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I agree. I actually enjoy being over leveled for the main quest. It's the reward for diligence

I think Expeditions: Viking managed to achieve it - the time limit was generous but present and made sense for the story. I suppose, the same could be said about the tutorial in Tyranny, but the scale there was smaller. For Larian's D&D game, if I am not mistaken, the party discovered that the illithid transformation is delayed quite early and from there it was trying to find a cure at a more leisurely pace. Then again, even if it continued to be urgent, every other NPC was promising solutions at the start, so going along with them could be in-character. Well, also looking for a high-level cleric, a pickaxe, and the True Resurrection spell, which would be travelling straight to the nearest large city.

I have finished Atlas Fallen on the highest difficulty in NG+. The interesting part is that the tools available (the weapon upgrades, new armour sets, and the more powerful Essence Stones) effectively offset it - while the bosses could 1-shoot me, I also was almost instantly and constantly at high Momentum (which additionally meant higher damage to me) and able to use the Shatter attacks with a lot of i-frames repeatedly. The longer battles were somewhat challenging, especially as the screen was getting more "noise" (from the weapon particles to the number of opponents), but, overall, it was easier than the first playthrough. The only issue is one of the randomly appearing battles with various modifiers. The foes to be faced vary, but the reward progression is static and carries over between the NG cycles. The thing there is that it is not hard to get hit once and the battle despawns after that. I assume, if I reloaded, the same battle would have been accessible at the same spot, but I have not tried. The regular random battles have an auto-save nearby and the main story ones can be restarted from the start of the encounter which is incredibly convenient. I am satisfied with the experience and might try replaying it in a few years. On a random note, the NG+ armour sets look much better than the NG ones. They are more detailed and more fitting.

It's a give and take. Both have attempted to be solved by timed quest and autoleveled enemies. Neither of which is good and makes for games I personally dislike. I will rather take a narrative hit and the chance that I may be overleveled for the main quest that the alternative.

It will burst unless some use case I'm not seeing appears or some major breakthrough happens.

Chavez did implement forced nationalisation of several US oil companies that had been invested in Venezuela for decades. And that is theft But I doubt that is the real reason Trump is threatening Maduro suddenly Here is a link about what Chavez did and how it contributed towards the collapse of the Venezuelan economy https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/05/07/how-venezuela-ruined-its-oil-industry/

ok, finished Silksong. 100% completion, all achievemnents unlocked, but 4 ones speedrun and ironman related. I liked it very much. I have nitpicks, though a lot of it is related to optional content so I don't know how to feel about it. Some 100% requirements I thought were unreasonably tedious or obscure, but then again, it is completely optional to do so . I am sure someone figuring some things out, for me it was googling things out once I run out of ideas and went "how the heck was I supposed to find that?!". Not as good of a metroidvania as Hollow Knight, but much better action-platformer. Loved movement, really liked combat. Most bosses are excellent, few are tedious. Ah, I wasn't too fond of act3. The bosses that become available there are great, but overall I am not sure of the new content available there required an entire new act3. Then again, I thought Castlevania's reverse castle was a bit lame as well.

Watched Fallout s2ep1 and as I expected, so far it was pretty much just a whole lot of fan service. Will keep watching for now, since it wasn't super terrible yet, but I dunno.

https://overclock3d.net/news/gpu-displays/nvidia-plans-heavy-cuts-to-gpu-supply-in-early-2026/ Gamers Nexus has been yelling to the rooftops for a bit now that we may well be in the last few years of consumer ownership of computers if this AI bubble doesn't burst.

Well, maybe. If your story is "I have a ticking bomb and need to solve it ASAP", then I would say you either create a linear adventure that will support this story, or create more open adventure that still forces player to hurry and move forward. I just don't think urgency and here is massive world full of optional content mesh together. Neither is a bad choice, and I just don't those two choices go well together. And of course, various games suffer from it in various ways. That a problem is common, doesn't make it non-existent, and if you make narratively centric game, it sticks out if the experience of playing the game doesn't support said narrative - at least it does to me. If game builds up someone to be a powerful being they should be a difficult fight. If the game builds up something as urgent, at least it should provide narrative excuse as to why we might want to get distracted. I am not saying that such flawes make a game automatically terrible, but it might negatively impact the experience for some looking to get immersed in the story.

I agree with everything here. For me, hobbits have nothing to do in a show about the second age, and the whole mystery box plotline with the Wizard was just as needless. Another big weaknesses of the show is that they feel the need to ape after PJ's Lord of the Rings. From trying to invoke the same "feels", to borrowing Howard Shore for the intro theme, to literally buying the design of the Balrog and alike. I actually quite like some of the original designs they have, like Numenor, and their version of the Grey Havens.

