Random video game news... RNG is your friend!

[Hurlshort]

Enshrouded gets wet! This is a pretty big change to the whole game world. I've been playing a lot lately. I love the desert biome.

[Sven_]

22 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

Borderlands 4 "min. requirements" include Intel Core i7-9700 / AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, 16gb ram and  RTX 2070 / AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, with 100GB SSD space.
Recommended = 3080 gpu.   And ofc probably that's for 1080/60fps. And UE5 engine. And Denuvo this time.

 

Then again, recently taken a look at pricing in the "good old times" over the longer term, e.g. loss of value over time. If you'd bought a 8800 GTX Ultra at the peak of the price and tech advancement wars, but a couple months later you could have purchased it new for like half of whatever you bought it for, no kidding. You can take a guess what that means when you decided to sell again and to upgrade... The same goes for any card during those years. My 3060? Is still sitting less than -30% off its MSRP in shops despite being released in early 2021. 3080s still sell for decent money on used markets as well. And the real pros more recent sold their years used 4090s with a net profit, despite no Covid nor Crypto craze in sight. Thus, a historical first in the history of PC hardware: people coming out richer some time after buying enthusiast hardware than before doing it.  

Plus, there's an entire generation now that doesn't even know how actually demanding real PC show cases used to be. Even trying to run those things on hardware released two, let alone six years earlier would have seen you laughed out of the room. Ok, this is Borderlands and no Crysis. But still.  
 

 

Where was I? AH:

That new Outer Worlds 2 companion trailer seems fairly vanilla, in particular in terms of character designs and traits. One is a robot, I guess... and that's it what sticks for now. But then, the RPG inside the RPG is what counts!

Edited Thursday at 06:29 AM by Sven_

[Hawke64]

The companions look quite good and the last line sounds very encouraging and appealing. Though, Microsoft still owns Obsidian. Well, that and the expectedly poor optimisation of TOW2 - I will not purchase something I cannot run, while the 4K textures would be a waste of storage space and energy. The developers not moving them into a separate free DLC show the lack of consideration for both the players and the environment.

VTMB2 getting released is interesting. While I do not expect it to be a faithful successor or a deep immersive sim, it still might be an engaging action in the VTM setting. Granted, the voice-in-the-head will be silenced quite quickly.

[Lexx]

Silksong in 2 weeks. I cri.

 

[Sarex]

It didn't say the year.

[Sven_]

On 8/21/2025 at 9:30 PM, Hawke64 said:

The companions look quite good and the last line sounds very encouraging and appealing. 

I've seen the usual crowd is all over it for all the wrong reasons. To me, it's a bit like a bunch of characters that may happen if you hit the "randomize" button in a Bethesda-style character editor and then take the first decently legit rather than funny option. The trailer also doesn't feature much of any dialogue or interaction, and it's supposed to be a companion trailer. Falls fairly flat to me. Then again, TOW1 overall was kind of a bit "flat" and never risking much. Baby's first Boyarsky/Cain-Like RPG. Pentiment had a lot more spice and flavor.

RE: Bad optimization? Do you mean Grounded 2 (saw somebody mention it would be quite demanding, but then it's still Beta)? I think we're partly in a weird transition stage now.

For many years, there weren't much leaps made in technological terms. On consoles, you (usually) don't have to worry anyway -- 30/40 frames per second are still a thing here, at least in dedicated quality or balanced modes if available (like in Mafia currently). And on PC, there weren't really any PC showcases. It's all "multiplatform games", FPS unleashed on PC -- and the sky (and your pockets) are the limit. Nvidia seem to have realized this, they aren't promoting 1,000Hz/1,000fps screens for fun, they see business opportunity.   Now there's a bit of raytracing (the mandatory bits of it not really demanding, see Indiana Jones or Doom). Oh, and UE5 with its Lumen. But it seems both inexperienced developers as well as Epic are still not quite there. That's the tradeoff when always using the latest tech: It's inevitably also the least tested. There also seems a confusion on PC: Whilst consoles have used (dynamic) upscaling for years, on PC too it was always meant to be mandatory for now, if going by Jensen's words. Still, all recent titles are still running on hardware 5, 6 occasionally 7, 8 years old.

