I’ve almost completely stopped keeping up with M:TG these days. I used to be into it but it just feels like it’s completely jumped the shark these days.

I’m playing Mankind Divided right now and loving it, already bracing for the heartbreak of the unresolved cliffhanger I know is coming.

Doesn’t load for me in Voyager either but it works in browser so there there alright. What the hell

GIF inclusion

On that note, the GIFs don’t seem to load for me. Tried three different apps (Summit, Thunder, Sync).

The faction thing is especially puzzling as factions play more or less zero role in STALKER 2. I guess one faction does crumble during the course of the main quest, and there is a bandit leader you can kill if you want. But this ain’t really what anyone would call “faction based gameplay”, nor is it close to what they’re suggesting during the deep-dive.

I’ve been trying to get through NOLF this year (never played it before) and it definitely feels janky and clunky. Some pretty awful stealth too. It doesn’t really feel like they’ve aged all that well. Maybe the sequel is better, who knows.

I gave up after a couple of hours as I just wasn’t having fun at all, I realised I was only playing because it’s a classic and I wanted to be able to say I had played it.

I played BG3 straight after Cyberpunk and that really stood out to me as well. The immersion and emotional impact of voiced protagonist lines really got me invested in Cyberpunk in a way I missed in BG3.

A lot of the details do unsurprisingly sound rather derivative, and it will be very, very difficult to reach the bar of writing set by writers who are no longer around. But the absolute worst part of this is that some of their ideas do sound interesting. A more elaborate thought cabinet is something I assume most Disco fans have wished for at some point, especially knowing the initial concepts floated around that had to be cut.

Also I didn’t know Anton Vill still worked there.

The Alice videos in AW2 are some of the best acting I’ve seen in a video game.

I don’t think Ruby works well but I suspect it’s a problem with direction rather than the voice actor themselves.

BG3 is great and all but there are other games with at least equal voice acting quality. For all its qualities I never felt like “wow, I’ve never seen voice acting like this in a game!” when I played BG3. It’s really good and really consistent but nothing earth shattering.

I know I bring up Disco Elysium a lot, but that is one game where I got repeatedly shocked at the quality and diversity of the voice acting. With the exception of one single character I think it’s acted to absolute perfection.

I also didn’t really feel the same about Alan Wake 2 like, at all. I thought it had superb acting (both voice and full video segments) and probably hold the quality of its acting above BG3 personally. Alan Wake 1 less so.

Kurvitz, Rostov and Hindpere are working together for a company called Red Info, but there has been no further info at this time. I think rumours are they might be ready to announce something this year.

Argo Tuulik is heading up Summer Eternal, so that is another one to keep an eye on. Sadly his work got halted by a legal injunction made by the people at Longdue.

Longdue themselves though have managed to recruit Martin Luiga. Whether he will actually contribute much or is there to lend credence to the project by virtue of his name remains unclear.

A high effort post on Lemmy? It’s more likely than you think!

Absolutely love these, they are delightful! They must take a lot of energy to put together but it’s so very much appreciated.

Wait, that’s Lord of the Rings movie trilogy themed though. How can that be 25 years old? …Oh.

Oh no.

They’re mostly also just all the same, so playing one after another back-to-back exacerbates the issue, at least for me. There are some exceptions, but that checklist filled Ubisoft collect-a-thon design philosophy really wears you out quick. At least it does me.

No. This is not a Disco Elysium dev, and especially not a writer. Everyone who worked on Disco Elysium has left the studio by now as far as I know and ZA/UM is nothing but an empty husk trying to exploit the reputation and name of the genius of others.

That C4 trailer was completely shameless. “We brought you Disco Elysium”… No you fucking didn’t. Now give the IP back to its creators you evil, soulless capitalistic pieces of trash. Fuck all the way off.

I’ve been splitting my time this past week. I was originally intending to be playing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided now, and I have been… a bit. I’ve gotten it running, done the tutorial and the first couple quests and side quests and explored Prague a bit. The game is beautiful, especially with DLDSR and the RenoDX mod installed for HDR. I’m really enjoying what I’ve seen so far, though I’ve barely scratched the surface in terms of main quest. Prague is a great hub city and the themes of the setting with the segregation and the almost apartheid like conflict are interesting and well realised. The gameplay feels very solid, though still a little too anchored in the “cover-based shooter” era.

However, with the F1 season kicked off I got the urge to play around a bit with F1 Manager 2024. It was free on Epic a few weeks ago so I already had it installed. It’s much like the previous iterations of the series - great presentation but a little vapid and shallow underneath. It’s a real shame, because there are things about it that are compelling. Having all those real team radios and proper circuits and gorgeous cockpit views during races and all the official branding does make a difference. The presentation really is top notch. In-race management is also pretty damn fun, especially this year where we finally have mechanical failures. Race simulation still has some flaws - it’s way too easy to overtake in Monaco for instance - but overall it’s pretty good.

I’ve used the 2025 DLC mod to update the game and grid to the current season, and the Andretti mod to see if Andretti Global can make Logi Sarge a world champion. Hopefully will be an amusing diversion this week, as there’s no race.

It’d be kind of like if Assassin’s Creed Unity played the same song that was in that famous reveal trailer (…)

God, that AC Unity trailer with “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” might still be my all time favourite trailer. It’s so good.

I’m glad AC Shadows is going in a good direction though. I thought the series was completely lost after the shift to RPGs. Still not sure I’ll play it but I might consider it now on sale. Yours is not the first surprisingly positive review I’ve seen.

Don’t hold your breath. Any hope of getting the true sequel died with the firing of Brian Mitsoda I think. Doesn’t even look like Rik Schaffer is involved in the project anymore either.

