What are you playing?

[Guest]

Reading is boring and books are bloated by boring nonsense because writers are spergs and they didn't have better autism outlets.

[Keith Chegwin]

True, I'm not normally a fan of high fantasy. It's a very cheesy genre to me. I vastly prefer hard SciFi.
What Tolkien did right was create a fantastic world. What he did wrong was going on for fifteen pages about what any odd fucker is wearing, smoking, eating, drinking, looking at and like and what his niece's breakfast was like. Descriptions over descriptions over descriptions.
Maybe I'll give the books another try soon. But I dropped them because he would just go on and on and on about a campfire scene for well over twenty pages describing absolutely fucking everything in the most minute detail. I can't stand that shit.

You read them in English or German?

[Kugelfisch]

German. I must've been 15 or so at the time.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

It's been a while for me, as well. Can't really remember how autistic the descriptions were.

[rabidtictac]

To be fair to Kugel, the german translation could have been total shit. I don't know. Tolkien is an English writer and he was writing for an English audience. His work is sometimes used in English courses because his prose is excellent. Tolkien was a Beowulf scholar and borrowed heavily from Beowulf in his own work. So not only was he a native English speaker writing to an English audience in English, but he was borrowing from an area of scholarship involving Old English and (presumably) Old Norse legends.

SpoilerShow

I say "presumably" because Beowulf is written in Old English and shows signs of being edited post-Christianity. So one presumes the original story may have been written in another language or be derived from an oral history in another tongue. But that may also not be the case.

Likewise, although I can comment on the quality of the Witcher series as a whole, I don't feel it entirely fair of me to shit on the prose for not being up to my standards (if I felt that way, which I don't.) Since it is just a translation and all.

[Keith Chegwin]

To be fair to Kugel, the german translation could have been total shit.

That's why I asked

[pibbs]

Im replaying Portal then I thought I'd play through:
Half-Life
Half-Life: Blue Shift (never played)
Half-Life: Opposing Force (never played)

[Kugelfisch]

Still going at it in Shadow of War. I guess I should go to the second region and work on capturing that fortress but I'm busy rounding out my army in the first one and lost two good orcs doing online invasions of other people's fortresses.

That's a pretty fun aspect of the game. In Single player you recruit orcs and possibly try to get them to become a warchief's bodyguard. That makes dealing with that warchief very easy as they will betray him when you face him. You can also just kill off his bodyguards beforehand.
Getting rid of a warchief is pretty important for conquering a fortress, of which every region has one. A fortress always has an overlord you'll need to defeat but before that you'll have to actually assault the fortress to get to him. Every orc garrisoned in a fortress allows for one fortress upgrade. The overlord allows for an upgrade to the walls, the first warchief for wall defences like flame throwers, the second for siege beasts and so on. If you defeat a warchief before the siege you disable those upgrades.
Likewise, in your assault you put in your orcs that allow for similar upgrades, like archers, siege biests, catapults, ologs to bash down walls and so on.

Online, you can lay siege to some other player's fortress. You can't influence his fortress in his game but if you lose an orc that one stays dead. What you have to gain is you being able to dominate his captains and keeping them (again, he won't lose them in his game, you basically just create a copy of them) and chests of loot for your character or free upgrades.
It's ranked so you get assigned a regional fortress with a defence level that roughly matches your assault force's assault rating.
What's hilarious is when somebody decided to make an orc with a mortal weakness his overlord. Really silly when you conquer his fortress, face the overlord and see the dude is mortally vulnerable to poison so the duel is just throwing a poisoned knife at him and wait five seconds for him to eat shit.

To bolster my army in the first region I dominated two orcs from the second one because they are a bit higher level. One of them just betrayed me after helping him out in a duel. Dude told me I was the worst boss he ever had. So naturally I decapitated the guy.
Also had another orc I killed two days ago because he was a pushover bitch I couldn't use for my army cheat death and ambush me. Dude was now a malformed poison guy because I killed him with poison. Unluckily for him, he was still mortally weak to it so one dagger throw later I was a legendary cloak richer.

The banter of the orcs is absolutely fantastic! I have about forty hours in the game now and I have yet to hear any captain repeat any lines, despite battling, killing, dominating and commanding a few doze already. They really have character and their shit talking often fits their strengths and weaknesses.
That is something that carried over from the first game where I remember having to deal with a dude being called Mûg the Beast Slayer or something, adorned in caragor pelts that'd talk massive shit about how he killed five of them with his bare hands the other day but was actually scared of caragors so releasing one from a cage sent him running like a bitch.

To be fair to Kugel, the german translation could have been total shit. I don't know.

Neither do I as I haven't read it in English and thus can't pass judgement on that.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Mobile Suits from Gundam IBO are pretty darn weird (basically all of them fight by hitting other mechs with a big slab of metal, or by firing the loudest gun they could find), but man do they ever make for good bodyguards in the other series' missions (where beam weapons are considered the superior choice in-universe, which IBO suits resist hard). I don't think I ever had one of them take damage from a beam attack.

Gundam Flauros looks derpy as fuck (imagine a grimdark version of Barney the Dinosaur who can turn into one of those enemy dinosaurs from Super Mario World; I can only assume he looks a little bit cooler in non-SD), but man does a range 9 attack ever come in handy.

[Singh'sSpot]

Started searching up some CRPGs on GOG.

Just started playing Divine Divinity, the name may sound familiar to some as you're thinking of Divinity:Original Sin, a prequal to this one.

Got to the part where I ended up in this Army camp and a wizard there brainwashed the knights there and killed my character. God damn, atleast I saved before that.