majestic

Is @Totally not Gorgon too?

The 40XX is such bad value at the moment that it's not worth losing your head over, just get a 30XX, or at the very least wait for the new AMD cards to appear. That's got to force some price movement on nVidia's end. Well, at least, I hope it will.

Heh. Blizz sent me an e-mail going like "the wait is finally over!" just a couple of minutes ago, and I raised and eyebrow and told my phone that I haven't waited for a Blizzard release ever since Wings of Liberty was such a massive disappointment, and then deleted it. It's probably for the best that I am burnt out on the game and online playing in general.

Perhaps, I have been playing (A)D&D based games for ten years at the point when Baldur's Gate 2 came out, but gaming at the time went through a series of rapid improvements, particularily in presentation, which not necessarily means graphics. Still, ultimately, unlike other confluences of parts at the right time like The Matrix (or maybe the first Wesley Snipes Blade) I feel like Baldur's Gate 2 holds up better. Apples and oranges though, maybe sticking to games would be better. Like, the first Half-Life. Let anyone young enough play it and they'll probably wonder what the big deal was. There are a lot of Diablo style game players who probably would disagree as they throw themselves into the meat grinder of getting powerful enough to overcome the next boss, but those games often have multiplayer components and are - even if they call themselves as such - not single player role playing games as much as action games. There's also the success of the From Software games, where player progression makes the game easier (insofar as they can become that, all in all), but the same caveat applies. They do have role playing game components, but they're arguably even more based on player skill than Diablo and clones. I was not suggesting that game designers should put grinding into single player games with nary a thought or include mechanics that work with a certain business model without adaptation. However, just one quick note, one of the most frequent criticisms of players of World of Warcraft was, for the longest time until Blizzard invested the effort to change it, that the game's story content was gated behind successful participation in endgame content. There's a certain irony in Blizzard's storytelling becoming so bad that it became hard to care about anything but the expansion progression for the sake of progression just when they removed the gating. Before the difficulty revamp, SW:ToR had a similar issue. The developers invested a lot of time and effort into their endgame design, and only a tiny fraction of the player base actually saw it. Some of Blizzard's raid instances and more difficult dungeons had more care invested in the design of the lore and storyline than many single player games, particularily around the time when they wrapped up the Warcraft 3 storyline (much to the dismay of Warcraft fans). Of course that is not true for games played primarily for player versus player combat, sandbox games, or the dreaded Korean grinders, but is not nearly as clear cut as that. I on and off played various MMORPGs, and SW:ToR and WoW alone amount for a combined four years of my life. Net playing time, that is, and that is without the games I played where I cannot quantify playing time for a lack of tracking, like the years (not play time) I played Quake at a semi-competitive level or that one browser pvp/strategy game that I probably wasted at least a net year of playtime on, so I think I know a thing or two about them. What I was suggesting is that there's a way to make progress feel meaningful without relying on level ups after hitting a level cap. Whether it is some form of alternate progression like D3 has with the Paragon levels, or a way to collect loot that changes game mechanics, or providing challenges beyond moving the difficulty slider. Yes, that of course is an option, but when has that worked out? In the most hilarious cases, turning the difficulty up makes the game easier, such as the case was with Icewind Dale, where playing on Insane meant the first Orc cave was difficult, and afterwards the doubled experience gain broke the game's intended balance so much that doubled enemy damage was not enough to make it problematic. Besides, it does not really solve the issue of feeling stuck in terms of progression. I am personally not a fan of Bethesda style 'get better by doing' design (I spent five hours in Morrowind jumping up and down a set of stairs near the beginning area to grind out levels), but such cannot really apply to a d20 based game, at least not beyond awarding experience for successful skill checks, and that's been a staple for a long while now. Anyway, to finish this already too long wall of text: there are ways to make the player feel meaningful progression even at a maximum character level. There's no reason why any of that cannot be adapted to a single player game. Not suggesting a daily grind nonsense here or roguelike elements with a progression path where you just fail oder and over until you've gathered enough upgrades to succeed. Owlcat could have put a cut-off point after coming back from the Abyss and changed progression into something else (gear is