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"Where did it start? How did it start? These are questions I asked myself when I made this post. The question being “my love of fantasy and fantasy RPG PC games? And why not Sci-fi, why fantasy as my favourite genre?" For me it was the late 1970’s, I was young and don’t remember much but I do remember my dad reading to us Enid Blyton’s “The Magic Faraway Tree” and that’s where it started. I was absolutely enthralled and mesmerized by this idea of a tree and portals that led to incredible and fantastic lands. You never knew what creatures they were going to meet or what place they were going to discover and my love for fantasy only grew from there. In the 1980s I also started collecting comics with Conan being my favourite and to this day I still RP my characters in RPG on Conan’s personality and world views. Basically, Chaotic Good but someone who helps the downtrodden, wanting wealth and never saying NO to a damsel in distress. It was also in the 1980’s where I started playing the very popular and loved Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone books and I was given my first D&D Red Box ruleset with that indelible image of a fighter and dragon and a new world opened up to me. The world of tabletop RPG. I still consider D&D ruleset and the various D&D fantasy worlds my overall favourite because that’s where my journey on RPG really started. Due to Apartheid sanctions, we had limited access to general fantasy paraphernalia and goods, but my dad was an investment banker and he travelled 3-4 times a year to the UK and sometimes the US and he would buy us things we couldn’t get in South Africa. But we were generally behind in IT and the advancement and creation of the PC, and this included Internet access and connectivity speeds. I used to read Dragon magazine and they had these adverts and stories about games called Ultima, Wizardry and Might and Magic and I always wondered “it looks and sounds amazing … imagine an RPG on a computer.” But in the late 1980’s that started ending because Apartheid was ending and suddenly people had PC at their homes and that meant PC gaming was also coming to South Africa. And in 1989 at my uncle’s house was the first time I saw a PC game and it was one of the classic Sierra games, Kings Quest 1. The PC had monochrome graphics and was incredibly basic, but I still was blown away by the concepts and how you needed to type actions to advance the game like “open door” or “push witch into fire “ . It was a life changing experience and my love, enjoyment and passion for PC gaming never ended from that moment like my love of general fantasy. I stopped gaming from 1995-2007 because of RL responsibilities and I was travelling overseas a lot, but I bought my first real gaming machine in 2007 and PC gaming has been an active hobby of mine since then. I play many different genres like action or RTS games, but fantasy RPG are still my preferred choice and it’s because of my childhood connection to the Magic Faraway Tree books. The idea of what waits behind that door, what lives in that ancient temple, what strange beasts await me are still the most exciting design themes of RPG that I treasure and appreciate. And Obsidian has created many games that align with my core expectations of what I want to experience in playing any RPG. These 3 Obsidian games are all in my top 10 of “best RPG of all time “and it’s tough to think of a top 10 or 20 list because there are so many excellent games out there. Lots of competition which is a good thing for gaming. NWN2: MoB: Brilliant D&D setting with an exciting and fascinating narrative that takes you on this epic journey to the Planes with memorable and interesting characters and companions. I love the entire NWN2 series, but this expansion was my favourite with the whole Spirit Eater curse and then the choices you need to make about the Wall of Faithless Fallout:NV: It’s my favourite third person\first person Fallout game outside the first 2 isometric games. I love open world and sandbox games and I like the concept of exploring anywhere you want and F:NV provides that reality. I had the single most appreciated moment in F:NV and that is the most appreciated of any game I have ever played. To get to NV I didn’t go directly and went through small regions and areas of interest, and I remember I reached a point where I was wounded with no ammunition, and I was being chased by brutal and indefatigable Deathclaws. I had a sniper companion who bravely stood his ground and died while I fled. But the Deathclaws continued to pursue me, and it was night and then I went around a corner and saw something … incredible bright lights on the horizon. I had reached NV finally and I was saved. I have never been so relieved in any game to find my destination as that single experience. PoE2: I thought Obsidian created a fun and worthy alternative to standard D&D ruleset and the whole PoE mechanics worked for me. I thoroughly enjoyed the overarching and depth of the narrative, the lore of the game world, the companions were interesting, and I appreciated the whole naval exploration of islands and open world design PoE2 created. So, in closing its easy to support Obsidian and love their games because Obsidian is not just a name of a company, it’s a world-builder and creator of so many games that resonate with me and the mystery and allure of The Magic Faraway Tree from my childhood.

