Quoting: JarmerI think I've played through GD ... 4 times? 5 times maybe? I think it's got to be one of my most-played games of all time at nearly 500 hrs. ITS SO GOOD.

About the only complaint I have on it, is that getting the best gear to really make your builds shine requires being on the highest difficulty for the drops. BUT to get to the highest difficulty you have to do the most boring thing ever of all time: slog through the game mindlessly once all the way to the end (because you don't give a shit about items or upgrades) and then after spending countless hours you will unlock the highest difficulties and you can actually start playing. Due to this I've never actually played the highest difficulty, because: aint nobody got time for that shit.

It's still mechanically, build wise, and FUN wise: one of the best arpgs ever made!

Yeah, I know what you mean. The higher difficulties is also what puts more importance on your build to be good and a lot of them become increasingly reliant on you actually having some proper gear in order to function properly. But if you then need to grind for every single piece of equipment and runes and trinkets and whatnot it just becomes plainly impractical to play that build, especially when you can just google some other build that isn't as gear reliant and works much more easily.

It's nothing especially wrong with Grim Dawn, though. Difficulty modes cannibalizing a game's own variety is a very common occurrence.

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Gothic 1 is very dear to me - the fact that one part of my nick is named after a NPC in this game I think speaks for itself. I was young, a few years into my primary school and although I was already quite good with English, I still struggled to play RPG games. I found their systems difficult to understand and kept getting my ass handed to me. So, the classics I played like the first two Fallouts or Might and Magic games were all games I *played* but never *finished*. Gothic was the first one that I actually completed. Thanks to easy systems - just two attributes! - and no shenanigans like "first-person view but you're actually 4 people" and thanks to the overall very immersive design I was finally able to just play and enjoy.

Which is funny because nowadays, the Gothic games have somewhat of a reputation for being difficult, partly due to weird controls and partly due to mercilessly difficult fights when you have a character with no learned skills and no equipment. I don't really remember having too much problems in the beginning. When I got told to watch out for the wolves in the forest, and when I immediately died to them, I simply learned to avoid the forests and to heed any further warnings :)

Gothic also killed Morrowind for me. When I finally got my hands on it later (Bethesda would never strike a deal with the gaming magazines over here, so it took years for me to get) and saw how the combat actually looked and worked, I bounced off immediately.

But to get back on the topic of the remake - I'm personally skeptical. It became more and more apparent as time went on that the first two Gothic games captured lightning in a bottle. To this day, it's still immersive in ways that most modern games do not understand. Piranha Bytes themselves struggled to capture the magic of the first two games while also utilizing modern mechanics that they thought gamers wanted for the rest of their career. They never did. So the odds are quite stacked against the remake. Thankfully, even if the remake turns out to be bad, I can look forward to the update on Archolos instead.

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Quoting: KimyrielleI have zero doubt that the people actually leaving Discord will be a rounding error, and the vast majority of users will continue using it. If people had a spine, our word wouldn't be the place it is.

It's easier said than done. If a gaming group of 10 people decides they want to leave, they're gonna have 20 opinions on where to go and so rather than arguing about it endlessly they figure it's better to just stay. There's sadly no alternative that screams "Discord refugees come here".

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Quoting: linuxjacquesTotal War: WARHAMMER III review ratings on Steam are ... not great.

It's...complicated. The reviews are negative but a lot of them are coming from people who've put hundreds if not thousands of hours into the game. We have a kind of a Stellaris situation here I suppose. It's a very ambitious game, that's difficult and expensive to maintain, the game desperately needs attention in its base mechanics instead of endless amounts of additional DLC that keeps breaking stuff. It's tricky to fund this maintenance development time, though.

But if you'll still be able to get hundreds of hours of fun from the game like me, then I can hardly sit here and tell you the game actually sucks and you shouldn't buy it, even if you come to the same conclusions after some time.

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May I ask, does anyone around here play this game?

I ended up switching to Vintage Story in the end. It's more complete than the Luanti games and mods are also excellent.

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In my opinion, the game has a technical debt and design problems that were there since the first Warhammer Total War. The third game is very ambitious, but the engine it runs on was never meant to tackle this. Immortal Empires campaign is the result. They began to operate on a true grand strategy scale in IE but their engine doesn't deal well with hundreds and hundreds of factions and while the map is beautiful, they had to squish it very weirdly in many places in the name of performance. It's the biggest Total War map that's at the same time, gameplay wise, too small.

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I've found that my enjoyment of real-time with pause is directly tied to the party size. If the party is 4 characters, it's fine. If it's 6, I can't keep up anymore and have no idea what's happening and why.

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They've also shown over and over that they love making games LOOK good, but have an utter disdain for making them actually perform well once you get into the medium and late game. Their engines tend to suck ass once you scrub the veneer off. Stellaris being the perfect example. They've flipped flop from core "ways" of doing things (how they count pops, etc...) so many times it's almost a meme by now.

Starting a fresh new game is a chance for them to fix their engine behind the scenes. It's just a question of if they prioritized it at all, I suppose.

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I dual booted as well but Windows lasted only for like 2 years before I realized the SSD space would be better used differently :) So, a whole decade of dual booting sounds like a lot to me. But I understand it, it's normal relatable human behavior. I think everyone has left the cheese too long in the fridge at least once in their lives and only threw it out when it went really, really bad.

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Yeah, I am at a loss here. Copyright is incomprehensible to me. You ask for permission, you get it, have a license and then get taken down anyway?

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