an easy one, but not necessarily the only thing). Sure, you'd eventually have a rushing player being a good ways behind the power curve, but in light of the encounter design of the game, it's probably safe to assume such a player knows what they're doing, or else they'd have given up long before that. Could add the incoming experience of the level cap to unlock interesting stat changes, like unlocking an ability for precision damage to pierce immunity in the same way Ascendant Element does for elemental damage. Of course they could also just slap a level cap on it that is just unreachable unless the player takes certain steps to do that, like Throne of Bhaal did, but that's not exactly interesting in Throne of Bhaal either. There are only so many HLAs one needs anyway. It is also not entirely necessary as long as the rest of the game is good enough. To go back to Baldur's Gate 2, in my first playthrough before Throne of Bhaal came out, I hit the level cap in the Underdark, and it still did not feel like a chore. Not like Act V of Wrath of the Righteous did. The game is just too long for its own good, and grinding through Unfair did not endear it any more to me. That is true, on the other hand, Owlcat doesn't have the same pull as Obsidian did/does, plus there's a marked downturn in the crowdfunding aspect when looking at the Deadfire campaign. Project Eternity raked in four million dollars from crowd funding, and Deadfire only half of that. Backer amounts also halved. The campaign for Deadfire also reads only half the amount of backers. It of course also says the funding was more, but over half of that came from investors. Fig, at the time, only allowed accredited investors, so we can probably rule out fans who wanted in on the success, unless there's some significant overlap. The Wrath of the Righteous campaign on Kickstarter got almost as much in crowd pledges as the Fig Deadfire campaign, but Fig probably scared people off - however, in absolute numbers, they're curiously comparable. WotR also happened long after the initial Kickstarter gold rush feeling was over. I certainly only pledged the minimal amount necessary to get a cpoy of the game even though I enjoyed Kingmaker well enough. Not a fault of Owlcat's, but I felt like I spent enough on Kickstarter projects at the time, and while I got lucky and most of them completed, only a handful felt worth the money spent, even though what was probably the biggest waste of money was a levitating flower pot and thus not really a game. The project completed just fine, and I received the lava stone and the magnets, but beyond being fun to show someone, in terms of practical applications it is preciously useless for an expensive gimmick, it also wastes a good deal of energy and if one ever has a brown out everything would just crash down. No, I do not, it is just one piece of the puzzle, but one that was significant for me. There was no fun in the exploration of the combat precisely because it no longer yielded worthwhile rewards, while still feeling forced to complete it all. Now, any OCD issues on my end are not Obsidian's fault, but the loot and crafting system was. Giving items a stat budget and sticking to it while designing loot that comes from combat that is too plentiful and exploration that is not exaclty interesting and yields no other rewards is just not a good idea. That one can just pick up any random weapon and enchant it with the same stat budget to do what you want and need for your characters rather than relying on found weaponry removes one of the broken aspects of the Infinity Engine games, that you can easily reduce your character's effectiveness without knowing just by putting your proficiency points into the wrong weapon category. Insofar I'm agreeing with you, Obsidian fixed many of the issues of the IE games, but in doing so lost what made them memorable. Yeah, the writers took a shortcut at the end, but that's something that happens too often in general. Irenicus is more relatable to me than Sarevok or Belhifet, in the same way it was easier to relate to Isair and Madae in Icewind Dale 2, where the ending takes a similar turn in feeling like there should be a peaceful option out of the final fight, but there just is none. Baldur's Gate works mostly by its charm, but it too long, too large and too empty and Icewind Dale is just a chore and I do not care a fig for any of the characters or the plot. I expected Deadfire to be a lot better, and it was. It was the primary reason for my silver backer's badge, which in light of my comments about not liking Pillars of Eternity might not make a whole lot of sense. Deadfire hat its issues too, and unlike Pillars of Eternity it feels like it pulled off a Lost and bit off much more than it could chew in terms of storytelling and having enough time (or a plan, perhaps) to properly finish it. Indeed, either my recollection is fuzzy or relying on second hand information and misuse of the phrase has left me with a wrong impression if it wasn't about the monty haul aspect of Baldur's Gate 2 - in which case everyone should ignore the statement and just use the dual wield one, because I'm perfectly certain our favorite troll ranted on about that for a long while. Aynway, what was the point of the +6 spear issue then?

