Decay

I would strongly recommend that people hold off on buying anything until either 1) They are part of a daily or flash deal, 2) already have a ridiculous discount (75% or more) or 3) It is the final day of the sale. It is entirely possible and actually common that a game is discounted but not a daily deal, but will become a daily deal with an even deeper discount just a few days later. Don't buy Nekopara at 25% off, for example, because who knows if it will go for 50% off in a few days. This is how these sale events are always run.

Yeah, the HD remake was a bummer. By default, it's more expensive than the GOG version while having less content. Thanks, Ubisoft. There are other good similar games, too. You may want to check out the modern King's Bounty games, which are basically RPGs heavily influenced by the HOMM series. Think kind of like single-hero HOMM games with no city management and VERY long story campaigns. There's also Disciples II, which actually has a more JRPG-ish turn-based battle system. And Age of Wonders 3, which leans closer to Civilization.

Heroes 3 is still the best HOMM game. It built on what made the first two good and made it all even better. 4 is the pariah of the series. 5 was like a 3D remake of 3 with some added jankiness and super long load times and turn processing times. 6 was okay, I thought. Not as good as 3, though. Whatever you do, do NOT get the Steam version of Heroes 3, though. The GOG version is superior.

I think you have the general idea? There's not much "gameplay", you click to advance the story and occasionally make choices. Unfortunately, it seems that Fuwanovel lacks a decent newbie primer, so here is a decent primer made by some 4chan anons: http://visual-novels-general.wikia.com/wiki/Basic_FAQ As for where to get them, you can buy officially translated (or sometimes natively english) VNs from MangaGamer, JAST, and Steam. There are also a lot of fan translated VNs that come in the form of patches to the full Japanese versions, but it is unfortunately pretty impractical for westerners to obtain them legally, and Fuwanovel does not allow illegal links to them, you'll have to find them on your own. A good resource for VN fans is VNDB, which has information on every VN ever made (or, it tries to). Listing the VNs by popularity is a good way to see what's popular at a glance, and when I got into VNs I spent a lot of time browsing that and checking out whatever piqued my interest. edit: And since this post has been spun-off and moved, welcome to the forums!

The man was producing and singing heavy metal at the age of 90, a true badass. He kept on working gracefully until his death, it felt like he was immortal. His performance as Saruman will be what he is generally remembered by, and he was excellent in that role, but his older roles in the `50s-'70s were fantastic as well. RIP Let's rock the fuck out in memory of Christopher Lee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anoHDO0FSR0

Because many people are raised around dogs, they have a natural affinity for them. People become really attached to dogs in general, and that makes them want to own them as virtual pets, too. I know I like it when they give that option. Also the fact that Fallout is meant to be at least somewhat realistic on some level, it's not pure fantasy. What would you have your loyal pet be? Dog makes the most sense in a post apocalyptic wasteland, they actually are loyal to their masters and have many useful skills for that situation.

I don't get too worried about "cash cows" as long as what they're producing is still high quality and fun. Which it is, for the most part. This goes for any franchise.

I ended up heading to Skellige before finishing the Novigrad stuff because I wanted to do that other witcher's quest line, but pretty quickly forgot my purpose and got engrossed in the going-ons there.

It's up to what you feel up for in the moment, but I genuinely believe it's the greatest open world RPG ever made. The storylines, the writing, the questing and world exploration, it's all top-notch. Combat isn't anything special but by open world RPG standards it's probably second only to Kingdoms of Amalur (which was mediocre in every other way, unfortunately). So if that's your kind of game, I would heartily recommend it. The one thing I will say is that you don't get to see it at its best until after you leave the prologue area. That area is still good, but it isn't until you start doing the Bloody Baron questline and the side quests in that area when things start to get fantastic.

I'm 100 hours into the Witcher 3 and I'm guessing I'm only around halfway done with the main story. And probably have done less than half of the side quests and discovered way less than half of the random map items. This game is ridiculous. Also, while I think the outdoor vistas can be pretty incredible, the best part of the game is probably the close-up character art, where it is completely unrivaled. I also really love the clothing and armor designs in general. And like I said earlier in the thread, the facial animations are ridiculously good. Talking to NPCs has become one of my favorite things to do in the game due to all of this. And I'm glad my computer can run it at those settings with a perfectly smooth framerate. Everyone is spending $300-400+ on their new Geforce 970s and 980s, while my $150 680 gets that? Yeah, okay. Props to CD Projekt for optimizing the hell out of this game. edit: And dat lighting. I'm a sucker for good lighting in games, generally thinking it's the most important element to a good overall graphical look, and it's top-tier in TW3.

What percentage was already completed, out of curiosity?

^^^^^ Aside from the blonde hair, they look very different. Although tsunderes being blonde is the stereotype... (hence Mitcher bleaching her hair)

You know... judging from some of the things FrontWing has done in the past, is there any way the protagonist won't be another soapbox for Japanese jingoism and this time, nationalism?

A stat tracker is not something they'd put in that spot on the UI. Those main spots are pretty much reserved for game modes only.

I'm not saying it's not something people are worrying about, I'm saying it's not worth worrying about. Being afraid to expand while worrying about the "SJW" specter is pure idiocy. Even if people start raising a big fuss over your VN (they probably won't), that's a good thing. See: Hatred, and how much it profited off the backlash.

Oh please. The higurashi thing was one person who admitted to pretending to be many. It was not something worth worrying about.

It pretty much all comes down to the price. If Grisaia was $10 it would probably be outselling Gaokao. Gaokao offers an actual non-ecchi-filled dating sim/VN hybrid of substantial length at a super cheap price, so in a way it was bound to do well. But the translation is utter garbage, possibly machine translated. Looking at Gaokao's steamspy numbers and considering where Grisaia was when SP requested for their games to not be tracked, I'm pretty sure Grisaia is at least pulling in more money. And they'll probably make a ton more once it goes on its first serious (50%+) discount. The real moral of the Gaokao thing is that your average customer doesn't actually give a shit about translation quality. As long as the text is legible and the girls are cute, they'll buy anything. You know, I actually sort of have a soft spot in my heart for Gaokao, it at least provides more and better content than the Sakura games, even if the English writing is beyond horrible. And the devs seem to want to retranslate it with the money they're earning, so there's that. At first I was kind of incredulous that it was doing so well, but I don't mind it so much anymore.