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Eletriarnation
Apr 6, 2005

People don't appreciate the substance of things...
objects in space.


Oven Wrangler

Jack Trades posted:

Personally, I'd even go as far as to say that I don't know of a single reasonably ambitious CRPG that wasn't completely broken in one way or another at release.

Are you talking only since digital distribution became a thing? BG1 and BG2 had minor bugs but they worked well straight off the disc - somewhat necessary, since "just download the 1.1 patch to make it not poo poo" wasn't really much of a thing yet.

e: Or yeah, NWN like the previous poster said - same situation. I feel like the current prevailing pattern of "shove it out the door and we'll fix it later" is developers taking way too much advantage of the fact that they can effectively patch a game post release now, versus a time when if you shipped a broken game then it would always be a broken game for the vast majority of players.

Not that it always stopped them, Daggerfall was an incredibly buggy mess back in 1996 and Bethesda seems to have done alright since then.

Eletriarnation fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Dec 30, 2023

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Arc Light
Sep 26, 2013



Further Reading posted:

If this is gonna be a weird sticking point with you - neverwinter nights has similar complexity to rogue trader (arguably more as a 3.5 adaption). From what I recall it didn't have anywhere near the level of game breaking bugs, inconsistent mechanics and tangled quest progression flags but I bet if someone looks hard enough there were other issues preventing it being 100% perfect. It's also worth pointing out that they had to build the Aurora engine as part of their budget rather than using a third party engine like Owlcat can with unity, which arguably makes the development process much less complex as more focus can be on system and narrative design where RT's most egregious problems lie.

It definitely didn't have game-breaking bugs. Neither did the first NWN. Nor the first KOTOR. I had all of those games on physical media and never patched any of them, along with most other CRPGs of that era. I had 56k dialup at the time, so even if patches were available I sure wasn't going to tie up the phone line downloading them. Nevertheless, I played NWN/NWN2/KOTOR a dozen times each and never ran into any major issues.

I absolutely appreciate easy access to games via Steam or other platforms, but back in the era of games on CD/DVD, they needed to work out of the box or else they'd get savaged by reviews/word of mouth. This goes way beyond RT or any other individual game, but the industry seems to have internalized the idea that a broken product is fine because they'll eventually patch it to completion, which is something that just couldn't happen back in the day.

Edit: beaten by Eletriarnation while I was typing this up, but yeah, I agree completely

cuntman.net
Mar 1, 2013

so far ive gone through every optional area as soon as i discovered them including the drifting void ship but i got to the ice planet and 3 chaos marines and a helbrute might be a bit much :staredog:

Arglebargle III
Feb 21, 2006

I really like how they wrote the dualogue for Pasqal. They way he combines religious and technical language is perfect. I especially like his total certitude in religious pronouncements, as if his religion is as simple as reading an instruction manual and promptly carrying out its instructions. The way he announces miracles or declares that one guy a martyr of the faith and designates him for servo skull production were inspired. I'm stealing this for tabletop.

I also liked how he showed up at the heretic forge and his first act is to formally decertify it.

Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Dec 30, 2023

CommissarMega
Nov 18, 2008

THUNDERDOME LOSER
There's this one planet where he asks that he be allowed to bring back to the ship a machine that busted itself to aid you, as it had martyred itself :allears:

Zodium
Jun 19, 2004

pasqal ftw

GoodluckJonathan
Oct 31, 2003

Zodium posted:

pasqal ftw

Pwnstar
Dec 9, 2007

Who wants some waffles?

I was reading about tech priest stuff online and apparently machine spirits are maybe real? That's kind of a bummer to me because while propitiating a literal ghost in the machine is a dope concept, I prefer the interpretation that their rituals are 100% mundane but nobody is aware of it.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.

Arglebargle III posted:

I agree that I've seen people talk up Notch of Purpose and Point of Interest but I rarely see enemies fail the check past early act 2

Cass can have some extremely high willpower in the lategame, so you can get a decent aoe damage from it if she's a master tactician and she's got a full 400% boost to her damage from that archetypes main ability... but by the time you'll have that 400% boost everything is almost dead because you earn the MT stacks via your allies resolve gains meaning they've already done stuff. Otherwise it ends up just moving enemies a little bit and doing like 30 damage, which to standard enemies with several hundred HP ain't much.

