sp3ctr4l
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Yep, I already said the Switch 2 makes sense if all you care about is playing Switch 2 games.
I am not trying to aruge that the Deck is just hands down, inherently superior in all cases, for everyone.
I hope there’s a way for you to put parental controls on your 12 yo’s Fortnite account’s ability to buy microtransactions, and that you have enough time to teach them how to identify and disregard all the dark patterns in the game that encourage irresponsible spending habits, as well as resist all the social peer pressure that comes with an MTX heavy game.
Point by point:
1: I mean, I guess? I do not even have a mouse myself right now… but if I needed just a cheapo one for basic use… you can get something functional for $20 or under, a basic mouse you’d get for a work laptop type thing.
2: People have all kinds of ‘unusual’ Deck set ups.
The mouse dongle you just mentioned wouldn’t… really make that much sense, as … you can just hold it… and use the touch pads… or the touch sensitive screen itself…
But its actually not uncommon for people to dock their deck, sync it to a controller or M+K, and then stream it to a smart tv, or a dumb one via a dongle or direct connection to the dock. No, you’re not gonna get true 4k on any non retro game, but a good number of people do something like this.
3: … As compared to…? Your minimum 3x more expensive PC you can upgrade with even more money? Another console/handheld you… can’t upgrade?
Unless the Switch 2 can play Cyberpunk 2077 at better than 45 fps, with graphics basically medium/high, I don’t see how the Deck is ‘showing its age’ compared to other similarly priced handhelds.
Decky FrameGen is pretty neat. I think I managed to tweak mine up to an avg of almost 55 on the benchmark, and thats without mucking around in CET to squeeze out even more.
4: I absolutely understand buying a Switch 2 is your best option if you want a very straightforward, doubleplus legal, and expensive way to play Switch 2 games.
Like, if you’re super dedicated to current era Nintendo games, sure, fine, yep, get a Switch 2.
But if you just like games in general…
5: Pretty much yeah, I agree. Its possible to get it working with a Deck, but its gonna be a lot more hassle, and you’ll need peripherals, yep.
So… its $50 more than an LCD, 256 GB Steam Deck (the Switch 2 is also LCD).
A Deck has two touchpads that work as mice.
And you can buy a real mouse with those $50 bucks you saved.
Oh right and it has a bigger screen, can run almost every modern to ancient PC game, and basically every retro game if you can handle an EmuDeck or RetroDeck guided installer, oh and it also just is a computer that does everything a mid tier linux laptop can do.
It can even run Switch games, and probably will be able to run Switch 2 games in… what, 2 years? 3 years?
I’m really not trying to rain on the parade here, but uh… yeah I do not understand the cost benefit analysis on a Switch 2 vs a Deck unless:
You really, really want to play Switch 2 games soon
OR
The Switch 2 somehow has vastly superior performance to a Steam Deck
… I kinda doubt that last one being the case, but the specs aren’t out yet (afaik) so I guess it is possible.
Aw, been a while since someone’s complimented me, thank you!
Yes, I too fucked up the city planning stuff a good deal until eventually… it clicked.
It isn’t the same game as Civ, a lot of the sort of ingrained ideas you don’t even realize are baked into your subconcious from playing Civ a lot… will lead you to knee jerk, make the kind of ‘well obviously i do this in this situation’ decisions…
and yeah, then get slapped with ‘nope, no workey’.
But… if you stick with it… just like you probably did, many moons ago, with Civ, you can absolutely get much more skilled.
You must empty your mind of false notions you didn’t even realize you had, before you can begin to fill it with correct ones, haha.
Its funny you bring up stellaris… i spent like a month just utterly failing until that ‘click’ moment.
Then, a few months of ‘i am actually decent at this’ and then a few more months till ‘actually this is boring because i win by stupid margins every time on anything but the most absurd difficulties, and in those games its pretty much a completely random dice roll of surviving early game or not due to the absurd early game ai bonuses… and then by mid to late game, the AI is just literally too stupid to engage in 80% of the micromanagement strategies i am using to snowball’.
I never played the demo, started with the full game… maybe a couple weeks after launch.
