One of the top Deadlock players uses a trackball. We all stan our ergonomic king.

I guess they mean they’re optimized for Nvidia in the sense that they need upscaling technology in some form due to either demanding graphics or poor optimisation or both, and Nvidia has the best one at the moment. I wish it wasn’t the case, but DLSS does look better than the alternatives.

Depressing? There are a lot of other things right now that depress me way more than the type of tools used to project the image I’m consuming in my escapist entertainment medium of choice. Maybe I would be more outraged if I was a programmer and knew exactly what kinds of optimizations developers were (or weren’t) doing these days. As an end user I have no problem with DLSS to be honest, I just see it as another tool and frankly it strikes me as one of the better applications of AI we’ve developed. There have been multiple examples where I was happier with the visuals with DLSS on rather than turning it off but also having to turn off or down a lot of other graphical bells and whistles. Also, making games that require DLSS on current hardware is future-proofing in a way, is it not? A generation or two of hardware down the line and you can just turn off DLSS and enjoy it in its full glory.

This was a good read, and I’m very excited to watch the documentary. I wonder who else will show up for interviews in addition to those named, Luiga and and Tuulik perhaps?

I haven’t played myself in about a month since it’s been the holiday period, but it looks to be in a bit of a lurch. Many streamers jumped ship to Marvel Rivals (at least for the moment). Marvel Rivals is also an inherently more accessible game since it’s not a MOBA. I think the initial hype has died down and closed beta testing will now resume in a more normal way. I wouldn’t expect another big player surge until open beta begins - possibly even full release.

Though Unity will always have my favorite game play(…)

I love seeing another Unity enjoyer around here. That game is severely underrated and had it not had that disastrously buggy launch the AC franchise could have gone in a completely different direction than the open world RPG flavour we ended up with. Plus, revolutionary Paris is one of the best realized video game cities of all time, it’s just beautiful.

I thought Infinite was fairly well liked? That’s a bummer to hear, it’s in my backlog docket. I just played Bioshock 2 a few months ago however and while solid I probably do agree it’s got nothing on the original.

How powerful is the PC? Is the question more about games optimised for mouse+keyboard, or is it about demanding recent games that allows his new machine to flex its muscles?

Since you say he likes Souls-likes Black Myth Wukong probably checks both boxes - I never ended up playing it (my backlog is too long) but it looked great with stunning visuals and I heard good things about the gameplay.

Cyberpunk with full path tracing is still one of the prettiest games out there and a pretty damn good game too after the patches and expansions.

Finally, something like Fallout: London could be an interesting suggestion as mods of that nature are out of reach of the console crowd. Could give him a whiff of what he’s been missing out on.

It’s been a while since I last played but the over-streamlining and continued simplification and homogenisation of the classes in combat was definitely part of the reason I stopped playing.

Casey even shows up in the dark place wearing the Max Payne tie and leather jacket! I was geeking out.

I grew up in the nineties and PC gaming certainly felt like a niche hobby then, at least where I grew up. “Normal” kids were doing sports, maybe some families had a Playstation, Dreamcast or Nintendo console in the living room. But there weren’t many others who played PC games and us who did were the nerds who got more or less bullied.

What competition has such a rich gambling scene though. No other game I am aware of (Maybe TF2 but, still valve)

Gacha games have been taking over the world ever since Genshin Impact and those are pure gambling. Going even further back, Ultimate Team on FIFA (EA FC now) is probably the worst true “selling gambling to kids” product I can remember.

You don’t get sick leave on a Dyche team just because you’ve raging diarrhea.

Jesse didn’t really do it for me as a protagonist, not sure if it’s due to writing or the performance (I suspect both). Which is really a shame because the game itself is really fucking cool. I still recommend it to anyone, the gameplay is slick and the SCP/world building aspect makes it engaging and interesting enough by itself.

Cyberpunk with full path tracing is still one of the prettiest games out there. And I also think - in its post 2.0 state - that it’s just a very good game too. I recommend the Ultra+ mod to squeeze out even more performance and visual fidelity from the engine.

I still haven’t worked my way through the deals I got during last year’s sales, and despite that I bought another dozen games on GOG this black week. So I’m trying to stay away from the Steam winter sale this year lest my backlog becomes such a behemoth it gives me uncontrollable anxiety.

I really like GOG so it would be highly unfortunate to see them go under. I guess we really can’t have nice things in this day and age.

Much needed. I finished the game before this latest huge patch dropped and had to use console commands three times just to fix progression locking bugs in the main story.

It’s still a must play for fans of the franchise I would say, but if you can wait it’s probably a good idea to do so. They still haven’t gotten A-life working.

If Warren Spector is actually involved I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt but I’m not thrilled about the competitive multiplayer aspect and the trailer presentation made me think “hero shooter” more than Deus Ex/Thief spiritual successor. Also Spector’s track record over the 20 post-Eidos years isn’t exactly glowing.

