Lilura's Blog: An Ongoing Codexian Obsession

[Lilura]

All the mods I used were years-old at the time. I'd rather not get hung up on minutiae like "reviews" and "retrospectives." I wrote a series of assessments about old games.

Well, don't call your write-up "a retrospective" like you did a few pages back, when you said mine outranked yours. Only mine is a retrospective.

That's why Google gave me more authority despite my retrospective garnering only 20 comments, and yours 200+.

Spoiler

 

[Howdy]

Passive Aggressive: The Thread

 

[Gregz]

I'm the most hated RPG commentator on the 'Dex, reddit, GoG, Watch and Beamdog forums. I'm even hated on neverwintervault.org. I've been banned from everywhere but here.

"If you're not pissing someone off, you probably aren't doing anything important. Meaningful achievements are, perversely, more likely to annoy the world around you."

-Oliver Emberton

 

[Roguey]

The bolded part is incorrect: the authoritative version of ToEE (patch 2) allows for the no-charge ID'ing of potions and scrolls through the orison, Read Magic. You can also easily craft a wand for ID'ing purposes.

News to me. Co8 1.0 patch notes, released October 2, 2003, literally weeks after release

- Read Magic will identify potions and scrolls.

ToEE 2.0 patch notes, released May 2004

Temple of Elemental Evil Patch 2.0 Fix Notes

Fleeing enemies could sometimes cause a crash, this has been fixed.

Infinite loop bug involving complex pending events fixed.

One-handed weapons wielded two-handed calculate strength bonus properly (1.5x unless light).

Enhancement bonuses of projectiles no longer apply to melee attacks.

Criticals often did not confirm if you rolled equal to target's AC, this has been fixed.

Bracers no longer stack in their slot.

Jaer's Spheres of Fire can no longer be used as melee weapons.

Dust of Disappearance value corrected.

Masterwork Guisarme type and size corrected, it is no longer a 1-handed axe.

Wonnilon's Repeating Crossbow and Masterwork Light Crossbow sizes corrected, both are now useable by small races.

Amulet of Mighty Fists adds to attack and damage now.

Being unable to remove shields in combat has been fixed.

Cat's Grace is no longer a Strength Domain level 2 spell.

Syntax errors in Hedrack's dialog have been fixed.

Valden now awards masterwork shields for rescuing his wife.

More information regarding the woodcutters dialog is revealed.

The courier from Lord Wizard Sargen will now talk with party members.

Romag's 3rd quest no longer allows acknowledgement of killing Belsornig if you had not in fact killed him.

Random number generator significantly improved.

Bardic music is now a standard action.

Bardic music now provokes attacks of opportunity.

Tooltip text, missing during character creation for Abilities and Deity, now displays.

Bardic Knowledge help page has correct title.

Help entry for Grummsh now properly linked to Strength Domain.

Help entry for Chain Lightning grammar corrected.

I checked the 1.0 patch notes from November 2003 for good measure, and the change wasn't documented there either. Either you're mistaken or they made this fix and told no one, and what good is that?

Well, don't call your write-up "a retrospective" like you did a few pages back, when you said mine outranked yours. Only mine is a retrospective.

The Codex itself labeled them retrospectives.

 

[Lilura]

I'm the most hated RPG commentator on the 'Dex, reddit, GoG, Watch and Beamdog forums. I'm even hated on neverwintervault.org. I've been banned from everywhere but here.

"If you're not pissing someone off, you probably aren't doing anything important. Meaningful achievements are, perversely, more likely to annoy the world around you."

-Oliver Emberton

 

[Tacgnol]

I checked the 1.0 patch notes from November 2003 for good measure, and the change wasn't documented there either. Either you're mistaken or they made this fix and told no one, and what good is that?

If Roguey has actually out-autism'd Lilura, I'm impressed.

 

[Roguey]

Additionally when it comes to wands (which I never bothered with)

Craft Wand [Item Creation]
You can create wands that cast spells.
Benefit: You can create a wand of any 4th-level or lower spell that you know.
Crafting a wand takes one day for each 1,000 gp in its base price. The base price
of a wand is its caster level ✕ the spell level ✕ 750 gp. To craft a wand, you must
spend 1/25 of this base price in XP and use up raw materials costing one-half of
this base price. A newly created wand has 50 charges.
Any wand that stores a spell with a costly material component or an XP cost also
carries a commensurate cost. In addition to the cost derived from the base price, you
must expend fifty copies of the material component or pay fifty times the XP cost.

(I think Troika nerfed this to 20 or 30 or some such but still)

This does not save you money.

 

[Falksi]

WHO WANTS DICK PICS?!?

 

[octavius]

A retrospective is "a looking back" at something. You are not looking back at something if you are basing your write-ups on current mods and EEs. Thus, it's not a retrospective.

Thus, the recent PC Gamer "retrospective" on Baldur's Gate is not a retrospective: it's an advertisement for the EEs.

All the mods I used were years-old at the time. I'd rather not get hung up on minutiae like "reviews" and "retrospectives." I wrote a series of assessments about old games.

For the tl;dr crowd, this is what Lilura's mad about:

I used a mod to make inventory management less cumbersome by removing the arbitrary stack limits and bag of holding restrictions. Some purists may be outraged, but I've already played with these annoyances; getting rid of them only improved the experience.

the inventory has another row for items (though I still recommend using a mod to remove stack and container limits)

Part of ToEE's claim to fame is its faithful adaptation of 3.5 edition D&D rules. It makes a few concessions for the sake of gameplay, but not enough. An example of a problem they created for themselves: all potions you find start out as unidentified. There is no knowledge skill that lets you identify them, and you can't taste a drop and recognize a familiar potion like you can in P&P. The only way you can find out what they are is to cast an identify spell or go to a shop keeper to identify them one by one, and both options cost 100 gp each time (individual potions cost significantly less of course). The Circle of Eight mod alleviates the cost by allowing characters to use the read magic spell instead, but it doesn't remove the sheer tedium of having to cast it so many times.

