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

On 9/14/2026 at 9:48 AM, Sarex said:

I should have said, a game that actually released.

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.

22 hours ago, Wormerine said:

From what I understand they argument is "it won't affect many players as barely anyone uses it". Which begs a question why create universally bad PR by limiting their play time 🫠. It seems to me like XBOX's leadership is scrambling for a way to squeeze extra $ out of the service. Aggressive price hike didn't work out, now they try different avenues.

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

As mentioned before and one of the purposes is to get the artefact that should make you immune to the massive anomaly haunting the CNPP, since the thing kills you in two "hits" when it can see you, which makes getting around a tad inconvenient. They make you do a bunch of stuff to get protection against it so you can go near it and get the (arch) artefact, implying you now have a certain level of protection against the instagibbing it does.

Except...that is not true. You are allowed to go near the thing to start another very long jumping puzzle, but once you are "there" the anomaly functions just the same as before: killing you in two "hits". So ... I died since the game had literally told me, and shown me, that I was a now enjoying a certain level of protection which I clearly was not outside of the very narrow circumstance where the level designers wanted you to not die to it.

Anyway, you are now in a very long, (and imho, tedious) jumping puzzle that ends with a very large open air section (this is important) combining the worst things about S2 platforming: you have no idea where you need to go, there's lots of jumping, various anomalies to avoid, "imaginary" artefacts all over (so scanner is borderline useless), and of course, the big Flare that will melt your brain should you get stuck on a ledge for a second too long. Given that you are jumping between a number of different, mostly identical, locations I lost track of where I was pretty early on, not that it would matter since there was no way to know where the thing I was looking for was going to be, whether it was 100% random or there was some system to it (I learned later that there, in fact, is a system to it)

To top it off I was hit with an emission while I was doing the puzzle (I said the open air things was going to be relevant...), probably because I took forever. Given how there is nowhere to take cover while doing this, and, as far as I can tell, no way to get out of this until you complete it, I had to reload and start the whole thing over again.

At this point I was rather agitated, but I got the bloody thing, died a few times getting out (because you need to do the finicky "cloud hopping" and I fell through a bunch of times), and then continued onto the final mission which I had hoped to be a victory lap of sorts.

Instead the game locks you into an arena with two of the new Amok mutants. The ones that are entirely invulnerable unless you shoot a small thing on their back that they expose for a fraction of a second...seemingly randomly, and that kill you in three hits? Oh, and that have a knockdown, so if one gets you the other murders you? Yeah those.

I gave it a few good shots, but at this point I was absolutely not having fun anymore so I got a mod to enable the console, turned on god mode, and still had a bloody time killing these two <insert expletives here>.

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".

6 hours ago, Hurlshort said:

I'm surprised no one here is playing Blood of the Dawnwalker. Sounds like a vampire Witcher game. I'm busy with zero company, but I'm keeping it on my radar for later.

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.

On 8/25/2026 at 8:37 AM, BruceVC said:

I remember talking about this game because I play Frictional games and I enjoy them. I played Amnesia Bunker last

To be honest I forgot about it, I must add it my list

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.

1 hour ago, Gfted1 said:

I dont know, it didnt seem that crazy to me. In my own garage are 3-4 hard drives that I still need to take a hammer to.

90F is definitely hot, especially if the humidity is high. Aside, its interesting to me that a lot of Europe doesnt have AC. Once the next sufficiently strong solar flare wipes our electronics, you will be the stronger population for these years of suffrage.

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

Horizon Zero Dawn, but with androids, and then with NieR's existential dread mixed in. Not helped any by the city music having some serious NieR vibes.

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.

1 minute ago, Sarex said:

Yeah, they sort of seem to not know what they want with the threat mechanics. They did say they plan to expand on it and make it more interesting but so far I agree that it's a step down from the first part. Although I will say that the first part may have been better in that regard simply because it was new and people were interacting with it for the first time. Here, in part 2, people already know what to expect so the feeling of see it for the first time is lost.

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

Notably I would have very much liked to see more speculation, in game, about the Emperor's role. He had a reason to send you there, specifically, so he clearly knew "things". To what extent Woedica was involved would have been something I'd have at least liked the PC, or the NPCs, to speculate on.

The Aedyran Empire being dedicated to Woedica was, at least for me, one of the main reasons to go it solo as the Living Lands. Even though the Steel Garotte had gone rogue, so wasn´t representing the Empire anymore, inviting in an empire that is dedicated to a goddess openly, and obsessively, hostile to Sapadal seemed like a rather bad idea, even when from a practical, and origin, point of view some sort of allegiance, like a grefram, might have made sense.

