Rinn

I'm 100% for Ciri being the main character and I'm also complaining "what about the lore". You can do both at the same time. There's a vocal minority of people who'll use the lore argument to be sexist assholes, but people who have actually read and understood the books can have some valid concerns (ie where and how did she go through the trials, why can she use magic again, where did she even find how to do the trials, and just... why? She didn't need them and it's a bit of a character regression. She was basically already a witcher by title.)

Yeah, exactly! I'm not married to the lore to the degree that I won't give the devs a chance to explain how this came to be, but I'm worried it's going to just be a cheap "well we needed to keep the signs and the potions as mechanics but Geralt is retired, fuck it, let's say they found instructions on how to safely make more witchers in Vesemir's cupboard somewhere."

(Lore nerd rant ahead, tl;dr: Ciri being the protag is 100% fine and I expected it but her being a full witcher is weird)

There's exactly one somewhat valid complaint to be had here, and it's that Ciri in the books explicitly didn't go through the Trial of the Grasses (aka one of the main mutation processes that makes you a witcher or, as it often happens, just straight up kills you), so idk how they'll justify her being able to use witcher potions and stuff now. And (also in the books) she has lost her access to magic at one point, so using witcher signs is strange too.

I can see her wanting to take the plunge and go through with the trials, but I'm also certain that Geralt wouldn't want that for her bc of how much it fucks you up + most of the secrets of the trials have been lost.

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and wait and see what explanation they come up with for her being a full witcher, but it better be good.

So, from lore perspective, I have no objections to her being the protag but I don't love her being a full witcher. I liked what they did with her gameplay sections in W3, I hoped they'd have just expanded on that gameplay idea more.

...no? This is specifically referring to things like fanfiction. Haters rarely actually write fanfiction - you'd have to be really dedicated to despise a work enough to devote hours of your life to writing in its universe. Fanfiction is generally quite earnest and made with love for the original work.

I've reinstalled Sims 3, because I wanted to play the Sims but just can't deal with the broken cash machine that is the Sims 4. It took a decent amount of effort to get it to run, and it doesn't run very well, but it mostly works. And... it's so good. I forgot just how good it was.

I'm amazed at how much there is to do, and just how well my sims can take care of themselves - when playing 4 I always just made 1 or 2 sims, so that I could control their every move bc otherwise they'd be stuck doing something useless on a loop. Here I can have a family of 4 and actively play just one of them, and the rest will cook, clean, do homework, and generally look after themselves while I'm not there. It's amazing how they had this figured out so many years ago, and regressed so horribly.

Recently released Wayfinder has been scratching that itch for me! It used to be a multiplayer live-service game, but during early access it got converted to a normal singleplayer/coop game with 0 microtransactions and it's a lot of fun. My only issues are with performance, which isn't great, and build variety, which doesn't exist. There are 8 characters with limited customization (except visual, you can do a lot with all the dyes and trinkets) and you just gotta rotate between them to keep the playstyle fresh.

But the combat is fun, the graphics are great (they aren't beautiful, but they have that timeless cartoonish high fantasy aesthetic, like early WoW), and there is a lot of stuff to do and reward chests to collect. It really is feeling like a new KoA to me - as you said, just a solid, mid-tier action RPG.

So considering that we're in patientgamers... add to a wishlist and wait for a sale? :P

...yes? That's how physics works (provided that that something is moving at a constant velocity). The only difference between an enclosed moving platform and unenclosed one is that there may be additional issues with the wind/surrounding air, but the train in this post isn't moving fast enough for that to be a concern.

I don't think so, considering that it was written in 1999. And it's just way too specific for something LLM would come up with.

It is fun, but buggy + doesn't have great performance in some areas. I've recently played it for a bit on 1.1 patch drop, and lasted for about 6 hours until I hit a brick wall of a progression blocking bug. There was a decently large thread about it on the forum, no dev response, no fix in the next 3 hotfixes, so I stopped playing. Might come back for 1.3 or something.

Yeah, one of the only games I've 100%ed, the achievements are deliberately set up so that you can get most of them organically by the time you get to the true ending. The rarest achievement on Steam has like a 6% obtainment rate, which is a lot.

The real juice of modded minecraft is in the modpacks - curated sets of mods that were configured to work well with each other, frequently with some custom recipes added by the pack developer, and sometimes some kind of a quest line to guide you through the pack and provide a more structured experience. There are many different types of modpacks - kitchen sinks (large collections of mods, frequently without a lot of balance tweaks or changes, for a more sandbox experience), questing packs (with the aforementioned quest books to guide you through the mods), vanilla+ packs that intend to expand on the vanilla minecraft experience and not change the gameplay loop significantly, packs focused exclusively on magic or technology mods (or both), expert packs (questing packs with heavily reworked recipes, where you need to build elaborate machines and automate stuff Factorio-style)...

I'm not up to date with the modpack scene, so can't really make you a definitive list - back on reddit (sigh) there is a r/feedthebeast community that specializes in modded play.

That said:

• FTB Academy seems to be a pack specifically meant to teach the basics of modded play.
• Project Ozone 3 comes up quite often as a pack with a good quest book that guides you through everything.
• Cottage Witch is what I'm currently starting, it's (so far) a chill magic vanilla+ pack. New creatures, new plants, some new mechanics, tons of new decorations for building.
• Peace of Mind is an older pack made specifically for playing on Peaceful, if mobs are stressing you out. It's got a good questbook too.
• and if you want to jump straight into the deep end... Enigmatica 2 (or 6) Expert, Gregtech New Horizons. Expert packs in which you need to automate everything to progress. Gregtech in particular is infamous for its complexity, difficulty, and length, but if you enjoy solving hard problems it might be for you.

You'll also need a launcher to install these packs - FTB have their own if you want FTB Academy, otherwise there are some options such as Curseforge (do not recommend, eats resources just by existing), Prism (seems to come up a lot as a recommendation), or GDLauncher (what I'm using).

All of these are classic roguelikes, a genre of games which frequently aren't much to look at. The tradeoff for the looks is that they offer vast depth and complexity... and (usually) permadeath and a learning curve that's more of a cliff. I recommend watching some yt videos about any roguelike you want to learn more about, just so a fan can explain the appeal and show off all the basics.

That said:

Caves of Qud - actually one of the prettier classic roguelikes, if you can belive it. You're a traveller in a strange and unique world of vast salt deserts, jungles, and the titular caves. There is a ton of flavorful, semi-randomly generated history (especially the ever-important tales of the sultans) and cultures, so every run feels different. There is technically a main plot, but you can just ignore it and go exploring - it's a sandbox experience. The best parts, to me, are the aforementioned flavour, the tactical combat (that can get incredibly chaotic, with screen-warping effects going off every turn), the build diversity, and delving too greedily and too deeply into the caves.

Cogmind - haven't played this one, but it's on a list. You're a robot. You're building yourself from parts as you go, fighting other robots and stealing their parts.

CDDA - one of my faves, but definitely not something I'd recommend as an intro to this genre. You're a survivor in a zombie apocalypse. Go do things and don't get bitten. It's a sandbox - survive as long as you can, achieve a self-set goal. The distinguishing feature of CDDA is how realistic it tries to be - crafting is very complex, you need to track your thirst, nutrition, and sleep, you can easily get sick or get your arm broken, the zombies can track you by sight, noise, and lingering scent... My favourite part is surviving long enough to build elaborate apocalypse death mobiles, Mad Max style.