I’m actually playing Mankind Divided right now for the first time and having a blast. Already dreading the cliffhanger I’ve been warned about.

As much as “oh my god JC, a bomb” is an iconic line read I think you can rewrite and remake the game without it losing what makes it amazing. The story and themes can stand on their own, they don’t need the dubious charm of wooden voice acting that sounds like it’s literally phoned in from actors cold reading the script.

Looks like a very cool mod. I’d still like to see a full remake one day, hopefully by the same people who did the System Shock remake.

I refuse to accept he was there for 10 years.

‘An excellent question’

EDIT: this was a reference to the Ashens bit about Chef Excellence, sorry if it came off as rude.

They have a long and storied tradition for sure. The Cage was legendary and the Brazil airport ad was incredible too. The Swap was pretty good too I thought.

A dark day for Ashens fans everywhere.

I played through F.E.A.R. and its first expansion Extraction Point this week for the first time, and I’ve been advised to leave the series be there. Having watched some video reviews on the following games I can see why. It’s a damn shame too what happened to the series, because F.E.A.R. 1 and EP are so damn good.

For a 20-year-old game it looks unbelievably good. It must have been mind blowing back in 2005. The particle effects and light destructibility of the environments still look great, the slow-mo is cinematic and the lighting in general is very well done. The art direction is great and it really nails the atmosphere.

I personally found the horror and story to be a little predictable and mediocre, but it doesn’t matter because this is seriously one of the best shooters I’ve ever played. All the guns are satisfying to use, the shooting arenas are well designed and the enemy AI is just as good as people say. It’s again hard to believe we had this in 2005.

I also need to make a special mention of Extraction Point as it hits the shooter/horror balance better than the base game and has better scares and horror elements in general. I thought it was great and basically the perfect F.E.A.R. experience.

Heavily recommended if you haven’t played this already. It’s currently on sale on GOG for like $2 I believe. Just make sure to grab the EchoPatch.

EDIT: It’s also possible to get EAX working and I really recommend looking into doing so, even if it is a little fiddly.

I’ll wait and see how bad the MTX will be before considering buying this game.

Hearing the bit about rights hell and patches makes me feel a lot better. House at the End of Time followed by that final broken capital area was just some of the least fun gameplay I’ve experienced in a CRPG. And I was there back in the day getting one-shot by Gibberlings in BG1! I’m not as big a fan of the epicly mythic type of narratives and settings as I am of more grounded stories, but if it makes the combat more fun and better balanced I might stomach it.

And if the game is genuinely that amazing I might bump it a bit on my priority list. I already bought it on sale last year, but the Kingmaker slog (what is it, 200 hours or so?) kind of wore me out on western CRPGs for a bit.

PugJesus too.

Yes, in many ways lemm.ee shutting down is a great example of the intention of a federated network at work, but it is also somewhat of a cautionary tale when it comes to centralisation. Ideally the load would be spread as such that any single instance shutting down would be reasonably painless to adjust for. There were already too many users and communities on .ee, really. Imagine what a disaster .world shutting down would be in the current state of things.

Good to know again, thank you! I played through Kingmaker last winter and your description is pretty spot on. There were parts of it that were great, parts of which that were not, and parts of it that were downright awful. And particularly the latter parts really soured me on it, and made me super reluctant to play Wrath of the Righteous. If that is Owlcat’s idea of high level play I don’t really want an epic adventure from them.

I’ve played Divinity 1&2 and BG3, but I’m less high on Larian than everyone else these days. They’re fine games and fun to play but Larian’s style of writing isn’t my jam and I also think BG3 has a lot of problems that get kind of glossed over.

I missed Pillars 1, so I guess that is on some sort of to-do list. I played about half of Pillars 2 but got bored and never picked it back up.

PSA: If you play ANY of the Pathfinder CRPGs? Get blind fight ASAP. And make sure every arcane caster has a few charges of Glitterdust at any moment.

I had Blind Fight on every single party member and that final bit of the game was still a hellish slog that made actively detest Owlcat.

Hey, you yourself most definitely count among the recurring characters around here too! Don’t think we don’t appreciate you and your delightfully colourful username.

Thank you! I guess the question is, is sitting through 100 hours of mediocre main campaign worth it to get to Mask? My guess is probably yes, but that knowledge will likely end up de-prioritizing the game on my backlog.

Thanks a lot for the rundown! Are the other two expansions any good?

That’s good to know. Are the expansions independent or do you have to get through the base game first? Would you recommend just doing Mask of the Betrayer and calling it a day there?

I meant it’s a $30 indie game as opposed to a full price $60 game, so even if you don’t end up liking it it’s not as big of a loss.

To be honest, I was flying with a specific group of people and when the main FC/corp leader quit I sort of just quit too. So I’m not sure I’d come back regardless, unless he miraculously comes back. But it’s been like 8 years now. Also, EVE consumes your whole life and it’s kind of nice to have time to play other games.

I was doing primarily small gang warfare, as well as some Blops dropping. And bombing runs whenever the opportunity presented itself. For income I was stocking the market of our home station, which I really enjoyed doing.

It’s a nice tool for admins and mods, but then again they already pretty much had access to this information. I’ve always believed votes are obscured for good reason, and knowing how people vote on your posts and comments is only going to bring about negative emotions.

What’s it like these days? I sometimes miss the heyday of like 2011-2014 EVE, but I stopped keeping track of what was going on some time after quitting. I also kind of lost faith in the direction it was going and what CCP was doing.

As someone who’s been around the block, is it in a good state now?