Humanoid

To be fair, it seems this is mostly an artifact of Steam Cloud integration messing with the one-save-per-account system (which obviously is in-itself questionable). You're supposed to be easily delete your save and start fresh, from what I understand. The microtransaction being sold is meant to be for editing your existing character. You buy an item, whether for $2 real money or whatever in-game currency it costs to buy it from a regular vendor, and it allows you to modify your character once per purchase. I feel the more egregious thing though is that the game's auteur was yapping on about how fast travel is bad for games, then immediately undermines the semi-valid point he was trying to make by selling consumable tokens that allow fast travel from anywhere. This is exactly the behaviour that one would expect from Capcom, actually. The latest Street Fighter is a huge offender, as are recent Monster Hunter games. Apparently the first Dragon's Dogma also had some cynical nickel-and-diming, but they were mostly removed by the Dark Arisen re-release/expansion which was sort of a "Definitive Edition" of that game. Maybe the smart thing to do would be to wait for Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen...

It's wild to think that you need to abuse a workaround to do so without paying $2.

Yeah, it'll probably be a good gig for an up-and-coming studio to try to make a name for themselves, even if they have to put up with working with the awfulness of Hasbro/WoTC for a while. I imagine multiple such projects will be commissioned now.

While I wouldn't have minded some new additional content for BG3 before saying goodbye, ultimately I think it's the right decision for Larian to do their own thing instead of hitching their wagon to the D&D licence. I'm steadfast in my opinion that BG3 is good in spite of being a D&D game, not because of it. No matter what you think of the state of BioWare today, few would argue that they made the wrong decision by abandoning the KoTOR series after one game and going their own way with homegrown IP.

There's hope yet for Limbo of the Lost!

I've never really considered their total body of work too closely, so just my snap opinions on each listed: KoTOR2 - My video card (a 7900GT? Something like that) died before I finished the tutorial. Never went back to it, bearing in mind this was a few years after the original release as is, probably circa 2007? So I was already sort of forcing myself to play it in the first place, never really had a strong incentive to because I don't like Star Wars. (I don't hate it, I just tolerate it in a gaming context if it's a good game regardless of IP) NWN2 - I have no memories whether positive or negative about the original campaign. I assume my save just petered out somewhere around mid-game but who knows. I couldn't get through the MoTB tutorial because of D&D sneak attack rules meant my rogue was not viable. I did play SoZ up until the final dungeon and liked it well enough. Alpha Protocol - Never finished it but admired the structure and ambition. The mechanical jankiness wasn't actually that big of a deal for me because I don't generally play this type of game for the challenge. I didn't particularly liked the timed dialogue and the lack of customisation. New Vegas - One of the best games of all time. Dungeon Siege - Dunno, I don't play ARPGs. South Park - Very good until the zombie apocalypse ruined everything that came after, which felt like filler. Damn shame. Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity series - I'd outgrown RTwP by this point and couldn't get into any of them. Yes I know Deadfire got a turn-based mode later, but a bit too late and without the game being designed whole-cloth with it in mind, the patch could not address the issue of far too much combat. The Outer Worlds - I abandoned it early due to the poor handling of stealth, turning it into far too much of a shooter for my tastes. The only reason I tolerate games like Deus Ex, Dishonored and Cyberpunk is because I can bypass their clunky combat mechanics, which is not possible in TOW. Grounded - Dunno, don't play survival games. Maybe if I had a regular group to play co-op with, but no chance solo. Pentiment - Should be up my alley, just need to overcome inertia to get around to it. It's only been out for ...wait it's been more than a year??? Where did the time go? (To be honest, I spent less time on video games in 2023 since, oh, probably since the late 80s)

I never gave much thought to the pronunciation of Dune with or without a hidden 'y', but hearing it a few times lately and all I can see in my mind's eye is "Doon". I'm no linguist but it kinda feels American. Is it?

Fair, it's just that I've never heard it talked about like that before. Perhaps not so surprising given almost my entire knowledge of baseball comes from The Naked Gun. Whenever the annual 10 hour trial of FIFA on EA Play rolls around, I start a career mode as a lower league player and figure I'll make a proper go of it. But then I get around a third of a season in (somewhere between a dozen games and two) and I feel I'm done with the game until the next instalment.

I always assumed that MLB The Show was sort of like a talk-show or game-show spinoff based on baseball, as opposed to being a game where you actually play baseball. Huh. (Think BBC Match of the Day for Premier League football for example)

He does like them a bit older.

