marelooke

Sad, but predictable. It was good while it lasted, I suppose.

Depending on how terrible the state the game is in at point x in time, it is either a "live service" or an "early alpha", according to CIG. Though, given that you can play whatever they try to pass for a game one could make a case for Star Citizen being, in fact, released in some form. Whether it is anything even vaguely resembling done...? Well, no. Squadron 42, the single player campaign, was the one that they officially communicated was supposed to release this year. That said, mixing them up is natural, given how most money spent on Star Citizen appears to have gone to Squadron 42 instead (at least, I hope so, given the state of Star Citizen after all this time). Anyway, to keep this somewhat topical, Squadron 42 which, as mentioned earlier was communicated to be supposed to release this year, has been delayed to Q2 2027 because of big, scary, GTA6. I'm sure releasing it around the same time as the "The Expanse" game is going to be less of a problem because clearly there is no overlap in the audiences for a space game and, hmm checks notes, a space game. Nope, not seeing it. Anyway, game's only been delayed for 10 years, so what's a little more wait. I also mentioned that it was "communicated to be supposed to release this year" because they've only now started looking for a release campaign manager, which to me seems to indicate they've known for a while it would get postponed.

4% of 40million, that is still a lot of people, they're just using percentages to make it seem less of a deal than it is.

Well, I finished S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Cost of Hope, so yeah... Couple of notes on 2.0 before I dive into the DLC conclusion: loading times for me got significantly longer (at least on Linux), and the incessant shader precompilation on startup had like a 50% change of requiring me to alt+f4 out of it. There's a way to disable it by adding an "Engine.ini" file, but the game kept erasing it so I had to make it read-only. Haven´t noticed any ill effects of getting rid of that precompilation, but that was annoying to have to deal with nevertheless. The final "main" DLC mission had a boss fight that was surprisingly appropriate (rather curious, and slightly worried, how the other branch will fare in that respect). The mission itself was OK in the scope of what S2 missions are like. So that left me on a relatively positive impression. Most of the other new side missions were good, except, unfortunately, the one I mentioned I was enjoying and looking forward to where it went: the one related to the new arch anomaly. The final part of that mission made me want to break my keyboard, and it really dragged down the whole experience for me. So I'll try to get into why without spoiling the storyline, but obviously I have to talk about mechanics and some of the things happening in the quest. If you want to find out the hard way, skip the spoiler bit. "The Forgotten"-mission spoilers So yeah, after that bull**** I was about ready to give the DLC a failing grade, that quest really, really ruined it for me. But I let it sit for a bit and while I do not intend to ever even attempt that mission again legitimately unless they make some significant changes the rest of the DLC was decent enough. One additional note is that after removing the CNPP anomaly and dealing with the faction stuff the whole CNPP area became pretty...lifeless. At least with my chosen faction during exploration I rarely ran into anything alive (and hostile), so that was a bit of a downer. Another niggle with exploration is that there is a rather large area where you will get incessantly attacked by Flame Poltergeists that are situated out of bounds (since these guys don't need to be able to see you to attack you...) so you can´t get rid of them legitimately (and they will just respawn if you get rid of the illegitimately, not that I would know...) I was debating a slightly higher score than I ended up with on in the end I have concerns about replayability. I don´t know whether I'd really want to play through the DLC missions more than twice (to see both sides). The extra areas (arguably, only the CNPP as you can access most of the Iron Forest without completing the DLC story), or the unique weapons don't seem like a compelling enough reason to run through the story missions again (and while I ranted mostly about The Forgotten, the main chain also contains a few missions that I'm not confident I would really enjoy doing again and again) tl;dr the DLC improves on the base game storytelling wise, but is really dragged down by other aspects that either do not improve on the base game (like mission design), or double down on things that were not great in the base game to begin with, like the excessive amount of platforming and the mutant design. Given that, for me, replayability of the DLC content is a concern I'd rate it at a 5/10, "decent".

I very rarely buy games on release, but I watched Mortismal's review and the combat somewhat concerns me. so I would have held off to see how that shakes out regardless.

