On 1/22/2026 at 7:03 PM, Wormerine said:

Sooooo..... I am full of ****. 

Those reports on RAM shortages, potential discontinuation/limited restocking of 5070 Ti, and potential price hikes of consumer GPUs got to me, and when I saw a very modest discount on a 5070 Ti, I jumped a gun and bought one. I have few weeks to ponder whenever to send it back or not, but am leaning toward keeping it. 5070Ti should keep me going for the next few years, while 3070 is clearly struggling with 1440p when Raytracing is required. Only sad, that I missed discontinuation of AMD's 3D processors for M4 socket. It seems that if I will want to beef up my CPU, I will have to switch the motherboard as well. That's a problem for another day though. 

Zen3's still doing pretty okay even without 3D cache. PS5 Pro is still based on Zen2. And the PS6 may be delayed to 2029+...

The Real Finewine Strikes Again: Ryzen 5600X, 5700X & 5800XT Revisit

Alternatively, do it like me: Say f*ck you to the PC specs rat race and go Indie entirelly --- until KCD3 is out. What lousy deal is it to pay 300% more for 5% better graphics these days anyway? HEAR ME OUT: On tomorrow's market of every game looking as boring as Hollywood and Netflix, pixels as big as Texas are the real treat anyhow. :D

Edited Saturday at 12:40 PM5 days by Sven_

Yeah, there are only few titles for which CPU is a bottleneck (Cyberpunk being one of them). I wish Ryzen would resurrect m4 3d chips, but I am good as it is.

A friend of mine convinced me to double down on my irresponsible spendings and swap my 27inch 1440p IPS for 32inch 4k QD-OLED.

Visual gains vary from game to game - games with a lot of dark and contrast benefit the most from OLEDs true darks. One thing which surprised me is how little performance gap there is between 2k and 4k thanks to DLSS - In 1440p anything below quality preset would be noticeable and even quality sometimes showed some ugly bits. With 4k though, I can easily use balanced and have a better image quality then I did in 1440p, and on performance it seems to be more or less on par with quality in 1440p.

I was a bit disappointed with the performance I was getting with my 5070 Ti when I turn raytracing on in Cyberpunk and Alan Wake2. I mean it is mostly playable now, but still seems like mostly novelty feature for high end GPUs. To compare I resubscribed for a month to GamePass to try the mandatory Raytracing games: Indiana Jones and new Doom. Both look stunning and run like butter.

Unless I turn on Pathtracing - Pathtracing cuts my framerate by 2/3rds.

Eh, I will see with time if it was a wise investments or if the RAM panic will blow over and I have overspend for an unpgrade I didn’t need just yet. The screen is nice though. Probably will enhance my experience more overall than the GPU.

1 hour ago, Wormerine said:

Yeah, there are only few titles for which CPU is a bottleneck (Cyberpunk being one of them). I wish Ryzen would resurrect m4 3d chips, but I am good as it is.

I upgraded AM4 one last time from an older Ryzen 3 a while ago. Back then, the 5700X3D was still around (for ~200 EUR). As I'm never looking for a higher end experience, this was a no-brainer decision: The 5700X3D thus cost twice as much as the 5600, but is nowhere close to providing twice the performance. X3Ds are great chips if you want the extra performance. But I'm actually surprised that they are so popular. They're clearly sold as enthusiast chips -- and as any enthusiast hardware (RTX 4090/5090 etc.), you're also PAYING extra. Guess that people are figuring that they still have much lower price tags then the best GPUs (true) and just go: "Ah, who cares!" :D

And naturally, on AM4, they're now forever the fastest gaming chips around, driving up demand all by itself.

Edited Monday at 12:55 PM3 days by Sven_

Yeah, in the end of I will want to upgrade it comes down to overpriced m4 chip, vs m5 chip motherboard and RAM. I would be happy with £200, less so with £300-£500 for used 5700 and 58003d. My 5600x is mostly enough for 5070Ti fortunately.

1 hour ago, Sven_ said:

I upgraded AM4 one last time from an older Ryzen 3 a while ago. Back then, the 5700X3D was still around (for ~200 EUR).

Alternative title “Why we can’t have nice things”. Tax write off is an interesting bit I didn’t know about.

This is very Sony. At least in this case you get the new version for free, with FF1-6, you had to pay again.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/39140/view/514107648813039662?l=english

50 minutes ago, MrBrown said:

This is very Sony. At least in this case you get the new version for free, with FF1-6, you had to pay again.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/39140/view/514107648813039662?l=english

Maybe I am just not perceptive enough, but what are the new "improvements" for the 2026 version of the game? Only thing, which I have noticed was some online "features" which could turn the game after three decades into Online Only mode 🤷‍♂️

Rock Paper Shotgun

The Outer Worlds 2 sounds like it's not getting a follow-...

