kanisatha

Thanks, you guys! I may give GTA5 a try first. I guess I should've been more specific and said it's the whole driving thing that turned me off (and continues to turn me off about CP2077). Using mouse and keyboard, and never having played any console games, I find it extremely difficult and frustrating to handle the driving mechanic. I constantly keep crashing the car or going in unintended directions, and never being able to escape a pursuer or catch someone I was pursuing because I am forced to drive slowly. And btw, riding a horse in games like TW3 produce the same experience though not as bad.

I've never played any of the GTA games, mainly because of the first-person shooter thing. But even I'm a tiny bit excited (curious?) about GTA6.

It's a free upgrade, which is all I wanted to know.

I finally finished my first run through Black Geyser. Overall, the game was very good and I enjoyed plaing it very much. It is definitely an old-school cRPG in every way. But, the fact that it was a low-budget crowd-funded game does show. The writing needed more work (not just the quality of the writing but also such things as dialogue branching and reactivity), and the area levels were often too simple, small, and repetitive. The main quest was okay, but I liked many of the side quests more, including especially the companion quests which had multiple parts to them. The companions themselves were a mixed bag; some were really interesting and well-written while others were obviously thrown in at the last minute. The good news is the that the developers are very good about accepting and listening to player/fan feedback. There were a couple of side quests where bugs were preventing me from completing them. After I used their built-in bug reporting system, they very quickly got back to me with solutions. Then, I used their correspondence with me to send back to them a lot of my constructive feedback about the game, to which they were very enthusiastically receptive. Their devs are even active in posting on the game's Steam forum! So, I have high expectations and a lot of excitement now for their next game, Avaria. ************************ I also finished my most recent attempt at playing Humankind. This time I was able to go all the way into the fourth of the five eras of the game before I finally quit. I play this (and other similar) strategy/4X games as sandbox games where I find ways to turn off the war/conquest part of the game. I build my empire and the AI builds its empire and we both stay clear of each other. This worked great in Humankind and the game remained interesting to me right up until I finally entered the industrial era. At that point, the game started to drag and become tedious and repetitive, and also somewhat frustrating (esp. the pollution mechanic), and so I decided I had got my money's worth from the game and I quit. ************************* Now I've begun my first playthrough of Dark Envoy (from the makers of Tower of Time from several years ago). So far so good, but clearly only because I'm playing on the Easy difficulty setting (there is a Story setting below this). It is very clearly an ARPG rather than a cRPG, and often-times even more a dungeon-crawler. It's lots and lots of combat encounters one after another, but at least on Easy I am able to get through them pretty quickly and without taking too much damage. I am even able to use their AI to control some of my party members while I only manage my casters. Works pretty well. The story has been very interesting so far, and I continue to like its steampunk setting with its mix of high-magic and advanced technology.

Governments should start proscecuting these cases as acts of industrial espionage, sabotage, and vigilantism. Who the hell gave these asses the right to speak for society/me?

I replay games very often, maybe just as often as I play a new game. But that's because I have very strong feelings about exactly what games I like, strictly within only the RPG, empire-builder/strategy, and city builder genres. So, my library of games is very small, just over forty or so games. I replayed BG1 and 2 a LOT. But now I've stopped because I just can't abide 2e mechanics anymore. Now, I replay the PoE games and the Pathfinder games. But I especially replay my favorite strategy games such as Civ 5 and Surviving Mars. Replaying Humankind right now for like the fifth time even though I bought it pretty recently.

This is what I've been expecting to see happen after the sale got finalized, and was hoping Xbox would grab Bioware and bring it back to its old glory. But that's very unlikely now, and the more likely outcome is that EA holds on to the Mass Effect IP and just dumps the rest of Bioware into oblivion. 😢

I'm almost at the end of my run through Black Geyser, but I needed a break so I fired up Humankind again. For any of you who have played that game through to the end, how do you keep city management interesting in the mid-game? It just feels like you have to keep building more and more districts in a never ending tedious cycle.

I was in college during the last few years before the wall came down. And I was a fanatical Cold War wargamer. I had the entire orders-of-battle for both Warsaw Pact and NATO forces across the IGB perfectly memorized. The grand total of combat troops, tanks, AFVs, and especially artillery tubes the Soviets had amassed among 1 Guards Tank Army in the north, 2 Guards Tank Army in the south, and 3 Shock Army in the middle was staggering. I always felt really bad for the troopers of our Blackhorse cavalry regiment at the Fulda Gap, because their lifespan was estimated as mere seconds if WWIII ever broke out. Their entire job was to die sending word back to SACEUR that the Soviets had crossed the border. And I also agree with you that winning the battle/war is fundamentally separate from a subsequent occupation. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and dare I say even Vietnam, the US decisively won every set-piece battle it fought. It was only occupation that sucked hard and cost us so very dearly. I still recall being on a panel at my university a few weeks before Bush sent us into Iraq in 2003. I was the sole person in the room who rejected both sides in the debate about going to war. I disagreed with the Administration's military plan, but I equally rejected those opposed to invasion, both here in the US and especially certain European governments, who were ridiculously arguing to stick with an obviously failed status quo. So, when asked what my plan would be, I suggested the classic Machiavellian realist alternative, which was to secretly cut a deal with Hussein for him to be our patsy and do exactly as we say in exchange for us walking away from all UN sanctions and our blockade. But then I also added that if that was too distasteful for our squeamish liberal internationalist elites (liberal in the poli sci theory sense and not the US politics sense), then another alternative would be to go in hard and fast, remove Hussein from power, hand over the country to an Iraqi version of Egypt's Mubarak (which we had there), and then get the hell out of that counrty ASAP. The domestic politics of liberal democracies are just not capable of handling what one must do to effect a successful occupation of a hostile enemy. Hint: it's what the Allies did to the civilian populations of both Germany and Japan in 1945.

Well, they were pretty scary at the height of the Cold War, weren't they? All those tank armies at the IGB poised to swamp and crush the hapless West Germans. 😉

Hehe, yeah, people are talking about that bug a lot in the game's Steam forum, and SNEG commented they will definitely make sure that bug doesn't return. 😄

Agreed. I still believe Ukraine faces a potential collapse on their front lines because of how widespread draft evasion has become among young Ukrainians. But I certainly didn't expect the Russian side to fair so badly in this year's battles. I guess Russian battlefield incompetence is endemic, and the only way they ever "win" is by throwing masses of their people at the enemy.

Agree 100%. For me as well, it's my single-player game, and even when the game itself doesn't acknowledge my RP choices and decisions, they matter greatly to me just to be able to make them within my game (including with character creation and development/leveling). So that's why, even when there are no consequences whatsoever, I won't rob from ordinary people and only from the elites, won't harm innocents, am happy to accept a fair price from merchants and won't steal from them, etc. It's why playing BG3 I refused to ever use the tadpoles or their powers even though there were no meaningful negative consequences and only powerful beneficial consequences. The whole point of playing an RPG, and why that genre of games is my thing, is to be able to play my game my way. And that's why I get really pissed off when developers won't give me certain freedoms or options within their game for me to be able to play the game my way. I suppose ToEE will now end up just sitting in my Steam library as a never-played game. I did do my due diligence looking at various youtube videos before I bought it. But I should've waited until someone here in this forum provided an honest and trustworthy appraisal. And now, that's exactly what I'll be doing with the PoR remake.

Thanks very much for the honest appraisal, Bruce! And prolly a good thing for you to post it here than in a PM so it benefits not just me but others as well.