Humanoid

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. 🤔

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.