karaddin

Yeah my wife explained it yesterday and I had the same reaction lol

They've given no acknowledgement that significant amounts were cut and said what things were removed were essentially choices based in making it better, not being able to finish it although that's relating to the data mined epilogue stuff rather than upper city content. It's obviously PR spin though. At this point I'm not expecting any major content additions until possibly a definitive addition at about the year mark or later.

I missed why they were worried he was a dark friend which does undercut it, but reflecting on it with that in mind had it all make much more sense. 1. The "blood calls blood" poem that Ishy recited as he was freeing Lanfear is a known piece of work explicitly associated with Lanfear* 2. The poem was graffitied onto the broken seal that was found by Bayle Domon 3. The graffiti was transcribed by him and sold to Moiraine 4. Not actually relevant to the suspicion on Lan but I did miss this detail as well - her knowledge of this poem being associated with Lanfear and it being attached to broken cuendillar is why she realises Lanfear is free and beelines to Rand* 5. Lan finds this transcription on her desk when he tries to take her dinner and realises she's left and leaves to chase her (culminating in the Myrdraal fight) and puts the poem in his pack* 6. Alanna and her warders find it in his stuff (which they're going through because both vigilance about him presumably being suicidal, but also having question marks over Moiraine due to how secretive she is, hence the comment about how much she changed when something happened 20 years ago). 7. Because they're already on alert due to above question marks, and they're ignorant of the above chain of events that explain why he has that poem - they think he's just wandering around keeping a poem praising Lanfear so the question marks get upgraded to suspicions*. This is the scene with them reading it at the well and Alanna says "Lan cannot know". 8. They leave her family and do the set up we saw in this episode to try flush him out. At this point Lan makes a judgement call that Alanna can be trusted and they can't actually win the last battle while keeping everyone else safely in the dark which is obviously entirely correct and loops in Alanna and the warders. *These are the details in the chain that I missed and it all makes sense imo once you take them into account. I think it's entirely fair to criticise the show for not adequately conveying all this, after all - I missed it as well, but I do think it makes sense as far as the logic behind the writing goes.

But the entire thing was a set up. They were suspecting Lan so they took him to that location, spill the details about where Siuan is, set it up so it looks like they're fooling around in the tent when the warders are actually out waiting already and wait for Lan to try run away - which he then does. At that point he decides to trust them, if he didn't think they were trustworthy he would have fought and died. My point here is that it wasn't a random decision to set up camp there, they went on purpose. And I wouldn't call it an intact temple so it had been destroyed.

Chivalry syndrome I love it. I would have been bothered by the size of Siuan's retinue being so small is she was actually getting attacked and it became plot relevant, but since it wasn't then yeah - just a shrug at budget limitations.

I just pulled him across with multiple distract enemies and used a take down on him lol. The militech one in the flooded courtyard certainly hurt though, had to take her in a head on fight and my hacks just aren't there yet for that. The new cyberware upgrade process feels promising but I don't know which deck is actually worth investing resources in. I don't think there were rarer versions of the starter deck before to even guess at what bonuses they might get, but I did it to T2 anyway so I could start on higher rarity hacks. Really hoping I can do a lot more with environmental hacks this time.

In the vision Rand didn't look betrayed so that's been one of the possibilities in my mind since as well. I think it really needs to be neither of them viewing it as such. The last episode is the one that's given me pause with the confirmation that it was *that* dagger though, I just wasn't expecting Mat to have it again. I guess the show hasn't had the dagger be especially deadly up to this point (I think we all just want to forget that component of the season 1 finale, the show certainly did lol) so Mat may not have reason to think it's any different from using any other dagger to do so.

They did have the "sparks trying to fill the darkness" one that surrounds them all when they're tougher but it didn't really look like much to me, they did show others as well but like the wolf visions they were much more real rather than abstract. The other thing about the vision is she didn't react negatively to Mat and then defended him to Ishy, so I think she doesn't have that "true understanding" thing for this one and is just interpreting what she literally saw. I've seen it suggested that the vision could still just represent Fain doing the stabby stab on the justification that Mat started the chain of events by taking the dagger.

I thought the usefulness of Min telling Mat about the vision is that if it doesn't happen at Falme it's going to be a justification for Mat to try and distance himself from Rand for as long as it hasn't happened which doesn't undermine Mat for the audience. It makes me wonder if the show is going to have Ishy somehow be able to give her a false vision as that would mean it just hangs around with the fear never going away for Mat. Either way I remain convinced it won't play out as Mat legit betraying and trying to hurt Rand.

Yup, always repay Vik before the heist - don't want to risk dying without paying him back!

I barely played due to a migraine but did at least start and decided to go netrunner/stealth for this one. I knew stealth revolvers aren't possible anymore so that aspect at least would be a lot harder to pull off.

It's not ok to make me like her like that if her fate is going to be unchanged. Also really liked the detail of how she was killing them, but also that she didn't do it like that until her warder was killed.

