I played through this series for the first time in the past couple of years, and I had no idea about this line, so I got to experience it fresh like everyone did in the early 00s. Absolutely amazing.
The first Divinity was called Divine Divinity, and it was closer to Diablo than Baldur’s Gate. As per this interview, this game is going to be the same style as BG3 and the Original Sin games.
They said very little about what that new engine entails, but much like Starfield, I suspect it’s largely reusing their old engine and only remaking select parts of it. Larian is doing something in the RPG space that, to me, makes nearly all of their competitors feel outdated, and it makes sense to me to make their own engine to do that as efficiently as possible. To make one of their games in an off the shelf engine like Unreal, with all of the bespoke physics objects and the ways every entity interacts with spells, elements, and other effects, could easily result in huge performance costs above and beyond what we saw in Act 3 of BG3.
Much less is determined by engine than the average person thinks. Andromeda wasn’t a new engine; it was an engine that was made to make Battlefield games that then had to be used to make action RPGs and racing games after the fact. Capcom made an engine for the games they had in mind 10 years ago, and it’s fantastic at Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, and even serving as an emulation wrapper, but it’s showing cracks under the support for open world games that they added more recently. Larian’s engine is made to support the systems driven RPGs they conceptualized in the early 2010s, and there’s little chance some other engine will do it just as well or better without plenty of custom code anyway. Ask Digital Foundry about all of the “optimization” Unreal 5 has done for developers already.
From the other Larian article in this community, it seems their engine improvements are largely things that they claim will allow them to iterate on ideas faster, like going right from mocap to a usable animation more quickly.
Keep in mind that also comes with Vincke championing AI, and though he says no genAI assets will make it to the final product, there’s still some dissent. Here’s hoping though.
I was just reflecting on games I’ve played in the last year, and wondering when Steam’s year-in-review thing would be happening (probably within the next week)....
There are too many games I want to play and not enough time to play them, and with a programming background, I decided to basically use Agile methodology to schedule which games I can reasonably finish in a given month. I’ve been tracking my completion times and comparing against How Long To Beat to get good ballpark estimates. This year, I’ve beaten 30 games, 15 of which came out in 2025, and I think I can beat 3 more before the year is done. When a new game comes out, I don’t like to play it unless I’ve played the earlier / mainline / canon entries in the series, so not only did I play Borderlands 4, I played through 1-3, the Tales games, and the Pre-Sequel. I played through the first three Mafia games and intend to play The Old Country once the Steam sale starts. I played not only Kingdom Come: Deliverance II but also its predecessor.
Speaking of KC:D2, that’s the best game I played this year, by quite a margin. Obsidian put out two great games this year in Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2, but despite obviously sharing a lot of the same bones, they deliver quite different experiences. Dispatch was a treat. Split Fiction was what I wanted as an iteration on It Takes Two. Borderlands 4 continues what Borderlands 3 set up in making its systems fun for math nerds. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was fun and novel in so many ways, and I love the story behind its development; I do wish that I loved the execution of its story more, and I wish the combat wasn’t so feast or famine, but those things didn’t seem to bother most people. The Alters might be the most slept on game in 2025 relative to its quality; seriously, it’s a great story, and it’s nice to see that level of presentation in a game of its scope and genre. (A lot of Unreal 5 games in that list…)
This series is pretty crazy to play through back to back, because they have to escalate so many times.
Borderlands 1 has the flattest progression curve of the series, and I say that in a good way. I very much prefer flatter progression curves in RPGs, or loot games in this case. It solves a lot of problems with scaling difficulty, eliminating grind, and so on. That said, this is the only game in the series that checks this box. This one sticks fairly close to its North star of Halo meets Mad Max; the premise is simple and it works. I played Roland, because the turret seemed to be helpful when playing solo.
Borderlands 2 is where it finds its identity that it’s known for; actually, they sort of found that identity in the DLC for the first game, but here the characters get much talkier. It comes with a major upgrade in game feel and pacing.
