I didn’t like that they “grew better,” tbh. I liked them the way they were when I met them.

Ooh, we should have them put up the Five Commandments of Discordianism (a.k.a. the PENTABARF) too!

I am just about to start the DLC, but I think the quality of the major bosses in the base game is pretty good. I would actually say that my main complaint is that they aren’t balanced around using all the new bullshit, so it ends up being more fun to fight them without it. Like, I’d love to mess around with spirit summons, but most of the bosses have terrible decision making when there’s more than one target available, so you just get a bunch of free hits. For my replay I just used a bastard sword and restricted myself to “fair” Ashes of War that feel like normal parts of a weapon moveset, like Stamp (Sweep) and Impaling Thrust, and only used a shield on fights where I couldn’t figure out how to do the fight without one, like Radahn, and it was a lot of fun! I also tried out perfumes for the first time and I think they might have to be relegated to the “overpowered” section in future playthroughs: Uplifting Aromatic in particular giving on-demand Opaline Bubbletear effect is extremely powerful and let me win some fights that I wasn’t actually proficient in. (Also it’s not especially fun to farm snow trolls for Arteria Leaf once you run out.)

My secondary complaint is that a lot of minor bosses, especially in the overworld, have a lot of terrain jank and camera issues, like Lansseax going down the nearby cliff and then having weird geometry issues with the tiny raised section down there, or the tree spirit “miniboss” in the rotten pond in the Haligtree that is encircled by raised roots that make the proper part of the boss arena too small, and which it regularly clips through during its animations, making it even harder to see what it’s doing than usual.

Looking forward to it! The Bloodstained games are some of the best Castlevania-likes I’ve played.

The mentor/parent figure has to die for the protag to prove that they’re self-actualized or whatever. Sometimes I can point out who’s going to bite it as soon as the first few scenes of the book/movie/game and it makes me want to stop reading/watching/playing, and then if I keep going anyway I regret it when it turns out I was right.

Okay the image is messy but the snake coiling around the scales is actually a sick concept.

They say you will likely spend 30-50 hours “leveling” in the desert, but… leveling how, exactly? Grinding the local wildlife into a thin red paste for dozens of hours doesn’t seem to be in theme with Dune. More like Runescape, where you also level all sorts of noncombat skills, maybe?

That’s not what the article is saying though? It doesn’t say the Greeks thought the sea was red, it says they didn’t have (or at least rarely used) a word for what color it is, so they only described it by its other attributes (like how dark it was).

Oof. Wasn’t this the one that was going to have in-depth object customization? I was looking forward to it from a dollhouse-building perspective. Even if it wasn’t great, having some competition might convince EA to allocate more dev resources to the Sims, which has ruthlessly embraced the “minimum viable product” philosophy for a long time.

Jesus Christ, they’re like the villains from Captain Planet.

Welp, time to learn the real version of the fight!

Edit: Got him!

The experience is very similar, overall. The most noticeable difference is that the textures for overlays like blood spatter are very low res on PS5 in performance mode. Not sure what quality mode looks like, I tend to leave everything on performance out of habit.

I started a new character (mostly because I no longer have a working PC, so I had to switch to playing on my roommate’s PS5) and am about 40 hours in now. I know I should be trying to actually advance, but I can’t stop myself from puttering around the open world.

I did, for once, decide to restrain myself and only level my main stats (Strength, Vigor, Endurance) instead of branching out into a little bit of everything to hit stat requirements for spells and weapons just to try them out. Either I suddenly got a lot better than I remembered being, or leveling sensibly makes the game like 10x easier.

One problem I’m anticipating for the DLC: I’ve already settled into an aesthetic I like, with lightly-armored sellsword vibes (bastard sword, Vulgar Militia armor, bandit boots, bandit manchettes). So there is a good chance that I pick up all the new DLC items, go “oh that’s neat, but not for this character” and then never give them a decent shot. :P

Edit: Holy shit Starscourge Radahn is, like, a real boss? The first time I played I killed him on my second try and I didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about. I spent the entire rest of the game making fun of him by pointing out enemies that are “literally stronger than Radahn.” But, uh, now he’s kicking my teeth in and it turns out I didn’t learn the fight at all. Did his hitboxes used to be bugged or something? I seem to recall that I previously killed him just by hugging his feet and mashing R1 while all his attacks missed me, but that is not currently happening, LMAO.

That’s fair. I imagine if you are playing every day for a long period of time, the game would get stale if it never changed.

How do you even keep returning players? I used to enjoy checking out League every once in a while, but it seemed like it wasn’t possible to keep up with all the changes that way. Every time I went back to it, I felt like I was learning how champions and items worked from scratch, because they kept changing. Eventually after every champ I liked to play had been reworked (some of them more than once) I just gave up.

As a Blood Mage sympathizer, I say we let Solas cook!

I think you need to use the same phone number you signed up with, but other than that I don’t know. If you signed up with a burner phone, maybe you could do that.

I don’t know, but mine guesses correctly when I’m a passenger about 90% of the time. Unlike the other commenter, mine doesn’t have a bluetooth connection to my car or a device in my car.

Once in a while I have to tell it I’m not driving.

For each trip it tells you things like how often you touch your phone, what % of the trip you spent using your phone, and how many times you braked hard (which is a proxy for things like tailgating or general inattentiveness, since it can’t see the road). Mostly it seems to be a “don’t use your phone” score. There’s an overall score, and you can see how big your discount is, but the score itself is largely meaningless without the ability to compare to other drivers.