The "What Are You Playing Today" Thread

[Dracos]

Been playing Fallout New Vegas.

Having a lot of fun with it.

But then I played Lonesome Road DLC.  And so I must Rant as it pissed in the gaming pond hard.  It'll have spoilers.  Spoiler: Nobody should play this.

Spoiler: ShowHide

Lonesome Road is pretty much a package of all the worst parts of fallout 3 (and derivatives) in one go, with a carrot lure of following up on the initial setup and also getting some upgrades and stat ups for your awesome robot and story for your eyebot.

Good side: Some chatter from your eyebot.  You get upgrades for it and a stat point.

That's it.  Everything else is bad. 

Even the good side doesn't go anywhere you didn't already know.  All of the liveliness they give Ed-e in the DLC vanishes the second you leave it and during it, it is hugely distracting to have Ed-e beeping at random things without any seemingly rhyme or reason to most of it...only just a tiny fraction that itself teaches you to pay attention to the noisey beeps.  The story revealed is basically: Ed-e had a shitty life, then met you.  Well, really?  I didn't get that from it being a disassembled wreck when you meet it.  Oh, right, the 'Good' end of this DLC includes murdering Ed-e?  What a 'good side' indeed.

I'll start from the beginning.  From the start, the DLC locks you in this old world facility with the statement you can stop at any time.  Unlike the rest of the game, it views this as the alternative option and will solely give you shitty retarded options in every other case.  I mean firing nuke, blowing up nukes, murdering everyone, etc.  Every option offered within the DLC (with max everything) are just bad options and the game lambasts you throughout for continuing to play it.  Literally, the main NPC calls you up and reminds you that you are a terrible person for playing it at the end of pretty much every segment.  And there's no other option to continue the game.  It repeatedly offers you "Blow up nuke or Quit Game" with no path around.  It really strongly begs the question of how all these other people were wandering around these area without a problem with their enormous blocked passages between zones.

There are no quests.  The entire thing is just walking forward and murdering things.  There is one person you can talk to in the entire DLC and he is super douchebag Ulysses.  I'll get back to that later, but seriously, no quests.  Just rewards for walking farther in it and having murdered and nuked what was behind you.

By the way?  Rival Mailman has to be among the dumber ways to pitch the rivalry.  And it comes off especially dumb if you're anything but hardcore NCR, since a lot of Ulysses' bitching isn't about you at all.  Using a mailman (an explicitly replacable entity) as forces of great impact was retarded, and while during the main game it's no big deal (just your job), here it is treated like you should've been responsible for every package you ever delivered, IN A WORLD WHERE SUPER-ROBOTS ARE READILY AVAILBLE TO DO CHORES.

Anyhow, right after the beginning, you get Ed-e, who you were forced to abandon not 5 minutes earlier because it is DLC.  As already noted, you will either be killing Ed-e (the only companion you get for the next few hours) or murdering thousands and reshaping the more of the world in terrible nuclear fire.  Because those are the only options, should you actually play this game and not take its implicit suggestion to uninstall new vegas entirely.  Really, what the FUCK was going through their heads that they thought placing players in a situation where all they could do is horrible atrocities with the reminder that you can stop anytime if you don't want to commit horrible atrocities was an okay thing?  If I had encountered this before old world blues, I would've just stopped playing entirely.  Anyhow, Ed-e is along with you for the ride, to tell it's story too of its hard life, in case there wasn't enough sadness going on.

Wandering out of this location (A nuclear base), leads you to a really nuked over overworld area.  Where apparently everyone there has decided to form a side known as "We are somehow not dead despite being at ground zero of a nuclear disaster, have retained our awareness, and have decided that we can somehow survive in this place".  Basically, they take the ghoul capabilities all the way into complete ridiculousness.  How are these people not starved/dehydrated to death?  They're not descended to feral animals, but they've basically decided that they should team up with former enemies against everyone just because?  In a world where both individuality and factions run strong, these are your army of intelligent faceless mooks.  They don't want you to leave or anything, they just are shooting at you because you're there?  Way to descend into frothing pointlessness?