We had a supposedly critical server go down. Then we checked and found the process the server is hosting hasn't been working for 2 weeks and our clients have not raised anything. Amazing we get paid for this.

This week our PM lead went on vacation and I was acting lead. We had 4 production incidents this week... They ranged from a random piece of old code that started producing issues without any reason, to our dev ops deleting our cron job server. Suffice to say, my working days this week were averaging to around 12 hours... Well if nothing else it was a learning experience.

Just realized I've been a member here for 20 years now. 10 more and it will be 30 years, jeeeeeez

Nothing. My cat figured out the power button.

Xenonauts 2 - They still have one big update to go before the game is able to be finished, but I couldn't help myself. The game is fantastic early on. Fighting the cleaners at the start instead of jumping right into it with aliens is a nice touch. The combat is great. I've got 17 soldiers right now and they are starting to get a bit decent. I've got one sniper who leads the pack in kills. In the first downed UFO mission, he ended up with 4 kills, and the last one was with his sidearm after his rifle ran dry. He's a legend already.

Hey folks! I am a Youtuber who posted a thread a while back asking for peer review for an upcoming class tier list video I was making for Deadfire. The video is complete and I am linking it below for anyone interested in following up. Thelee from these forums makes a guest appearance at the end to discuss the finer details of the rankings. Here is the link:

Japanese lawmaker is considering to start an investigation against Ubisoft, due to the cultural appropriation and other cultural inaccuracies present in their latest checkbox simulator. https://nichegamer.com/japanese-politician-investigation-assassins-creed-shadows-inaccuracies/

The socially ingrained pursuit of happiness instead of contentness is relatively new, and with so many things, was driven by corporate greed. If people would be content with being, well, content, then what's the point of buying ever more stuff? Imagine people just buying whatever they actually need to live out their lives, the economy would collapse. There's a surprising number of things we take for granted that were invented and had the need for it manufactured after the fact, by commercials and therefore commercial interests. When Edna Murphey invented the first deodorant, mankind had survived for hundreds of thousands of years without it. Nobody needed a deodorant. Nowadays, after a century of dedicated marketing left us with the impression that body odor is bad, can you imagine a world without deodorant? In German, we have an idiom for finding someone intolerable, that literally translates to not being able to stand their smell. It makes no sense in modern parlance, as humans basically stopped having much of a smell, unlike in times past, where this had a very literal meaning. You found someone's actual smell disagreeable, so you did not like having them around. Anyone who is content with their lives please realize that this is perfectly fine.

Both sides.

I don't always collect. But when I do...

Yeah, sorry, for a moment I forgot who I am replying to. I'll just show myself out.

Shadow of he Erdtree. It's completely glorious, best game they have ever made, and it's a DLC.

Unfortunately, New Vegas is there to show that there can be a decent RPG build using FO3 structure and tools. Not that FO3 is without any merit - it just isn’t quite there. Both in content quality and system design. PS. Anyway Fallout3 is Garbage and Here is Why

I had a bit of free time the last couple of days so I decided to install one of the games I've purchased on sale and never got around to playing. I picked Company of Heroes. I think gameplay-wise it's held up pretty well, I've only spent a couple of hours with it but I'm having fun. The only downside right now is that it's been about 20 years since I've had to use the arrow keys to scroll around the screen and it's taking a while to get comfortable with that again. Relic are amazing though, I'd forgotten how much fun I used to have with the Dawn of War series. Dawn of War IV is long overdue, hopefully if Space Marine 2 does well they'll give Relic and the franchise the boost it needs to do another.

finally got to Malenia in Elden Ring, attempting her pushed my total play time over 240 hours, and I have yet to even burn the friggin' tree. at least I'll be ready for the DLC once I get around to trying it.

