Ninety-Three

That was very helpful advice, thanks. Turns out it's not for me, but I love getting told "This is the point at which you'll know if it's for you" (and having that point be reasonably early). I wish more recommendations were like that.

What exactly do you mean by traps? There's definitely too much instakill overall (or maybe there's just too little death to damage), but I didn't feel like there were many traps where you would die unexpectedly, I usually died in pits to foreseeable failures of dexterity. I'm confused, you get the charge attack in the second town. Are you saying you never went onto the airship and found the shop, or did you buy it without reading the description and so never realize how it worked?

I just finished this game, and I felt like all its attempts to make me care about Shield Knight fell completely flat. For some reason, the enemies in the Shield Knight dreams drop tons of cash, so I found myself letting her fall as I tried to earn more. When I got to the Enchantress fight, her AI made me resent her like a bad escort mission. She's invincible, why can't she follow me around, rather than randomly walking away from me and forcing me to dive through fireballs to get my shield bounce? The last straw was when the Enchantress did that "sweep the entire field" attack and Shield Knight kept moving back and forth between two pillars, and I got hit because I had no idea where she was going to be blocking. It also seemed like the game gave you way too much health. I literally never died from damage outside a bossfight: I could charge through the level taking hits like a berserker, and it just never added up to enough to kill me before I either found a heal, or died in a pit and respawned with full health. That also made the instakill pits/spikes/etc feel really jarring: enemies take off 5, maybe 10% of my health when I mess up, spikes take 100%. In bossfights, I'm used to health feeling like a margin for error, something that says "Okay, you can screw up this many times before you lose", but here it felt like a resource "Well he does 2 damage to me per cycle, but I can easily hit him 3 times in that cycle, so he's going to die first". It's not specifically that it made the bossfights easy, but it made me feel like I didn't have to get good at them: I didn't have to learn how to avoid all their patterns, just figure out a good way to damage them and I could out-DPS them. Tinker Knight and Polar Knight were maybe the worst examples of this, I didn't even try to avoid Tinker Knight knocking me off bouncing on his head, or Polar Knight's "throw four snowballs" attack, I just ran into them headlong because I was doing damage faster than the bosses. I thought the Boss Rush might force me to finally play well, but with a full heal after each boss, my berserker style remained valid.

Hi folks, I'm new to the Twin Peaks thing. Ages and ages ago, I heard a conversation about Twin Peaks that said "After the show ran its course, the writers admitted that despite appearances, they had no grand plan, they'd been making it up as they went and sometimes even retroactively assigning significance to past events." This kept me away from the show for years, and I recently realized that I had never actually confirmed that that was true. So here I am to ask: Were the writers making it up as they went? If so, that rather kills my interest in the arc plot, but is Twin Peaks still worth watching as a serial?

I don't mind micromanagement in a game like Divinity: Original Sin because it feels rewarding, it lets me do complicated stuff. Here it feels like a tax: all I want is for my dude to run over there and hit the spider with his sword, I'm trying to perform the most basic combat action possible, I should be able to make that happen with one click, not six.

I've found that in any melee involving more than about four combatants, the pathfinding turns from bad to downright malevolent. I've often had them choose to go all the way around to the right (getting engaged along the way) rather than taking two goddamned steps to the left. In a party with a bunch of melee characters, every fight takes 2-3 times as long for everyone to get into melee when I leave them to their own pathfinding rather than micro things. As I originally asked, how far in is that? Because so far I have few enough per-encounter abilities that they deplete in ten seconds, and none of them require any positioning or thought except for my tiny handful of per-rest wizard spells. With those, I rest so rarely, use them up so fast, and get so few of them that I hoard them like JRPG consumables.