We then start getting lectured about this awesome place growing here before it got nuked.  There is literally no indication of this anywhere in the setting or dialogue.  Everything that I encountered was either from long ago in history or just destroyed entirely.  There was no indication at all of any post-fallout society anywhere here.  Not one bit.  Way to setting fail guys.  Were you too focused on the road to realize that it doesn't sell that I blew up some city here if there is no city nor even a cleared out spot that would've made sense for people to have been living in?  There is one bunker, but that's it.  Nobody you kill has any story or journals or dialogue or view of the events.  And your character actually is delivered as not remembering it... so there's nothing but Ulysses rantings to go on that there ever was a divide.  Nobody in the gameworld even comments on it (With one extremely vague exception that doesn't use any names).  By the way?  Way to continue the trend of completely incompetent NCR.  Awesome that we get choices between: Slavery, Tyranny, Incompetence, and going solo for the real world, despite NCR being traditional good guys.  Nope, here they were retarded again, thanks Obsidian.  Apparently the NCR mailed itself a nuclear detonator of some kind and then blew up the nukes.  Because anyone in fallout would be so horrifically stupid as to be playing around with nukes for military purposes.

"Hey guys, it seems there's a lot of nukes here.  We could fire them at Caesar."
"Okay, someone take general completely stupid outside and shoot him.  Preferrably staring at any of the toxic wasteland sites that are literally within viewing distance of almost every human settlement in the world from the last nuclear war."

Basically, everyone here and the impulses that set off the original disaster are so incredibly stupid that it becomes farcical that they're being taken seriously.  And then blame the mailman.  Of course, they're the ones that made it possible.  No one else would've provided a way for them to get their horrible disaster from Navarro (Enclave not NCR usually, btw) to Divide.

Fallout New Vegas surprised me by resolving the most important problem to my eyes with Fallout 3: Shitty, hard to traverse terrain.  Guess what?  Lonesome Road brings it back, with regular blocked routes, unsurpassable hills, lack of a free roaming goalset, and 3d maps (so that your local map maker stops being helpful.  Sure I know I need to get on that hill, but I sure don't know that I need to go the opposite way, climb up the side, up the tower, climb over it, leap down onto it, and then cross the bridge...)  Sure, it was a minor bit, but for me it ended up adding about a half hour to getting through the tiresome DLC and certainly didn't help an already miserable experience delivery.

Most of the DLCs had named villains of some kind that had opinions.  Usually these opinions were "Shoot you", but they had them.  Here?  Named guys just are mini-bosses.  They have no story, no dialogue, no reaction, no bypassing (well Rawr is bypassable I think), and basically are just upgraded versions of the rather beefy mooks that were everywhere.  Just generally a large step back from the 'everyone named should have personality' of New Vegas.

All of the DLCs had some special weapons.  Here was the Red Glare, the biggest, noisest and generally why bother weapon to pick up.  It fired missiles.  Cool.  Direct hits meant you needed like 3-6 hits to kill each one of the enemy.  Or I could shoot them with Christina's sniper rifle.  Or the gauss rifle.  Or smash them with a power fist.  Or any number of things that actually took them out in 1 or 2 hits without firing giant party damaging explosions everywhere.  Why in the world was Red Glare so weak?  It seemed nothing actually turned it's giant explosions into devestating hits, despite it's enormous visible explosions.  It just really wasn't much different than just pulling out one of the fancier pistols.

The DLC was big on East vs West.  Nobody bitched on it like Ulysses.  But the East was basically one state (Arizona) and the west was basically california...  Ignoring that Fallout 3 was in DC.  The rest of the country can be ignored though. :P

But the worst?  The Worst was Ulysses.  His background is that of a failure and a hypocrit in reality, but he's built up as some sort of superman in the other DLCs.  Even though his tribe got killed off, and he served with Caesar, and he apparently stalked you for ages without killing you.  He's a hypocrit who has ended two (almost three) entire cultures, but completely holds a grudge on the whole divide getting destroyed.  Go mailman, pretend you're just a mailman, when you trained tribals to kill and murder en masse.  But anyhow, he basically sets this whole thing up to kill you without dirtying his hands...  or get access to a nuke?  Who knows!  Cuz I sure thing if all he needed was some eyebot code, it would've been easier to walk around the mess whatever way he did (through the unpassable walls on either side of a region he has marked~), then to involve the hero at all.  And that was in classic shitty villain fashion the only way a lose condition for him showed up.  Hey the hero got killed, guess no nuke since the device was destroyed with him/her.

