clueless1 wrote on 2025-12-28, 22:29:

Great game! I played it back in 2019, along with the Annihilation Line DLC. It was good for about 35 hours of entertainment between the two.

Heh, I'm often "late to the game". Wish I had played it sooner.

I'm about 7 hours in, taking my time, exploring and soaking in all the Terminator universe goodness! All 7 hours are just today. 🤣

DLC is next on my list.

newtmonkey wrote on 2025-12-28, 14:27:

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Shivering Isles
Finished! I was expecting this to be a lot longer, but it took me around 12 hours to complete the main quest and some side quests here and there. I did rush through the main quest, however, and I know that there's a ton of optional content available.

This was really exceptional! It's definitely got some of the best content in the entire game, and there's even some minor replayability with regard to which of two factions you choose to ally with. It brings some the weirdness of Morrowind back to the series, and the quests are quite varied. I had a great time with this. Highly recommended!

well, i enjoyed the main game so maybe this dlc is worth a shot too! There is something about Oblivion i really liked, maybe its the NPCs, the look and feel. it felt like a 'small-big' world

clueless1 wrote on 2025-12-28, 16:16:

keropi wrote on 2025-12-28, 15:57:

yeah the 12gb is a weird number for sure... but going to 5070ti was out of the question for what I plan to do I forgot to mentio […]
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clueless1 wrote on 2025-12-28, 15:52:

Congrats! The only reason I didn't consider this card was due to 12GB VRAM. Some current games maxed out will use up every bit of 12GB at up to 1440p, so future games may prefer 16GB. If you game at 1080p, then 12GB should never be an issue.

yeah the 12gb is a weird number for sure... but going to 5070ti was out of the question for what I plan to do
I forgot to mention that 110e more was referring to the price of 5060ti/16gb ...
my current monitor is a 1440p one - nothing fancy but probably it's the thing I will replace next as I really want a HDR-capable one

I added the 5070 to my chart and it ends up being 2nd best value to the RX9070. The only potential issue is the 12GB VRAM, which may eventually become a limitation in 1440p, and for sure will be a limitation at 2160p.

Are you daisy chaining the video cards together hopefully get better performance. I remember you can do that with nvidia, almost like a RAID config

Started a new game of Baldur's Gate 3 on the PS5 while at my sister's for Christmas. I had gotten to Act 3 on the PC but never finished it and it's been too long to just pick up where I left off. On the other hand, I've also done Act 1 a million times since I played the beta...so I tried to make my character Palpatine to make it feel more fresh for me haha.

twiz11 wrote on 2025-12-29, 19:29:

clueless1 wrote on 2025-12-28, 16:16:

keropi wrote on 2025-12-28, 15:57:

yeah the 12gb is a weird number for sure... but going to 5070ti was out of the question for what I plan to do
I forgot to mention that 110e more was referring to the price of 5060ti/16gb ...
my current monitor is a 1440p one - nothing fancy but probably it's the thing I will replace next as I really want a HDR-capable one

I added the 5070 to my chart and it ends up being 2nd best value to the RX9070. The only potential issue is the 12GB VRAM, which may eventually become a limitation in 1440p, and for sure will be a limitation at 2160p.

Are you daisy chaining the video cards together hopefully get better performance. I remember you can do that with nvidia, almost like a RAID config

I don't think SLI has been a common thing since around the 800 series of nvidia gpus. I know it was supported as recently as 2020 by the RTX 3090, but it was a very inefficient way of boosting gpu performance and almost no one went that route. Too much system power draw for only a ~50% gain in gpu speed. It was cheaper and more efficient to just upgrade your gpu to one that is 50% faster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Link_Interface

Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition
I've tried to get into this game many times over the years, but could never stay interested. I decided to force myself to play it this year, with the hope of building some momentum and getting into the game.

The game starts out somewhat strongly with a murder investigation (a lot like Ultima VII, just not as good), with several quests with alternate solutions. Nice! There's a strong mechanical foundation, as objects have physical characteristics like weight and material, so you can lift heavy barrels (if you are strong enough) and can ignite and burn certain things.

You start to think that this is going to be an amazing RPG, but the cracks start to form right away. The dialogue is simply awful. Every single character is some kind of quirky joke... it's like interacting with the worst of the "cute" (embarrassing) stuff in the Baldur's Gate games, but it's every single character in the game. I had the same problem with The Outer Worlds; if every character and situation is a joke, how can you expect me to take it seriously? The writers surely didn't.