I'm on the hardest difficulty. And the problem isn't that I don't have to use tactics, it's that there are no tactics to use. My combat verbs are "Go here", "Basic attack this", and "Fire your boring once/encounter ability". The only choice I can even make with such a limited set of verbs is whether to fire the activated ability at the start of combat, or near the end (and every ability I've found so far is clearly best used at the start). I guess I could put more focus on ranged and try to kite the enemies, but with how awful the pathfinding is, you couldn't pay me to do something that reliant on it.

I can't do it, combat is just so boring. I just spent a minute, literally sixty seconds, watching my guys basic attack the enemies until dead, and the only input I gave during that time was telling my team to attack a new target when their current one died, because on their own initiative all they did was pick their noses. Every fight, I micromanage my team into position (how is the pathfinding this bad?), I fire off my per-encounter clickies then spend way too long just watching basic attacks fly. I've heard people in this thread saying it gets better/more tactical/etc, how far in is that?

This isn't quite an eggcorn, but it seems on topic. For about two decades, I thought the Queen Elizabeth Parkway (a major highway near where I live) wasn't actually named that, and "Parkway" was just what people angrily called it because using it is like being parked.

Funny, I legged it straight to town at the first chance I had, rolled in there with a full party (of level 1s, plus myself at 2), and stomped them flat. My experience with the start of the game was mostly "Wow, they let me, but they did not intend for me to customize a full party at this point".

Um, what? The game entirely explained both sides, in what was effectively an allegory for economic systems. Technology helps people by allowing humans to accomplish more, be more effective, and thus be able to help more people. Technology is bad by creating an underclass who don't want technology but are effectively punished because they are less effective than those with it, but they think it should be valid to not want technology. You see my point? It's not about transhumanism because none of that is about augmentations in particular. Everything it says could be said of any technology.

In what way was HR about transhumanism? It didn't have a single thing to say about it, augmentations served as a thematic stand-in for technology as a whole. You could do a find and replace of "augmentations" -> "technology" and most of the game's dialogue would still scan perfectly, especially the villain's plot at the end which is when the plot ostensibly really starts being about augs. I feel exactly the opposite, for a setting with cyborgs, I'm not sure they could have been any less about transhumanism if they'd tried. The original had things to say, about power, governance, technology. HR had Sarriff saying "Augs are great and are going to help people!" (in vague ways I'll never much explain) versus the villain saying "Augs are bad and are going to hurt people!" (in vague ways I'll never much explain).

I was really excited to see an article about the new Deus Ex game, so much so that I briefly forgot how game trailers work, and that nothing remotely informative will be coming out for a long time yet. That can't be true. Saints Row characters feel enthusiasm.

There was some discussion of a human game a while ago, but it fell through and then everyone seemed to go away. I am still totally up for some all humans games, who else is in? I suppose I'd be up for games with just two humans, but that would probably play out super weird. Worth trying at least. Anyone interested should probably share Steam info to help coordinate, since a forum is not the ideal way to schedule multiplayer games. I'm Ninety-Three on Steam.

I never had trouble with needing a damage type, because I made sure I had access to all schools of magic. Spending just one skill point to gain access to the school's low-level buffs is very worth it, and it usually left me with one spell of that school left over so I could have Flare, Bolt, Oil and so on to set basic environmental effects, and those sufficed when I ran into the rare enemies who need a particular damage type to kill them. After I figured out the party I wanted (two Lone Wolf rogues dipping into magic for self-buffs and environmentals), I never ran into a situation where it felt like it would be way easier if only I were specced differently. I can imagine DoS being frustrating if that were the case, but I don't know how you were playing, and all I can say is it wasn't an issue for me. To respond to something slightly more on topic, I've never been a fan of the "You can't fuck up too badly" school of character design. While other people find it reassuring, I always hear "You can't optimize and break the system too well". If a designer brings the weak builds closer to the strong ones, it's not just reducing your ability to fuck up, it's reducing your ability to do well.

