Wormerine

Meh, I am sure there are many factors. What I have been wondering is the sheer size Obsidian has grown. About 10 years ago they were a minimal crew relying on crowdfunding to make Pillars1. Now, they are what - a 200-300 studio working on multiple projects at once? Both big and small. That's a lot of cultural shift to go through, with a lot of new hires, training to do etc. All things considered Obsidan has done pretty well so far. While I didn't love Avowed, I thought there were things to enjoy in there, I hear good things of Outer Worlds2, Grounded did really well, and Pentiment is at the very least a critical darling. So in all - I don't think they had a bad run so far.

Well, yeah, but Avowed I thought has a bit of "Anthem" syndrome of "is that what have you been working on for 7 years?" There is making a behemoth of a crowdpleaser for 5-7 years, and there is making a 2 years in development game for 7 years with multiple reboots. I know nothing of profit margins, but according to articles 30% is highly unusual, with 20% being more common. As to Avowed - I am a bit surprised as initially I thought the world from Obsidian was that it did about as well critically and commercially as they expected. Perhaps the expectation was for it to have better legs then it did.

Rock Paper ShotgunThe Outer Worlds 2 sounds like it's not getting a follow-...Obsidian have revealed they aren't working on The Outer Worlds 3,but have plans to make more games in Avowed's fantasy setting Eora.1) releasing three games within same year: Not their intention, and don't want to do it again. 2) Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 didn't meet Microsoft's sale targets 3) No Outer Worlds3 in development 4) more titles in the setting in Eora - whenever it is Avowed2, Pillars of Eternity3 or something else entirely.

Alternative title “Why we can’t have nice things”. Tax write off is an interesting bit I didn’t know about.

Yeah, in the end of I will want to upgrade it comes down to overpriced m4 chip, vs m5 chip motherboard and RAM. I would be happy with £200, less so with £300-£500 for used 5700 and 58003d. My 5600x is mostly enough for 5070Ti fortunately.

Yeah, there are only few titles for which CPU is a bottleneck (Cyberpunk being one of them). I wish Ryzen would resurrect m4 3d chips, but I am good as it is. A friend of mine convinced me to double down on my irresponsible spendings and swap my 27inch 1440p IPS for 32inch 4k QD-OLED. Visual gains vary from game to game - games with a lot of dark and contrast benefit the most from OLEDs true darks. One thing which surprised me is how little performance gap there is between 2k and 4k thanks to DLSS - In 1440p anything below quality preset would be noticeable and even quality sometimes showed some ugly bits. With 4k though, I can easily use balanced and have a better image quality then I did in 1440p, and on performance it seems to be more or less on par with quality in 1440p. I was a bit disappointed with the performance I was getting with my 5070 Ti when I turn raytracing on in Cyberpunk and Alan Wake2. I mean it is mostly playable now, but still seems like mostly novelty feature for high end GPUs. To compare I resubscribed for a month to GamePass to try the mandatory Raytracing games: Indiana Jones and new Doom. Both look stunning and run like butter. Unless I turn on Pathtracing - Pathtracing cuts my framerate by 2/3rds. Eh, I will see with time if it was a wise investments or if the RAM panic will blow over and I have overspend for an unpgrade I didn’t need just yet. The screen is nice though. Probably will enhance my experience more overall than the GPU.

Alex is looking fantastic but still two months of wait....

Sooooo..... I am full of ****. Those reports on RAM shortages, potential discontinuation/limited restocking of 5070 Ti, and potential price hikes of consumer GPUs got to me, and when I saw a very modest discount on a 5070 Ti, I jumped a gun and bought one. I have few weeks to ponder whenever to send it back or not, but am leaning toward keeping it. 5070Ti should keep me going for the next few years, while 3070 is clearly struggling with 1440p when Raytracing is required. Only sad, that I missed discontinuation of AMD's 3D processors for M4 socket. It seems that if I will want to beef up my CPU, I will have to switch the motherboard as well. That's a problem for another day though.

6 characters releasing every month for the next half of the year. More coming this year? Eitherway, it's quite a flex. And what an SNK thing to do, to undercut this powerplay with a terrible AI slop trailer. All that is left to do, is to reveal the two hidden characters as Saudi mandated guests that no one wants in the game.

lol. It seems some folks looked at Vault-Tec and saw it as an inspiration.

And update on Rockstar vs Employees. At least some of those claims seem rather dodgy to me:

I think it should be Microsoft - Sierra got bought my Activision, Activision got bought by Microsoft. Unless Arcanum IP was owned by more then just Sierra. Do we really want Arcanum sequel though? I don't think original creators are naive enough to attempt a sequel that would do justice to Arcanum's ambitions. As much as I hate to say it, the only dev I could imagine tackling Arcanum2 is Larian, and I would rather have them stay away from the rest of my beloved IPs. 😅

Yeah, I am happy to wait for an upgrade until a game I really want to play comes out. I did love building a new PC and having an insane backlog of quality titles to go through. Dishonored2 being one of them, and it still deserves more playthroughs then the one I gave it. Still waiting for a lot of Sony sequels to come down in price.