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.

On 4/8/2026 at 8:35 PM, Hurlshort said:

I am also playing WoW, after a few years away. I don't really know what is happening anymore, but my house looks nice.

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

Spoiler

it's been literally hours, a day at most, since "the event", and the place has to feel deserted, but they just couldn't help themselves and slapped a mutant in there. I mean, I can get the ambush at the end, but the Bloodsucker right when you enter? That's just, ughhh 

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.

8 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

At this point I think the worry - if one is worried - should be about AI effect shrinking/replacing jobs all over, from low-tier to upper management - not just artistic creatives.  Although with potential population replacement crisis in some countries (not enough generational babies), not having enough "replacement" workers in many areas in 40-60 years could be a serious issue in terms of companies/economy and possible restructuring of such infrastructure systems - and by then AI/robotics might help in some fashion there. Maybe it won't happen but who knows anymore. Then there will be another baby boom at some point and they'll have to make jobs again.

On the potentially bright side, 300 years from now AI could be part of what moves humanity closer to no money motivation of ST:TNG.  "You mean you don't get paid???"   Either that, or Skynet. Either or.   

Generative AI can't really replace creative jobs, because by its very nature it cannot be creative, it just regurgitates what it has learned, often in quite a mangled fashion. It can, however, be used for rapid prototyping, which as far as I can tell is also the use-case Swen is talking about.

From my perspective there's two worries about these GenAI tools:

• juniors lean on them and don't actually understand the output, thus they do not learn, or pick up entirely wrong information that they take for truth
• execs think they will be able to replace people, because that's what Gen AI companies sell, and then they'll wake up and their company is on fire. After a bunch of People lost their jobs, of course.

4 hours ago, kanisatha said:

On AI use, sorry but I am hardcore in the opposite direction from most of you. Given my strong negative views of (most) humans (nature, capability, behavior), I can't wait for highly evolved AI systems to replace humans. I especially can't wait for AI systems to replace humans as drivers given the basic inability of most humans to properly operate an automobile.

Maybe, but it will need to come from entirely different AI research, Generative AI is a dead end for that future, something even OpenAI has pretty much admitted at this point.

7 hours ago, HoonDing said:

TES VI will have AI generated NPC's,  NPC conversations and quests.

It will be total, complete, utter garbage.

Where Winds Meet has NPCs that are basically LLM bots, it sucks about as much as you'd expect it to if you've ever used the likes of ChatGPT.

They're also fairly easy to break if you're somewhat familiar with these tools (eg. by just babbling until they run out of context at which point they forget their "personality" and you can make them do pretty much anything). There's some, let's say, interesting "conversations" with NPCs out there that are often very much NSFW...

Had to be careful to avoid spoilers, had some really nice screenshots from cutscenes, but alas, major spoilers in them.

Starting the game off slowly...

The environments are gorgeous

Still does not do the location justice

GOTY

Cats, cats everywhere!

The game sure has got the vibe down

I'm sure she's angry for a reason

Think I wandered into a Tomb Raider game

Eeeeep

Yeah...so I do happen to be colourblind 

Looks like I'm slightly more powerful than a single goose, go me!

11 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

Yeah, I get it's a main aspect of the game, ofc (not a peaceful game, lol), I just meant there seemed to be at least one early (?) quest/thing where you could do it that I saw, and sometimes that means there's more like that - like the kinds of constant run/avoid speed runners might take advantage of. But I have no clue, maybe they were using some glitch to their advantage, or it was still a tutorial area with different rules or something.  It does look (story, npc) cutscene heavy but Chinese games I've tried before, it probably won't bother me much (vs. US games). I was planning on using original language/subtitles (even if text translations aren't always awesome), the Eng dialogue/dub/whatever sounds horrid.

Combat mechanics probably are a bit more than I want - I find constant parrying/dodge timing annoying/difficult AND tedious/boring vs. exciting/gratifying - but I'll probably try it at some point. If it was offline I'd just mod it but - plus re: waiting, I'm curious if they'll actually mellow out the supposed multi-multi menu nightmares a bit. they've supposedly said they're "looking at that" re: complaints.

Apparently the problem isn't just the translation, some of the lore supposedly is obtuse to the Chinese players as well per this Reddit post of a Chinese player.

The English voice acting has mostly been fine, at least with a female MC, I don't dare try Chinese since some of the text assumes Chinese, and things do get cut off occasionally, especially when it comes to on-screen tips. Though there's some weird issues sometimes like where the subtitle runs behind one step with the spoken dialogue, or the lines are assigned to the wrong person, which is hopefully less of an issue in Chinese.