Ulysses won't shut up about history, but at no point is this part of expressing an actual philosophy.  Compared to all of the sides outside, he's basically taken a 'let the world burn and self-destruct in the worst way possible' philosophy.  But he's very bitter and bitchy about it too.  He is the singular least motivated individual in Fallout New Vegas.  Nobody seems so utterly purposeless as he is.  Except maybe the faceless mooks shooting and cutting each other in this DLC.  They might be possible more lacking in motivation.  This seems singularly wasteful as they spent multiple DLCs building him up.

The wiki has some designer quote from Chris about Ulysses being awesome.  But the thing is, You the Player have no agency in this interaction.  You weren't even there for your character having caused the disaster.  And so his whiny bitchy self-destructive lecture sessions miss the point.  You didn't pull the trigger that started his obsession with you, so it's very difficult to even feel associated with the blame he's trying to stick on your character or his own incompetent murderous intent.  So as he walks the player down effectively a corridor of switches where each time you pull one, the next door opens and something terrible happens (like firing a nuke off), you also don't have any agency, since when the game will give you skill checks or options at all (and they're ridiculously high when they show up), they don't actually matter in changing anything.  You can no more finish it without firing a nuke off or blowing up dozens of nukes or murdering lots of people than you can start fallout without getting a character.  It's an inevitable and thus stupid line of events.

I think that's about all that was bad with it.  Actually, there's one more.  The DLC doesn't as I understand affect the main game at all.  Despite doing something that should be literally country reshaping, nothing changes.

It had one good part.  When I finished it, I turned right back around and pulled out the mystery man magnum.  The guitar music played and I shot the main character of the DLC in the back of the head and chucked him off the cliff.  That was gratifying. :)

[Dracos]

Beat new vegas.  Many asked me my thoughts.  Overall, had fun with it, though I can see why it didn't get the stellar praise that it was going for.

New Vegas: Good, but crashy and some silly storyline deadends, one character has no good endings at all -80ish.  Not surprised really that it alone failed to meet the high standards for quality though, even though I enjoyed it way more than FO3.  I definitely encountered upwards of 30 crashes in my run, and this is the fully patched way after release version.
Old World Blues: Great, 85ish.  The characters were really fun and it had a silly scifi vibe.
Dead Money - Kinda meh and with a stupid lesson at the end? 

Spoiler: ShowHide

Oh, here's a ton of gold, and not only is it too heavy to carry, but it isn't worth too much anyway and most things won't have much money to pay you for it regardless.

Honest Hearts - Not bad, but kind of scripted/forgettable.
Lonesome Road - All the hate in the fallout universe, gathered in one intensely shitty DLC.

[Sierra]

I liked Dead Money a lot because the NPCs were great and it generally succeeded at evoking a tense, creepy atmosphere. Also holorifle, I love that thing so damned much. I still don't entirely understand the hate some people leveled at Dead Money because, what, they took away all your shiny toys and the game was actually marginally difficult for a few hours? That said, Old World Blues is definitely the most recommendable of the DLCs. I laughed more at the first conversation with the Think Tank than I have throughout the entirety of most games.

Honest Hearts really only has the survivalist journals in its favor. I hope you found all of those (especially the last one), because they're excellent work. Otherwise, yeah,

Spoiler: ShowHide

even Joshua Graham

manages to be shockingly uninteresting. I guess I do like that both of the ending options are fundamentally successful but sad in their own way? It's something. Lonesome Road, well, at least it had an adversary that communicated with you, more than can be said for Honest Hearts. Ulysses is inconsistently written (it felt too easy to talk him into standing down) and trying to make something profound out of mailman was indeed a very wrongheaded starting point for the character, but I give the voice actor credit for doing his level best to breathe some personality into the guy. Dude sounds like my mental impression of Discworld Death.

Yeah, the DLC is wildly uneven. I do think that the base New Vegas content is the most impressive effort at worldbuilding I've seen in a game, though, and I adore it for that despite the crashing and the frequently laughable lack of challenge. Critical reviews concluding that FO3 > FONV baffle me like nothing in the world. I am not sure I've seen a game fill so much space and use it to produce a world so less worth caring about than did FO3.

[Dracos]

Pardon my favor for that guy who keeps askin' me not to spoil the stuff for him. :)

I never finished FO3.  The sewers finished me and well, the Nation of Tod destroyed my ability to believe in their world building.  "You're from the WASTELAND!"  *looks 3 feet to the left, to where a giant rad scorpion is dead against the side of the fence* *looks down at the lack of actual floor, just barren poorly textured ground*  "Sure.  Sure I am."

