Still thoroughly sucked into Pathfinder: Kingmaker. At least I’ve stopped poking around in side areas now, just focusing on advancing the main story. Also doing companion quests. This might be the longest not-live-service game I’ve ever played? I think I still have at least two more full chapters to go.

Like a lot of PC reviewers now, they’ve separated out their technical coverage; here’s PC Gamer’s tech review. But yes, even a couple sentences on it would have been nice.

In short, expect better performance from Nvidia GPUs, possibly until third parties get XeSS/FSR up and running; don’t expect full support for hardware enthusiasts, and don’t try it on the Deck unless you’re okay with the absolute lowest settings.

The full slideshow is a great collection of data, really interesting stuff if you’re interested in gaming biz.

That said, while I’m sure PC enthusiasts (among the larger gaming audiences here at Lemmy and Reddit) will be thrilled to see PC gaming rising while mobile is falling, the actual revenue breakdown is less exciting. PC growth is driven by a larger percentage than ever of microtransactions.

Much of the presentation is centered around “black hole games,” which make up a ton of the market and are extremely difficult to pull users away from. Sad when a lot of the strategy seems to be about cost-cutting and getting better percentages from the storefronts rather than making better games.

Seems I’m way too picky for that. I fell down an MMORPG rabbit hole for several years a while back and have spent the last several years catching up. Already starting to feel like I’ve played most everything from older gens I’m going to really like.

One thing I’ve noticed is I’m wishlisting way more upcoming games than before. There’s the occasional exception, but if I keep a rolling release schedule, I’ll generally still be playing new stuff well after release.

Way too early to speculate. Until the cards are independently benchmarked, there’s no way to assess value.

Only ones of those I tried were Pillars and Divinity (and its sequel). I found Pillars rather obtuse early on so I didn’t stick with it very long. I liked how fresh Divinity felt, having its own ruleset that was still simple to understand. Didn’t like how super strict the level differential was and the quantity of traps in the game was beyond sadistic. In hindsight, I don’t think that one was very good overall.

On the other hand, I thought D:OS 2 was incredible. It was still way more strict on XP than I’d like, but that’s the only thing I would have changed about the game. Looks like it came out just before Kingmaker did, so I’m not surprised it got buried. Larian’s just on another level, and Baldur’s Gate 3 ended up fixing that one issue I had (while elevating almost everything else at the same time).

I still am enjoying Kingmaker so much, though. Probably would have blown my mind if I’d played it before BG3, heh. Hoping for a little bit more character writing, but in any case, I’m really enjoying the battles.

Firewatch is such a great, bite-sized experience. Still think about it from time to time.

Started Pathfinder: Kingmaker and I got sucked into it big time. Just finished the prologue last night. Reviews for this were not great, so I don’t know if the game improved dramatically after release or if there are rough spots in the campaign coming up.

I guess it’s also possible its old-school feel contributed to some of that. I really do feel like I’m playing a fresher version of Baldur’s Gate 2, complete with unfortunate quirks.

This sounds ambitious for a small studio. It doesn’t help that both Northgard and Dune: Spice Wars felt feature-light to me, maybe due to their signature genre blending.

Could be they’ve scaled up (and trust me, I’m yearning for more space games in the AA category), but too many of these projects are shooting for the moon and falling short. I’d love to see a stretch of releases with smaller scope–like Everspace 2–that the industry can build on, because space games are not where they were in 2000. Chris Roberts is off in his ivory tower doing his thing, and the big devs are either planetbound or obsessed with procgen.

Yeah, my gaming experience lately has been a bit of tension between sticking it out and learning when to drop stuff.

I didn’t like the Trails series at first but the fourth and fifth games ended up being all-time favorites. This one’s not going to get to that point, but it’s also part of a larger series that could have a lot of fun gameplay to mess around with.

Just started Disgaea 1. For whatever reason I’ve bounced off this game half a dozen times since first trying it all the way back at release, but I’ve more or less settled into a groove with it now.

Having a good time with it, though I’m wondering if I should pick up a manual or something somewhere. Kind of obtuse systems and details I’d normally be able to get out of the UI, but not here.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop was amazing. Not for everyone and probably a little too difficult in a couple spots, but the writing and atmosphere is impeccable. Absolutely nails the vibe it’s going for.

Absolutely gorgeous game with an equally bad gameplay loop. Kinda sad.

I wonder how well the marketing exclusivity is working for them. I’ve come across more than one person that thought Metaphor: ReFantazio wasn’t on PlayStation because of it.

Don’t mind me, I’ll be sitting here waiting patiently for my Destiny of an Emperor remake.

Biggest surprise for length was Dragon Quest VII, the PSX version. Started playing it close to release, dropped it several times and finally finished it years later.

I’d played multiple games in the series before and I think the longest one topped out at 40 hours, so I really was not expecting a 100+ hour marathon like that was (although the very, very long prologue should probably have served as a warning).

Especially considering last I checked, Porsche isn’t pushing a line of space ships.

Post-Meiji is an interesting time period. I don’t know how much media with Western localization there is in this setting. Even The Last Samurai was early Meiji.

Big, chunky logos are part of this specific vibe, though I can understand why it’s a turn-off (with a couple of the fictional ones being out of focus).

AHHH this raises so many questions. So ready for this.