Had a fantastic day at work thanks to CrowdStrike. Although, yeah, I guess it's the ultimate way to secure computer systems: make sure they don't work at all.

I'm deep into Cyberpunk 2077 again. Remembered one of the last patches added new bikes, so went out of my way to buy a new one. Here is my with my new ride. Wish I were that cool in real life.

Well, aren't you Republicans happy that you made Biden immune to save your own candidate from having to deal with the fallout of his indictments?

Damn Euros,stop bragging about your first world internet service.

Damn, they saw what I said about new accounts needing to automatically be suspected in this new age of AI-generated spam and made the perfect counterplay. They're evolving!

's an authentic BruceVC post all right.

So I was one of the people who genuinely enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077 even in its near-launch state, and thought that despite its issues, it was one of the best games of the year. Today, I finally started the Phantom Liberty expansion, and I now hate Cyberpunk 2077. Platforming, long linear sequences where you can't save, mandatory boss fights... yeah, it's made pretty much the worst first impression possible. Any pretense of it being an RPG are gone, and it's just moving from set piece to set piece in a completely unreactive way like I imagine Call of Duty does - with the caveat I've never played Call of Duty. It's a complete genre-shift into a genre I outright despise.

Nice reading Bruce! I don't know the specific book, but Enid Blytons "The Famous Five" books were something I loved, growing up. The four kids and their dog going on all kinds of adventures, helping a young mind escaping the limitations of the physical world and go to various places of the imagination. Had the very same "red" D&D basic rule book too Good to see, that circumstances didn't completely block your access to things that interested you

Calling Lexx a spam bot was uncalled for.

The First Templar as a new giveaway on GOG https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_first_templar

Made a baby cry just by looking at it. Still got it. Also the local crazy man in my neighbourhood got reassigned, the new guy is just ranting about feminists. Sad. The old guy used to just mutter gibberish and try to fight garbage bins.

Gameplay is crap, enemy mobs around every corner. Bethsoft thinks you have ADHD and need attention every 20 seconds or you might get bored and quit. Worldmap is typical Bethsoft theme park with a new attraction around every corner. Story is complete garbage, actually all dialog is garbage. Three Dawg can shut the hell up. Consistency of the gameworld doesn't exist - what do people eat? Why are there raiders and dead bodies everywhere? Why do we need Super Mutants on the east coast? Why did we need to rehash the Enclave that was wiped out in Fo2? Why bring back the BoS again and make them shining knights? Why bring Harold to the other side of the continent just to turn him into a tree? This is ****ing bull****. Also lots of bugs - last time I tried it for lolz, I've played for 30 minutes. Then I've reached Megaton and the game kept crashing, so I just gave up. Man, I can keep going forever, but it has been talked to death for years now and I'm just tired. So my tl;dr is ... it's a bad game.

Fo3 is garbage, sorry but it's fact. Everyone who disagrees is either too young to know better or has no taste. Even if you remove the "Fallout" from the name and see it as a generic post apocalyptic game, it's mediocre at best, still bad in many areas.

HELLO, THIS IS THE BARTIMAEUS BOT ALERT! Evidence: #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5. All only tangentially related posts made on various random forums by a newly registered user within the last day by the same username. This one had a decently believable post, I almost didn't look them up...but the fact that it didn't seem to be addressing anyone in particular despite starting with "I agree with you" combined with the random words smashed together username (which in my own experiences of forum moderation, is almost always a dead giveaway that the user is a bot) made me make sure, and yep. Once the idiots running these AI-generated spambots figure out how to use different usernames across different websites (i.e. doing the bare minimum to disguise themselves) and maybe some mild textual improvements to avoid easily patterned behaviors, we might really be in trouble, because I honestly thought that this could be a real post for a moment.