The Pre-Sequel is the blandest of the series by far. The characters are boring, and the elements they use to spice up the formula are not very spicy. The boss fights are well designed though, even in a way that gives it something it does better than 2. But something else interesting happens in this game. I played the class where you get a little drone that comes along and marks targets. Later up the skill tree, this gives you access to a little mini game of killing the guys that you marked to extend the timer of your active ability, plus one or two other gimmicks that create a positive feedback loop. This makes the moment to moment decision making far more interesting in a fight, but it’s a shame how boring a lot of the game can be otherwise.
Tales from the Borderlands is probably the only truly standout writing in the series.
Borderlands 3 is one I seemingly enjoy more than most people. The villains are terrible, I’m sure we all agree, but what’s important to me about the writing in this series is that it has personality more than anything else. I’m not really expecting to hear a ton of great jokes, though I’ll admit I consider the part with Ice T in the body of a teddy bear to be pretty damn funny. The mini game that I noticed in Pre-Sequel that creates a positive feedback loop? It’s kicked into overdrive here. Building out my skill tree is so much better and more interesting than in its predecessors, and there’s yet another major upgrade to game feel over 2 and Pre-Sequel. The decision making in each fight is all about that feedback loop rather than just mindlessly shooting until health bars deplete. I really enjoyed this game. I’m somewhat new to the loot game genre in general, but I have finished Titan Quest before this series, and this positive feedback loop seems to be a relatively recent innovation in the genre; maybe around Diablo 3? I took a brief walk through some other games and couldn’t find anything like it.
New Tales from the Borderlands should have been thrown right in the garbage. It is the worst writing in the series by far.
Borderlands 4, I have yet to finish, but I’m probably 3/4 of the way through, and this time I’ve got a co-op partner. It stands on the shoulders of all the improvements in 3 and adds some new movement stuff as well as some subtle changes to the general design of classes. I once again play a gadget class, but even though my class was functionally nerfed, the way they did it made it more interesting to play. Even with a performance patch, the game still runs pretty shit, but I’m having a good time. The open world may actually be a detriment compared to the old way the game did things, but not so much that it’s a huge drag.
If I’m picking favorites, at this point, it’s a tough call between 3 and 4.
Did you ever play them back in the day? I emulated old games for years before I realized how much some of them were designed to be viewed on a CRT. CRT shaders have gotten to be pretty good these days, and it does a lot for the experience for me.
Wuthering Waves should not be surprising. It’s a game that’s popular in China. If you’re polling people from all over the world to determine a winner, the one that wins is the most popular game in China.
Clair Obscur is a good game, but I definitely like it far less than everyone else, and if I were god of video game awards, it would have gone to Kingdom Come: Deliverance II this year.
Fatal Fury winning best fighting game was the objectively correct choice when faced against an early access game and several collections.
The Alters losing out to a port of a PS1 game, even a spruced up one, for the strategy category is pretty stupid. The Alters also should have shown up in narrative and performance.
As for reveals, there’s lots to be excited for. My most anticipated game for next year is probably Invincible Vs; I have not seen Ella Mental at where I’m at in the show, and maybe she won’t show up until later seasons, but she looks like a great Storm archetype for that game.
Hundreds of people worked on that game, as many as some AAA games, and yet games like Blue Prince, from a solo developer (or very close to it?) had to compete against that?
Moby Games lists 121 people in the credits for Blue Prince and 416 for Clair Obscur. At some point, the number of people who worked on a game is nearly arbitrary once your publisher enlists a QA contractor or starts localizing to more languages. I don’t think it’s ever been murkier territory to try to classify a game as indie.
What we think of as the rise of indie gaming was when they started getting publishers to promote them. You needed one in order to be listed on XBLA back in the day.
Xbox 360 and Summer of Arcade are major pillars in bringing indie games into the spotlight around exactly that era. There may have been Darwinia and Ragdoll Kung Fu on Steam at the time, but it was the likes of Braid, Super Meat Boy, Bastion and such that really came up within the XBLA promotions.
I played quite a bit of Pocket Tanks, but there’s a huge gulf between that and the public consciousness that came up around indie games in the summers of arcade.
I have now caught up to where the show left off, and I’ll probably pick up the comics during an imminent sale somewhere. I did hear that this game would have an original story, and given all the deconstruction of its genre that that show does, it gets me excited that they’re doing something similar for tag fighting games. A riff on Storm from Marvel vs Capcom 2 would be perfect for that.