I know Troika did what it could with their budget, but there's a combat track that only plays if you rest and get an encounter while outside or on the top floor of the temple, and a moathouse combat track that doesn't play at all; an utter waste. I understand the later Circle of Eight mods do address this to some extent.

For this playthrough I used the 3.0.4 co8 patch because the later patches add too many subjective non-Troika aspects.*

When I got to the fights that made a certain notorious Codex poster cry like a baby and beat them on my first attempt, I realized that one of the later co8 patches gave those enemies the ability to wake each other up. In my playthrough, sleep was the equivalent of an instant death spell.

Have you become Lilura's agent, writing press releases?

 

[Jacob]

Most of those are not worth playing, especially the first 100 and the ones past 550.

The first 100 games on this list include:

Wizardry 1-3
Ultima 1-4
Might and Magic 1
Nethack
Bards Tale 1 + 2

I've played them all and I can tell you: THEY ARE WORTH IT!

I can only agree on wiz 1-3 and m&m

i mentioned in other threads that i can't into ultima, with the exception that i'm willing to try vii sometime and the ultima worlds have pretty cool settings.

 

[Jacob]

and credit should be given where it's due, wizardry is highly replayable for such a primitive looking game with a seemingly primitive mechanics

 

[Sykar]

Richard Garriot, Jeff Voguel, Sami Maraanen, Dejan Radisic, Chris Hunt or codex favourite Cleve Blakemore

None of these can prove that they played BG and she can.

"she"

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Guys, don't fuck around with Lilura. Her blog gets ONE BILLION UNIQUE HITS EVERY YEAR. She is not to be played with.

 

[Sykar]

Guys, don't fuck around with Lilura. Her blog gets ONE BILLION UNIQUE HITS EVERY YEAR. She is not to be played with.

Lilura while wanking to its 1 million views:

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Bro don't make fun of her, she is the AUTHORITATIVE VOICE ON ALL THINGS BALDUR'S GATE AND THE LIKE. Not to be trifled with by peasants, nothings, zeroes.

 

[ItsChon]

Lilura is weird in that some of her insight and opinions are actually very intelligent, nuanced, and absolutely worth hearing. I also think she makes the Codex a better, more interesting place by being her. All that being said, she also has her fair share of retarded opinions, moments of autism, and a general lack of social skills. She's like an intelligent boomer.

 

[ScrotumBroth]

I support purist approach when rating games, however for playing enjoyment mods are the way to go. But even then, only quality of life/restoration mods, never fanfic.
This excludes Beamdog, they've managed to desecrate everything and as such do not deserve anything but contempt.

Also, vanilla NWN2>expansion. That faggy religion spiel talked me ear off. It's also a bit pretentious and out of touch. I'll take a big monster and chad with a flaming sword any day.
Incidentally, faggy religion spiel in DA:O literally lives and breathes boring. Those whinging and whining voices really got under my skin.

At least in the Witcher things are less faggy and more dynamic and manly, with stories worth staying a while and listening. Same goes for Fallout 1 and 2.
PST walks a fine line between higher thought output without (too much) boring fagginess, it should be passed around to all writers and devs for education.

Shit, am I blogging? Is this blogging?

 

[Lilura]

Roguey It's your word against mine.

Shit, am I blogging? Is this blogging?

It's a good start because you don't like faggity RPGs. But you'll need to up your game if you want to soar to the stratospheric heights of Lilura1.blogspot.com.

Since my blog is so successful, I really should write a guide on how to start a blog, how to get the views, and how to generate inordinate amounts of butthurt. Stay tuned.

 

[Roguey]

Roguey It's your word against mine.

All you or someone else has to do is take a clean ToEE 2.0 install, find the nearest unidentified potion, then cast read magic on it to see if it gets identified. I'd prefer not to have to do this myself, though I dread that may end up being the case.

 

[Lilura]

All you or someone else has to do is take a clean ToEE 2.0 install, find the nearest unidentified potion, then cast read magic on it to see if it gets identified. I'd prefer not to have to do this myself, though I dread that may end up being the case.

The game isn't installed because I'm in Jagged Alliance 2 mode and don't want to get distracted. I'm 99% sure, though, because I wrote it in my retrospective while playing patch 2. I never wilfully deceive people in my retrospectives.

 

[ScrotumBroth]

You two should meet up and have totally-not-gay sex.

And adopt Bester for the lulz.

 

[Roguey]

The game isn't installed because I'm in Jagged Alliance 2 mode and don't want to get distracted. I'm 99% sure, though, because I wrote it in my retrospective while playing patch 2. I never wilfully deceive people in my retrospectives.

You were right, read magic works. However, it's still a completely undocumented change, obviously inspired by co8, and one wonders why not just make all potions start off as automatically identified instead of using a modder bandaid solution? Or even the Temple+ solution of having a single casting identify all the scrolls and potions in your inventory. The utter incompetence of Troika.

 

[Lilura]

The utter incompetence of Troika.

You dare insult Troika?

 

[Roguey]

You dare insult Troika?

They caused many of their own problems.

 

[Saravan]

I have no idea who any of you are but I find this thread very funny and I often come back to this forum just to read this thread.