I was at London Pride 2024 on Saturday with my university. It was curious to see several groups of the safely contained homophobes, but they do remind why the Pride is needed. I have also realised that I strongly dislike whistles and large groups of people in general. Still, going to get some sort of hearing protection and come to London Pride 2025. Hopefully, the transphobes in the government will be removed by that time.

Don't worry, I happened to leave a tab of this page open earlier and took an image of it. Learn to live with your mistake of approving AI-generated spam, you commie bastards! There's certain to be more of it that I'll have to point out anyways, with the way things are going: the least you can do is not delete our posts over it. And here I was, seeing that you replied in this thread, and thought to myself, hey, @Bartimaeus surely commented on a link to hbomberguy, but nah. Another spam bot got through the mod screening. I actually haven't seen this particular hbomberguy video yet, and I'm not too knowledgeable of Fallout 3 (or pretty much any other Bethesda game...or actually, any of the Fallout games for that matter). Anything that says a Bethesda game is bad is pretty much automatically approved by me, though.

Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition free on Epic: Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition | Download and Buy Today - Epic Games Store

Happy to share that July and August 7ths editions are now in hand. If you have an idea percolation for September, please do reachout!

Made some progress in Necromunda: Hired Gun. Didn't listen to people's advise to avoid an area where people disappear. Ran into a Genestealer nest. Kal Jericho and I agreed we'll continue our search in the opposite direction. Nice that neither the player character nor anyone they talk to know what a genestealer is, so your character just talks about monsters and then gets drunk to forget them.

The issue of this statement is, that most probably, we wiped out Neanderthals as well, like thousands of other species

Oh, hey, I'm totally with you on this. I was making my point based on my prefessional judgment as an international security scholar. But at a personal level, I'm completely with you (though destruction by alien species invasion would be more fun, and I'd get to witness first contact in my lifetime which would be very cool). I too am extremely disillusioned by the human species. It's why my retirement dream is to buy a large horse ranch in northern Wyoming so I can sit on my porch with a cooler of beer and a faithful dog, and have a front row seat to twilight's last gleaming. Should be a great show.

An old show came to mind, Earth Final Conflict. Shamelessly filmed in Toronto, started off ok, but wow did it go off rails. Anyone else, ever watch that?

You can check this sources, a part from wiki: text books in game (you can find them in the wiki); description of magic items related to orlans (also reported in the wiki); game dialogues in game (you can find them in metadata game files); reddit users have done some descriptions too, i.e.: https://www.reddit.com/r/avowed/comments/q63qaj/the_world_of_avowed_eora_lore_orlans/?rdt=51429 notable characters background (in game and in the wiki); posts from developers in this forums; blog entries; posts/podcasts/interview from developer in socials and/or other websites (I know they exist by you have to find them); "World of Eora" podcasts (you can find links in this forum; I don't know if they are canical and/or accurate anyway); maybe there are some information in "Lords of the Eastern Reach" website/forum; pen-and-paper PoE RPG: perhaps in the alpha release guide: https://d1079ywfijtdjs.cloudfront.net/deadfire/media/downloads/eternity-pen-and-paper-guide--alpha.pdf. A part of the above, nothing other comes to my mind now

the wiki seems deficient. there's supplemental books to both poe1 and poe2 that were part of backer content, maybe you can find pdfs, that can lend more insight into the lore. there's also additional lore dumps in-game. most notably, in FS, one of the "redacted" books you find talks about the orlan empire a tantlizingly brief bit (something like "they built an empire on compassion and for that they were punished")

Yes, Trump's mental state is mostly okay. Of course. He is a stable genius after all. The most brilliant mind of the century. Ah, what am I talking about, he's the greatest thinker of the modern age. That half of the US population thinks that this moron with the intelligence of a lobotomized chimpanzee represents and embodies them is a scathing indictment of the US education system.

The brain makes a lot of waste. Now scientists think they know where it goes An intriguing finding. It turns out we are all being brainwashed.