MrBrown

https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/blizzard/23185888/regarding-last-weekend-s-hearthstone-grandmasters-tournament

So now they're dropping the number from the official English title, and using a direct translation of the Japanese name of the series as a subtitle just for this game? This is never going to confuse anyone at all.

I only have the cat, but to use it, you have to equip it on your belt, and then activate it from your abilities.

I kinda agree with cokane, in the sense that I always build parties, not individual characters in these types of games, and tend to separate them to more passive auto-attack guys who do nothing else, and active ability-using characters who do that more than attacks. And I usually fill my parties with the passive types, with as little active types as possible. I don't see a problem with games like PoE2 though, since you can pretty much let the AI do most of the talent usage, or just pick mostly passive talents. So I think these games cater easily to this type of playing, provided you're willing to learn and configure the AI.

As long as you don't multiclass very stupidly, or distribute your ability scores badly for your class, yeah, I guess. And you can always lower the difficulty.

It's very unfinished and buggy.

I seem to have about 400 hours played, I'm sure about 200 of that is character creation.

There's a subquest with Tenebrous Depths about killing some boss monsters in there, and there's some writing on items you can find there. But that's all there is, AFAIK. This is from playing it during the main campaign, completed 2nd tier. It's different if you just play it rogue-like, but I haven't tried.

I think it's genuinely just bad. BTW, a word of warning, when you get to chapter 2, don't put mercs as advisors. This can lead to a common game-ending bug in the current version.

The word is that it's a bit annoying, because it doesn't tell you that you can still fail by waiting on the main quests too much. But it doesn't make your kingdom fail in other ways.

On my 2nd playthrough, hit a game ending bug, my last safe save is about 10 hours away. Very motivating.

Sure, but they will probably eventually start putting in code to prevent that, or sue them for something or other.

Somehow, I don't think the other companies will allow you to subvert their launchers so easily...

Partially. There's number of spells/day, which you can use on any you prepared. Classes differ on how they know and prepare their spells.

I kinda agree with leveling being too slow, or rather, that D&D has this sweet spot of about levels 3-8 where the game is at it's best, and earlier levels are just random. For itemization, I liked the amount of items BG1 one had, but I wish they'd more interesting rather than just +1 or +2.

5th ED is already less spell slotty than previous editions; all casters have a number of spells/day/spell level, and can use those to cast any of the spells they've prepared. The difference between caster types is in how they know their spells, and how many they can prepare. IIRC.

I started wondering how they'll do itemization. Past D&D games (and most CRPG) have been really heavy into lots of and lots of gear, but 5th ED uses a bit of a different rule. For any magic item that's even a bit powerful or complex, you have to "attune" to it, and any character can only attune to 3 items at a time. Works well in PnP, so you don't have to do math to figure out what stacks and what doesn't and all that stuff, but can be quite limiting for a CRPG.

Finally managed to beat the game. What to say. I guess "unpolished gem" is the most positive thing you can say about this? There's a lot of good stuff, but it really has it's bad sides too...

There's too much hype for 2077, it can't turn out good.

There's more details than in BG2, but less than in NWN. Most classes gain more abilities than in BG2 (the PnP game is geared toward one character per player, afterall), but I'd say it's a lot less fiddly than 3E (NWN), since you don't have to plan Feats before hand, or spread points around skills and stuff like that. I'm only familiar with the core books though, so I don't know how much stuff there is in all the other published stuff, or how likely they're going to put that in BG3.

I'd say 5th ED is a sort-of streamlined version of 3rd ED. Simple advantage/disadvantage rules, instead of lots of weird bonuses and penalties from here and there. IMO, they didn't take it far enough with some things, but YMMV. Dunno if that would make it better or worse as CRPG.

The Enhanced Edition is out. Apparently it doesn't immediately break everything, except custom portraits.

So. Eothas is destroying the thingamagic that makes souls pass to the other worlds, and back. Without it, souls can't be reborn, and eventually people aren't born with souls, right? So how did it things work without that thingy? It was build by the Engwithans, or something right? How did stuff work before that?

For some reason, DA2 was the Bio game that I ended up playing the most. Not completely sure why. One thing for sure is that I liked that the NPCs had some unique traits so they weren't just copies of possible PCs, and the game structure of 3 acts with free exploring during each meant there was always challenging combat (something DA:O and DAI fail at). So it had a lot of replay value for me.