If Valve’s Employee Handbook is to be believed, they don’t use a formal project structure with static teams. Instead each developer works on whatever project interests them, and one of Valve’s current goals is to improve game performance on Linux/AMD by contributing to upstream open source projects.

Valve is as close as we’ve gotten to someone paying a bunch of industry veterans to contribute to open source. It’s amazing what happens when all innovation isn’t black-boxed in an internal repository and forgotten about.

Kreia couldn’t care less about the beggar. The point of her lecture was to get you to consider the unintended consequences of your actions, since she was screwed over multiple times by her own. That’s why she says something no matter what you choose.

Kreia is a teacher before anything else. She’s also a massive hypocrite, which makes her infuriating if you don’t recognize it’s intentional.

I believe the Restored Content mod restores some scenes where you can actually earn her approval (including during the end game), which helps a lot.

Have you played Obsidians other works? They love deconstructing tropes. It’s what they’re known for, aside from top-tier writing and being screwed over by their publishers.

• Pillars of Eternity has a cleric party member who’s a bitter old man that openly hates his own god.
• Alpha Protocol is a clusterfuck of factions allying with and betraying each other, and remains the single most reactive RPG ever made (nearly every choice has consequences, sometimes thirty hours later). It’s hard to recommend though because the gameplay is terrible and it’s probably their buggiest game (it was rushed out the door by Sega, who refused to pay for post-release patches).
• Tyranny puts you into the shoes of an executive officer in the Evil Overlord’s army after they’ve already won. I haven’t played it but I’ve only heard good things.
• And of course New Vegas brought the Fallout series back to its morally gray roots by having all sides be terrible, but giving compelling practical (if not moral) reasons to side with them anyway.

That perk you get from Brianna in KOTOR 2 that lets you add your wisdom modifier to AC when unarmored would have worked wonders in KOTOR. It’s weird that Jedi can’t get the definitive monk class trait in the first game.

Actually, a mod like Tale of Two Wastelands that combines the two games’ content would be amazing. They fixed so many balance problems in the second game (then snapped balance in half over their knee with the crafting system - as is tradition). Porting those improvements to the first would be sublime.

Hopefully it doesn’t get stuck as a glorified cache drive due to cost and forgotten like Intel’s Optane was.

If the amount of explosives you use doesn’t replace your current problem with a new, even larger one, you didn’t use enough explosives!

I checked my playlist and it’s very nearly the oldest entry still on there. It’s definitely due for a watch by this point!

Clearly the problem was that you didn’t bring enough grenades!

That final gauntlet of infinitely respawning enemies in the Star Forge must have ended so many non-Jedi/Sith challenge runs. If you don’t have crowd control abilities and high enough DPS to get rid of one group before the next makes it to you, they will wear you down.

On the other hand if you DO have force powers (which the developers clearly balanced the endgame for) and a decent team, it’s a cathartic march of triumph as you blast your way through dozens of what used to be somewhat challenging enemies while Malak panics in the background.

Kreia is the Wise Old Mentor by way of cranky, ornery contrarian and I love it. She’s exactly what you’d expect a librarian who left the Jedi Order because she thought she could do better to be like. And that’s not even getting into spoiler territory!

She’s great - love or hate her, she has more personality than almost any other character I can think of. Even her contradictory actions can be examined and explained based on who is there to see her and the lessons she wants them to learn.

Even if said lesson is “don’t touch or try to influence my apprentice, you imbecile!”.

That video has been in my aptly-named “Watch Eventually” playlist for ages. I should get around to actually watching it!

Younger Me was so upset when there was no way to have Atris admit her love obsession and join you in a Dark Side playthrough. She’s the prime example of that “I can fix her (but the way she’s broken is hotter)” meme.

The Handmaiden being replaced in your party by Blandy McBlanderson if your Exile is female is another, though at least that one was fixed by one of the most popular mods.

The first KOTOR feels like it belongs in the original canon. It’s basically a perfect Star Wars movie with a bunch of game padding around it. It’s the most “Star Wars” Star Wars outside of the Original Trilogy.

KOTOR 2 did what Rian Johnson tried to do in deconstructing and subverting the usual Star Wars tropes, and did so a million times more competently than The Last Jedi. With the Restored Content mod it’s one of my favorite pieces of media ever.

The crash I referenced was caused by having the scrollbar enabled IIRC, and it was fixed earlier this year. It made it impossible to launch the main activity without crashing if you’d enabled that setting, so users were sharing workarounds to launch directly to the settings screen without loading any communities so they could disable it.

Sync has had serious issues in the past such as an easily triggered, reproducible, guaranteed crash on open, with the dev not putting out a fix for months. This neglect goes back several years, to back when Sync was a Reddit client. Most infamously he disappeared for over a year when his UI refresh wasn’t well received.

The app is great (I’m only on Boost due to user tags requiring a paid subscription in Sync), but his response time to issues is glacial. And it doesn’t help that it’s by far the most expensive client if you want it ad-free, and features that used to be free now require an even more expensive subscription to use on top of that.

I found that the initial euphoria helped me get out and do things I normally wouldn’t (like catch up with friends and family I’d lost track of over the years), and the satisfaction from that helped keep me naturally happy after the false euphoria faded. Your mileage may vary, but actually getting things done for once helped a ton with my related disorders like anxiety and depression and things weren’t nearly as bad even when I started feeling normal again. And remember, the medication’s ability to let your brain feel motivation doesn’t fade, only the euphoric feeling.

The danger I see is that I think I need to up the dose to match the euphoria from the start, while I actually need to get to the point where it’s 0 % euphoria, 100 % noradrenalin.

That’s one of the main things my doctor warned me about when I started taking Vyvanse. He said that even though it might feel like your medication isn’t working as well, to not to chase that rush because it won’t actually help your symptoms and you’ll quickly become tolerant of the higher dose as well. All you’ll accomplish is paying more for a higher risk of side effects.

Not to mention if you appear to be a drug seeker they might decide to switch to a different, non-controlled medication that doesn’t work nearly as well as what you’re currently on.

Also a constant feeling like a hundred bucks, better than many recreational drugs.

Be aware that the euphoria is a temporary side effect and will only last for a week or two. The “actually being able to do things” part will remain, but feeling like a hundred bucks is due to the drug literally being an amphetamine and will fade as your body becomes tolerant of the dosage level you’re taking.

It’s a social media thing. Supposedly posts get deprioritized by the algorithm if they contain “family unfriendly” words like kill or drug references. No idea if it’s actually true or just a myth, but it’s why users edit out innocuous words in these screenshots.

At least orcas don’t do to whales what they do to sharks - eat their liver and leave them to die in agony.