I still don't see how anyone matches Argenta (or Ulfar, but most people use Argenta) for sheer damage dealing ability - i can get nice big crits from Yrliet sniping but that's at most a couple attacks a turn, and I can see how Pasqual can do a lot of damage with a heroic action but it's single shot plasma and takes a lot longer and a lot more clicking and of course requires a heroic action.

The fact that Argenta can get at least 3 burst attacks a turn, including extra turns, without needing a heroic action at all really makes it hard to match her IMO. She can get 5 AP with the right perk picks and gear (there's an item where you get +1AP when you kill someone for the first time on your turn) whenever she gets a free turn, and then you've got a standard burst attack for 2 AP, Run and Gun + burst for 2AP (may cost 3 AP if you need to use Revel in Slaughter by having killed 2 dudes), and then the 0AP burst from Wildfire. 5 AP, 24 bolter shells downrange with the heavy bolter, and only one of two different extra turn skills used by an officer archetype. Add in the archmilitant heroic that makes your first attack of a turn not cost AP and she's got 4 full auto attacks. For a 2 AP ability from the officer. Then you trigger Move, Move, Move from the officer and she's got 2-3 more burst attacks on an extra turn that's only meant to give her mobility.

And since those attacks, hits, and kills can stack armor and dodge on her, you end up with Argenta clearing out the trash and having 200% armor and 400% dodge so you can just sit her out in the open to facetank any enemy that's somehow not dead yet.

Lastly, you can tell how badly optimized the lategame is by the fact that the final battle will absolutely tank your FPS down to 1. They clearly did not test those graphic effects.

CommissarMega
Nov 18, 2008

THUNDERDOME LOSER

Pwnstar posted:

I was reading about tech priest stuff online and apparently machine spirits are maybe real? That's kind of a bummer to me because while propitiating a literal ghost in the machine is a dope concept, I prefer the interpretation that their rituals are 100% mundane but nobody is aware of it.

if I may quote myself, I've got a more in-depth explanation for machine spirits below, but the tl;dr is that both of your interpretations are/may be correct.

CommissarMega posted:

Okay, so, Machine Spirits:

Way back in the day, humanity relied on AI machines known as the Men of Iron to do the grunt work. This worked out well for a time, until of course these thinking machines decided that hey, they were doing most of the work, they deserved most of the power, right? As expected, future capitalists didn't take too kindly to their toasters deciding to unionize, and so thus ended humanity's golden technological age (later known as the Dark Age of Technology) in interstellar fire. The Adeptus Mechanicus that arose afterwards held that Abominable Intelligences were verboten, and creating machines with the minds of mankind would be punishable by the most painful torments the AdMech could think of. Considering they held the vast majority of Dark Age tech and knowledge, they could think of quite a lot.

That said, much of humanity's greatest technological accomplishments relied on at least some kind of AI, and so thse were grandfathered in as 'machine spirits', which was an animistic belief of the Mechanicus that all devices save the most rudimentary had an animating spirit, which also had the happy side-effect of ensuring that the Mechanicus had a monopoly on all technological development and operations.

That said, there is another aspect to machine spirits, especially when it comes to things that don't require an AI. After all, not every Guardsmen is a member of the AdMech, and your average habworker doesn't go to a Temple Mechanicus every time he wants to make toast. In this case, 'machine spirits' make for a handy excuse for rote operations of technology, especially those technologies the Imperium might not be able to mass produce (or even at all). Say a guy want some air conditioning while he's driving. On Earth, he might have an older car and need to wait half a minute or so before he can safely turn on the AC. In the Imperium, he might recite the Catechisms of Techno-Inspiration three times (each taking ten seconds to do so, conveniently enough) in order to fully rouse his car's spirit before he turns on the frigidarius, lest he incite his vehicle's wrath.

In this way, the AdMech passes on knowledge to its lay priests and the howling masses. Dressing up regular technological procedures in religious ceremony also ensures that the aforementioned ancient technologies still in use aren't misused; a gung-ho idiot (which the Imperium encourages the production of) might be cavalier with how they operate their lasgun if they just saw it as some tech, but might take far better care of it if he thinks the Emperor-as-Omnissiah will curse him if he doesn't. That said, the higher ranks of the AdMech DO know the science behind most save the most advanced technology, but even at those high levels there's still some semblance of mysticism.