The less you know about Rivellon, the better.

The ending sucked, if that helps.

And also on the smaller scale

But that would essentially put the game on rails. You have this amount of time and you need to do it by then. Anything that obviously forces a player to play the game a certain way is bad, at least from my point of view. You should, of course, guide the player to what you think the gameplay is, but it should not be forceful or easily spotted and worst of all you shouldn't correct it after the fact, especially if the players enjoy it and it doesn't damage the intended gameplay route. I think there needs to be some suspension of disbelief, overall that dissonance between the story and gameplay in such a complex and nonlinear game is to be expected. If you start picking it apart you will find a lot of examples of said dissonance. At the end of the day, when creating a game you should pray at the altar of Fun, not Balance, Harmony or Realism. Those should always be means to and end, which is FUN gameplay. Were that to be done in such a large game with so much side content, I would think that it was the developers way of forcing the player to reply their game if he wants to experience all the content and that would just be a very negative feeling.

ha! Yes, I forgot how annoying the itemization was in D:OS2. I didn't watch the video, so am just replaying to your post. Even back in a day when Baldur's Gate2 was in my mind the gold standard for everything that is right and good, the dissonance between main quest urgency and what I thought was the intended and enjoyable way of playing the game stand out as a flaw. By principle, I believe that game's narrative should be tied to a gameplay exerience - if the narrative requires swift forward, gameplay should at the very least encourage it as well. If you go for laidback do what you want experience - come up with the scenario that supports it. I get that devs want movie like hook propelling things forward, but at least to me, it hurts it more in the long run. It forces me as a player to ask myself a question: "is the threat presented by the game narratively real or a facade", and I just don't think it's in games best interest to have me think that. That said, I didn't think Cyberpunk2077 was a particularly bad example of that, but it did roll my eyes every time V got "worse" after progressing main story a bit. It was just a bit too obvious that his condition doesn't exist unless one does very specific quests. I didn't find C77 story very effective, but that wasn't a part that suck out to me. To me Baldur's Gate3 was a far, far, far worse offender. In C77 there might be a bit of dissonance between the game's story and players affinity for side content but in BG3 the characters didn't seem to decide if they have a ticking bomb in their heads or not.

On the other hand, the existing Forgotten Realms worldbuilding can get in the way of immersion as well. I did not find the existence of the Act 2 area being left cursed for the past 100 years to believable for example, in a similar way perhaps to how Bethesda Fallout games would have you believe people still live in bombed out ruins full of debris 200 years after the war. And that's to say nothing of how the story interacts with access to restorative and resurrection magic in the setting. But yeah, mechanically the D:OS games were weird with the extremely steep level scaling essentially funneling the player into a fixed path through the zones. BG3 didn't have that issue at all, but in some ways had the opposite problem inherent to modern D&D which unbelievably still has things like empty level-ups where you don't do anything but click the confirm button, and the continuing insanity of only every second stat point increase doing anything (seriously, a quarter of a century of this nonsense). Thankfully Cyberpunk did not level/stat/perk-gate silent takedowns so I could still merrily ignore every single mechanic complained about by that YouTuber. Healing? Grenades? Stamina? Never heard of 'em.

no doubt karoline were dreaming o' her annie leibowitz portrait, and instead... ... is as if hoon had never seen a vanity fair photo shoot. glamour with more than a hint o' satire is de rigueur. am suspecting this group thought they were too clever to fall for anything subversive, but they nevertheless wanted to be immortalized... these jokers is never gonna be on rushmore and maybe having a public elementary school in florida or ohio named in their honor after they is dead is not gonna be a meaningful ego stroke. an eventual sight gag for something like futurama? no thanks. a vanity fair photo op were gonna be a way for this group o' clowns and ghouls to be cool. HA! Good Fun!

Tbh, I couldn't even do a regular second playthrough of WotR, I think I dropped it half way through. Although my issue is that I can't help myself but do all the side content and that is very draining when you have already done it once before. But to be fair this is not a rare occurrence for me, there are only a handful of games I replayed, Baldur's Gate 2 being one of them that I can remember of the top of my head. They should be very careful with that. BG3's world building is supported by D&D and its external media. While I love world building, cramming it in one game is very risky. PoE is a great example where the sheer amount of text dumps stunned the players in to a state of not caring. The only game of that format where I saw it work, and I say work very loosely, is Disco Elysium.

