2077

Life is filled with disappointment. Luckily, mods.

Shadowrun: Dragonfall I enjoyed a lot mainly for the great round-based combat. The atmospheric soundtrack is wonderful on top, plus the environments are beautiful. The skill tree offers enough variety that it might warrant another playthrough to optimize your character setup (as a rigger, I wish I had invested Karma to get a third weapon slot, to have something more significant to do besides watch both my drones do all the fighting).

The story is just alright I felt, the dialogues are often more on the juvenile side of things; especially some of your crew members tend to mope and play difficult in conversation, where I felt pushed into basically babysitting them.

In Shadowrun Returns I played a decker and discovered that due to the fact that decking is merely a visuelly less exciting version of combat compared to fighting in meat space, I hated spending time in cyberspace. Luckily, there is only one instance in Dragonfall where you need to partly rely on hacking.

The whole idea of goblinization in the Shadowrun universe I always found ridiculous, fantasy-type characters in a Cyberpunk world will always feel jarring to me. Never was able to get into it as a tabletop experience therefore. But the video games are neat, I found I could easily ignore the metahuman aspect of it and concentrate on the excellent gameplay experience.

Neverwinter Nights (Darkness Over Daggerford)

Sometimes you just have to cast Weird on a copy of werewolves that were acting like weirdos.

Rise of the TombRaider

1. You didn't!!!
2. Dear Diary, bots have taken over my life. I'm so angry!

A Totally Not Pirate Adventure... aka Rise of the Third Power

Another fun and somewhat streamlined JRPG from Stegosoft. Still a noticeable step up from Ara Fell. It's a fairly linear game and the overworld looks bigger than it actually is, which really is more of a vehicle for some of the sidequests than anything else. Good story, likeable characters, and some really nice music. I found the cartoony character portraits a little weird at first, but I grew to actually like them as I kept playing.

Thad time of the month

... Hey look ....

A single line of people

Barbarian A - Lets Charge it
Barbarian B - Raaaaaah
Barbarian C - Wait wait, let's play a trick and pretend we are not barbarians - we should win easily

All Bar's together

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

"I don't know how it happened, it all took place so quick." - Dire Straits, Latest Trick.

Where will you be, when the night falls ?

Robin Hood's Cousin and the End Times... aka Foretales

Quite the fun little card game with bits of deckbuilding (but unlike games such as Slay the Spire/Monster Train) and some choose-your-own-adventure-style story progress. Considering practically most of the story is presented via tiny dialogue boxes, it's actually fairly well written and pretty funny at times. The narrator (only voiced "character") is quite enjoyable, too, although some of his non-story quips become somewhat repetitive after a while. The card art is gorgeous and they did a superb job at imitating ye olde Disney's Robin Hood's style.

I also failed my first run (of 9.5 hours) which very much seems to be an intentional game mechanic - I was stumbling a bit here and there throughout the run as I was still figuring out new things as I was nearing my inevitable doom. Good thing then that there are several story branches throughout that I had to miss the first time around. I also like the combat most of the time does not actually need to be a fight to the death as the game lets me bribe, bedazzle, or intimidate opponents if I have enough points for each.

Rats! (The Musical?)... aka Plague Tale: Requiem

So far a good follow-up to the first game, but it definitely requires knowledge of the predecessor's story since it's basically a direct continuation which would just leave new players confused because it pretty much expects you to know what happened before. Most of the time the game looks quite gorgeous ,but the stiff puppet facial animation outside of cutscenes, somewhat gliding up and down stairs, and set-dressing NPCs can look a bit silly at times. The dangers of a game trying to look realistic. ;) Still, it's quite fun overall, and those rat tsunamis definitely have those "holy shit!" moments.

I found it interesting how the photo-mode at times could reveal under/undeveloped environments outside of the gameplay area and the tricks used to hide those. Also rats seem to be only rendered in front of the camera and never behind the player as I find vast empty spaces when I zoom out and rotate.

May I ask you, since I see you were playing NN:EE?
Do the main game and the modules have voiceovers in dialogues? Or at least, in most of the dialogues, if not in all of them?
I have the Diamond Edition and I was thinking of buying the EE Deluxe, if the latter has more voiceover than the DE.
I didn't mind reading in games, some years ago, but these days I find it more immersive to hear the actual voices of the heroes as the developers have made them to be heard.

It depends on the module, some have voice overs in dialogues but as with the main campaign that always had voice overs, not every single dialogue has it. I've always found the voice overs a bit jarring for this reason and wish they just didn't bother.

The voice for Hevesar Dimpet (Darkness Over Daggerford) was too low in relation to the background music. Also some NPCs in Darkness Over Daggerford and Tyrants of the Moonsea got new portraits.