I've yesterday finished the final boss we have access to for now, which seems to wrap up the Kaifeng storyline and I did have some trouble, though I managed it in one try in the end. I guess one tip for combat is to use the Healing Fan as an offhand, as well as to look into the weapon combinations in general, I found this video helpful to explain how I picked wrong initially  

 

17 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

^ Ok I finally found one of those 15+ hr videos re: the story questing  (vs long reviews/should you buys/guide to, et al).  To me it looks like most grunt combat you could mostly brute force if you felt like it, or avoid entirely (example: keep running and click on quest things fast enough to trigger cutscenes before enemies can engage), but bosses seem pretty "souls like." Lot of optional bosses one doesn't have to do, of course, too, but story bosses same mechanics. There is a story-mode difficulty and an "on screen parry prompt" option, but doesn't sound like it tones things down a lot if you're wanting to mostly story/explore.  Although they could change this later.

So think I'll wait a few months and see what they do/change with the US/international version of this game. Another one of those "wish it was/had an offline/SP version" because that aspect looks great (I'd even pay vs. free to have one).  But then they couldn't deluge you with "buy this costume" menus. Or that yacht for super whales.

Been playing this game quite a bit recently on the default/recommended difficulty but with the parry prompts enabled (which means I can pretty much forget doing anything MP related). I never made it past the first boss of Dark Souls (not my cuppa tea), but I did greatly enjoy Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, to try and give some kind of indication of where I fall. I've basically completed the major content of the first region (Qinghe), and just started on Kaifeng (second region).

Combat is rather hard to avoid, region completion relies, among other things, on finding boxes, which means you have to clear out hostile camps (chests are often locked until enemies are dead). Movement abilities tend to get disabled when you aggro enemies, so just running past usually isn't much of an option, and when it is it's generally obnoxious enough that you'd probably just want to beat them up anyway to get it over with.

The main story bosses, at least so far, have been mostly fine for me, difficulty wise, but each major region also has a region story, and the final boss of Qinghe (first region) was pretty darn brutal and took me a couple of tries.

Technically they (and the rest of the region story) are optional, but most of the storylines do appear to tie into the overarching narrative so I'd consider them very worthwhile to do. This is also why I'd recommend taking one's time exploring and at least completing the major plot lines in the region, and not just beelining the main story.

There's also optional bosses, those can be skipped entirely, though I've accidentally triggered a few due to not being aware they were there, or them being in a place that makes them really hard to avoid. That said, once beaten they do not respawn in the open world.

The lore/story is pretty interesting, but unfortunately most of the cultural nuance is lost in translation, leading to some pretty major gaps in understanding of the story for anyone not intimately familiar with Chinese culture/(folk)lore that I had to resort to Reddit to explain to me (thankfully there are Chinese players that really care and post comprehensive breakdowns of major storylines/events)

9 hours ago, kanisatha said:

I started playing BG3 about a week ago. I'm using a lot of mods, though all of them from among those available through the built-in mod manager. The most important mod being the one that gets me a 6-character party.

As I had expected, the game is okay but not amazing the way everyone likes to gush over it. It's definitely not worthy of all those 98, 99, 100 review scores it was given, calling into question the credibility of those reviewers. Among the things that I dislike are a horrible inventory system and hotbar system, poory designed UIs across the board, moving and organizing the party as a group being a huge pain in the ass, most containers in the environment being empty (and not getting clearly marked as such even after you check them), and all NPCs can be interracted with even though many dont have anything meaningful to say. Your own dialog options during conversations are often many and yet the range of different options is very limited, meaning many of the options are merely minor variations on saying the same thing.

Combat is also, as expected, rather tedious, but I can live with it from having a party of six and using low difficulty settings. But it is rather ridiculous the extent to which characters miss their attacks. I've gone through multiple rounds of combat where every single one of my six characters missed on their attack. But I'll grant this is a huge flaw of DnD and not the game per se (and why I love PoE mechanics so very much more).

Where the game does shine is in beautiful environments, and very nice character animations and cutscenes. The story is also good so far.

More to come.

There's some setting that fudges the dice and is intended to help avoid chains of bad rolls, in practice it seems to make rolls worse (or at least more "average"), turning it off seemed to at least improve things for me. May be in my head, may not be, there's been evidence collected to indicate the former, but since Larian doesn't disclose how the setting atually works and kept updating it there's no telling how accurate that evidence still is.

Anyway, may want to try turning it off (it's on by default) and see if that improves things for you, it did for me.