Even worse, the game is presented as a sort of modern take on Ultima VII, but the open world is actually a bunch of level-gated nonsense. The game isn't level scaled (thankfully), but encounters are fixed and finite, which is actually another form of level scaling. You can exit the first town from the southwest, west, north, and east... but enemies are way too powerful in any direction but west, so that's where you have to go. Even worse, every single encounter is like this, so even after heading west, the zombies and skeletons to the north are level 3, but the zombies and skeletons to the south are level 4, and a single level makes a huge difference. You can definitely beat enemies that are a level or two above you (though this makes combat take even longer), but you're clearly meant to follow a linear path through the increasingly difficult fixed encounters. This means that, instead of exploring the world, you end up walking around looking for the next encounter that matches your level.

It's also annoying that every single combat is basically going to be a tactical encounter that will take you, I dunno, at least five minutes to clear. Five minutes doesn't sound like a long time, but, even only four hours in, I am starting to dread combat. You really want a mix of hard and easy encounters; the former to actually challenge you, the latter to feel some sense of advancement. If every combat is at roughly your level, it all starts to feel like the same thing over and over for a hundred hours; why do skeletons at my level take 5+ hits to kill, when I get at most six attacks total from my entire party every round? When I run into an encounter of six enemies, I'm tempted to just shut the game down for the day, because I know I'm gonna be sitting there for at least five minutes taking roughly one enemy down per round (less, of course, if "skeleton archer" somehow heals "skeleton brawler" halfway through). Who wants to sit there smacking some lowly monster like "skeleton archer" attack after attack in turn-based combat.

And of course, the equipment is all level locked, so if I stumble upon some awesome sword in a chest somewhere, I'll get penalized for using it unless I'm at the same level. One of the companions I tracked down came with a bow she was under-leveled to use properly! Am I playing an MMORPG? This makes no sense.

I'm gonna rant again about this game, after playing it a bit more.

Maybe it gets better 10 hours in. For now, it's not really an RPG in the classic sense. It's more like a tactical RPG. That maybe brings to mind classics like X-COM or Jagged Alliance, but imagine playing those games without the tactical depth, and being forced to slowly walk from battle to battle. No, it's less like that and closer to something like Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre on consoles, where you follow a linear story from battle to battle. The difference is that those games keep all the "RPG" stuff in menus, and don't pretend that you're playing a nonlinear RPG, but instead just send you from one battle to the next.

What annoys me most about Divinity is that it feels like the old bait-and-switch. You spend the first couple of hours of the game in a town solving a bunch of little quests mostly through dialogue and exploration, which makes it feel like a real RPG. After that, you're funneled through fixed encounters that are exactly the right level for your party, unless you go in the wrong direction and get stomped by encounters that are two levels above you.

I really hate this concept of leveled encounters, where you hit a fork in the road, save your game, and then head west and find out the encounter is two levels above you and maybe impossible, so you reload and head east and find that the encounter there is closer to your level, so that's where you go. It pulls me out of the game completely. What's wrong with the approach taken by, for example, Ultima VII, where overworld encounters are generally the same wherever you go, allowing you to explore the world without much trouble, but encounters in dungeons and endgame areas are more difficult, limiting you exploration?

Anyway, we'll see how it goes. Maybe once you clear the first major quest, the game opens up a bit?

newtmonkey wrote on 2025-12-30, 19:53:

I'm gonna rant again about this game, after playing it a bit more. […]
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I'm gonna rant again about this game, after playing it a bit more.

Maybe it gets better 10 hours in. For now, it's not really an RPG in the classic sense. It's more like a tactical RPG. That maybe brings to mind classics like X-COM or Jagged Alliance, but imagine playing those games without the tactical depth, and being forced to slowly walk from battle to battle. No, it's less like that and closer to something like Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre on consoles, where you follow a linear story from battle to battle. The difference is that those games keep all the "RPG" stuff in menus, and don't pretend that you're playing a nonlinear RPG, but instead just send you from one battle to the next.

What annoys me most about Divinity is that it feels like the old bait-and-switch. You spend the first couple of hours of the game in a town solving a bunch of little quests mostly through dialogue and exploration, which makes it feel like a real RPG. After that, you're funneled through fixed encounters that are exactly the right level for your party, unless you go in the wrong direction and get stomped by encounters that are two levels above you.