Some of the tilesets were unchanged, but the forest tileset was probably the most improved just for the fact that they got rid of those skeletons laying around in the trees.

Also if you get EE on GOG, one of the extras is going to be Neverwinter Nights HD Art Pack. Instead of installing the HD Art Pack this way, I recommend getting the version off of the NW Vault here that has additional fixes to what Beamdog has done.
https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwnee/hakpak/original-hakpak/beamdogs-hd-art-pack-community-fixes

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I got EE because I was having some stability issues and frequent crashes with Platinum edition that was patched up to 1.69 and even the 1.71 CPP didn't completely fix it. I was having an extremely high incidence of crashing when either entering or leaving the troglodyte village in Pirates of the Sword Coast, but any transition to a different tile set could result in crashing.

So while Wyvern Crown of Cormyr is even more broken in EE to the point of being currently unplayable, I would say that EE has been a vast improvement just for being more stable. (I keep Platinum installed for when I want to play WCOC.)

Thank you very much, but which of the ones under "Attachment" should I download?

You would download one of these two depending on how you want to install it - either as a userpatch or override.
* Beamdog's HD Texture Pack - Userpatch V 1.4.2 [Compiled] (Fixed weapon icons)
* Beamdog's HD Texture Pack - Override V 1.4.2 [Compiled]

Override really is just dumping a bunch of files loose into your override folder. Userpatching is slightly different for EE than it was for diamond/platinum and not fully explained in the readme, so I'll explain it a bit.

1. Open the nwn.ini file in notepad
2. Copy the HAK line and paste a duplicate under it, then edit the word HAK to say PATCH. You should see something like this:

HAK=C:\Users\username_here\Documents\Neverwinter Nights\hak
PATCH=C:\Users\username_here\Documents\Neverwinter Nights\hak
SCREENSHOTS=C:\Users\username_here\Documents\Neverwinter Nights\screenshots

The userpatch archive contains a userpatch.ini file. You can place this in your Documents\Neverwinter Nights folder that has the nwn.ini if you are going to use all aspects of the update and have no other improvements that you wish to install. If you wish to only install part or have other improvements you want installed, then you'll want to merge the two files.

Since I only used part of the Beamdog update, my userpatch.ini looks like this:

[Patch]
PatchFile000=bdhd_items
PatchFile001=bdhd_creatures
PatchFile002=patch-portraits
PatchFile003=patch-gunner
PatchFile004=patch-armor
PatchFile005=patch-ccohee

This means that I added the files bdhd_creatures.hak and bdhd_items.hak to my hak folder, but not any of the other files. The file patch-gunner.hak is Gunner's Body Rebuild/Retexture, which is why I don't use any of the bdhd_pheno haks as I've gotten used to these models. I was previously using the Reforced weapons, but some of the weapons have broken shadows in EE.

Some odd happenings in Total War Warhammer 3 Immortal Empires << NORSCA!!

Fairly soon after the beginning of the campaign, some demon forces decided to camp outside a harbour of mine. This gave some stress since i was already at war with another Norsca tribe and with the harbour being almost the only sensible source of income, not to mention the demonic nature of the force. Luckily another tribe attacked the main settlement of the same tribe i was at war with, forcing their chieftain, who took the fort, to retreat... weakened.
Now, when you play as Norsca either as the Wanderer or that weird Troll, you have the option of taking control of the enemies lands and forces when one chieftain is defeated by another.
And that is exactly what i did.

I managed to grow my forces a bit to a size i thought to be more than a match for the Demon Prince and set out on a march to repel those ugly faced bastards. Halfway on my march to defend the harbour, another Norscan Tribe sailed in, apparently allied with the demon's forces, and set anchor, doubling the already formidable presence of the Demon lord's army.

For a couple of turns i stood undecided, in the meantime rebuilding the capital and several villages into something more defence aimed, expecting some sort of invasion but..... They just remained on their boats waiting for some sign yet to reveal its self.

I'm quite proficient with Total War, but something like this never happened before. I can imagine that the strategic total strength of the factions is almost equal, though with allies Be'lakor must be the stronger one. This is usually taken into account of the power rating, but maybe glitching here.

Anyway,

Picture 1, added Warhammer 3 to a gaming mode setup program that came with the motherboard promising all kinds of things and even an oversaturated 'real' colour mode, which even managed to survive the downgrading of the picture..

Picture 2, Mr, Wulfrik the Wanderer, tired of waiting for an assault, set out to assault yet another Norscan Tribe.... Who actually managed to strike first but failed to defeat the guardians of the earlier conquered capital

Thank you, as I'm not good at this! :)