And finally, 40K is a universe based on belief and how the actions/emotions said belief inspires resonates in the warp. The Eldar once believed they were invincible, grew decadent, then turbo-murderfucked a Chaos God into existence whole also ensuring that humanity would need to turn its atheist god-king into a psychic lighthouse in order to travel from star to star. And now there is an empire consisting of trillions of screaming fanatics, 99.999% of whom (even the heretics) believe that all machines have a spirit in them that needs to be appeased...

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.

Pwnstar posted:

I was reading about tech priest stuff online and apparently machine spirits are maybe real? That's kind of a bummer to me because while propitiating a literal ghost in the machine is a dope concept, I prefer the interpretation that their rituals are 100% mundane but nobody is aware of it.

My read has always been that despite the Imperium's prohibition on AI there's still lower scale AI/higher scale processes floating around in a lot of old technology and they get called machine spirits. I don't think they're meant to have actual spirits unless warp fuckery gets involved. So you end up with a mix of 100% mundane ritual and trying to soothe the sub-sentient but still somewhat intelligent program running the reactor system.

e: f,b.

habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Dec 30, 2023

Mad Wack
Mar 27, 2008

"The faster you use your cooldowns, the faster you can use them again"
i'm not a huge 40k buff but doesn't some martian dragon also play into the machine spirit stuff too?

Sharkopath
May 27, 2009

habeasdorkus posted:

My read has always been that despite the Imperium's prohibition on AI there's still lower scale AI/higher scale processes floating around in a lot of old technology and they get called machine spirits. I don't think they're meant to have actual spirits unless warp fuckery gets involved. So you end up with a mix of 100% mundane ritual and trying to soothe the sub-sentient but still somewhat intelligent program running the reactor system.

e: f,b.

I think the workings of great machines like titans, ships, and most tanks imply many machines gain sentience over the ages. So while your toaster oven might start out as just a simple tool if you give it enough time it'll start trying to kill you unless you please it with offerings, and the biggest machines can overwhelm you entirely with their power of mind. It doesn't help that a lot of machines are powered by cogitators, or lobotomized human minds linked in sequence.

There's a really messed up sequence in a recent book that says like a lot of things in the Imperium, the lobotimzation is pretty slapdash and even a base cogitator can have its sentience returned by a great psychic power like the tyranid hive mind.

Sharkopath fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Dec 30, 2023

Taear
Nov 26, 2004

Ask me about the shitty opinions I have about Paradox games!

Zodium posted:

pasqal ftw

If only he wasn't an operative
I love all the stuff about him but god operative is annoying as sin to me.


Sharkopath posted:

I think the workings of great machines like titans, ships, and most tanks imply many machines gain sentience over the ages. So while your toaster oven might start out as just a simple tool if you give it enough time it'll start trying to kill you unless you please it with offerings, and the biggest machines can overwhelm you entirely eith their power of mind.

I'd argue most of this is just the tech cult poo poo and it's open to interpretation. Machine Spirits don't exist.

Arglebargle III
Feb 21, 2006

Like most things in 40K "machine spirit" covers a huge range of concepts, from a dogmatic belief in the anima residing in a toaster, to the quirks of ancient and cantankerous but not actually intelligent devices, to intelligent but not actually sapient devices like your typical starship main cogitator, to abominable intelligence that the Mechanicum would rather keep around and reclassify than purge.

Sharkopath
May 27, 2009

Taear posted:

If only he wasn't an operative
I love all the stuff about him but god operative is annoying as sin to me.

I'd argue most of this is just the tech cult poo poo and it's open to interpretation. Machine Spirits don't exist.

Oh no they're super real, the big machines require people to jack into them ghost in the shell style and they will devour your mind if you are too weak to control them. The helmsman in this game talks about it if you ask him.

I think it's been a while since they had it open to interpretation. They settled on it being real a ways back. Being attached to the machine leads to it influencing your thoughts and actions as it's on board personality overwhelms your own, for war machines this mostly means being ultra aggressive to the point you ignore basic strategy and such. The machines want to kill and are always trying to bend you to their will.

It's just that compared to say Nomos your average machine spirit is more like a wild animal or unruly toddler than a thing you can converse with.

Sharkopath fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Dec 30, 2023

Arc Light
Sep 26, 2013



Pwnstar posted:

I was reading about tech priest stuff online and apparently machine spirits are maybe real? That's kind of a bummer to me because while propitiating a literal ghost in the machine is a dope concept, I prefer the interpretation that their rituals are 100% mundane but nobody is aware of it.

Edit: beaten to it by multiple other posters, but I already wrote this out so now you get to read it.