Hell, I'd be happy to buy 1440p again, provided it's both OLED and affordable (because I'd likely want to buy three of them at the same time).

Yeah, for Americans for which the Super is a price drop it's just boring. But for the rest of the world, it doesn't even have that to fall back on. A quick look locally show the 4080S at $1800, the 4080 at $1600. Yeah, it's less than pointless, buyers who come in after the old stock dries up will potentially end up worse off overall in terms of frames per dollar. It's not even a matter of local stores price gouging on the shiny new release, nVidia formally set the MSRP to $1870. The refresh serves to interrupt the natural price drops of the old card and is in effect a price hike to prop up margins between now and the release of the next gen. To be fair, I'm not currently following the market in any meaningful way. When in this mode I only read the conclusion page or watch the last 5 minutes of a couple reviews and don't care to dig any deeper. I built my current system in early 2021 and yet three years it feels like only yesterday. 20 years ago, that kind of time period would have had seen me upgrade at least once, if not twice. I'm probably golden until something like The Witcher 4 releases in what, 2026-27 at the earliest?

Will the spacesuit be made out of the same material as those "canvas" bags were?

Last year I built a 5700G-based system in a SilverStone Milo 10 case, half for the novelty of it. This was after finding that my NUC8, which features Iris graphics better than the NUCs that came after it, was still incapable of running fairly light games like Rogue Legacy 2 - a side-scrolling platformer. It was basically the best I could do in a case of that size, which has absolutely nil support for a standalone video card. Hell, in the "short" case configuration I'm using, most CPU stock coolers don't even fit. So yeah, I guess I would be the target market for something like this.

Based on the photographic evidence, it looks like some sort of Kinect revival game is on the cards.

To be honest, as someone who's put 1000 hours into XCOM 1, I immediately disregarded Midnight Suns purely on the basis of it being a superhero game. I have no idea what the gameplay is actually like.

I have 3h 25m logged apparently, all on (fake) launch day. With every passing day it becomes less likely I'll ever come back to it. I like Skyrim well enough, and have in the order of 150 hours in it. I gave both FO3 and FO4 more of a chance than I did Starfield, but even then I'd had enough after 20-odd hours. And I absolutely despise Oblivion. Even as someone who had used vim extensively, using vi was a harrowing and arduous task. (For context, after a year of using vim for all my regular coursework, exams were conducted on machines which only had plain vi)

SoZ is the only form of NWN2 I played with any seriousness, though even then I quit just at the doorstep of the final dungeon because I didn't feel like I needed closure. I have very little memory of the original campaign, I couldn't even tell you if I got out of the tutorial because I don't remember anything other than something something village attacked, standard Obsidian temporary tutorial companion dies, then who knows. For MoTB I very clearly remember I quit the tutorial dungeon because a dungeon full of backstab-immune enemies is just no fun.

I'm not a fan of Legendary Actions in principle either, though I sort of get why they exist to even up the action economy when encounter designers insist on designing an "epic" fight against one big bad who thinks fighting 1 vs 6 is a smart thing to do. But I think it's more reasonable to not design fights in that way in the first place, and Larian seemingly agrees judging from how they've approached their boss design where the boss never truly fights alone. (Granted I haven't seen any of the Act 3 bosses yet)

Ironman feels a bit arbitrary in a game like this, because (I'm assuming) it's game over if your active party of four dies, but totally fine if three die and a fourth gets away and pays to resurrect the other three at camp. But for most of the game you have two other characters at camp anyway, who could easily pay to resurrect the four active members who did die.

As someone who mostly traversed Night City by combination of bus and foot, that sounds right up my alley. I know some people feel that effectively teleporting around with public transport can be immersion-breaking, but for me it's nowhere near as bad as leaving my car in the middle of the road whenever I get to my destination.

Some of the potential endings are pretty notable in how much scope they've seemingly been given to change the established Forgotten Realms lore. So why not conquer Hell itself?

There's a demo available which contains the first chapter and saves carry over to the full game. Probably going to go play that myself once my eyes recover properly from laser eye surgery.

I'm still half asleep and with the way the embed displayed, I read the title as "Dine Hard". Now I'm disappointed it's not that.

The gang have already set up their YouTube channel in preparation for tomorrow's announcement, so likely not.