Fionavar

Hello everyone - can you comment, as time permits, please, are you still experiencing slowdowns as you access the community?

We're in the final hours of the 10th Anniversary! Thanks so much to everyone who have helped us not only be the most successful Extra Life stream, but we exceeded our goal of $30k! Please do join us for the last few sessions before things wrap up at 1800 PST! http://twitch.tv/obsidian Donate today: https://obsidian.net/donate

We're in the final hours of the 10th Anniversary! Thanks so much to everyone who have helped us not only be the most successful Extra Life stream, but we exceeded our goal of $30k! Please do join us for the last few sessions before things wrap up at 1800 PST! http://twitch.tv/obsidian Donate today: https://obsidian.net/donate

Here's the Sunday Schedule ... http://twitch.tv/obsidian Donate today: https://obsidian.net/donate

Here's the Saturday Schedule ... http://twitch.tv/obsidian Donate today: https://obsidian.net/donate

Here's the Friday Schedule ... http://twitch.tv/obsidian Donate today: https://obsidian.net/donate

Please join us for a little, some, or a lot of the Extra Life Anniversary event this coming weekend, November 15-17. More info is below but know how important the Forum Community has been in supporting Obsidian. Please consider this an invitation to help us now help the chids!

The latest Community blog by @melkathi has been published: Ghosts & Goblins & Chocolate! While you check it out, please consider what musing might be percolating for you! Looking for new submissions for December 7th and into 2025. Please DM if you would like to explore this further

This is a story about sacrifice. It is also a story about nostalgia, but more than anything, it is a story about the sacrifices gamers make. We travel back to a time of low pixel count and greenish screens – specifically the summer of 1992. The radio that summer would blast SNAP! Rythm Is a Dancer and my cousin and I, shortly before our 13th birthdays, were in summer camp on the German island of Norderney. In the evening, after lights out, with eight kids per tent, obviously nobody slept. In our tent we did two things. Firstly, one of the boys had brought terrible horror novellas, and we read those. Over thirty years later I still have nightmares. Mostly because the story did not make sense – you can’t hide a whole labyrinth inside the walls of a bell tower! The second thing was eating chocolate and other sweets. And this is where this becomes a story of sacrifice. You see, the eating was predominantly done by the other six. The two of us would initiate it, but then we’d spend the night selling our stash to the others in the tent. In retrospect, we should have found a way to expand business to the other tents, but we were not even thirteen. There was a reason to this, which had little to do with entrepreneurial spirit. The camp organizers had permitted each kid a 50DM allowance per week for the two weeks of camp. Incidentally, as my cousin pointed out, 50DM was roughly the price of a new Game Boy game. Not eating chocolate but watching others enjoy my stash was not a choice. It was a sacrifice that only gamers will understand: others would eat so I could game. Everything went well. Until the very last day. It was hot. We were on our last excursion in town, killing time until we had to get the ferry. In the (heat of the) moment we decided to grab an ice cream. The worst 3,50 I ever spent. Also, one of the worst ice creams I ever had and most likely the reason why I still do not eat lemon ice cream. It almost put me off lemonade as well. An hour before we left, I dropped to 46,50. One, horrible tasting lemon ice cream was the reason I couldn’t pay for Gargoyle’s Quest solely through the chocolate black market. Mind, the entire process did turn Gargoyle’s Quest into one of my favourite games, even though it wasn’t really my thing – too dark in tone, too much jumping around spikes. In the end, the cool green daemon on the box cover turned out to be red! That was an unexpected plot twist. It highlighted something though about descriptions and plot relevance: how often do authors abuse the fact that in written format you do not have information until they give it to you? In comics, movies, and games, you see things from the start. Unless it is a greenish Game Boy screen and after hours and hours some NPC tells you: your skin is red. Two things I remember about Gargoyle’s Quest: how I made the money to buy it and how surprised I was finding out the protagonist was red. Also, the many spikes. Three things I remember about Gargoyle’s Quest: how I made the money to buy it, how surprised I was finding out the protagonist was red, the many spikes, and the gnarly trees, the inextinguishable flames, the different breath weapons… Among the many things I remember about Gargoyle’s Quest is that it is a game literally worth it’s weight in chocolate.