Indie games have to launch on steam or they fail miserably. Seriously though. This is why I roll my eyes at people who claim steam makes it breaks these games.
Those two things aren’t opposed though. Launching on Steam doesn’t guarantee success, but I believe what they’re claiming is that not launching on Steam more or less guarantees its failure.
The article cites, from the developers, that the development budget for the game was under $10M, but take that with a grain of salt, because from SkillUp’s interviews with the team, getting Andy Serkis and Charlie Cox on the project was considered to be a marketing expense. Still, what they were able to do with so little is...
It’s short by JRPG standards, and if you find a deep enough sale, I’d say there’s still a good chance you’ll be into it and it’s worth a try. It’s very JRPG but also very different from others I’ve played at the same time.
What you need to do in that case is be prepared for lots of smaller games to not hit, and then eventually one will that will make up for all the experiments you did along the way. That’s how they and their peers used to operate before they all tripled down on those big hits and stopped making new IPs.
I guess that depends on where your cutoff is for AAA, but if you’re including FromSoft, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II just came out this year at a similar level of budget and production value. And I know people have their issues with Unreal, but it really has raised the bar for what a “AA” might be capable of. The likes of Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2, The Alters, Split Fiction, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 this year (and games like The Thaumaturge last year) are all what we would have expected out of a AAA game in the not-too-distant past, most of which comes down to scope, where a lot of AAAs are arguably doing too much.
On the other hand, winning an award from this show has a tangible effect on game sales, so it’s nice when a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 can beat the mainstays like The Legend of Zelda and earn that bump for themselves.
The jury is composed of the review outlets, not the studios. It does have a bias toward larger games, because the outlets reviewing games have an incentive to more reliably cover the games that most of their audience will be interested in, but it’s not because Sony’s voting for themselves to win.
Well, you said those were the only AAA devs that weren’t making money printing skinner boxes, and we had plenty of counter examples just this year. Obsidian put out 2 or 3 games this year, depending on how you count, and it wouldn’t be crazy for them to have an announcement for a game coming next year.
Absolutely give those two games a try; they’re high on the TGA’s lists for a reason.
Larian’s next game is the teased statue that Keighley tweeted, so they’ll have something to announce tonight. The only thing they said it isn’t is Divinity: Original Sin 3, but it could be a different Divinity RPG, or a looter like the old-school Divinities, or a new Dragon Commander, or a new spin-off entirely. They’re also a multi-project studio now.
Starfield was undoubtedly inspired by Interstellar and such, which is extremely my style, but even though it had some ideas here and there, the execution was what bothered me, and that’s why I’d like to see Larian’s take on the same kind of setting.
In fact, Mat Piscatella of Circana says, “On the hardware side, PS5 saw the most extensive discounting. So, it got a big sales lift. Wouldn’t take much more away from the week than that, tbh.”
If you want to know if this YouTube channel is of any value whatsoever, click on the channel, then click on videos, and take a look at every video thumbnail and title, and you’ll have your answer. Believe me when I say that I’ll be happy if Nintendo faces financial consequences for some of the things they’ve done in the market, but all this data proves is that PS5 had a large discount and Switch 2 did not.
There’s click bait, and then there’s rage bait. Veritasium never tried to get me upset about gravity not being a force with a thumbnail of an evil Albert Einstein saying, “HE LIED”.
Does anyone know if this will have any story hooks whatsoever to Rogue Trader? Because if so, I’m compelled to play that one first, but then this becomes a scheduling problem for me.
Worth noting that, like large swaths of other parts of the industry, the Saudis now own Evo. It hasn’t changed yet, but Ronaldo ended up in Fatal Fury, so…...
It’s a larger scene than the likes of Rivals of Aether II or Virtua Fighter 5, but there’s more at play for game selection than just that. And remember that when it comes to copies sold, Mortal Kombat 1 having a bad day is still about as good as Street Fighter or Tekken having a great day.
