Khrux

Funnily enough The Witcher 3 is one of the games I always think of for the trope of not following the plot. Often I think of the ludonarrative dissonance specifically between Gestalt’s paternal drive to find and protect Ciri Vs Gwent.

For large scale, AAA open world games, I mostly think of Breath of the Wild, which transparently sets itself up as being about taking as long as you need to get strong enough to save the world and Red Dead Redemption 2, which doesn’t care about the stakes of the world.

I sometimes can’t wrap my head around the fact that Witcher 3, BotW and RDR2 were each two years apart. I don’t feel any open world game has occupied the cultural space those games did since.

This is Call of Duty 22.

I used to play call of duty way back in the day and fell off around the time Black Ops 2 came out, mostly because I felt like there are too many games and I didn’t need another black ops.

There’s now more Black Ops games than I’ve bought games this year.

There was the occasion dark environment on old mario kart games that ticked all these boxes and I never had an issue with.

Oh no, I hate this art and design style:(

On the D&D side, the final big adventure is releasing for D&D now before they refresh the rules starting in autumn. That adventure is high level and the main antagonist is Vecna, with him effectively having lieutenants of many of the other popular villains.

This isn’t just a D&D tie in, it’s an ad for Vecna: Eve of Ruin.

I’ve had a (probably wrong) take on the ridiculous direction modern GPUs have gone, that isn’t just because of crypto mining, ridiculous profit margins and machine learning. From when I got into the hobby until the release of the PS5 and whatever Xbox competed with it, if you built a PC at a similar budget to a console, it would consistently outperform it. The PC I built 8 years ago has started showing its age but in its prime was about 1½ times the cost of a console for triple the power, now 1½ the cost of a console more or less gets you a console.

Part of that is the horrendous inflation of PC parts, particularly the GPUs, but also that the hobby has shifted away from being competitive against consoles to having no chance of being cost competitive. When they stopped being in competing fields, the cost of PC parts just exploded.

It’s a shame cities skylines 2 doesn’t run on many PCs, or even that the first one became so DLC heavy because watching SimCity implode under EA’s bullshit just for an amazing successor to take to the field was amazing.

I’m very excited for the successor to the Sims but I’ve been waiting for it a scarily long time without any major promising news.

I was weirdly forgiving of Fallout 76 (never played it, I’m not too hot for multiplayer games) because it was made so soon after fallout 4. It always felt like one of those DLC that got so large that it got released as a standalone game, which practically any large game studio has done and Bethesda did with Arcane’s Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider.

A huge soft spot I have for the elder scrolls comes from the heroic fantasy exploration with enormous orchestral music and adventure in every direction, something people say about Starfield is that it’s large and sparse, which is accurate for a grounded space game but goes against what makes half of Bethesda games fun. Fallout falls in the middle of the pack being far more pulpy than Starfield and in 4, I feel this was a large issue with it feeling bland; it’s pulpy wackiness was toned down when it should have gone up.

I don’t expect Bethesda to give me the video game equivalent of game of thrones but I do expect the Saturday morning cartoon that I’m equally fond of, and they still hold all the ingredients to make that recipe. Unfortunately Starfield was always tonally wrong for that, but ES6 is perfect for it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still only buy ES6 a year or so after release, maybe 2-3 if it’s really crap, but I think a fair few of the ways that they’ve deviated from the working formula post Skyrim may not be an issue here.

Half of those were me and my 2014 hellish Skyrim setup.

Oh it may have been, I totally wouldn’t be surprised if every time I read Team Fortress, my brain just interpreted it as TF2.

TF2 source 2 totally makes sense as although TF2 gets no updates, it’s still a popular game and valve can’t totally take the idea of upgrading it to source 2 off the table themselves.

This one is a shame that I don’t really understand, I wonder if it’s related to the fact that it’s for the GameCube and that’s Nintendo’s territory. I’m curious to see if this activity continues and expands, as even on steam there are remakes of half life in source and basically fan expansions to portal being sold for profit, among other products and projects.

Like Club Penguin.

I swear my spelling is getting worse every day.

I played a modpack about 7 years ago that basically removed a lot of official content including most hostle mobs, villages and villagers, and a bunch of other content, but replaced it with lots of non-fantastical creatures, a wider range of materials, different medieval era weapons etc. It really felt like you were alone in an untouched world, in a way that Minecraft already really does, except that the existence of zombies and villages juxtaposes that.

Then on the flipside, it had the Twilight forest mod, perhaps the aether mod (I don’t really remember) and this general idea that if you want epic fantasy and magic, you need to leave the overworked, which felt narrativly really nice to do, I think it populated the nether with skeletons and and endermen before official Minecraft did too, I don’t clearly remember.

I’ve longed for that game ever since but I don’t know what the modpack was called, and I’ve never found it again.

I didn’t realise Skyrim blocked achievements when modding, I’d definitely didn’t back in the day, it’s one of the few games that I have all achievements on and I’ve modded it to hell basically every time.

I used to boot it up and just play through that one repeatable painting heist that was optionally 4 player, although I’d do it by myself.

Unity spent a long time being unplayable in an are where that was unforgivable than it is now. I picked it up just before the big patch where they also threw in the first DLC for free as an apology and I ran pretty well on my device, but nobody cared because nobody was playing it.

I feel it also had a pretty lackluster story, I opened strongly but generally but then just became blander as it progressed. I really wanted to like the characters, but they never landed for me.

The last game that I feel had a great plot was black flag, largely because everything since origins has been enormous in scope in a way that’s just directly detrimental to a linear cutscene style story. Also as historical RPGs they’re good but Assassin’s Creed has something really special that has been forgotten, and I was hoping this game would reignite it, but it seems not.