Too much going on. It’s like they’ve just accepted and (mostly) implemented every single feature request they ever got without necessarily thinking about how it should work with all the other stuff.

I played PoE for a good few years around its release and had a lot of fun initially with the temporary hardcore leagues with new mechanics every time, but there is a good reason I haven’t come back to the game - and it’s not just that I’m kind of over the ARPG thing. Scope Creep has turned it into a convoluted mess to get back into if you’re been out of the game for a while (or never played it) and I say that as someone who typically enjoys complexity.

The SoD expansion was made by Beamdog some 15 years after BG1 was released. It’s admirable that they tried getting the original voice actors back, but otherwise the team behind BG 1&2 (and ToB) had nothing to do with it. I couldn’t get through it, and I have a hard time supporting the Enhanced Editions as is due to Beamdog inserting their fanfiction into them as well - though I recognise they’ve been instrumental in revamping the engine and bringing the games to a new generation of people.

It even ruined lots of let’s plays and streams of the game if you ever decide to watch any. It’s wild how intrusive they are.

Not to mention the fucking notifications for Epic Games Achievements are loud as all fuck and default to “on” every time you open the launcher so you have to manually turn on Do Not Disturb every time you launch the game or your immersion gets ruined every 5 seconds by an Epic Achievement notification ding (and visual on screen popup btw!)

Epic is just terrible. I wanted to bypass the launcher by using Heroic instead, but it wouldn’t recognize me having the Deluxe edition without actually installing the game through Epic and being logged in through their launcher. Garbage.

And that’s very deliberate! There are a couple of key rolls very very early that have positive outcomes if you fail them. They’re supposed to teach the player that failure is okay. But it turns out many many people are too afraid of the dangerously red button and the low percentage number so they never even try in the first place, thus also missing the lesson.

Also that sequence you’re talking about is one of my favourites in the game, it’s so damn funny. Another classic failure is the ice-cop-hat-fuck-show.

It really is the best book I’ve ever played.

I actually think an argument could be made for Disco Elysium not being one of these games actually. I’ve seen people bounce off it because they went in with the wrong expectations. The game doesn’t really market itself correctly: it claims to be an isometric RPG and a detective game, but it could be argued the game is actually neither. Also lots of people miss out on a lot because they weren’t aware of the fail-forward design principle.

Dividing my time between playing STALKER 2 and modding it. There is a really great game underneath the surface - at least the potential of one - but it’s a shame it released in the state it did. The A-life offline simulation being turned off smells of console constraints and/or a forced release after they ran out of possibilities to delay further. I really hope they’ll be able to keep working on the game through patches because it has the potential to be truly fantastic.

Also still playing Deadlock, a game or two a day or so. It’s an often frustrating experience - as MOBAs tend to be - where matchmaking still has a huge impact on your fun, but the core gameplay is just so damn good. I just wish I was in a skill bracket where people are actually using mics and coordinating and communicating. Partly an EU problem though I’m sure.

A heathen I might be, but I still prefer BG2 over BG3. And Jon Irenicus might just be one of the best video game villains of all time.

I’m so glad you’re enjoying it! It’s a damn shame BG3 took the world by storm last year, as I felt AW2 truly deserved more awards, including Game of the Year. BG3 is good and all but at the end of the day it’s just a really well made RPG. AW2 is doing something bold and interesting with the video game medium in a way that deserves to be celebrated. It topped Jacob Geller’s yearly list for a reason, and I think he put it the best in his video:

“Is Alan Wake 2 the best game I’ve played this year? No. But it’s the most excited I’ve been to be playing a video game this year.”

Also it should have won the Game award for best soundtrack and I’ll hear no arguments.

Mods are already out to fix it, but it’s not unlikely they tied a bunch of functions to timescale so that longer days screw up AI/Emissions/Quests etc.

The keybinds are absolutely atrocious and I was staggered that so many were unable to be re-bound. Quick Melee is “V” and you can’t change it??

The beefy mutants are absolutely a problem and made me actually switch from Veteran to Stalker difficulty simply because those bullet sponges are not fun gameplay. Otherwise in the long sequence of inane design decisions the absurdly fast timescale (24h in game in a single real life hour!!!) is pulling me out of immersion a lot as well. I hope it can be modded without breaking everything because I just want to be able to savour these beautiful areas and weathers for a bit while exploring without weather changing and night falling every 5 minutes!

Lastly, and I haven’t gotten far enough to see much of it yet, but most importantly will be the A-life implementation and how much of it is actually fixable with patches. That was what made the other STALKER games feel alive, and the devs have at least acknowledged that it’s not working at the moment. Hopefully that means the engine for it is actually there though and can be patched. Unless they’re lying to save face, I suppose.

You know what, I agree. And I would love to see the look on Todd Howard’s face if Fallout: London wins GotY. It should be eligible for that reason alone.

I have a 7800X3D and a 4070TI, running the game at 3413x1920 with DLDSR on my 1440p monitor with everything on Epic and DLSS on Balanced. For the most part, I’m sitting at 65-85 FPS. However both frame drops and stutters are pretty bad, and performance tanks in the populated first town area (forgetting its name), regularly hitting 45-55 FPS. To note also, frame gen doesn’t seem to work for me. It works for a couple of minutes, then it starts behaving like a memory leak: getting me down to sub 10 FPS until it crashes or I reboot the game. This doesn’t happen with frame gen off.

On that subject though, I’m getting frequent crashes anyway. The first two hours yesterday were fine, but I’ve had 4 fatal error CTDs today. Very disappointing.

It breaks my heart to read about all the bugs and performance issues. Not that they were entirely unexpected - especially since it’s a STALKER game - but I was hoping for a miracle. I really, really want this game to succeed and the game itself sounds like they hit it out the park. I just hope launching in this state doesn’t ruin the game’s reputation and sales.

I believe the generally accepted scientific term for the English language is “clusterfuck”.

Could be, could be. I think your suggestion would make for a better game with less conflict between what the main story is saying and what the game is presenting in the open world. Having the story emphasize how fast V is dying, only for the player to then fuck around with car races and random merc contracts and whatnot really doesn’t work all that well as far as immersion goes.

Jackie’s death would have also been much more impactful if we’d have spent all that time with him playing through those six months.

I mean… maybe? Those are nice things of course, but if I wanted to start using an alternative to TikTok I would never consider something without an algorithm. The whole point - for me at least - is to waste time eating digital slop served to you by an algorithm so that you don’t have to know what you want to watch when you sit down and open it up. If I already knew what I wanted to watch I wouldn’t be on an app like this, I’d be searching up the video or subject on another platform.

I always felt like the game was originally never meant to be an open-world game, it’s as if they were going for a mission-to-mission corridor kind of game and wrapped up a world around it to walk around in at a later phase.

That’s my take on it too. The story they wanted to tell does not mesh well with an open world game, but since the people loudly wanted something like “RDR 2 but Cyberpunk” they felt obliged to attempt to shoehorn it in.

The whole cutscene thing with Jackie after the intro feels like it was supposed to be actual gameplay, but was just cut out and changed to a cutscene to skip time.

Completely agree. I think having you play through that part would have made a huge impact on how you connect with Jackie. Maybe they felt it would have pushed the Keanu introduction too deep into the game?

I’ve been trying to get back in the game a couple of times, but it often just feels so lifeless and lacks any depth.

They’ve added some touches to the open world, but I think it was too fundamentally broken to be easily patched. The new skill tree from 2.0 is actually good though and I think the combat is pretty fun in its current state, even without going to mods.

It’s inspirational what they’ve done. I really hope the launch goes well.