Humanoid

I have a bit of an itch to try the character creator to see if the characters I see in reviews are outliers or if that's really the best they can manage with the tools. But it's not an itch worth burning 80GB+ of download quota on just yet. The EA Play trial will be there forever anyway so no rush. DA1 was earnest in that Bioware put in a lot of time and effort to make the best game they could while the company was still independent. For me it didn't hit, but I respect it. Conceptually another "save the world" story was not what I was after, and in terms of narrative the game made me actively not want to save the world with the way the origin stories are written. DA2 was the opposite, in that it was extremely cynical where DA1 was earnest. Conceptually I thought it was a great idea, a smaller-scale, more personal game with lower stakes than usual. The implementation though was just cobbling stuff together in order to meet EA's extreme deadlines and it's just a procession of reused content and waves of enemies spawning out of thin air. DA3 was a single-player MMO.

Yeah, it's one of the things that show why the D&D licence was to the overall detriment of the game instead of a benefit. Still really liked it regardless, but very glad they're done with the series.

Gah, you gave me a right old fright there in the context of Tim Curry.

Hm? Celebrity casting in Star Citizen hardly seems out of place given the precedent set by Wing Commander 3/4 and Privateer 2. In fact if only one game in the entire world did celebrity casting, it would be that game.

Yeah, it's not even followed by the companion buzzword "roguelike". It's not an automatic will-not-play, but it is an automatic will-not-back-on-Kickstarter I guess. Hell, even "deck-building roguelike" is not an automatic will-not-play, it's just that "Slay the Spire but..." is not at all a useful designation for me until I do get around to trying Slay the Spire. As for Midnight Suns, that is a do-not-play for me, but that's because I do not play superhero games, and that's non-negotiable.

First time I've heard of it. *clicks link* "deck-building" Oh no.

I never engaged past the introductory battle with them in my relatively brief time playing FO4. There was no narrative reason for me to go follow them anywhere, and I proceeded to Diamond City with no hesitation. That's the last I ever saw of them. But yeah, the Boston setting in general may be another reason non-Americans might not engage with the game so well. I don't know anything about the place other than that the water may taste slightly of tea. I may not know much about the real Vegas but put up a few gigantic neon signs and it's pretty instant recognition. Washington has the White House and the obelisk, which is something I guess. The broader issue though is that if you design in-game locations that make sense as self-sustaining communities, it doesn't matter if they don't correspond to actual real-world locations. Is Shady Sands a real place? Hell if I know, but it's a place that makes sense and I don't question its existence in the game. If instead a location's entire raison d'etre is "hey it's this famous real world location, but ruined" with no thought put into it beyond that, then those locations better be notable and relevant to the potential audience.

Games have different failure modes for running out of VRAM. Some may at least gracefully dial back texture quality dynamically, which sometimes might not be noticeable. But others aren't nearly as well-prepared for it and become a stutter-fest. Funny thing about the 4070 Ti in the first place is that I think it's a card they're struggling to sell. It's one of the two older models in the family, the other being the original 4070 GDDR6X version. The Super variants were released later, and the 4070 Super ended up being a 5-10% slower Ti, but with the same VRAM and for around 20% less money. Mind you it's the same again with the Ti Super, 5-10% faster than the Ti for 20% more money, though at least you also get 4GB extra VRAM this time, unlike going from a Super to a Ti. At any rate, I don't think it's a card you should fear missing out on, mainly because it's hardly a paragon of value in the first place. The 5070 will have it covered easily, and even with AMD abandoning the high-end, the 7900 XT is already faster than it for the same price, so you can infer that their replacement for that card will also be a suitable alternative. (Note that prices are based on what I've seen locally, so the pricing gaps might not be representative. The Super is around $900AUD here, then add $200 AUD for each successive step up)

The same thing has already happened multiple times in recent memory, so it's nothing new really. Is it really any different to just 5 years ago with the 5700 XT, a decade ago with the RX 480, and going further back, the 3870? Doesn't feel like it. The mainstream gamer will be find and well catered for by whichever products they'll likely release. They try to create a halo product that matches nVidia's best when they can, but if they're way behind in a particular generation, they don't bother. Yeah, it hurts the Radeon brand in terms of it increasingly being viewed as just a value product, but it's not like it has much cachet right now even with the existence of the 7900 XTX. I think the last time AMD could have made a claim to have the fastest card was in 2013 with the 290X? As for me, I'm looking forward to so few bleeding-edge games that I suspect I can stretch the life of this midrange 5800X + RX 6800 system I built early-2021 into the DDR6 era whenever that arrives, thus bypassing DDR5 altogether. The four-digit naming scheme will probably be gone by then so I can't even pretend to plan for something like an 11800X3D or whatever. Not with its 12GB VRAM it won't. A 4070 Ti Super or more realistically a 4080 would be the baseline for a passable 4K card.

Darkest Dungeon developer Red Hook has been acquired by Dead by Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive. Never heard of them, but that doesn't sound good. Another soul battered and broken, cast aside like a spent torch.