I'm on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2's final main DLC quest and really don't know how I feel about the DLC itself yet. Just to reiterate patch 2.0 was a very marked improvement to the game, but you do not need the DLC to experience those improvements so I consider them separately, this post will be about the DLC content specificallly. The good: the DLC areas were neat, being able to finally explore the Iron Forest and the CNPP freely is fantastic. The new weapons are good (though "locking" some of the unique ARs to a red-dot is...a choice). When it comes to the missions, there's the main mission, and then there's a bunch of new side missions. The main DLC missions, at best I found them to be "eh", at worst I actively loathe them. They're really more of the same from the base game, but dialed up to 11, which is the problem, at least in my book. But if that was your cup of tea, well, there's more of it. If, on the other hand, you were hoping they'd go back to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-style mission design where you are given an objective and then there's different ways to approach it...well, this does not appear to be that kind of game, unfortunately. Everything is on rails, even the labs in SoC arguably gave you more freedom to accomplish your goals than S2 does in its story missions. The missions have tons of platforming, magically locking/unlocking doors to force head-on engagements, create boss arenas, and/or lock you into sections of the mission (and then usually making those permanently inaccessible after the mission). Then there's the usual nonsensical "action" cut-scenes (please just ditch those if there ever is a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 3), and finally they throw so much loot at you that inventory management becomes more of a problem than the actual enemies (in one of the missions I picked up over 100 bandages(!)). I swear they are just trying to make fun of us loot goblins by actively giving you gear at the start of missions. The story forces a faction choice, as I feared. As a certified Loner I am absolutely not a fan of these choices, not in the least because the choices in this game tend to negatively impact exploration, my favourite part of the game, by making bases inaccessible (which is also why in this play-through I avoid the mission unlocking Pripyat, getting there through other means). So far it does not appear to have any negative consequences to my standings, though I have heard that picking the other side, does, or maybe it is bugged. Will probably dig more into the DLC storyline when I get through all of it. The side missions, have been a bit of a mixed bag. A few were literally just going somewhere and then talking to someone, though I guess you could start a fight if you really wanted to. The one involving the new anomaly seems pretty cool so far, but it feels as if progress is gated by completion of the DLC's main story, so more on that one later. Stability has been good for me in general, though I had a single CTD in the penultimate DLC mission.

SOMA is fantastic, enjoy! Right, got some hands-on time with the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 DLC and Patch 2.0 now, so here's some initial thoughts. The Zone itself feels much better, things in general look a lot more realistic and the areas look less samey. The biggest improvement by far is the lighting, you don't need a Flashlight in the weirdest situations anymore. Spawns also seem to be somewhat improved, at least I haven´t had enemies spawn on top of me anymore and the tendency of the game to just drop encounters on you on a timer also seems to have been toned down a little bit (but it is still very much there). They also tweaked some values so radiation started affecting me again, while before the patch I was pretty much immune to all but the "you shall not pass"-instakill radation, so that is nice. There's some new variants of existing mutants, not really sure what is different aside from their colour. Most of them still have all the problems they had before. Mutant design in general in this instalment is, imho, poor, and the 2.0 patch doesn't appear to have done anything to address this (not that I really expected it to) The DLC (so far) itself feels a much more coherent story-wise than the base game, so that's a big improvement. It does seem to focus on, or at least heavily involve, the Duty vs Freedom rivalry. I've personally never cared much for the relationships between the various factions, at least not any further than "is hostile/is friendly" and the whole "faction war" shtick from Clear Sky is something I absolutely did not care for at all, but ymmv. At least the people you meet are likeable, and as long as I won't be forced to pick a side it is "whatever" as they say. The boss fights (or the fact that there are any at all, really) still really suck and I really wish they'd just get rid of them entirely. They are just not fun and horribly immersion breaking. There's some fun new anomalies in the DLC, but I'm not sure if any of them pop up outside of the new areas, but so far I have not seen them outside of the new areas. The game is probably close to where it should have been on launch at this point. I would still recommend people new to the series play the originals first though (at least SoC and CoP) because I really think they ruined the impact of mutants in this one. In more general terms I'd say the game now qualifies as "good" in my book, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-enjoyers that have been holding off on getting it may want to consider jumping in at this point.

Well, the sort of expected thing happened, I started NG+ in Stellar Blade and kinda lost interest, at least for now, when I got to the second open world area. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2's first major DLC came out and I've been trying to play it, but GOG games on Linux are such a pain in the neck. Heroic Games Launcher just refuses to download the update, and the manual installer just refuses to let me install it. Apparently someone had the "bright" idea to forcibly check the Windows Registry for the install path, and if it can't find the game there it just bails. No option to manually pick a path to install to. Since this game is stupid large and my internet is stupid slow I imported the game from my Windows install when I finally dumped that for Cachyos. That probably means the registry entries are missing, which I guess explains why both Heroic as well as the manual installer fail. Downloading the whole 171GB again is going to take like a day (17hours according to Heroic) so I'm pretty peeved off right now. If GOG wants me to buy any more games off of them they're going to have stop relying on Windows specific mechanism for their installers at the very least.

