marelooke

If the port is of the same level of quality as Nier: Automata I think I'll pass. Yes, I'm still bitter about it deciding my savegame was not worthy enough to be kept around.

Still, barring the tombs, I found Rise to be the better of the series, certainly when it came to portraying Lara, and just storytelling in general. Reboot and Shadow appear to have been written by the same people, Rise feels like a (and, imho, better) different team. Let the Rise people do the writing and the other folks do the tomb designing and I'll be a happy camper. (still gotta finish Shadow, the story was so cringe, even compared to reboot, that I just parked it)

The gang, assembled (well, missing Alphinaud) Mom always causing some heartache... Heavensward spoilers (including the post-release patches) Downtime for the hero, shocking!

Mostly Final Fantasy XIV Online. Still leveling, story took a pretty dark turn between "vanilla" and "Heavensward" though it appears they're squandering the potential of that plot direction. Oh well, can't say I'm entirely surprised. Voice actors changed with the first expansion as well, gotta say that for most I'm afraid I don't consider it an improvement (or at least jarring enough that it irks me still even though I'm in the "post Heavensward expansion patches" stage), exception being Alphinaud, whose new voice actor (or direction, at least) is a pretty big improvement. Here's to hoping they don't switch voice actors each expansion, though... I should note I did enjoy the main story of the expansion with the Dragonsong war. I'll probably do a more comprehensive writeup on my opinions on the game once I complete the story.

So it's a Headcrab simulator? Cool!

Dark Souls and Nier Automata

Could be interesting, assuming the port doesn't suck. Since I can't name more than a single port I've played from recent years that didn't it's a wait-and-see for sure.

Warhammer sale on Gog, this means you heathens who still haven't played Mordheim: City of the Damned can now make up for your sins for cheap!

Conan Exiles is getting an expansion, sounds like there might be a new map, so that's exciting news since, well, I kinda know the current one by now Maybe we'll get some technical improvements too (server software is not particularly high quality, it leaks memory as if it were a sieve) https://twinfinite.net/2020/03/conan-exiles-expansion-dune/ Oh yes, also Conan Exiles-style Dune survival game, but we already knew that one was in the works.

No, the complaints are that it is called Baldur's Gate 3. Unless they continue the saga (which I would doubt, and honestly, if anybody does it's almost bound to end badly) it's capitalising on nostalgia and the reputation of those who went before instead of earning their own place (and while Larian has made some decent games they have not made it anywhere near "old Bioware" level). Had they called it "Baldur's Gate: Whatever" people would be (slightly) less annoyed (I know I would be). While there are plenty of series that have a very loose connection between different "numbered releases" (so to speak) Baldur's Gate wasn't one of them. It was very explicitly the story of the Bhaalspawn. Hell, the titular city didn't even feature in the second game, and their only real connection was the PC... Neverwinter Nights would have been a better pick (and given the clunkiness of both NWN1 and 2, a better fit for Larian too, at least at this point in time), since the only real connection between the two games was the location and they already played differently enough from each other (and much closer to what BG3 looks like) that it wouldn't have been as much of a stretch, either. Alas, Neverwinter Nights doesn't exactly have the cult status the BG-series has so it's much less profitable to make a "NWN3" than a "BG3" from WotC perspective.

Looks like an upgraded Neverwinter Nights based on the other screenshots (especially the one with the elevation difference with the archer). This might, or might not, be bad in itself, but it definitely would be bad for a game that calls itself Baldur's Gate 3. Should've just called it NWN3, honestly, and I doubt anybody would've cared. In other words just capitalising on the cult status of Baldur's Gate, kind of expected from WotC, but disappointing from Larian. We'll see how it turns out, I'm betting on severely disappointing for Baldur's Gate fans, but since we're a minority nowadays it will just end up like Fallout 3 where the media and masses will just eat it up anyway.

