The second one suffered from being extremely rushed. Much asset reuse. It also made the game more “action-y” because I assume some souless suit said that kids don’t want tactics they want biff bam ACTION.

It also made every encounter consist of multiple waves, with enemy reinforcements popping into existence inside your party and rendering positioning nearly useless. It’s like they were going down a checklist of ways to make combat less tactical.

I hope they bring back spells like Virulent Walking Bomb from the first games. That one would poison an enemy and make them explode when they died, and if any enemy nearby died to the explosion or within the next few seconds they’d explode too, and so on.

It wasn’t the best spell, but it fit the “mages are one misstep away from becoming eldritch abominations” narrative and damn did it make you feel powerful when the secondaries went off and it turned an entire room full of enemies into mist.

Prey drive is no joke. My sister has a heeler/corgi mix, and taking her for a walk is an exercise in not dislocating your arm whenever she spots a small animal. She’s adorabloodthirsty.

Oddly her other dog, a heeler/pit mix, is super chill with no apparent prey drive whatsoever. I’m pretty sure you could hold a baby bird in front of his face and he’d just sniff at it dumbly with his tail wagging.

Having owned a beagle, its brain looked more like the cat image but with “murder” replaced with more food “not food, but I’ll eat it anyway”.

Dogs think about food when they’re hungry, or when food is present. Cats will stand on you and complain for hours because their food bowl is only 90% full and they’d really prefer it to be 100% full at all times, please and thank you.

There’s an entire song about this.

The thing is, Viconia and ::: spoiler Throne of Bhaal spoilers Sarevok ::: had similar arcs in the previous games but I never got annoyed enough to not want them in my party. A character can be disagreeable without being insufferable.

Ellison.

At least they all appear to be cosmetics like furniture, outfits, and skins for pets. Judging by the DLC descriptions I don’t see any gameplay locked behind paywalls.

Agreed that those prices are absurd though.

I’ve had Sun Haven in my library for a while, but I’ve been holding off on playing it due to reviews calling out bugs at launch. Is it in good shape now that it’s had a few major updates? And how does it compare to the other juggernauts in the genre (old Harvest Moon, Rune Factory, and Stardew Valley)?

Also, it looks like the game is being review-bombed on Steam right now. Is that just due to the deluge of DLC with the latest update, or is there something bigger wrong with the game?

My brother-in-law once put a slice of bread on my sleeping sister’s stomach, and when their dog (a very gluttonous beagle) started chowing down, woke her up by shaking her while shouting “the dog is eating your flesh!”

He’s great. There’s a reason he became my best friend after they married.

What are you talking about? Dragon Age already had two sequels.

They just called them Pillars of Eternity I and II for some reason…

There’s a Half-Life mod that brings it to PC, along with one that ports the Decay co-op expansion.

Thanks for the detailed review!

I’m curious, have you played Starsector? It’s an RPG/space combat sim, not naval combat, but it feels broadly similar. From what you said you liked about this game it seems like you might enjoy it, and it’s ridiculously well polished for a game still in alpha - I’ve encountered virtually no jank or annoying bugs in my playthroughs.

(Trading kind of sucks* due to tariffs making margins low if there’s not a shortage in a good, though there are mods out there to make the economy act more like a more traditional trading sim)

(* Though it has the most fleshed out smuggling system I’ve ever encountered, with stealth mechanics and suspicion meters and economic effects to dumping things on the black market)

Who else is better equipped? In my view it would solely depend on the lawyers that internet archive hires, and money plays a big factor in that.

The EFF. This kind of thing is why they exist.

The Archive making themselves an easier target was a huge misstep IMO. All it takes is one overreaching judge telling them they need to purge all copyrighted data (a common judgment in lawsuits like this) and the world becomes a worse place.

Thanks for the recommendation! Ouch, those Steam reviews are not gentle about the state of the game. Saw this developer response under one:

Thank you for your passionate review. It’s clear that many people had high hopes for this game, and unfortunately, we fell short due to various factors including mishandled feedback, poor hiring choices, and bad business decisions. It’s been almost a year since the game was completed, and I’ve lost a lot of sleep over how many things we screwed up so badly. However, we have to move on and put what we’ve learned to good use. Reading your feedback warmed my heart in a way that we knew people care enough to play and felt emotionally invested in this kind of game, and if we put out something great at one point in the future, there’ll be a chance to redeem ourselves. For now, your feedback is fair and I totally agree with everything. We might be able to make a few more updates in the near future, and I’m sure we might be able to do something about the refueling situation at least.

So even the devs weren’t happy about things. Is it still worth getting even with its flaws?

I agree. Black Flag got s lot of comparisons to Pirates!, but while it was pretty great (tailing and land missions aside), it didn’t come close to the sheer freedom of this game.

I think the closest modern games have come to scratching that itch have been indie rags-to-riches warband simulators like Mount & Blade, Kenshi, or Starsector, though none are a perfect successor.

Spec Ops actually did have choices where you could be good (or at least less bad), but ironically people missed them because they didn’t think being good would work.

For example, at one point you’re being harassed by an angry mob of locals. A lot of players simply shot them because a lifetime of experience with shooters told them that no other input would be recognized. But in actuality, if you fired warning shots at the ground or over their heads the civilians would flee without incident.

You’re able to run MemTest? That’d suggest it’s not actually fried if it can still run things.

Check your BIOS/UEFI to see if Secure Boot was re-enabled. If your CMOS battery died and you didn’t notice, your machine config could have reset to its default values during the power loss.