Rinn

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.

I was in the mood for a) something that won't require a lot of thinking and b) something high fantasy. So... I started The Way of Kings. I'm not Sanderson's biggest fan, but I can't deny that it's a very quick and fun read (despite its monstrous size). No thoughts, just get swept up in the world and enjoy.

The storm-based worldbuilding is very cool. Coincidentally, I've been playing Against the Storm a lot. Very interesting how a similar base idea (what if we had a world ruled by a cycle of storms?) can go in such different directions.

Spoilery thoughts: