Helz

There's a thread at Obsidian Entertainment that stretches all the way back to Black Isle and Troika Games, and I'll always tie them together. They have long been some of my favorite studios, and I admire them for maintaining such a high level of craft and creativity. Obsidian games I play: KotoR 2: I loved the first game and the sequel is at least as good. I didn't delve much into the gray and stuck to killing Sith. There are some nice UI improvements that make it hard to go back to the original. NWN2: NWN was not for me, so this was a nice surprise. It's a solid, party-based RTWP RPG, hampered by the early years of 3D graphics. The camera and UI are aggravating. I restarted several times but never finished it or even tried the expansions. I'm thinking about starting again. Alpha Protocol: This is a great game and I'm glad it's available on GOG. Severely underrated, partially because of release day bugs. Bugs were part of their reputation back then, but I'll give Obsidian credit for patching their games into a good state. Fallout NV: One of my favorite games ever. I love Fallout 1 and 2 and I thought Fallout 3 was incredibly immersive. Fallout NV added good writing and a better setting. I can breathe under the desert skies so much easier than down in DC's subway system. Pillars of Eternity: Kickstarted and happy about it. Isometric, party-based RTWP RPGs are my favorite style of games. I like a lot of turn-based games, but RTWP feels more alive to me. I was hooked with the promise of 2D painted backgrounds and the extensive spell list (the best since Baldur's Gate). I badly wanted this game to succeed, and it did. I also credit Obsidian with helping to reignite an interest in crunchier RPGs. PoE 2: I waited for the complete edition to come out before I played it, and it's a masterpiece. The first game was really good, but also felt a little limited by its budget. This one takes the good from the first and makes everything bigger and better. The Outer Worlds: I was really into this for a while, but something weird threw me off about the level design. I'd run right by doors and stairways and not see them. I'd wander through the same building and keep discovering important stuff that I'd already walked past over and over. Now I'm wondering if the FoV was set too low for me... It was great that the companions had unlimited ammo. It was so freeing that I could give them giant machine guns and not go broke in 2 minutes, that I went back and played FO:NV with a mod that does that and its hilarious fun. Obsidian games I've missed: Dungeon Siege 3: Not Obsidian's fault, I didn't like its predecessors either. South Park: I didn't have the console at release, and by the time it was on PC I was over South Park. Tyranny: Don't want to play the bad guys. Grounded: Great concept, but too resource collection/crafting heavy for my taste. Pentiment: I planned to buy on day 1, but then I read a Josh Sawyer interview describing how the murder can't be solved and you pin it on whomever you choose. Something like 'the truth is what you make it', and I thought, "that is bull****". It's possible I misinterpreted this badly, but it killed my interest. Feel free to correct me.

I grew to really like Midnight Suns. I played for 120 hours before I finished it. It felt like living with a bunch of superheroes. The combat became more varied when I switched up my team every fight, and the advice I got here helped. I found the writing to be very good and appreciated the depth in the characters from the comics. I also finished Brutal Legend for the first time. Amazing art, design, and music. I got stuck in the same RTS battle as 15 years ago, but this time I looked up what I was doing wrong. I did not know that I could upgrade my soldiers Also, needed to find more guitar solos, so I turned my hotrod around and played all the map missions. Combat driving through Heavy Metal world with headphones is an adrenaline rush!

IronSource is an in-game advertising platform that Unity acquired for 4.4 billion dollars. Unity already laid off 1,300 employees before this latest lay off. Unity lost the trust of every development studio in the business last year after their now ex-CEO announced that they were retroactively changing their software licensing agreement from one of the most lenient to bat**** insane. They also offered to exempt certain studios from this if they implemented the new IronSource ad platform. Unity is being run into the ground.

I had just unlocked the next difficulty level and it didn't seem to make much difference at first, but the game might have read my post because the very next mission I played, it handed me my ass. I went from never having a character knocked out to wiping 10 times before I got lucky with a 5 enemy KO. The henchmen are using new skills that I've never noticed before, so things have definitely taken a turn. I've also spiced things up by changing which heroes I'm using in every fight. I'm not a fan of the Marvel movies and haven't seen one in a long time. Superheroes are a complete change of pace for me, but the only problem is I don't know who half of them are. Midnight Suns is growing on me. I don't think I'll ever like running around and collecting stuff, but in the Emo Kids meeting when I had failed to gather enough ingredients, Majik just shrugged and said she hates doing that too