The developers of MMORPGs solved the issue of progress beyond the level cap over twenty years ago, and I am not just talking about the treadmill of grinding for better gear to fight encounters that yield even better gear, even though this is a big part of why playing Pillars of Eternity beyond the level cap was extremely frustrating. The design of the loot and crafting system lead to your party not being able to look forward to any meaningful upgrades at a time even before Twin Elms, and there was nothing remarkable about the items you could gather from exploration or combat, which was designed to not yield rewards in the first place, a decision that could have been decent, had the game not focused on battles as much as it did. The expansion and soulbound items were too late, and arguably too little to make any real difference. It probably takes more resources than a company like Owlcat would have, and probably more resources than could justifiably be spent on games like the Pathfinder games, but there could be any number of options. From adding additional ways to make encounters more difficult for those who did all the optional content and have powerful items. This can be accomplished by interacting with the game world in some natural way. Feel overpowered? Then do not deactivate the machine of elemental summoning, have an achievement for that, or some improved piece of equipment, or maybe just a new skin or some other cosmetic option that simply looks 'kewl'. People spend literal truckloads on silly hats for Team Fortress, something I will never understand, but certainly a silly extra hat could be something worth going through some extra pain for a lot of people. All it takes is some care in encounter design, and some good ideas. It is something that is present in Wrath of the Righteous too, like with the dragon encounter mentioned earlier. There is a way to make it easier, although it is arguably necessary to do so, depending on the time one tackles the quest, and the game does impress on you that it should be handled early enough. After all, the mercenary who accompanies you make it clear, in no uncertain terms and to the point of almost breaking the fourth wall, that he will not sit around and wait for you to finish every sidequest before tackling his. For a sufficiently powerful party of a completist or someone who went the extra mile to get more levels out of the early game, maybe add a meaningful way to tackle it head on. Done. Oh, sure, add any number of elements from the dreaded multiplayer games out there, and you will have purists running up the walls, but what has listening to them ever yielded? In the days of yore, if Bioware had listened to Karzak and made rogues the best at dual wielding and never created Ixil's Spike +6 ("There is no such thing as a +6 spear!"), would the game have been better? What happens when you listen to the vocal minority of your fanbase is Pillars of Eternity, or rather, the Deadfire sales fiasco. I see these threads and talks about what went wrong all the time, and there is a whole lot of speculation, but here's an idea: Pillars of Eternity just was not a fun game to play. It has no +6 spear, but it was not fun. Was the loot that eventually cropped up in Baldur's Gate 2 a litle on the ludicrous side? Why, yes. Were +6 weapons against AD&D 2nd Edition rules? Yes, of course they were. Heh. I still remember the sentiment on the forums when Troika announced that they were working on a 3rd edition Temple of Elemental Evil game. What was the sentiment by some of our posters? "When this comes out, people will go Baulder's (sic!) What?" Baulder's What, indeed. ToEE is a fine 3rd edition combat simulator, a right buggy mess and a game where the writing quality makes Owlcat's Pathfinder games appear well written. Begin the game with the neutral evil vignette for a good laugh: "You arrive at a church, which you want to burn down because you're evil and evil people burn down churches." Why, what a wonderful way to start out. Was Pillars of Eternity better written than Baldur's Gate 2? Maybe. Arguably. Probably. Still, even twenty years after completing Baldur's Gate 2, I still can quote Irenicus' hammy, scenery chewing dialogue, I remember fighting Firkraag, Kangaxx, even the relatively pathetic Shadow Dragon. Upgrading items in both the base game and the expansion, the Cloak of Reflection (boo, boo, nerf the optional item, it makes Beholders too easy, boo boo). The companions are memorable, even if not all of them are worthwhile in combat. Even on topic, we're talking about the dragon quest. Is it frustrating? It certainly can be, especially for a first time player. Are we taking about it? Sure, you bet. Are we still talking about playing Baldur's Gate 2 fondly? Well: You know what we're not talking about? Yeah, how awesome the Blunderbuss of something or another was, or what a great battle the Adra dragon was, or how memorable Thaos was while chewing the scenery in David Warner's perfectly fitting voice.

