legend

This is 100% Persona in a fantasy world and I'm here for it.

If I'm following this, it would not be more effective than your eventual immune system if you were actually infected and recovered. Is that right? If so, it's unclear to me just how "universal" this vaccine would be, because we have instances of people getting sick with a different strain of COVID not very long after they recovered from a previous version. Sounds like it would be better than what we have, but I question the extent of how universal it is.

Ah okay. That does indeed make it easier!

FWIW, it's not enough to just kill enemies and harvest their parts. Some parts can only be retrieved from enemies in specific ways and you need to look at the bestiary to learn what those ways are. The really high-level gear often required components that needed those special conditions to retrieve. Yeah Burning Shores is gorgeous. There are few games that stand with it graphically. Maybe just Cyberpunk and Alan Wake on PC?

Yeah I think my biggest issue is the weapon grind is a bit much. Games need to strike a balance between not handing you the best weapons without work and making sure you can get some of them in a normal playthrough. Getting the best fully upgraded gear swung too hard into a slog. Otherwise, the game is great.

Not sure I have any interest in returning to F4. It was the weakest in the series IMO. Either that or I just didn't feel like it evolved enough. But I might back back in for the London mod.

Well, there goes the thread

I want DLC that get's rid of long cooldowns. Maybe a PC mod someday?

I got it to land once or twice but then just abandoned using it because dodging (assuming you had stamina!) was just so much more reliable. I'm trying to decide why it feels off. The best I can come up with is the animation does a poor job illustrating when your actual parry frames are.

Played a little. Very pretty. I'm getting a ton of audio stutter almost non-stop which isn't great. Hopefully they fix that soon. I'm unsure how I feel about the combat so far. The parry timing feels weird to me and at level one your stamina is so fucking low that it makes it kind of unfun with how quickly you just can't do shit. I've also never liked punishment for death, so taking degradation costs doesn't feel great. I'm all for games where they're hard and you die a lot, but punishing the player for it has always struck me as just out-right bad game design. It's possible that as the game goes on this will be fairly innocuous with sufficient repair materials, but I think games shouldn't even bother with it -- just don't make it a design element. I much prefer games that are hard but *encourage* you to keep trying rather than punish you for failing. E.g., Rogue Legacy 2. Also, I'm kind of lost? I guess I have to find a lever somewhere but the entire map is filled so I'm clearly overlooking some needle in a haystack. I don't think having quest markers for everything is great, but finding a missing item somewhere on the map isn't great either. We'll see how this one develops.

Not much long now!

There isn't really a ticking clock game-play wise. There are maybe 3 times in the game where you need to be careful about doing something without sleeping and the game is usually clear about those moments by the characters saying if you spend too much time x will happen. Otherwise, just sleep whenever. Loot everything for camp supplies and send them to your stash. Also make sure you use your short rests in between sleeping. You get two for every long rest. Depending on the class, short-rests can restore abilities and spell slots. You can respec your entire class and ability assignments anytime you want once you find Withers. You can even respc party members into wholly different classes if you want to. It technically costs 100 gold to a do a respect but (1) that's not actually that much once you get going and (2) you can steal it back from Wither very easily with no penalty But yeah, it's a lot. DnD has a fuck ton of rules/abilities/spells and this game gives you them all It's better to just play with abilities to learn it as you go. Don't be afraid to save scum a bit to give you a chance to experiment with different skills and abilities to figure out how they work. You can save anywhere in the middle of battle, so you can even save, try an ability you're not sure about, and then reload immediately after seeing what it does.

This sounds like it's impressively well engineered.

Not spending their time predominantly on new games doesn't mean they're not playing them. Multiplayer games can skew much older and will stay in a rotation for long time even while people buy and play new games.

I absolutely would not want to be whichever studio is forced to make this from a business deal their execs made looking for a quick buck while forcing them to make it under far shittier conditions than Larian's leadership. The only hope I'd give to anyone is Obsidian helmed by Josh Sawyer, but I'm not sure he wants to do another DnD game and frankly I'd rather him explore his own ideas.

Watched a little, but I'll wait to play it!

I was a PC gamer both before and after Halo. I'd still place Halo 1/3 as top on my list for FPS campaigns. There are few games that have such diversity of tactics to explore. I don't think COD4 would even crack the list for me. It was fun, but if it weren't for the fact that everyone keeps buy COD games, I would have forgotten about it by now.

Oh shit. This comes out for rent and purchase digitally tomorrow!

Oh I happily already know that I was just commenting that it feels like we need it!

Yeah, I'll be giving this a whirl in early access.

It's weird that one of the few other great video game adaptations: Arcane, also stars Ella Purnell.

I finally saw it too. It's great as expected. I think the box scene in part 1 is still my favorite scene though. It really feels like it needs Dune Messiah though. The end brings closure to the main arcs, but I feel like it more clearly signals that there is more to say about this story than the ending of the book did. I mean, it's been more than 20 years since I read the book, but my memory of that was it felt complete, even though I knew there were more books. In contrast, the movie feels like it has more to say about the burden Paul takes on and the cost of it to the world that was not resolved.

I liked the chocobo racing a lot except for those fucking doors! Actually really just some of the fucking doors. A lot of the time, you have enough visibility ahead of time to judge which ones would open/close when you got there, but there were a handful where it felt like you turned a corner and basically had to guess how far along it was in a cycle and could get fucked by chance. Those can eat a dick. The star fighter mini game was the best. But I have a soft spot for Starfox64, so that tracks.

Good choice for #1.

Counterpoint