This is it right here, at least for me personally. I’m a huge Dragon Age fan (played through DAO and DA2 before Inquisition’s release) who has always been vaguely interested in Larian’s Divinity Original Sin games but never made them a priority in my backlog. Seeing the cinematic cutscenes and the 3rd-person voice acted dialog for BG3 made me immediately interested and now I’m 10-ish hours deep into Baldur’s Gate and loving it!

Also slowly resigning myself to DA4 not even coming close to matching BG3 in quality given the circumstances of its development.

I’m curious, how are you discovering new music this way? my understanding of soulseek and nicotine+ is that they’re great for finding music by artists you already know, but idk how they would work for discovery…?

sick! do you think you’ll ever print these physically? I’d love to pick up a copy if you ever do. :)

sick! do you think you’ll ever print these physically? I’d love to pick up a copy if you ever do. :)

I completed all of the shrines before I beat the game, and found it enjoyable. I also really enjoyed running around the depths collecting all the lightroots. I enjoy exploring caves and wells too, so that’s next on my list to complete. Grinding for armor sets is tedious to me so I’m skipping it…

How far away from your monitor do you sit to see all of the 49”?! It must all be in your peripheral vision, haha. (Edit: oh, I overlooked the ultra wide mention and was picturing a 49” tv type thing, haha. Ultra wide makes more sense!)

I actually went down from two monitors on my desktop to one… nothing wrong with the second monitor now sitting in my closet, but I’m liking the extra space on my desk and it feels more ergonomic to not be swiveling my neck as much.

Interesting! Sakurai would say keep your params out of the code, so that you can easily tweak all params in one spot when balancing things. But maybe having all params in code is reasonable to handle when you’re a solo dev.

I’ve been looking for this kind of comment, because this was my first thought on reading the statement. Very PR speak implying that the state of subs like r/interestingasfuck meant that they didn’t want the brand risk that now comes with being on Reddit – not that they cared about or were protesting the API changes.

I do think it’s interesting because it shows that the mod protests on those subreddits - even if brief - triggered a big enough brand risk moment for MSFT/Minecraft to decide dropping Reddit completely (rather than temporarily or similar) was worth it. I don’t think we’ve seen any other brands officially do that yet.

There were rumors based on the Steam specs that the game would be always-online, but they moved “broadband internet connection” from Minimum to Recommended specs – so at least on PC, it’s highly likely not online only.

Gunbrella is made by the folks who did Gato Roboto, which is a short and snappy metroidvania - super stoked to see they’re working on a longer game with similar vibes!

Glad I wasn’t the only one who thought the audio mixing was a little sub-par on Stray Gods. I’m left wondering if the full release is going to be like that, or if it’s just that the demo was released before they’d done a polish pass on the audio. Hopefully that’s something reviews talk about!

Stray Gods — the demo did a great job of demonstrating what the gameplay will be like! the art is gorgeous and the voice acting is solid. I just have a few minor critiques: the soundscape of the VO felt weirdly empty and echo-y. I would have loved some additional room tone ambience, additional SFX like fabric swishes when characters turn their heads: imo it needs a little something to make it all feel cohesive. The demo was also structured so that you get a taste of later songs, but without clearly communicating that the new gameplay section was from a new part of the game, which confused me. It also made it harder to care about those choices because I’m missing the context.

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood — I can’t believe they let us play for so long in the demo?! I kept thinking ok it’s going to end now but it didn’t! That’s always a nice surprise in a demo. The card design mechanic was enjoyable, and detailed enough to provide room for personalization but not too complex to be overwhelming. The mechanic also appeared in an interlude where I wasn’t expecting it (which also had a later influence on dialogue) - that was a delight, and I think is a good sign of further depth in the full game. I like that the main character has a distinct personality and isn’t a generic character or too self-insert-y. Can’t wait for the full release of the game!