Days above 30 degrees Celsius used to be extremely exceptional for most of Europe. I recall having one of those on a year was newsworthy here in Belgium while I was growing up. Additionally it used to cool down during the night, meaning just opening the windows at night was plenty to keep houses at sensible temperatures with how well insulated they tend to be. So historically there just hasn't been much of a need for AC, something that has only started changing rather recently with the quickly accelerating pace of climate change. Anyway, to stay on topic, I've seen a load of posts suggesting EA is considering shutting down or selling BioWare after the sale. Apparently they've tried selling BioWare before so, yeah, that would be interesting. While it would be tempting to celebrate that the IPs could end up under better stewardship I'm not so sure anyone that could afford buying BioWare would be any better than current leadership, so yeah. Anyway "single source" and all that, but who knows, even on a good day I doubt BioWare's games bring in the big bucks, at least when compared to the sports games.

Finished Stellar Blade, not quite sure how I feel about it to be honest, and not sure whether I even want to go through NG+, or try to get the other, presumably worse, endings. It doesn't really resolve much of anything near the end (imho), and most of the things EVE finally figures out in the last few areas were likely obvious to most people rather early in the game. Can´t quite put my finger on it, but the story felt a lot like Background Spoilers The cliché villain monologue of a certain character also felt...misplaced...after the buildup. The world building was generally enjoyable, though both open word regions being deserts sure was a choice. That said I did not mind quite as much as I expected to when I arrived in the second one (note: deserts are generally my second least favourite map type in games, a close second to "ice/snow-deserts"). Lots of backtracking, and a lot of the camp locations feel like they are chosen to drag out play time. Not something that particularly bothered me first time around, but the idea of having to deal with some of it again in NG+ is kinda offputting to be honest. Combat felt kinda "meh", and, to me at least, very unnatural, and counter-intuitive. I should note I'm not a "Soulslike" player, but I did finish NieR: Automata and mostly enjoyed that. Dodge timing just felt extremely inconsistent to the point I mostly stopped bothering, instead relying on interrupting the attacks that required dodging. Didn´t have such a problem with parrying, at least until the final boss at least ("Providence"). There's also the blue (or purple, can't tell: colourblind) abilities where you need to do a two button thing that I just never could get the hang off, it's such an unnatural combination for me, and it's just way too easy to trigger this one "wrong" and get slapped. I think I only pulled it off by accident, really. Likely a "skill issue", but I sure hope they improve upon it, because I tried getting a hang of it and I didn´t manage over the course of...well the entire game. Until the final boss the hardest boss for me was easily the Juggernaut, likely because he's basically all about dodging... Last few bosses (aka "the boss gauntlet", because there's like no downtime between them) were not particularly enjoyable for me, even though I mostly got through all (except the final one) in a few tries. The difficulty at the end ramps up extremely quickly and they are so unforgiving I ended up having to play extremely defensively dodging/parrying/interrupting until I got them stunned, and then repeated that until they die. Any attempt at aggression just got me killed, so the fights ended up being long, sloggy burns, not really my idea of a good time. The last boss probably should have been reserved for a challenge mode or something (imho, of course). Most of his attacks are fakeouts, so everything timing-wise you learned up to now you can basically throw out, he is stupid fast, does stupid amounts of damage, and has a ridiculous health pool. He also has some QTE-attack that I still don't know what the correct thing to do is, because whatever I tried I always seem to fail it (a general problem with in-fight boss QTEs I found) You now suddenly have to combine multiple evasive manoeuvres in extremely quick succession, or get absolutely murdered. I ended up deciding the juice just was not worth the squeeze for this fight and put it on story mode to get it over with after getting through the entire game on normal so far. I'd probably give the game a 6.5/10. I finished it, it's decent, no real regrets, but there is, in my scrub-tier opinion, some serious room for improvement.

I've always avoided fighting the bigger wildlife in the first games, but it is kind of unavoidable in this one. We'll see where they go with it, I suppose, currently they feel more like a nuisance than a threat, which does not seem ideal if you are trying to create a tense atmosphere. Familiarity indeed plays a significant role. I'd be extremely impressed if they manage to recapture that feeling from the first game, but I consider it rather unlikely and am certainly not banking on it.

