Saturday Morning Gaming: Something To Get Excited About
Obsidian is one of those game companies that makes me feel guilty for not having talked about them more. Sure, I have mentioned that Fallout: New Vegas (One of my favorite sequels to one of my favorite games of all time) is an awesome game but they’ve done a *LOT* of awesome stuff that I never got around to talking about.
They were behind Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. (One of my favorite sequels to one of my favorite games of all time.) They were behind Neverwinter Nights II (another of my favorite sequels). Alpha Protocol probably deserves its own post in its own right (something to the effect of “I totally see what they were going for”). Pillars of Eternity is a game that people who loved Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale would love and help them remember why they loved those games and, perhaps more importantly, *SHARE* why they loved those games.
It is one of the game companies out there that has done me right a heck of a lot more often than it has done me wrong (and the times it has done me wrong were for sins that I found easy to forgive… bugs, crashes, glitches… that sort of thing). The way I used to feel about Bioware is the way I feel about Obsidian.
And, as such, I was *THRILLED BEYOND WORDS* to hear that Obsidian has a new game coming out.
Here… let’s watch the trailer:
Oh, wow. So many different feelings. The first impression I have is that this game reminds me of Firefly. I showed it to a co-worker and he said that it reminded him of Borderlands. So we have something from 15 years ago and something from 9 years ago that this is reminiscent of… and, while it’s doing that, it’s (apparently) working the “New Vegas” angle and so we have some *SERIOUS* nostalgia wine packaged in some new skins.
I’ve already pre-ordered it on Steam, though I’ll probably get the version available on PlayStation 4. Because, hey, I watched Firefly in my basement, I played Borderlands in that same basement, I beat New Vegas in that same basement… and it’s coming on time for me to explore some new worlds in that same basement. Even if those new worlds are outer.
I can’t wait.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is “Storm Squad” by JD Hancock. Used under a creative commons license.)
I’m making a budget for 2019, so I guess I’m playing Mint and LibreOffice Calc. The controls are a bit clunky, but the gameplay is deep and rewarding. Hoping to get the DLC of Overtime: The Workening. Plus I can’t stop playing Duolingo: Esperanto, and I get a few minutes in every single day. It’s like learning a real-life Quenya or Klingon, but more people serious about speaking languages.
Gonna kick off this Saturday by firing up gedit and BlueFish to write for The Anomalist.Report
These comments exists for system and administrative purposes. Please ignore. Sorry for having put it on this post in particular, but now that they’re here and it’s working again I don’t want to mess with anything.Report
These comments exists for system and administrative purposes. Please ignore. Sorry for having put it on this post in particular, but now that they’re here and it’s working again I don’t want to mess with anything.Report
The test is now complete.Report
Tangential and such, but we started using Mint earlier this year. It’s fantastic if you approach your books in a certain way, but we’re having to do all sorts of hacks to get it to get along with how we actually do our books.Report
Kindly elaborate upon “in a certain way”. My curiosity, as you Americans say, is piqued.Report
The biggest issue is how much it doesn’t like lump payments. One example, and it’s kind of unavoidable, is monthly insurance payments. It likes things just so and it’s most happy if you pay $20/day for your insurance instead of $600/mo. What ends up happening is that when your $600 payment goes through, it freaks out and sends you alerts about how you JUST SPENT A WHOLE LOT OF MONEY ON HEALTH-SUBCATEGORY-HEALTHCARE-SUBCATEGORY-INSURANCE!!!! and how out of line it is with your other healthcare spending for the month with tips about how to keep your spending in line.
Granted, that’s more of a quirk than a problem, but this approach does make it easier, for example, to pay for auto insurance monthly instead of every six months. It also means that if you’re making annual payments towards something you have to account for it in your budget.
Like say you’re paying for Audible annually at $225. You set aside $18.75 a month under Entertainment for it. But when you look at your Entertainment surplus, you have to mentally subtract out that a lot of that is going to go towards Audible come December (or whenever). Or absent that, you can’t have an “Entertainment” budget but specific budgets for specific subcategories that you have budgets set up for individually. Or you need Audible to be taken out of your budget entirely, or put into a different category from “Entertainment”. But then you don’t know how much you’re spending on entertainment unless you’re adding across different categories.
Does all that make sense?Report
Almost forgot, I’m going to play Audacity to do some audio production work. Some kind soul on the internet bought me a microphone, an audio interface, and some cables. I’m looking to learn about adding depth to audio productions, making people sound like they’re in a space rather than being “flat on paper”.Report
Oh yeah, that one is going on the Steam Wish List.
Things are getting such that I will need to budget for a new video card soon too.Report
That game looks amazin. I may start Assassin’s Creed Odyssey this weekend. It was 27 buck in a black Friday sale on Amazon. I loved Origins–it was the first of the series that I finished, and this one looks like more of the same. I also have a Star Wars: Legion Tournament today (star wars army men? I’m in)/Report
I’ve re-watched the trailer a half-dozen times and I think my favorite part is where the guy leans in and says “let’s get started”.
Though, the first time, my favorite part was the “shade” (I think the kids call it) thrown in the direction of Bethesda.Report
> At least it was until the corporations bought it, branded it, and started selling it at ludicrously inflated prices
Is this the shade to which you are referring, or is there something else within the trailer that I have missed this morning?Report
Cross-reference with the credit text reading “Original Creators of Fallout” and yeah, I think you’re right.Report
“And the developers of Fallout: New Vegas”
I like to think that Todd Howard pursed his lips a little when he saw the trailer.Report
My youngest noted this shade by saying, “This is Obsidian showing Bethesda how to properly make a Fallout game.”Report
Steam has a handful of screenshots from the game (warning, mild spoilers, I guess) and the one that has me grinning to myself is one that shows a snippet of conversation. If you want to avoid spoilers entirely, I’ll give the basic form of the conversation without giving anything away:
Person you’re talking to says a line.
You have three potential responses:
1) Use a Conversation Skill if the appropriate skill is high enough
2) Use a line of dialog that doesn’t use a Conversation Skill
3) Leave the conversation immediately and attack
OH MY GOSH I CAN’T WAITReport
But will it have dialogue options for those who wish to play with a 1 intelligence or the equivalent in The Outer Worlds?Report
From what I’ve read, yes.Report
It certainly looks interesting. Unfortunately the screenshots seem to imply this is a first-person only game and if so then I will not be able to play it.
I’ve spent basically the whole weekend playing the new Stellaris patch, and its effectively a new game. The planetary management system is vastly deeper than the old one and is engrossing enough that it no longer feels like killing time between wars, like the old one did. It’s taken some time to get used to it and it could probably use some balance tweaks, but so far I’m really enjoying it.Report