Just an early warning: Neither of those games are apparently anywhere near as good as Pillars is, at face value. In defense of Divinity, if you come at it knowing that you should just skip through all the text without reading, it makes for an amazing hack and slash RPG. It has balance issues, in the sense that all abilities aren't exactly on equal footing, but you have so many tactical options that each fight is interesting, and if you enjoy trying to break and optimize a system, it's great fun. I couldn't say which is better, because their strengths are in very different places. I agree with what Pepyri said, the writing in PoE is actually worth reading (a rare thing), though I've had some frustrations with combat: the melee classes have few activated abilities, so most of their time is spent walking up to the enemies and basic attacking until someone's dead, and the pathfinding in a many-person melee is awful, like really really bad. Regarding Wasteland 2, blech. I found the writing bland and the combat blander, they managed to make the combat system significantly simpler than the not-exactly-complex Fallout 1. Either DoS or PoE would be a much better place to spend your time.

I recently got this game, and having read over the ability list on the wiki and knowing that you can make custom party-members, I plan to assemble a team of 6 fighters built for maximum deflection, each running the fighter +deflection aura. Before I commit to this course, is there any strong reason I shouldn't? Mandatory wizard checks, entire dungeons full of enemies that ignore deflection, buffs not stacking, that sort of thing?

But if all men are complicit in the culture that creates sexism, surely that's because of something they've internalized. So the internalized part can't be the issue here. If a man can tell another man "Hey, stop being affected by sexist messages about women", I don't see why the gender of his audience should determine whether or not it's okay. I understand that your point is "Stop being affected by messages about a group of other people" is different from "Stop being affected by messages about a group that includes yourself", but I don't begin to understand why the former is okay and the latter isn't, or why (in the case of a female speaker) "Stop being affected by messages about a group that includes yourself and me" is okay again.

I strongly disagree with this. Even accepting the notion that all men are automatically complicit in a way women aren't (I disagree, but it feels like way too big a can of worms to open here), I dislike the idea that only those who are without sexism can call someone on it. Can Man A not call Man B on B's sexism because A too is sexist? And if he can, then why can't he call Woman B on it?

Link is broken. I have seen a downright surprising number of people who clearly, sincerely believe "The feminists are coming to take away our Assassin's Creeds and our GTAs!" Starting from that error, I see where they get the energy and motivation for this stuff. I've never seen sincerity from the harassment side, but I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that people who can make one huge, baffling mistake can make two.

As I understand it, the radio station called in to the hospital pretending to be the queen of England, said "Oh hello there, could I please speak to Kate please, my granddaughter.", and then she transferred the call to someone else who spent several minutes being pranked (my quick Google didn't turn up the content, but also failed to suggest it was particularly objectionable). After the event, the hospital didn't appear to be angry at the staff. So it wasn't targeted at a specific person, it wasn't exactly harassing, and when the suicide happened, the station apologized and donated at least USD$400,000. It sounds like you're being either way too harsh on the radio station, or too soft on Gamergate.

Does it strike anyone else as a terrible idea that the HUD elements exist in the game's "physical" space? If the player isn't looking dead center, then at least one of their main HUD elements is going to be out of frame (because they maximized this problem by scattering HUD elements to all four corners of the screen). What if VR has to go through a "90s PC gaming" phase before the UI becomes remotely usable?

I hate this so much. The only thing it conveys is "It's definitely not the case that I don't care at all", which is almost always the opposite of what the speaker intends. Does this just come from people mishearing "I couldn't care less"?

I have never noticed that argument, here or in any other discussion of 4chan, but I suppose being implicit can do that. This has put me to wondering though, once Poole realized that his site had become a cesspit, what is he supposed to do about it? He can't shut it down or someone else will just restart it to recapture most of the community, so if he doesn't have the time and inclination to handle moderation himself, is he morally obligated to hand the site off to someone he trusts to moderate it?

Of course, but it's not like he created the site, then left it alone for ten years and came back to discover it had become a popular cesspit. At some point, he starts becoming responsible for not doing anything about the cesspit.