marelooke

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.

I do sort-of the same, except I try to treat my Windows machine as a "console" (aka. gaming only) and use "open" operating systems (GNU/Linux, *BSD) for everything else (that isn't work, because there I don't get to choose, sadly).

Unpopular opinion: DOOM (2016) is good, but not great. Might have qualified as great without the nook-and-cranny-searching upgrade system. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I've mostly been playing Warframe again lately after a stint with Destiny 2. The lack of FOMO junk in that game is refreshing (tho Nightwave is pushing in that direction). Though mostly I've been tinkering with hardware since I discovered how (relatively) cheap second hand enterprise grade hardware is, so my server machine might actually be able to run a Conan Exiles dedicated server acceptably now. (still playing that occasionally fwiw, pretty nice building game )

Barely did any of it. I did grind through the Halloween event though. I do enjoy the game, mechanically, but the way it is set up with all the FOMO events etc. is just a huge turn-off, and I'll probably just drop it since there really doesn't seem to be much of a way to play it "casually" and still feel like you're achieving anything.

Looks like Valve trying to push VR by dangling a HL3 carrot in front of frothing fans to me. Honestly once this much time has passed and with most of the people that made the originals gone I feel they should just be left alone. Putting stuff in the same setting is fine (like this game), but making a HL3 at this point, yeah, probably not a good idea. Unlike BG3, which most of the people going ape about haven't played the predecessors of, I doubt HL3 being rather unlike HL2 would go over too well.

So what does it compare to? Seeing Uncharted and Dark Souls comparisons, so guess it's not a spiritual successor to Dark Forces, which is a bit of a disappointment to me (seeing health bars etc, also was such, to be frank)

Is that another name for Anthem?

Didn't most of the people that made Diablo 3 and Reaper of Souls quit? So where would they poach people for Diablo 4...? Hmm,I wonder if these WoW devs are ready for a change of pace...

News seems to be in the same area as player activity now, Community Content is below that for me in games that support it (eg. Conan Exiles)

I bought Brukel on Steam, it's basically a walking simulator about the experiences of the developer's grandmother during the second world war, narrated by said grandmother. This one might hurt. My grandparents never, ever, spoke about the war(s). Everything I know about their experiences (and those of my great-grandparents) I learned through my parents.

And that most supposed fans of the genre have never even tried Grim Dawn...

How does that convert to Microsoft Minutes?

There was a lot wrong with DA:O but the newer installments still managed to "fix" everything that wasn't broken. If only a better studio (well, or one not managed by EA, at least) had gotten its hands on that engine, the things that could have been. I think I...need a moment. *sniffle*

Wasn't the issue that it couldn't deal with multi-core CPUs? I seem to remember having to force it onto a single core to stop the game from crashing to the desktop. Awakening otoh, I ran into a game breaking bug. Given the state that expansion launched in I guess it was already a miracle I made it that far in before encountering issues, but I digress... I decided to wait for a patch for the issue, which took a long time to arrive so I never actually got back to that playthrough. Heh, I still have that game on discs too, so I actually wonder how that's going to work now that all the BioWare infrastructure is gone, can I even still get the DLC to work, for example (there's download on EA's site, so I hope they have that covered)? Could be a fun ride just to get all that working again

I nabbed Lust for Darkness and Agony in a sale bundle on Steam (for about half what one of the individual games goes for normally) Agony's take on Hell rather intrigued me when a video was posted around here when the KS happened (afair this didn't have any of the nudity and stuff, just the level design). The game appears to not have been able to live up to the hype, gameplay wise, so it's always been on my "maaaaaybe if it's really cheap", so here we go Lust for Darkness similarly has an interesting aesthetic and mature theme and while the main plot is apparently rather predictable the backstory is supposed to be interesting.

But did he shoot first?

Dangerous decision, this is why I still haven't finished Dragon Age: Origins' Awakening expansion. One of these days I will get to that, I'm sure

Didn't EA provide installers of some sort before forcing everyone onto Origin though? I kinda remember being salty about that one (that and buying a disc version of ME3 only to be forced onto Origin, Half Life 2/Skyrim all over again)

Not really surprised and I would be even less surprised if Origin would disappear entirely in the future and/or that others would follow suit. Building a better Steam than Steam hasn't exactly been proven quite as easy as many made it out to be, nor will it probably be quite as cheap as many expected it to be. Not to mention that people sooner or later get fed up with the insane fracturing of the landscape. With all these stores and their associated subscription services I would be entirely unsurprised if piracy was on the rise again, just like for audio/video content. Piracy is a service problem, after all, and service appears to be getting worse again.

Well... FNV was literally unplayable at launch for a lot of people (including yours truly, who could play for a maximum of 15min without a CTD), so that kinda didn't do it any favours. Took a very long time to get it to a playable state and it's still one of the more buggy games in that engine (might have to fight Fallout 4 for the honour). Anyway, don't have all that much time to game due to house renovation projects so mostly mucking around in games that don't require any form of commitment, been creeping closer to 100% on Skyrim and been doing some more building in Conan Exiles (should check out that new dungeon as well at some point)