Random video game news... renewed!

[Sven_]

3 hours ago, Lexx said:

Does he mean this Albion?

Yes! Personally, I liked the "predecessor" (Ambermoon) more though. Really impressed me technically back then though. It had Ultima Underworld 3d-style dungeons... on an Amiga 500.

Edited Wednesday at 05:57 PM by Sven_

[Bartimaeus]

19 hours ago, majestic said:

This is going to be hilariously useless, but I just cannot stop myself. Please name the element(s) in Veilguard that make it exclude straight males. Provide specific examples and give a proper contextual reading for those. Bonus points if you can make it about excluding straight white males.

What is not in my nature, I cannot give.

- Lucifer, The Tragedy of Man

1 hour ago, PK htiw klaw eriF said:

All of this puts me in an awkward situation because I would very much like to hate on DAVe but also don't want to roll in that mud. I was hating on this **** before launch and these vermin scurry in to start as soon as they see sales figures aren't great.

It does put one at conflict, doesn't it? I don't like the character designs, but not because I'm a moron that's always been a moron and who will always be a moron, but because I think they all just look like real (but creepy) people dressed up in cosplay, and cosplay deeply upsets me, so I don't like that. I've said it a number of times before, but the closer graphics get to reality, the more uncanny valley they are, and that goes double once you start dressing them up in fantasy get-ups. Ya gotta have an art style that is more than just "let's map real people's faces to our character models"...well, you do unless you want my first impression of your game to always be, "Are those skinwalkers doing cosplay? Yeah, I'm out."

More importantly, I think there are right ways and wrong ways to criticize media, and I think the other intelligent humans that know you will be able to recognize the difference if you take a fair approach to it. If we had to defend every piece of media whose views we agree with just because we agree with it, we would have to defend a lot of crap that isn't worth defending, and that's no way to live life. Really, it's just better to cut people who are either stupid or disingenuous.

Sorry, did I say "cut people [...]"? I meant to say "cut out of your life people [...]", of course. Whoops, honest mistake, .

Edited Wednesday at 06:32 PM by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

13 hours ago, BruceVC said:

No Im not going to go into more details. Its not like you really want to have this debate in a constructive way 

As usual your standard response is " you a racist\fascist " and that's why Im saying what Im saying 

No point wasting my time with this type of engagement 

Anyway it doesnt matter what we think the reasons are the game failed to make its sales target, either it makes its target or it doesn't

It doesn't seem  like Bioware is going to be around much longer and then these types of analysis become irrelevant anyway

QED

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

Sorry, did I say "cut people [...]"? I meant to say "cut out of your life people [...]", of course. Whoops, honest mistake, .

It works both ways tbh.

[Gfted1]

Avowed review: Wait, are we the baddies? - Ars Technica

[uuuhhii]

many avowed review are coming in now

sound like 2a game with that next gen engine visual

[Wormerine]

 

[kanisatha]

On 2/11/2025 at 5:56 PM, melkathi said:

You really don't have to.

I already played it for your sins.

Honor my sacrifice.

Oh, come on! It wasn't that bad. I actually liked DA2. The repetitious areas thing was very annoying, yes, but the game overall was okay--good, even. The story was interesting as were most of the companion characters.

[Bartimaeus]

2 hours ago, Wormerine said:

 

I sometimes forget how silly first person view models look in first-person action games, especially if you're not the one playing (...and I don't play first-person action games anymore basically ever, so that doesn't help either). Hands and arms coming directly out of your face... It doesn't help that the reviewer's FOV looks terrible, wonder if they didn't bother to change it or if it can't be changed. It's funny, I don't suffer from claustrophobia (and I've been strapped inside an MRI machine where you can't move and the whole of the machine is surrounding you and just about pressed up directly against your face and there's no way out without people from outside extracting you), but every time I see an FOV that is too low, I feel like I know what claustrophobia is like, because yuck!

Edited Thursday at 07:28 PM by Bartimaeus

[elwisty]

On 2/11/2025 at 10:03 PM, Zoraptor said:

Looks like a NWN2: Enhanced Edition is happening, developed by Aspyr.