Well, thanks, saved me a couple of mintues of my life there.

In case you don't recognize them (and I am not going to blame you), these three are the guys that bully Usagi before Makoto shows up and gives them a well deserved smack down. The show accomplishes that by making her throw the basketball back at them so hard it turns into a CGI ball and the guy with the orange hat just keels over from the force of the impact. The others get an off-screen smackdown because, uh, the stuntwomen had a day off or there wasn't any budget left for them doing another scene where Makoto fights. I get that you probably can't find a trio of super buff dudes in 2003's Japan for your shoe string budget show that will let themselves get beaten down by a girl on screen, but seriously, those three twits up there, that was the best you could do? Edit: also probably unfair to complain about, but Makoto's actress isn't tall enough, but she looks the part better than I previously thought going simply from her in costume in the opening sequence.

Definitions taken from Merriam-Webster. Yes, this post does indeed pertain to the discussion at hand. In which way I'll leave to the reader to figure out. This one is for @BruceVC, but it is problematic because it only defines the less revelant section (1) of the above definition.

I remembered something I read before I watched the first episode of Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon a while back. Motoki is eventually going to propose to Makoto. Which I thought was a nice gesture by the writers (considering Makoto is the butt-monkey of the team way too often), but this Motoki is a total moron who is constantly duped into accepting the silly home made arcade passes by the girls, so I'm no longer sure it was that nice a gesture. Man. I hope he gets something useful to do, or at least something to say that's not dumb. Sheesh, he just asked a turtle to go on a walk. Edit: Usagi has a pyjama party with Ami and Naru. Rei didn't want to come because she's Rei. Rei also had the good sense to tell Usagi that she should not force Ami to do things she does not want to do. In theory, this is a decent episode, but it's a bit too early. Ami being intentionally bad at school because she thinks that will make her more relatable to Usagi is pretty painful to see. It also shows the biggest downside of the series. It's live action, and no matter what you do, some things just do not work with actors, and Usagi's exaggerated mannerisms when talking to Naru are amongst them. The girls do their best, but that is also somewhat limited. Well, so far the series was rather entertaining, but I hope the next character focus episode will be better. Also, just when I thought the episode is not going to follow THE Sailor Moon formula, Nephrite and Beryl show up. Edit 2: Here is an image of Rei making her psychotic killer face looking supportive at Ami:

With the Angel Path? Yes. With the build? You do not want to fall as Paladin, so lawful good it is. That particular Neoseekers build is made to provide one of the easier Unfair experiences and it assumes that you know a couple of things, like the reason for having both Paladin and Hellknight levels: because smites stack. Smites also stack with Mark of Justice, which will come from either Seelah or a mercenary. Unlikely to matter on the lower difficulties, of course. It also assumes you know how to make the two handed version of Gravesinger and how Archmage Armour works (i.e. only by casting it on yourself with a scroll or potion).

I post here because I need to fill the void inside myself with reactions from people who I do not know, and for the greater part neither respect nor care about. It is not adequate to imbue my meaningless, hollow existence with purpose, but it does so better than most other pursuits.

If we don't crack the world's shell, we will die without being born.

I kept losing LAN connectivity. I went and replugged the network cable at the switch and at the back of my computer to see if there's any improvement (so far no more disconnects, which means the cable is up for replacement). Note to self: next time, turn off any running games before going anywhere near the Death Star's thermal exhaust port. Ouch.

What happened:

I think you two have been reading too many posts by Abeloth if you think that 'best trash since Lexx' was criticism.

Incidentally, there's a virus scan running on my uncle's laptop right now. He brought me the thing saying that no matter what he does, he's constantly bombarded by pop ups featuring nude ladies. It is a Lenovo ideapad, with a lightning fast AMD A4 something or another CPU, a 1 TB Western Digital hard disk and, what's kind of weird, apparently 6.67GB of RAM, which leads me to suspect that there's something broken beyond having caught some porn adware, but maybe it's just a strange readout on the UBUNTU LTS distribution I just booted up. I had to look up which key to press to get into the BIOS to set the boot order to include USB drives. For this particular model, it is F2, and lo, it did not work the first time around. Actually, and get that, Lenovo's official support statement is to retry until it works, and to make sure that you hit F2 like mad from the moment you turn on the thing. It needed thirty minutes to boot Windows just so I could shut it down because the last shut down was incomplete and the scan software complained about not wanting to scan a Windows set to Hyperboot mode or with a pending repair. Took another 15 minutes to update virus signatures. Currently running ESET, with ClamAV and F-Secure still in the queue. I have no idea how long that will take, but seriously, I just want to accidentially spill coffee on the blasted thing so it goes where notebooks like that belong, into the great beyond of horribly slow hardware, where it and whoever designed it is forever tortured by watching it boot Windows for all eternity.

Sorry for the double post, but this warrants one. This is how awesome Nephrite is in PGSM: This is shaping up to be the best trash since Lexx: The Dark Zone. Just, uh, PG-rated. edit: Usagi, Rei and Ami are at a costume party. Usagi has a full body bear costume, Ami has a cat maiden outfit and Rei shows up in her Miko gown with a red mask. I give up. This is simply too much, that has to be intentionally ludicrous. Luna is also absolutely snarky. Nephrite is being inconspicuous. Today's monster is a giant, spiky vulva-shaped cactus.

