Hawke64

For what it's worth, Frogwares managed to get the rights to their title back from Nacon, so I hope that Spiders will recover, unlikely may it be. Eurogamer.netFrogwares now sole publisher of The Sinking City followin...Ukrainian studio Frogwares is now the sole publisher of Lovecraft-inspired detective adventure The Sinking City.

Well, this is an excellent opportunity to test how long Steam can go offline. I did not expect the developers to actually mean it, but free stuff of the free-stuff-appropriate quality is welcome. I've finished the first 2 areas as of now. The game looks and runs worse than the original, has some odd QoL gaps (the over-the-shoulder camera and the interactive items highlight*), and the companion AI is not helpful, but everything else is fine (the controls are rebindable, the saving is actually good, the story and combat are there). The 30GB of the "highres" bloat can be removed only after downloading, like it was with Steelrising, but at least it is 1 file and can be binned without breaking things. It is disappointing to see what the publisher reduced the studio to. *the last time I had to continuously hold a key to move the camera was with NWN2. Regarding the highlights, it is hard to see anything without it on due to the excessive amount of visual noise and the upscaling (still present even if the Disabled option is chosen). Like, it's the basics of visual design - the player needs to see things, and they still failed it. But the volumetric fog and ray-tracing are in and the performance (on Steam Deck) is poor (<30FPS).

Veil of the Witch He's right. We need to increase our numbers to 9 and only then take on the undead army.

I've tried the demo of the stand-alone spinoff of The Lost Eidolons, the Veil of the Witch. The improvement in the visual design and UI are remarkable. The characters are distinct and recognisable, with a wide breadth of active and passive abilities and a good pace of upgrades, the UI and animations are expressive and quick, and the dialogues are concise and on point with the options to ask for more information. I love that the avatar is nameable and the appearance is slightly customisable. While I prefer more hand-crafted encounters and controlled upgrades, the overall experience feels like an enormous improvement over the first game. The demo offers about 2-3 hours of gameplay, the starting party, and 1 boss, so I hope to purchase it on the next sale (unless I forget). In the original game, I have reached Chapter 17 and the tier 3 classes.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/a-handful-of-bottlenecks-remain-for-morrowind-remake-mod-skywind-but-its-still-progressing-steadily-towards-release https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/morrowind-in-elden-ring-mod-is-now-mostly-playable-despite-the-fact-its-creators-entire-existence-has-been-consumed-with-interpreting-gibberish-code It is good to see several different fan remakes of Morrowind being worked on. Though, the ER one is much further from completion.

Lost Eidolons The loading screen looks nice until you start seeing the bending blades on the left. The MC generally attempts humour. The models are class-dependant. So the plated armour looks like a vest. They look too samey and I do not mean the background troops. Flattering. I was a Teenage Exocolonist (demo, bought the full game but have not played it yet) The options are good to have, though quick saving and no RNG would have been better.

I am somewhere mid-game in Lost Eidolons. It is a turn-based tactical game in a fantasy setting. It is generally playable, the controls are rebindable, the saving is functional, the writing is readable (as in coherent and grammatically correct). There are some interesting systems, such as Aides (a party member who does not participate in an encounter provides passive bonuses to another who does and gains XP) and the ability to explore the camp with the over-shoulder camera. It is also possible to teleport around via the map. The combat itself is rock-paper-scissors, with what beats what being shown in the lower right corner at all times. There are also some terrain effects and magical status effects which can work together. Now, there are a few issues that annoy me. The most noticeable one is that the character models look generic (and the characters of the same class look almost identical) and the general palette is the grey-brown of the 00's shooters. On the lower resolutions, it is quite hard to see the UI icons, while most portraits, as mentioned, are too similar to tell apart. There is an incredible amount of small talk and fetch quests with little to no player's input. Even with the in-camp teleportation and skipping, it still takes a lot of time. The character development system is functional - gain enough XP in the relevant skills and the class will unlock, the problem is that the high-tier classes and skills are locked behind the main story, so I've had the party maxed out for the last 5 or so chapters (I am at 14 of 27). As a character cannot carry an arsenal or switch between armour suits in combat, I do not understand why I would want my Barbarian-to-become to learn throwing fireballs. The story itself is generally decent (a mercenary company accidentally offs a local lord and decides to join the rebels to avoid persecution by the Empire) and the MC is a generic Chaotic Good MC with a few points in CHA. Despite the opening mission spoiling the main antagonist, it is interesting to see how it gets to that point. In terms of performance, I have not noticed FPS drops or crashes, but the game occasionally runs hot. I've had one hardlock when I tried to skip an enemy turn. Probably, I would have had a better experience if I did not play right after Symphony of War (better visual style, more complexity and variety), but I also would not have played now if I had not played SoW.

