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I must admit, it’s not “just” a remaster, but they somehow managed to capture the spirit of '06 when this first came out PERFECTLY. Picture this: I was still in college and studying at home when Oblivion was finally released. I had been waiting for it for a long time (to my young mind back then) and I remember it was a perfectly beautiful, sunny day and I was home alone with no obvious way to get to a game store.
So I asked my elderly neighbor if I could borrow her clunker of a car for “an errand” and drove over an hour to the nearest game shop.
From the game itself I mostly remember how drop-dead gorgeous everything seemed - and how terrible my PC’s performance was back then, especially in outdoors areas.
Today, I experienced the exact same form of awe, followed by the most gorgeous graphics I could imagine, and… 15 fps outdoors. EXACTLY how things used to be when I was a young man.
Magic. Truly a win for Bethesda (after Starfield). Now all I need is a PC who can actually run the damn thing on high with over 60 FPS.
As long as demand remains higher than supply they can practically ask whatever price they wish and people will pay it. Disgusting, but the businesses sinking dozens of millions into GPU’s just to keep their own AI’s from going on a 4chan racism bender will eventually run into that wall. It’s a technological dead end (at least in its current iteration) and the market is “winner take all” so there will only be a few big winners while others will be left holding the bags in the end.
Nothing will ever beat the C&c 1 DOS installer. Incidentally, that was my very first own pc game ever and the start of my gaming career. For some reason I expected that all other games in the future would have similarly impressive, artsy install procedures. That unfortunately never happened.
Then again I was spoiled for having c&c1 be my first ever pc game.
It’s been a while but AFAIK you control three or four party members so it’s more like the older BG games than NWN1 in that regard.
Storywise it’s set in the Forgotten Realms near the regions of the first game but it’s a completely new story with new characters. Iirc the story manages to decently subvert some expectations. I remember a conversation with a dead god in the expansion that was on par with meeting Sovereign for the first time in Mass Effect.
That one has already been done: https://store.steampowered.com/app/704450/Neverwinter_Nights_Enhanced_Edition/
. You’re barely even buying a console anymore, a lot of this hardware has more or less converged. What you’re buying is access to the cultivated ecosystem.
Bingo. In an age where most people’s phones have better hardware than the Switch, it’s all about access to the walled garden instead of hardware.
I suppose Morhaime and Metzen have to wipe away a tear once in a while when they see their brainchild being violated in every possible way, but they can do so using fat wads of cash Harrelson-style, so I can’t say I feel the least bit sad for them. This is what happens when you prostitute your (and others’!) dreams to the highest bidder. I hope it was worth it.
Fun fact: King’s Quest I, one of the very first games in the world to use graphics, had puzzles that could be solved in multiple ways. Taking a non-violent approach was the only way to max out your score however. For example, there’s a giant you can kill with a slingshot, or you can tire him out and make him fall asleep for more points.
There’s mods to fix that. I went from 3-4 minutes loading to ~30 sec.
Whatever it ends up being, I’m not interested. Never cared for competitive gaming. Sad that Valve has decided to use part of their enormous talent pool for, well, this while almost any genre would’ve been better.
Also, this is already a highly saturated niche. I don’t doubt Valve’s technical prowess and knowhow to develop a game that can surpass all the other ones in quality, but a gilded turd is still a turd under that gold leaf, even if it’s technically the best turd in the world.
We’ve been up against the 5Ghz thermal wall for over a decade. We can keep adding cores but we need significantly improved design (less nanometers) for these gains - and these are now running up against another wall, namely quantum tunneling which begins being a problem at around the nanometer scale.
I assume only a radically different architecture (light instead of electricity?) will be able to smash these barriers.