Wormerine

I don't think anyone posted it yet but a big shakeup at the top of Obsidian's corporate overlord: Phil Spencer is retiring, Sarah Bond is leaving. Matt Booty is still there and gets to be a "chief content officer" while the new CEO job goes to Asha Sharma the president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product. Proof will be in the pudding, but her background doesn't inspire me with confidence. The VergeInside Microsoft’s big Xbox leadership shake-upMicrosoft has a new gaming CEO

Yeah I will be waiting for a discount as well, especially that from the reviews I expect to enjoy the sequel less then the original. It’s also not an in-house port this time around so I will be waiting for specs and more importantly Digital Foundry’s port breakdown as well. Edit. Specs are out: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/death-stranding-2s-system-requirements-have-washed-ashore-and-theyre-pretty-reasonable /Edit. In other news: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/remedys-new-ceo-is-a-former-sports-betting-guy-and-ea-executive-who-aims-to-scale-remedy-in-a-way-that-builds-lasting-value/ I don’t like the sound of that, but with how financially unviable Remedy seems to be some form of downfall is inevitable. Not that being a successful studio saves anyone from being shut down these days I suppose. I hope Control: Resonant will be good. I really appreciate them as a studio, but I also feel they can be highly uneven in their output.

Hellblade2 What an odd… game? Tech demo? After beating the game I am not even sure if the combat is an actual mechanic or bunch of smokes and mirrors. The whole game is somewhat confusing as to what is interactable and what is a cutscene. It’s so inconsistent it really disconnected me from the experience. The story… is that the same team that did the original? S’sS had such a strong vision and purpose, but the sequel while has some promising concepts feels underdeveloped, poorly paced and just not as purposeful.

Heck yeah!

Resubscribed to GamePass to test few things on my new 5070 Ti, so now I am speeding through what I can before the subscriptions runs out. Doom: Dark Ages. It's alright. I loved Eternal but Dark Ages lands for me in D2016 territory - laud, meaty gameplay loop, but in the end somewhat hollow. I really liked it for the first few hours, after than I got a bit bored and irritated with some of its designs. The game's heavily revolves around new shield/parry mechanics and guns feel somewhat 2ndary in this one. Novel at first, but becomes quite repetitive and dull by the end. Still, some interesting ideas. To me Eternal took ideas of D2016 tightened the screws and delivered something special. I feel Dark Ages could use something similar. Otherwise, just putting my 5070 Ti though a ringer. So far I am somewhat underwhelmed. Moving from 3070 it is not quite a jump I was hoping for. Outside few outliers the gains seem smaller then I would have hoped. For the most part games that I could run before, I can run about the same but with prettier settings. Games that run like ass on 3070, still tend to run like ass - either I stick to lower settings and get a bit more consistant framerate, or try to pretty things up and also end up with similar questionable frame drops. So far the only two real game changers were Indiana Jones and Doom Dark Ages - both, I think, were a bit much for 3070's 8GB of vRAM and required heavy visual sacrifices and offered not so great framerate. On 5070 Ti, on the other hand, they look and run beautifully. Something like Outer Worlds2 though - on 3070 I had to turn down the settings and have a hideously looking game that couldn't sustain 60FPS - now I could fine tune something to make me happy, but I am still disappointed by the overall performance. Set things to high with balanced DLSS and it will still dip below 60 FPS - be it 4k or 1440p. It is still and improvement - OW2 and Ninja Gaiden4 were two games I just didn't think my 3070 could deliver on anymore, and they are playable and enjoyable now, but I don't think it bodes well for 5070Ti longevity. Unless GPU truly are reaching a limit of processing power they can deliver. I am happy with my new OLED monitor though. I think a smarter move would be to just get 1440p OLED and wait for a greater breakthrough on GPU front. But hey, maybe if more games like Indiana Jones and D:DA come out it might end up being a worthwhile investment. For the other stuff - so far the conclusion is, if it runs well on 5070 Ti it also run alright on 3070. If it run like ass on 3070, 5070 Ti isn't enough to power through that.

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