I never understood the “don’t nerf things, buff other things!” argument. Power creep is a very real issue and much more tough to deal with than players getting upset briefly.

Ragebound sounds about right. I had Ninja Gaiden on my original Xbox back in the day and while I loved it and played the shit out of it I never beat it. These games were fucking hard.

I’m starting to really despise this franchise, studio and/or publisher. Fuck off with these remaster cash crabs two years after a game is released. Are we due a The Last of Us: Part 1 Remastered - Remake too soon? Get out of here.

Didn’t the remake rip out all the amazing period songs from the original OST? I remember vibing to Django Reinhardt as you’re driving was a huge part of it for me.

I was praying for Letho even though we all knew it was going to be Ciri (for better or worse, we’ll see).

Leaning into the moral grey of the Witcher world with Letho would have been awesome, he says (in one of the endings to his story) he’ll head out east over the mountains so we could have gotten some all-new environments and it would have been 100% CDPR IP so they could have done whatever they wanted without trampling over lore too much. Plus Letho is just an amazing character with huge protagonist energy. Oh well.

Deadlock killer?

FFXIV: A Realm Reborn is a fantastic trailer but it’s almost cheating because Answers is such an unbelievable Uematsu banger that it carries it on music alone.

Assassin’s Creed: Unity had one of the best trailers of all time, and it will take something truly special to dethrone it from my personal nr 1.

Portal 3 Kingdoms was a mistake.

I haven’t played MTG in a few years (and don’t intend to come back what with the SpongeBob crossover and all) but Magic used to at least try to limit mental math in terms of changing values on cards. Buffs lasted a turn, and anything permanent was auras or equipment or +1/+1 counters.

Gwent has a lot of numbers changing value contextually, often by multiplication instead of simple addition. Now, combat math and all that is way more complex in Magic, but Gwent does have lots of changing numbers to track.

What do you mean, the Cretaceous period was just yesterday.

It came out just a couple of years ago, right?

Too much going on. It’s like they’ve just accepted and (mostly) implemented every single feature request they ever got without necessarily thinking about how it should work with all the other stuff.

I played PoE for a good few years around its release and had a lot of fun initially with the temporary hardcore leagues with new mechanics every time, but there is a good reason I haven’t come back to the game - and it’s not just that I’m kind of over the ARPG thing. Scope Creep has turned it into a convoluted mess to get back into if you’re been out of the game for a while (or never played it) and I say that as someone who typically enjoys complexity.

A very appropriate release to celebrate the 10th anniversary of TW3 (my god time fucking flies). Much like the author of the article I was always surprised there weren’t any physical editions of Gwent being sold. And again like the author, I hope it’s the Witcher 3 version of Gwent being sold and not the standalone. I want to re-live my degenerate decoy/spy shenanigans.

Of course, but if a game’s quality was typically inversely proportional to the review scores, wouldn’t that mean 10/10 reviewed stuff like Elden Ring and BG3 was garbage and the truly great games averaged 1-3/10? I’m just confused by the statement.

I uh… what? I mean, sure, some reviews are bought etc but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a superb game average 1/10 in reviews. Did I misunderstand you?

Witcher 3 had 96 minute days, which felt fine for that game. Any game I play for immersion usually ends up needing a mod though because timescales are often a problem. RDR2 shouldn’t have 48 minute days either, that one was even worse than Stalker 2.

If you play slowly and focus on immersion - and the game has survival mechanics - I find somewhere between 4-6 hour days to be perfect.

Even for games with fast timescales that is insanely fast. You barely have time to take in the environment and scenery before weather changes and the sun goes down or rises again. You can start a gunfight in the morning and finish after nightfall. For a game that lives and dies by immersion it completely pulls you out - at least it does me.

Yeah I had to install like a dozen mods to attempt to even remotely address things, but it’s clear from a myriad examples that there was basically no QA testing done. From the bugs, to the fucked up balance to stuff like the day/night cycle being 1 hour realtime for a full 24h in game (!!!) there are just so many things that would have been brought up hour one of testing.

More surprising too, with Hazard you kinda knew his diet and lack of training discipline would catch up eventually.

I’m a massive Stalker fan, and the state of the game pains me. What they have is so good. The world is beautiful and immaculately designed, the vibe and the atmosphere is all there. The guns feel good. The story is good so far with interesting characters and good performances (at least in Ukrainian) and the animations and presentation in main story dialogue quests has been good and immersive. Not cyberpunk levels maybe but good and a huge step up from previous games.

But man, there is so much that reeks of unfinished and half-done. They likely would have needed another year at least but I think they just ran out of money. It also looks like being forced to comply with console parity for the Xbox meant they couldn’t get performance under control and had to rip out A-life (or abandon it when it was clear it wouldn’t work on Xbox).

With how great the good parts are it pains me doubly.