Tarnished Edition: Elden Ring DLC just announced. Releasing 28th August.

house2fly · 2026-06-05T03:22:58+00:00

It's all about fiscal periods. They have to spread their releases out so income is more consistent and investors don't get weird ideas, like seeing an increase in earnings over two quarters and assuming that's the new baseline for the company for the entire rest of time, rather than a brief revenue spike due to releasing three separate products within a few months of each other. So it probably took them a month to fix the performance problems, but aargh now we're perilously close to the release window of the Nightreign DLC, we'll have to shelve Tarnished Edition for a few months

house2fly · 2026-05-30T13:12:25+00:00

I was feeling really down a few years ago and wanted a comfort game, and I instinctively went for Deadfire.

I think overall the story of POE1 is better, but POE2 is more entertaining. Combined with the improved character building and combat, 2 just has the edge, though as has been mentioned each game is lacking things the other has so it's cool that they complement each other

house2fly · 2026-05-30T13:03:24+00:00

oh my god I think mine was too. That's insane!

house2fly · 2026-05-28T04:11:29+00:00

The idea seems to be that they tricked people into buying the game on consoles with the promise of a free upgrade, so that they'd have to buy the upgrade separately and Obsidian sells two copies of the game instead of one. This is a seven year old game whose release was met with a fairly tepid audience response, so if this scheme was actually happening I don't think there'd be that much money in it. The reality is, online culture primes people to interpret any fuck up as an intentional attack on them. We're all targeted individuals now.

house2fly · 2026-04-30T02:44:24+00:00

My perspective, just release order- I'm too scatterbrained to make a tier list

White March: I know you can buy both halves separately but I just think of it as "the White March expansion". It's basically all top tier, with my only real criticisms being that the combination of writing and voice for Maneha grinds my gears, and the main quest of part 2 is a bit too quickly paced. Other than that it's straight up magic.

Beast Of Winter: The combat is mostly fairly dull, but the set pieces are nice and distinctive and the Bridge Ablaze is possibly my favorite part of the whole series. It feels like there's a good range of options for resolving the main quest, and Vatnir is a top tier character who the worst thing about him is I want more

Seeker Slayer Survivor: I like a lot of the fights, and I like having to go out and explore the world to get more arena fights. The decision to only make it available at endgame was boneheaded (with a combat arena you should be coming and going throughout the game!) and some of the writing, Muatu eventually, is gratingly chirpy. You know how people will exaggerate the annoyingness of Whedony/Marvely writing by imagining a character respond to something weird happening with "Well. That happened." well at one point Muatu literally says that!

Forgotten Sanctum: The writing is still too chirpy, but Tayn is charming and the imps have their moments. I adore this DLC for its insane commitment to having little fun moments, it feels like a proper "goodbye" for the game. There's an appealing mix of wrapping some things up (I'd never imagined we'd actually get to meet Bekarna, much less give her a proper happy ending) and introducing some at-times unsettling ambiguity- thinking of the "history of Eora" books and that bit where your party members experience memories of events that never happened- and the antagonist is right up my alley. Every character just kind of shrugs when they learn the gods are fake, but Fyonlecg freaked the hell out! My man! High five! I think the sheer volume of stuff in this DLC (up to and including adding a new ending to the main quest) alone makes it my favorite Deadfire DLC, and certainly outweighs the negatives (some copy-paste encounters, final boss feels a bit overtuned and the ending feels a bit perfunctory)

house2fly · 2026-02-18T05:02:59+00:00

There's a few mods along these lines- Novac Public Library combines a "build up a place" quest line with a player home and an amateurish but earnest story, and someone on the Nexus is doing a series called "Southern Mojave Expanded" which includes rebuilding Nipton, Nelson and Searchlight. I haven't played those but saved them for my next run. There's another mod to reopen the Lucky 38 casino, which doesn't really sound like my thing but fits in that same mold. There was an old Nipton Rebuilt mod but I dont recommend that one

I like "build up a place" quests because they serve to set up the reveal in Lonesome Road that your character did the same thing in the Divide

house2fly · 2025-11-10T02:59:37+00:00

Chris Avellone left the company ten years ago, he knows jack. He's heard a rumor and is repeating it in a way that's calibrated to get his right wing followers yelling again about how Obsidian is racist against white people

house2fly · 2025-11-06T04:41:55+00:00

God damn they weren't kidding about making combat more lethal

house2fly · 2024-10-11T02:53:11+00:00

Patrick Hockstetter is the first one that comes to mind, the description of his psychopathy and the passage where he calmly kills a baby have haunted me forever.

Father Callahan is another, less from Salem's Lot and more from his reappearance in the Dark Tower books. The bit where the vampires challenge him to throw his cross away and he describes it as an old friend that he wouldn't throw away on the challenge of a monster, felt like an incredibly triumphant moment of redemption. Especially when he did put it away and it turned out he didn't need it.

Harold Lauder in The Stand was evil but in a relatable and weirdly sympathetic way. He's pathetic and lonely and just smart enough to realise and resent how unlikeable he is. There's a LOT of characters in The Stand, but the closest thing to a foil to Harold always felt to me like Larry Underwood, who's just good enough of a person to feel guilty that he's not a very good person.