Honest Hearts can easily be declared bland (as much as the Ranger stuff seemed neat.  I didn't track much of it down).  But I found it blandly unoffensive.  Dead Money...There was a lot I liked there.  I definitely had trouble seeing in it though with how dark and foggy the area was and despite reading how to and having a stealthy char, I really had trouble dealing with the final encounter how I was intending to.  Overall, I could see the makings of a great experience, but I felt that the terrain design brought it down and the story telling didn't quite manage to bring it up, so it got more of a meh from me.  I certainly don't look down on it.  The NPCs were great.  I kind of wish they didn't hamstring you to one at a time, and they got to shine in a yammering at each other way the whole way though.

[Sierra]

Stealthing through the final encounter? Yeah, I think that enemy just has ridiculous awareness or something, even with maxed stealth it's tough to evade being detected there. I think the only way to do it is ignore the front door and backtrack through the entire area, which is kind of ridiculous. Besides, if you just stealth past, you don't get their gauss rifle!

[Dracos]

Stealthing through the final encounter? Yeah, I think that enemy just has ridiculous awareness or something, even with maxed stealth it's tough to evade being detected there. I think the only way to do it is ignore the front door and backtrack through the entire area, which is kind of ridiculous. Besides, if you just stealth past, you don't get their gauss rifle!

That is exactly it.  All of the rational ways to leave that encounter get blocked by forcefields.  So the only way is indeed to run through the entire area (which does appear to be a loop then).  The encounter also has super-vision, so if you have line of sight at any point, you are spotted.  Just doing an all out run was the only thing that seemed to work.

[Jason_Miao]

In IRC, someone mentioned that I should try out the newer versions of Angband because it "actually has graphics."  I don't know what sort of heresy that is, but since I'd always intended to check out some of the Angband variants as well, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and try ToME, which stands for Tales of Middle EarthSomething Unpronounceable But Avoids Cease And Desist Letters.

It used to cover lots of areas and events in Middle Earth, but the developer removed everything Tolkien related in the new version 4.  There are still versions of the old 2.3.5 floating around, the last made by the developer Dark God, if anyone is interested in wandering around killing Ringwraiths, saving Gondolin, and such.  As a bonus, it may even include ASCII "graphics" rather than the new stuff, although I'm not sure about that.

Gamewise, ToME was well known for having a story, lots of races and base classes, and lots of minibosses that would drop randomly created artifacts that would range from pointless to amazing to absurdly stupid (activate every 200 turns for death). It's kept those to a large degree. 

My thoughts on a few aspects, in no particular order...

Story: Traditionally Western RPGs, like Angband, had about this much story: (1) Go to General Store (2) Buy Lantern (3) Kill Morgoth.  Eastern RPGs went the other route of letting you fight the final boss for hours and hours, burning all of your rare items in the final battle and doing millions of damage, only to find that you've done no damage because your defeat is a scripted event.  ToME takes the road of not restricting where you can explore (if you want to go to Dreadfell at level 1, go ahead!), and presenting the world's history and current events in little scrolls you find called lore.  This is where I'd hoped RPGs would go, rather than adopt railroading wholesale.  So, three thumbs up on this part from me (or two for now.  I'll steal someone's thumb later on).

Characters/Classes: point/tree system for both races and classes.  As noted earlier, there are lots of choices.  In a questionable move, most of them are locked, and have to be unlocked in-game.  I could even understand that, if the classes were really niche or challenge classes.  But who decided locking classes like "Wizard" by default was a good idea?  That's a shame, because there's lots of types of skills/power sources, and the game give you plenty of opportunitiLetes to branch out into other areas.  Restricting people from reasonable starting choices is pretty nonsensical.

Controls: mouse and/or keyboard.  This can be detrimental if you're only using mouse since the pointer is not very precise, and missing a widget may be interpreted by the game to run somewhere.  Running into a pack of frost giants when you were just trying to reach the stat screen to level up is not a pleasant way to die.

Extra lives: Like non-ASCII graphics, this is one of those things I find disappointing, but most will not.  There are two default adventuring modes: Roguelike, which gets you one life.  Adventure, which gets you an extra life when you reach certain milestones (I don't know what those milestones are, because I've never used this mode).  So if you ever wanted to try playing a Roguelike but wanted a kiddie-pool option rather than the glorious rush that comes from surviving by the skin of your teeth on your one and only life, this game offers one.