I don't know if there's been a lore update, but you basically had the right of it originally. In the older lore, at least, it was more like 75% irrelevant ritual mixed with 25% actual maintenance. Pray, ask the machine spirits for assistance, press these six buttons in this order (the part that's actually important), and then pray some more.

The machine spirits were usually nothing more than religious superstition about dumb (ie, non-AI) machinery and electronics. That's the rule, but there are some exceptions. After robot wars during the Dark Age of Technology, AI is outlawed in the Imperium, and anyone who develops or even uses AI is subject to execution.

Buuuutttt...

Some of the stuff that survived the dark age is actually pretty useful to the Imperium. Really useful, in fact, far moreso than anything actually developed since then. Ditto things that might turn up as hardcopy schematics found at the site of old colony STCs. Land Raider tanks are a good example. A Land Raider's computer system is run by an AI, but AI is illegal so the tech priests can't admit it. Would be a shame if the Imperium couldn't use such fine machines. Especially back when the rules were being drafted pre-Horus Heresy and the Land Raider was a backbone of both the Space Marine legions and the Imperial Army. The only people who really know much about the inner workings of any computer system were from the Adeptus Mechanicus. Not like outsiders would be able to figure it out.

So they just... pretended the Land Raider's onboard computer wasn't an outlawed AI. Pretended it just had a cranky machine spirit that didn't respond as reliably as a normal tank's computer. After all, what's a little white lie? They already pretend that the Omnissiah is just their term for the Emperor, because if they admitted what the Omnissiah really is, what they actually worship, things in the Imperium would get... tense.

Edit:

Mad Wack posted:

i'm not a huge 40k buff but doesn't some martian dragon also play into the machine spirit stuff too?

Yeah, it's been years since I really followed this back in high school and this is entirely off ~20 year old memories because hell if I'm going to read a 50 page nerd wiki article, but I'm pretty sure you're right. Assuming there hasn't been a retcon, the heavy implication was that the Omnissiah that the Adeptus Mechnicus worships isn't the Emperor at all, but something else. Possibly a Necron Void Dragon imprisoned on Mars millennia ago. They just pretend that when they say Omnissiah, they're referring to the Emperor

Arc Light fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Dec 30, 2023

CommissarMega
Nov 18, 2008

THUNDERDOME LOSER

Mad Wack posted:

i'm not a huge 40k buff but doesn't some martian dragon also play into the machine spirit stuff too?

Oh yes. See, way back in the Earth's past, the man who'd become the God-Emperor fought some manner of great beast on Earth, and somehow imprisoned the beast he fought on Mars. I say 'somehow', because it's implied that ol' Jimmy Space was St. George, and the dragon he 'slew' was actually an impossibly ancient being called the Void Dragon- so yeah, 'somehow' this guy, barely 9000 years old and still living in the medieval age, kicked the rear end of a star god literally billions of years old and millions of years sapient, then proceeded to imprison it on another planet (presumably by tossing it really, really, really hard).

Much later on, the early Mechanicum found the Void Dragon, and somehow the still conked-out star god influenced their early technological designs. IIRC it's also implied that the Dragon might have influenced humanity's technological progress as a whole, as it was the most technologically-inclined of its kin.

Arc Light posted:

They just pretend that when they say Omnissiah, they're referring to the Emperor

I think for the vast majority of the Mechanicus, they sincerely believe that the Emperor and Omnissiah are one and the same, and of the few who do know of the Void Dragon, only a few sincerely believe it's the Omnissiah- after all, part of the general Mechanicus credo is that only humanity's technology and knowledge are worth anything.

CommissarMega fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Dec 30, 2023

FuzzySlippers
Feb 6, 2009

I expect kotor 2 sold quite a bit less than 1 though it was following close on the heels of the previous release. I think it’s profoundly buggy nature did matter and Obsidian never seemed to be happy with how it did for them.

I think there’s some rosy glasses on some of those games. NWN 1 infamously launched as a mess both bugs and design wise and was only redeemed with patching, expansions, and community content. The release reaction was petty negative but they turned it around.

BioWare at the top of their game was definitely peak crpg polish as BG1/2 had their bugs, but they did release in decent shape though they have significantly simpler rpg systems compared to later games.

Poor Obsidian took BioWare’s engines and made infamously mega buggy sequels to both NWN and kotor. I hope their Microsoft overlords treat them better.