Obsidian have revealed they aren't working on The Outer Worlds 3,but have plans to make more games in Avowed's fantasy setting Eora.

1) releasing three games within same year: Not their intention, and don't want to do it again.

2) Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 didn't meet Microsoft's sale targets

3) No Outer Worlds3 in development

4) more titles in the setting in Eora - whenever it is Avowed2, Pillars of Eternity3 or something else entirely.

That's upsetting. These games are very much for me. I don't finish a lot of games, but for some reason, Avowed and OW2 captured my attention and held it until the end. I'm disappointed that they aren't doing better financially. In comparison, while I enjoyed BG3, I never finished it.

They did seem to do well critically, so I hope it isn't just unreasonable sales expectations. I don't know, I just hope Obsidian doesn't end up in another hole. They've been remarkably resilient so far.

Microsoft's approach was awful.

Super premium pricing discouraged both casual and dedicated initial interest; and that is just about impossible to overcome just with quality because no one likes the feeling they're being taken advantage of. Very odd choice to try a new higher pricing level on them. PoE/ Outer Worlds 1 were not Fallout and were not Baldur's Gate, indeed PoE2 did notably poorly at launch, but eventually made money. You can't price as if they're must haves.

They will probably/ hopefully have decent tails at least, at a more sensible pricing level.

microsoft can ruin windows as much as they did

they can certainly ruin obsidian

Much respect for surviving in this industry for a quarter of a century -- and then by doing mostly RPG-Likes. But to be honest, Obsidian's management seems to suck a bit also. At least once it gets heavily involved with creative decisions.... which seems too often.

Avowed got delayed and rebooted a couple times to hit in 2025 because the founders first wanted their $kyrim-Like in Eora. Then they shifted it all towards multiplayer (the trend of the mid 2010s, see also Bioware and Anthem, Arkane Austin (RIP) and Redfall). Then they decided that all of that wasn't to their strenghts and restarted another time.

The Outer Worlds seemed to have started out as a similar shallow sales pitch: "Fallout-Like... in SPACE!" (Legend has it that Feargus kept neglecting Tim Cain's ideas until Cain proposed what Urquhart had been waiting for all along). Tim Cain is certainly on record as saying that the direction given was targeting a more "casual audience". Whether that helped to attract players and keep them excited long-term for mucho sequels, who knows. I'd argue it certainly didn't help the game to leave a more impactful footprint. Given that it's a game of heavy looting, but loot (and ammo) is to be had in such an abundance, it doesn't even matter. Same as with the "stealth", even the quest design seemed to assume an audience that would get lost in their own toilet, with everything being blatantly signposted -- in a game supposedly all about player expression! Nintendo shows more confidence all throughout Zelda than any this.

Deadfire balooned in cost and workload because of the management's late decision to include Full-VO, contributing to the initial commercial underperformance. Even Josh Sawyer talked openly about this in a Post Mortem. Hindsight bias in parts, to be fair. As that decision was of course driven by Larian doing full VO at the time and Larian... well look at where they are now.

Not sure if there's any truth behind the story about the development of Tyranny and how Paradox money was supposedly used... creatively (so let's not go there). It's too easy to look at the game as a confirmation all itself, given that it never had a proper ending (I still liked Tyranny).

And then don't forget the Kickstarter and Pillars Of Eternity that helped saving the company back then. That was initially blocked by management, they were rather hesistant at the very least. Josh Sawyer and Adam Brennecke had to fight hard to get them to agree and give it a go. Later on, they were even threatened to get laid off if they wouldn't have met the final deadline. Seems "just", smacks me as big time disrespectful however, in particular considering how Sawyer had helped in saving management's ass at least once before (see the remarkable development and crazy deadlines of Icewind Dale II at Black Isle / Interplay).

TL;DR: It seems that Obisidian is at its best when the creatives have a bit of leeway... Grounded initially was a small team project, Pentiment naturally never meant to be a big money machine, Mask Of The Betrayer a DLC that didn't have the pressure to deliver the revenue of a main release also. And back with New Vegas, it's easy to see an environment where developers could do a little bit more of their thing also. As the mere prospect of doing another Fallout, any Fallout after Bethesda's commercial smash of FO3 must have won Obsidian management over. Here's hoping for more Groundeds and Pentiments and Pillars Of Eternitys anyway... in whichever format!