Everyone's persisting in talking about some big new RPG being released in a few days. Awowed or Ewoked or something. 

But there's going to be a NWN2 enhanced edition! Party like it's 2006: 

 

[kanisatha]

1 hour ago, elwisty said:

Everyone's persisting in talking about some big new RPG being released in a few days. Awowed or Ewoked or something. 

But there's going to be a NWN2 enhanced edition! Party like it's 2006: 

 

Yeah, this will be an insta-buy for me if it turns out to be true.

And even more joy - Beamdog, which is now owned by Aspyr, has confirmed in a Steam forums post that they are NOT involved in this project. Hallelujah!!!

Does anyone know what NwN2 having been in "rights hell" the past 19 years is all about? It's being referenced in all the stories about this EE, but no one is providing any details. So I am very curious.

Edited Thursday at 09:02 PM by kanisatha

[MrBrown]

17 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

And even more joy - Beamdog, which is now owned by Aspyr, has confirmed in a Steam forums post that they are NOT involved in this project. Hallelujah!!!

Is that a good thing? Didn't they do the NWN:EE, which I think went over well.

[Mamoulian War]

1 hour ago, kanisatha said:

Yeah, this will be an insta-buy for me if it turns out to be true.

And even more joy - Beamdog, which is now owned by Aspyr, has confirmed in a Steam forums post that they are NOT involved in this project. Hallelujah!!!

Does anyone know what NwN2 having been in "rights hell" the past 19 years is all about? It's being referenced in all the stories about this EE, but no one is providing any details. So I am very curious.

The rights hell is all about Atari and WotC. A mix of awfulness which could be toppled by only a few

[Zoraptor]

At this point I think it's safe to say it's Hasbro/ WOTC that's the root of the issue. One issue with games rights/ developers might be a coincidence but they've had issues with Interplay/ BIS, Bioware, Atari, Obsidian and Larian- just off the top of my head, limited to D&D and with me not paying much attention.

They just don't seem to be very good at all at anything computer game related and when there's a success it's despite them.

[Sven_]

The one thing NWN2 has always needed is a decent camera.... just one.  I think with the popularity of the tabletop, a NWN3 (or similar project) could be a real winner... during Covid it may have even hit pretty HARD. Everybody creating and/or playing D&D adventures from home, with their group or alone.


Re: Avowed, looking decent. Performance on entry level GPUs looks alright also (GTX 1650 ist below minimum specs and doesn't count). I'm firmly in the "Outer World's is alright, but fairly vanilla" camp (except for Monarch, which was... almost like an MMO grind, until I decided to just run past the gazillion of copypaste enemies and NEVER looked back). As such, a PoE3 would have hyped me more.

Edited yesterday at 12:50 AM by Sven_

[Bartimaeus]

Is there such a thing as reverse review bombing? Like, if you're expecting Avowed to get review bombed by people who are going to refund the game during the early part of release just for being "too woke", is there a group of people out there buying games just to give them positive reviews and then refunding them?

[Zoraptor]

It's far simpler to just get a bunch of people to say that the game is being review bombed and get the rating manually (or 'manually') curated by removing all the zeroes. Indeed, that's what happens fairly often eg to Rings of Power on IMDB* and various games on Steam.

*purely coincidental who owns that site, of course

[Bartimaeus]

6 hours ago, Zoraptor said:

It's far simpler to just get a bunch of people to say that the game is being review bombed and get the rating manually (or 'manually') curated by removing all the zeroes. Indeed, that's what happens fairly often eg to Rings of Power on IMDB* and various games on Steam.

*purely coincidental who owns that site, of course

I know that's a thing on Steam, but does it happen with new releases? I thought that was only a thing for games that already had positive reviews and then suddenly get an influx of negative reviews after the fact that Valve believes aren't really to do with the game itself.

[BruceVC]

12 hours ago, kanisatha said:

Oh, come on! It wasn't that bad. I actually liked DA2. The repetitious areas thing was very annoying, yes, but the game overall was okay--good, even. The story was interesting as were most of the companion characters.