More on Divinity .... In another recent interview, Swen makes it a point to say that in this game they're putting in a lot of work to build out the setting/universe, because they learned from making BG3 how important it is to have a strong, well-developed and detailed universe where everything fits together and makes sense, which he admits has never been the case with their setting in past Divinity games. This matters hugely for me, because the #1 criticism I've had of the D:OS games, by far, is how utterly pathetic and trite the setting is in those games. Swen even specifically says that "world building" was never Larian's thing in the past, and that is a courageous and welcome Larian mea culpa. For me, world building is the foundation for a good RPG. So, if this indeed happens with Divinity, and I have no reason to believe it won't happen, then that goes a very long way to making me excited for this game. TB combat systems always suck, but I can hold my nose and live with that. It's these other essentials for a good RPG that matter most to me. https://www.ign.com/articles/if-you-like-baldurs-gate-3-this-is-gonna-be-great-larian-boss-swen-vincke-reveals-what-to-expect-from-divinity-in-first-interview-since-the-game-awards-announcement And in another separate interview, Swen also says that the rules/mechanics they will use in Divinity will NOT be the same as in the D:OS games, and will be something new that they create from everything they've learned from their past games. That's another huge YAY from me.

I haven't seen the new movie, but I've been told they have some greater fidelity to the novel, but again change the end.

True, I got bored out of my mind with all the combat in Rogue Trader even when you could make your characters one-shot every enemy including bosses. Wrath of the Righteous on Unfair is in a similar boat. Granted, that difficulity is mostly for people who can't stop themselves (like me, I guess), but it was painful even before they fixed the most overpowered and broken game mechanics, like AC double dipping and Ember's Rays of Enemy Deletion (she basically one-shot Baphomet on Unfair for me) or breaking prerequisites with Loremaster, etc.

I imagine it would be much the same trying to replay Rogue Trader today. Because of the experience of my first playthrough I'm afraid I would be bored out of my mind this time around. Maybe just finding another way to overpower mobs would be fun, but I kind of doubt it.

I watched a bit of Josh Strife Hayes' new video on Cyberpunk 2077, and once again I am reminded how different experiences can be. All of the problems with the game he talks about are there and valid criticism, but for me, they just don't matter that much. Like the problem that so many games with side content have. V has only a few weeks left to live, but you have all the time in the world for side content. A problem that Baldur's Gate 2 already had with having to chase after Imoen. Or not. It makes no difference - plot wise, at least, and I am completely indifferent to the dissonance it introduces. Being able to fully experience all of a game is much, much more important than having the added stress of having to complete something within a certain timeframe. This is a very big reason why the only achievements I have left to do in Hollow Knight and Silksong are the speedrun ones. That's just not how I (want to) play games. Enough so that I actually don't bother doing them in spite of it driving me crazy to have the achievement completion percentage not at 100. Anyway, there's one thing I want to talk about that I found interesting: Josh's reaction to various game elements that were introduced bit by bit and changed in various updates along the way, with the big overhaul of Phantom Liberty bringing the greatest changes. Many of the things he criticizes were, funnily enough, quality of life changes that were introduced in various patches and updates. Like grenades and health items not being limited, but auto-regenerating. They used to be limited, and you as the player spent a non-trivial time in the crafting menu building more of them. The change to auto-regenerating with perks to increase regen-speed or effectiveness of the items was an incredibly good change to the flow of the gameplay, but as a new player, you can't know that, having never experienced the game as it was before. It is not unreasonable to say that limited consumables would have been nice because you'd have to prepare for fights more than you do now, and yes, on the surface level that is correct. It is correct for many games. It just isn't for the flow of combat in the game. There are a hundred tutorial popups that were added for different mechanics or systems that the game didn't launch with. Yeah, the auto-fixer wasn't introduced in a tutorial mission because buying cars was this nightmare of having to drive around the city and buying them directly from garages and parking lots after getting a text message from someone (mostly fixers after completing side quests for them). He complains about the more or less unenecessary stamina bar, but there was a time in the game when out of combat sprinting was linked to stamina and to improve the athletics skill you basically had to sprint-bunny-hop through Night City. The stamina bar of Cyberpunk 2077 2.x is a holdover that was turned into something affecting shooting and melee and you pick perks that make it matter less and less. Again, not a bad change from what it used to be, but from a fresh perspective it is really weirdly implemented. My point is, here, that being part of the development of mechanics changes one's perspective. It's not always for the better, like when the constant balancing of Pillars of Eternity made the game expierence worse for me because all the combinations and mechanics I used to progress more easily through the troves of pointless combat encounters of the game constantly got weakened. For someone new to the game, having the product now as it is - that might not make a difference.

Haven't seen the novel, but they have a nod to Arnold via his picture being shown on some wall. The movie does try to have a bit of a retro feel.