The November 7th is formatted and ready to be published! Until them, please (re)explore the submissions already available in The Community Blog. As well, I continue to take submission for new entries. Please DM if you have an idea for December 7th or into 2025! https://forums.obsidian.net/blogs/category/2-community-blog/

Thanks for sharing this amazing affirmation! I have let @The Guildmaster, @SChin, and Admin know ...

I remember my first MS-DOS 'real' 386 computer ... the incandescent glow I am sure was designed by Stephen King and was never conducive to sleeping well after gaming on it! Thanks for the sharing of you, Pidesco, always a gift to learn of another's journey!

Latest 7th blog is live from our @Pidesco

For a while now, I've wanted to write something about me and Obsidian. About the history, about the community, about the games. From Sith Lords and Project New Jersey up to Avowed and Outer Worlds 2. I've been here for 20 years. If it sounds like a long time, it's because it is. I first joined the forums on the day they opened, along with a bunch of people who had come here from the old Black Isle Community, which I was never a part of. Western RPGs were at a bit of a low ebb in 2004, especially PC ones. Bioware and Bethesda were the major RPG developers at the time, and already responsible for some of my favourite RPGs ever. However, while both Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights had a lot to offer, and I was very much looking forward to them, they ended up not quite meeting my expectations. Bloodlines came out that same year, and while great, it did not do as well as it deserved. To me, at least, it kind of felt like Obsidian would be the torchbearers for the kind of RPGs I wanted to play. C&C was the key design feature: Choice and consequence. Or as some of us used to say back then, "The Chosen One must choose!" I wanted games with multiple paths, where my gameplay choices affected the storyline and the world around my character. I wanted the sort of agency I felt I got in games like Fallout, Planescape Torment, or Baldur's Gate 2, but more so. I felt that the CRPG as a genre was good but could move forward and improve, and even back then I already felt that wasn't happening. With game budgets already ballooning, the trend was not to make games with loads of essentially optional content but rather to create games with very rigid critical paths, or open world games with very little gameplay depth. RPG features that I thought should be standard were falling by the wayside, instead of being improved and expanded upon. And that was what I often focused on when posting here on the forums. Or maybe not. Sometimes I did do some substantial posting, but frequently my posts were little more than short jokes, trying to get a laugh out of people. More often than not I was just lurking, perhaps silently agreeing with posters like Metadigital or Baley, while disagreeing with posters like Volourn or Hades_One. But it was without noticing that eventually the community became a part of my identity. It quickly became a daily online destination for me, a way to connect to like-minded people across the world. And it led to slowly making sort of online friends like Role-Player, Darth Drabek, or Rosbjerg, by being a part in events and side communities. I even met some forum denizens in real life, and thanks to the coming of Obsidian loot, I now go around in my everyday life with Obsidian stuff, be it a pen, a backpack or a t-shirt. My wife knows that Obsidian games are my jams, my kids sometimes used to wish they'd get gaming loot like me. Nowadays I don't post that often on the forums. I still lurk on a daily basis and help out a bit with stuff as time permits. What I think about, sometimes, are the people that have come and gone. People that have been around for a decade or more that I feel are still new users, users that were here for a short time but left an indelible mark. Forum posters that I cherished and enjoyed, and others who were infuriating and wrong. Essentially, in some ways I'm not the person I was when I joined. 20 years is a long time, I said. In the time I've been here I left a degree, went into another degree, got a job, started a career in an area I never thought I'd be in, became somewhat good at it, moved to another country, acquired a whole new family, lost my parents, learned to enjoy myself, developed a serious comic book reading habit. It's a lot and it happened without me noticing, really. But I'm still the same person, as well. I'm still a gamer, with a healthy focus on RPGs, I still furiously devour music and books and movies, I still have a terrible tendency to want to be right about everything, (to my own detriment "I'm right and you're wrong" brings me joy), I'm still a nerd, and I still want to finish that first degree. I also sometimes still wonder what it would be like to work at Obsidian. Even if I'm really not a fit for the company, or Irvine, or SoCal in general. Pretty sure my family would have liked it though.

Next week's 7th blog is being prepped for posting. Until then, why not checkout the contributions this far: https://forums.obsidian.net/blogs/category/2-community-blog/