Sven_

Tiberian Sun was the first truly "mass hype" I experienced. If you discount the school yard nerd excitement over Zak McKracken as the "not quite sequel" to Maniac Mansion, but that was contained to that, school yard 1980s Commodore nerds. Tiberian Sun though? Was all over the gaming press, the WWW was also a thing already. Germany's PC Games ran specials months before release. Tiberian Sun turned out a pretty alright game (no Starcraft / Warcraft 3 though). But it's also the first that didn't quite live up to all the hype for me. In the end, it was merely another C&C. Even the pre-release screenshots were faked. Some backlash was naturally inevitable. Still, it's..... ok! As to be expected, that commercial is far more "original" and the bolder take tho.

The 3060 only had 12gigs because at the time, the alternative would have been 6gigs (memory interface limitations). And that apparently Nvidia didn't want. So you had this weird line-up where the 60 card had more VRAM than even the 3080 (a model with 12GB launched much later in 2022). Now that 3GB GDDR7 chips are a thing, it may be easier to release 12, 18, 24 GB cards. But yeah, custom models would be actually useful now, if they were allowed to also go with custom memory configurations. Like back then, a 8400GS variant optionally going with more VRAM than the 8800 Ultra (kidding, that was a complete waste, naturally). With a 3070, I'd also try to sit it all out until the PS6, at least the official spec announcement (and build from there). In terms of raw performance, you're still better off than a base PS5 (ca. RX 6700 non-XT, as said) and close enough even to the Pro (ca. 5060Ti). 8GB may mean reduced settings (textures and the like). But they're still officially supported by any game. (Until the PS5 launched, 2+3GB were still supported, even in MS Flight 2020, Red Dead 2, etc.) "Fake" anything has been a thing on consoles since forever. I think with UE5 and the like (and diminishing returns in terms of raw performance), it's here to stay. Actually, Nvidia's CEO proclaimed as such back in 2022ish on a keynote: Raytracing et all is really demanding, so they needed another "breakthrough": DLSS (upscaling, Frame Gen). I'm going to DLSS4 upscale the heck out of the 3060 if needed, as thankfully, even from 720p as the internal base to upscale from (1440 Performance mode / 1080p Quality mode) it's useful now. And Nvidia actually provided the DLSS4 upscaler even for legacy models, including RTX 2.... Nvidia, of all things!

My first encounter with him was in a movie where he popped up alongside Tim Curry, Catherine O'Hara and Joe Pesci. The first cut is the deepest!

Closest estimate I could find. On Youtube, you always find people uploading stuff, I typed "Avowed + i7 8750H". Both of your parts are newer and a tad better. By the way, some devs may consider renaming "low" settings to "efficient". Back on Crysis, picking low was an off-button for shadows, lighting, geometry detail, whatever you picked. Devs in general got a lot better with scaling, so that even on lower settings, the desired image is usually still there. Plus: Digital Foundry often run the comparisons. Sometimes, a medium setting is above console image quality, sometimes below. And occasionally, like in Indiana Jones, the RT lighting on Series X is more simple than on PC even when the setting is put to "low". The only setting on low that would annoy me here on Avowed would be the flickering shadows. But putting them to medium, even high, barely costs performance (see optimization guide). I'm glad that in the past ~15 years, I was mostly using lower end-ish hardware (CRPGs et all rarely release as blockbuster games). Even when I upgraded to the 1050 Ti for Dishonored 2, it immediately tanked to sub 40 fps in the most demanding scenes on med settings (Machine House Entry, A Crack In The Slab with its time travel and multiple levels being rendered simultaneously). Actually, I'm currently trying an FPS lock in the driver settings to check how low I could go and still find fun. Why? I want to keep the 3060 and build a new machine only once the PS6 and its specs are out -- the PS6 is gonna be the base platform for AAAA games until at least the mid 2030s. Plus, 60 to 40 fps is a difference of 50% in extra performance needed for instance -- and that's way more than a generational upgrade brings today. Your 3070 was released in 2020. It's taken half a decade for the **60/Ti series to get (slightly) ahead. By the way, 5060Ti/9060XT levels of performance are what's roughly build inside the PS5 Pro. Base PS5 experience is closer to a ~RX 6700 (non-XT). And Monster Hunter Wilds ain't that stable even on consoles as well. Seems like Resident Evil's RE Engine was never built with vast open spaces in mind, and brute forcing it is rather not ideal (see also Dragon's Dogma 2). All Resident Evil games since 7 themselves have been rather very light on the hardware...

