Used to use Sync and I still prefer it in a lot of ways, but I can see the writing on the wall what with ljdawson not having reared his head for well over a year. That app will stop working when Lemmy 1.0 rolls out.

Switched over to Summit and I’m slowly getting used to it. Still missing some features and options and having some bugs, but overall it’s good and I think it will grow into being the best app for me in the future.

!thingscutinhalf@lemmy.world, Things Cut in Half, 11 => 29, 5 posts (1 this week)

Activity in random small niche subs? It’s tiny, but a great sign nonetheless.

I really should participate more in that community. It’s just a little tough that some of my favourite poetry isn’t in English and finding good translations is hard-to-impossible. As the often paraphrased quote by Robert Frost says, poetry is what gets lost in translation.

!poetry@lemmy.world, Poetry, 23 => 247, 1501 posts (19 this week)

Love it! Props to @BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world for laying the groundwork for so long.

God damn it my backlog is already long enough why’d they have to go ahead and do this.

Sigh

Now where’s my credit card?

I think this criticism is fair to be honest and is one of the things that’s sort of swept under the rug a bit in discourse about Witcher 3. I definitely think the pacing is off just as you mentioned. I’ve heard other people regret their choice of Triss because they had basically locked in her romance already by the time you start doing stuff in Skellige with Yen and start seeing what she’s like.

Personally I think the Yen/Geralt dynamic is a lot better than with Triss, although it’s got its own troubles (nobody is perfect). I like the banter between them and they feel more like a proper couple.

The game as a whole also flows better with Yen as your romance choice in my opinion and to me it feels more like the Triss romance is an afterthought yes. A bone thrown at those who desperately can’t stand Yen.

Geralt (in the books) is deeply in love with Yen and is also bound to her by literal Djinn magic, so it makes sense that he’s always hot for her in the game and I think the attention paid to the Yen side of things is a desire by CDPR to anchor their game in the preexisting lore.

If you’re not dead set on Triss or wildly opposed to Yen I’d say go with it and do the Yen romance. It’s very suitable for a first time playthrough imo.

If we know anything about evolution it’s that everything will one day become crab. Reddit is just planning for the future by preemptively outlawing anti crab language.

At least we were for a long time. User churn combined with steady growth recently might have changed that at this point though, not sure.

Same here. Do you think this data is from Email Apps/Clients rather than the addresses? iPhones are extremely popular and so I can imagine loads of people open their mail on their phones. But I have a hard time seeing more users being on Apple mail adresses compared to the huge widespread gmail.com users.

I’m sure the remake will release with the same level of QA and polish that the original Oblivion shipped with. That renowned Bethesda standard of quality.

The whole aimed shots thing makes combat magnitudes more fun in the classic Fallouts. Maybe this is telling of when I first played the games (hint: I was a teen), but there is something about taking cheap shots at people’s groin that doesn’t get old. Becoming a Prizefighter by exclusively and indiscriminately punching your opposition in the dick is always going to be funny.

The critical hits and misses are also very entertaining, though definitely add to the notorious RNG. The animations and effects, like disintegrations and splatter, also make combat a lot more satisfying.

To be fair to Arcanum in terms of companions Baldur’s Gate 2 was really the watershed moment in terms of how companions were treated in RPGs. Arcanum released less than a year after it and so while development timelines were shorter back then I doubt they had much time to adjust and get influenced by BG2. Fallout 1&2 doesn’t have it much better in terms of fleshed out companions.

(Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).

I would definitely recommend FO 1&2 easier than Arcanum and with fewer caveats. Maybe that’s just because I think they are fundamentally better and more important games than Arcanum though and so they are more worth suffering through some jank for. They still have a fiendishly retro interface that is quite clunky and the combat is not great, especially without mods. There is some really questionable encounter design in there and they both suffer from tremendous RNG heavy potential misery and loads and loads of reloads. Not least with random encounters.

Also the first few hours of Fallout 2 are absolutely miserable. It’s still one of my favourite games of all time though.

That would have been quite something. I’ve seen P.T. being played and that was fucking scary.

I played the Multiverse Edition which had a bunch of patches and fixes integrated. Including HD I believe.

I think the world building is pretty good, at least parts of it. There is some disappointingly boilerplate Tolkienesque fantasy in there, but the conflict between magic and technology is well realised and interesting and feels grounded in the world. The steampunk aesthetic is cool and I like the Victorian racism angle they’re doing with half orcs and ogres. I liked the newspapers and there are some interesting quests, like the half ogre conspiracy. I thought the peace negotiation was going to end up being absolutely amazing but in the end it is just an anticlimactic stat check.

The combat is absolutely atrocious in every possible way, from balance to animations and whether you play turn based or real time doesn’t really matter, both are horrible. It’s quite possibly the worst AI I’ve ever seen and every fight is just every creature mashing into eachother until one dies. I don’t think anyone or anything has special abilities or different AI behaviour. You can’t use Mage followers because they don’t use their magic, opting instead to charge into melee with their fists or staves.

The tech skills are the most interesting and unique aspect of the game, but involves a horrendous amount of parts collecting, crafting, inventory management and over-encumberance for very little rewards.

The companions feel extremely bare bones by modern standards and it’s extremely disappointing that none of them even get ending slides. I liked Virgil but not even he got any sort of closure at the end.

The main story was okay, it had some twists and funny moments like with Nasrudin. The whole “life was a mistake” angle by the BBEG felt a little tired to me, but maybe if playing Arcanum was the first time I came across that concept it would have blown me away.

The actual writing itself is not bad in terms of the prose and dialogue etc and the game has some funny moments.

The vast freedom you get with character building is probably the best part. I like how varied you can make your characters, although I don’t know that all builds are viable. Props for following the example of Fallout 1 and 2 and including specific “dumb dialogue”, even though I didn’t go for that personally. Having to balance tech and magic with your character build is a fun concept.

Overall I understand why it has its cult following and I’m glad to have played it, but it’s hard to recommend it to people unless they have an extremely high retro game/clunk tolerance.

Thanks to the design documents being leaked back in 2007 (I think) and the original designers being open to contact from some dedicated people, there are actually a couple of fan made attempts at creating what would have been Van Buren. I know of both Project Van Buren and Fallout: Yesterday.

I played Arcanum for the first time this year. There are a lot of cool things in it, but it really doesn’t hold up all that well.

Solid 4chan LARPing. If it actually was Elon though I’d expect it to sound even stupider somehow.

I will throw in another vouch for this series. It is exactly what you’re looking for. I haven’t played any of the more recent entries but I’ve heard they’ve been received very well. Total War: Rome 2 is a classic, but for something more modern I’ve heard only good things about Three Kingdoms, though I haven’t played that one personally.

My meagre contributions pale in comparison to your efforts, but I do what I can.

And there are those who have it even harder than YOU. Everyone’s station in life is different. They are allowed to experience that.

I’ve never understand the logic of the people who espouse that line of thinking. Is only the one single person alive who has it the literal worst out of all the billions of living human beings allowed to feel bad, and everyone else is obliged to look at them and say “well it could technically be worse so I guess I’m not allowed to feel bad”?