I got the first season pass, which I could justify mainly because the base game itself is on Game Pass and therefore cost me nothing. But yeah, I've sat out all the content since Fate of Iberia, which I found unsatisfying. CK3 is a game that doesn't stand on its own in terms of its strategy mechanics. It therefore lives and dies by the quality of its event writing to keep people playing once they've gotten a half-decent grip on the mechanics at which point they'd already be able to steamroll the AI. Sad to say, it's mostly very poor. And there's a clear reason for it: lack of any meaningful editorial control. I remember seeing a breakdown of the process to how new events are added to the game: each one is generally pitched by and scripted by a individual writer-developer, and it's peer-checked by one other person (not always the same person, just a peer) who gives it the once-over. That's it. It's like if you get a classroom of kids to each write a short story then publish an anthology of all of them - the result will be very, very uneven at best, disastrous at worst.

I wish HBS well, but alas I don't play horror games. As for Veilguard, I'm choosing to skip that preview in order to wait for a less curated one.

Yeah, after completing the overlong and overly scripted Phantom Liberty opening set piece, I decided to just faff around doing open world content for another 5 hours or so and am done with Cyberpunk for the foreseeable future. Mostly just playing Euro Truck Sim 2 again for the last few weeks. Annoyingly the West Balkans DLC has yet to go on a proper sale (I guess it will once the next DLC is released), but the revamped Switzerland is lovely. The hidden route through the old section of Bern is a particular highlight.

Ah, I meant the little underground community at the end of it, which Google tells me is called Neathholm. I think it's still classified as being part of the prologue, but I guess the tutorial was over.

I know next to nothing about Warhammer, be it 1K or 40K, and from the sounds of it I'd probably be best off if that remained the case. More a case of very mild FOMO with the bundle running for one more week. I have base WoTR only, it didn't grab me so far but I only just left tutorial village. As it's on a back-backburner for now, the door was open for it to be replaced by Rogue Trader if it was a clearly better game, but given the complaints listed above it appears not.

I was going to ask about buying the bundle when I've gotten barely one hour into WoTR, guess I have my answer now.

Apparently Ubisoft has not just decided to reset the Might and Magic canon to before they acquired the IP from 3DO, but to a point before HoMM4 and MM9 (y'know, when NWC decided to reset everything by exploding the planet).

They did just release the 5800XT and 5900XT, but it's completely different because for CPUs there's no space between the numbers and letters, see. No potential for confusion at all. Just as well though that RDNA1 only went up to the 5700 XT. I did have a HD 5850 back in the day though... EDIT: Bring back the Black Edition CPUs I say.

I do recall that when I was shopping for my current system, the 5600X was actually sometimes going for above it's RRP, getting up to $500AUD and very hard to find in-stock even then. I ended up importing a 5800X from the UK instead (the same store didn't ship the 5600X overseas), which ended up at just over $600 shipped. That, incidentally, is pretty much the exact same price as the 9700X is now. My CPU before that was a 6700K which cost me around $520, so all things considered, I'm still relatively content that pricing is remaining under the inflation curve. I'm not in the market for any PC-related things other than 1-3 OLED monitors at the moment, not sure I'll even need a new CPU before AM6/DDR6 hits. Given how bandwidth-starved Zen 5 supposedly is, there may be decent gains from DDR6 alone. I do sincerely hope that the low-TDP of the current X series isn't just an excuse to launch a 105W+ XT variant early in this timeline though.

I do like that they've reined in the power consumption of the X CPUs to be more in line with the non-X Zen 4 CPUs, even if it makes the raw performance improvement over Zen 4 look poor. A simple 8C/16T CPU at ~135W was not the direction I liked AMD going in, so I'm glad they've not done an Intel and kept pushing up the power limits. That's not the full story of course. 7700X to 9700X, 5% improvement for around 40% less power? Great, I wouldn't complain if that was what we got compared to the previous best. The problem though is that the 7700 exists, and suddenly the 9700X is more like 8% faster for zero improvement in wattage, significantly less impressive. And also probably a sign that there won't be a cut-price 9700 in our future. Ah well.

I was thinking that if the free period was at least a week, ideally more, I'd have contemplated the download to see what's new since I last played 5+ years ago. But a weekend? Yeah, nah.

To be honest I just want something, anything, to disrupt the de-facto monopoly they have in the premium laptop space.

I liked it from the start, but that I think is mostly down to me treating it like a Looking Glass type sneaky game. For that approach, the massive 2.0 mechanical overhaul really had minimal impact. The random generic loot? Doesn't matter. The unbalanced combat? No impact. Indeed the biggest change probably came in an earlier patch, when they made throwing knives non-consumable. So yeah, it's very good at that. In terms of its other qualities, I rate it as a mediocre RPG, and as a spectacle shooter ...I don't care because I hate that kind of gameplay, as evidenced by my recent rant about Phantom Liberty. The game is at its worst when it funnels you into their grandiose set pieces.

"Normal lifespan" probably being the warranty period.

Maybe they could get together and form some sort of gathering of developers.