Wormerine

Avowed and Outer World2 run on Unreal Engine5 so it will be more demanding to run - I worry how stuttery it's gonna be. I wonder if high graphics card requirements come from VRAM requirements, like with Indiana Jones. It seems Nvidia cleverly throttled available VRAM in all but most expensive GPU, so my rather pricey 3070 will become dated faster than I expected. Eh, I don't think there has ever been much hype generated for any of MS releases - just recently Indiana Jones was arriving like it was meant to flop, and by all accounts it is supposed to be pretty good. There are games that just don't trailer well. The decend chunk of gameplay I saw from previous looked promising. I am saying that, though, as I have intention of checking it on gamepass. I would never have a confidence to drop £60 to buy it on steam (or god forbid £80 to not have to wait to pay).

Back from holidays. Cleaned my PC, did fresh install of Windows, just to clean things up a bit, and bought some more RAM on discount bringing it up to total of 32GB. Time to get back to work: Street Fighter6 - still, playing, still getting better. Still not in Masters. Monster Hunter: World - I have been drifting away from this game. I enjoyed low rank a lot, but now as I am slogging through high rank the grind has been settling in. There are new monsters, yes, but to face some of them I need better gear which means fighting same monsters as before to re-craft same armours, but with higher stats, and also it feels it take far more kills/captures than before to craft said armours. I don’t feel like difficulty added much, beyond a more chaotic battlefield - it just feels like repeat of low rank, and I am just not into it. Still, doing a hunt or two every couple days, but the progress been slow. 4th Deadfire playthrough (this time principi) in preparation for Avowed. Some mods, including xp gain rebalance. Still, liking it a lot, perhaps even more so after taking a lengthy break. Relative lack of interactivity was noticeable after years of playing BG3, but I love the look of the game, and how smooth it plays.

It's Mary Poppins BTW, unless there is a joke here I am missing. Thankfully, Polish translation didn't try to polishise character's name. I hate when they do that.

Yeah, I hope some extra depth will go with it as well. Eh, it is just a trailer. With gamepass there is no way I won't be checking it out anyway.

While I play these days most of my games in english, I do understand to appeal of polish dubbing. I have very fond memories of BG1&2 Polish VO, though due to clunky translation I stick to eng version these days. That said, since RPGs started to use full VO I just haven't seen many games doing full translations. I don't mean to discourage you from asking for Polish VO, I just wouldn't expect it if I were you.

I am not outraged by the price. Diminishing returns law must apply and it makes sense that GPUs get more and more costly to make and sell. I am sure price gauging takes place, but I am also not surprised if they can’t reach a new level for performance without investing unreasonable amounts of money. What I do find unreasonable is the ongoing push for new expensive GPUs and better graphics while benefits stopped being visible to me quite a few years ago. Does God of War2 look better than God of War1? Eh, I suppose but I still think GoW1 looks better than I even need a game to look. We do however see more and more dominant games that aren’t on the cutting edge of graphics, so I wonder how much value there is in pursuing best GPUs. If I can’t run Great Circle well, that’s doesn’t make me happy but I also don’t think like I would be missing on something groundbreaking.

No, but also not bad for “your princess is in another castle” character that she was. I think potential is more important, than what she was in W3. She can be a great new protagonist - but she might as well not be. It’s all about the execution, so it’s up to CDPR to deliver.

Cause look to Disney to see that milking out dans favourite without a story to go with ot doesn’t go that well. Witcher3 wrapped up Geralt as a character. Sure, you could drag him back, but in the best case scenario they would undermine W3. I had three games with Geralt they ended with a high note and CDPR to move forward is a welcome sign to me. According to the interview on FPS podcast Geralt is still in the world, so we will see him, but CDPR is doing to expore a new character. It could be good it could be bad, we will see. Ciri should give them space to try something new. edit. I am quite surprised that there are people who are surprised that Ciri is the protagonist - that should be the most obvious choice for those who played and finished Witcher3. When someone asks „why Ciri” my counter question would be „have you ever played previous games?”

Yeah, I was wondering what you mean by Dodgeroll. My brain already forgot Path of Exile release, and returned to reading PoE as... well PoE.

While overall I see PoE2 as an improvement system wise, per-encounter resources and more limited access to skills for some classes did result in per encounter decisionmaking being more limited. Most of the game tends to revolve around having enough PEN, and everything else is 2ndary. When difficulty is tuned just right, I think it is a good system. It is not until the DLCs that Obsidian was able to dial in combat more, though it has some issues as well (like some encounters going on for far too long). Have you modded the game at all? I could be that the game is simply to easy for you - PoE2 has difficulties keeping up a difficulty curve due to its open world. I tend to use XP mods to make my party less overpowered after initial island, and there is of course Deadly Deadfire for those looking to spice things up. Still, I didn’t find “I am doing the same thing in every encounter” to be as bad in some other games (cough DOS2 cough), but it is not quite as tactically interesting as I think it tries to be. Still I play those games for story and world, and with some XP rebalance mods combat is way better than it needs to be for my purposes.

No kidding, that could actually be fun.

Is it? It looks to me incredibly cynical - like how much more we can recycle and sell. The only thing about this trailer which gives me any faith if "FromSoftware".

That's looks... like more Outer Worlds that for sure. I am looking forward to hearing about the improvements to the combat and/or roleplaying systems, as while I liked OW1 it did feel too shallow for it's length already, so twice as much of Outer Worlds doesn't sound as enticing, even if it is prettier (aka. require pricier hardware to run).