I really hate this concept of leveled encounters, where you hit a fork in the road, save your game, and then head west and find out the encounter is two levels above you and maybe impossible, so you reload and head east and find that the encounter there is closer to your level, so that's where you go. It pulls me out of the game completely. What's wrong with the approach taken by, for example, Ultima VII, where overworld encounters are generally the same wherever you go, allowing you to explore the world without much trouble, but encounters in dungeons and endgame areas are more difficult, limiting you exploration?

Anyway, we'll see how it goes. Maybe once you clear the first major quest, the game opens up a bit?

The thing I dislike most about Divinity is the puzzle aspect of combat. A lot of combats expect you to fight by utilizing the terrain in a specific way, otherwise they are overwhelming. It makes the combat feel like more of a puzzle to me than just RPG combat.

I think it's a matter of pushing an engine mechanic that the dev thinks is brilliant right in the players face. I would have prefered that those elements gave you an edge, not just forced you to utilize the mechanic. I didn't like that much.

The same can be said to a lesser degree of Baldur's Gate 3. Which I think is tremendously overrated and haven't been able to finish it out of boredom.

Persona 3 Reload

As a long time fan of the Persona series, I really like the improvements that Reload made to the combat system. In the original version of P3, you could only control the protagonist, while your companions were always on autopilot. This time, you have full access to the entire party, which makes tactical decisions a lot easier. They even added the "baton pass" mechanic from Persona 5, though in a slightly diminished capacity. Also, exploring Tartarus is not that tedious anymore, since they ditched the fatigue system entirely. And the addition of Theurgies, which kinda work like Limit Breaks from FF7, makes boss fights much more enjoyable.

Visually, the game looks fine, but it's not quite as stylish as P5. You can sometimes tell that the devs had a limited budget for this remake, and couldn't polish it as much as their flagship product. For example, some areas have a weird lack of lighting, making the environment unnaturally bright. They also recast all the characters with new voice actors in English, which made me worry a bit, but it seems the new folks generally do a good job. The only one I'm not sure about is Akihiko. His voice is mostly fine, though quite different from the P3 original. But on certain occasions, his tone becomes oddly comedic, which doesn't always fit the situation.

Anyway, I'm really enjoying this game so far, with one exception: the camera controls. I mean, the screen shakes when you're simply flipping between personas in the menu. What's up with that? There's also a lot of unnecessary camera shaking and jerky movement during All Out Attacks. And trying to adjust the camera angle while navigating tight spaces leads to some weird pushback, which makes things feel very awkward. I'm guessing this happens because P3R now uses Unreal Engine instead of its own proprietary tech like the previous entries. Yeah, UE always finds a way to mess things up. Otherwise, it's still a very fun game.

newtmonkey wrote on 2025-12-30, 19:53:

I really hate this concept of leveled encounters, where you hit a fork in the road, save your game, and then head west and find out the encounter is two levels above you and maybe impossible, so you reload and head east and find that the encounter there is closer to your level, so that's where you go. It pulls me out of the game completely. What's wrong with the approach taken by, for example, Ultima VII, where overworld encounters are generally the same wherever you go, allowing you to explore the world without much trouble, but encounters in dungeons and endgame areas are more difficult, limiting you exploration?

I'm not sure the levelled encounters such as in fallout 3 etc are a good alternative though. why is there suddenly an 'albino radscoprion' where there used to be a small regular radscorpion, for instance. i kind of prefer the idea that in location x are tougher enemies than in location y, in the same way that some mountains are harder to climb than others, and one should practice on the easier ones first. However i'd agree that shouldn't be used in game design to make entire regions inaccessible (just parts of it).

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Mysteria Ecclesiae DLC

I am really digging this DLC! So far there has been zero combat, lots of cutscenes and dialog, and a fair amount of exploration. The story is a mystery and you are a medieval detective. 😀 But the story is relevant, gripping and there's a sense of urgency (people are dying with plague-like symptoms and you're trying to solve the mystery before more people die and without getting sick yourself!). The setting is gorgeous! The Sedletz Monastery is northeast of Kuttenberg and prior to starting the DLC, was inaccessible from the main game. Now, your entire map is of the monastery itself, and it's HUGE! So much grounds to explore, inside, outside, below (cellars), guest and help quarters, priest quarters, library, dining hall, infirmary, etc.

The developers know how to tell a story and help you unravel a mystery. Back to the game now.

After a little over an hour session, things have gotten more challenging. Once the sickness in the monastery became public, the entire monastery was put on quarantine, so now the areas I'm allowed to wander have been reduced greatly. That means putting on a stealth outfit, crouching, and sneaking around, waiting for guards to pass, and if necessary, throwing a stone in the opposite direction to distract them. Now it went from just entertaining, to entertaining and challenging.

gerry wrote on 2025-12-31, 09:19:

I'm not sure the levelled encounters such as in fallout 3 etc are a good alternative though. why is there suddenly an 'albino radscoprion' where there used to be a small regular radscorpion, for instance. i kind of prefer the idea that in location x are tougher enemies than in location y, in the same way that some mountains are harder to climb than others, and one should practice on the easier ones first. However i'd agree that shouldn't be used in game design to make entire regions inaccessible (just parts of it).

Yeah, I agree with you 100%. It's something older RPGs got right early on (like the Ultima games), so I don't know why nearly all recent RPGs are either level scaled open worlds like Fallout 3/4, or rigidly leveled fixed encounters like Divinity, Might & Magic X, The Bard's Tale IV, Xulima, etc.

Completed Tomb Raider: Underworld. When I previously wrote about Tomb Raider: Legend I said it would be nice if Underworld was a bit better. Good news, it is in many ways. Levels are much bigger and not so narrow as in Legend, while they still aren't all that open there is actually some space to explore around this time, which is certainly an improvement. On one level you get to drive around with a motorcycle between few points of interest, the pathways are narrow corridors but after Legend it nearly felt like playing an open world game.

Combat encounters have been improved by a ton, you spend majority of time fighting just animals amongst the ruins. Pacing is also much better, feels more like a Tomb Raider this time instead of some cheap shooter. Too bad many enemies love to knock you down, gets a bit frustrating. At least there are no crappy boss fights anymore. Your flashlight now has an infinite battery which is nice, it didn't get much use in Legend but here it's a bit more useful. Lara's moveset has increased dramatically making all the acrobatics you'll be doing much more varied and interesting, but this isn't exclusively a good thing. Which takes me to my laundry list:

First and foremost the control and camera issues seemingly every game that uses this engine suffers from are not only still here, they have effectively gotten worse. As the levels and the acrobatics you need to do are now more complex the imprecise controls and sometimes unhelpful camera screwed me over so many times during my playthrough I was pretty ready to blow the game up with a kiloton of TNT several times, especially during the last level. To a degree the controls are more like suggestions and you just have to hope like hell Lara does what you wanted.

Then there's the "secret" treasures, in quotation marks for a reason. The levels have so ridiculously many of them you are basically swimming in them. Kick a vase, a treasure, go left instead of right, a treasure, trip on your feet and fall on your face, a treasure. You'll find so many of them they lose all purpose, it's like picking up pebbles while taking a walk. And every single time you hear the "you found a secret" jingle, which by the way is now a combination of the sound from Legend and from TR1 playing on top of each other. About half way through the game I stopped giving a crap about them completely.

Checkpoints seem a bit janky, fairly often for some reason there are several checkpoints in very short distances for no reason whatsoever. Like three within 8m with zero hazards around. Or at least the sound effect plays, I don't know are they all functional checkpoints. Sure hope at least one of those wholesale checkpoints work as intended. There were also checkpoints that played no sound at all to let you know you got one.

The story is still crap, but thankfully it's mostly kept in the background this time. Without going into spoilers in a surprise move it also has a TR1 connection. Maybe they figured it would be neat since they had just made Anniversary, or maybe the unlucky guy who drew the short stick at office and had to write the storyline for these games was just grasping at straws. The main villain of Legend is as bottom tier as they come so I get why would they do that, but it still comes across a bit shoehorned.

I'll be honest, even though the game has some clear improvements I found it very difficult to warm up to it. The controls are most to blame for that and the idiotic amounts of "secrets" killed a good portion of the joy of exploring, but there's also this general uninspired blandness to it. Doesn't seem to me the game had anybody with a strong creative vision steering the ship. After the first level I didn't have too high opinion of the game, but the levels after it were better and with time I slowly started to tolerate the controls and other issues a little more, enough to even have a good time occasionally. Then during the last levels I went back to being inches away from throwing the game out the window.

So I did get some enjoyment out of it, but I have a hard time recommending it to anyone and I won't be revisiting it in the future.

Sombrero wrote on 2026-01-01, 14:57:

To a degree the controls are more like suggestions and you just have to hope like hell Lara does what you wanted.

Kinda weird how the devs messed that up. I mean precise, responsive controls are one of the most important things in a Tomb Raider game.

For all its faults, at least the Survivor trilogy has great controls, especially with regards to platforming. Heck, I even like their CoD style shooting mechanics, which feel super smooth. Those made me (mostly) enjoy the combat there, despite the huge number of enemies that are often thrown your way.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2026-01-01, 15:43:

Kinda weird how the devs messed that up. I mean precise, responsive controls are one of the most important things in a Tomb Raider game.

I can only assume the engine didn't turn up as well as they would have preferred and were unable to do anything about it. As far as I know the first game to use that iteration of the engine was Legacy of Kain: Defiance and I have vivid memories of nearly popping a vein for the same damn control issues while playing that back in 2004.

Fun fact: Deus Ex: Human Revolution uses the same engine, just a later version. Probably explains the janky dialog animations 😁

Well, I beat Terminator Resistance. Moving on to the Annihilation Line DLC.

I've got to say, I really enjoyed exploring the "future war" world. It's rare that a game captures my interest enough where I actually want to explore every inch of each area I'm playing in. Or to do all the side missions. You can tell the devs paid full respect to the source material, and historically, that's been a rare occurrence. It was fun blasting all the T-800 variants, fighting the HK Tank, and scavenging all the loot I could find.

I think I'm going to try Terminator 2D: NO FATE when and if it ever goes on sale. That looks like a lot of classic 90's arcade action fun as well!

Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition
I really don't know if I like this game or not. Sometimes it opens up a bit and you get to explore, and it becomes fun. Mostly, though, you're trying to track down the two or three encounters at your current level, so you can level up and then fight the encounters at that level.

The environmental effects (poison, fire, etc.) seem interesting at first, but it's so gimmicky. You walk into a new area and it's covered in poison or fire, so you cast the rain spell and move on. What's the point?

I'm still annoyed at how resilient enemies are, even when they are at your level. It feels like every enemy takes 4-5 hits to kill. Why 10 hours into the game does some random skeleton take 4-5 hits to kills? The slow animations just make it worse (I resorted to using Cheat Engine to speed the game up 2x).

Dishonored
I don't have much experience with stealth games; I've played some Hitman 2, Thief, and Siren (I've also completed most of the Metal Gear games, but I think they are too simplistic to be considered real stealth games), but it's not a genre I've really got into. I've had Dishonored in my library for a long time, and finally decided to give it an honest shot this week. So far, it's awesome. It sort of feels like a cross between a stealth game and a game like Deus Ex, as there's lots of worthwhile exploration. I like how you can choose whether to kill people in each mission, and you actually get ranked at the end. I'll bet this game would be a lot of fun to replay.

newtmonkey wrote on 2026-01-02, 17:22:

I've had Dishonored in my library for a long time, and finally decided to give it an honest shot this week. So far, it's awesome.

Enjoy! Dishonored 1 and 2 are both superb games. I can play them over and over again and not get bored, since there are so many options for each situation. Heck, I even platinumed both on my PS4, and I don't normally chase trophies. In particular, completing a "no powers, no kills, never seen" playthrough felt immensely satisfying. Though I wouldn't recommend that approach for someone's first run.

P.S.

If you're on the the Definitive Edition, I would suggest playing "The Knife of Dunwall" and "The Brigmore Witches" DLCs after finishing the main story. A couple of prominent characters from Dishonored 2 first appear in those DLCs, and the plot is connected as well.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2026-01-02, 18:09:

If you're on the the Definitive Edition, I would suggest playing "The Knife of Dunwall" and "The Brigmore Witches" DLCs after finishing the main story. A couple of prominent characters from Dishonored 2 first appear in those DLCs, and the plot is connected as well.

I agree, DLC's so often play second fiddle compared to the main games and at worst they are nothing but waste of money and time, but these are genuinely good. I quite like the levels.

Last time I played I went through a pacifist/ghost run of the main game and these DLC's only to notice at the statistics screen after the very last level of The Brigmore Witches that one of the stupid enemies somehow died. Must've hit their head or something when I dropped their unconcious body on the floor, maybe drowned on a tiny buddle. I was not pleased 😁