It's funny that Dark Ages is seen as a demanding game. Historically, much like any Doom since the reboot, it's an imposter. I mean, it's released on a Series S! Even my 3060 would still perform hugely better than Carmack era Dooms with much more recent hardware then. And the CPU requirements are low anyway. As for Avowed, this is basically one of the minimum spec GPUs release six years ago. Looks fairly decent. Grounded 2 still seems in a rough shape. But if TOW2's anything like Avowed, I'm personally not even wondering whether I could run Outer Worlds 2, despite running entry hardware released 2021 (Ryzen 5600 / RTX 3060). It may not be a stable 60 fps without upscaling. But then I didn't play TOW with more than 45-50fpsish either on my prior Ryzen 3 / 1050 Ti setup. As said, 30/40 are absolutely still a thing on "affordable" consoles at least on dedicated quality/balanced modes -- plus (dynamic) upscaling. On PC, your pocket's the limit, and Nvidia are pushing the demands for 1,000fps already. Frame Generation or not, that is a THOUSAND frames rendered in every single second. And each of those frames is still getting more complex. Let that sink in for a, well, second. 5,000 Dollars GeForce 6090 GTI Super Mega Hyper Ultra -- when are you gonna release it, Jensen?

I've seen the usual crowd is all over it for all the wrong reasons. To me, it's a bit like a bunch of characters that may happen if you hit the "randomize" button in a Bethesda-style character editor and then take the first decently legit rather than funny option. The trailer also doesn't feature much of any dialogue or interaction, and it's supposed to be a companion trailer. Falls fairly flat to me. Then again, TOW1 overall was kind of a bit "flat" and never risking much. Baby's first Boyarsky/Cain-Like RPG. Pentiment had a lot more spice and flavor. RE: Bad optimization? Do you mean Grounded 2 (saw somebody mention it would be quite demanding, but then it's still Beta)? I think we're partly in a weird transition stage now. For many years, there weren't much leaps made in technological terms. On consoles, you (usually) don't have to worry anyway -- 30/40 frames per second are still a thing here, at least in dedicated quality or balanced modes if available (like in Mafia currently). And on PC, there weren't really any PC showcases. It's all "multiplatform games", FPS unleashed on PC -- and the sky (and your pockets) are the limit. Nvidia seem to have realized this, they aren't promoting 1,000Hz/1,000fps screens for fun, they see business opportunity. Now there's a bit of raytracing (the mandatory bits of it not really demanding, see Indiana Jones or Doom). Oh, and UE5 with its Lumen. But it seems both inexperienced developers as well as Epic are still not quite there. That's the tradeoff when always using the latest tech: It's inevitably also the least tested. There also seems a confusion on PC: Whilst consoles have used (dynamic) upscaling for years, on PC too it was always meant to be mandatory for now, if going by Jensen's words. Still, all recent titles are still running on hardware 5, 6 occasionally 7, 8 years old. Personally, I'm curious as to when whether games are going to be consumed the same way as movies. The point at which a critical mass doesn't care about how much older a release is than what's currently out (few would skip on Alien/Aliens in favor of some vanilla Hollywood flavor of the week monster ride just because those are "old" movies). In a way, it's already happening. As outside of games pushing actual photo realism, there's diminishing returns. Grounded ain't such a game pushing for the realism. Much like the upcoming Borderlands 4. And to an extent, also The Outer Worlds 2...