As I said in another reply, yeah, it absolutely was rough on a technical level for the first few months, a good number of actually fairly common edge cases where the game’s systems would break, things wouldn’t actually work as intended, as described by the game itself.
But, after about 6 months, they fixed basically all of these… and didn’t really even have to do like major tweaks to the balancing of the game… the problems were technical implentations of the designed game, and once they got those ironed out, the game as envisioned was now actually the game as it performed.
Go pull up the steam store page right now: Overall score is still ‘Mixed’ it did indeed have a rough launch… but Recent Reviews are ‘Very Positive’.
The people that bothered to stick with it… well they seem to very much like where the game is now.
So, I’d say yes, the general consensus of people still playing it is that it did indeed improve significantly.
Also, its pretty undeniable that 2K, Civ 7, very much did try to ape some, but not all, of the changes that Humankind put on what is basically the Civ formula, that just never occured to them.
The entire concept of you and other players basicslly just having the avatar of your civilization remain the same for all time, but the civilizations themselves change, with historical eras?
Thats one of the most obviously visible differences between Humankind and any Civ game that existed … prior to Civ 7.
It is also, somewhat ironically, one of the main reasons those initial reviews of Humankind were ‘Mixed’: a whole lot of Civ fans just thought the whole idea was stupid, and were vocal about it.
… And then Civ 7 does the same idea, but more watered down, with only 3 eras, 3 different civs per playthrough, as opposed to Humankind’s … well basically 6 + 1, where that + 1 represents your pre-civilization nomadic tribe/culture, basically playing a fairly different kind of game, prior to building your first real city and thus advancing to your first choice of civilization.
Also, worth throwing in here I guess: Advancing through eras works with a similar mechanic as to racing to build wonders in Civ: You can only have one player as each civ at a time, so if you really want to have first dibs and the full range of civs to choose from, you have to be the first to era advance, otherwise another player may beat you to it and pick the one you were planning on.
But, it also works differently than wonders: Wonders are just built by a city in Civ. Eras in Humankind are advanced by earning points for completing basically era specific mini objectives… and you have a range of different options to choose from, maybe you go for numerous easier objectives, or focus on a few, more difficult ones.
Err… well, without any mentions of specific gripes or difficulties you are having… entirely seriously, actually play through with the tutorial enabled.
There are 3 different tutorial settings:
No tutorial
Moderate tutorial (ie, you’ve played some Civ games and want to mainly focus on what is different in Humankind)
Full tutorial (baby step you through everything like you’ve never played any kind of turn based 4x before)
The middle of the road tutorial does a pretty good job of highlighting and explaining systems and actions that work differently from Civ, or are just entirely not present in Civ, but doesn’t hold your hand through every single basic concept that you would already be familiar with as an experienced Civ player.
EDIT: Beyond that, I guess uh… a lot of the game sub systems kind of work… similarly to a lot of Civ game mechanics, but not quite the same, in some cases, significantly differently.
For starters, your civ progresses as you unlock new ages, but your leader stays the same. NPC leaders have a set of traits that affect their demeanor in diplomacy, as well as give them varying kinds of buffs for their gameplay.
These NPCs and their traits are actually classed by the total score of their cumulative traits, basically just a few minor traits are ‘easy’, up to a whole lot of powerful traits as ‘hard’. You can pick to play against easier or harder NPCs as you like.
You can also unlock traits for your own leader by basically doing in game achievements.
But uh yeah, get used to the idea of swapping civs situationally as your progress through ages… or you can sort of ‘prestige’ a civ beyond its roughly historically accurate age, if you want a buff to … i think its your renown or fame score generation the purple one lol. In some situations, it might make more sense to continue with the unique units, buildings, and sometimes civ specific gameplay mechanics through an age.
Other stuff uh…
City planning is pretty important, Humankind uses a multi tile approach to cities, where you can plop down varying kinds of districts and unique buildings according to the terrain around the actual city center. You may have to balance between urban design/zoning that is super efficient in the short run, but actually inefficient in the medium or longer run, as well as defensive structures, which you’ll may want to place on a choke point tile, even if it would be highly productive with a non military structure on it.
