Me personally, would have just not been losing the war. QED.

A collection of spines does send a message.

The Lance of Longinus has its uses.

Had a friend pick up the tab for lunch. We’ve been back and forth the past month with schedules always not quite lining up, so he was excited to finally chat so much that he insisted on taking the bill.

Yeah, he has a 40k Ork army and wanted to use these as grot tanks. Since then he’s gotten a resin printer, so a lot of his old prints like this one got tossed into a bin.

Who wants they prussic drank?

The first Mass Effect game was mechanically clunky. Some of that was really on display with the early combat, which might have been a big barrier.

Mass Effect 2 tossed a lot of the mechanics of the old game, turning combat into a cover shooter with squad commands for special abilities. At the time there was some complaint from the hardcore RPG community that combat was dumbed down, but overall the reaction was that it was smoother and less annoying even if it lost some nuance.

The story of ME1 was a bit of a deeper and more esoteric mystery. At times it could seem meandering, even if the high level ideas were solid. ME2 was “I’m building a team” as you assemble party members towards a clear and signposted final goal.

Deep Rock Galactic has nailed the formula with seasons as ways of adding things with using them as FOMO. Missed skins and loot from previous seasons used to just get recycled into the RNG loot. Now they added a system to toggle and play missions as if you were a in a previous season and earn the old loot.

Wasteland 2 and 3 will activate the same brain ridges as the original Fallouts. I actually would recommend starting with 3 if you don’t think you can commit to playing both games, as it has the most polished presentation, and you get all the relevant backstory quickly enough not to need to play the other games. WL3’s structure is all about supporting different, mutually incompatible factions, which can feel like Fallout New Vegas.

I’m currently playing Colony Ship, which is an independent game that makes no secret of being inspired by Fallout. It is very mechanically dense. Clearly it is intended to be played by a variety of character builds. I haven’t finished it, but it seems promising so far.

Underrail is another game that takes a lot of inspiration from the old Fallout titles, with a lot of social stratification and mystery about the world in the game and mechanically a lot of different build types.