Lexx

New Castlevania has dropped. Watched 5 episodes so far. Not bad, but at the same time it doesn't give me the same feelings as the first show had. Also I'm probably really bummed that it's only 8 episodes again and soon I'll have to wait another year or something until season 2 is out. Man, I hate waiting.

Yes. To start the expansion story, you'll have to meet with Alt. Don't think there was a level requirement to that.

Yooo, I just unlocked new vehicles. There's some sick new stuff available to buy. Looks like I'll need more money. Like, a lot.

I went with cool and reflex, since I'm a revolver guy, and for everything else I'm using Katana. Though, I have to say that knife throwing is really good as well. Stealthy, fast, usable distance is pretty far as well. Combine it with dash and/or optical camo and you can easily stealth whole areas now. Bit sad that I can't really do mechanical and hacking stuff anymore, but oh well. It's not really required anyways.

Got some more hours with the expansion. In short: - Still like the car. It just looks good. Only shame it kinda drives like ass. Not sure why they can't balance cars to not be so touchy. Hard to not crash into everything all the time. - Story presentation so far is pretty nice. Some cool moments, not too easy, not too hard. Felt a lot like Escape from New York in the beginning. Now it has opened up for me and guess I can go and do whatever I want. - visually still look amazing. There's few glitches here and there, but whatever. Still the best looking game I've played to date. - the new area has lots of verticality. This is one thing I don't like about the base game.. everything is flat and on ground level unless a gig makes you move into a predefined map.. and even then there's rarely any verticality.

Agreed, still more a fan of motorcycles, since they are more useful. Still need a change of pace for a bit now. : >

That new pre order something something car is pretty nice. Probably going to be my main wheels for a while.

It's supposed to start sometime around when you get to the voodoo boys.

I've tried the new update now. Can't feel a difference in performance. Not sure if the game looks better than before since I haven't played it in a while. The new mechanics are working exactly how I thought - all perks reset after loading a savegame and you can relocate them. Also I got a call from Viktor who told me that "new upgrades are available" or something and that I should go and visit a ripper doc. So I went to the next one and then all my implants were reset and I've assigned new ones. The whole implants mechanic is different now - looks and feels a lot better, imo. Also I've lost the suppressor on my revolver. Seems that suppressed revolvers are a thing of the past now. And the clothing system completely changed too. Went to the nearest clothing shop and assigned new clothes. Oh, shooting from vehicles seems to be working nice. Not sure yet when or if I would ever need that in regular gameplay, but will see later, I guess.

It's 2023, SSD is always necessary. Hell, even my backup server only runs on SSD now. Not buying anything else anymore.

Must be a hardware issue, since I don't have any ghosting in my game. It's honestly impressive to me how it manages to boost the fps so much with almost no visible impact. Only in rain did I notice weird artifacts.

Not that there was any to begin with.

This is interesting and explains the outward facing hole in the sub:

The grain thing just shows how much corruption there is in europe as well. I can understand both sides - ukraine who just want to move their grain through poland, etc. and the bordering countries who are worried about crashing grain prices because they can't compete with them. On the other hand, there are already rules that the ukraine grain can't be sold in european stores... but why does it happen anyways? Look at the people who are mixing the local stuff with it. This is where they have to crack down - give them huge fines or whatever, I don't know. I'm sure the authorities could find out who's behind it if they would try.

I mean, some do https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-calls-azerbaijan-stop-military-activities-karabakh-2023-09-19/

Never finished MW5 because the mission design was... not that great. Always the same, always the same waves, frustratingly dumb ai, etc. Dunno how much that changed with the later DLCs.

Truth told, I'm still tired and burned out on the clans. But good to know MW5 was successful enough that they still keep working on it.

Here's some more funny: Obvious disclaimer, no idea how much truth is in it. This might as well all be BS, just like all the other "Putin is about to die"-reports.

Had nothing better to do, so checked out Lookism. The premise sounded stupid, but turns out the show is pretty good. Watched all 8 episodes in one go and want more now. No season 2 in sight yet, though.

The purge continues?

Patch roadmap: https://community.jaggedalliance.com/index/dev-diaries/devdiary-16-patch-roadmap-r21/ Bobby Ray's incoming! On the one hand, I've really missed the shop, on the other hand, my crew is already fully decked out and I don't really have any issues with crafting the ammo I need. Since I have almost unlimited amount of money now, I fear the shop will make the game even easier. That said, I do kinda miss the early game difficulty. Rolling with 2 squads of fully geared out mercs with high skills does make the game quite easy most of the time.

Damn, what a twist. Too lazy to look into it deeper, but it does sound like it makes sense.

What did they do to get death threads. That's not exactly a normal thing to happen. I'm really curious which engine is going to replace Unity in the long term. I'm still baffled at this stupid decision. Especially since their current plan is impossible to realize and they can pretty much just invent fantasy numbers and there's nothing you can really do against that as a developer.

I find it hard to believe that the expansion would change the engine all that much? Like, if it's already fine right now, I kinda doubt it will be all that different.

https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/build-planner I just glanced at it, but looks good to me so far.