injurai

Steward... load up Celery Man.

I really hope we get something standout for the Wizard, I thought those subclasses where very dull hyper-specializations. These subclasses were more defined by what was lost rather than gained. Hopefully they've had time to think of something really cool. I want a paradigm shift that touches all of the Wizards existing spells, some sort of inversion or orthogonal take on the jack of all trades base class.

Statement from President Donald J. Trump on Standing with Saudi Arabia https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-president-donald-j-trump-standing-saudi-arabia/

Hillary is filtering out Russian spam!?!?!? LOCK HER UP!!!!!

Per-rest!!!!!!!!!!!!

Civ V Complete is just so good. I like a lot of the design changes I've seen in 6 but I've held off because usually the base came isn't complex enough to hold my attention. I actually don't mind the graphics, but the characters are pretty awful. I don't know why the westerners are always depicted as fat blobby and based on the characters most unflattering pictures often times from past their political reign.

Is Quake really the game you find most comparable to Rage 2? A dark corridor hit scan ice rank compared to the open vehicle sim carnage shooter? So very very odd.

This deals with the internal conditions over at Blizzard and helps explain some of the recent happenings around the business. It really makes a lot of things clear. It mostly deals with employee compensation in relation to Blizzard's recent performance and all the implications that follow.

To be fair, there's a good chance the Cainarsky is all of these things. Pretty sure it will be a Vampire romance puzzle game.

What's interesting is Sony is now the only first party to not really have a dedicated rpg developer. Neither in the JRPG realm nor the WRPG realm. Nintendo has their own brand of rpgs like Pokemon, Mario & Luigi, etc. But they also net a tone of exclusives. While Xbox suffered from the middle-sized japanese devs just not putting out on their system, it's also clear that Sony is just letting things fall in their lap. MS might really be able to push Obsidian head and shoulders above much of the other competition given the competitive landscape.

Having your character taken out of battle via low endurance simulates getting a concussion or other near-death sorts of injuries. Maybe the enemy would enact a double-tap, but they have other drawn blades and staffs to worry about. It opens up the opportunity to rescue your party member. It's a really great facet of the endurance system, is intuitive, and adds a neat layer of strategy of choice when it comes to party health management. Also you absolutely can balance per-rest systems. Not only can you know exactly how many resources the player has at a given moment to implement a dynamic scaling. You can also scale the area relative to the players level, then forgo dynamic per-encounter scaling in favor of zone-balancing to encourage the player to strategically build momentum through an area while keeping it challenging. You can also repopulate mobs if the player rests in an area which would further discourage spamming. There are so many more options and it can vary area to area for totally different experiences and challenges. Challenges which play out different relative to a party's build. This environmental balancing is far better than some lazy system wide mechanic approach that makes assumptions abstractly over the whole game. It's also important for a character to be able to alter encounters based on preparation and prior play. Once again, all the vestiges make plenty of sense a game like Deadfire, it's really the strange injury/empower/non-vancian shift that has caused most of the issues.

It's a movie with cool world building, and its kind of fun to imagine going native as an alien species that's hyper evolved for harmony with nature. It's a flawed yet stunning movie. I don't know, watch it with a beer or something.

Im obv speculating, but my gut tells me it could be something as simple as: owners arent getting any younger. they want to cash out and spend their 50s in a lower gear watching their kids grow up - furnished with a big lump sum of money that will see them nicely through to retirement in 10 yrs time. i work at a big firm thats done its fair share of acquisitions. one of the former owners of a company they bought is living the life o'reilly. hes chilling out in a cushy role that he negotiated as part of his terms for selling. i dont know how happy he was prior to selling his firm, but hes deffo happy now. I've said the same earlier in the thread, even if they owner's did have an exit strategy in mind for all I know that could have still be 5 years out. Which is why I'm also curious how much this has to do with Deadfire's performance and the gap until they release their other projects, and the need to obtain funding for any recently freed up teams.

Yeah, I would have preferred more consideration for promoting in-game play strategy and with an emphasis on solving the issue through solid dungeon/zone design. Thinking back, instead of getting rid of vancian and adding empower. It would be nice if the longer you went without a rest, the more you'd build up some sort of inspiration points that you could spend to trigger a second-wind. Sort of like a "state of flow" that would help the player continue forward if they had strategically protected their party's health but wouldn't force them to turn back due to spells. This would disincentivize resting for spells, and disincentivize rest spamming. You'd change your play-style to earn this second-wind and once you got it, you'd feel ready to rest or turn back once you finally made it to the second-wind/flow. So you could probably only earn one per rest per party member. In some ways as your resting bonuses wore off you'd have this glimmer of a chance to earn another sort of bonus and earn some spells back. I'd probably make the bonus take away from passive defense and add to passive attack or something, meaning you can still use abilities to defend but you'd get a general boost to damage. So it'd force you to be both more defensive and aggressive to irk out the last bit of action your party has left in them. Also I just realized I kept calling endurance, stamina and afflictions, ailments. Oh well.