I have finished the Symphony of War DLC missions. There was quite a decent variety of missions and new units - the ones accessible earlier were noticeably easier while the later ones provided a decent challenge. The new units generally enhanced the performance of the existing squads, as I did not want to create a full necromancer squad and could not find enough War Cats. I guess, the main appeal of the DLC would be the NG+ mode. While it does not allow to carry over everything (the units are possible to repurchase for the new currency, Memory Crystals, but they start from level 1), it allows to customise the experience further than the base difficulty options. In terms of story, it provided some interesting lore, but it did not anyhow affect the main game or the ending. I have also found a guide which explained what I suspected - same units attack the same row, so having mixed squads is preferable to the single-type ones.

A few titles I was interested in are available on Fanatical for £2.25 - 3.00 each (I probably will repurchase them on GOG if they are good). https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/build-your-own-fantasy-worlds-bundle

I find it deeply ironic to complain about the Obsidian distribution decisions on their official forums. Nonetheless, removing the better-optimised version is remarkably customer-unfriendly, even if I own it on GOG (and EGS) and there is nothing Obsidian/MS can do to mess it up. I remember thinking that it was great that Obsidian did not shove the "upgrade" bloat onto the original game's owners and I am sorry to see that it has changed now. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1920490/view/694259874864824927?l=english On a similar note, the Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo (STJV) union calls to boycott the publisher whose actions led to the closer of one of its developers. https://www.stjv.fr/en/2026/04/spiders-liquidation-a-tale-of-social-destruction/ Regarding DRM, if the access to the software I have purchased can be cut off on some exec's whim, then my inclination to pay rapidly decreases.

I think I had seen the other Dancing Dragon games before purchasing SoW, but they seemed like more generic RPGMaker games and I quite strongly dislike the JRPG combat in them. There are some exceptions (Crystal Tactics and Trans Theft Horso), but most go with the defaults. Could you please let me know what you liked and disliked about the Dancing Dragon titles?

Got the Soul Reaver remake. It looks like I imagined the original. I have little recollection of the combat and the story (got cooler than the boss => got kicked into a whirlpool => must get revenge), so it is nice to rediscover them. The lack of the thumb mouse button support is less nice, but generally fine. Regarding updates, I suppose my main issue is that now purchasing a game on release is effectively being a paying beta-tester, while each and every patch breaks things and, in the case of Steam, prevents you from playing. Mind, previously, what was broken stayed broken, so you could end up with a non-functioning or incredibly buggy game, but the current approach encourages the developers to release MVP and patch later. Thus, unless you really know and love the particular developer, waiting for at least a year or two usually provides a better experience. On the other hand, e.g., the Eternal Strands devs removed the DX11 support in one of the patches and rolling back on anything but Steam is impossible. That is to say, the experience can get worse and the game can become just unplayable. May UE5 be sunsetted. Symphony of War, the DLC. There is a decent variety of missions, though they do not continue the main story and are various side missions (happening before the main story). I guess, however cheesy the main story was, I did appreciate it existing. Still, the main squads can be deployed there, so it is a good way for the lower level ones to gain XP, as the missions are mostly easier (not all, but most so far). Some bits are odd, e.g. some characters are shown as knowing each other, but it was never shown in the base game.

I partially agree with your statement. The natural languages are heavily patterned, while most of the human knowledge is recorded in text, including the descriptions of the properties of various physical objects. The LLMs know that in the sense of having this data and building the relationships between various words, so they do have internal representations of concepts. They obviously cannot have it as personal physical experience in the same way as humans. However, the actions and feedback are included in the reinforcement learning and the user interactions (if the incorrect responses were rated higher than the correct ones, it can lead to issues). Programming languages and study materials tend to be more structured than random texts, so LLMs work better with them. You also do not need from your pair programmer whether they have a cold or if they are hungry or what they think about dogs (unless you are really bored). It's nice if they remind you to stay hydrated, but they do not need to experience it physically themselves (neither does a calendar reminder which is easier to set up). Therefore, they can be fit for the particular purpose. Well, given the wide adoption of Claude, they are. Here is to hope that the developers can understand the code they ship. However, as you've said, LLMs (and humans) can be wrong and cannot be held accountable for their errors (nor can some humans unless you consider Luigi Mangione to be inspirational, but, again, it's a more of a systemic social issue and not directly related to LLMs). Therefore, ideally you would not want either in the decision-making position. I agree that the tools should be fit for purpose and the job market can be challenging to navigate. I personally find filling the application forms with multiple popup menus on an external website to be more annoying, especially when the exact same information is in your CV and they cannot even scrape that correctly. One would hope that it'd discourage competitors, so the resulting pool is lower. Overall, the first rounds of interviews are to find the more suitable candidates and tend to be outsourced to the people who know little of the field you are to be working in. So, using a chatbot at this stage and just reading the summary or watching a video recording is not a bad idea. When you get to the point of the practical exercises and need to explain your logic, that's when you'd want your potential team lead to be present.

