Started Kingdom Come: Deliverance yesterday and it’s pretty good. I only just got out of the tutorial phase of the story and I’m impressed by the realism in the game. It’s like a non-magical recreation of TES 4 Oblivion, and the Bohemia open world feels very alive.
NPCs have schedules. You can see them through the windows as they sit down, do the sign of the cross, then eat their meals. Although a lot of them are generic NPCs, the unique named characters can have speech skill checks (your character vs theirs) to determine outcomes as well as to haggle on prices.
I like the freedom it gives your character when it comes to making money like through thievery. That gameplay loop is pretty well developed, with noise and visibility playing a role in your success. Playing as a thief is almost as satisfying as in the Thief games, which is impressive considering that you don’t have any of the cool gadgets in those games and only have lockpicks.
The one thing I haven’t gotten the hang of yet is combat. I’m flailing around slashing and stabbing but my character isn’t strong enough yet to really hold his own against anything more than one or two bandits. Maybe I’m too used to the simplistic hack and slash style in Oblivion or Skyrim, but I feel like the combat system could be polished a little better (like let me switch focus between enemies a little easier so I won’t as easily get flanked.)
Currently emulating the old Crash Team Racing as I make my way through most of the Crash Bandicoot games. The racing game is pretty hard as racing games go.
Still working on Divinity Original Sin 2. Game is fun and it’s a lot better than #1 in that series. It’s a large time investment but I do love the game.
Diablo 4's Season 2 started this week, and I'm having a lot more fun playing with my rogue this round than I did with my druid in Season 1. They made it a lot easier to level up, which is nice. I could have done without the story though. It was super short and the new character Erys was not likeable at all.
My Ghost Recon team in my second playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3 got past level 8, and they may as well have ascended to godhood then and there. There are several achievements for killing some boss or another before they get to do some kind of attack, but this team just bursts them down before they get the chance to take a second turn. I'm in Act 3 now and just checking out a few remaining plot threads that I missed in my first playthrough.
I'm also trying to finish a run of 30XX. It's good, and the level generation is slightly less repetitive than its predecessor, but it's mostly just more of the same. New bosses and such, and the game is still good, but I was hoping for more of an iterative improvement over the first game.
Just on the topic of demos, I feel like they are making a comeback these last few years (speaking as a PC gamer).
Steam has their Next Fest, which is all about demos, and I’ve found a few games there I bought later or put on my wishlist.
As for Talos 2, while I haven’t checked out the demo, I really liked the first game, so I was gonna get the sequel anyway eventually, unless the reviews thrash it for some reason.
I did clans a bit. Some message boards were similar. I was a mod of a small guitar-oriented message board and we knew each other's real names, there were occasional real-life meet-ups where people drove from other states, etc... I miss that.
I was in a bf2 clan that was pretty tight knit. I have good memories of that. I was also in another clan when I was 14 and one of the older guys tried to groom me. No DoT, I don’t want to masturbate with you
The first time I run a game, before anything else, before a developer logo, a splash screen, ANYTHING: I want a screen with volume sliders. This setting needs to be saved upon completion and then ask if you want to see this screen on every launch, or just this one.
I know I am not alone. I am tired of having my eardrums blasted to hell every time I launch a newly installed game. Some games even go back to eardrum-destruction every launch until it loads the user settings.
This shit needs to be standardized. A lot of us wear headphones and are on voice chat or listening to music or whatever when we launch a game, and the deafening EA logo or whatever it may be is NOT welcome.
Back in the day, around the time of CS 1.6, some co-worker friends and I would have LAN parties. This was when everyone still had CRT monitors so we had to be careful not to trip circuit breakers.
Paradox published games are so often great gameplay-wise but technically incompetent lol, wouldn‘t surprise me if it utilized like 2 CPU cores tops to simulate a whole metropolis
It’s using unity game engine. I’m a graphics programmer in the industry and at my current and last workplace I made tech for games studios (i.e. I dealt with performance of easily 100 games a year at one point). Unity by far was default the worst to deal with due to the limited tools to fix issues that were inherint to the engine. Note don’t take this as me saying unity is a bad engine, it’s just that it isn’t a performant one. Its focus is elsewhere (accessibility and ease of development, things it excels at).
So yes, you can definitely assume that, in fact I’d assume one core for the simulation unless they wrote an entire new architecture to replace unity’s functionality (you’d still be locked to single thread sync points, but that’s manageable). It’s a hassle most don’t deal with as it’s a lot of work to struggle against writing code like unity wants you to write it.
I worked in a studio that exactly did that a decade ago, and it was painful and frankly a huge upfront dev cost that takes a long time to pay off.
Sklylines 1 was on Unity, but Skylines 2 is using Unreal as its engine this time.
I stand corrected. Must have been confused by the tech demo and hearing about “the new engine” from some CS content creators and making assumptions. It is indeed made in Unity, which is a shame. I used to love that engine, but it really hasn’t kept up with the times. I was so excited for it being in UE5.
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