Sworn Enemy is so good, though, as is the one that lights your paladin on fire to deal damage to enemies and heal allies in a radius.

Yeah, I've done that before with New Vegas. It's actually a pretty fun way to play since the stats aren't super important to baseline success but open up a lot of different builds.

But does Charisma come up very often as an option? I feel like you'd still be better off with high Speech or Barter.

Yeah, it's definitely more micro-intensive than other examples of the genre. My last playthrough was with a tanky paladin and I still had abilities I needed to be sure to use almost every fight.

Charisma is the obvious dump stat, unless you reaaallllyyyy want your companions to be unstoppable brick walls.

You probably would've enjoyed the Blood and Wine DLC for the Witcher 3 more, as it is significantly lighter in tone.

But the question is whether you find and complete those quests or if you can afford to get the implants without a full understanding of the game's systems. On my first playthrough I certainly never maxed out anything mid-game. And then when you consider the sheer length of the game, especially with the DLC, there's…

Oh, definitely don't spend Perks on upping stats unless you really want the boost or are aiming for a specific Perk. You'll get much more mileage out of piling onto your starting advantages than trying to balance yourself across all of them.

Speaking of BotW, here's a little new information about the Champion's Ballad, if you're curious:

Fallout's stats are actually really straightforward, they just don't explain it very well. Each stat can go from 1-10 and generally provides a very clear-cut benefit. Each point of Luck, for instance, increases your chance of a critical hit by 1%, so at 10 Luck each attack will have a base 10% chance to crit. Past…

Or, to compare Hiravias to Kana and Sagani, since that's what you're wondering about:

Druids are pretty weird in Pillars, and Hiravias is thus kind of hard to fit into a party. At it's core, the class has a bunch of AoE spells that are pretty good, generally not as powerful as a damage-specced wizard but more generally applicable than a cipher, easier to trigger than a chanter, and often possessed of…

It mostly casts into harsh relief that none of the living characters have much effort put into them. I wonder how long it took someone to model the Rito chieftain, who has a unique model, no spoken lines, and is only on-screen for about 15 seconds total.

There's some good stuff there. Bolson's innuendo alone is amazing. Nintendo just doesn't really push that angle enough.

I know why they did it, but I can't help but wish that the Necromancer had come out closer to the start of the next season. I don't have much interest in Diablo 3 outside of seasons anymore.

I think the Witcher 3 demonstrates that you can have open world exploration and strong story chops. If nothing else, that game had a bunch of side quests that let you hang out with Geralt's friends. With BotW, once you are done with the Divine Beasts Link's allies don't do shit.

Yeah, I'm more interested in story DLC than challenges and unlockables. But there are a bunch of upcoming Switch games I'm interested in, including a fair number of indie titles that I really just want in handheld mode so I can watch Netflix or something while I work on them.

I really liked The Sexy Brutale, but it has a narrative flaw that I see far too often in video games and it really hurts it at the very end. The developers were trying to seem like their cutesy, clever, morbid little game has real emotional weight, but it ultimately just makes the whole premise not make any sense at…

Blood and Wine is rather silly, but I wound up with a remarkably grim ending. It's one of the best bits of DLC I've ever encountered; it's essentially an entirely new Witcher game.

I still think that it just needs more cast involvement. Not necessarily in terms of required quests—I think its "beat the game whenever you feel ready" design is pretty dang great—but more quests where you can actually hang out with the characters you meet. The Witcher 3 was really good about this; completing main…