Personally, I'm curious as to when whether games are going to be consumed the same way as movies. The point at which a critical mass doesn't care about how much older a release is than what's currently out (few would skip on Alien/Aliens in favor of some vanilla Hollywood flavor of the week monster ride just because those are "old" movies). In a way, it's already happening. As outside of games pushing actual photo realism, there's diminishing returns. Grounded ain't such a game pushing for the realism. Much like the upcoming Borderlands 4. And to an extent, also The Outer Worlds 2...

Edited Saturday at 05:25 AM by Sven_

[LadyCrimson]

It's cinematic only but for a game, I like that it's a Korean Joseon era setting.  Not many (AA/AAA) pc-games with that folklore/look. Sadly (for me) it's probably a "souls-like" action/adventure/SP meaning outside of being pretty, it won't be for me (unless I cheat my way through it ).  But I'm kinda curious if it'll manage to distinguish itself, gameplay-wise, as something more than ending up being largely known as a Korean  "Black Myth Wukong."  Like more rpg elements (party members, a tad less linear, whatever, etc). Probably not, but who knows.

UE5 engine.  Character is inspired by a Korean novel and/or real life person turned into a legend, or something. One of those things.
 

 

Edited Saturday at 07:10 AM by LadyCrimson

[melkathi]

I am afraid you'l be right, and it will be one of those souls-action games.

On the other hand, nothing in the trailer prevents it from doing a complete plot twist and have the characters travel forward in time to bring their rivalry into the current era to battle it out at a music event as K-Pop Idols. Then the game would be part life sim, part music industry management sim, part dating VN

 

Unlikely,

One can hope.

[Pidesco]

On 8/21/2025 at 9:30 PM, Hawke64 said:

The companions look quite good and the last line sounds very encouraging and appealing. Though, Microsoft still owns Obsidian. Well, that and the expectedly poor optimisation of TOW2 - I will not purchase something I cannot run, while the 4K textures would be a waste of storage space and energy. The developers not moving them into a separate free DLC show the lack of consideration for both the players and the environment.

VTMB2 getting released is interesting. While I do not expect it to be a faithful successor or a deep immersive sim, it still might be an engaging action in the VTM setting. Granted, the voice-in-the-head will be silenced quite quickly.

Avowed was surprisingly well optimised I felt, and I'm expecting the same from OW2. 

[Hawke64]

10 hours ago, Pidesco said:

Avowed was surprisingly well optimised I felt, and I'm expecting the same from OW2. 

I thank you for your input and I am happy to know that Avowed was working on your hardware. Nonetheless, I would like to point out that at release the Steam Deck performance was reported as poor with the FPS dropping below 30 at the lowest settings (the handheld is a decent indicator of whether it would run on my main system, excluding some OS version-related fluff which is a no-go), while the system requirements still show both the minimum and the recommended storage space as 75GB, meaning that the unusable for me textures are baked in and I would be forced to download them regardless.

The Outer Worlds 1 was an excellent example of handing it - the players who could afford to spend more on their hardware and energy could access the more energy-consuming graphical features for a modest fee, while the others still could play the game comfortably without missing out on anything.

Still, I am happy to wait for my hardware to be able to meet the recommended system requirements which is also likely to coincide with the price being equal to the consideration the developers gave to the optimisation. It is applicable for both The Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed. I do hope that PoE3 will have "less graphics" and full save file import, should it ever happen. Arguably, PoEII is ~50GB, but it was worth it.

[Pidesco]

What are your current specs? 

[Wormerine]

On my 3070 I was able to run Avowed mostly ok, but unfortunately, I do start feeling the limits of my 8GB memory. I tried Doom: Dark Ages, and oh boy. That just wasn't worth playing with that performance. Technically I was able to push to 60FPS with heavy use of DLSS, but it definitely wasn't smooth 60FPS. 