Then again, recently taken a look at pricing in the "good old times" over the longer term, e.g. loss of value over time. If you'd bought a 8800 GTX Ultra at the peak of the price and tech advancement wars, but a couple months later you could have purchased it new for like half of whatever you bought it for, no kidding. You can take a guess what that means when you decided to sell again and to upgrade... The same goes for any card during those years. My 3060? Is still sitting less than -30% off its MSRP in shops despite being released in early 2021. 3080s still sell for decent money on used markets as well. And the real pros more recent sold their years used 4090s with a net profit, despite no Covid nor Crypto craze in sight. Thus, a historical first in the history of PC hardware: people coming out richer some time after buying enthusiast hardware than before doing it. Plus, there's an entire generation now that doesn't even know how actually demanding real PC show cases used to be. Even trying to run those things on hardware released two, let alone six years earlier would have seen you laughed out of the room. Ok, this is Borderlands and no Crysis. But still. Where was I? AH: That new Outer Worlds 2 companion trailer seems fairly vanilla, in particular in terms of character designs and traits. One is a robot, I guess... and that's it what sticks for now. But then, the RPG inside the RPG is what counts!

Gaming's Last Action Hero chimes in. Arkane Studios Founder Brands Game Pass 'Unsustainable' and 'Damaging' - Insider Gaming I think Gamepass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade, subsidized by MS’s “infinite money”, but at some point reality has to hit. I don’t think GP can co-exist with other models, they’ll either kill everyone else, or give up.

Watching your opinions getting reaffirmed on Youtube is one helluva drug.

Still Arcanum... The dungeons here are really bad, they make even Owlcat's look almost lovingly handcrafted pieces of tunnel crawling art. But yeah, one does not simply play Arcanum for the combats. It's for the setting, the concepts (both in systems and world design) and that unique soundtrack, though it gets a bit repetitive due to its lack in tracks.

“Not every game is for every single person. Sometimes you have to pick a lane” - The Outer Worlds 2’s director on meaningful role-playing consequence and banning respec https://www.rpgsite.net/interview/1...ctor-interview-respec-rpg-choice-consequences# https://www.gamesradar.com/games/rp...e-can-stealth-properly-through-each-location/ Obsidian learning a lesson here? What's omitted of course is that respecing et all wasn't necessary in the first game either way. It was too Vanilla RPG: Can't Do No Harm (or Interesting) Edition for that. And it was certainly one of those games that tried to please (almost) every single person. Aka being scared of chosing a lane and committing to that. However, with even big IPs such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Age underperforming by going that "scared cat" kinda route of not committing to anything (including their respective IP's legacy), there may be a shift in strategy. One even approved of by upper management. May be wishful thinking on my part, of course.

This just in: How Warhorse tricked the system -- the full story of how Czech Mates managed to successfully pitch Dungeons&No Dragons to them releasing KCD2... In a digital space of following trends and chasing larger audiences at ANY cost, Kingdom Come is the kind of project that is giving me gaming hope.

Looking at midrange GPUs now going for 600+ bucks and there being no end in sight: It's not all bad when you are looking for alternatives. It wasn't in 2023+2024 already! Drova - Forsaken Kin bei Steam SKALD: Against the Black Priory bei Steam Plus some Josh luvin' of course: Pentiment bei Steam

Considering that New Vegas has (in the long-run) turned out to be the no.1 fan favourite, even amongst those who started with FO3, I'm actually somewhat hopeful. So many games doing spectacularly well that according to industry wisdom shouldn't have, helps -- whereas vice versa, those that went with perceived wisdom often times struggled. Or at least: failed to set the world on fire even if they set out to do so. Generally, a lot of industry people still seem to act as if it was 2005, and young males playing plenty Gears Of War and Call Of Duty on Xbox was the only big crowd to convince and go after. Speaking of which: The Outer Worlds 2 hands-on preview: There's a chance this is Obsidian's greatest game, and the best shooter of 2025 | GamesRadar+

