This is what I do. The only parts left from the original build are a pair of 2TB HDDs installed back when it was a Win7 system.

Hawke is like Shepard; you can customize them, but the pre-made face model has more detail than what you can make in the character creator.

Bloom was brand new. Devs didn’t have access to it at all until that console generation and took a while to figure out how to use it right.

The ‘real is brown’ phase was similar, with devs suddenly being able to use color grading and having no idea how to use that responsibly.

I’m tired and misread that as, “to prepare for eBay,” and thought that actually using the service to understand it before buying the company sounded remarkably sane for this guy. Or CEOs in general, actually. Alas.

Most Skyrim SE mods are compatible with Skyrim VR, so there’s a chance.

I still don’t see why they copied this feature from Humankind. It was the worst part of an otherwise decent game. They should have learned from Humankind’s flaws and done something like keep your civ but change your leader by era. Same general concept, but feels much more Civ.

For that matter, the original controller without Steam running had a default mapping that had it output as a mouse and keyboard with sensible bindings. It was called ‘lizard mode’.

That was BioWare and Fallout 3.

The promised bonus was dependent on what rating the game got from Metacritic. If it got an 85 or better, they got the bonus. It got an 84 and specifically lost points due to the rampant bugs. BioWare was responsible for bug testing and QA according to the contract.

Costing…how much?

$1139

There’s actually an official “back path” for the Morrowind main quest if you killed Vivec. You need to take an item from his corpse to Yagrum Bagarn, but you also need a high reputation. If you muck up the back path, too, you can brute force the main quest by completing the final step anyway, but good luck figuring out how to do that without a quest pointing you to what you need.

What assets you’re recycling is a huge factor. There are crates in Fallout 4 that were originally made for Oblivion. You almost certainly won’t notice unless you’re looking for it. Similarly, I’m playing Divinity Original Sin 2 and there are a bunch of little things that were reused for Baldur’s Gate 3, like vases. Again, most people will probably never notice.

On the other hand, BioWare reusing animations that were originally created for Neverwinter Nights in Mass Effect 3 is jarring, even though those animations generally worked fine in KOTOR. Or Assassin’s Creed 3 using combat animations in the modern day segments that were designed for the flintlock-wielding enemies in the historic segments.

Cyberpunk also has a nudity setting in all versions.

You can also get really good at Lute Hero, but it takes longer.

The money grind in 3 is easy, too. You just need to buy a house, rent it out, use that to buy another house, etc.

And changing yourself. Frequent magic users would get old and spindly, I believe occasionally glowing. Axe swingers would get ripped. Your character would be a literal representation of your playstyle and that was cool as hell.

It was both more and less involved than that. Putting XP into the Strength stats made your character buff, Skill stats made them tall, and Will stats gave you glowing patterns on your body, except in 3 where they made your tattoos glow instead. What you actually did was irrelevant, just how you spent your XP. In Fable 1, buying levels also made your character older, but age became connected to plot in 2 and was dropped as a morph in 3. Moral alignment in all three and ethical alignment in 2 and 3 also affected character appearance, but the specifics varied a lot between games.

My problem with the Forerunner stuff in Halo 4 is the same problem I have with all the aesthetic changes in 4 and 5 - it’s extremely busy. 1, 2, and 3 have a sleek and simple design language that makes it very easy to tell what’s happening in chaotic combat. The vibrant colors and shiny materials even give Halo 3 an almost heroic fantasy vibe. They deliberately went the other direction with Reach to enhance the grim tone of the game, but environments are still relatively simple so that enemies stand out. 4 and 5 put excessive lines and greeblies on absolutely everything. It’s all so packed with details that you sometimes lose enemies in the background and it can be difficult to tell what you’re looking at.

Nintendo is consistently terrible about not having solid launch titles.

And the point I’m making is that only a handful of games are keys; the vast majority are still on the cart, same as the last system.

Games aren’t “games”, they’re download keys.

Generally agree with your post, but a large majority of games really are games. If they’re a download key, it’s very clearly labelled on the box.

LOST JJ Abrams didn’t do anything other than the pilot and had no solutions to the mysteries said pilot introduced.

I would love if Civilization or Crusader Kings implemented this.

Final Fantasy 9 had you learn skills from equipment.

If you’re only interested in multiplayer then those are solid options. If you like campaign then you should definitely check out 2, ODST, and Reach.

And I’m hoping for them to be flatpacks so they still run five years later. I’ve had to resort to running Windows builds via Proton for games that have native Linux builds because they don’t work anymore.

And x-axis, just to be thorough. Especially for third person games since they still can’t all agree on what the default should be.

Playing as Emily in 2 is really fun. You have the option to ignore stealth, go all out with your powers, and still not kill anyone.

PlayStation is probably going to still have exclusives, or at least timed exclusives, driving some sales. But this announcement may be the final nail in Xbox’s coffin.

I have carpal tunnel syndrome and mouse heavy games hurt, but playing with a controller is great. If this can easily replace a mouse and keyboard setup then I’ll be playing with it a lot, and those track pads are a big reason why.

They’re also good for emulating certain consoles with quirky controllers, like the N64.

Gameplay-wise, Rogue is even better than Black Flag. Narratively, Rogue is a disaster fueled by Shay being painfully stupid.

The 360 had far less RAM than the average PC of 2010, and the engine has had a memory leak since Morrowind. I never finished New Vegas due to that, even on PC. Moving to a 64-bit version of the engine with Fallout 4 helped a lot, just because it took longer to run out of memory.

Fuck yes. A slave that takes on the slave owning Templar? Sign me up all day, I want to run into a confederate camp and crush them.

Freedom Cry, the standalone expansion for Black Flag, was essentially this concept in the Carribean. You play as Adewale, a slave turned pirate turned Assassin, and liberate plantations.

Lightfall sunsetted everything I was using that wasn’t an exotic. Completely destroyed my build.

I love VTMB, but the gameplay was never the highlight, it was always the writing. If the story and characters are well written and it ties into VTMB1 somehow, I’ll consider the title justified. The writing is a pretty high bar, though.

I could be wrong, but doesn’t he own the company?

You made a comment that is typically meant with complete seriousness without any indication you were joking. PETA, for example, has an entire anti-Pokemon campaign built on the premise that Pokemon is animal cruelty.

Microsoft, Sony, EA, Activision, or Square Enix would be my guess.

Only for backwards compatibility titles. PS5 titles have to be run off of either the integrated storage or an M.2 SSD.

DLC playable clans. Toreador and Lasombra NPCs will work fine with or without the DLC. If you want to play as one of those then you need to shell out another $20.

Not sure if this is what they’re talking about, but they made an ARG as part of the early VTMB2 promotion stuff. You had to do stuff within a fake dating app called Tender that was made in-universe to help vampires find feeding targets.