Played and finished Avowed. Pretty good game overall, would give it a 7/10 "Good". I'd also probably pick up a sequel, depending on where they intend to go with it (there is plenty of the living lands we haven´t been to, certainly would not mind seeing more of it), though likely not if they're going to charge 70EUR again. Forced dodge/parry based combat are not really my thing and just getting out of the way by just sidestepping an attack not being a real option kind of annoyed me. Aggro rules, if there are any, are rather opaque. There really did not seem to be any consistency on who mobs focus on. Even if you're in another room there´d be one that magically would chase you down to beat your skull in. Anyway, it obviously wasn't enough of a bother for me to not finish the game, but expletives were used at time. I thought the overall story was intriguing, though I do feel they dropped a bit too much information too early, by the end of the first area, if you're a bit of a completionist, you pretty much know the gist of what is going on and it feels as if the rest of the game just fills in the outline. The Scatterscarp major decision kinda felt icky to me, especially a scholar PC and/or Giatta should've been able to give more insight as to the consequences of one of the choices. It just felt like the devs were actively trying to rope you into a specific decision. The whole political angle to things, on the other hand, felt like it turned out a lot more black and white than I had hoped, which was a bit of a shame. Endgame choice While you appear "stuck" with your companions I did enjoy the ability to "agree to disagree" with them. That said there were, especially later in the game, some jarring inconsistencies in their reactions, where they'd praise you for something when it is happening and then scold you when talking about it in camp, or vice-versa. There was also the one quest near the end that made absolutely zero sense (the one with the stolen books in the archives) as you're given absolutely zero context so you're just making a decision blindly resulting in companion reactions that entirely out of left field. Thankfully that was the exception. Anyway, enjoyed my time with the game, would recommend (but not at the launch price). Aside from that I played through what is available of Subnautica 2 so far. Mostly it is more Subnautica, so if you didn´t like the prior ones, well, don't bother, but if you did, good times! The one thing that sort of annoyed me is the amount of hostile wildlife compared to the first one(s). I feel it cheapens the experience. It's a bit hard to explain, but feeling vulnerable and avoiding enemies as you didn´t know how dangerous they actually were felt like a big part of the earlier games. Having bits taken out of you on the regular kinda makes it less scary, if that makes sense? Curious to see how the game develops but they're off to a good start at least.

Got suckered into WoW Anniversary (aka TBC Classic), but Blizzard really managed to ruin the experience by adding phasing to an expansion that really, really cannot support that many players in an area, and I just gave up. Anyway, apparently they also messed up by applying "final" patch balance to the start of the expansion, making early content excessively easy, but I never made it to level cap, so I guess I at least dodged that disappointment. Sure as hell killed any chance of me touching retail again if they can´t even manage to not mess up something that had already proven itself. Ugh. Not really feeling like playing much right now, current Where Winds Meet storyline isn´t really doing it for me, and constant FOMO it pushes is wearing me down. Been wanting to start Rogue Trader, but the sheer size of the game is kinda scaring me, because if it's really good it will consume me... and I've already been trying to stay away from the likes of Factorio, Stellaris, and Satisfactory to safeguard my sleep schedule... Maybe a few games of Darktide would do me. Hmm...

Completed The Medium, took just under 10hours, quite enjoyable for the most part. Gameplay-wise the most similar game I can think of would be SOMA, but with Resident Evil's camera/perspective (and then I'm talking about the OG) I do wish they hadn't done the "cliffhanger" at the end though. Game has some technical issues as well, I suffered two CTDs and it seriously stutters when switching to/from cutscenes, which kinda sucks when you need to react quickly. If you like these types of games definitely worth playing through, though I'm not sure I'd pay the full price for it.

Poked a bit more at S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 now that 1.8.1(.1) is out and, well, feels mostly the same as before. The main difference appears to be that some mutants feel tankier again (Bloodsuckers, notably) and there's more of them in the wild (Poltergeists especially). I also have visual artifacts now, so yay for that? Haven't found the new weapon/missions yet so no opinion on those. Honestly, this is one of those games that the more I play it the more disappointed I get. The environments are great, but they gave up on everything else that made the original games great to get that fidelity it feels like, immersion being the main thing, but the storytelling is just bad in a lot of ways, and given that it's pretty in-your-face in this one it's kinda hard to ignore. Just played through the SIRCAA part (again), and am now at the Noontide base As a side note, ambient subtitles are still broken (though slightly less than before), most of the time (by which I mean: "almost always") the first line of a dialogue doesn't get subtitled. My Ukrainian hasn't gotten any better since the last major patch so it's still really annoying.