Sven_

For the record: While I didn't love The Outer Worlds (1) either, I thought there were decent things in there as well. Overall, I think it's a rather mid title by Obsidian standards though. And one seemingly scared of its own design goals as well. There is "casualization" -- Pentiment, set up as a narrative experience surely isn't a hardcore gamer's game, and that's perfectly fine! It was never conceived as such. And then there is say the aforementioned looting in TOW1 that doesn't even matter as it's this abundant. In a way, it seems Obsidian came out of their crowdfunding stage under the impression that specialization would not be worth it (after Deadfire, see the quote prior about making real money off two PoEs...). Whereas for Warhorse, Larian, Owlcat et all it was the opposite. That said, whilst there were layoffs, Obsidian never cut down solely to the crew doing Pillars 1 back then. IIRC, they were still a studio in the ~100-150 people range at that point.

That was my reaction to when Deadfire launched -- to nowhere near the buzz as PoE. To be fair, Eternity1, unlike Original Sin, was always big time sold on nostalgia, and eventually, that crave for the good ol' days may be fulfilled. Still, in the case of PoE, it's certainly not the "type of game" at fault -- or Owlcat wouldn't have rolled these things plus DLC plus Enhanced Editions en masse from an Eastern European CRPG factory line. :D In the case of TOW, it's not the type of game either, see Fallout New Vegas. What would have bummed me out (and kinda did) with TOW1 is that it was announced as a sort of Vegas-Like project (see the announcement trailers... "From thy builders of Vegas!"). And then was more like a baby's version of an Obsidian game, of one I've played better versions of before (not talking size, but depth). The entire industry is struggling a bit atm though. And if you ask me, the thing to notice recently has been about specilization -- of picking an experience and going all-in on it rather than watering it down so that everybody may be onboard. A game like Kingdom Come would have never seen the light of day at Bioware, Bethesda and Obsidian -- see how Josh had been hoping to make a historical game since forever, but bosses would go: "Nobody would buy that." And even FromSoft exploded by Elden Ring -- a title likewise that would have never seen the light of day at most of the old Western powerhouses of the industry, as deemed as too "inaccessible". These games were allowed to excel at what they were targeting -- and attracted added people simply by doing so, making them curious what's so "special" and "unique" about them. Warhorse have talked about how many history buffs they got onboard who aren't even hardcore gamers, for instance. As a side-effect, Warhorse are now pretty much the only top dogs on the "historical RPG" block too -- there simply is nobody around making a game like them on the scale of them, zero direct competition. Loot and combat and dwarves and elves and Pip-Boys? Dime a dozen. It's actually not just games. See also music, where there are few omnipresent superstars still left that everybody and their cat owns a record of. And rather, everyone tends to build their own streaming playlists, tailored towards them specifically. The market here too has exploded so much that everybody will eventually find something fit to their tastes. (Over 19,000 games released on Steam alone in 2025). One thing is clear though: Chasing trends with dev cycles of 4-7 years ain't gonna cut it. By that point that trend is long old hat. And everybody else chasing it as well may have already picked up what was left of all the buzz once you're finally ready to ship yourself. :D

It's certainly not an unusual length for RPG-Likes that try to be HUGE ASS 100+ hour GAMES (see Kingdom Come 2, Starfield, BG3....) As said, it's one of Obsidians own main objectives to now cut that down to three, four years. Speaking about MS' profit targets, I'm sure they're calculacting that in, but: Pricing a game, any game at 70-80 bucks whilst making it available on Game Pass isn't promoting that game. It's promoting Game Pass first and foremost. Not sure about you guys, but games at that price point have to REALLY win me over (which increasingly fewer of these risk averse big budget games desperate to cater to everyone and their pet hamster do). Else I'd rather buy 2 great indie games and a glorious Pentiment (and still have money to spare for snacks and drinks on top of it). What Raf Colantonio said. Xbox Game Pass ‘damaging’ the game industry, former Xbox dev says inXile's Clockwork Revolution is likely going to face a battle too.