There’s more going on here than release now patch later blargle blargle. The gameplay complexity expectations increase year to year so it’s more than graphics everyone has to chase. They might have gotten some freebies from using Unity like the renderer, but everything important about the rpg systems they had to build. People expect a lot more from an rpg now than 2E.

RT is a good game with some deep flaws, but my gripe here is not in disliking the game (all of their games are ornery as gently caress and definitely not for everyone) but in acting like fixing it’s problems is a simple matter. Everything about game dev is a bloody headache.

FuzzySlippers
Feb 6, 2009

I didn’t know that sometimes the machine spirit ritual stuff was covering up the usage of AI. That’s actually a really cool lore detail. Is any of that covered in detail in the books?

CommissarMega
Nov 18, 2008

THUNDERDOME LOSER

FuzzySlippers posted:

I didn’t know that sometimes the machine spirit ritual stuff was covering up the usage of AI. That’s actually a really cool lore detail. Is any of that covered in detail in the books?

It's never said so outright, but incidents like the Vengeance of Rynn's Might and most descriptions of piloting Titans makes it very obvious that there's some kind of AI doing work inside the Imperium's machines.

Preechr
May 19, 2009

Proud member of the Pony-Brony Alliance for Obama as President

FuzzySlippers posted:

I didn’t know that sometimes the machine spirit ritual stuff was covering up the usage of AI. That’s actually a really cool lore detail. Is any of that covered in detail in the books?

See anything that has Titans in it, like Titanicus, or anything dealing with Imperial Knights. Those things very obviously have onboard AI of varying complexity, and sanity.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Taear posted:

I'm confused because both of you here are taking the exact opposite of what I'm saying.
Wrath is good from the start doingitwrong and if you don't like it there you won't like it. That's all. I'm not saying "it gets good 50 hours in" or anything, if you don't like the start you're not gonna enjoy it at all.

And Warmachine I'm saying that because most players don't get that far it's not in the devs interest to spend time developing later game. Beta testers 100% would get there, but who cares when people play 30 hours and drop it? You can see this with achievements in games

I mean, if your thesis is that most players don't complete long games, then why make long games: I agree. Instead of trying to make a long rear end game, make a shorter, more reactive game. I'd rather have a tightly plotted, reactive, and complete game that's only 15 hours or whatever if I can play it 5 times and get a different experience each time.

But they decided to make a long game, so they need to finish the long game. If you're saying "make a long game but leave the back half incomplete because 80% of people won't notice," that's the most cynical game publisher CEO bullshit I've heard out of a layperson and buddy, they don't need you to make excuses for their greed.

Eifert Posting
Apr 1, 2007

Most of the time he catches it every time.
Grimey Drawer
I played both Neverwinter games on launch and they were both buggy messes.

Hidingo Kojimba
Mar 29, 2010

Welp, I've finally made it to Act 4 and I see the game has started locking conversation options behind dogmatic/iconoclast/heretical rank 3. Which means I feel like I'm being punished for not compulsively hammering one alignment option to the exclusion of all others regardless of context because the game doesn't even give you close to enough point to get one of the alignment options to three if you've dabbled in any capacity. (I'd say I've picked about two thirds dogmatic, one third Iconoclast and I'm still about 40 points off dogmatic rank three.

They REALLY need to add more options for getting alignment points, or put another half-dozen big choices in Acts 3 and 4 that give you +30 alignment points a piece. If the game's going to keep throwing locked paths at me from now on with no real chance to rank up then I'm going to be gravely disappointed.

Nephthys
Mar 27, 2010

FuzzySlippers posted:

I expect kotor 2 sold quite a bit less than 1 though it was following close on the heels of the previous release. I think it’s profoundly buggy nature did matter and Obsidian never seemed to be happy with how it did for them.

I think there’s some rosy glasses on some of those games. NWN 1 infamously launched as a mess both bugs and design wise and was only redeemed with patching, expansions, and community content. The release reaction was petty negative but they turned it around.

BioWare at the top of their game was definitely peak crpg polish as BG1/2 had their bugs, but they did release in decent shape though they have significantly simpler rpg systems compared to later games.

Poor Obsidian took BioWare’s engines and made infamously mega buggy sequels to both NWN and kotor. I hope their Microsoft overlords treat them better.

There’s more going on here than release now patch later blargle blargle. The gameplay complexity expectations increase year to year so it’s more than graphics everyone has to chase. They might have gotten some freebies from using Unity like the renderer, but everything important about the rpg systems they had to build. People expect a lot more from an rpg now than 2E.