Looks like my firewall managed to corrupt its own configuration (great feature for a firewall) should all be fixed now

I half expected the start of the game to be a Skyrim meme... First encounter with a Chokobo... Just another day on the job. She's so corny, but I still like her, for some reason (cue Imperial March) March of the bad guys (and girl) See, angering dragons is never a good thing,... Not even Ctulhu is safe! Protecting the weak and annoying... Cute flying vegetables! Cat people looking cute... Meh, who needs visibility when you can look cool instead?

Eastern European RPGs would like a word The rest of the West is too busy not trying to step on any toes to be able to even go within a galaxy of "sensitive" subjects. It's a disease (and a sign of an unhealthy society, but I digress)

Still mostly FF XIV (the M MO, for those unaware ;)), gotta hand it to them, while the story is a heap of clichés it's pretty well told. They actually do take the time for you to "bond" with characters before killing them off, quite unlike the "trend" of telling you you should care about $CHARACTER right off the bat ("Hey, you, PC, go find your dad/son you don't really know! But you should care about them, because family! Hey, where are you going?") Game swings heavily between derp and dark too, going from a raped girl right back to brewing booze for goblins back to burying people (as in, tossing corpses on a cart, not the usual MMO fare of turning people into corpses). It's almost surreal at times.

There's a flattering comparison if I ever heard one!

Got suckered into FF XIV. Game's weird to be sure, and indeed much better than the beta of the original I participated in, way back when. Story is surprisingly decent, too. I mean, for a MMO. I also enjoy that there's some actual RPG options still there, the level scaling also makes it so lower level areas still feel alive.

Been blasting fools in Ion Fury. Been a blast so far. (Heh)

Yes, I was talking about the Metro dev/publisher financials, not Epic's. It's usually the developer/publisher that releases sales numbers. Though if Epic makes claims about sales I do expect them to back those up with actual numbers though, not with vague and misleading statements comparing to 7 year old games (their comparison was to Last Light, not Last Light Redux, which likely sold quite a bit more than the original). Should also be noted that they claimed digital copies, this likely includes all the Steam preorders (including all those that got rushed in when the deal was made public) Well, AAA might be giving them too much credit, I guess AA is more appropriate. It's definitely not an indie, or niche game, anymore. Should be noted that prior to W3 CDPR wasn't an AAA dev either, though If taking the statements from Epic as fact then the game more than likely did perform below expectations (the retracted "slip up" from that manager appears to imply so as well). This does not mean it did "badly" per-se. Should also be noted that Metro was the first game to go exclusive, and the way in which it was handled didn't leave much goodwill, so the impact on the game is likely to be larger than for those following it, and, most especially, those where it was expected (eg. Borderlands 3). That it turned out buggy might also have pushed a lot of those that were on the fence to the "will get it on another platform once it is fixed"-crowd. Once Epic actually starts competing on price, rather than by taking games "hostage", we'll talk about them being "a welcome addition" right now they're just a cancer bringing console issues to the PC platform for absolutely no benefit to the customer. Ugh, and just when stuff showing up on Gog as well as on Steam steamed like it was becoming more common, too

As usual it's mostly marketing bs with very few actual meaningful numbers. Their main goal appears to make people believe that "resistance is futile". Eg. Metro Exodus appears to have sold pretty badly (at least, far below what I would have expected for the amount of hype there was), though they did manage to spin it the other way around since "journalists" failed to consider the comparison they were making, and just parroted what was said. Basically Exodus, an AAA game, selling "double" (I think they said double) the amount of "Last Light", a niche game with a big controversy impacting initial sales, isn't "good". If Witcher 3 would have sold twice the number of copies of Witcher 2 (also pseudo-niche, like Last Light), CDPR wouldn't even have broken even. Now I'm sure Metro isn't quite as big (or Exodus as costly), but if we scale the comparison down then 2 times the LL sales still doesn't look particularly good. (and yes, I did use numbers, insofar available, and extrapolated based on that, I can dig those up if anyone really cares). Obviously it's all extrapolation, but still there does seem to be quite a bit of marketing spin going on, and very little questioning of what is actually said. We'll only know for sure once the financials are published, but I'm fairly confident sales weren't as great as Epic would want us to believe, or they'd have shared actual sales numbers. Anyway, a lot of modern day "journalism" going on, in other words. Gotta give it to Epic though: their marketing department is ace.

