The SoD expansion was made by Beamdog some 15 years after BG1 was released. It’s admirable that they tried getting the original voice actors back, but otherwise the team behind BG 1&2 (and ToB) had nothing to do with it. I couldn’t get through it, and I have a hard time supporting the Enhanced Editions as is due to Beamdog inserting their fanfiction into them as well - though I recognise they’ve been instrumental in revamping the engine and bringing the games to a new generation of people.

I’m a week late but the issue is Haze is essentially at a 100% pick rate while Ivy and Kelvin are among the least popular - hence why you never get Haze. You need to pick two equally popular heroes - like Infernus and Pocket for example - to put at white and then Haze on purple. That’s the only way to force it. But expect longer queues.

Even for games with fast timescales that is insanely fast. You barely have time to take in the environment and scenery before weather changes and the sun goes down or rises again. You can start a gunfight in the morning and finish after nightfall. For a game that lives and dies by immersion it completely pulls you out - at least it does me.

Yeah I had to install like a dozen mods to attempt to even remotely address things, but it’s clear from a myriad examples that there was basically no QA testing done. From the bugs, to the fucked up balance to stuff like the day/night cycle being 1 hour realtime for a full 24h in game (!!!) there are just so many things that would have been brought up hour one of testing.

More surprising too, with Hazard you kinda knew his diet and lack of training discipline would catch up eventually.

I’m a massive Stalker fan, and the state of the game pains me. What they have is so good. The world is beautiful and immaculately designed, the vibe and the atmosphere is all there. The guns feel good. The story is good so far with interesting characters and good performances (at least in Ukrainian) and the animations and presentation in main story dialogue quests has been good and immersive. Not cyberpunk levels maybe but good and a huge step up from previous games.

But man, there is so much that reeks of unfinished and half-done. They likely would have needed another year at least but I think they just ran out of money. It also looks like being forced to comply with console parity for the Xbox meant they couldn’t get performance under control and had to rip out A-life (or abandon it when it was clear it wouldn’t work on Xbox).

With how great the good parts are it pains me doubly.

It even ruined lots of let’s plays and streams of the game if you ever decide to watch any. It’s wild how intrusive they are.

Not to mention the fucking notifications for Epic Games Achievements are loud as all fuck and default to “on” every time you open the launcher so you have to manually turn on Do Not Disturb every time you launch the game or your immersion gets ruined every 5 seconds by an Epic Achievement notification ding (and visual on screen popup btw!)

Epic is just terrible. I wanted to bypass the launcher by using Heroic instead, but it wouldn’t recognize me having the Deluxe edition without actually installing the game through Epic and being logged in through their launcher. Garbage.

“Popular guy” doesn’t quite tell the whole story. I personally don’t get the appeal, but for whatever reason Perez is incomprehensibly popular. I think he’s like the 2nd most famous athlete in Mexico, he sells the most merch out of anyone on the whole grid and has brought a slew of sponsors to Red Bull. This is in addition to any Carlos Slim money.

It is definitely an appealing financial package.

To each their own, I suppose. I love GOGs efforts, and I love the convenience of being able to purchase old games there and know they are pre-patched (sometimes with unofficial patches), made compatible with modern systems and play-ready. Their launcher/store is whatever, but I don’t think I’ve ran into any game where it’s required to run it to launch.

Bad customer service is unfortunate, however. I’ve never personally had to deal with them but that does suck.

I watched some GT World Challenge races this year that were kinda great but its sort of awkward to watch. I find their YouTube confusing and they also post spoiler highlights almost instantly after races so fuck you if you’re not watching live, I guess. Lots of endurance races too which - while great - are less convenient a watch than a 2-3 hour race.

Incredible that a race with so many things happening somehow has been this shit.

It was certainly one of the races of all time.

And that’s very deliberate! There are a couple of key rolls very very early that have positive outcomes if you fail them. They’re supposed to teach the player that failure is okay. But it turns out many many people are too afraid of the dangerously red button and the low percentage number so they never even try in the first place, thus also missing the lesson.

Also that sequence you’re talking about is one of my favourites in the game, it’s so damn funny. Another classic failure is the ice-cop-hat-fuck-show.

It really is the best book I’ve ever played.

I actually think an argument could be made for Disco Elysium not being one of these games actually. I’ve seen people bounce off it because they went in with the wrong expectations. The game doesn’t really market itself correctly: it claims to be an isometric RPG and a detective game, but it could be argued the game is actually neither. Also lots of people miss out on a lot because they weren’t aware of the fail-forward design principle.

He does seem to get on well with players but tactically he has been one of the worst coaches I’ve seen, both in terms of game plans and adjustments but also on a macro level in terms of drilling in structure and patterns of play.

He was an incredibly gifted player with a fantastic football IQ, but it’s possible it was all instinctual as opposed to cerebral understanding and he has a hard time translating that into instructions for his players now that he’s coach.

At least Coventry fans will get to enjoy some Lampardian transitions even if the football ends up terrible! No but seriously, there is a risk that’s all they’ll get to enjoy.

Might finally make me play it again, at least to fuck around with some new builds.

Both PugJesus and Blaze are doing some seriously heavy lifting all over Lemmy. Either one would be a worthy winner imo.

If not for a bunch of McLaren blunders this season would have been an all-timer. Not sure what you were watching but the stretch between June and November was genuinely thrilling and Lando had a solid shot at clinching his first championship this year were either he and McLaren a bit better or Max and Red Bull a bit less perfect at extracting the maximum of every weekend.

The stretch of mid '22 through '23 was a low mark in terms of excitement I agree (though we had some awesome races last year if you discount who won), but after what we’ve seen this year I’m very hopeful next year will be an absolute thriller. There is a genuine chance we’ll have a 4 way title battle!