RT is a good game with some deep flaws, but my gripe here is not in disliking the game (all of their games are ornery as gently caress and definitely not for everyone) but in acting like fixing it’s problems is a simple matter. Everything about game dev is a bloody headache.

Kotor 2 is a much better game than Kotor 1 even with the bugs and being incomplete. It's better mechanically in every way and is far better written with much better characters and a stronger plot. Even accounting for the flaws it's one of the best RPGs ever made in the same vein as Fallout NV.

You are unfortunately though correct that Kotor 1 vastly outsold Kotor 2. Google says it was 3 mil vs 1.5 mil. Given how much better Kotor 2 is, I suspect you are right that the bugs and word of mouth severely impacted sales. However I do think that people care less about bugs these days than back then.

Nephthys fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Dec 30, 2023

Arglebargle III
Feb 21, 2006

Mad Wack posted:

i'm not a huge 40k buff but doesn't some martian dragon also play into the machine spirit stuff too?

They set that up back in the late 90s or early 2000s but there's very little storytelling space there, since an ancient god waking up on Mars would kind of be the end of the setting. Same thing with the Tyranids on Terra thing from a couple years ago. They can sort of have genestealers be a problem but advancing that plot line would break everything else.

As for the Mechanicum at large it's hard to say whether they were corrupted by necrons from the beginning or if they just really love necrons. The necrons represent the unliving incarnation of everything the Mechancum desires, and it's hard for lots of them to overlook that just because they're a bunch of hostile xenos.

FurtherReading
Sep 4, 2007

Arglebargle III posted:

They set that up back in the late 90s or early 2000s but there's very little storytelling space there, since an ancient god waking up on Mars would kind of be the end of the setting. Same thing with the Tyranids on Terra thing from a couple years ago. They can sort of have genestealers be a problem but advancing that plot line would break everything else.

As for the Mechanicum at large it's hard to say whether they were corrupted by necrons from the beginning or if they just really love necrons. The necrons represent the unliving incarnation of everything the Mechancum desires, and it's hard for lots of them to overlook that just because they're a bunch of hostile xenos.

In Act 5 the way Pascal explains the necrons looks very much like propaganda from the void dragon angry about them betraying it. It's a very cool look into just how much the void dragon might have influence over mars.

Aramoro
Jun 1, 2012




habeasdorkus posted:

Cass can have some extremely high willpower in the lategame, so you can get a decent aoe damage from it if she's a master tactician and she's got a full 400% boost to her damage from that archetypes main ability... but by the time you'll have that 400% boost everything is almost dead because you earn the MT stacks via your allies resolve gains meaning they've already done stuff. Otherwise it ends up just moving enemies a little bit and doing like 30 damage, which to standard enemies with several hundred HP ain't much.

What are these abilities and traits called? Notch of Purpose is the only one I've seen that moves folk and I've no idea how they do damage.

JamMasterJim
Mar 27, 2010

Aramoro posted:

What are these abilities and traits called? Notch of Purpose is the only one I've seen that moves folk and I've no idea how they do damage.

Eye of Oblivion is a massive Debuff they cannot resist
Blood Augury is great damage stacking while Tonicity is Good damage stack. Perilous ways adds WP damage to enemies you move.
Mastery of Time, The Course Untravelled,Ebb and Flow Stack WP and Perception sky high
You pick Strange Vitality, Mind Over Matter and Pass Unscathed and now you have more wounds than Space Marines you can regenerate and you are dodgier than Eldar
Then pick poo poo like Open to the Warp and Undam sea of souls to debuff their resistances and armor.

Notch of Purpose will lure enemies closed to the tile (pick one that is the same distance from multiple enemies) and Point of curiosity will move the whole group to a zone.
You throw vision of hell to reduce toughness (and wounds) and their resistance checks so everything works better.
Then a lidless stare for massive stun and ok damage that will almost always work (since you lower their resistances constantly and stack your WP) or Held in my gaze for single target nuke that keeps scaling.
And for single target enemies, Warp Curse makes them even easier to melt.
Mend Reality and reveal the light are very good buffs, but you can finish fight so fast, they are not as relevant unnles you want Cassia to superbuff your MC build.