Human kind uses a heigh layered terrain approach, with I think 7 different heights. A height 6 tile right adjacent to a height 1 tile will have an impassable cliff on that border. I like to play with more extreme height variations so as to both make the world feel larger in that land traversal takes longer, things like mountain passes and terrain chokepoints become as relevant as they often are in the real world, and it offers more interesting battles.
Rivers are in tiles, not borders between them. This makes crossing rivers more time consuming and annoying… but plays well into the rest of the games combat systems… also, if you embark on a river tile early game, this is basically the representation of building small makeshift boats… and now you can move much faster up or down a river, which is very much in line with how many real world civilizations used rivers as basically logistics highways.
There’s also a system of regions, basically. You can assign a few cities to be connected to the same major city, and then basically micromanage the entire region of cities to coordinate their production to subsidize each other, in various ways. If you do this well, you can benefit greatly, but if you either screw it up or don’t take advantage of it, you can be at a comparative disadvantage to other players.
… theres a whole lot of stuff that is different than Civ games, I could type for hours lol.
Civ peaked at Civ 4 and all its expansions for me.
Yes, doomstacks were a problem, but hard pivoting all the way over to Civ 5’s only one unit per tile led to a whole bunch of other bullshit in the opposite direction.
Humankind … just has better inter game system synergy, and those individual systems seem better thought out, more engaging and less… cheesable, exploitable, to a great extent due to how everything meshes together.
The first few months after launch absolutely were rough, with some pretty significant bugs in specific, but often crucial scenarios… but they got ironed out, and the result is great.
Also a lot of the initial backlash was from the pollution / global warming mechanic… they quickly added an option to just turn most of its effects off, but to me the entire thing read as a bunch of people being used to massively colonizing, industrializing and war mongering and then being angry that … that has consequences.
Guess those people have trouble grasping the concept of an externality.
Oh well, they’ve all been filtered, recent steam reviews are ‘very positive.’
Fucking called it.
This shit isn’t hard to predict, yet huge numbers of people treat you like a delusional conspiracy theorist when you say that a tech service provided by a company/org that converts into a public corp and plans to do an IPO… is now fully shifting into ‘make everything shitty and squeeze as much money out of it as possible’ mode.
Star Citizen is certainly a gigantic ongoing delusion/scam of development hell…
But it doesn’t really meet the sort of ‘internal corporate contagion’ criteria, it won’t directly tank non Star Citizen teams or games.
While they have contracted out development work at various points… its not a giant conglomerate of different studios working on different projects.
If it finally liquidates and goes tits up, it only kills Star Citizen, and maybe Chris has to sell his yacht or w/e.
Star Citizen is its own special kind of nonsense.
Since Ubisoft introduced us to the term AAAA game with Skull and Bones, my attempt at giving an actual, solid definition to differentiate a AAA game from a AAAA game has had this as a fundamental aspect:
The game gets stuck in development hell, analagous to a movie that keeps needing reshoots and rewrites, and ends up requiring so much money thrown at chasing the sunk cost fallacy that it negatively impacts not only its own development, but impacts the development of other games by the same studio/publisher, and/or the overall financial solvency / employment headcount of the overarching parent company.
Basically, what a AAAA game actually is, is analagous to a bank or large corporation that is Too Big To Fail… but video game companies largely are not going to be bailed out by the government.
So, by that metric, we’ve got:
Skull and Bones
Concord
Suicide Squad
If you go back further in gaming history, you could probably find more games that fit typical AAA criteria (Large-Huge numbers of actual developers, aiming at a high level of graphical fidelity, financed by a large corporate publisher that controls a plethora of studios, all these measured relative to the timeframe of development)…
… and then also hits the AAAA criteria, that the development drags on forever, a sunk cost fallacy mindset sets in amongst management, management then gets high on its own supply, and the game draws in so many manpower and financial resources that it endangers entire other projects and teams not directly connected to this particular game’s development if this Too Big To Fail game does actually fail.
