kanisatha

Quite a few of you here will find this analysis to be very interesting and on point: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/putins-new-story-about-war-ukraine

I was about to post making this exact point. We constantly have a stream of former-blah blah people forming new studios from which we have not yet seen a single game worth talking about. I expect this guy won't be any different.

So awards like this matter to you? Just curious, because they don't matter to me at all, but I'm always interested in why things matter to people.

That's strange. I went through the whole DLC, did every questline all the way through or almost all the way, and never had this issue with a low-level NPC who could not be kept from dying. You may want to check a guide. The Neoseeker and Fandom.com wiki guides are particularly good.

You can get quite far into each faction's quests before you start breaking them, though doing certain quests ahead of others makes a big difference. But the problem is that it is not always clear when you are about to get to that point of breaking another faction's questline. It is even possible to cross the no turning back point in a questline without knowing it beforehand. I think they have done this intentionally to force players to not try doing everything in one playthrough, so that they can claim the game has good replayability.

It also may point to piss-poor marketing as a major culprit here. Potential fans had to find or stumble upon the game over time because Obsidian did not lead them to it.

I agree with you about '80s rock music, and also Def Leppard specifically. But for me the '80s were awesome across the board generally. I was class of '86 in high school and class of '89 in college, so that was quintissentially my decade.

I'd be totally up for that if the hookers are also real.

Sure, but my post was general and separate from and not tied to that video in any way.

BG3 is seeing sales success as a AAA cRPG heavily because it is a D&D game, because D&D already has a very long-standing fanbase that is 15 million strong. A game franchise that does not have a D&D-like huge pre-existing fanbase (i.e. Pathfinder, PoE, etc.) will never sell enough to make a AAA game profitable. As an example, the only way Bioware could produce AAA-level sales for its Dragon Age franchise was to move its DA games away from being cRPGs. The notion that cRPGs now have mainstream crossover appeal because of BG3 is utter nonsense. BG3 has mainstream crossover appeal because D&D now has mainstream crossover appeal. And on top of that you throw in a whole bunch of gratuitous interactive sex and nudity into the game and you've got yourself a ton of sales. But this "model" will never work for PoE.

For now. That can eventually change.

Don't do it, Microsoft. There's no "lesson" to be learned from the garbage that is BG3, and I don't want anything similar from Obsidian.

I can't wait for AI to take over the world. The worst AI *has* to be a better person than the best human.

The summary of this analysis to me is: bear sex = awesome game (which is rather pathetic)

This is it exactly. And it is the direct result of the world overall being very realist whereas the West is the only part of the world that is liberal (in the academic sense of that word and not the US politics sense of it). In a realist world, the lone liberal will get eaten alive.

Many academics in international security are beginning to wonder about this as well. A very recent article in Foreign Affairs asks if the world is now significantly more war and conflict-prone. Another one posits that Russia and China are moving the world towards being more militarized. I have been making these same arguments for some years now within my academic circles, and have been referring to China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea collectively as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Sorry Bruce, but SteamDB estimates are total crap. The VG Insights estimate of 10-12 million is the FAR more reliable number.

Yup. Now I'm going to up my pledge to help fund some of those stretch goals.

Thanks for the post. It makes me very sad and unhappy that Sawyer would go with TB combat for a PoE3. I would hate that. I hope he would at least still keep both systems in the game.

The problem I have with these games is their pawn system. I don't like that complete strangers can take my pawns for use in their game.

Yeah it was utterly surreal listening to Russia's ambassador at the Security Council a few days ago debating the resolution the US vetoed. With a straight face he went on and on about how it is so very important to ensure that civilians are not harmed in Gaza and how "everything" must be done to protect them. And then Lavrov repeated those same talking points. My real frustration, though, is that neither the press nor Western government leaders are jumping on this and publicly calling out the Russians for their rank hypocricy. Western governments are so atrocious with handling global PR.

But won't that be direct competition for the new inXile steampunk game?

Even though I will get the DLC no matter what, because I paid for it already with my original KS backing, I will be giving them quite a bit of money for this KS. I truly hope it makes it. But I am pessimistic about their chances. And that will mean they will go out of business, which truly sucks.

I'm pretty much the same, but would also add that I am also happy to pay full price for the games I like and don't wait on a sale to buy them. And to add to previous discussion, I also never ever pay any attention to Steam's collective ratings of reviews (i.e. very positive, mostly positive, mixed, etc.).

Continuing on with my Solasta playthrough with the Unfinished Business mod. The 6-person party is just so awesome! Exactly how the game should be played. I'm not using too many other features from the mod, mainly the option of removing attunement and including multi-classing. Difficulty has not been affected in any meaningful way. I've made a few tweaks here and there to keep the challenge balanced, and that's it. Only wish the game had more story and characters heft.