Not only Feargus.... Apparently Chris Parker et all were pushing for it too. That had carried over for far longer though. Avowed wasn't supposed to just channel Obsidian's inner The Elder Scrolls -- it was supposed to do that AND be multiplayer on top of it. If dev cycles and processes wouldn't be an issue, they wouldn't be talking now about trying to shorten them to three or four years as one of the main commitments. From Bloomberg: A few successes later, Urquhart and his co-founders were in talks to sell the business to the company that had almost killed it. During the negotiations with Microsoft, Obsidian’s executives assembled a slideshow presentation for the concept that would become AVOWED, pitched as an ambitious cross between megahits The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Destiny that would allow players to battle monsters together in a massive fantasy world. It was an impressive if unlikely proposition. “My thought when I first saw it was, ‘I don’t think there’s a team on the planet that could execute on this,’” says Josh Sawyer, Obsidian’s studio design director. Two years later, Obsidian stripped out the multiplayer feature, and a year after that it assigned a new director to the project. By the time AVOWED came out, it had been in the works for nearly seven years. Also pretty curious how Feargus now wishes that MS would allow for risky and/or smaller projects to be made still, when it was Josh Sawyer who had to once again (see Project Eternity) battle hard with Feargus to get Pentiment off the ground. He even considered to leave had it fallen through. Credits where credits are due: Back at Interplay, when Feargus suggested to a then little known company called Bioware that they better make their next project a D&D game, he struck Gold. No less as no decent big D&D game had come out in many years before. Otherwise, he really doesn't strike me as somebody that should get too deeply involved on the creative side of things (the other founders aren't as regularly "visible" with wonky decisions, as Feargus is pretty much the public face of Obsidian, but who knows...) You know who should be in charge of all things creative? Whoever came up with the initial idea for say Grounded. Not only does that game cater to a specific niche rather than trying to be a little bit of everything for everyone: "It's ELDER SCROLLS MEETS OBSIDIAN MEETS DESTINY!" (Scope issues aside: A game made for everyone is a game made for no one). Grounded, unlike most recent Obsidian games, also has a distinct hook that nobody else on the market has: "Oh LOOK! It's Honey I Shrunk The Kids -- THE GAME!"

That said: Even the greatest games in the world may struggle to find an audience if they're pitched to the public like canned tuna rolling en masse from the factory line. Case in point, TOW2's companion trailer. Bioware-style companions (get companion, unlock backstory and companion quest) are pretty cooked anyway (personal opinion, I know). But what was that? At worst, it's selling blandness without realizing. At best, it's meant to be a joke. However, it is a bad one. As it is always a joke on the designers. Like the one in The Outer Worlds 1 on Monarch, where after a string of boring fetch quests, there's a joke about how fetch quest-y the prior hour all was. Or the one in a gazillion bad adventure games, where after combining stinky cheese with dynamite and cat hair and maple syrup, you get the world's deadliest nuclear bomb. And to top that off, a line of dialogue is promptly rubbing it in of how ridiculous that just was. (There's actually great adventure games to this day, mind). Back to the trailer: Even making a joke about how bland and unremarkable and everyday your companions would be -- that's unlikely to make anybody more excited to spend any time with them. Say what you will about Larian (and I know they're divisive here, not a huge fan of at least DOS myself). But they've nailed how to sell their product. They've even nailed to sell the pitch of 80% of Obsidian (and even Arkane) games in existence. As their entire campaign for BG3 was focused on promoting player expression and could be summarized like this: "Do whatever you like... which may or may not include shagging a bear." Players sharing on TikTok how they'd turn themselves into cheeses to make cheeses boldly go to places no cheese had gone before, or Streamers promoting and sharing the many ways you could handle the Goblin camp in act one -- that got people talking. In the end, it was the perfect storm nobody could have anticipated, naturally. But the message and intent to actually get noticed by a few people was there from the go.

