Computerchairgeneral

I’ve been working my way through the Baldur’s Gate series after putting about ninety hours in BG3. BG1 was fun even if the story was a bit predictable and generic, although it did feel like playing through a DnD campaign. Really enjoyed Shadows of Amn, but Throne of Bhaal just turned into a slog at the end. I think the most interesting part of playing through the trilogy was watching Bioware’s style develop over the course of the three games. As someone who was introduced to Bioware through Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire I’ve always thought Bioware’s character writing stood out, especially in the old days, so it was a bit jarring to play through BG1 where the companions feel more like hirelings you pick up for their class rather than full-fledged characters. BG2 felt more like a classic Bioware game with banter, romance, and companion quests, although the Real Time advancement system kept glitching out on me. I was hoping to move on to Planescape: Torment after TOB, but I’m feeling burnt out on Infinity Engine games. So right now I’m trying to find something in the Summer Sale to serve as a palate cleanser.

Yeah, it would be great if Kojima was still working on Metal Gear, wouldn’t it Konami? I wonder why he isn’t?

Good. I can maybe see the argument for a remaster that improves the graphics, but they don’t really need a ground up remake in a new engine. Not as long as they’re still playable on modern computers.

Amazing game. One of the few shooters I can think of that really drove the “War is Hell” message home. Shame it got delisted over an expired music license.

Given what the modding community has been able to come up with without official tools, I’m looking forward to the mods that are going to come out after the next patch.

Well that’s a shame. Not a fan of Paradox’s DLC policies, but some kind of competition in this genre would have been nice.

I had genuinely forgotten about the sequel until I saw this. Started wondering how I had missed that and then I remembered it was a straight to streaming cash grab. Time to go back to being blissfully ignorant.

This feels like a trailer for a live-service Dragon Age spinoff, rather than the next main Dragon Age game.

Yeah, really hoping this is just a misstep from the marketing team. It’s such a whiplash inducing shift in tone from all the previous marketing and trailers that they’ve released. If not then they certainly picked an interesting game to fully shift the tone from dark fantasy to…whatever Veilguard is aiming for.

Fable having this realistic art style still feels weird to me, but at least it seems like they’re matching the tone of the other games.

Yeah, the art style definitely feels like a holdover from the live-service days. I could see them having to work with whatever assets were left after that version of the game was scrapped and just having to make it work.

Not sure how I feel about the art style. Varric and Harding look decent, but it felt like the longer the trailer went on the more the characters turned into something out of a stylized hero shooter. Honestly, the whole trailer felt more suited to a hero shooter than a single player RPG. Hopefully the gameplay looks better, but this was a very odd way to formally reintroduce your game after ten years of scattered trailers and announcements.

Glad to see the Stop Killing Games initiative continuing even if the most likely response from the UK government is going to be “No”.

Accidents happen. Your finger slips and suddenly your game is full of Nazi symbols. Happens all the time. Also, I get the gist of Garriss’s response, but mentioning that he had men and women at his house and his mother was always present just makes things sound weirder than a simple denial. Sounds like a horrible situation all around.

Child labor is child labor. It doesn’t matter what “skills” the kids are learning.

Just think of all the memes you could mine from four hours of patented Lucas dialogue.

Classic Fallout games are timeless. Also realized that by the time I’m seventy gen delta, or whatever greek letter we’re on, will consider Fallout 4 a classic, retro Fallout game. So that’s a fun thought.

No? Xbox might not be in the greatest place right now, but it’s a far cry from where Sega was when they discontinued the Dreamcast. Yeah, Microsoft stepped on a lot of rakes with the Xbox One, but it wasn’t a Saturn-style disaster and Microsoft is still doing well enough to buy out a major game publisher.

Good. This was a terrible idea. Even setting aside all the privacy concerns, which are numerous, how well would this have even worked? Trusting algorithms to guess the age of users was only going to result in a ton of people not being able to play a game because the algorithm decided they look like twelve-year olds.

I’m impressed at how well thought out this battle plan is. I’m usually pessimistic when it comes to governments taking pro-consumer stances, but then again all it takes is one government siding against game companies to set a precedent. Hopefully this picks up steam and gets to a wider audience. It feels like one of the few things gamers can agree on these days is how much they hate business practices like this.