I would like to start with that the following are personal opinions, observations, and anecdotes and not a scientific study (alas, no data and not enough inclination for that). I can see the point in regard to the energy consumption and I also find it quite irritating that our social group, Gamers™, seek and encourage the higher use of energy on something as frivolous as graphical fluff (may UE5 be sunsetted). Regarding the necessity, it is very relative. I do not have mobility impairments and can use a broom instead of a vacuum cleaner (I believe the animal companion prefers less noise), and someone whose job and source of income is cleaning would go for the more "human energy"-efficient option. In the case of LLMs, a use case I've seen is job search, a very generic activity with a large amount of text on it. One of the people I know tried to use the free (government-funded) employment assistance services. The meatbags there were nigh useless and apparently could not parse the person's educational background and previous employment, while the positions suggested could have been just randomly pulled from a pool. On the other hand, the chatbot was able to provide the job titles for the desired career direction, what to watch out for in the adverts, how to format the CV, and how to pace the search, so it could be done alongside the ongoing employment without burning out. The LLM also was available at any time and provided responses and feedback promptly. Some people might prefer the LLMs as the pair programmer or a study partner for the same reasons - availability, flexibility, and general familiarity with the relevant field. Granted, they are/should be aware of the possibility of hallucinations and the necessity to check sources. Regarding taxation, at the moment, I would like to see how it is going to go. It is possible to tax the corporations (unlikely may it be) and the "agentic" AI is not able to do most jobs fully (even 2D artists'). And institutional knowledge is a thing that can easily get lost in the layoffs. So, I agree that the lack of employment due to the CEOs' lack of foresight and professional skills is a threat to the livelihoods of their employees and can negatively affect the companies and the end-users in the long run. The most recent case I am aware of is PinkNews going for "reporter-free newsroom" (the CEO is a dumb ****, so expected as much). So, the point being, there are areas where humans perform worse than the genAI, the necessity is relative, and the human CEOs not being concerned with the long-term prospects of their companies or the societal outcome of their decisions is an issue. The not mentioned issue with the LLMs and image generation being widely available is that malicious actors can use them as well, whether it is spear-phishing, various photo editing, or hate speech at scale. At what point an undesirable side effect becomes an inherent feature I cannot tell.

Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga Chapter 12 I wish my ego was that big. He's not wrong. It is a pretty good trait. Chapter 17-19 (I think) RGB dragons. The water-walking clerics. The party has "interesting" ideas. The enemy is a significant chunk of the population. But the survivors will need less resources, so it evens out. Some of the later battles showed that the quality is more important that the quantity of the dragons. Best friends and roommates I could not tell if it was the writing or the translation (I believe the game was written in English). Thank the devs for the toggle The Sayunaa arc (spoilers) I.e. our power structures are for the betterment for the world. I guess, it is what a cleric would say. "Liberating" the other locations was fine, but the capital is a no-no. Chapter 27 or so Chapter 28 End-game spoilers The Legends DLC. I did bring more of my squads there, but the paladins could defeat the 20 hostile squads alone with enough time. Some of the unique mercenaries.

Possessor(s) Started moving before the room loaded. It was not, in fact, quite fine. The first attempt. The boss did not have the time to do it when I played more aggressively. He was not wrong. The first of the major bosses. I was sceptical. So, yeah. Mid-game spoiler The area boss

What I've purchased is mine to keep. The Black Geyser developers have launched a Kickstarter campaign for another RTwP RPG in the setting: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grapeocean/avaria-iron-rule The game is not related to Avaria: Chains of Lust.

It is the "garbage in, garbage out" situation - LLMs are tools and depend on the ones who make and use it, so Grok reflects Musk and the current Xitter population. Structured, high-quality data and reinforcement learning should provide better results, but require effort (time, funding, etc.). The energy consumption and e-waste are issues, though. Hence my general dislike of the corporate-owned models, despite their current affordability (also that the affordability can be easily taken away). One could consider the open-source software as an example of people cooperating, but I am unsure if it can work for the training and hosting. It is a good use-case. Alternatively, forcing companies to provide the contractual terms in the layperson-readable format could achieve the same result (some already do it). I know I am not paying a lawyer to check a random EULA for me, though I try to read them briefly (some are interesting, the software ones usually are "the software might not work, we will change it however we want, and you will not sue us").