You did not think my megalomaniac building urges had suddenly gone away, right? Still working on my pyramid, 41x41 is a lot of space to fill The centre is a fountain (Mitra statue), and three elevators, each going to a "main" floor, which themselves are divided up in sub-floors as desirable, mostly with stairs. The battlements along the upper walls here are not accessible from the ground floor, need to take an elevator to the first floor (or second, for you strange people that number the ground floor as 1), and then down to the battlements. it's divided in 4 quadrants split by these long halways as above, two of these quadrants are basically still empty, the other two are the dungeons, and the crafting quarters. Dungeon: Cells with view on the wheels of pain... (gotta entertain the prisoners, right? ) Crafting quarters are still fairly barebones Attempt at sense of scale using the one quadrant that hasn't been worked on Top floor has windows, yay! Entrance as seen from the centre of the pyramid

Played through (and finished) Rage 2. It's an OK shooter. Story is nothing to write home about, and if you really had to "Meh." would sum it up pretty well. Gameplay loop is fun though, but it doesn't take all that long before enemies become pretty much trivial. Game is supposedly buggy as hell but aside from one weird crash (seemed like the audio crashed, got the crash popup but game kept running, without sound. Had to kill it from task manager) I didn't run into any major issues, certainly none that really impeded gameplay, or made the game unfinishable. Bit annoying that the DLC are behind an external service. I thought Steam didn't allow that crap, but guess they changed that policy while I wasn't looking. Game's not good enough for me to be willing to bother with a 3rd party store to get DLC, so their loss, I guess. So yeah, decent game, might be worth picking up on sale.

The bad news it that Reboot 1 and Reboot 3 are clearly made by the same team, unfortunately. I like Reboot 2 quite a bit more as well (my "Shadow of the " playthrough just fizzled out, should probably get back to that eventually). If I can have Reboot 2 with the tombs of Reboot 3 we'd have an acceptable nu-Tomb Raider, imho.

Started and finished Moons of Madness. It's set in the Secret World universe (which seems pretty cool, actually, someone should make a good MMORPG in the setting... ) The game started off pretty strong but sort of lost its "horror" vibe halfway-ish through (at least for me), after that point it was more about figuring out the specifics about what was going on and how it would turn out (though I'm sure most forumites could, by that point, make a pretty good guess, at least in the broad sense. Especially if familiar with the universe). Felt "The Park" (also set in the Secret World universe) did a better job at keeping the suspense going until the end. Not a bad game, might be worth picking up in a sale if you enjoy these types of games. Oh, and one miss-able achievement that basically requires you to do something dumb to get it (standing in easily-avoided electrified water), bit of a bummer but I doubt I can be bothered to play through half the game again just to get that one (at least at this point).

Been slacking a bit on taking screenshots, but since this thread's been lacking a certain something now, here we go: When playing solo I sometimes just teleport between bases, the neat thing is that the old location doesn't immediately unload, so you get a glimpse of how cool things could look with increase draw distance. The beams in the distance are caused by my Tier 3 Derketo and Set temples in my main base, usually these get unloaded (and indeed, they will be unloaded once the engine catches up), but for a brief moment one can get to enjoy what could have been... I've also been working on my fourth base now (hmm, come to think of it, I don't think I've posted any screens of No3, heh), since it's in a rather incomplete state here's a a distance shot (basically only part of the initial sandstone mockup is done, stability is iffy too, hence the holes). Figured I'd try my hand at building a pyramid, it's pretty big at 41x41 foundations, so yeah, will see where this ends Also not liking the new dodge changes, combined with the stagger changes from a few patches ago this makes it impossible to solo quite a few of the bosses, forcing even more reliance on the stand back, try to stay away, and let thrall fight "combat" style.