As you say, it goes back even further that SBMM, to the large scale abandonment of the dedi server paradigm in favor of auto match making.
Nearly no online games even have actual server browsers now.
Back in the late 90s through the 2000s to early to mid 2010s…
Nearly every online game was a dedicated server, or at least you throwing open a temporary server with your own custom control over maps and gamemodes.
Many dedicated servers were run by a person or community… and this enabled communities to form around them, enabled lasting relationships to be made, hell, probably most mods or clans for most of those kinds of games arose from that, and a lot of those went on to later become massively more expansive, start their own game studio and put out their own games.
Now thats almost all gone.
You… used to be able to get onto a Battlefield server and know the regulars, like a bar.
That promotes at least a baseline of basic manners and etiquette.
Now all you can do is look at a general conception of an entire game’s community, because the player has no agency to actually choose to associate or not associate with certain people or groups.
This is basically completely unrelated to CoD… but…
Halo Infinite released some Juneteenth (a holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the US/ themed cosmetics a year or two back.
The color scheme for armor was named ‘Bonobo’ somewhere in the filename or metadata… which is a monkey.
Oops.
https://kotaku.com/halo-infinite-juneteenth-bonobo-freedom-emblem-nameplat-1849065291
… MegaCorps are not your friend, they’re just doing performative marketing.
No, come on man…!
What we need…
Is another… open world survival pvp crafting game.
Preferably with zombies.
And season passes.
And 83939583 in game cosmetics.
…
About a month ago, as a joke, I said that like the most frustrating, evil game I could imagine would be basically a game that is nothing but shitty NPC escort quests, through an active warzone with other players in PvP, where the NPC is fragile, annoying and whiney and pretentious as possible, moves slower than you run but faster than you walk…
…and every time they get wounded or just scared or drop something or trip or see a butterfly, you go into a bethesda death stare with them where you have to get through a 10+ step dialogue tree that is different everytime and only has a single success state, all others result in you having to retry…
… and its all still an active real time combat zone while you are locked into this, you and idiot NPC still vulnerable to other players.
The state of video gaming is such that within minutes, someone said this would actually be a game they’d want to play, that its an actually novel idea, sounds fun.
When I read that, my mouth dropped, in a dazed stupor.
EDIT: Fuck, all you’d have to do is call it Puppy Girl Escort Quest, and make the person you’re escorting be varying kinds of kawaii waifus, surprise, the game is actually a harem anime.
Like did my original comment give you the impression that I didn’t know people rule 34 every goddamn thing possible?
In the context of the reply you were replying to, basically yes.
I read what you said as hyperbolic, but generally dismissive of the idea that characters in media have sex appeal and/or vicarious romance appeal, often generally, and often to such an extent that it drives people to make and share their own erotic spin offs.
I think it is silly to not realize how much a popularity of a show these days can be reinforced and strengthened by appealing to the fanfic crowd, to not realize that many network execs have realized that they have a better shot at cultivating a… well, cult like fanbase, if they make their show in a way that appeals to that kind of crowd.
Maybe I’m really old but you suggesting that anime is the reason we stuff sex into shit is just so funny to me. I once heard someone say “every generation is the first generation to think they invented sex.”
I didn’t suggest anime was the reason we stuff sex shit into more western media for more broad audiences.
I said that doing that, stuffing overtly sexual and will-they-won’t-they, romantic tension type material into media, is called ‘fan-service’ within the realm of anime, and an analagous or similar thing is happening outside of anime.
The comment I replied to was like why romance if porn exist which was also funny
I think the unstated thing that I could have said, but did not, because I assumed it was common knowledge, would basically be:
For quite a long time, men have been the main consumers of video and still image pornography.
And women have been the primary consumers of erotic novels, in the US at least.
The American media approach to attempting to make the viewer feel aroused thus differs based on the sex they are appealing to:
Straight men, as a market demo, generally go for visual sex appeal and sex acts, overt or covert lewd gestures, tight fitting or revealing clothes etc.
Straight women, as a market demo, generally go for on screen romance, for the build up to and moments of dramatic sexual tension, will they won’t they scenarios, the context around a relationship that builds up to the actual sex, etc.