I did buy and install extra two 8GB sticks, adding my total RAM to 32. I am kinda glad I did it now.

Time to play a game: “let’s overanalyse each word that comes from Tim’s mouth to try to figure out what he is working on at Obsidian: 5:00 1) Tim knows I am watching and is too smart to reveal he is working on a new IP 2) Tim works on existing IP 3) Tim works on a new IP, but it is not his. I still know nothing.

Well, BG3 spend 5ish? years in EA, so it checks out. Good luck with Act2. My 1st playthrough stopped there, I slogged through it in 2nd playthrough, and two consequent attempts stopped in act2 as well. I don't think you need to do all of its content to progress, and I wonder if my completionist mindset works against me in that act. It is soooo big, and narratively rather static.

Strange, It says it supports windows10. I was initially to suggest Linux, as BG3 has apparently a pretty great Linux support, but it seems GOG doesn't support Linux? Laaaame

If AI could truly think for itself, wouldn’t it just develop its own biases and bull****? AI is a human creation and it will be controlled and influenced by people. It is not and will not be an all knowing, all-wise and fair god.

Well, also Fallout1. Still, I fundamentally don’t understand why the common need for “you do this now or you DIEEEEE. Also here is a world full of sideactivities to explore.” I mean I do get it. Universal thread of destruction is an easy narrative hook for a custom protagonist. It still just doesn’t make sense. Surely, your hook should be about exploration and discovery, and reason to engage with the world, not the opposite. Obsidian usually is good with this stuff, though I felt both Pillars did have this issue as well.

ok, finished Silksong. 100% completion, all achievemnents unlocked, but 4 ones speedrun and ironman related. I liked it very much. I have nitpicks, though a lot of it is related to optional content so I don't know how to feel about it. Some 100% requirements I thought were unreasonably tedious or obscure, but then again, it is completely optional to do so 🤷‍♂️. I am sure someone figuring some things out, for me it was googling things out once I run out of ideas and went "how the heck was I supposed to find that?!". Not as good of a metroidvania as Hollow Knight, but much better action-platformer. Loved movement, really liked combat. Most bosses are excellent, few are tedious. Ah, I wasn't too fond of act3. The bosses that become available there are great, but overall I am not sure of the new content available there required an entire new act3. Then again, I thought Castlevania's reverse castle was a bit lame as well.

Well, maybe. If your story is "I have a ticking bomb and need to solve it ASAP", then I would say you either create a linear adventure that will support this story, or create more open adventure that still forces player to hurry and move forward. I just don't think urgency and here is massive world full of optional content mesh together. Neither is a bad choice, and I just don't those two choices go well together. And of course, various games suffer from it in various ways. That a problem is common, doesn't make it non-existent, and if you make narratively centric game, it sticks out if the experience of playing the game doesn't support said narrative - at least it does to me. If game builds up someone to be a powerful being they should be a difficult fight. If the game builds up something as urgent, at least it should provide narrative excuse as to why we might want to get distracted. I am not saying that such flawes make a game automatically terrible, but it might negatively impact the experience for some looking to get immersed in the story.

ha! Yes, I forgot how annoying the itemization was in D:OS2. I didn't watch the video, so am just replaying to your post. Even back in a day when Baldur's Gate2 was in my mind the gold standard for everything that is right and good, the dissonance between main quest urgency and what I thought was the intended and enjoyable way of playing the game stand out as a flaw. By principle, I believe that game's narrative should be tied to a gameplay exerience - if the narrative requires swift forward, gameplay should at the very least encourage it as well. If you go for laidback do what you want experience - come up with the scenario that supports it. I get that devs want movie like hook propelling things forward, but at least to me, it hurts it more in the long run. It forces me as a player to ask myself a question: "is the threat presented by the game narratively real or a facade", and I just don't think it's in games best interest to have me think that. That said, I didn't think Cyberpunk2077 was a particularly bad example of that, but it did roll my eyes every time V got "worse" after progressing main story a bit. It was just a bit too obvious that his condition doesn't exist unless one does very specific quests. I didn't find C77 story very effective, but that wasn't a part that suck out to me. To me Baldur's Gate3 was a far, far, far worse offender. In C77 there might be a bit of dissonance between the game's story and players affinity for side content but in BG3 the characters didn't seem to decide if they have a ticking bomb in their heads or not.

It will be interesting to see what they will keep from D:OS and D&D and what they will change.

Oh comeon, I don't think I have encountered a single trap like that. Though I did spent most of the evening banging my head against Karmelita yesterday. To be fair, it's been a while since I played so I am a bit rusty, and my stick drift does muddy up my execution.