Minus the benefit of a rewarding character system and costumization of course (par for the course for Bethesda since). The "seamless" exploration (like a fantasy themed Elite). The lovely bunch of 320x200 pixels. And the dungeon complexity -- to be fair, as everything in Daggerfall was RNG, any seemingly simple "fetch my slippers" quest to get 10xp could lead to a multi-level hellhole putting POE's Endless Paths, Ultima's entire Underworlds plus Skyrim's Blackreach combined to shame. Like: "All I wanted to do is fetch the slippers and now I can't find the exit no more." @Lexx Yeah, and the lack of consequence is actually by design... Raw size and scale is all what matters to them. FO3 still tried SOME of it. But overall, it's one of the big tragedies of the 21th century that Bethesda landed Fallout. An IP once reknown for coining the term "choice&consequence", right from character creation to technically being able to walk right to the big bad and talk him out of it -- THE END. No more.

This is a stance clearly taken by Bethesda games, which consequently have well earned their "wide as an ocean, deep as a p*ss pot" tagline. (And as Starfield had replaced the distractingly beautiful work of their world and art team for procedurally generated specks of dust and greys at the arse of the universe: Everybody got to finally see it.)

Arcanum. Never actually finished it. This time, I might -- with a Necromancer Elf that made a pact with the devil. And is as beloved throughout Arcanum (or most of it) as hemorrhoids. PS: I don't want to crap on The Outer Worlds too much. It's not a "crap game". Still: How do you go from this to The Outer Worlds, where perks as exciting and game changing as "+10% to damage" or "+5lbs to carry weight" rule? I have a few suspicious. But still, it's one thing to try to make something more accessible, widespread industry process and no. 1 priority since ca. 2001. It's another to turn it into something as bland and vanilla as frozen burger patties sold en masse at Walmart.

That was me and Bioware, like ca. post NWN. One of the reasons I didn't buy into Avowed... I may one day, but it has a very Bioware feel to it. And that's not a route I'd want. From its production chasing market trends (Phase 1 -> Phase 2 -> reboot) to where it eventually seemed to have ended up. "Moar action" had been Bioware's answer to everything for two decades, after all: "When you press a button, something awesome has to happen." Germany's GameStar liked it, but they described the game's strengths as rather atypical for Obsidian as well. I understand that Obs were unsure where to go with Eora after Deadfire. But I'd hoped for something bigger into RPG, and be it say a Vegas or Bloodlines-Like. Or a Skyrim with actual depth to it, like systems proper and consequences to your actions (and a more condensed game world that would have been manageable). Of course, the push for multiplayer during the mid to late 2010s had poisoned many a well, see also Arkane and Redfall... I think it's a good thing that some of the bigger successes in recent years have shown to have some system depth to them (like KCD2, BG3, et all). Like them or hate them, these are projects that weren't scared to carry their RPG tag proud and loud. That doesn't mean that every game needs to be super indepth. But the vice versa applies also. I have a feeling the super compressed action/adventure/RPG-Like space may solve a few things here all by itself. Even Ubisoft can't do without some looting and leveling anymore, after all. You're walking into a super crowded room here. Meanwhile a Belgian dude in armor can walk right in, and turn heads simply because there's nobody quite like him in there.

Finally put some ca$h into purchasing The White March, my final piece of the puzzle. (Bought both PoE 1+2 immediately upon release each.) A choice made for capitalism by capitalism.

About to have my first rendezvous with lovely Ravel in PS: Torment since.... 15, 20 years? Any tipps on what I should get her? Chocolates? Flowers? My heart ripped out and put on a silver plate? May continue with another run of Fallout 2 next. Records of this Pip-Boys orgy inspired me to think about it.