In general, for men, sex appeal is direct, physical, literal, and for women, it is more cerebral, more about mental framing and constructing scenarios that feature, or could potentially feature wish fulfilment, being desired by a person with preferred character traits, etc.
These are of course not absolute truths with no exceptions, there are many exceptions, and yes I am aware that creating the media environment in this way reinforces the norms themselves.
Nonetheless, this is still quite true in general, in aggregate, when you run the numbers.
So… thats why it makes sense to conflate sex and romance from the perspective of a media exec designing a show.
Sex sells, you just package it differently if you’re appealing to men or women.
To most media execs:
Men want the sex.
Women want the story about why the sex is happening.
… Have you not heard of Tumblr? DeviantArt?
Gooning or swooning to shipping fanfiction and fan made eroge / nsfw art has been a huge component of many fandoms, of all kinds, for at least two decades.
The reaction from a whole lot of more modern media is to just capture a lot more of that in the official media itself.
In anime in particular, this is called ‘fan-service.’
Porn is absolutely a giant competitor in the ‘digital media consumption / attention’ market, and it completely makes sense that for people who believe in making every digital media product with as broad an appeal as possible, that there’s been a trend toward an analog of fan-service outside of anime.
I mean…
There absolutely still are widespread, massive shortages.
https://www.nowinstock.net/computers/videocards/nvidia/rtx5090/
https://www.nowinstock.net/computers/videocards/nvidia/rtx5080/
https://www.nowinstock.net/computers/videocards/nvidia/rtx5070ti/
https://www.nowinstock.net/computers/videocards/nvidia/rtx5070/
As of the time I post this, all models of all RTX 50 series cards are completely out of stock at every large online retailer, other than resellers/scalpers on Ebay.
BestBuy, B&H, NewEgg, Amazon… literally 0 available stock.
Yes, they did also raise their prices, but there is still a massive stock shortage.
99% sure MicroCenter is also effectively completely out of stock for any online purchaser as well, as they basically only ship if you’re within a one to two hour drive of one of their physical store locations, and they don’t actually have very many locations…
Sure!
The title isn’t clickbait though, and you don’t actually even have to know the term.
‘branded a paper launch’
The Verge is saying others have called it a paper launch, which is completely correct and not misleading, regardless of what ‘paper launch’ means.
As to whether or not it actually is a paper launch:
It certainly seems like it is.
If the people’s whose job it is to review tech hardware, who often actually have some level of direct contacts and connections with manufacturers … if they can’t even get their hands on these, its safe to say Nvidia shipped an astoundingly small amount of actual hardware.
Just go on youtube right now and you can find a plethora of videos describing how almost no one could actually get one, that supply evaporated in minutes, possibly literally less than a minute.
No online store currently has any stock, whatsoever, of 5000 series cards.
Also, there was chatter and rumors before the launch that the secondary/partner manufacturers had had some kind of miscommunication with Nvidia and did not manufacture enough cards.
It seems even worse than the original PS5 launch.
PS: More fun terminology bs;
A lot of people use the term AiB to refer to a secondary/partner manufacturer of a GPU, as an adjective or prefix, as in:
AiB Card, AiB 5090, AiB Board…
They use this to distinguish a GPU actually made directly by Nvidia (or AMD), as compared to the same model of GPU made by a secondary/partner manufacturer, with slight tweaks to clock speeds and their own housing and fan/cooler style.
Thats not what AiB means.
AiB means ‘add in board’.
Its a noun, not an adjective, and it means basically any graphics card, sound card, capture card, network card, anything that is its own board that plugs into a motherboard.
Nvidia / AMD directly manufactured reference GPUs … are AiBs.
… I am probably fighting a losing linguistic battle on this one, as improper usage of AiB is now quite widespread, much like how ‘liminal space’ actually means ‘a space that is designed to be transited through, not inhabited for long periods of time’, but the common usage is now basically that anything creepy to anyone for any reason is a ‘liminal space’.