Yes its biggest fault for me was the repetition of dungeon design , it was lazy

But I enjoyed the narrative and how it involved over years  and I liked the companions and Romance arcs. Especially Isabela 

 

[BruceVC]

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/obsidian-plans-to-make-rpgs-for-100-years-by-not-trying-to-grow-aggressively-expand-our-team-size-or-make-super-profitable-games/

Here is a really good link from Obsidian around there vision of the company and how they plan to survive and ensure profitability in a reasonable way  

They have learnt lessons from the likes  of Bioware and Veilguard and its sales failures  and they plan to avoid that type of financial crisis for the company

" They didn't call out any examples themselves, but the duo was clearly setting themselves apart from companies that pour enormous budgets into long and turbulent development cycles and then announce that the resulting game underperformed because it didn't immediately sell tens of millions of copies. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the most recent high-profile example of an expensive RPG that didn't meet its owner's sales expectations, and EA cut jobs at BioWare after the miss. " 

[Wormerine]

Huh. Well done Obsidian.

[Lexx]

Seems there's only two kind of reviews for Avowed: "Super awesome!!" and "worst game ever" -- will probably play it via GamePass once it is out.

Edited 19 hours ago by Lexx

[melkathi]

No GOG? 

Just them dodgy American sites

[Wormerine]

1 hour ago, Lexx said:

Seems there's only two kind of reviews for Avowed: "Super awesome!!" and "worst game ever" -- will probably play it via GamePass once it is out.

I don't think I have seen an overwhelmingly positive review for Avowed. From what I have seen people invested in Eora, found a lot to enjoy in Avowed, while people not invested in the universe mostly found it underwhelming. So it seemed Avowed might have missed the marked in trying to bring in new audience, while the existing audience would likely prefer PoE3 to begin with.

Eitherway, it seems that Obsidian is continuing playing it safe - which is disappointing. I was hoping that lesser player agency came with some unique upsides, and so far it doesn't seem to be the case.

While Outer Worlds benefited from Bethesda creating a lot of goodwill for it with Fallout76, it seems K:CD2 created the opposite for Avowed. Which is a shame, A detailed, hardcore medieval adventure is kinda what first person PoE adaptation should be IMO. Fantastical powerfantasy, I think runs against the IP's nature. Alas Obsidian continues to pursue mainstream appeal with Outer Worlds and it seems, Avowed, producing simpler friction-free experiences.

Still, looking forward to it. Based on what I have heard I should enjoy the game well enough.

Edited 17 hours ago by Wormerine

[Hurlshort]

25 minutes ago, Wormerine said:

While Outer Worlds benefited from Bethesda creating a lot of goodwill for it with Fallout76, it seems K:CD2 created the opposite for Avowed. Which is a shame, A detailed, hardcore medieval adventure is kinda what first person PoE adaptation should be IMO. Fantastical powerfantasy, I think runs against the IP's nature. Alas Obsidian continues to pursue mainstream appeal with Outer Worlds and it seems, Avowed, producing simpler friction-free experiences.

Still, looking forward to it. Based on what I have heard I should enjoy the game well enough.

I disagree. K:CD2 and Avowed are tremendously different types of games. Sure, they are both RPG's, but that's about it. One goes for historical accuracy and tries to recreate a living breathing medieval world. You aren't a super soldier, your just the son of a blacksmith who can't hold his liquor and has lucked into some nobility. It relies on minigames and precise combat controls.

Avowed is high fantasy set in a fairly alien world. It's weird and otherworldly. The combat revolves around fantastical powers. I don't know how that runs counter to the first 2 games. You were literally tangling with gods in the games. Avowed compares more to Skyrim in that regard, even though I dislike those comparisons as well.

I can see what you are saying if you feel Avowed lacks the complexity of K:CD. On its surface, it does seem to be a simpler game when it comes to mechanics and extra stuff. I feel like Obsidian has made a concentrated effort to not overextend itself. I haven't played enough to see if there is more to it. It has cooking and crafting, but it isn't as crazy as other games.

Anyways, I love that we have both of those games on the market. They are both great and play very differently.