Edited Wednesday at 06:32 AM2 days by Sven_

That said: Even the greatest games in the world may struggle to find an audience if they're pitched to the public like canned tuna rolling en masse from the factory line.

Case in point, TOW2's companion trailer. Bioware-style companions (get companion, unlock backstory and companion quest) are pretty cooked anyway (personal opinion, I know). But what was that? At worst, it's selling blandness without realizing. At best, it's meant to be a joke. However, it is a bad one. As it is always a joke on the designers. Like the one in The Outer Worlds 1 on Monarch, where after a string of boring fetch quests, there's a joke about how fetch quest-y the prior hour all was. Or the one in a gazillion bad adventure games, where after combining stinky cheese with dynamite and cat hair and maple syrup, you get the world's deadliest nuclear bomb. And to top that off, a line of dialogue is promptly rubbing it in of how ridiculous that just was. (There's actually great adventure games to this day, mind).

Back to the trailer: Even making a joke about how bland and unremarkable and everyday your companions would be -- that's unlikely to make anybody more excited to spend any time with them. Say what you will about Larian (and I know they're divisive here, not a huge fan of at least DOS myself). But they've nailed how to sell their product. They've even nailed to sell the pitch of 80% of Obsidian (and even Arkane) games in existence. As their entire campaign for BG3 was focused on promoting player expression and could be summarized like this: "Do whatever you like... which may or may not include shagging a bear." Players sharing on TikTok how they'd turn themselves into cheeses to make cheeses boldly go to places no cheese had gone before, or Streamers promoting and sharing the many ways you could handle the Goblin camp in act one -- that got people talking. In the end, it was the perfect storm nobody could have anticipated, naturally.

But the message and intent to actually get noticed by a few people was there from the go.

Edited Wednesday at 07:33 AM1 day by Sven_

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-03/xbox-studio-behind-grounded-outer-worlds-is-charting-new-path

A good link summarizing Obsidians financial wins and disappointments from there 3 latest games and the failure to meet Microsoft targets

They going to be making some real changes around development timelines

15 hours ago, Sven_ said:

Avowed got delayed and rebooted a couple times to hit in 2025 because the founders first wanted their $kyrim-Like in Eora. Then they shifted it all towards multiplayer (the trend of the mid 2010s, see also Bioware and Anthem, Arkane Austin (RIP) and Redfall). Then they decided that all of that wasn't to their strenghts and restarted another time.

Other way around iirc; while Feargus may have wanted a Skyrim like- and who in gaming management wouldn't, really- Avowed started off active development as a multiplayer game; then switched to single player, then with zones rather than seamless. That interview was from 2016, before even PoE2 launched.

I don't think there's much evidence of unusual development trouble in either really, you just tend to notice issues more in games you pay attention to. Both games had pretty close to standard dev cycles time wise for games of their scope; Avowed slightly longer and OW2 probably a bit shorter. If there's one thing Avowed delays stuffed up for sure it was staggering releases properly, ideally you'd want longer there.

9 hours ago, BruceVC said:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-03/xbox-studio-behind-grounded-outer-worlds-is-charting-new-path

A good link summarizing Obsidians financial wins and disappointments from there 3 latest games and the failure to meet Microsoft targets

They going to be making some real changes around development timelines

The problem here is MS having a target of 30% profit for their games. So if Avowed/TOW2 came in at 20% profit, which by any measure would be a success story, the mere mention of them "not meeting sales targets" sets off an avalanche of "the games bombed/were a failure" type of unfair asinine comments which undermines those games and Obsidian's reputation. :(

7 hours ago, Zoraptor said:

Other way around iirc; while Feargus may have wanted a Skyrim like- and who in gaming management wouldn't, really- Avowed started off active development as a multiplayer game; then switched to single player, then with zones rather than seamless. That interview was from 2016, before even PoE2 launched.

Not only Feargus.... Apparently Chris Parker et all were pushing for it too. That had carried over for far longer though. Avowed wasn't supposed to just channel Obsidian's inner The Elder Scrolls -- it was supposed to do that AND be multiplayer on top of it. If dev cycles and processes wouldn't be an issue, they wouldn't be talking now about trying to shorten them to three or four years as one of the main commitments. From Bloomberg:

A few successes later, Urquhart and his co-founders were in talks to sell the business to the company that had almost killed it. During the negotiations with Microsoft, Obsidian’s executives assembled a slideshow presentation for the concept that would become AVOWED, pitched as an ambitious cross between megahits The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Destiny that would allow players to battle monsters together in a massive fantasy world. It was an impressive if unlikely proposition. “My thought when I first saw it was, ‘I don’t think there’s a team on the planet that could execute on this,’” says Josh Sawyer, Obsidian’s studio design director. Two years later, Obsidian stripped out the multiplayer feature, and a year after that it assigned a new director to the project. By the time AVOWED came out, it had been in the works for nearly seven years.