So while Epic, Multiplayer and Immersive Sim isn't what I like hearing together, one a face value I do see a potential appeal. VS encounters from Deathloop were easily the most interesting part in that game, as setting up a competitive thief like experience could be interesting. Of course, multiplayer brings bunch of challenges on top of usual Immersive Sim - netcode and balance - and in general I am rarely compelled by multiplayer games - but will be keeping an eye on this one.

I will always support GOG release, as it is my platflorm of choice when buying. I doubt we will get any confirmation if the game does or doesn't come to GOG until it does. Historically, I found devs to be very cagey about GOG releases even if it turns out the release is days away - I had situations when when asked about GOG I got "we have no plans to release on others platforms" reply, only to buy the game on steam, and than few days later the game releases on GOG. I don't know what's the deal - my guess would be that GOG wants to synchronise release announcement to maximise eyeballs and sales, or perhaps something else is preventing devs from talking about their future plans - but in general, I found that unless game is on GOG, I can never get a comfirmation if there are any plans to release the game there. Eitherway, due to its consumer friendly policies, I don't expect GOG release anytime soon. My plan is to play Avowed through gamepass, and perhaps pick it up sometime later on sale, like I did with Outer Worlds.

That's not accessibility, but anyway. I doubt Avowed will be getting VO localisations outside English language, unless it is very light on dialogues.

Now that’s a real surprise and for me the best reveal of the Game Awards. Solasta was delightful and this looks like it has bigger budget to work with. Hopefully it will help fleshing out combat further, and make narrative a bit less of the afterthought. I am very happy they are sticking with the Ip - I thought that in many ways they struck gold with the first game (creative gold that is).

Well.... one day he will. For now, though, he seems like he is quite happy to do it, as long as there are interesting topics to do. We will see if there will come the day when Mr. Cain will run out of words - he seems pretty good at talking.

Oh, is it worth it? I have a freeslot for NVMe that I haven't filled yet. To be frank, I can't complain about speed load of my classic SSD, so I have been hesitant in upgrading.

It's a subscription service, think Netflix for games. You pay monthly fee and get access to a library of games (and as with subscription services the offer changed depending on what Microsoft licenced - come games come some games go). You download a game using XBOX App and run game's natively on your machine. However, it doesn't come with all the perks that owning a game grants you - it is a closed system, so I don't think modding is possible. And of course, if you stop paying for the subscription you loose access to all the games as well. Still, I found it to be an excellent deal to try games I wanted to play, but didn't particularly care to own. It comes with some big titles, but also quite a few smaller titles that I found worth trying out if not buying out right. I think there is also some cloud streaming service connected to it, but I never looked into it.

Yeah according to digital foundry, while the game does require RT, it is pretty well put together otherwise. According to them texture resolution is precisely what you should tweak depending on your vRAM (for 8GB they recommend Medium for 1080p, and Low for 1440p). On lower spec machines they recommend lowering Shadowns to Medium and hair to Low.

Update - with storm warning in UK, and not much work to do I spent a bit of time bashing my head against Radahn and finally bested him - ended up using help of a trusty Mimic Tear in the 2nd phase. And frankly after after I saw how absurd he get when he is near dying, I can't say I feel bad about it. Fortunately, I lucked out and managed to survive his final onslaught through panicked rolling and gulping any remaining Esuts Flasks that I had. It could have gone either way, but fortunately, once the lad calmed down he went for his heavily telegraphed grab giving me plenty of space to finish him off.

Hmmm, makes me wonder if it wouldn't be worth selling my 3070 (if anyone buys it) and buying something of 40 series with more Vram. That said, there isn't any new release that I must have, but I wonder if slightly better GPU would remain longer viable, than my 3070 which seems to be on the edge of not being good enough.

I am honestly quite interested. For one I love classic Indiana Jones films, and beside that - exploration and puzzles were always my favourite Tomb Raider bits, and after those were mostly exorcised out of the TR franchise it is nice to see Indy pick up the slack (also Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine - I have such fond memories of this clunky game). I am worried if it will run well enough on my rig. It is bad time for me to jump into it - I will be leaving my PC behind soon for holidays, and have too many things going anyway - need to wrap up couple games and finally free up some space. But I probably will be checking it out once I resume my gamepass subscription for Avowed.

I am not sure if easier is the best word - more fair, that's for sure. DS2 (similar to Elden Ring) suffered IMO from a lot of cheap bullcrap. I didn't think DS2 was too hard, I just thought it was full of "gotcha" moments. DS3 went back to telegraphing its intent and when it it jump at you, it was rarely with intent to kill. But there is still, of course, an element of player experience in the genre. The combat model is pretty simple really, as far as player involvement is concerned so skill acquired in one game tend to transfer to another. Speaking of which - I might be burned out of Soulslike as well - that or I just didn't like recent releases. I used quite a few summons in Lies of P - I just didn't feel bosses were worth learning. I am also somewhat stuck in Erdtree - though I think it has more to do with how unreadable enemy attacks are. I am at the final boss - I learned his first phase and am chipping at this 2nd phase. There is so much visual noise that I don't see another option than to die over and over again, and try to learn and memorise proper dodge timings. But I don't think it is entirely me. I did enjoy some parts of Erdtree immensily. Some bosses as well - not as much as DS3, but still. I find a lot of the bosses to be artificial difficult though. Killing you through attacks to which proper defense is unclear, a lot of charge attacks which timings have to be memorised, similar looking attacks with different wind up times to trip you up. I don't know I feel Elden Ring was too much - it overstayed it's welcome, and DLC had far too much repeat for my taste as well.