orcawolfe

I remember they tried to use the environmental angle for marketing. They claimed that they were making use of discarded fruit pulp that would have gone to waste.

But of course it was actually an efficiency nightmare. They shipped the pulp to their factory, then shipped the weight of the pulp plus juice to the customer, who would then throw out half the weight of each package.

It would have been way more efficient for them to just buy the pulp, squeeze it in industrial quantities and sell bags of juice like some trendy health thing. But of course then they would have been a juice company instead of a tech company, and juice companies don’t get as much venture capital.

Solasta is an incredibly faithful recreation of the 5th edition rule set. And I absolutely love it. I’ve played the main campaign, all the DLC, and a fan made recreation of the temple of elemental evil.

The rule implementation is fairly strict, especially when compared with BG3. Can’t be casting somatic component spells with something in your off hand. Your wizard spell book is something that you can accidentally sell (oops). Need to attune those magic items. But I find it all pretty fun and I felt like I actually learned more of the D&D rules.

The cutscenes and dialogue animations are… actually comically bad. But I like the idea behind the way scenes work. Basically you set your character’s personality at the start of the game and then they automatically speak according to that. Some of dialogue is hilarious. Some of it is even internally hilarious.

But what really shines are the encounters and campaign design. The encounters are all very fun and well designed, there’s a fair amount of verticality and environment interaction. Each encounter feels like it could plausibly be part of an an actual tabletop adventure. And the overall story also feels like something that your friend would come up for his homebrew world. It lacks the style and polish of BG3 but makes up for it with authenticity and heart.

Assist
Solasta is the closest I’ve ever felt to playing dungeons and dragons in a video game and I would highly recommend checking out the base game at least.

The funny thing is that I used to have YouTube premium bundled with Google play music, but I had to cancel after they killed it. YouTube music was just a terrible experience coming after GPM (lost a lot of songs in transfer, unable to play only liked songs by certain artists, uploaded music locked in jail and unable to be mixed into playlists, etc…). I felt like I had to voice my complaint by canceling YouTube music, which I could only do by getting rid of YouTube premium as well. How else do you protest a product that got bundled onto something else you already used? Anyway, I would buy a cheaper premium tier if it didn’t include useless YouTube music.

They got the Skyrim voice actor (wes Johnson) back for old Herma Mora for the new expansion in Apocrypha. And they had him go back and rerecord the old voice lines as well. I think they did that with Dagon as well.

Whenever I hear of a game I might like, or buy one on a whim I add it to a list. I do something similar with books and movies. The purpose of the lists aren’t to put pressure on myself, but to remind myself of all the things I’m interested in and to avoid the feeling of “I have nothing to play/read/watch”. If I’m not enjoying something, I just won’t finish it and I check it off the list so I know I tried. For me, deciding what to do with my limited time can give me analysis paralysis. I don’t see the list and backlog as a chore, but more of an easy menu of options that I’ve already considered.

I enjoy being able to set my own goals and rules in games. If a game tells me to kill 15 bears just to check off a box, I’m probably not going to want to. But if I decide that I need 15 bear pelts to make myself special armor so I can RP being a barbarian or just look cool then I’m all over it. For me, planning what and how I’m going to do in the game is as fun as actually doing it.

I swear I am not kidding about this. The Ikea Markus chair is my favorite office chair. I lock the back upright and the lumbar support perfectly contours to my back. I do use an extra memory foam cushion on it to make it a bit softer. Every fancy gaming chair or office chair I tried has felt worse on my back than this chair. The racing style gaming chairs are all too straight and the fancy herman miller chairs are too curved. The Ikea one is just right. I had one for almost 10 years and then the fabric started to wear away so I bought another one and it is also perfect. Try it out before spending $1000 on a chair.