Dungeons: Randomly created persistent dungeons of fixed depth.  I think ToME shines here; the developer has thrown together some nice ideas or nice twists on old ideas.  Those ideas don't always work (Trollmire, an attempt to make a forest look like an actual forest rather than the traditional Rogue-halls and rooms, is annoying to actually explore), but sometimes they do.


While it's slightly rough in a few spots (e.g, Invisibility spell states that because you're ought of phase with the world, "your damage is reduced by 70 percent."  Does that mean damage I deal, or damage I take?  That's important information to know before I sacrifice 200 mana for a spell!), and it does have some mechanics bullshit that I disagree with (which I won't get into here), it feels mostly well crafted and is probably a nice balance between starter roguelike, and...well, Rogue.

[Dracos]

Finished my play through of Tomb Raider tonight at about 3 sittings and 92 percent.  Had a good time, got surprised by things that changed since I'd been attentive to the project, and hope those getting it have a good time on tuesday when it comes out :)

I'll fling up some comical blooper moments later.  Like the ghost flashlight.

First I gotta tease the rest of the folks about it. :)

[Dracos]

Playing the DQ8 postgame.

I fought dragon 2 (of technically 9, or maybe eight?).  It took like an hour and a dozen deaths.  My strategy kinda didn't go all that right, but I had enough power to really only spend 30 percent resources to take it down.  So not great for the eventual "AND YOU FIGHT THEM ALL TOGETHER" fight.

I suppose the Dragonlord has good reason to be cocky about literally holding off my group of level 50 monsters for an hour.  I think the most 'heeey' bit was him going 25 rounds without using a certain spell effect.  Then when my counter for it backfired on me hard...and I took it down, immediately doing it twice in a row.  "AHA AN OPENING, GIGAFLASH".

[Dracos]

Finished my DQ8 run.  Now trying out Amalur. 

It's tutorials really do want you to be reallllly specific.

[Iron Dragoon]

So, recently played Divinity 2.

It's the third game in a series called Divine Divinity (Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity, and Divinity 2: The Developer's Cut). I picked up all three on Steam sale for fairly cheap. So far, it has been an excellent investment. As a note, Divinity 2: The Developer's Cut is actually two games in one, sorta. They released a stand alone expansion that continues exactly where the original release left off. Additionally, if you start the original game, and have the Dev's version, the game *automatically* continues into the expansion, completely seamlessly, which was a really nice touch once I figured it out.

I've only played a bit of the first two. Reason for this is they're traditional third person, world down view RPGs. I got into the first one and realized they were going to be time sinks. Since I had school, I skipped on them to play Divinity 2, which is a third person action RPG, figuring those types of games tend to be shorter.

Well, not sure about that anymore. I've got 41 hours into it and have failed/missed a number of quests. There is simply a *lot* to do in the game, in addition to the game having moral routes.

The game starts with your character being an initiate Dragon Slayer. Your job is to, predictably, slay dragons. Unfortunately for you, your predecessors were *really* good at their jobs, so there's only one left. The dragons you fight aren't actually dragons, btw, but Dragon Knights. They are basically mortals who, either through their own power or by being chosen, were given the power of a dragon. Things get a bit crazy for your character in the first part of the game, though it takes a decent bit of time for you to get to that point.

Predictable plot spoiler:

Spoiler: ShowHide

At some point, you come across the Dragon Knight solo. Which is sort of a bad thing, considering you're the newest Dragon Slayer. Not only are you the newest, but you haven't fully completed the rituals, which leave you vulnerable to some of the dragon's abilities. The dragon, predictably, abuses this and you wind up getting dragon powers. This causes a bit of conflict later in the game.

This includes the ability to transform into a dragon form. They've separated the dragon form stuff from the non-dragon form stuff. Basically, when you're a dragon, everything is air to air combat. No normal ground units will even show up if you fly to the ground, and vice versa; no air units will attack you unless you're in dragon form.