Much respect for surviving in this industry for a quarter of a century -- and then by doing mostly RPG-Likes. But to be honest, Obsidian's management seems to suck a bit also. At least once it gets heavily involved with creative decisions.... which seems too often. Avowed got delayed and rebooted a couple times to hit in 2025 because the founders first wanted their $kyrim-Like in Eora. Then they shifted it all towards multiplayer (the trend of the mid 2010s, see also Bioware and Anthem, Arkane Austin (RIP) and Redfall). Then they decided that all of that wasn't to their strenghts and restarted another time. The Outer Worlds seemed to have started out as a similar shallow sales pitch: "Fallout-Like... in SPACE!" (Legend has it that Feargus kept neglecting Tim Cain's ideas until Cain proposed what Urquhart had been waiting for all along). Tim Cain is certainly on record as saying that the direction given was targeting a more "casual audience". Whether that helped to attract players and keep them excited long-term for mucho sequels, who knows. I'd argue it certainly didn't help the game to leave a more impactful footprint. Given that it's a game of heavy looting, but loot (and ammo) is to be had in such an abundance, it doesn't even matter. Same as with the "stealth", even the quest design seemed to assume an audience that would get lost in their own toilet, with everything being blatantly signposted -- in a game supposedly all about player expression! Nintendo shows more confidence all throughout Zelda than any this. Deadfire balooned in cost and workload because of the management's late decision to include Full-VO, contributing to the initial commercial underperformance. Even Josh Sawyer talked openly about this in a Post Mortem. Hindsight bias in parts, to be fair. As that decision was of course driven by Larian doing full VO at the time and Larian... well look at where they are now. Not sure if there's any truth behind the story about the development of Tyranny and how Paradox money was supposedly used... creatively (so let's not go there). It's too easy to look at the game as a confirmation all itself, given that it never had a proper ending (I still liked Tyranny). And then don't forget the Kickstarter and Pillars Of Eternity that helped saving the company back then. That was initially blocked by management, they were rather hesistant at the very least. Josh Sawyer and Adam Brennecke had to fight hard to get them to agree and give it a go. Later on, they were even threatened to get laid off if they wouldn't have met the final deadline. Seems "just", smacks me as big time disrespectful however, in particular considering how Sawyer had helped in saving management's ass at least once before (see the remarkable development and crazy deadlines of Icewind Dale II at Black Isle / Interplay). TL;DR: It seems that Obisidian is at its best when the creatives have a bit of leeway... Grounded initially was a small team project, Pentiment naturally never meant to be a big money machine, Mask Of The Betrayer a DLC that didn't have the pressure to deliver the revenue of a main release also. And back with New Vegas, it's easy to see an environment where developers could do a little bit more of their thing also. As the mere prospect of doing another Fallout, any Fallout after Bethesda's commercial smash of FO3 must have won Obsidian management over. Here's hoping for more Groundeds and Pentiments and Pillars Of Eternitys anyway... in whichever format!

I upgraded AM4 one last time from an older Ryzen 3 a while ago. Back then, the 5700X3D was still around (for ~200 EUR). As I'm never looking for a higher end experience, this was a no-brainer decision: The 5700X3D thus cost twice as much as the 5600, but is nowhere close to providing twice the performance. X3Ds are great chips if you want the extra performance. But I'm actually surprised that they are so popular. They're clearly sold as enthusiast chips -- and as any enthusiast hardware (RTX 4090/5090 etc.), you're also PAYING extra. Guess that people are figuring that they still have much lower price tags then the best GPUs (true) and just go: "Ah, who cares!" :D And naturally, on AM4, they're now forever the fastest gaming chips around, driving up demand all by itself.

Zen3's still doing pretty okay even without 3D cache. PS5 Pro is still based on Zen2. And the PS6 may be delayed to 2029+... The Real Finewine Strikes Again: Ryzen 5600X, 5700X & 5800XT Revisit Alternatively, do it like me: Say f*ck you to the PC specs rat race and go Indie entirelly --- until KCD3 is out. What lousy deal is it to pay 300% more for 5% better graphics these days anyway? HEAR ME OUT: On tomorrow's market of every game looking as boring as Hollywood and Netflix, pixels as big as Texas are the real treat anyhow. :D

Unavowed. Becuz (pixel) size matters! ❤️ Big props to Dave Gilbert for making a living by telling the stories he wants to tell for twenty years now? This one is also the game where he got a little inspired by Bioware-style companions. Gilbert's never been much of a puzzle guy, but this gives him something toy with. You even get to name your character and can chose an "origin", with the game starting out a little different depending on your choice.

