Humanoid

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.

Every version from FM20 through to FM23 has been available for free at some point via Epic and/or Amazon Prime (which is only kind of free I guess). I expect the same of FM24 later this year, but it's definitely not something I'm interested in. If I ever do play FM21 Touch again I suppose I'd have to see if it can be modded to implement some of the new rules added since that season, such as expanded subs.

Developer Alderon games, who may or may not be one of the companies discussed here, claims an almost 100% failure rate.

You just reminded me that I never finished Dragonfall. Don't recall why, maybe I lost my saves during a computer upgrade or somesuch. I did finish the original campaign and it was a fine enough introduction to Shadowrun, which I'd no experience in beforehand. I probably need to do something else post-Cyberpunk before going back to something that hits the same notes again. Maybe after Avowed?

I'm paid up for the next couple years or so having loaded up on a bunch of cheap South American 3-monthly Xbox Live Gold cards. I think it worked out to around $7AUD a month for Ultimate once all's said and done. If I ever had to pay full local price for it, it'd simply be a case of only paying for single months now and then whenever there's a few games I want to try out.

Very much depends on the game. There's a lot of outdated information because back in the day, MS Store titles were distributed as UWP Apps which pretty much meant no modding at all. Those days are gone and the games are just standard Win32 apps now and most can be modded just fine, but the reputation persists. Bethesda games are a bit of an outlier because of their reliance on the third-party script extenders for the more complex mods, most famously SKSE for Skyrim, alongside F4SE for Fallout 4 and now SFSE for Starfield. This is a dependency for many mods, so mods that require it won't work. There's currently no official way to load them with MS Store versions of the games, but the good news is that there is some progress by third-parties who have now got it working (technical details here). Note that I've no knowledge of any bugs or limitations it may have as I haven't played Starfield since launch day and thus never actually tried modding it - I got a total of around 3 hours in before quitting of boredom. Anyway, the original authors of it have no interest in enabling MS Store compatibility and the devs of this side-project don't have the rights to distribute the SFSE code, hence the oddness of their release being a hex mod for the official SFSE release. Would be nice if they could come to an agreement someday to make it as easy as installing it on the Steam/GOG version.

While stealth archer builds are no doubt brokenly overpowered in Skyrim, it does need a bit more setup in Cyberpunk. Less true now that throwing knives automatically respawn in your hand I suppose, which wasn't the case for the vast majority of my time with the game. Regardless, I found myself not liking that approach in either game, I like my takedowns close and personal. In Skyrim that means stacking enough damage via perks and gear to one-shot enemies, in Cyberpunk there's no stat check involved. It's not as smooth as Dishonored's system, but it's certainly less silly than new Deus Ex's canned animations. The complexity is more down to how you use quickhacks to help set up your approach - distracting and luring enemies, temporarily depriving them of their senses, etc. Towards the lategame you do supplement the basics with powerful spells like Power Word: Kill, with both lethal and non-lethal variants.

Mostly yes, you can ghost the vast majority of quests. In terms of the base game, I think it's one mandatory midgame boss fight and the endgame one. There's a series of sidequests where it's kind of nothing but hunting down mini-bosses, but for all but one of them (there are over a dozen) I found stealth takedowns still worked fine. Occasionally you'll have minor sidequest content where you might be talking to someone and they pull a gun on you and you shoot them dead, over in a couple of seconds. Can't really call that a combat encounter, just a slight extension of killing someone via dialogue option.

Well, not hard at all once I turned the difficulty to easy (after around half a dozen deaths). Not the point though - that simply being that I don't want to play a spectacle shooter because I don't enjoy that kind of gameplay. Same reason I don't play FPSes at all, or watch Michael Bay movies, etc. Obviously CDPR can make their game however they like, and it was never promised that a full stealth style was going to be viable. However, I was really enjoying the Deus Ex / Dishonored type gameplay, so to be pulled violently out of that style is pretty jarring. The only major incident like that in the base game I remember was

I'm expecting FM25 to be a car crash because of the switch to Unity from their 15 year old homebrew, so waiting would likely have been a case of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Personally FM21 remains the final version I'll play until they reintroduce FM Touch. I just can't deal with the feature bloat anymore.

I'm sure it does get better, because it can scarcely get worse. The prospect isn't all that enticing at the moment since it resulted in me rage-quitting, so we'll see if I give it another shot once I cool down. That said, nod of respect to being allowed to abandon the main quest and just let fate take its course. Actually Aside, the intro's extended nighttime sequence has shown up the contrast limitations of LCD monitors as brutally as any game I've ever played. Doesn't help that LG's nano-IPS panels have some of the worst contrast around. So if there is a silver lining, it'll be that it accelerates my purchase of a new OLED monitor.