Well it's a horror game (and a well done remake, should have added it). Personally I was getting aquainted early (the Amiga version had so much better music tho). Well, it did have one. But at times you got the feeling they first started out with a Best Of horror (kinda like Waxworks from above!) and the rest came after. I think the second game actually lost a bit when it went into more of a typical (thriller) story. In the first game, you never knew what would happen next ... or where you would be taken to. That was messed up, but in a good way.

Resident Evil has effectively been a corporate mascot, a brand name, a branding under which a corporation gathers and sells whatever it sees as the most profitable. Zombies, werewolves, presidential daughters, 10 feet booby women, explosions, cheesy dialogue, quick time events and pushing rocks — under this corporate Umbrella, anything goes. Because as long as all that nonsense is being sold with a Resident Evil™ tag on it, someone's gonna bite. The only really legitly good entries from my end were 1+2 and 7. I can accept 4 though, although it was a really big departure from the rest until that point and all its tonal cheese. Still, if Capcom would be in the Hollywood business rather than gaming, half of those games+spin-offs would have been trashed the same way as a Michael Bay movie -- or the dumb sequels to Jaws or The Terminator. They aren't in Hollywood though, but gaming. And in gaming, professional critics like or at least tolerate everything, for as long as it's not bugged to crap (proof: count the major releases with a Metascore below 50 or even 60). Still curious for the 9th entry, as every once in a while, Capcom still seems to find something (see RE7, first half of it anyway). PS: I quite liked The Evil Within also, if that counts.

Biggest flaw of the first game. You have this premise -- and then you play it this safe and family friendly that quests basically solve themselves, perks are mostly fairly uninteresting (+10kg to carry weight, +20% to melee damage, wow), the capitalism=bad joke is fairly light and on repeat -- and one planet was basically Chinese MMO central (Monarch, with tons of fetch jobs and copypaste mobs of enemies, ADVICE: invest in running speed and just run past the ****ers, they're tedious). I chuckled at the board computer though, there's a few decent places and from the raw elements, it's 100% my type of game. The execution was just fairly vanilla overall by Obsi standards... Almost like a proof of concept. Still have to try the DLC admittedly, which are said to have improved a few things already. Still, Pentiment was the actually passion project that had been bubbling in the mind of someone for years. Whereas legend has it that for TOW Feargus tasked Tim with pitching game ideas -- and kept rejecting all of them until Tim called him to suggest what Feargus had been waiting for all along: "Fallout.. in space!" And the difference shows either way. Watching the full direct on TOW2 now, as with a sequel and more money, there's a chance it's all evolved beyond that.

80 bloody bucks for TOW2!!!!!!!!!1 The push for Game Pass gets harder still. edit: Just wanted to create an opportunity to bring in Tim Curry, mind. I think the price rages regarding games are pure first world luxury, as there's an abundance of offers and choices everywhere, every day of the week, month, year. Mount Everests Of Shame exist for reason, after all. Hooray for the capitalism... I guess.

The two million (or hopefully 20) bucks question: Did they fix the camera? Or rather: cameras? Thief is also back... again. This time, it's VR. Thing is: VR would be actually one possible sensible evolution of Thief. Looking Glass tried to approach VR way back right with Ultima Underworld -- just not via clunky headgear of that time. But via the software. The minimalist HUD by the time of Thief. The zero cutscenes during gameplay policy. The incomplete in-universe maps Garrett would aquire from associates rather than blindly following markers gameloop. The mostly open sandbox type of levels, with AI and players able to roam. The quite advanced physics and sound for that era. And the movement, including being able to freely lean, to crouch, to jump, to swim -- that wasn't a mistake. That was by design. "We were trying to build the holodeck". https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/system-shock-the-oral-history-of-a-forward-thinking-pc-classic However, as the reboot missed literally *all* of that before, consider me doubtful for now. I'd be more confident if this gig went to Wolfeye Studios or Arkane -- studios that "get" the basics, as they're partly consisting of Looking Glass, Origin and Ion Storm alumni.