Leaderboard

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1154960/Ardenfall/ I've played for 40 minutes or so (got through the tutorial cave and walked around the first town). Looks like Morrowind with (much) better combat.

The Last of Us Part 1 Maybe my third or fourth playthrough, but first time on PC. Never actually finished Part 2 and decided it's time to do it. It's been long enough that I really don't remember some of this.

I got the email today that I am officially verified as run #16! It's hard to believe its been over 6 months since I finished my run. Something fun is Sam said in his email there have been a surprising number of submissions recently. Looking forward to seeing what people have done.

feels like manifestation of main-character-syndrome. happened a lot more when deadfire was younger. someone would rant about something, and be horribly offended if anyone even slightly pushed back on anything, like gasp, people might want to talk/discuss stuff and not just blindly agree with you.

I have a game breaking bug with New Arc Line where the game crashes if I try to leave the area I am in. Personally I believe it is some resource leak that corrupts the character's save files. But I am not a dev. I have put it aside for now and hope they fix it.

I didn't know there is a new Heroes of Might and Magic in works, and there is even an early demo to try out. It looks like it's being done on budget, but it is actually quite snappy, and seems like could be a nice entry to the series. As the series have been in limbo for a while, it is nice to see a return to form, though it might be a bit too conservative. HoM&M3 die hards might not be willing to move on at this point, and I am not sure how much new blood with a budget title like this one attract.

No more delays to sanctions for NIS, our national refinery and oil/gas supplier. As of next week we are on reserves as Croatia will stop the transit of crude oil through their county. So either Gasprom (Russian company which owns majority) agrees to sell or it will have to nationalized. If it's nationalized, good bye to Russian cheap gas and a bad message for any foreign investments.

I backed it as well, because it's something I'd been hoping to see (a Starfinder game), so... I figured I should. It's two years away though, so we're in for a bit of a wait. It looks like they're already up to $400,000, so they may end up with more than they bargained for. Starfinder: Afterlight could become one of my favourite CRPGs—even if the studio's co-founders are 'more scared about huge success than a bit of failure' when it comes to their big Kickstarter debut (PC Gamer)

more game should launch on gog did gog bow to the new censorship like steam did

I just backed it but at the lowest early bird tier. I might go up if they announce a GOG release in addition to Steam

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/epictellers/starfinder-afterlight money raised pass stretch goal

Manor Lords - finally a giant beta test version dropped. I guess it isn't abandoned after all (ha). Didn't sign up for access, I'd rather wait for full public version with beta-resultt patches added, but from reading up, sounds like a lot of changes (plus some new maps). Old saves will not be compatible with it. No Man's Sky - still making silly ships, still flying around exploring planets, still occasionally see stuff I've never seen before - and still have restart-itis re: Abandoned Mode new starts. I never went much past the intro of Little Kitty, Big City, since the one time I tried was when I had the PSU reboot issues, and I just never went back to it. They keep patching/adding to the game, including cute outfits (heh). Hoping to motivate to look at it again this weekend. I could use some "cute."

New community blog is live by @Fishtick The Unintentional Gatekeeping of Video Games

Boeroer was being pretty reasonable yeesh, so aggressive. Did you just want to rant then?

Expected them to boil the frog longer before doing this, with some luck this teaches a lot of people a thing or two about how these subscription services do business. Then again, if they haven't figured it out by now they may just be beyond help anyway.

Playing "those who rule" turn based tactics JRPG(style). I am enjoying it, but it's perma death for your units. So it takes me like 10 tries every level because I can't handle losing a character forever. MAYBE later when I stop liking a character, or have too many, I will allow some to die. The story is pretty basic so far, but im only on the third non training fight. You control some ranger group troops. Everyone is betraying everyone. You're very clearly fighting for the bad guys. I hope it turns out everyone is evil, just like real life. There is no world map or anything, just dialogue sections followed by a fight. There are lots of conversations between the different characters, which is kinda interesting because characters can die so you can definitely miss out on side objectives and stuff. My only real problem with it is that I'm constantly restarting fights due to perma death. Which is fine, but they make you go through the dialogue over and over which gets annoying after the 10th try. There are story choices you can make, but it kinda feels like those choices don't really matter. Example. Very early on you can choose to surrender or to fight. If you choose to fight it just cuts to black and you move on to the next section... I can't imagine choosing to surrender would give you anything different, though I have not tried. I dislike pointless dialogue choices. The only game I use a walkthrough guide with are the persona games. Mostly because there is a "correct answer" that has positive effects, and bad answers are just bad. Often there is no discernable reason for that answer to be correct. Or maybe it's just too cryptic for me to tell.