To "do someone" prior to having a sexual connotation, meant to swindle or con someone. You might be more familiar with "do someone in" which usually means to mug or kill someone, but prior it was to take someone for all they were worth. What can I do you for? taken literally is almost a threat or warning to not get taken advantage of. But it's being said in jest. What it's actually doing is setting up a formal transaction where the onus is on the asker to convince the person to borrow their time. "What can I do you for? is an invitation to hear out a proposition with no promise of help. Eventually it's became a friendly way of putting up a barrier. Now that it's seen as friendly I think most people assume it's merely a grammatical inversion of "What can I do for you?" solely for the sake of saying something with flair.

I appreciate Obsidian's commitment to feedback, overall they did an awesome job sorting through a lot of fan criticism and really trying to dig into the arguments to figure out the reality of a lot of the first games systems. Trying to address resting and penetration especially, and really everything you listed under the good. What's frustrating though is some of the worst missteps are a result of moving away from a lot of the good things they had already established. I think the worst change was the health mechanic system. I still can't wrap my head around why they rolled that back. It wasn't what needed fixing in relation to resting, the problem with resting was that it was done to both regain health/stamina AND to replenish spells. Since saving on health/stamina often meant going ape with your best spells you often had to rest frequently if you ever hit a difficulty spike. I and many other's identified this as driving the high frequency of resting. Well, they changed how resting worked and gave us empower and took away vancian casting. Wow, that solved it in an incredible heavy handed way. But I thought a step away from classical vancian could be a big win, as long encounters didn't become too similar. Then they still choose to muck with the health/stamina system even though it was a phenomenal improvement to the iso-rtwp genre. All they had to do was better convey injuries and status ailments (I don't think anyone liked those minuscule UI elements), but instead they gutted the fine granularity that stamina/health and pushed injuries to the extreme of being a countdown to a fail condition. The complaint of health/stamina/ailments related to confusions due to how PoE1 conveyed it's systems to new players. This was a more general complaint about conveying the game's systems and how it got lost within other heavy lore dumps and verbose dialogue early on. While I loved the deep writing, it did make reading carefully the mechanic descriptions hard, plus a lot of the descriptions were hidden away in menus and the game hadn't opened up enough for the player to even grasp how it all fit together. Yet, stamina/health/ailments were not particularly esoteric, and health and stamina probably should have either been visually conveyed better on UI or had their names reversed. They solved this communication issue instead by changing the underlying system. People warned them about this error as they were hashing things out, yet they committed to the change. The misalignment between injuries, risks, and party management severely impacts the meta-game loop. The game needs that player experience of venturing to one's limits. Keeping the older stamina system, there could have been a lot more opportunity to really lean on your ship as a portable base that would absolutely necessary and critical to assuring your progress. In general the ship is really not all that it could be, and I feel this flawed approach to resting had echoing affects all the way out to the new "keep." I've also been critical of the smaller dungeons since before the game launched. Large dungeons are the definition of dangerously exploring to the edge of one's limits. Venturing forth into chaos. Not only should this dynamic be generally across the game, but it should peak occasionally in different forms across the game, one being mega-dungeons which are concentrated depths of abyss that need to be penetrated. The Keep, Caed Nua, Heritage Hill and others make up my favorite parts of the first game for this very reason.

Speaking of impeding success. There is a frustrating dynamic in party politics where each party wants to be the one to usher in a change that they'd both agree on. So instead they hobble each other to get the name recognition for positive change. When people like Elon Musk step up to advise Trump in order to help navigate the next 4 years smoothly, then get's criticized by the progressive left for merely an attempt of effort, it really shows where people's minds are. Of course that relation fell through in the end, but the important part is to cultivate that mindset of attempt. It's gross when people promote arbitrary guilt by association, it's really just an excuse to abdicate responsibility and find easy refuge within echoic reward structure. It's the exact same way the bulk of the GOP operated for most of Obama's terms.

Pretty sure it's more than what we normally see from Marvel/StarWars. Maybe Disney's production is more scaled parallel?

By the time Avatar 2 comes out, we'll know who the next president will be. I guess Avatar 2 & 3 also wrapped principle photography so there is a hell of a lot of time for post-production being given.

You should watch Fight Club.

♫♩With your feet in the air and your head on the ground♫♩

Saudi is a key player in the petrol dollar (they only sell their oil for USD.) We aren't dependent on Saudi oil, we are dependent on the surplus valuation of the dollar holding it's value. Until the US can find an export that the rest of the world wants that forces the globe to keep a sizeable portion of their wealth invested in US dollars, then we aren't getting out from under shackles. If only Venezuela was a neo-liberal polyarchy divorced from OPEC... until then :sadface: Apparently the Saudi's have less oil then they are letting on, but I don't think they are running out any time soon. Literally the spice must flow.

Huh, didn't know there was another new IP in the works. I heard rumors of another Witcher game (not starring Geralt) was on the table. I think most people assumed a Ciri game, but it could be anything really. I know Marcin Iwiński has referred to plans for Cyberpunk "2078" and "2079" and if they are trying to round robin on IPs then it makes sense that they'd want something else in the pipeline. The Witcher probably needs to rest as a franchise for a little while anyways. Also the round-robin pipeline I does not include the smaller companion / mobile games. That truly just is garnish on the business model.

"The spice crude must flow." - The World Probably