And in order to keep using Navigator powers and trigger more stat stacking, Officers with Take it down and their Heroic act or even Navy officers (like Abelard) with the talent that gives free MP and lets them move help to snowball the absurdity even faster.
And of course, if you make Cassia A grand strategist she will go first (or any other archetype from tier 2 but she has seize the initiative from officer)(

Justin Credible
Aug 27, 2003

happy cat


If you like Mechanicus stuff the Forge of Mars omnibus rules.

Buschmaki
Dec 26, 2012

‿︵‿︵‿︵‿Lean Addict︵‿︵‿︵‿
Mechanicuso soy: Bwuh I gotta break out the censers to propitiate this conveyor belt

Dark Mechanichads: Let's just throw a demon in this thing and see what happens

VanillaGorilla
Oct 2, 2003

Put more time in, finishing out the Dargonus storyline and hitting the point where they’re going to railroad me into A3.

I dunno - I feel like there’s a better game here where you strip out most of the ship exploration and colony management and focus in on building out the three “main” planets with more locations and side stories - making more of a KOTOR than a Mass Effect. Kind of par for the course for Owlcat where there’s always like one extraneous set of systems (kingdom management, the crusade, etc) that weighs on the experience.

Like a bunch of the little events that pop up as you build improvements on the colony worlds would have been way more interesting if, you know, I could have played through them with my party. Beyond that, navigation is annoying and most of the systems just don’t have much actually going on - which might be fine from a lore perspective but doesn’t make for an interesting gameplay experience.

Szarrukin
Sep 29, 2021
Why is Abelard Iconoclast? I'm only in Chapter 2 but so far he acts like 100% Dogmatic. Iconoclasts are supposed to "believe in value of human life and freedom" and Abelard gives no gently caress about either.

deep dish peat moss
Jul 27, 2006

Szarrukin posted:

Why is Abelard Iconoclast? I'm only in Chapter 2 but so far he acts like 100% Dogmatic. Iconoclasts are supposed to "believe in value of human life and freedom" and Abelard gives no gently caress about either.

He's Dogmatic because he has to be to survive in the world of the imperium but if you're playing an Iconoclast RT his whole dogmatic facade falls down and he's like "thank god I don't have to pretend to want to murder everyone anymore"

Buschmaki
Dec 26, 2012

‿︵‿︵‿︵‿Lean Addict︵‿︵‿︵‿

Szarrukin posted:

Why is Abelard Iconoclast? I'm only in Chapter 2 but so far he acts like 100% Dogmatic. Iconoclasts are supposed to "believe in value of human life and freedom" and Abelard gives no gently caress about either.

He left the Imperial Navy because he felt he couldnt make a difference in the rigid structure of it to tool around with a xeno-heretic. He's 100% iconoclast

Sio
Jan 20, 2007

better red than dead

Szarrukin posted:

Why is Abelard Iconoclast? I'm only in Chapter 2 but so far he acts like 100% Dogmatic. Iconoclasts are supposed to "believe in value of human life and freedom" and Abelard gives no gently caress about either.

It doesn’t take much to be Iconoclast in the Imperium. He occasionally cares about his crew’s wellbeing, like in the prologue when he wants to save the middle deckers and in the striking lower deck event where he is clearly being lenient and protective of his insubordinate lieutenant.

He’s also really big on Theodora, so he’s definitely not very Dogmatic.

ChrisBTY
Mar 29, 2012

this glorious monument

You don't really get to be a Rogue Trader's right hand man unless you have an open mind or the plot bends over backwards to make it make sense. Heresy is in the job description.

Magni
Apr 29, 2009
I think it's also that it's easy to get a bad impression of him with the Depot 4 quest. It's pretty obvious that him cracking down that hard initially was at least in significant part driven by grief and anger over Theodora's murder. He's still pretty big on discipline and regulations less out of actual fanaticism and more just out of professionalism as a navy officer.

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Terrible Opinions
Oct 18, 2013



Nephthys posted:

Kotor 2 is a much better game than Kotor 1 even with the bugs and being incomplete. It's better mechanically in every way and is far better written with much better characters and a stronger plot. Even accounting for the flaws it's one of the best RPGs ever made in the same vein as Fallout NV.

You are unfortunately though correct that Kotor 1 vastly outsold Kotor 2. Google says it was 3 mil vs 1.5 mil. Given how much better Kotor 2 is, I suspect you are right that the bugs and word of mouth severely impacted sales. However I do think that people care less about bugs these days than back then.
KOTOR 2 also had a really bad first area, that is enough for some people to just drop it right there.

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