A game mechanic should not be patentable in this manner. Fucking copyright law.

I’ve personally gotten a lot out of all the AI enhanced graphics technologies, and pretty much consider these applications the absolute perfect use case for the AI we have today. Yes, they shouldn’t be a substitute for optimisation, but overcorrecting the other way and attempting to claim that DLSS is garbage that ruins everything and looks like shit is also bad (and untrue).

Even frame generation has its uses, as long as you don’t play something fast paced where there is a lot of camera movement and/or you’ll feel the added input lag too much.

A special shout-out to the redheaded stepchild of the family too: DLDSR is a fantastic technology and once you’ve tried it you’ll never want to go back.

I’m taking this topic to be less of “what’s the most important video game” (which we already had a long discussion post about recently re: the BAFTA award thing) and more of “what’s the best game to just sit down and play right now”. In which case, probably Portal 2? I can’t think of a much better candidate in terms of being a perfect execution of what it sets out to do with an appeal that can be compelling for absolutely everyone regardless of taste.

I’ve never really thought of it as one, but I guess Disco Elysium could technically qualify as a point and click adventure. It just doesn’t have the object combination based puzzles I normally associate with the genre.

I plowed a solid month into Stalker 2 when it came out and loved my time with it, but it has it’s fair share of problems. Not having proper A-life alone makes me very reluctant to nominate it for GOTY.

I really hope they come back eventually and do a full remake for the sequel as well. But maybe the SS1 remake didn’t sell enough that another similar effort would be profitable?

I’m in the minority that says the newest games don’t need to get 60fps 4k ultra on the newest GPUs

This is a great take tbh and I agree. Future proofing is a thing and we’ve seen old benchmark games hold up remarkably well thanks to it - hell, look at Crysis! I also think a lot of people underestimate just how demanding 4k is. We’re still not at the point where 4k is the new 1080p imo.

Were you not a fan of what they did with the SS1 remake? I thought it was well received even by fans of the originals? It’s still on my backlog list but it looks amazing and I’d love to experience SS2 with the same treatment applied to it. Maybe SS2 is a rare exception but I personally tend to think early 3D games are pretty much ideal candidates for remakes as they tend to age poorly in both engine, visuals and gameplay. Not to mention controls and QoL.

I’m kind of in the same boat. SS2 will always be there if I wanted to play it, and a remaster isn’t really making me more or less likely to. But a full remake would be very interesting especially since the studio was so successful with the SS1 remake and it turned out so well.

That’s what I’m saying. I wonder why they decided to only remaster the sequel and not fully remake it when the SS1 Remake turned out so good.

It looks… fine I guess. For me at least it’s just a little disappointing as I missed out on System Shock 1&2 back in the day, and I heard such good things about the SS1 remake. So I was really looking forward to the SS2 being remade with similar quality, since that is the one out of the two people tend to wax lyrical about.

Graphically it looks awesome too. At the native settings it would have had around 2012 it didn’t look to great, but after raising it to the max it looks really good. It can be crazy how future proofed older games are with graphic options.

One of the best things I’ve found for cleaning up older games is DLDSR. Hell, I try to use it on any game I can get away with, but on older games especially it’s great because you have so much excess FPS to play with that it’s basically free. The anti-aliasing effect of it is especially nice on older games and typically much better than the native AA solution.

Intent is critical for my enjoyment of art. What makes art wonderful is that it lets you connect with another human being, get a glimpse into their mind, see their perspective, feel their feelings.

Gen AI as it exists today has no intent, so I have no interest in it.

Yeah if you come from modded Anomaly S2 will feel downright casual, but it’s not even necessarily the challenge that would turn off mainstream players though I think but the pace. Stalker has always been a very slow game (and we love it for it!), but that’s a tough product to sell in today’s attention economy.

On a side note, if you’re into GAMMA etc and truly hate yourself you can check out Stalker A.R.E.A… I was playing around with it a bit just before the release of S2. Disgusting stuff.

The nature of the game is also not necessarily mainstream friendly at it’s core. Fans of the series love the lack of fast travel and the long, tense walks between locations for literally 20 minutes at a time with nothing much happening (I am one of those fans). But I can’t pretend that’s not an acquired taste at the very least.

I’m still sad the source code of IWD2 was lost and we’ll never get an official Enhanced Edition (for all my hate of Beamdog and their writing and fanfic insertion the updated engine and QOL work they’ve done is quite nice).

Tuulik is more than a lead writer, he is one of the co-creators of the setting as one of the players of the original Elysium tabletop sessions alongside Martin Luiga (with Robert Kurvitz being the DM).

It’s extremely puzzling to me that Martin Luiga jumped onto this project when I’ve heard so many bad things about Longdue, not least their ongoing feud with Argo Tuulik. I thought the bad blood was primarily between Kurvitz and Tuulik, not Luiga. But yes, Martin being involved in this project does legitimise it somewhat. I’m still more optimistic about Summer Eternal and Red Info, as far as the splinter studios go.

I have a good PC but not top-of-the-line and I was getting playable frames at launch already. The only way 40 FPS on a top PC makes sense to me is something like playing in 4k and with DLSS turned off.

I should do another run soon. Maybe add some more mods this time…

I don’t know how far you got, but you might have gotten unlucky with who you spoke to in game. Lena, Anette, Tommy, Mañana and Roy are all immediately accessible for example and are all rather lovely people, providing some soft contrast to other more abrasive characters.

Can’t say anything about the delivery of the content though. It’s certainly extremely info dumpy and text heavy - part of why I was saying to start with that it’s less than a game and more of a novel.