For anyone who didn’t know, yes Jeanette from VtM: Bloodlines was referenced in the design documents for Rocksteady’s Arkham Asylum version of Harley Quinn, which subsequently became the industry standard:

Hope you’re able to get some well earned rest!

Mechanically Anomen with his grandmastery capability outshines Viconia imo, whether you go the Flail of Ages classic on him or even Slings and play him back row.

As a character however then yes, Viconia is probably my favourite character in the game and probably the most well written of the bunch.

I am also very fond of Haer’dalis though.

You can for sure do an all female party, Mazzy, Nalia, Jaheira, Viconia, Aerie are all available - it’ll be somewhat challenging though. You’d need to micromanage reputation to keep it neutral so neither Viconia nor the good characters leave (unless you modded that out), you also probably need to boost thief skills with potions and/or items regularly. Viconia also has some downsides to keep in mind, like the low Con, single classed Clerics being pretty mediocre and not getting Holy Smite due to alignment. She does have base 50% spell resistance though so there’s that, and can get to 100% with the right gear. There is also Neera and Hexxat, but I don’t enjoy the EE companions much.

I will say for a first playthrough I tend to recommend people bring Yoshimo, as he has some ties into the main quest and also various sidequests around Athkatla. Not a female though.

Player count seem stable enough at least. There’s always a spike in activity during summer though, which now has passed. Could be that?

Ooh, I absolutely adore BG2. Probably the most formative game of my youth, it’s both the game that got me hooked on RPGs and the game that introduced me to modding. I still hold it as the best Baldur’s Gate game, and Irenicus as one of the best video game villains of all time.

What’s your party composition?

I don’t think you were mislead, Alan Wake 2 is slated to be on PS+ starting Oct. 7th. It was announced during the recent State of Play.

Anyway, I still recommend going through all the games as they are amazing in their own right, and playing one will only heighten the appreciation of the next. Particularly if played in release order. Alan Wake 2 is definitely the crown jewel, so I understand wanting to get to it ASAP, but at the same time it will have a much more profound impact if saved for last.

EDIT: also I forgot but, thank you for the nice words. It’s still kind of weird that I’m being recognised by name around here from time to time but I guess I do comment a lot, and verbosely at that.

Goes well with the Big Bounce theory, which I tend to choose to believe in myself as the idea of an eternal heartbeat of the universe is very comforting.

Kind of. Mechanically Alan Wake 2 is so good that yes, it does stand on its own, and it’s such a great game that if you’re completely against playing the preceding games then it’s probably worth playing on its own.

However, Remedy are doing a Marvel-style connected universe, so in my opinion it’s a case of “the more you invest in it, the more rewarded you get”. The story of AW2 is a direct sequel to AW1, and also directly overlaps with Control. Control had a DLC called AWE that acts like a direct bridge between AW 1&2.

Furthermore, despite having to change the name to Alex Casey due to Rockstar owning the IP the character Alan Wake canonically wrote the stories about Max Payne, so they are also referenced. Quantum Break is only vaguely hinted at due to again, Microsoft owning the IP, so that one you can probably skip if you want.

Personally, I think Remedy have produced all bangers (though I haven’t played Firebreak), so playing them all never felt like a burden. There is also a timely Humble Bundle celebrating their 30th anniversary which has their entire catalogue minus Firebreak for like 30 bucks.

The plot of the whole thing is somewhat convoluted, so trying to absorb it all from a YouTube recap is kind of hard, but if that’s what you want here’s Sam Lake attempting to recap the story leading up to AW2 in 15 minutes. This is heavy spoilers for the preceding game obviously.

Well, you have to use root builder for MO2 to work properly with Cyberpunk which is sort of fiddly and also I suspect the reason Codeware stopped working.

Yeah I have it set up for 2.1 I think which makes me not feel super motivated to update the whole thing.

I still haven’t updated my modlist because I have it working as-is but sometime last year when Codeware changed its file structure it stopped working with MO2, and I never got around to sorting it out. I should really fix it one of these days so I can update the game.

FF XV is a broken and flawed game at best, and realistically probably closer to objectively bad. But the soundtrack is an absolute banger with some stellar leitmotif work. Dewdrops At Dawn at the very end picking up the line from Sunset Walz/Valse Di Fantastica is probably my favorite.

I’m kind of in between games, actually . I finished Enotria: The Last Song and even did a quick NG+ run for the secret/true ending achievement. I had a good time with it and would recommend it to Souls fans if you can tolerate AA/jank and can grab it on a deep sale. It’s not overly difficult and not too long that it outstays its welcome, which for me feels like a good thing at this point. Loved the setting and the Commedia Dell’Arte framing.

To follow I dipped my toes into playing a Soulslike Metroidvania with fantastic combat, interesting lore and a beautiful and visually distinct art style. I’m of course talking about Si- no actually it’s GRIME. It was on all-time low deep sale recently and I’ve had my eye on it for a while so I snapped it up. So far it’s been good but… I don’t know. It hasn’t really grabbed me yet. I think maybe coming off a Soulslike it was slightly too similar and that’s why I’m not hooked yet. I can tell it’s fantastic and it’s very unique, I think I should just have played something else in between.

So I also pirated Cronos: The New Dawn in a try-before-I-buy effort inspired by spooktober. I know it’s the wrong sub for a new release but what can you do. It’s been… alright so far. Haven’t played all that much, only like two hours or so. I like the story and the world building but it’s not really scaring me like I was hoping it would. It seems to be more about tough and gruelling combat encounters, which is not necessarily what I’m looking for right now.

I might just audible into replaying The Final Draft of Alan Wake 2 instead and finally getting into playing the DLCs, which I own but have been saving for a rainy day.

Yepyep

That formatting is what Reddit uses and Sync still has the code to process it.

For me that was the first ending I got, Rogue’s path followed by the Sun. I felt like absolute shit afterwards personally. I took Johnny’s offer because I was appealed by the idea of redemption, but instead he dragged Rogue down with him one last time. And then in Path Of Glory V had learned nothing, discarded all the character growth and ignored every lesson to instead let Night City consume her like it does everyone else that fails to realize it’s a festering swamp you must leave behind at all costs. That’s why the two endings that have a positive undertone - The Star and Temperance - involve the main character leaving Night City behind.

Reaching Room 46 the first time is the first of like three or four natural jumping-off points, I’d say. You can totally stop playing there if you’re satisfied, but if you want to keep digging you can go so much deeper.

I’ll have to look into the mods, I bought RoboCop RC on deep sale this summer but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Despite being a somewhat janky AA game it looked cool and seem to have gotten quite good reviews so I’m looking forward to it.

Nothing has ever hit me harder than Disco Elysium, and I don’t think anything else ever will. Everything from its themes of failure and depression and addiction and clinging to the past to its surprising message of hope in the face of unrelenting nihilism resonated with me on a molecular level. And the Final Dream is just the single most impactful, emotional and heart-rending moment I’ve had in any game ever. The culmination of the entire game distilled into one scene, and even the whole pathos of that one scene concentrated into three closing words:

Spoiler tags aren’t working for me either, I don’t think they’re correct for Lemmy markdown. It should look like this:

::: spoiler Spoiler Title

Spoiler text body goes here

:::

And hopefully work like:

Anyway for Cyberpunk endings I agree, and happy endings don’t really go with the setting. Personally the one I felt best about was doing the “Don’t Fear The Reaper” secret ending path into the Temperance ending, for me that was an awesome and fitting resolution. But I had grown quite close with Johnny over my playthrough. Caveat that I haven’t finished the DLC yet and I know it adds endings, so maybe I’ll like one of those better.