He had some cool challenge runs if you're ever in the mood, I think the most ridiculous was using console command to lower his max hp to only 1hp so he couldn't take any damage at all lol. A couple of his other challenges weren't really feasible and fudged the rules a little.

I don't think I would have noticed if I stayed on normal (which I was on for my first play through), but when I got sucked into trying to challenge myself it became more noticeable. To be fair the worst case of that was probably the blades build before they nerfed armadillo mods and with a sandy, so much heal on kill/heal on hit and mitigation that I was almost unkillable at the end lol. Just charge into anything.

And it absolutely was. I exclusively played on very hard after my first run, the early game could be extremely challenging but once you got past 35-40 the only real challenge was the secret ending (which just so happened to have enemy scaling)

Yeah this is absolutely how I'm interpreting it. I thought this episode was great and the cruelty of the Seanchan breaking process was executed well on both the obviously horrifying but also subtle levels.

Watching some gameplay on very hard from this guys stream and damn - it looks like "Very Hard" became a whole lot harder, at least at max level (due to the above mentioned scaling).

I recently got a Ryzen 9 7900x and good heavens that thing runs hot (by design). We just had a string of days around 34C and the air con was really struggling on the last one and when I checked it was sitting at 91C even after I'd quit everything, but barely goes above that under load. Not really Cyberpunk related but I was also surprised to find how much impact the monitor cables can have. I play Granblue Fantasy with multiple accounts and had to briefly go back to an old monitor that used a DVI to HDMI adaptor and something about needing to run that could cause YouTube to stutter badly while playing GBF. Back up to 27" with display port and it's fine again now. Not sure what the adaptor or DVI was doing to mess with it.

One Piece is a Japanese manga (and anime adaptation) that's had a successful first season live action adaptation on Netflix. The series description would be something like it's the story of a boy with a rubber body that sets out to become a pirate and find the legendary treasure the "One Piece" hidden somewhere in a mysterious and dangerous stretch of ocean on a mostly oceanic planet. My description of what the story ultimately becomes about has spoilers about the world building but not really much about the story

Yeah I hadn't actually clicked through prior to my previous comments. Those top ones are more reasonable than the rest of the list lol. I loved the hell out of Elden Ring but it's got that at #10 and I can't even call it a franchise when it's only had a single instalment. Most valued IPs within a very specific population seems more accurate than anything more wide ranging.

Yeah if you can't buy in to the tone I don't think it can work for you, although it's doing the best job of making that style of tone accessible that I think it could have done. I don't know that I'd say whimsical though, it's goofy but there's a *lot* of dark subject matter that I wouldn't associate with whimsy. I tend to go with goofy which possibly isn't any better for communicating that lol. It's funny and absurd and operates under different rules to the real world, but there's an emotional sincerity to it that manages to make these exaggerated moments land as genuinely tragic/moving and it's the heart of the story. If you aren't feeling that sincerity then I don't think the moments are going to land. That's obviously talking about the manga/anime as a whole, the live action hasn't had time to get to much of that yet.

One Piece is absolutely monstrous in Japan, but its footprint has definitely been smaller in the West. It's at #2 for total comic sales behind Superman and I think Oda is #2 behind JKR for something else although I'm forgetting the metric. That said between the live action being successful on Netflix, a huge climax being reached in the anime and the manga revelations making it clear the story is approaching it's end there's absolutely a lot of recency bias there as well so you're probably not wrong that it's a factor too. ETA: Ah I was misremembering - it's 3rd for book sales by a living author. 2nd is JKR and 1st is Danielle Steel (500 million copies and 800 million respectively as of a year ago). Danielle Steel is a long way ahead lol.

Yeah those few breadcrumbs of "hit us up if you're looking for work" really make me want more. You get that from the Tyger bosses at Clouds if you don't kill them as well, doing work for the big wigs in the gangs is pretty adjacent to corpo work anyway (and they're interconnected at that level anyway). I think we would have gotten that second DLC if the initial release hadn't gone so poorly, I understand the decision that they're better off investing that time into UE5 but that's not going to be anything with V at this point in their life and I really want that.

Yeah I assume it's the same as the other extra apartments you can get at that point. Yeah Kerry is an absolute disaster and his attraction to V is tangled up in unresolved feelings for Johnny. Femme V fucks with that dynamic so he isn't into her, but male V is a chance to fuck the one that got away lol. Much like giving them a defined sexuality it contributes to him feeling more real to me but do agree it would be nice if there was a bi male character that's into both. Could use a bi female character that's more interested than Stout while we're at it. Basically the "more options would be good and we can ask for that without diminishing what we got".

I actually did an express play on male V in part to see it and it didn't do it for me at all lol. In comparison the scene with Judy is by far the best intimate scene I've come across in a game. I interpret that as "they do a good job of targeting the intended audience with each option". Judy is a lesbian and that's woven through everything they did with her. Panam is hot but she's for the lads.