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Tim Cain is back at Obsidian!

It is a bit like what you'd get if you described Gothic to an alien race and they decided to try their hand at it to replicate literally everything about it. Apart from everything else I also haven't met a single woman (one women, not a romantically unattached woman. It's Piranha Bytes like, not Bioware like. Sorry Bruce) in my brief sojourn. I did catch a fish, and squashed some bugs (hmm) for a quest, so there are some animals I'm a genuine threat to.

Map a key to quick change between mutation loadouts. Can we get more than one hot pouch wheel? Also dont see the point of the the quick craft wheel, maybe replace that or the emote wheel with mutation select.

The only issue I've ever run into with LTSC was with the old versions e.g. LTSC 2019 being feature-outdated for a couple of newer games, which is what necessitated me upgrading to LTSC 2021. But they would just straight up not run - otherwise, no problems I can think of, it's pretty much just Windows 10 but a little lighter and a little less annoying. However, I have not ever used Edge and I have not played Anno 117, so I cannot comment on those. You could try temporarily disabling UAC entirely (i.e. everything is run as admin all the time always) to see if it resolves the Anno 117 saving issue. Admin permissions can be a little flaky with Windows: in theory, an application you start as admin should also open other stuff as admin (e.g. in the event of running secondary executables), but somehow it doesn't always necessarily work out that way. Someone also posted having a similar issue with the game, and it actually ended up being the fault of Windows Defender:

Horses in particular took 3 hours. Otherwise, I was on AL last week (still have a few days to spend until 2026) and Black Geyser was of reasonable length (~35h for the first playthrough, 8h? for the second) to play. I also WFH 3 days per week and it is glorious as it cuts down ~130 minutes of commute per day. I would not try to play anything Ubisoft-like and currently just listening to the other gamer in the household playing Rogue Trader. I like Owlcat, but the turn-based combat and their density of encounters fill me with dread. So, might try in a year.

I was expecting a lot more LOL corny sounds. There is a bit of that (mostly the dialogue bits) but the sound effects are pretty fun and nifty. Every time the engine duh-duh-doo-doo-doodoooo-wherrrr types went off I both laughed and admired. They broke it up into four short parts, this is the first one.

Feels great in these Gothic-likes to finally become powerful and then revisit places on the map to clean house. But the most enjoyable is really to be able to pick up whatever you want without having to worry about getting encumbered.

I hear for Gothic like games, studios actually hire professional bug devs to add the right bugs to the games.

Decided to give the gothic like Of Ash and Steel a go. vaguely stilted dialogue, somewhat odd voice acting, and got killed by an oversized rat immediately after leaving the tutorial area. 10/10 for being a gothic like experience so far.

Been playing this game quite a bit recently on the default/recommended difficulty but with the parry prompts enabled (which means I can pretty much forget doing anything MP related). I never made it past the first boss of Dark Souls (not my cuppa tea), but I did greatly enjoy Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, to try and give some kind of indication of where I fall. I've basically completed the major content of the first region (Qinghe), and just started on Kaifeng (second region). Combat is rather hard to avoid, region completion relies, among other things, on finding boxes, which means you have to clear out hostile camps (chests are often locked until enemies are dead). Movement abilities tend to get disabled when you aggro enemies, so just running past usually isn't much of an option, and when it is it's generally obnoxious enough that you'd probably just want to beat them up anyway to get it over with. The main story bosses, at least so far, have been mostly fine for me, difficulty wise, but each major region also has a region story, and the final boss of Qinghe (first region) was pretty darn brutal and took me a couple of tries. Technically they (and the rest of the region story) are optional, but most of the storylines do appear to tie into the overarching narrative so I'd consider them very worthwhile to do. This is also why I'd recommend taking one's time exploring and at least completing the major plot lines in the region, and not just beelining the main story. There's also optional bosses, those can be skipped entirely, though I've accidentally triggered a few due to not being aware they were there, or them being in a place that makes them really hard to avoid. That said, once beaten they do not respawn in the open world. The lore/story is pretty interesting, but unfortunately most of the cultural nuance is lost in translation, leading to some pretty major gaps in understanding of the story for anyone not intimately familiar with Chinese culture/(folk)lore that I had to resort to Reddit to explain to me (thankfully there are Chinese players that really care and post comprehensive breakdowns of major storylines/events)

I enjoyed Black Geyser. I'd play more games in that setting.

