kanisatha

Thanks. Yeah you are correct in your assessment. It is indeed tricky to find games I will like outside of my many strong preferences. I am trying to broaden my preferences, but the problem is I keep finding out that I'd rather just replay an old game that I liked than play a new game that is so-so to me.

Thanks. All these, and other similar games, I have and have played (repeatedly).

No, never. Given the dirth of quality fantasy RPGs to play nowadays, I've slowly become open to the idea of trying some post-apocalyptic RPGs. But for me to be willing to try them, they'd need to at least satisfy me with respect to my other major game preferences: be party-based; no first-person perspective; melee combat just as viable and effective as shooting from afar. Oh, and I'm probably not going to try a super-old game. I'm not one for wanting fancy graphics, but even I have my limits. Recommendations?

As much as I'm a fan of Obsidian, I've only ever played three of their games: NwN2, PoE, and PoE2. This is mainly because I have not been willing, in the past, to go outside of fantasy setting based RPGs for my games. And for me, all three of these games were fantastic!

I decided to change up from playing RPGs to playing city builder survival game: Patron. I had tried playing this game when it first came out, but found it not very interesting or fun. Now, more than a year later and with many changes and upgrades, the game is pretty good. I've been playing for a few days and have not yet lost interest. As always with this type of game, I know I will start losing interest once my city gets really big and exponentially harder to manage. But for now in its early stages, the game is pretty addictive and fun.

Zoria released:

But I'm not asking for them to be full-blown companions, as you suggest. I simply don't want to have to share them with/have them be used by some online stranger.

One of my favorites from back in the eighties which I recently heard for the first time in 35 years! LOVE her voice!

Does anyone here still watch network TV? If so, any thoughts on the new CBS drama Tracker? It's my favorite new show (well, my *only* new show). I'm quite amazed there is even one new drama on TV these days that has me so hooked.

But surely all of this is possible to do with companions without those companions having to be shared with other players.

Did you mean Realms Beyond? Because Black Geyser is very much alive, and recently had a successful KS for its DLC due later this year.

Sorry to disappoint, but this game is vaporware. The devs absconded with the KS funds, and with bankruptcy and a legal war between the two main devs. The project is dead and we won't be getting the finished product. If TB is acceptable, these are the current old-school indie cRPGs I would suggest: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1159090/Zoria_Age_of_Shattering/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1478850/Vendir_Plague_of_Lies/ This one is RTwP, but not quite a cRPG; more a cross between cRPG and ARPG: https://store.steampowered.com/app/945770/Dark_Envoy/

Well, unless the soul happens to be that of Gen. Blunt, for whom I was not too sympathetic. Plus that halfling scholar-woman is going to be researching interplanar travel without gates, so there's my rationalization. Yeah, I even save-scummed to get the achievements for elevating each of the five clan leaders to Speaker.

You may want to check out this site. It not only gives you info on the new expansion coming for this game but also a whole bunch of additions and improvements coming for free to the base game: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grapeocean/black-geyser-dlc-tales-of-the-moon-cult

Haha. I saved and did both to get both achievements. For someone staying behind I also left my PC behind <sob>

I think ( I may be wrong) the gap between you and Monty is that you are talking about all RPGs whereas Monty is being limited to classic, old-school cRPGs. I also used to limit myself that way, but eventually decided I wasn't going to get too many of those old-school cRPGs without TB combat nowadays. So now I have embraced ARPGs up to a point. I still won't do games that are pure dungeon-crawlers or pure hack-n-slash. They still have to be story-rich, character-development-rich, and roleplaying-rich. It is interesting that given the choice of expanding to ARPGs versus accepting cRPGs with TB combat, I am very much more accepting of the former over the latter.

Finally completed my Solasta: Palace of Ice run. Overall I liked the game very much. The only issue was that because I was using the big UB mod for the game in which I had set allowing the XP cap to go above the game's 16 levels, I ended up being rather over-leveled at the end (level 18), which made the final battles a bit too easy. But that's my bad. The DLC had a very interesting story all the way through to the end, and I actually ended up caring about at least some of the NPCs I interacted with in the game. Now I have to figure out what to play next. I'm still waiting on a good sale price to buy my new gaming computer (with a 14th-gen i9 processor and the RTX 4090 GPU), so I cannot yet buy the "big" games like CP2077 or Starfield.

I looked at this game, and do like a lot about it. But I draw a firm line against their pawns concept, specifically the idea of sharing pawns with other people. That is a very hard 'no' for me.

I am completely in agreement with you on this question. Your game preferences are exactly mine as well, and I also am very unhappy, even angry, that I'm not getting any games that fit those preferences.

I saw this story some time ago, and fully agree. I am quite certain BG3 cost even more than CP2077, over half a billion, and that is indeed not sustainable. But I also feel the silver lining is that other than a few studios here and there, most studios have come to understand and appreciate this point, and are signaling that they will be scaling back, even if this makes those gamers who want and demand the huge-budget AAA games mad. For my part, I'd MUCH rather a studio make five $200m games than two $500m games, or even better ten $100m games.

Any weapons for the Ukrainians is a good thing. But the most important thing they need now, more than anything else, is artillery (both tubes and shells).

I don't see why it need be one or the other. Since you've just played PoE1, I would suggest PoE2 to follow up. And you can (and should) play BG1&2 later on. But I can also see some people recommending the opposite because they like taking a break from what they just played. I, however, favor continuity over taking a break from something.

Hey I still have one of those pants!

R.I.P. Alexei Navalny Murdered simply for caring about your country.

Yup. What I've been talking about with my students in my National Security Policy class, that the Russians will soon test (and deploy?) a nuclear space weapon for anti-satellite use. Not as much of a threat as an orbital bombardment system, but still a major escalation in space-based weapons.