Look, I believe you, but I’ll admit I’m having trouble reconciling a few things about it. If it’s a CPU-bound problem, I’d expect it to get worse as the CPU gets faster, and my PC now is much faster than the one I played Fallout 1 on about a decade earlier, yet my encounter rates were remarkably similar. Not only were they remarkably similar, but they were remarkably similar to every other RPG I’ve played like it, such as Baldur’s Gate and Wasteland 2. Looking at heat maps of encounter rates on a wiki, I definitely had more in the red zones, but it was maybe two encounters per square rather than a dozen, and a dozen sounds miserable; I, too, would come to the conclusion that something was wrong if I saw significantly more encounters than I did. I ran Fallout 1 on Windows back in the day and Fallout 2 via Proton, so we can eliminate that as a variable that may have caused the game to behave differently. A streamer I watch played Fallout 1 for the first time via Fallout CE and had extremely similar encounter rates, and not only are we running very different machines, but surely that project unbound the encounter rates from the CPU. If we’re hitting some kind of cap on encounter rates, why do they all appear to be at about the rate I experienced? And why would we not assume that that cap was the intended design?
By cap, I mean lower bound. I see random encounters. If random encounters go down as CPUs get faster, my CPU is so much faster than one from the 90s that my random encounters should approach zero, but I had plenty. I just didn’t have what that person experienced where it felt like too many. In fact, it felt so right to me that I didn’t question that anything might be wrong, but I would if I saw dozens. You’re right: there’s no way they could foresee how fast my CPU would be in 2024 or 2013/2014, so how would their logic still output what feels like an acceptable encounter rate that matches other games in the genre by accident?
It’s the shoestring budget and development timeline that would leave me to believe that they didn’t intend for it to be dependent on clock speeds. It’s the tabletop roots that made me feel like I got the correct encounter rate while 8 times as many would feel wrong.
I would say it’s “tedium” that sounds unappealing to me at higher encounter rates rather than “punishment”. And it’s not just my personal tastes but also what all of their peers were doing with encounter rates, including Wasteland 1 and 2, which I’m sure you know share a lineage with Fallout.
I only played about 5 hours of Wasteland 1, but in what I’m sure is a DOSBox container that it comes in via Steam, the encounter rate was once again very similar to my experience with Fallout 1 and 2 and other CRPGs. I’m glad you enjoyed the game that way, and I definitely learned that it was at all influenced by CPU speeds, but I’m still not convinced that I got an unintended encounter rate given how reliably I and others come across it that way, unless you can cite a Tim Cain video about it or something.
I should have been the one to fill your dark soul with LIGHT! (www.youtube.com) angielski
It the echo that gets me.
‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
What are your gaming highlights of 2025? angielski
I was just reflecting on games I’ve played in the last year, and wondering when Steam’s year-in-review thing would be happening (probably within the next week)....
2025 Game Awards Results Discussion (screenrant.com) angielski
Expedition 33 coronation as expected....
Over 19,000 games have released on Steam in 2025, with nearly half seeing fewer than 10 reviews (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Order of the Sinking Star | Official Announcement Trailer | Jonathan Blow [1:31] (www.youtube.com) angielski
A Gaming Tour de Force That Is Very, Very French (www.nytimes.com) angielski
The article cites, from the developers, that the development budget for the game was under $10M, but take that with a grain of salt, because from SkillUp’s interviews with the team, getting Andy Serkis and Charlie Cox on the project was considered to be a marketing expense. Still, what they were able to do with so little is...
The Game Awards begins 11 hours from now. What are you looking forward to? angielski
The game awards begins roughly ~11 hours from now. what announcements are you hoping for?
PS5 is outselling Switch 2 (www.youtube.com) zxx
Interesting video on game consoles last month ago-ish.
Warhammer 40K: 'Dark Heresy's Upcoming Alpha Launches Next Week (www.belloflostsouls.net) angielski
Evo Japan and Las Vegas 2026 lineups announced (evo.gg) angielski
Worth noting that, like large swaths of other parts of the industry, the Saudis now own Evo. It hasn’t changed yet, but Ronaldo ended up in Fatal Fury, so…...
After Black Ops 7's weaker launch, Call of Duty will no longer do back-to-back releases in the same series (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Netflix has agreed to buy Warner Bros, including game developers behind Mortal Kombat, Hogwarts Legacy (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
'Huge respect to the folks at Obsidian': Todd Howard invited Obsidian devs onto Fallout season 2's set so they could see New Vegas in the flesh (www.pcgamer.com) angielski