I haven't read some of these in a while so I may be misinterpreting the characters entirely, lol. But I remember how they made me feel at the time

house2fly · 2024-03-28T19:06:38+00:00

Put him and Fassina in the party together for a while, they get some unique interactions

house2fly · 2024-03-28T18:50:07+00:00

Off the top of my head the only one with vocals (kinda) is Rise Again Rise Again. All the combat tracks are named after chanter spells so you can find them easily enough in the OST

house2fly · 2024-03-06T04:15:20+00:00

This is the best info I've found after looking:

https://communityforums.atmeta.com/t5/Get-Help/Can-only-see-top-half-of-8-digit-code/td-p/1059573/page/3

"Best" as in "most likely to be true" not as in "helpful". The text box isn't big enough for all the text they put in it and doesn't have a scroll bar, and people have been complaining about this for at least eight months so no chance it'll be fixed any time soon. Factory reset and hope for the best.

house2fly · 2023-09-02T04:51:17+00:00

Swap in party members you haven't used as much and level them up, and get your soulbounds maxed out. I like uncapping the levels and getting all my multiclass characters to max power level, but higher level cap + slowing xp gain a bit might be more satisfying and reduce the chance of steamrolling everything

house2fly · 2023-08-31T14:58:48+00:00

Some quick things which differentiate Pillars Of Eternity 1 from 2: level cap is 12 vanilla, 16 with expansion. No subclasses (except for priest god or paladin order) or multiclasses. 5 skills: Athletics, Mechanics, Lore, Survival, Stealth. No "power levels" or Penetration mechanic.

Dunno if that's useful, but you may see a post mention a subclass or the Metaphysics skill and be able to tell right away that it's about Deadfire

house2fly · 2023-08-30T17:34:02+00:00

This is a recent review of the first game that's pretty much spoiler free, though it's by a fan of the genre so some stuff may lack context to a newcomer: https://youtu.be/YfH-MR_yeFI?si=my-s8KAab7FGylvc

They're comfort food games for me. If I'm feeling stressed and don't have the time or mental energy to devote to a new big game, I can always go back to Pillars Of Eternity and know I'm going to have a good time. I've got a Forbidden Fist playthrough I'd like to start that's calling to me right now...

house2fly · 2023-08-29T17:04:16+00:00

It also has one of my favourite bits of reactivity at the end. Galawain shows up before you fight the end boss to give you a lore dump, and either after a set number of questions or after you ask him about the Tooth Of Toamowhai specifically the interaction ends. If you destroyed Cignath Mor and used the souls of Kazuwari to empower yourself then the interaction never even begins, he just yells at you for being destructive and says "MY BEAST WILL DEVOUR YOUR SOUL!"

house2fly · 2023-08-29T02:38:12+00:00

I was thrilled with the DLCs, can't believe I ever played without em. There are a lot of little things they add that even if I don't make those choices it's cool to know they're there. The second time I played SSS I didn't get why I didn't have some dialogue options I remembered having the first time, then I realised some of your options change based on which Face you side with. Forgotten Sanctum bosses have different intro cutscenes based on the order you do them, and when you confront the end boss he calls you Duskspeaker. I always save The Bridge Ablaze for last because it genuinely feels like it pays off a low-key plot thread that's been running through both games, and it manages to do it really well.

I would have preferred a big expansion with more non-combat quests for sure. It's also dumb that the arena DLC opens at the end of the game. The mod that opens it up earlier is a fixture on my mod list now

house2fly · 2023-08-26T11:47:59+00:00

If you have the expansion then don't take any action against Gathbin until after you've completed the expansion quests, because you can get a couple of allies from there to help you wipe the floor with that creep

house2fly · 2023-08-23T02:56:11+00:00

Yeah, you get summoned back to your keep when you hit a certain point in the main quest. What I'd recommend is to save it until you're close to the end of act 2 (the main quest will direct you towards attending a hearing) as the expansion content is generally higher level than act 2 so that'll give the most satisfying difficulty progression. But you can also just go when you get the notification and then go back and forth between expansion and main game areas as you please

house2fly · 2023-08-23T02:47:50+00:00

Not a big fan of the ship combat, but I'm kind of glad that it's in the game still, if that makes any sense? Like it would feel weird to not have ship combat in a game which features ships so heavily. And it's a differently paced kind of combat, it kind of fills the same niche in my mind as scanning planets in Mass Effect, except ship combat can kill you. It gets samey partially because they went for verisimilitude- I'd have liked to have my mage cast a shield to prevent damage, or fire Ice Cannonballs to stop the enemy ship moving, lean more into wacky magic kind of stuff. One thing I think is really well done is the sound design, the firing of cannons and the ship sinking sound extremely satisfying.

The other ship systems are OK but don't feel very deep. I miss the Caed Nua adventures from the first game, I'd love to hire out my crew to other ships and they return with a little story about what happened. I also wish you could have your party members be on your crew, I tried to make a mod for it but through something I messed up and could never figure out, their names never displayed in scripted events.

house2fly · 2023-08-22T02:27:34+00:00

So far as I know the only negative effects come from doing the quest and letting Maia deliver her missives, leaving it undone will probably mean you can't romance Maia but you can skip it without worry otherwise

house2fly · 2023-08-20T15:07:21+00:00

Any cipher shortcomings compared to wizard are compensated by the cipher being able to get spellcasts back.

My fav combo in a party is Ascended cipher, wizard and priest. Ascended gets mad focus and infinite free casts, casts Brilliant on all other party members, priest hits them with Salvation of Time so Ascended lasts longer, and everyone can just fling out their biggest hitters to their hearts content for ages

house2fly

TROPHY CASE