kanisatha

I guess it is true that all good things must come to an end. If future Obsidian games are going to be like Bethesda games, then I've bought my last Obsidian game. 😢

Heh. I saw that too. Nice little quiet admission. With China and Russia, that makes three.

I wish that setting would lighten up a bit and not be so damn bleak and dark and dystopian. I just can't get into that. Same reason I've had to pass on Obs' Tyranny.

See right there, that's my problem. In many games, including BG3, I end up liking the side/companion quests way more than the main questline. So, I want to do as many of those as I can. But the devs of this game are explicitly saying they want to limit how many side quests you do in any one playthrough because replayability. And that doesn't sit well with me because I usually just don't have the time to play games that much and so don't replay games that much, especially because my one playthrough tends to be a comprehensive and slow/take my own cool time playing the game playthrough. And this game is exactly the kind of game that I will surely pass on replaying. FYI, my one and only playthrough of BG3 took me 557 hours. So, it's hard to imagine going back to that game again, at least not anytime soon.

I told you about this.

Yes, apparently the game is very mod friendly, as people have already created mods to increase/eliminate the various time limits.

Thanks! I added it to my wishlist, and have been reading through some of the discussion on the Steam forum and watching some youtube videos. Alongside the timer issue, the combat seems to be the other major concern for people. But if I can make it meaningfully easier on me through the game's difficulty settings, then that will make a difference in whether I buy the game or not. Btw, the boss I was talking about is named Xanthe. Apparently, you don't necessarily need to fight her, and can instead befriend her. So, there is that. But if you end up fighting her, please share details on that encounter.

Thanks! Could you provide a rundown on the difficulty settings of the game? Does it have anything along the lines of an easy or story mode? And if so, how does that actually impact the game?

Well, I'm going by what was in the various gameplay streams I saw some months ago after the game was announced. In them, early on in the game, you fight a very powerful spellcaster of some sort. In the very first round of combat she activates a spell that places a curse/hex on you. Then, you have a certain number of rounds by which you need to kill her to end the curse/hex, or else it puts so much damage on you that it kills you and game over. And in order to kill her, you first have to go through a couple of her minions while she retreats to the far back of the area, while continuing to attack you with her spells. All who played through that battle said they had to reload several times before they beat that battle. That's the kind of thing that's a hard pass for me.

I'm in the same boat as others who've commented. This game does interest me, but I'm going to wait and see. If you play it, please post your expeirnces with it. In particular, for me, I'm concerned about timed quests, and even certain combat sequences being timed (something really bad/game-over happens if you don't kill the big bad boss within a certain amount of time). That is something too onerous for me to abide.

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.