Given that Trump has now reiterated multiple times, at least once after he personally met with Nvidia CEO Huang, that he will indeed be going forward with tariffs on Taiwan…
If you’re in the US, I wouldn’t expect to be able to get any 5000 series Nvidia GPU any time soon, at least not for under $3000+.
EDIT:
AMD cards will also be affected by the Taiwan tariffs, but uh, they tend to price things a bit more affordably, and provide more actual stock volume… but as of right now all we know is the 9070XT was planned at some price below $899, most people expected $450 to $500… but there’s still no official price, or date, and now the tariffs are a thing… so… maybe $899 actually is now a realistic price estimate for the 9070XT?
Who knows! All the gamers can now thank Trump for making all PC / Console components and likely video games themselves more expensive.
EDIT 2: Also, you can run professional production, CUDA style workloads on AMD cards:
https://repairspotter.com/computers/what-is-the-amd-radeon-equivalent-to-nvidias-cuda
YMMV.
Also also, the RDNA 4 architecture for AMDs 9000 series cards seems to be rebalancing toward more raytracing performance, but that’s based on leaks so far.
To add a bit more context, it’s been used in the tech industry for at least 20 years, if not more.
There doesn’t seem to be too much actual proper etymological documentation on the first usage or history… as you say, it most likely derives from ordering something, and not getting it, and being left with only a paper invoice, from back when such things were mailed or faxed…
…it may have derived from the old layaway process retail stores used to do: you order and pay for something upfront, they hand you a voucher, and when they get the product, they hold it in inventory for you, as opposed to putting it on the sales floor for general purchase by anyone, and then you exchange the voucher for the item.
But that’s just a guess.
… So… Dragon Age is dead.
But DA isn’t dead. There’s fic. There’s art. There’s the connections we made through the games and because of the games. Technically EA/BioWare owns the IP but you can’t own an idea, no matter how much they want to. DA isn’t dead because it’s yours now."
In a subsequent post, Chee wrote, "So someone just reposted my thing saying they’ll write a giant AU [alternate universe] and that’s what I’m talking about.
So, Dragon Age is not dead in the sense that you can still occasionally commission DeviantArtists for DA art, and you can still freely write DA fanfiction and not make any money off of it.
… And someone can make yet another medieval fantasy world, maybe actually turn it into an actual profitable and thus widespread IP … assuming you’ve quite considerably changed the basic concepts and don’t use any actually named characters or groups.
Wyvern Era.
Drake Epoch.
Dragon Age is dead, add yet another notch to EA’s IP/Studio murder count.
They’ll probably manage to finally kill Battlefield / DICE this or next year.
EDIT: I somehow missed the title.
Yes, you absolutely can own an idea, thats what patents, trademarks and copyrights literally are.
This is actually delusional levels of cope.
You can talk all you want about French revolutionaries and Camus, but at the end of the day, you didn’t revolt against anything, you signed away your creative output to a soulless corporation for cash.
You could have found or founded a worker cooperative non profit, you could have copyleft your world and story and characters, you could have MIT or GPL liscensced the game code, and still sold the finished game for money, but nope, you did none of that.
That’s an insanely bad analogy.
For starters, children are legally barred from entering casinos, unlike many, many video games which include mtx, dark patterns such as layered currency obfuscation, pricing schemes that encourage you to buy that next tier amount of video game currency that always leave you with a bit left over, constantly asking the user if they want to buy something, designing the UI such that you always see what you’d be getting extra if you were levelling up the premium battle pass instead of the default one, etc etc… which are either directly targeted at, or allow children to play them.
Why are children banned from casinos?
Because their brains aren’t developed enough to properly understand risk vs reward.
Secondly, the social dynamics at play in both a casino and games with even only mtx cosmetics… both of these settings massively peer pressure the customer/consumer/mark into engaging with the gambling/mtx spending mechanics.
Its not just that whales are a thing that somehow exist prior to and outside of mtx games or casinos, its that the entire system is designed to pressure everyone who interacts with it in any capacity into breaking down and spending more and more.
These systems are designed to produce more, whales, more dolphins, to push everyone toward a higher class of spending irresponsibility regardless of the propensity upon entering.
