I dropped Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire for the time being. It’s good, but I just don’t feel it right now. The ship travel does suck though.
Then more coop Baldur’s Gate 3. We are now in Act 3, about to go into the city.
BG3 is part of the reason I stopped playing Pillars 2, since I got a lot more into it than I thought. That’s why I started another solo run, trying to make it through Honor Mode. So far, I died twice in Act 1. First time was the three Intellect Devourers shortly after the tutorial. Second time was to the Gnolls that siege the two dudes in a cave. That one, I could have survived, but did some dumb misplays and paid the price. The current run is going pretty good, although I had some really close moments. The Spectator fight almost took out my party, same with the Robots in the Underdark Tower. If I die again, I’ll probably change to a custom difficulty, where I can save, just to learn the game and fights more, before I try again. I severely overestimated my game knowledge.
I also beat Windblown a few more times, and moved up to the final difficulty, but barely did any attempts since then.
Square was really scraping the barrel for this one. “Good graphics, that you can change!”
Changing how many NPCs could be nice, and I’m probably gonna need DLSS for upscaling. AMD and Intel users might have to wait for a mod, since there was no mention of FSR or XeSS.
They’ve already said it’s all because of DLSS 4. The 5070 needs the new 4x FG to match the 4090, although I don’t know if the 4090 has the “old” 2x FG enabled, probably not.
On the site with the performance graphs, Farcry and Plague Tale should be more representative, if you want to ignore FG. That’s still only two games, with first-party benchmarks, so wait for third-party anyway.
I unlocked the final difficulty in Windblown. However, I’m gonna play the previous one a bit more, to get some more reps, since the stat increase for enemies seems just insane.
Then I played more Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire. While the game is good, it took me a while to get into it. I don’t like getting around with the ship, it’s just super tedious. When you don’t enable enemy scaling, the world is also full of enemies, that are far too strong for you (I did beat some fights, the game said are probably too difficult). Now, after 25h I’m level 10, can do more stuff, and it’s getting more interesting.
Finally, my friend and I continued our Baldur’s Gate 3 coop run, and we just made it to Act 3. Because this is a Dark Urge run, and we are pretty much killing everything, there was a bunch of stuff we couldn’t do in Act 2, so it felt a bit short (except for our month break or something), although we did spend a lot of time in combat.
I watched the trailer and the evolution they’re going with is apparently not making an RTS anymore, but an Action Roguelike. If that’s the kind of evolution we’re talking about, I feel we’ve already stuff in a similar vein (dunno specifically about roguelike though).
Maybe Bioware just wasn’t happy with the game, it happens all the time. Bioware also cancelled two games in 2013, looks like they were just doing a lot. So, possibly they were just stretched too thin with all those different projects. The founders also left Bioware shortly after Mass Effect 3. Who knows if they were the driving force behind the game, and after they left it didn’t really go anywhere.
There are tons of different explanations, but of course it’s all EAs fault. From what I’ve read, working for EA is actually really great, and people seem to love it. That doesn’t really gel with the soul-sucking image you try to paint. In the early 2000s they were actually garbage, with the whole EA spouse thing, but they have apparently massively improved since then.
Also, while this isn’t really evidence for anything, we’ve had actual stories that some publishers forced some type of game on a developer, like Redfall or possibly Fallout 76. Personally, I just think stories like these can’t stay hidden forever and will eventually make it out into the open, like the Anthem flying stuff.
Finished Disco Elysium. I think I made pretty much the same choices as my first time years ago. I’m still not a huge fan of the ending, but now that knew what to expect, it wasn’t as jarring. When I do another playthrough in a couple of years, I might have to be a stealing racist or something, but I like Lieutenant Kim too much and probably won’t go through with that.
Then more Windblown. I beat the game on the first three difficulties (of five) now and unlocked almost everything for now. I’ll definitely try to get through everything, it doesn’t seem too hard.
Finally, I started Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. I’m still very early on, but I hope I’m finished by the time FF7 Rebirth is out. This game has proper turn-based combat, not just RTwP like the first game, which I like a lot more, even if it’s much slower.