Yeah 30USD monthly. I can understand why people are getting less interested in that service, if you can get few good games on sale for that money (even on physical medium).

Maybe it will force developers away from spending all their attention on eye candy and action. One can hope.

*reads about some Xbox price hike, both physical goods and now GamePass, stuff* Even considering tariff's re: hardware, I wonder if Xbox/MS has decided if you can't afford them, you won't make them any money anyway. I don't think it's only the price of the Gamepass hike alone - companies really need to realize there is such a thing as subscription/constant fees exhaustion. I mean, from fridges/dishwashers to cars to game/entertainment services. Enough already. Just gimmie a product, not a "service", already.

...Wait a second, they took the ancient fused uniques from Diablo 2 and made it into an actual mechanic now? Supposedly, Mephisto had a bugged drop table in the initial release of Lord of Destruction that limited how many uniques could drop at the same time, but it was coded badly and it made it so that in the extremely unlikely event of too many uniques dropping, you'd get the base item of one but the properties of another, hence the monstrosities above. Wizardspike Gauntlets in particular were duped to all hell and back, but there were a few others. I say "supposedly" because there's no video of this ever actually happening despite the fact that someone could go (dis)prove it if they really wanted to, those old versions of the games still exist and it's not at all difficult to change the drop mechanics to force only uniques to drop - it could just as well be that they were hacked items. Though unlike all the hacked items that were mass-removed from everyone's characters like twenty years ago never to return, fused uniques still exist on the official D2 servers, so maybe there's something to it after all.

I have started New Arc Line. There are currently three races to choose from: Human, Elf, and Dwarf. Humans and Dwarves can choose between Diesel Tech and Voodoo Shaman as classes. Dwarves choose between Steam Tech and Hellfire Mage. I am trying out a human Dieselpunk Gunslinger. The writing... has some problems. On the one hand, a lot of writers, they try too much. Lots of words, lots of fancy words, all to prove "Look ma, I have a vocabulary." I do not like that. Other people do. The writers seem to not have English as their mother tongue. The odd mistake here and there. The attempt to write "British" characters, with slang and all, without understanding the slang - thinking they do because they watched Austin Powers. We'll see though how the story goes. Mr Simon made a great first impression as NPCs go. Unlike Mick... who is a bit boring. Why is it so often in RPGs, that the first character to join your party is boring? I hope the story works out as interesting. Somehow other than Arcanum, there hasn't been a good tech vs magic RPG - Silverfall fell a bit short and was also a long long time ago. The game is a bit unstable. Trying to load a previous save can crash the game for me That's Early Access I guess.

https://www.ign.com/articles/microsoft-reportedly-testing-free-xbox-cloud-gaming-supported-by-ads-with-monthly-play-limits-announcement-and-launch-coming-soon I'm calling it - after the next "generation", there won't be any more xbox game console. At least not as we think of it. It'll just be another streaming service device. Or it'll shut down entirely. One hour play time limit? Five hours a month that are "free?" For games? What a laugh.

I was playing Mass Effect: Andromeda and enjoying it in a shallow sort of way. (Shooting stuff, zooming around in the Nomad, ticking off sidequests) . It helps that it got such a poor response when it was released -- I had no expecations to be disappointed. Then I bought a house needing renovation. It feels like signing up to some kind of monastic bootcamp where the training involves being hit by paint pots and paying nightly obeisance to an Ikea catalogue. Will I be able to go back to Andromeda once it's all over? Or will it be like Frodo returning to the Shire, but realising he's too traumatized to be able to appreciate it?

"The investment is done with a 20B loan which they intent to recoup with cutting costs by using AI to replace visual and voice artists." Amazing. Never buy anything EA ever again.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250929186526/en/EA-Announces-Agreement-to-be-Acquired-by-PIF-Silver-Lake-and-Affinity-Partners-for-%2455-Billion