 

Went back to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 now that about a year has passed and we're on the 1.6.1 patch to see how far the game has come and...well, they've added Night Vision Devices, and the Mosin, and it does run more stable, but other than that very little seems to have changed about the things I disliked.

In fact, one of my main complaints, enemy spawning, seems to have regressed since I last played, even at release with enemies obnoxiously spawning around you it'd take some effort to actually catch them "popping in", but on 1.6.1 I've literally had enemies pop into existence right in front of me on enough occasions that it's become rather bothersome.

There's also generally too many, it's literally impossible to get from A to B without the game spawning a bunch of enemies around you, if you're lucky they'll be too busy fighting each-other (which, I suppose, is an improvement over release where they'd all go for you). To test whether it was the game or I was just imagining things it I decided to make the trek from Quiet to Azimuth Station (after the mission that takes place there) multiple times in a row, this is a short distance that has you cross a tiny strip of empty bog, of the 8 times in a row I made the corssing (4 in each direction) I didn't run into anything only once, every other time there was something going on in this tiny strip of land. That's ridiculous, especially since there's no realistic way for anything to get there.

Missions still have the same issues they've always had with exposition but they've somehow managed to break in-world subtitles (which is a bit of an issue, seeing as I can't stand the English VO, but I also don't speak Ukrainian...) so I have to rely on memory for much of the context.

Haven't had any main missions outright break though, which is nice. Worst I had was an early side missions for the Ward in the Chemical Plant that I had to reload 6 or 7 times to get to function correctly.

So yeah...there's supposed to be an engine update in the next patch (1.7), honestly not sure what good it'll do unless it somehow also fixes the spawn issues.

2 hours ago, Hawke64 said:

I have the game and here is a screenshot of the only gameplay I have experienced:

The Paradox launcher mildly annoys me, but the firewall is handling it and the issue above is more significant. I suspect it is the usual UE5 thing (kindly, may Lumen and Nanites be gone), so I will try with Steam Deck later (not entirely sure how to install GOG games on it, but will try). 

I'd be more upset about it if I did not purchase it 5 years ago for a fraction of the current price. As is, I am just disappointed. 

---

Found the pre-rendered videos:

 

 

Not sure why but I'm getting Shadow Warrior vibes from this.

On 10/2/2025 at 12:53 AM, LadyCrimson said:

*reads about some Xbox price hike, both physical goods and now GamePass, stuff*

Even considering tariff's re: hardware, I wonder if Xbox/MS has decided if you can't afford them, you won't make them any money anyway.
I don't think it's only the price of the Gamepass hike alone - companies really need to realize there is such a thing as subscription/constant fees exhaustion. I mean, from fridges/dishwashers to cars to game/entertainment services. Enough already. Just gimmie a product, not a "service", already.

Expected them to boil the frog longer before doing this, with some luck this teaches a lot of people a thing or two about how these subscription services do business.

Then again, if they haven't figured it out by now they may just be beyond help anyway.

On 9/25/2025 at 1:06 AM, Theonlygarby said:

I kinda get it from a creative standpoint.  It would be like making a movie and then having people want an option to remove parts they don't like.  Not a perfect example but i could see people wanting their creation to be experienced as intended.

You can already pick a specific crisis to happen, so I doubt that's much of a concern, I just want the inverse option: the ability to exclude certain crises without turning off the entire DLC they are in.

Cetana is also very different from every other crisis. Most crises shake up the galaxy with their rampages, as generally by the time they spawn borders are kinda entrenched, and the crisis forces the galaxy to take action, shaking up borders and the political landscape. As far as I can tell that's their whole point.

Cetana is just "there", and unless you, as the player, do a bunch of stuff, and set up very specific fleet compositions to deal with her insane difficulty (compared to every other crisis out there) there's really nothing happening until she presses her "I win"-button. The AI won't lift a finger, not even when she declares war on the entire galaxy (not that, given her power levels, they'd be much help anyway), and until she does it's pretty much business as usual. 

She may be fun once, or for some challenge run, but by and large I'd call her boring, as there's a whole lot of nothing, then a single massive fleet battle that you hopefully win, and...that's kinda it... If you beat her the game is basically over as there's probably not a whole lot left to do until the victory year as I'd be rather surprised that anyone able to beat Cetana would be having any issues beating up the rest of the galaxy after, if need be.

Honestly, design-wise she really feels more like an elaborate event-chain than an endgame crisis.

Maybe in a game with multiple crises having her mixed in, I can see that being more engaging, but on default settings with only the single major crisis? I'd rather not have it be her.