I finished Possessor(s) a week ago and was quite happy with the game, some jank aside (mostly, the collectibles and the map). I liked the exploration and the boss battles, with the difficulty increasing as bosses were losing health. I have started Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga. It is a tactical game in a fantasy setting. Unless there is a major plot twist at the end, it is fairly generic. The tactical combat and character development feel satisfying, with the "one more turn" lasting for 5 hours. The complexity is unbelievable for an RPGMaker game - there are squads, large maps, functional UI with mouse support. I think there is a perma death mode, but it is optional. The drawback is that the story and the narrative are hard to take seriously. The high-fantasy writing style is consistent - the generals and the farmers have a different manner of speech and the narrator leans towards the former, so it is not as obnoxious as it was with Gedonia. You can also just hire new units on the market, instead of waiting for your party members to multiply, which is most welcome (the last game of this type that I played is Fire Emblem: Fates).

The Life and Suffering of Prince Jerian has been funded successfully. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/101xp/the-life-and-suffering-of-prince-jerian/posts/4665935

From quickly skimming through the article, it is solely about copyright rather than the environmental impact, employment, and the developers' ability to troubleshoot AI-generated code. As a man with an MSc in Data Science who does not work with genAI (not because I do not want to), I unironically love the topic. The 2D artists, whose livelihoods were affected by it, have significantly stronger feelings. Their logic is that whether or not you would have paid a person for the work, the models you've used likely were trained on their work. I would say that (I think) the labour for the sake of it, i.e. if it does not produce anything or gain skills (or at least some satisfaction or financial compensation), is soul-crushingly pointless and has no inherent value. There are several aspects which when combined might make one less comfortable. LLMs (Large Language Models) are trained to be extremely confident, yet supportive and go with the user's suggestions, because humans perceive confidence as knowledge (and there is some link between the eloquence and the perceived intelligence, which negatively affects primarily immigrants). LLMs are prediction models and do not possess any "ground truth", just a lot of data with different weights attached. They can work well for data summarisation or for some generic data, but less so for the niche subjects (and if you are unfamiliar with the field, you might not be able to spot errors). At the moment, the older models are provided for free to build reliance on them, as the skills unused deteriorate, so it is expected to lead to dependence (I can tell that I cannot easily multiply 3+ digit numbers without writing them down). You can see the similar pattern (en****tification) of building a user base, then extracting value from it in the other industries, such as video streaming. For software development in particular, I've been told that Claude Opus is a fantastic tool to use. The gotcha being that the developers must understand and be able to troubleshoot the code it generates, otherwise, the software will be impossible to support long-term. There are some other drawbacks and use cases and most are summarised in Abigail Thorn's video (1h): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaU6tI2pb3M If you do need an LLM in your life, I would still suggest running one locally (can be done with a £700 Mac Mini M2).

Possessor(s) is available on GOG with a 75% discount. I've repurchased and left a longer review there. TL;DR - a fantastic game with excellent story and combat, and somewhat unfriendly map. https://www.gog.com/en/game/possessors

If you are talking about Jerian, then it is a stats-heavy visual novel with a poor UI. If you like the particular genre, I'd suggest Long Live the Queen instead. One of the dev logs was amusing for the wrong reasons: https://steamcommunity.com/games/2936290/announcements/detail/529872149958100080?snr=2___ Like, the lack of self-awareness is hilarious - the developers are the ones in complete control of the setting, of the choices available and their consequences. The refusal to acknowledge the base assumptions and biases can and will bleed in, whether in the selection of options or in the wording. Due to the amount of variations, the narrative can be collaborative, but, ultimately, the developers are the one determining the limits of what is possible. Well, also the modders, but they rarely work with visual novels. The Prince could make a ground-breaking industrial invention and realise that he wants to implement universal basic income or he could spend the whole game trying to gather the ultimate collection of post stamps. I can tell that neither option will be offered despite them being well within the setting. I have backed it, as a family member wants the game, but still find it unappealing personally.

Possessor(s). I love the combat system and the passive that sends the projectiles right back at the attacker. After I found where to go (the map did not cooperate), the story picked up the pace and progresses steadily - there's a decent character development and lore (alas, no lore dumps). Judging by the achievements and an in-game side quest, there are more powerful versions of the main bosses. The one I have fought had a completely different moveset to its main story counterpart. It also was sitting on one of the main weapons (I've gathered all of them by now and fully upgraded 2). There are some rough edges, I assume due to the time constraints (the exploration dialogues seem to be out of sequence), but it is very enjoyable overall.

The Fortune's Run developer has been released and has plans to release the game (as in, it still brings her some income and personal fulfilment to do so). https://steamcommunity.com/games/1692240/announcements/detail/492721254199986236?snr=2___ I bought it on Steam some time ago, though have not played yet. The game is available on GOG as well.