hit mastercrafting boni would not stack but a +5 and a +4 would give you 9 guard on hit. As for how and why this wasn't caught earlier, well, nobody plays more than one mission with these weapons equipped, and that's literally the first one you do. After that you can only unlock Javelins when reaching certain level thresholds and by then you're swimming in supposedly better weapons and the numbers that pop up when shooting stuff get steadily higher, so you don't notice. It was caught by a theorycrafter trying to figure out how damage is calculated. Which is why they attempted to play with a bonusless level 1 Defender for a baseline comparison. Which is something you don't have to do as internal tester. *Could easily have happened to Blizzard as well. WoW was and probably still is riddled with issues like that. Good old times when you had to farm a level 45 dungeon for blue gear that was better for certain builds (or encounters) than the epic loot you got from level 60 raids. Diablo 2 still has tooltips that are about as accurate as an astrology reading. No hate mob around back then though.

We've been using software for character generation* and rules lawyering for a while now, the actual playing is happening quite traditionally. Pencil, paper, proper dice. *Especially for 4E. Can't imagine not printing skill cards. Haven't tried 5E yet though.

Why would you not play a shooter on KB+M, peasant? edit: Anthem effectively killing PS4s is probably in the same ballpark as the Switch dock scratching the console. People confusing cause and effect, in other words that PS4 would probably have died soon even without Anthem and people scratching their Switch consoles in the Ninendo dock are most likely spastics. The crashing I'll buy immediately - console games are nowhere near as stable as they used to be and the technical underpinning of Anthem doesn't seem to be that awesome (and that it apparently hangs and freezes during matchmaking is telling). Still takes two to tango, Sony isn't entirely without blame here either.

Well that's easy: Real time stealth matrix.

I watched Behind the Curve recently. I'd recommend giving it a try. It deals by far and large with the flat earth community, not the theory itself. That they do debunk very well on their own, aside from the video already linked they've also acquired a 20k $ laser gyroscope to prove that the Earth doesn't rotate. Guess what? It does. 15° per hour. Who would have thought? edit: The documentry has a single standout moment that's not linked to flat earth theory in itself. There's this woman on YouTube, her name's Patricia Steere and she's been advocating various conspiracy theories and debating them for a while. By now people think that she's a plant - her name's PatriCIA STEERe after all. A CIA plant meant to steer them, get it? Get IT? Yeah. She bemoans that no amount of proof on her part convinced the others that she's not an agent and for a lucid moment contemplates if she's guilty of doing the very same. It passes in an instant though and she dismisses it. She knows she's not like that, after all. Heh.

I watched Sex Education on Netflix. Some background information: I fully expected to hate the show. This is because of two things. I don't like most comedies (I do appreciate parodies though) in the first place and I absolutely detest the sort of sexual humor this show appeared to be built around based on the trailer. Like a guy wanking on his ear, oh, haha, or someone doing an apple pie. Laff, laff. Hilarious. The only reason I even watched the first episode is because I saw Dana Scully and Mark Antony had roles. For the first six and a half episodes I was pleasantly surprised to be honest. I liked the characters, the humor wasn't the sole and ridiculous focus I expected it to be and when it happened it was either not outragingly annoying or clever enough to warrant a smirk or two. Then it suddenly morphed into one and a half episodes of Teenage RomCom Reloaded! featuring all the tired ol' tropes set to Crimson & Clover. What in the ever blazing flustercuck? Sigh.

Well you're from Sweden, that's kind of expected. The only reason why early HammerFall was even moderately acceptable was because Jesper Strömblad was in the band. I still listen to Glory to the Brave and Legacy of Kings with some regularity, didn't mean to imply I've stopped liking their early work. I didn't really like the stuff they've put out afterwards: Felt that Renegade was a letdown and Crimson Thunder barely any better, stopped listening to them for a while after Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken. My record collection contains almost all swords & sorcery power metal put out in the 90ies. Except Helloween. Didn't like them too much. The Departed is great though: It's the perfect mix of pathos and awesome. Could listen to this for hours. :D

More specifically he's captured another Waru alien and is experimenting with its healing properties.

That's not really a dumb question, one would expect a decent single player experience in a BioWare game, but alas, no. At some point it is essentially unavoidable to wade into multiplayer because the campaign gets put on hold until you grind out a list of things to do in Freeplay. And that includes repairing three allied javelins (i.e. resurrect someone). It's not that bad, I spent a few hours in freeplay and am essentially done except for missing a single javelin repair, but it's annoying nonetheless. The campaign itself is mostly an excuse plot and the dialogue shallow. I mean, even for a BioWare game. I think I have close to 200, most of that in the multiplayer, though I did finish the campaign. I keep telling myself that I did it so you wouldn't have to. Ouch. I wonder to what extent the game's (technical) problems are down to the choice of engine. Are the shooter mechanics any good at least? How's the AI? The combat is like Andromeda without cover mechanics or the ability to switch your skills. Back at The Forge you can equip - depending on your choice of javelin - a certian amount of gear. A Ranger for instance can have various types of grenades and a missile launcher that you can fit with frag, fire, frost or seeker grenades or AoE missiles, homing missiles, poison darts or a laser beam but it's nowhere near as flexible as Andromeda was. There's combos you can set up and execute. The AI however is completely unable to deal with the vertical movement abilities in the game. Some areas circumvent that by Star Trekking your transporter system - forcing you to fight in no fly zones. It's Andromeda's multiplayer stretched over a co-op game with a campaign. The enemies are, well, dumb, and the difficulty settings apparently only scale damage and hitpoints. With longer range weapons you can even find spots where you can take potshots at enemies (including what passes as "boss" encounter) without them being able to target you. The caveat here being that I only tried Normal and Hard modes so far and I haven't unlocked Strongholds yet, which is what looks like Anthem's 4 player dungeons. The higher difficulties unlock only with higher levels and need, I assume, better gear. Strongholds with story progress.

I tried to play Anthem. Caveat: In the way the designers wanted me to, at any rate. When you launch an expedition into the world you have a few options, one is called quick mission. You're matched with similar players and randomly join a public mission in your progression range. Tried that six times. Five out of six times I was put into a dead game instance where the mission progression died for some reason. You join, notice that there aren't any waypoint markers, enemies or NPCs to interact with, wave at the others, and leave. Granted four of the five dead instances were the same mission at the same progression level, so there's a chance I ended up in the same instance four times, but that makes little difference. Once it worked. As with Andromeda you can see the parts being there. Flying over the terrain, dropping down with a bang, firing at relentless groups of enemies for a moment feelt like the invasion of Klendathu, except with a happy end and all. Also did some freeplay - an always public expedition where you fly around the map trying to find something to do. Which, without any help or markers, means you fly around aimlessly about the admittedly incredibly pretty world. It's pretty, but boring. Imagine Guild Wars 2 with only three other players somewhere else on the map and in order to find world events you need to get really close to them. The game also knows its loading screens are bad so there's an option not to load the story area (Fort Tarsis) after a mission, but to directly to the launch bay, a smallish map where you can do pretty much everything you could do in Fort Tarsis except continue the campaign. A nice idea... in theory. In practice the launch bay also is supposed to serve a lobby function and you're matched with other players in your range to facilitate social interaction. That matchmaking sometimes takes longer than loading Fort Tarsis. And it disconnected me twice. Oh yeah, and a freeplay expedition disconnected me. When I tried to reconnect it had already backfilled my place. Whlie you still keep the loot in that case you're not getting any alliance points or experience for it. This is more kaputt than SWTOR ever was at launch.