Since there doesn't seem to be a thread, anybody looking forward to some TI Doto? Favorites? Dark horses? Drama (matu - liquid)?

 

Japan: It's the best Harry Potter game that's not actually a Harry Potter game

China: It's the best Harry Potter music video that's really an opportunity to show off every cg effect we can conceptualize.

ngl those effects are pretty good

 

AKA Cho Chang's instagram feed.

 

Can't you tell those were gryffindor ties, obviously J.K never clarified that Ginny was a Caucasian ginger so we can assume she was asian you racist /s

 

How dare you.

THIS is what an Asian ginger looks like. I know this because I understand and respect other cultures, even the dirty foreign ones.

 

This was really fascinating. An interview with Jessica Bevin, Ninja's wife and manager. It's amazing to me how big streaming video games has gotten.

https://www.businessinsider.com/jes...VRC99hPWPJhceQbHFtBmBX2fofQCfFGxGDZFnuzB_nvww

 

http://archive.is/H7wMc

A true gem from Kotaku. The gist of it is that gamers suck for raging at Epic Store exclusives. However, there is one bit that is just... wow. Nathan Grayson is an exceptionally rare breed of idiot. The article quotes an indie gamedev, and Grayson seems to have completely missed the quote's implication as it relates to every dumb demand Kotaku and other game journalism outlets have made towards the industry since Gamergate.

I would expect Nathan to read this quote he got and realize that every time he and his friends have screeched about tits, ass, race, representation, sexism or whatever the fuck in video games they most likely didn't buy anyway, they've been doing exactly what Nathan seems to be disavowing in this article. But that would require self-reflection and more than 3 starving brain cells, so I guess I'm out of luck.

 

I think one of the most annoying things is that kotaku and others continue to complain about gamergaters.

CNN/Fox etc don’t write articles complaining about their readers like this.

 

That's 360 hours and three completed playthroughs of Pathfinder: Kingmaker done. I tried to start a fourth, but my body couldn't handle playing through the tutorial area again and forced me to uninstall.

The game has its flaws, and has some really shitty core code problems, but overall a fantastic experience for a crpg lover. The recently released Enhanced Edition update (basically just a new cover over the now mostly bugfixed game, and some kingdom management improvements) didn't hurt.

 

After finish Baldur's gate 2, I was torn on what I want to play next. I almost went with Pathfinder Kingmaker, though all the reviews I saw said that it was still pretty buggy, so ultimately I went with Icewind Dale. On the surface, it looks like a similar game to BG2. Same company, same UI, same D&D system, same pretty much everything. I have very little history with that game. I once watched my friend play for like 30 minutes back in the day and all I knew was that you have to make an entire custom party of 6 to use (or use the defaults).

Either way, that means theirs no canon party members, which means no character interactions, dialog, or quests. Those are all some of the best parts of the BG2. Despite the same mechanics underlying both games, Icewind Dale is pretty much a piece of shit. The plot itself is kind of lazy, like even the predictable plot twist was halfhearted. The character AI seems less polished as well, and they would constantly get stuck.

Then, there are the encounters. BG2 has a lot of difficult encounters. Some of them are samey (tons of high level wizards where you need to peel through their protections and fight through time stops and shit), but theres dragons, demons, beholders, and mindflayers. Lots of weapon immune monsters that require a lot of diversity, while also leading to the fact that if you visit the wrong dungeon at the wrong time, you can get fucked in the ass.

Icewind Dale only has one order in which you can do everything. There's no real exploration. There's no real thought to the encounters. Each one is essentially just swarms of monsters. Early game, is 20 skeletons, late game it's 20 umber hulks. Those aren't exaggerations. It's a very lazy encounter design that can feel very frustrating to have to constantly reload if one of your characters gets picked off, since you can't learn resurrect until like the second to last chapter in the game. Not to mention, early game is super punishing because there's monsters that are immune to non-magical weapons, and if your specced your level 1 characters wrong, it's going to be a disaster. I didn't have any foreknowledge on those encounters, so I got screwed.