I could upgrade to 48GB now.... All I need is to stick it in. 😱 I'm also considering to quit AAAAAAAAAAAAA gaming entirelly -- and, should there be a title that interests me, play it ten years later, when every toaster can run it (games don't age near as much as they used to, just go back to Dishonored 1+2 to check, you'll see...) Granted, the majority of my games have been the smaller ones for years already (and I wish Obsidian would make more Pentiments too). But there's so many nice people not milking every last drop out of ya. And they have my attention. ❤️ *2GB required!

Tbf, it's the (still) cheaper DDR4. 😄 Bought on a big discount when the news appeared that production would slow down and eventually stop... (Who could have predicted a crisis that makes Asus re-consider AM4 motherboards?)

Did Obsidian predict the memory crisis? 😁 Case in point: TOW2 seems pretty playable with 8 GB of system RAM ("for the most part"). And as you may know, system memory is now as expensive as a graphics card. I'm personally still rocking 16GB (plus a 12GB GPU), by the way. No probs in the likes of Indiana Jones or KCD2 either. Despite having a 32GB kit lying here since early Summer 2025... (ordered on a discount, when news appeared that prodcution of DDR4 would slow down/stop). Placing a bet that 16GB will only become really a "no-no-no" once the PS6 hits. This is a console generation that even has a 10GB machine -- 10GB total: the Series S. Else you're mostly still fine. Except for streaming, extreme modding, Star Citizen and multitasking, that is. There's more memory intensive tasks than gaming either way. But as memory has been mostly dirt cheap for so long, people had stockpiled RAM sticks. In the past 20 years, I never paid more than 50-70 bucks when building a new system equipped with then "recommended" AAA gaming RAM capacity. Not minimum, recommended. So enthusiasts had basically double that -- or more.

There's a question mark behind Arkane's future anyhow... at least for a long-term fan. Not quite sure what Blade is gonna be. As to increasing the system requirements, that's how it's always worked, naturally. The entire AAA industry is basically pushing the latest tech -- you may naturally ask at this point whether anybody would even buy Assassin's Creed like 15 for 80 bucks if not even the gfx would be improving anymore. However, upgrade cycles have gotten slower, as games are being developed with 5 years old tech (consoles) as the base. Gotta be honest, though: I'd rather buy 3-4 15-20 bucks indie games than a blockbuster one these days. Those also tend to be more focused, rather than trying to offer a little bit of everything for no one. Exceptions are projects I want to support or games that I REALLY consider premium. Thing is, outside of production values, the big boys aren't even the "premium" in this industry anymore. All they have is the cash to spend. However, as they are rarely allowed to invest it into anything interesting... I mean, it's worse than Hollywood. Hollywood still finds a slot for at least a del Toro, Burton, Nolan movie. In gaming, it's mostly an endless wave of remakes, remasters, sports games and recycled trends now. Lately even at industry award shows, it was studios that kept some independence / control over their projects that came out superior. Bit of rambling, sorry. But consider this: Even the last "fresh" Rockstar IP was tackled and shaped like two decades ago: L.A. Noire. Development started at Team Bondi in 2004/2005. That's just crazy. Speaking of which, these guys seemed to have one helluva time making their gaming dreams come true. It shows in the game for sure. ❤️

It will go completely unnoticed. As that's what TES has been ever since. 😄

Hopefully the level systems for items and gear won't come back. That was certainly an improvement, but it was down to D&D not dealing in such. It's a part of what made Original Sin play out like a thinly veild combat parcours: If a sword level 3 does like twice the damage of a level 1 sword, not only does that mean you constantly have to trash weapons. It also means that you shouldn't even try beating enemies above your level. Thus every area on every map in DOS had a clear level assignment. Mind you, Original Sin had much more of a combat focus than BG3 in general. I haven't played a major RPG with as little mandatory combat as BG3 in forever, especially the 1st map. Ok, maybe Kingdom Come in a lot of parts. One of Warhorse's biggest prides was showing that you can reach a crowd without every single quest boiling down to bloodshed. The quest design in KCD1+2 is oft deeply rooted in the "mundane" in general. Like picking flowers with the missus. Or looking for a corpse in a pile of sh*t behind the Bylany tavern at 6 AM (and getting a stinky debuff thereafter, with every other NPC reacting badly to it). 😄