probably, at which point you might as well pirate the game anyway. At least then you’re not financially supporting Sony’a dumbass decision.

If you’re a fan of ARPGs and haven’t yet given Last Epoch a go, I highly recommend it. It’s probably the single best casual ARPG currently available, meaning you don’t need a galaxy brain to figure out your own builds. I’ve levelled 5 characters to endgame just kinda fucking around and putting together simple synergies.

The extra A stands for Ass!

Black bears are kinda surprisingly small and a bit skittish. Their food doesn’t often fight back, so if you can make yourself large enough and threatening enough, you can make yourself look like more trouble than your worth and get the bear to fuck off. I think a lotta people just hear bear and instantly think of the monster that is a grizzly, but there are scales.

Of course, all bets are off if the bear is starving. If you get into combat with even a black bear, it will fuck you up, but that’s basically true of all wild animals.

This really shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. From my limited work on modding, QA just isn’t a thing you can actually do. It’ll work on your machine, and maybe you can have one or two other people test something on their machine once or twice, but once it hits the wild you’ll quickly find bits that don’t work on thousands of machines.

I’m very excited for Fallout London, but I’m excited to play it in like a year, once things are stable.

This just seems still bad? I mean if you really love your Magnus, now you have two of them, but you’re gaining such a tiny amount of fire rate, and it’s still a semi-auto so the fire rate isn’t even necessarily worth that much.

The problem isn’t just his acquisition, it’s that he sucks. His passive is a worse adaptation that doesn’t even work if you want to use the real Adaptation. His AI companions have the same braindead AI that enemies have, making them worthless. His slam is basically a worse version of the ability you get rid of on Rhino.

I think the combo of Razor Gyre dealing slash and Fusion Strike technically being a strip is all he offers right now, and that’s not very much. He needs a full Pablo rework before he’ll start seeing play.

I mean, I don’t wanna undercut this accomplishment, but Bioware games have pretty much always had trash character creators. We’ll need to get our hands on this one to see, but the competition is Elden Ring and Dragon’s Dogma 2, which both have pretty incredible options that have allowed users to recreate tons of characters from real life/pop culture.

This is a pretty great idea. Man, imagine how awesome it would be to roll extra Eximus on it! That would actually make me run the Sortie.

It’s pretty fun, but I wonder what will make me return to it after the clan event ends. I managed to naturally drop all the blueprints I needed, so now I’m just stacking up the Arcanes. Once I have everything, it feels pretty unlikely I’d return. The “overwhelming Eximus” at the top were nerfed, so it’s not a good Affinity farm. The mission itself is pretty long, so even if it gets added as an Omnia fissure, I’m probably not going to choose it for relic cracking. It feels like another Tyvar Pass, where even though I really like the gameplay, I’m just never going to come back after running it 150-200 times.

I’m impressed that there’s such a comprehensive process. I’m a little worried by the fact that this means Iran could have a registry of nearly every trans person in their country, but maybe they’re practicing good data retention policies and the records get regularly destroyed.

ngl, I look at it the same way I do FromSoft games. “It’s called what now? sorry, it was an Estus Flask in Dark Souls, that’s what it gets called forever.”

All science fiction adjacent shows are legally required to do at least one Inner Space during their run, that episode was just business.

Honestly, I could maybe get behind AAA narrative-focused games being the hot new trend to chase, but Actiblizz just cancelled a massive internal project late last year and laid off all the devs working on it. I think it was also some trend chasing bullshit, some survival craft-em-up style live service nonsense, so why the hell didn’t they just scrap the project and shuffle the existing devs around. What was the point of shuttering that team just to make a new one?

Huh. Not exactly the IP I was expecting them to adapt next, I really had my money on Lord of the Rings. That being said, I guess Star Wars works too? I can’t really think of what melee infantry would look like though outside of Force users though, and it’s not like there were really factions that made heavy use of monsters… Is it really just going to be all gun lines all the time, with a couple very powerful characters?

They’ve published single-player games. For single-player games, the only metric that matters is sales. If the game sold well, they can make a sequel, and if it sold poorly, they won’t make another. For live-service games, the metric that matters is Monthly Active Users, because the more users you have the more likely some of them will buy something in your live-service cash shop.

Hey has anyone checked on Destiny recently? They’re also published by Sony, do they require a PSN account? or do they get away with it because Destiny 2 was originally more of a partnership?

I mean, I’d hate it as well, but I already avoid D&D, and Wizards of the Coast has shown over and over again that they’re more than happy to burn out committed fans in order to chase the potential of new players. Also maybe it’s just the pick-up games that I’ve been in, but playing a creative character is often a huge part of the draw that people come in for. People are becoming aware of TTRPGs through improv comedy clips on TikTok from funny people like Critical Role or Dimension20, and those are the moments they want to emulate.

Nah, you gotta hit people with the nostalgia bait. Sell 3e again as D&D Classic, reusing artwork from 1e, with Minsc & Jaheira on the cover.

I would actually casualize the shit out of it. Streamline combat, make it so that most minor combat encounters end after like 5 turns max. Collapse skills down into like 10 max, maybe even combine two attributes to lower that number. Remove all the component stuff from spells, you can cast a spell as long as you aren’t unconscious. I think the D20 system is too ingrained to change now, but I’d want to try something that’s faster to grok, either by going for a system where you roll under your stat or moving to more D6s. I’d also want to jazz up character building.

Basically, make D&D into actually babby’s first tabletop RPG. It’s currently treated as such, despite being a terrible system for newcomers IMO. Most of the new crowd of TTRPG players I’ve played with want to hangout with friends, do some silly improv bits, maybe have a cool moment where they kill a goblin in a creative way, and go home. D&D is way, way too crunchy for that crowd, they quickly stop paying attention during combat if it drags too long, and nothing drags a game to a halt like one of those players needing to make a check they haven’t “practiced” before. Assuming I’m still trying to do Cynthia’s job of making more money than God, I think that’s the clear way forward, because all the videogames and movies and marketing don’t mean a damn thing if the new people bounce off the ruleset.

I have some really, really bad news if the only thing holding your worldview together is the idea that people make their way in this world on their own merit.