Venba — the demo is short and sweet, but enough to let me know I’ll like the full game. the recipes-as-puzzles is fun, and a neat introduction to the world of Indian cooking. and ofc the art and animation is lovely - I especially loved the menu and options screens.

Saltsea Chronicles — there was clearly a lot of thought and care given to this demo. I really appreciated the initial context they provided around “here’s what’s happened in the story so far”, and the little glossary pop-ups when characters used new words was a great touch. Charming characters and world building. In dialogue choices, it wasn’t clear which character you’re making the dialogue choice for, but as I got further along I think it’s more about the vibe and not picking specific dialogue choices. Keeping my eye on this one for sure!

Slay The Princess — this is an older demo that I hadn’t tried yet. 10/10, this sucked me in for several hours. There are so many interesting options and paths to choose, and the voice acting and art is amazing. I’m very curious where this will go in the full game!

I have secretly been putting off playing Oblivion and Morrowind until the modders release Skyblivion and Skywind, haha.

I did some navmesh work on personal Skyrim mods, so I’d actually be able to help out with that… I can see navmeshing being relaxing while listening to audiobooks or podcasts. If only I didn’t have so many other personal projects! 😵

It was such a huge relief when they revealed that the protagonist for Starfield would be unvoiced, and even more when they showed character backgrounds and traits in the gameplay demo last year.

We don’t have Starfield in our hands just yet, so ofc our hope could be misplaced, but based on the evidence so far, they understand what fans loved about Skyrim and earlier games and where Fallout 4 departed from that. For me, that departure was the main quest that railroaded you into a specific sort of character and the voiced protagonist limiting dialogue to “yes/sarcastic yes/yes, but I need more info/no.” Everything they’ve shown us about Starfield makes it look like we’ll be able to come up with very different characters for each of our playthroughs, and that’s exciting.

I think having one team that works on all the mainline games contributes to BGS games being what they are. I imagine it contributes to cohesion and knowledge transfer among the devs between games, which helps maintain consistency in output over time. In an age of AAA teams churning through devs with burnout and crunch, it seems like BGS keeps a team together that has multiple years of experience collaborating, and that’s a good thing.

Re: the teaser… imo, in the context of the time, people were going to believe TES had been entirely abandoned if they didn’t release that teaser. Since BGS had alternated TES and Fallout to that point, there was the expectation that TES 6 would be the next game after Fallout 4; but instead, in 2018, they announced, “Fallout 76 is next and Starfield after that, and we haven’t forgotten TES, it’s just 3rd in line.” If they’d only announced FO 76 and Starfield, TES fans would have blown up about the franchise being dead.

I honestly don’t understand why anyone is surprised by this, or why it makes them have a negative opinion of Bethesda Game Studios.

I understood when they announced that TES VI was in development that it wasn’t in active development at this time, but that the announcement was to quell the fanbase who thought TES had been entirely abandoned.

Skyrim took 3 years, Fallout 4 took 4 years, Fallout 76 took 3 years (but wasn’t a mainline game), and Starfield took 5 years, which is the longest development time for mainline games by… one year, the horror, and it’s an entirely new IP with space systems that I’m sure took additional time to develop engine-specific features to support. I anticipate TES VI will be a larger and more ambitious game than Skyrim and will be influenced by how they’ve developed Fallout 4 and Starfield, so seeing it release in 2028 with a 5 year dev time vs. Skyrim’s 3 seems entirely reasonable.

Sometimes I think about growing cucumbers just to be able to pick off the little white prickles on the outside; I always found it terribly satisfying as a kid!

Reminds me of this neocities site that has a collection of Gameboy Camera photos collected from the internet.

Not here for games, but I want to shout out Heave-Ho! because it’s a wonderful co-op game! Goofy physics co-op platforming. :)

The game mechanic loops around unlocking new plants in Horticular are very satisfying to me, and I especially enjoyed building habitats to attract new animals to the garden. Wanting to collect all the plants and animals in the demo really sucked me in! :)