I bought Marvel: Midnight Suns on the Steam sale. The gist of the reviews seemed to be that the turn-based combat is a win, but there's a lot of socializing in the base that drags on. Struggling with loneliness, this sounded like a plus to me. The first 10-15 hours have mostly been good. The characters are well-written and the combat is fun, but the missions are already getting stale. 95% of the battles have been against 3-4 varieties of henchmen, the combat maps are tiny and contain identical environmental items. Normal mode is too easy and harder difficulty levels have to be unlocked, which is dumb. I knew what I was getting into with the social part, but I have to admit that there's a whole lot of it. Every combat mission is bookended by 30-60 minutes of talking to your teammates, taking them on 'dates', improving your base, etc. This increases your relationships and unlocks team attacks. I accept this because I knew what I was getting into and it's done well, but there's also a whole bunch of collectables (crap) to run around and find. You don't strictly have to, and I've been avoiding it, but it unlocks new powers and more junk. Ultimately though, it's the repetitive combat missions that I'm getting tired of, and I did not expect that. The combat system is not the problem and it's still early, so I'm hopeful that the fights will improve.

Sorry for the late reply. Yes, Melee is strong. Late game weapons will smash or rip armored enemies apart. I think the only bad combat skill in Fallout is Throwing.

Small guns are powerful because they include shotguns, submachine guns, and rifles. You do want high Perception. Once you get your guns skill up, you can reliably hit burst and aimed shots. Blinding enemies makes them permanently helpless, so go for the eyes. The Better Criticals perk gives a chance for criticals to kill instantly. Later in the game you can use the Tag! perk to quickly level up energy weapons to use against heavy armor. It's helpful, but not strictly necessary because while your regular attacks will barely scratch them, your criticals will still disable or kill.

1) Your combination of 2D backgrounds and 3D models for the PoE games is brilliant. Were there unexpected challenges in marrying them together? Regardless, please apply those techniques to future games because the results speak for themselves. 2) ~5 years later, how are things going with Microsoft? Are they supportive without interfering too much? I truly hope they allow you all to do what you do best.

I've been playing Gloria Victis for the past couple of months. I've played M&B: Warband (and all its flavors) heavily since 2011. This has combat similar to that, but inside a PVP focused MMORPG. I'm nearly at level cap despite spending almost all of my time riding around and fighting. I swore off grinding anything except kills, and the game lets me do that. It's niche and janky, but a replacement for Warband was practically the holy grail.

Also, Concelhaut's Crushing Doom! The clanging anvil sound makes it the greatest.

Here's how I created my very own ship of the damned. First, I only took sailors with bad traits (greedy, murderous, cruel, etc.) and put them on the biggest ship they could barely handle so they all had to work double shifts. Then I blew all my gold so I couldn't pay them. Then I threw all the food and water overboard. Then I kept sailing into storms and choosing all the stupidest things, "let's open all the windows", "sure let's eat this barrel of rotten fish", etc. I also removed all of my companions in case the sailors were intimidated by them. Then we just sailed back and forth across the map until eventually one of them killed the cook and I chose an Intimidation check that I knew I'd fail. Then I felt bad and reloaded.

Devil of Caroc is nice but not required for a brute. You can use Disciplined or Tactical Barrage to cancel out confusion. Whispers of Endless Paths is a really good AoE weapon, but its not so great for single target damage. You might want something else for bosses. If it helps, here's my brute build. I didn't min-max it, but with blessings I'm sure he could hold his own in PoD.

If you turn on upscaling, you'll rarely overlevel any encounters and the difficulty becomes more evenly distributed. If you've already beaten the game, using Berath's Blessing will make the start of the next one significantly easier. You can also export a level 1 character equipped with a late-game item from your old game and import them into the new one, allowing you to use it for the entire playthrough.

On the bright side, you can't see your hitpoints anyway, so its like they're not draining away. This helps explain why my berserker brute was KO'd ~50 times and left with severe CTE.

When I'm new to this type of game, I take a traditional party: tank, offtank (main), healer, rogue, casters. The majority are SC. This is a pretty safe strategy that doesn't require me to do research before I can play. I always start out with difficulty set to one above normal. On the next playthrough, I set the difficulty to max and take a lot of classes I didn't try the first time. If I keep playing, I'll start experimenting with interesting team compositions like all casters.