No, they contracted this game out to another developer, and it’s in Unreal. It’s been in the works for a long time. If they’re smart, it’s a testbed for getting future games off of their usual Creation engine.

That game only really went into production after Starfield shipped.

Video game marketing changed dramatically about 2 years ago. No one likes long marketing cycles anymore. There are too many opportunities for delays or “puddlegates”.

I haven’t played it, but it’s on my list. A very long list. And Rogue Trader is 40k, right? Meaning fantasy trappings but in space? That can also be fine, but I appreciated Starfield’s setting for sticking to harder sci-fi tropes, like its obvious inspiration of Interstellar.

I wasn’t a fan of a number of choices they made in their RPG systems in the Original Sin games, so until we see what their next game is, I’ll wonder how much of the heavy lifting done in BG3 was due to D&D rather than their designers. Still, BG3 knocked basically everything out of the park, so even a lesser RPG from this team will still likely be great. It would be nice to have the CRPG equivalent of Starfield from Larian, since most sci-fi RPGs tend to stick to the post-apocalypse.

I watched two Jobst videos, and the second one didn’t sit right with me, so it’s no surprise he played fast and loose with facts that might see him lose a court case.

As for what I’ve been playing, I just beat Borderlands 2 the other day, and now I’m working my way through the DLC before I move on to the Pre-Sequel and 3. It’s mostly a huge improvement over the first game, but they definitely unflattened the progression compared to the first game, which is something a lot of RPGs and adjacent games do. It’s never been my preference, and it comes with its own design problems, like how the game refused to give me some decent guns toward the end of the game and then suddenly gave me guns that trivialized the next part of the game.

I’m still in the middle of Kingdom Come: Deliverance as well, but I’ve only inched forward in it since the last of these posts.

And I’m always playing fighting games like Skullgirls, so that’s the free space on my Bingo card.

I built my last PC in 2021 just accepting that graphics card prices would never come down anytime soon, and I paid about $1400 for one. They did come down, not long after. I can wait more patiently this time.

You have to go specifically to the giveaway section.

When I build a new computer sometime in the next year or so, I’ll probably end up buying the second-best AMD card available at the time, because that’s where there tends to be the best bang for my buck. But in reality, I’ll be using the full power of that card for only a handful of games over the lifetime of that machine, and I’ll spend most of my time playing a 2D game that came out in 2012. Yeah, you can absolutely get away with cheaper cards and have a great time.

a backdrop of a challenging economic environment, including high inflation and fluctuating exchange rates

I think that’s all you’re going to get.

I doubt it. Maybe Grand Theft Auto and Mario Kart can get away with charging more, but a lot of games asking $70 aren’t finding many customers willing to pay that price right now.

Yes, they charged for it years ago on the last gen system. This type of rerelease usually includes the DLC in the package so that they can go back to charging full price for a game that’s no longer in the zeitgeist and not worth as much as a brand new game.

That’s what happened to that cancelled TimeSplitters reboot, too.

By sheer compatibility, we’re well more than halfway there.

No one can predict the future, especially not now, but things are clearly changing. Microsoft is getting messaging out there right now to let you know the ways that they’re rolling with the punches. The next Xbox, and corresponding handhelds, will in all likelihood just be thinly disguised PCs that absolutely let you just install Steam, Epic, etc. on them if you so choose. So in that world, when you can buy an Xbox that also plays PlayStation games that have released on PC, how does Sony compete with that? That’s very up in the air.

And for all the ways that Nintendo has historically handled consoles, they’re under new management now that may be open to doing things differently. The way they’re trying to press their market advantage at the moment, which was already going to result in fewer units sold, could be even further undone at the worst possible time for them by a stupid trade war. How will they choose to respond to that? Because bleeding money by sticking to their old ways isn’t going to be what happens. If they did burn to the ground, the insurance company that owns their intellectual property would dig them out of the ashes and sell them where they can make money again.

That’s going to happen in only a few years, with the next Xbox.

Even MMOs have been run by amateurs. If you make the servers available, someone will figure out how to run it.

Mad Max is WB.

My friend loves quoting a line from that show where HyperScape was uttered in the same breath as games like Call of Duty as a “mega franchise” to try to will its success into existence. That episode is only a few years old, but HyperScape is already shut down forever.

I can’t make you like it if you didn’t enjoy it the first time, but I thought it was a great FPS and RPG that didn’t waste enough time, like its contemporaries might, to become boring. If you gave it a few hours, you’ve probably seen the cut of its jib.