helsmuth

The first expansion pack for the Witcher 3 took me 22.5 hours to finish the main story quests. I'm glad I waited a couple of months before playing it, since the next expansion "Blood & Wine" still has no release date. I'll definitely be preordering as soon as its available. The following review contains plot details and spoilers for the game.

This game starts in an inn. Not on the Plane of Shadow, where you fled as Undrentide crashed to the ground (if only Heroudis had flown her citadel above 1000 feet, like the wise Dagget Filth had advised...). Soon enough, the inn is under attack, thereby combining two of the laziest beginnings possible for a BioWare game. This hackery might be forgivable if they had leveled up my character to cover the gap in time, but oh well. Can NWN:HotU possibly live up to the example set by chapter 5 of Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn? We shall see...

When Neverwinter Nights was released in 2002, it had everything I wanted in a CRPG. In particular, Kal & I had tried the awful multiplayer in Baldur's Gate, but there's only so much of "you must gather your party before venturing forth" that we could put up with. I had enormous fun on the multiplayer servers, especially the persistent worlds . I spent quite a few hours in the level editor as well, dreaming of creating an electronic version of my pen & paper city, Helsmuth. However, I have never finished the single player game. I only ever made it as far as Chapter 2. Partly it was the sheer grind of tracking down the "Waterdhavian creatures," but mainly because it just couldn't compete with the experience of playing D&D in person. NWN did finally convince me to convert my game from 2nd edition to the 3rd edition rules, though, so there's that. The main reason I decided to buy NWN Diamond from GoG was because NWN2 was too demanding fo...

After 117 hours, I've completed my first playthrough of the Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. I actually bought a new laptop specifically so that I could play this game, since my Acer Aspire with GeForce GT 640M could barely keep up with the Witcher 2. I've had enormous fun with this game and I'm very much looking forward to playing the two expansion packs, Hearts of Stone and Blood & Wine. However, after such a satisfying ending, I feel the need to take a bit of a break for a while. More details (and spoilers for all three Witcher games) after the jump:

I've finished Shadows of Amn in BG2:EE just shy of the 2.95 million xp cap, which puts me a bit ahead of the starting value of 2.5 million for brand new characters in Throne of Bhaal. My party looks like this: Gorion's Ward , CE half-elf Fighter 11 / Mage 12 / Thief 14 Korgan : CE dwarf Fighter 19 (Berserker kit) Minsc  CG human Ranger 17 Jaheira : TN half-elf Fighter 13 / Druid 13 Viconia : NE drow Cleric 19 Imoen : NG human Thief 7 / Mage 16 My alignment changed to Chaotic Evil because I succumbed to the sin of greed. I blame Elric of Melniboné (or, more specifically, Stormbringer). Also, I may have kicked Darth Sarevok in the nuts ("Release your anger, only your hatred can destroy me!"). My bad :-) It would have been cool if the Fate Spirit at the beginning of Throne of Bhaal had given you the option of bringing back some of the BG characters who were left out of Shadows of Amn, like Xan or Shar-Teel . I suppose there's probably a mod for that. I...

I've been playing Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition on my Nexus 7 tablet, which is the 3rd time that I've restarted this game from scratch. I didn't have my save game from 2013 when I played BG:EE, since I had to wipe my laptop and the backup is in Australia. I also made a few screwups with my game in the early stage, which I've managed to fix using EE Keeper to edit the save files. You'll see lots of mentions of CLUA Console on the forums, but it's tricky/impossible to get this working in the Android version of the game, even if you use a bluetooth keyboard. Here are the instructions for setting up EE Keeper for Android if you don't have a PC version of BG2:EE installed. Basically, you need to copy the 'main' and 'patch' files from the    sdcard/Android/obb/com.beamdog.baldursgateenhancededition  directory on your device, then extract them using 7zip on your PC. You can configure EE Keeper to use this as the installation directory,...

One of the things that clearly distinguishes life in the Wild West from the "default setting" of D&D is the availability of rail transportation ... and the unavailability of magical transportation. For those who can afford it, a 9th level sellspell would charge 450gp to teleport  3 passengers up to 900 miles in the blink of an eye. In a small city (population > 5000) there is an 86% chance of at least one 9th or 10th level wizard, or 10th level sorcerer (3.5ed DMG, p139). Of course, there's also the chance of a teleportation mishap, but every mode of transport has its downsides. For everyone else, wagon trains and riverboats are still the norm. A long-haul stagecoach can cover from 70 up to 120 miles per day over well-maintained roads. Charles O. Paullin (1932) Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States , the University of Michigan. Michael Graham Richard (2012)  How fast could you travel across the U.S. in the 1800s?