The game is long and involved. It has a ton of moral choices and a ton of quests. I haven't done a second play through of the game yet, so I can't say how significant those choices are, but they are there. The evolution of the game is fairly predictable, but also manages to throw a few loops in there. Some quests take a bit of actual problem solving instead of just handing it to you on a plate, and the hidden things in the game are the same way. The puzzles in the game often require you to run back and forth in the current areas you're in, but with the number of quests in each area, it's easy to hit things up as you go from one to the next, so it's not as off-putting as I was expecting. The puzzles also sometimes require you to actually use the lore of the world and read books, as well as the 'special' treasure chests in the world require you to find keys, and they don't always drop off of monsters. A lot of the time, you have to solve mini-puzzles, explore, and find actual hidden keys. A few of the chests require you to make a minor moral decision to get access to the keys.

Hidden rooms and hidden buttons tend not to stand out at all, and are fairly easy to miss if you're not watching for details, which is pretty nice. Also, a lot of the times the first hidden button or key you find leads you into a mini-puzzle that you have to solve with no lore assistance at all, which I found to be kind of nice. I like solving things.

As for character customization, there's a fair bit. You have basic stats that you put points in, 4 per level, and then you have an ability tree, which you get 1 point for each level. Initially, this will seem a bit stingy, since you can put multiple points into a single ability, but the game has Skillbooks in the world and as quest rewards. These books, surprise, give you one additional skill point, and they become fairly common quest rewards further into the game.

The intro makes you pick a 'class' but after that, you have free and full access to all trees, those being Mage, Warrior, and Ranger, with a fourth tree based on Dragon Slayer specialties (weapon specializations, inventory upgrades, ect). Class abilities are point buy, with an initial cap of 5 points per skill. Those caps can be raised over the course of the game by both questing and abuse of one of your dragon slayer abilities: Mindread. It's exactly what it says, and using it initially creates an experience debt. While that sounds sorta bad, while the mobs in the game don't exactly 'level' with you (so if you do everything you can, you *will* be slightly OP, which is sorta nice in that it makes you feel powerful, but not insanely so), their XP seems to keep pace with you, so the experience debt never really became an issue for me. At least that I noticed. Additionally, abuse of this ability is encouraged because using it will grant you additional stat points or skill points fairly often.

I can say that it was much more involved than I expected, really, with each area of the game having a significant amount of space and side/mini-dungeons to explore. The hidden stuff, while sometimes a pain to figure out/find, was all pretty accessible, and while some of the puzzles and jumping puzzles were sometimes annoying because of some minor clipping issues (just barely catch the edge of something sticking out and you fall straight down), nothing really got me overly annoyed or frustrated. All in all, it's a pretty good balance throughout.

You can pick it up in a pack on Steam sale, the Divinity Anthology, which is normally $29.99. It goes on sale fairly often, so unless you need something *right now,* I'd hold off until a sale hit. The first two normally run $5.99, with Divinity 2 going for $19.99.

[Jason_Miao]

It's the third game in a series called Divine Divinity (Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity, and Divinity 2: The Developer's Cut). I picked up all three on Steam sale for fairly cheap.

I've only played a bit of the first two. Reason for this is they're traditional third person, world down view RPGs. I got into the first one and realized they were going to be time sinks.

I bought the first two from GOG way back when, before Divinity 2 was even out.  In fact, I think those were the first games I ever bought from them.

The first one is just as you describe it.  There is one additional interesting aspect, where equipment abilities are randomly generated, which means you can get random crap and the occasional exceptional weapon.   I spent most of the game using a sword that had the freeze spell that activated on hit and Vamipirism, even though there were many theoretically "better" weapons around.

The second one is buggy as hell.  The first one was the same, but they'd later patched it so that it was actually stable.  No such consideration was given for the second when I bought it.  If you plan on returning to the earlier ones, you might want to check to see if they've patched it (or see if you're willing to put up with Ultima IX levels of crashing).

[Jason_Miao]

Played Master of Orion 2, which I'd bought off of GOG months ago, but had not gotten around to playing again until last week (after I finished Ultima 5 and 6 again).  Won an 8 player game on average through a series of fortuitous circumstances. 

[Brian]

Started playing Bioshock: Infinite last night.

Feels a bit more ... arcadey than the first two.  Setting is fabulous, though.

Just need to figure out what's wrong with my video card, since it likes to flash bright spots all over the screen, and randomly stretch shadows from any object to the horizon ... and it's doing that in quite a few games now. :|

[Dracos]

Playing more Reckoning.  Just got my first solid 'What I make from crafting is way better than what I already have, a 100+ rise in Armor Rating redirecting me from my set pieces.

Learned that the Widow's army of spiders doesn't count as dangerous enough foes to have fate.

But killed them anyway.