[Sven_]

8 hours ago, Wormerine said:

On my 3070 I was able to run Avowed mostly ok, but unfortunately, I do start feeling the limits of my 8GB memory. I tried Doom: Dark Ages, and oh boy. That just wasn't worth playing with that performance. Technically I was able to push to 60FPS with heavy use of DLSS, but it definitely wasn't smooth 60FPS. 

It's funny that Dark Ages is seen as a demanding game. Historically, much like any Doom since the reboot, it's an imposter. I mean, it's released on a Series S! Even my 3060 would still perform hugely better than Carmack era Dooms with much more recent hardware then.  And the CPU requirements are low anyway.
 

 

 

 

As for Avowed, this is basically one of the minimum spec GPUs release six years ago. Looks fairly decent. Grounded 2 still seems in a rough shape. But if TOW2's anything like Avowed, I'm personally not even wondering whether I could run Outer Worlds 2, despite running entry hardware released 2021 (Ryzen 5600 / RTX 3060). It may not be a stable 60 fps without upscaling. But then I didn't play TOW with more than 45-50fpsish either on my prior Ryzen 3 / 1050 Ti setup. As said, 30/40 are absolutely still a thing on "affordable" consoles at least on dedicated quality/balanced modes -- plus (dynamic) upscaling. On PC, your pocket's the limit, and Nvidia are pushing the demands for 1,000fps already. Frame Generation or not, that is a THOUSAND frames rendered in every single second. And each of those frames is still getting more complex. Let that sink in for a, well, second. 5,000 Dollars GeForce 6090 GTI Super Mega Hyper Ultra -- when are you gonna release it, Jensen?  

 

Edited 12 hours ago by Sven_

[Lexx]

Avowed was running great on my PC. Couldn't believe this was an Unreal Engine game since most other Unreal games run surprisingly bad for one reason or another.

[LadyCrimson]

Btw, I'm not ticked re: BL4's requirements vs. my personal hardware. I'm barely interested in the game, really. I'm just tired of all these games thinking they have to up the ante (usually this means graphix-tech) when there isn't really much reason to do so for the game/series.  I mean sure, if a dev wants to make a super fancy showcase, they can do that/some games are meant for that. But I see no reason for BL4 to have that min. requirement (could've been a gtx 9xx min, say). I'm guessing that min. is because of RT that maybe you can't entirely turn off - I looked it up, BL4 will "feature ray tracing."  (sigh)

Nvidia's BL4 "showcase" video is showing/claiming 200+ fps, meaning without DLSS4/frame generation it's likely many are going to have poor - or at least not the desired - performance, since, y'know, most people don't even have a 50xx. Edit: that said the showcase video is pure marketing bull, since they don't even tell you what gpu or original resolution they're using to get those frame-generation fps.
 

 

Edited 2 hours ago by LadyCrimson

[Hawke64]

On 8/24/2025 at 1:48 PM, Pidesco said:

What are your current specs? 

Intel i7 8750H (the Turbo Mode is disabled due to overheating), Nvidia RTX 2070, Win 10 with DirectX 12.1.

The Avowed minimum system requirements are: 

• OS: Windows 10/11 with updates
• Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600 / Intel i5-8400
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: AMD RX 5700 / Nvidia GTX 1070 / Intel Arc A580
• DirectX: Version 12
• Storage: 75 GB available space

Which means it may or may not run, as the CPU and the OS version can easily be unsupported. While the 75GB download size means that I will not try any time soon. 

For the last part, my point of comparison is Steelrising - there were 26GB of the game and 40GB of junk that are unusable textures. It was kind of the developer to at least put them in one file, so I could easily remove them, yet I should not have to download them in the first place.

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[Pidesco]

I would be surprised if it didn't run, but sure, it's possible. Of course, performance isn't going to be amazing, but I'd wager both Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 should be playable on your rig.