So I was one of the people who genuinely enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077 even in its near-launch state, and thought that despite its issues, it was one of the best games of the year. Today, I finally started the Phantom Liberty expansion, and I now hate Cyberpunk 2077. Platforming, long linear sequences where you can't save, mandatory boss fights... yeah, it's made pretty much the worst first impression possible. Any pretense of it being an RPG are gone, and it's just moving from set piece to set piece in a completely unreactive way like I imagine Call of Duty does - with the caveat I've never played Call of Duty. It's a complete genre-shift into a genre I outright despise.

I'm not sure there is an Obsidian game where the gameplay (mostly thinking about combat here, although that's obviously not true for Pentiment) is strong enough to stand on its own. Closest might be South Park of all things. Hopefully Avowed has a more fleshed out stealth system than Outer Worlds. If it does it'd probably become my favourite Obsidian title mechanically as is. Not necessarily asking for Looking Glass level implementation, though something like Cyberpunk would be appreciated. But I'll settle for a marginal improvement over Skyrim.

Eh, yes and no. It's true of many things, and in the early game it's mostly a few rare events where an early game oversight might mean you need to wait an entire in-game year for the next chance. Often not a big deal since you're waiting on other stuff anyway, e.g. completing the Spring bundles in year 2 means just a minor delay since you're waiting for winter items anyway. However the time pressure becomes more unavoidable the deeper you get into lategame, initially mostly with the Skull Cavern content from launch (where losing all your staircases and bombs but failing to reach level 100 is a massive setback), but increasingly so with post-launch content like Ginger Island.

I feel the burnout begins for me the moment you branch off into livestock. While it doesn't really take much time compared to crops, the gameplay is much more repetitive and shallow. If I ever start a game fresh again (it's probably years away, maybe with the fan expansion?), I'll probably just skip that element and use cheats to spawn the required animal products in. 1.6 has added even more micromanagement, in that you now are actually incentivised to close the barn/coop door every night to maximise animal happiness. (Prior to this patch, it was a common urban legend that you needed to do it, but it actually did nothing) To be fair, I haven't used the super-popular Automate mod yet. Maybe if I was going to seriously try to grind out for the late-game items that cost seven digit amounts I would, but at the moment I'm thinking of doing the opposite and basically deleting everything but my greenhouse.

Playing Stardew Valley for the first time in several years due to the massive 1.6 update. I know the last time I played, multiplayer was not even officially supported and required a user mod to play. Looking that up, it was mid-2018, so it's been at least six years. Funny thing is that the major content patch was probably mostly in the 1.5 update, which was effectively a free expansion with a brand new major zone, but that passed me by for whatever reason. Realistically the new zone only becomes accessible in the second in-game year, so there's a bit of an issue where by the time it was unlocked, I felt like I'd almost had enough of the game already. Regardless though, I pressed on so I could at least see some of it. I'd never really bought into the idea of the game as a whole being an exemplar of the "cozy game" genre. There's far too much pressure in terms of both time and inventory management for that. But I could see where the argument comes from, and for most of the game's existence the argument has been fairly reasonable. That ceases to be the case with each piece of new content that's added though, mainly in the sense that it rapidly becomes overwhelming if you're the type to stick with the game's central theme of being a farmer. Instead you're very much incentivised to completely abandon most of the base game mechanics in order to even have time to engage with the new content. An element of this was already hinted at in the base game with the somewhat-optional Skull Cavern, the endgame dungeon that required you to heavily optimise an entire day's play to it in a pretty literal sense. To give a bit of context, the intended approach for it pretty much involved kitting yourself out the night before, praying the game's RNG generated a good luck day in the morning, then using a teleport at 6am and start mining with explosives until 2am, when you passed out from fatigue (which is optimal play, the 1000g penalty for not going returning home manually is trivial). But to be fair, this is something you only had to pull off a couple of times in an average playthrough before being set for resources. The new zone takes this approach and dials it to eleven. Every single day your new goal becomes to get yourself to the new zone as soon as possible at the sacrifice of everything else, and engage in the new major grind there. I admit that after a few days of this, I gave up and installed a cheat mod that allowed me to freeze time, turning the game into a more traditional RPG in which I could explore the content at my leisure. I thus wave farewell and good riddance to the game's central time management conceit, but it nonetheless feels bizarre that the intended approach seems to be to stop farming altogether, sell all your animals, ignore all your friends and their quests, etc. Now in mitigation