Ok, I’ll make this a straightforward feedback and opinion post... Played now for 40+ hours between the demo and this pre-release. I’m a veteran of larger survival games, so my views are based on that experience. This game has so much potential, but it seems even in it’s early state, there are core design decisions that lend itself to a entry level (easy) survival game and that’s all. - There isn’t much here. The story literally takes you 15 minutes to complete if you follow the queues. Then you do dailies to waste your time on building components that shouldn’t require this much effort to get. You don’t get grass floors by default? Cmon... Even as early access, I would have expected at least a full quest line that takes you through the Initial story, at least 10 hours of content for the $30 price tag. You don’t need community feedback from early access to tell the story YOU want to tell. - Where is the threat? Playing on Whoa difficulty, the only pressing thing is the annoying eat/drink cycle. You can outrun or dodge most insects, and spiders path the same routes if you watch them from high up, easily avoided if farming resources. Tunnels and caves? What do I need there to enhance my base or self after one visit? And even if I make my own dangers...I can just Load a prior Save and be fine again....what? (Covered more below) - Bases have zero risk if you place them anywhere above the ground. It doesn’t even need to be high up, a root of the oak tree or on the soda cans is good enough to avoid all danger. What’s the point of the game past the story if your bases have no threat? Why build re-enforced walls? The game has no longevity if it’s not about protecting your base and your possessions. - Retrieving your dead body backpack is far too easy. If you even die In the hardest difficulty, I would expect your backpack to be guarded or even looted by territorial insects. Why did they care to confront or kill you in the first place if they didn’t find you a threat to their territory? And wouldn’t they be interested in your stuff? Food, drink, components for their own nests/homes...all in your backpack. - A survival game with a manual save system? Again...where is the danger or consequences of your survival decisions if you can just load up a past save? The Save option in the menu should be removed and Auto- Save should trigger internally off system events, including death. That way you can’t go back to avoid a bad result or decision. Save and Load = no threat or consequences for your actions. - The enemies. How is it that with all the great AI you have for these insects, all I have to do to avoid their attack is jump on a rock and watch them leave or spear them to death at the right angles? And how is it that I can kill a Spider by spearing them through my partially completed grass wall and yet the spider doesn’t damage the wall at all? Simply build a small hut, 2x2 and leave some of the walls partially done. Then spear through the translucent blue parts...dead spider. Again, I thought these insects were supposed to pose a threat to your base? If there is no threat in a survival game, there is no longevity and it turns into a creative base building lego game. - Dev, please play with a controller and tell me what the purpose of the hotbar is at the bottom of the screen? You can’t quick swap or interact with any of the slots on the fly. The action bar should be removed imo. Also, control flow in the menus and crafting is just off. I spent a lot of time remapping most my controller buttons through the options to try and get to something close to other survival crafting game interfaces that do it correctly. Managing inventory by moving single items(No stack move or pull), no split stacks, armor that stays in your backpack even when its equipped, tools mixed in with weapons in crafting, crafting station that has no storage of it’s own or that can pull from a chest connected to it, etc etc. - Great looking game, nice visuals...until you look into the distance...well, i guess it’s distant. Why is the house and any structure over 20yds away fuzzy and blurry on console? Are we saying we can’t render these assets on Xbox One X? Find that hard to believe given there are plenty of larger survival games on the Unreal Engine render far more. - The HUD needs options to turn off elements. Too much clutter with constant ‘hand popups’ on every environment item. But I already posted A full detail on that In a separate thread. Harsh post somewhat, sure. But all too often game preview or ‘early access’ often becomes an excuse to deliver subpar, inferior games and still charge a significant price for a game that isn’t worth in it’s current state. Early access seems to somehow give a ‘pass’ for developers to deliver no story, broken systems, and bad design....all with the excuse of ‘it’s still early access’. I wouldn’t say Grounded falls in most these categories, but first impressions mean alot. We play early access games, and most the time we play the game through the early access development cycle, become bored or frustrated and never come back to the actual release of the game because of the bad taste the game left us during early access. Just hope a MS 1st party, AAA dev like Obsidian doesn’t end up with the same result.

I have never read something more accurate and telling. This person thoroughly understands the genre you've entered into as a developer and has hit every nail on the head. I sincerely hope this post is taken seriously because it has advice in it that could make this game infinitely more successful.

Clippy RPG confirmed

Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa

Had to install Windows 11 on an external drive to get Anno 117 to save games...

Replayed a bit as I got the DLC, maybe will replay the whole thing with them. Giving Argenta the bolter with AoE remains a bad idea, hilariously so as got her to suicide herself as a mob was a little too close.