Ultimately, the game just does not feel very polished. You'd think being an enhanced edition would help, but I was still coming across bugs and glitches. There's large gaps in item acquirement that shouldn't really exist. Just not a very satisfying experience overall, but at least it was relatively short. Honestly, I'm looking at the ratings for the game and I'm kind of surprised that they're as high as they are.

 

Pathfinder: Kingmaker is mostly bug free now. It launched as an absolutely horrible, unplayable mess. The critical path was literally unplayable for a week or two before they patched it. It was the worst launch I've seen in a decade. But it's been ten months. It got several hotfixes a week for months after release. All the critical bugs have been ironed out, and really only a few misc ones remain. It feels something like a Bethesda game (on the bugginess level) now.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker was the best crpg I've played since NWN. And I really love crpgs, I've played most of them - Planescape: Torment, NWN, IWD, BG, BG2, IWD2, NWN2, Divinity: OS, DOS2, Tides of Numenera, PoE, PoE2. And now PF:K. To those unfamiliar with Pathfinder, Wizards of the Coast split up years ago, and Pathfinder is basically an advanced, extended version of DnD 3.5 rules, made by mostly the same guys who worked on DnD. As someone whose favorite rpg ruleset was DnD 3.5, Pathfinder was a curious mix of something new and something familiar and comforting.

The game is long. I'm a completionist, and my first playthrough took 120 hours. That's massive. The game is immersive. The game is quite deep. The alignment system and multiple diffeent ways to solve every quest highly encouraged replayability - I was still finding new things on my third playthrough! The main story is fairly cohesive, and set over several years. The story companions are mostly well written. The dialogue and vibe of the world is mostly 'standard western fantasy' - it's not grey morality or grimdark, so it's corny at times.

The two DLCs are probably worth the price. The first adds a new class and race, an excellent story companion, and some new content. The second one adds a new, roguelike infinite dungeon that you can find set in the main game, but also play in entirely standalone mode.

The game still does have its issues. It was released months early, and it was... I'm not clear of this, but the studio's first big rpg. The code is a mess. The longer your play, the more the game slows down. Quicksaving near endgame takes 8 seconds (on an SSD). You'll never get high fps, even on beastly machines. There are a few visual bugs that were never patched. There are far too few character portraits. Only part of the dialogue is voice acted. Some game mechanics like lockpicking are arguable. But this is getting into nitpick territory.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker was clearly a product of love, and it's been patched into playable state. 9/10. If you liked the old crpgs with DnD 3.0 and 3.5 ruleset, definitely check it out.

 

I think my issues with PF: KMhas more to do with the real Time aspect of this style of games.

I disliked it in Baldurs Gate and dislike it now. I get you can add auto pause, but it just doesn’t flow well.

DnD gaming should be turn based a la Divinity.
Really hoping BG3 leans into that more.

 

There's a mod on nexus that gives Kingmaker a turnbased mode. Can't personally vouch for it because I like the real time style, but everything I've heard about it has been pretty glowing.

 

I haven't used the turn based mod, since I prefer rtwp myself, but basically anyone who's mentioned it gave it glowing praise. Closer to tabletop feel, more control over everything, revealing new depths in combat. The only flaw seems to be that it makes encounters last for a long time, and since this is a pc crpg, it has a lots of encounters.

Apparently the devs had an internal poll to decide whether the game should be rtwp or turn based, and rtwp won with like 55% of the votes.

With the direction Deadfire took, perhaps more games in the future will launch with both rtwp and turn based options.

 

You can toggle it on and off while playing, so it turning trash fights into a long slog isnt really a problem.

 

This game continues to look like a sleeper hit.

 

Sleeper is right - I've barely seen any mention of this anywhere else, and I know at least one gaming channel who hadn't heard of it as of Friday afternoon, but it does look very cool.

 

It's certainly interesting. The developer's past work has been reliably "interesting, but flawed", so we'll see if they can manage to elevate this time around. I'm very likely to buy it, I'm a sucker for the pirate aesthetic they've got going, but I'm expecting it to be a bunch of good ideas with shoddy execution, just like Technomancer and Mars: War Logs.

 

Indeed. It’s definitely on my watchlist, which remains somewhat disturbingly short when compared to some of the previous years.

 

Yeah there is a 50/50 chance of it being a hot mess or something epic. We shall see