Empirically, this works. Insanely well.
Saying ‘its all the whales fault’ is a cop out.
Its the fault of game execs and studios that hire psychologists to figure out how to design the most exploitative games possible, and lawyers to figure out how to legally justify this.
Its the fault of regulators being asleep at the wheel and allowing nearly the entire industry to get away with this shady bullshit for so long, usually with only slaps on the wrist.
You’re blaming the drug addicts in a society that’s normalized addiction.
I’m blaming the drug manufacturers, the pushers and the cops that look the other way because they or their boss gets a kick back.
… Is this a joke?
The vast majority of the gaming market, if you go by generated sales revenue, has been mobile gacha games with lootbox / mtx / in game currency transactions for almost a decade now.
This is why basically every major AAA ‘live service’ game is primarily constructed and rushed out the door as a minimum viable product in terms of being a good game, but very robust and well developed in terms of the game’s primary purpose, which is to serve as a platform, a monopsonist (EDIT: monopolist) market for in game items, cosmetics, battle passes, etc.
Its been like this for almost a decade
Not quite KSP whole planet scale, but uh, Kenshi.
Its a pretty damn big world, pretty sure it is significantly larger than Skyrim.
You’ve got world speed controls, rpg style mechanics and progression, and you can have multiple members of your party, and you can build your entire own town if you want to.
The game is filled with many roving factions, who all have a sort of reputation dynamic with all other factions, as well as yourself/party.
The game is full of many different story lines, many of them conflict with each other and cannot all be done, there is no such thing as a plot armored, impossible to kill npc, and there are tons of unique, npcs you can meet and have many kinds of interactions with.
If you want to take on a huge faction, you can, but you’re probably going to need to literally raise your own army to do so.
Main downside is the control scheme is fairly awkward / old school… its basically like an mmo from the early 00’s, but single player; click to tell your peeps where to go sort of thing, awkward camera controls by modern standards for an ARPG.
You don’t directly control the combat of your character like in Skyrim, the game basically rng rolls based on you and your opponents stats to determine who uses what kind of attack or block or dodge… but you can set different combat stances, basicsally.
… So its not an ARPG in the sense of Skyrim or AssCreed or Dark Souls… but it is an ARPG in a more loose sense, that its an RPG mechanics style game and world, without rigid turn based combat, which all revolves around action.
But the scale you are looking for is there. If you don’t set the time to fast forward, it can easily take 15 minutes to an hour or more to walk between settlements or major landmarks, depending on what part of the map you’re in.
Nothing is really obvious from the onset of the game in terms if what you are supposed to do, beyond not get murdered, eat, drink and sleep to stay alive.
It’s very much a sandbox approach, but theres tons and tons of stuff to do if you are capable of directing yourself.
Also, lots of mods that add more content, immersion, and deepen or alter gameplay mechanics.
Kenshi 2 is in the works with upgraded engine and graphics… ETA totally unknown.
The game looks absolutely amazing on an AMD GPU, without realtime raytracing.
Several years ago now, I managed to get it to 4k90fps on a 6900XT, with basically all settings on ultra/psycho via some ini tweaks, custom FSR values, just no ray tracing, using ‘old school’ cube maps and light sources and what not.
And that was all running in Proton, on linux, as well.
Nvidia absolutely barged in and said hey guys guess what, we completely obliteraterated the entire history of how lighting works in game engines, here’s our new extremely pretty but extremely, astoundingly inefficient lighting engine, rewrite your entire game engine and game to make it work on your custom engine that’s been cooking for 10 years without any notion of this new lighting paradigm.
EDIT: I should add that that is 90 ‘real’ fps, no frame gen, just early FSR.
I suggest you check out Decky FrameGen.
The technicals are … very complex, but the upshot is: It basically injects FrameScaling/FrameGen modes into games that don’t officially support them on AMD hardware.
So… I’ve done this with CP2077, and if I understand this right, basically it injects FSR3, but under the DLSS settings under the game’s options menu… and it works better than the game’s current officially supported FSR 2 for the Deck.
Elden Ring may also be able to benefit from it.