I stand corrected. Man, that's normally my job, being right about minor details. People to this day still comment about how romantic Chibi-Usa and Pegasus were on YouTube videos. There are videos out there who rate them highly amongst the best power couples, so no, it is not just back then. By all accounts, Ikuhara and company made Pegasus worse than he was in the manga. Previously, they filed off the rough edges, like changing the Black Lady/Prince Endymion kiss into an illusion and removed the implied rape, dropping Usagi's suicide attempt from the first arc, making the Sailor Guardians less of a blood thirsty band of murderers, and instead introduced a bunch of other stuff, like actual character development. They also had the good sense to remove Tuxedo Mask's super creepy early behaviour (kissing a drunk and passed out Usagi, watching her transform after urging her to lose no time, stalking her and simply showing up at her open window) and Mamoru's 'romantic' reaction to Usagi showing up and basically accusing him of desiring Chibi-Usa 'like a woman' which was to kiss her and pacify the hysterical woman by giving her his love rod, showing her what he really desires. Usagi is all happy, glowing and fine with Chibi-Usa the next day, only to go back to being jealous a bit later. Typing this out makes me look like I engange in hyperbole, but I really do not. I wish I was. I also wish I would have never watched Crystal and Eternal, and never read any of the manga chapters, but here we are. However, credit needs to be given where it is due, the manga was still really progressive for Japan in 1992. It is just that the anime was better in every regard, unless for some reason one prefers the storyline and dislikes the 'slow moving' filler episodes or dislikes that the stoic and man-hating Rei was changed into a fiery, passionate and boy crazy girl that likes to yell at Usagi but still would do anything for her. I went looking for a Rei hug gif, and found only madness. There's an entire Shipping wiki, and endless material dedicated to UsaRei. The anime fandom is in dire need of a cleansing. Back to the Dream Arc / SuperS: the Amazan Trio, for instance, does not get 22 episodes of raping innocent women, men and - to make that even worse - children. They attack the Guardians and simply get taken out. Their assaults are also not as overtly sexual, they're 'just' trying to seduce the girls with their own insecurities - insecurities that looked an awful lot like Ms. Takeuchi adapted them from Sailor Moon S, but that might just be coincidence. The Pegasus romance is still creepy simply by virtue of him being a horse most of the time and the age difference between him and Chibi-Usa, but he also makes clear that he's more like a thirteen year old boy stuck in this form, and there is none of the pedophile grooming behaviour he exhibits in the anime, but that is partially also because these issues are all really short and there is just no time for anything in the manga. It is hard to see all of that and not think it intentional. Ikuhara and company were fed up with Toei's interference in their work, but how they got what they wrote and animated past quality control or TV censorsphip, I have no idea. That might also be due to the production schedule, they just had to air what they made, in the first few episodes they did not even have all of the stock footage yet, as evidenced by reusing Chibi-Usa's film transformation scene and the curious lack of their combined transformations. Pulling the plug on an episode would have meant not airing an episode of their cash cow franchise, so we got what we have with SuperS. Rape allegories and a pedophile horse, in what Toei wanted to be aimed at younger children than Sailor Moon R and Sailor Moon S were. No wonder almost the entire creative team was changed afterwards. What is really interesting to note is that Toei just managed to find a team that then proceeded to make Sailor Stars. Stars took a hit in character design, but everything else was pretty good. Some of the show's best episodes are in that season. The only story arc worth a damn is there, and half the basis for Steven Universe.

Was that the transformation pen? I thought that was just a costume and a different hairdo, but could be...

The manga did not either, although to its credit, they did use the disguise pen in the third arc to infiltrate Dr. Tomoe's acedemy. Although by the time of Sailor Moon S, the anime writing team ignored most of the manga, just making use of the characters and general plot points. With good reason. Indeed, the primary point for most of her insecurities. Which is a little strange in an anime with typical anime hair shapes and colors, but that's why they made her super tall and super strong too, so it is more readily noticable. Well, how strange. The picture of Berly telling Jadeite that she is not a merciful queen and Tuxedo Mullet did not?

Random observations about Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon: Usagi's pen she uses to disguise herself early on in the series is a gaudy looking mobile phone she uses to take a picture of whoever she wants to disguise herself as. That seems somewhat more limited in use than the pen. Usagi's mother is insane. She brings coffee to Ami and Usagi, then starts wrestling Usagi on her bed, yelling: "Get your coffe, Ami!" Rei is scary, but understandably the only one who even remotely looks like her counterpart. Unlike in the manga, Rei does not immediately burn Jadeite to a cinder. That's a win in my book, although with Nephrite in the preview for the next episode, I'm guessing he's toast either way. The sound effects are hilarious, sometimes Usagi just walks around and the ninja fighting sounds are playing.

I am disappointed that Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon episode three does not have Jadeite's magical bus to abduct the girls, there's just a portal that appears and a monster grabs them with terrible looking CGI arms. Rei's crows look pretty terrible too. The amount of unintentional comedy is gold. I don't know, perhaps it is intentional... Beryl telling Jadeite something important: