Ha! It’s a bit poorly named, but what the mod actually does is edit out most of the anime reaction sounds in the cutscenes. It’s surprisingly subtle - there are still plenty, but they’re placed where it makes sense instead of characters exclaiming with every slight movement they make.

The mod page has a comparison video with the base game that shows what I mean, but if the noises didn’t bother you then more power to you. Just be careful - I hear they can be contagious.

When you get around to playing FF7R you may want to check out these two mods. I couldn’t even make it through the intro without them.

Peak would be perfect for OP’s group. It’s cooperative, so having players of wildly different skill levels just means the better players can support the newer ones.

Abiotic Factor is an excellent game, but unfortunately it’d fail both of OP’s player requirements (too complex, and easily spoiled/speedrun by someone looking things up ahead of time).

It’s a shame they pulled the demo.

How would a prequel even work? The first Saints Row was a gritty street-level crime drama and only escalated to its signature ridiculousness after the Boss took over in 2. The original leader of the Saints, Julius, even has your character assassinated at the end of the first game (you get better) because he didn’t like how violent the gang was getting.

A game set before the Boss joined where Julius is still calling the shots sounds boring. Unless they mean a prequel to the reboot, but why make one for a game that was poorly received and instantly forgotten upon release?

That moment and what happened after defeating the Elite Four in Pokémon Gold both blew my mind as a child.

GTAV has made over ten billion dollars, one billion of that in its first three days. They would have earned more than double its entire lifetime development costs (estimated at ~200-250 million) if they’d charged a twentieth of what they did.

They’ve monetized GTAV so thoroughly via Online that they’ve given the game (including single player) away for free because they still made a profit off of it.

Charging $100 for a sequel they’ll definitely monetize even worse is the epitome of greed.

There’s also Flax, which feels a lot like how Unity used to before its enshittification. Or even better, in many cases.

The “support” was clearly a hallucinating AI agent, and Ubisoft has already clarified that the game is still supported and should get a patch in the future. This is yet another example of how replacing employees with LLMs doesn’t actually work.

It’s hard to go back to Avorion after they ruined subordinate auto-trading. You used to be able to tell your traders to make money and they’d figure out trade routes and grant you a decent passive income. Now they can only trade within a few sectors (each good’s price varies in a gradient spanning the galactic map, so trading with a neighboring sector is barely worth it due to prices being nearly identical), and you need to invest heavily in both the captain and trading hardware upgrades for their ship to make it even remotely worthwhile.

I know I shouldn’t expect an X4-level economic simulation, but they straight up ripped out an already working system and replaced it with something barely functional.

There’s a mod adding the ability to set up manual trade routes, at least.

Bethesda has a tendency to take features from popular mods for their previous games to improve future titles. Skyrim’s combat, for example, is heavily inspired by the Deadly Reflex mod for Oblivion. I wouldn’t be surprised if TES 6 cribs the Souls-like combat formula due to those mods’ popularity.

You’d be hard pressed to find solid, user-friendly documentation for UE2 as the engine wasn’t publicly available back then. There’s official docs, but they’re lacking compared to later editions.

If you really want to play around with old Unreal for some reason, the UDK (their first “free” release, based on Unreal Engine 3) might be your best bet if you can find a working download.

So it’s actually part one of a trilogy and there’s no publisher in place for the sequels? It’s like Molyneux gets off on disappointing players.

IIRC, they open themselves up to legal punishment if they push a false DMCA claim after the target files a counterclaim, which (along with the bad press) is probably why they dropped it.

Sadly this is about as good a system as we’ll likely ever see - at least there’s some hope for falsely struck projects (even if many don’t counterclaim as it opens them up to legal action). I have a feeling any replacement system would be far more stacked in the industry’s favor.

They publicly announced the rename, which was the first time most people heard any Overwatch-related news in years. People remembered the game existed and went to check it out; turns out a lot had changed and word of mouth spread, bringing even more players.

The rename takes effect on the tenth.

They renamed Overwatch 2 to Overwatch, which drew major attention back to the game for the first time in years.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone else reference Save the Date. It’s one of my favorite visual novels despite its simplicity, and was a prime example of metafiction years before games like Undertale and DDLC made it popular.

I mostly enjoyed their previous survival game Conan: Exiles, but lost all interest in Dune the moment I learned you couldn’t play solo offline. Conan was live service too, so it’s not like forced multiplayer is necessary to the formula.

Horizon

lower-spec

Here’s hoping. The first Horizon was also the first game to not run on my decade-old mid-range PC, and now’s a terrible time to need an upgrade.

Man, remember when God Eater was the closest thing we had to Monster Hunter on PC? That was rough.

Have any clones done the genre justice? I can’t think of a single one that rivals even Monster Hunter’s worst entries (unless you count Dragon’s Dogma, but the resemblance is skin-deep).

I was going to say it’s hard to go back to games with random encounters after the genre moved away from that mechanic, but their rereleases usually let you disable them.

In its original Japan, Dry Bones is known as Karon, a reference to the sound of bones clattering.

Well there you go. They won’t rest until they speak to your manager.

They’re regular barrels that are burning red hot from housing the explosion. Explosion spirits prefer to nest in occupied areas with plenty of goons around, and nobody can move their housing to a safer place without burning themselves.

It’s a shame how players keep blaming their enemies for leaving giant weak points around when it’s really just an unfortunate natural phenomenon.

It’s a crapshoot. Some need EGS running, some don’t.

All of the Fable games were easy. The first one had a shield spell early in the magic tree that made hits drain mana instead of health, mana potions were cheaper than health potions, you could carry a ton of them, and using them was instantaneous even in battle. It was straight-up impossible to die unless you did so deliberately.

The shield spell also made it so getting hit didn’t reset your combo (which acted as an experience multiplier), so you could grind against infinitely respawning enemies like town guards or undead in the graveyard for a while until your combo was in the hundreds, then chug a few experience potions and max out all of your stats instantly.

The only downside was that the spell made an annoying loud humming noise the entire time it was active.

I can’t remember ever having trouble in the second, but I don’t remember it being so broken either. It was just tuned a little too low since they wanted casual players to be able to enjoy it. The games could have used some difficulty options.

To get the good ending you need to become a landlord.

Plot twist: this is actually the evil ending.

They’ll have to pry Star Wars Empire at War from my cold, dead fingers.

The greatest thing he’s done is kept Valve a private company. He’s not beholden to shareholders constantly demanding that the line go up at any cost.

Funny how he’s still fantastically wealthy. It’s almost like treating your employees well and providing a quality product to consumers is a viable path to success, and selling out isn’t actually necessary to become rich.

Well it wouldn’t be a single pixel then, would it?

Early Access - Play 4 days early starting May 15

The screenshot has the information, May 19.

I love when games have extended post-release development like this so you can watch them continue to grow and evolve. Terraria in particular has been going for so long that some of the new additions come from suggestions by the dev team’s children.

(Actually that was already true several years ago. I’m expecting their grandchildren to begin contributing ideas any day now.)

Occasionally I rebuy one of the giveaway games because I completely forgot Epic gave it away for free. I grab every free offer and immediately put them in the memory hole.

There are open-source programs for configuring Logitech peripherals without the insane bloat of the official app. I can’t name them offhand because the last time I used them I had to try three or four to find one that worked with both old and new hardware, but they exist.

That’s how it works. A mod provides builds tied to specific beta branches, and a player is given whichever mod build is most closely tagged to the branch they have installed.

The announcement mentions how confusing the nomenclature is, but Steam still refers to branches as “betas” because that’s what a lot of the existing documentation uses, even though it’s just as common these days for branches to be used to provide access to old game versions.

People joke about companies being too big to fail, but Samsung is the largest of a group of conglomerates that basically run South Korea. They know there’s no way the government will allow them to collapse since they would take the Korean economy down with them. Why not take the most profitable route when there’s no risk (to them, which is all they care about)?

Does the open source Gothic engine have any options to modernize the camera and movement controls? That’s what killed my interest in the first two despite them being on paper the perfect games for me (and I enjoyed 3 and Risen despite them being considered a step down in quality from the first two).

It’s been ages, but I remember one of the first things Gothic 2 has you do is navigate down a narrow spiral staircase that resets your camera and walking direction any time you brush against the walls. It’s as if the developers wanted to warn you ahead of time about the control issues.

Very rarely. Originally Ludeon said they’d never offer discounts, same as the Factorio devs, but they eventually changed their minds. Sales still only happen once in a blue moon and are barely worth the wait. The highest Rimworld has ever been discounted is 20% off the base game and 10-15% off the various DLCs.

Wait until you try the expansions. Biotech alone completely transforms how you play in a horrifically addicting way.