CoronaBlue

Do as much as possible in town before heading out. Also, depending on what difficulty you are playing on, you might not want to fight enemies that are a level above you. I'm currently playing it on the hardest difficulty, and mobs one level above that of my party are extremely difficult. I can easily handle one or two, but many more usually emerge from the fog as I'm fighting. Crowd control is essential in this game. Make sure to equip your archers with plenty of special arrows. In my opinion, archers are the most versatile class in the game because of those arrows. Enemy archers with special arrows are downright disgusting, so you need to make sure your archers are equipped to be just as brutal. In this way, your mage and archer can compliment each other very well. Please note that I am definitely not an expert; these are just things I've observed while playing the game blind on the hardest difficulty. Out of curiosity, is the game stuck on one CPU core when you play? Does your FPS begin to roll off after a few minutes of playing, until you save/load?

Tomb Raider 2013

"Your thumbs can't withstand spacebars of this magnitude!" ~ Steelseries

I recommend playing the first one. While it might be true that you don't strictly need it in order to understand what is going on in the second game, it does provide a great deal of context for the overarching metaplot that is going to conclude in the third game. The story and characters are, in my opinion, very good. The game really forces you to make some tough calls, without telling you which is the "good" action. The Witcher 2 also does this, but I don't remember ever having to stop and consider my decisions as much as I do in The Witcher. A lot of people don't find the combat to their liking, which is understandable. I'm one of the few who enjoy the combat because it rewards you for being prepared. If you drink potions, prepare bombs, and coat your swords in oil then you will most likely win whatever fight you're going into. If you don't do these things, you will most likely die. That said, I have two major gripes about The Witcher that I think everyone should be aware of if they are considering buying it: 1. The quests don't always have a logical flow I'm a big fan of context in my RPGs, and one of the things about The Witcher that drives me batty is the fact that you can run across a lot of out of context dialogue. By this I mean that sometimes Geralt will know things he shouldn't otherwise know. So far I've only encountered one example of this that was actually unavoidable. Every other time in the game it was because I was exploring too much, or I clicked on every dialogue option. See, most other RPGs train you to explore every nook and cranny, and click on every dialogue option. In The Witcher, it is actually not a good idea to do either of these things. It is possible to skip entire sections of quests simply because you found something before you were supposed to. This is undoubtedly bad design. I'm sorry CD Projekt, I love you to bits, but I have to call you out on this kind of stuff. The Witcher was CD Projekt's first game, and it is definitely not perfect. Receiving information out of context is enough to make me put the game down for a few hours, but I'm pretty picky about this stuff, so your mileage may vary. Just don't let this one little gripe be the thing that prevents you from experiencing the game. I would definitely say that The Witcher is greater than the sum of its parts. 2. It doesn't utilize the full power of high end systems I have a GTX 770 and an i5-4670k, so you'd think that I would be able to handle this game no problem, right? Wrong. There are sections of the game (particularly in later chapters) where my frame rate drops from something like 100 to below 60. All of my research about this game tells me that it is limited to a single processor core, and there is really no way to fix this. The areas that I have mentioned are heavily populated with NPCs, and everyone experiences problems in them (from what I can tell). If you have a fairly strong system, then these areas will just feel like a speed-bump for you. However, lower end systems may have a really hard time. The above doesn't even mention all of the strange little problems that come from it being built in the Aurora engine. I may be wrong on this point, but I've yet to see proof that any of the games graphical bugs are the fault of the users system and not the game itself. Just keep this in mind if you get it. Once again though, I have to recommend this game. The fact that a large number of people can love it, despite its shortcomings, should demonstrate that it is at least worth a look.

The Witcher series.

Disabling auto-update wins again!

Thank you, ATT, for proving once again that you are unqualified to tell me what I need. Maybe I'm taking that statement out of context though.

Last I checked, the patch locks the PC graphics settings to low. Might have been fixed since yesterday.

Nope. I'm slowly killing myself with every meal. Going to the gym makes me feel very awkward. I've exercised at home before, but I've yet to find a way to make it less boring. Eventually I get tired of being bored, and just stop. Boredom is not something I deal with very well.

Do they not see how cutting off two thirds of your potential customer base is a bad business move? I'm sure it's not as even as that, but you understand my point.

The building process (the part that comes once all of your components are sitting on the table) can only be learned through experience, in my opinion. The first time I built a PC I also watched a bunch of videos. They were good as a step-by-step guide, but the only way to really know what to expect is to get your hands dirty.

Assuming there is a sale, my girlfriend had mentioned getting me the Arkham games for PC (dat PhysX) in preparation for Arkham Knight (please, please, please don't be a terrible port). Other than that, I'm pretty much all set for games. I'm not really craving anything except things that aren't out yet.

As someone who owns this game, I do not think that it deserves to be game of the year. Here is why. Not that I pay attention to this sort of thing. "Game of the Year" meant something when I was younger, but these days it seems like a bit of a farce...along with pretty much everything else to do with the industry.

For similar mechanics, you're pretty much limited to current Elder Scrolls titles (Skyrim), or Fallout. Also, I do not recommend Dragon Age: Inquisition. There are a large number of issues with the PC version, and Bioware is being tight lipped about when they might be patched.

When you say "like Skyrim," do you mean having similar mechanics to Skyrim, or being of similar production quality?