Also pretty curious how Feargus now wishes that MS would allow for risky and/or smaller projects to be made still, when it was Josh Sawyer who had to once again (see Project Eternity) battle hard with Feargus to get Pentiment off the ground. He even considered to leave had it fallen through. Credits where credits are due: Back at Interplay, when Feargus suggested to a then little known company called Bioware that they better make their next project a D&D game, he struck Gold. No less as no decent big D&D game had come out in many years before. Otherwise, he really doesn't strike me as somebody that should get too deeply involved on the creative side of things (the other founders aren't as regularly "visible" with wonky decisions, as Feargus is pretty much the public face of Obsidian, but who knows...)

You know who should be in charge of all things creative? Whoever came up with the initial idea for say Grounded. Not only does that game cater to a specific niche rather than trying to be a little bit of everything for everyone: "It's ELDER SCROLLS MEETS OBSIDIAN MEETS DESTINY!" (Scope issues aside: A game made for everyone is a game made for no one). Grounded, unlike most recent Obsidian games, also has a distinct hook that nobody else on the market has: "Oh LOOK! It's Honey I Shrunk The Kids -- THE GAME!"

Edited yesterday at 04:23 AM1 day by Sven_

Avowed could never be Elders Scrolls, because one big part of it being so popular still is it's easy moddability. I don't know why they just can't see this. If you put out your game on Unreal, there won't be any mods. The game will be forgotten in a month. This happens all the time with those games. You need mods, to keep people in the loop. Making mods for Bethsoft games is so incredibly easy that anyone can do it. Sure they sell more on consoles than PC yadda-yadda, but mods in the news are what brings people back over and over. Hell, you just have to look at Skyrim or FNV Nexus. The amount of mods for those games is crazy.

20 hours ago, kanisatha said:

The problem here is MS having a target of 30% profit for their games. So if Avowed/TOW2 came in at 20% profit, which by any measure would be a success story, the mere mention of them "not meeting sales targets" sets off an avalanche of "the games bombed/were a failure" type of unfair asinine comments which undermines those games and Obsidian's reputation. :(

Yeah you are absolutely correct about that IMHO insane profit margin. I doubt, that in MS anyone, except iD and Bethesda can meet this target (even Blizzard cannot do it anymore). I am kind of disappointed, that they bought so many smaller AA studios, and then they decides to come up with such crazy profit margin target for them. This might pretty much kill all the smaller size projects in these studios for the foreseeable future.

30% doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Perhaps even quite reasonable, within the limits of what you'd expect from MBA types.

I'm not sure there are any publishers that would metaphorically get out of bed for something that takes 5 years to generate a 10-20% profit even in a sector where most products lose money; the lower end is probably a practical loss due to inflation. Companies will take low reward so long as it's also low risk (and low opportunity cost, ie you don't have something better to do with the money) but gaming is really not low risk; on an individual title basis it's high risk and mostly relies on big returns from a few titles rather than moderate returns from lots.

21 hours ago, Sven_ said:

By the time AVOWED came out, it had been in the works for nearly seven years.

That's a not unusual length of time for games today, at least when they have pretensions about being a big hit. Which is a bit of an indictment on the industry as a whole.

3 hours ago, Zoraptor said:

That's a not unusual length of time for games today, at least when they have pretensions about being a big hit. Which is a bit of an indictment on the industry as a whole.

It's certainly not an unusual length for RPG-Likes that try to be HUGE ASS 100+ hour GAMES (see Kingdom Come 2, Starfield, BG3....) As said, it's one of Obsidians own main objectives to now cut that down to three, four years.

Speaking about MS' profit targets, I'm sure they're calculacting that in, but: Pricing a game, any game at 70-80 bucks whilst making it available on Game Pass isn't promoting that game. It's promoting Game Pass first and foremost. Not sure about you guys, but games at that price point have to REALLY win me over (which increasingly fewer of these risk averse big budget games desperate to cater to everyone and their pet hamster do). Else I'd rather buy 2 great indie games and a glorious Pentiment (and still have money to spare for snacks and drinks on top of it). What Raf Colantonio said. Xbox Game Pass ‘damaging’ the game industry, former Xbox dev says

inXile's Clockwork Revolution is likely going to face a battle too.

Edited 2 hours ago2 hr by Sven_