toxicitizen

...once the price drops a bit.

Wrapping up Witcher 3 just one achievement short of full completion was too annoying, I had to get my fix somewhere else! Also, freeing up that much space when I uninstalled it felt pretty good. So getting to uninstall these two as well served as extra motivation.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Well, ~10 months later I've finally reached the end of the Path. This is technically for Blood and Wine but I don't think I ever made a post for Witcher 3 proper, so here's the whole thing. It's been so long since I finished the base game that I don't really have much to say though. It was pretty incredible and completely consumed my entire existence for a solid month. The main story was kinda eh but a lot of the side-quests are fantastic and the world itself is just so easy to lose yourself into. I will say the main story loses a lot of steam near the end. After you find Ciri, things build up to a climax at the battle of Kaer Morhen but things just keep going from there and it never quite manages to get the same kind of momentum going. Then the actual climax feels a little unearned comparatively. But all in all, a fantastic game and I'm not sure what I could possibly say about it that hasn't been said a hundred times before. Hearts of Stone is just a damn solid quest line. It's honestly up there with the best from the main game, I was kinda surprised. It all takes place in the base game's map, though, so it doesn't feel as meaty as an expansion. Blood and WIne, though. In my Control post, I was going on about how story DLC that takes place outside the main game usually sucks and man does this one prove me wrong. I thought the main quest wasn't quite as good as Hearts of Stone but considering there's a ton of new side-quests, witcher contracts, a whole new tier of witcher gear and an entirely new area to explore (and a gorgeous one at that), I really can't complain. I'm really glad I post-poned this one until I had read the books, though, because I feel like I got so much more out of it now. They're not mandatory by any means but there are frequent mentions of Geralt's last time in Toussaint along with a major character from the books that shows up, so there's a lot I would've had no context for. Ultimately, Blood and Wine is like the Witcher 3 experience in a nutshell. It's to DLC what Witcher 3 was to RPGs for me: way longer/bigger than I'd normally want but I really didn't want it to end. Also, I've never regretted not playing on the hardest difficulty more than I do right now... When I started, I was worried Death March would be too frustrating but about 50 hours in I realized that if you do all the side-quests and witcher contracts then you end up so overleveled that the game becomes ridiculously easy. Guess that gives me an excuse to do New Game + at some point in the future. Ideally after the ray-tracing update drops and once I have a card that can run it.

I decided I should read more short fiction and the place I get my books from has all their Stephen King on sale for October. So, I did the natural thing: went completely overboard and bought most of his short fiction collections (along with a few of his novels that I really want to read.) The ones marked in red are those I already had. I also got this collection of 100 short stories by Ray Bradbury because you gotta have some Ray Bradbury. Can't just be all Stephen King all the time.

Goddamn, No Man's Sky?! I can understand some healthy skepticism but those are some abysmally low expectations lmao. Can't say I see where you're coming from at all. Especially since we've seen some pretty elaborate gameplay demos of Cyberpunk whereas the whole NMS thing mainly revolved around people deluding themselves into thinking there HAD to be more to the game that they were keeping under wraps for some mysterious reason. At this point, all I can say is that I sincerely hope you're as wrong as I think you are.

It's less embarassing that way. You're making a video game movie but also not really. Either that or Paul W.S. Anderson is such a hack that he can't conceive of another way of introducing and building that world. Just look at the weird fantasy world through the eyes of normal-ass soldiers. That's surely the most interesting way to go about it.

That was in response to what Thursday said, not to your purchasing decision. Also, when I say "best game ever" I just wanna clarify that I'm speaking specifically as a hardcore Deus Ex fanboy lol.

Aren't pretty much all of these things fairly typical of AAA game development to one degree or another? It sounds kinda bad when you put it all together like that but it's not like any single aspect of Witcher 3 is flawless, either. But the overall package still ends up being greater than the sum of its parts. At least, in my opinion. I know some people still like to go on and on about how the combat is somehow "bad" lol. Personally I'm not too worried. A part of me foolishly expects the best game ever made (lol) but I also know to realistically expect it to be rough in some ways, especially around launch. And even then, it HAS to end up being more interesting than Assassin's Creed, of all things. I'll take ambitious-but-flawed over assembly-line-cookie-cutter any day.

Probably something along the lines of "amount of work required to get game running on PS5 is not zero and game is unlikely to make us any more money", so the devs couldn't be bothered. Like, that list is mostly stuff I've never heard of, mediocre trash or Hitman Go. Shadow Complex is the only one I'd consider a game worth putting any effort into.

I was gonna wait until closer to launch but a friend surprised me with a Steam gift for my birthday. Why isn't it November 18 yet????

My main issue with Foundation was how formulaic it was. The new powers were cool but "Go there and interact with this altar kinda thing. Alright cool, now do it 3 more times" was just boring to me. Exploring the Oldest House in the main game was great because I never knew what weird shit I'd find around the next corner. Foundation was less interesting to me because it lacked that unpredictability. I'm assuming the whole thing with Former being out of the Astral Plane at the end is sequel bait. Which could be really cool if, you know, they actually follow up on it.

Control: Foundation and AWE DLCs Well, these certainly didn't do much to change my view that single-player DLC that takes place outside the main campaign is rarely all that great. It was more Control but it somehow lacked what made Control so great. I don't know if it was due to me taking a break between the base game and DLC or this just not working as well in short-form, but I just couldn't really get back into it. By the time I started the AWE questline (which is the thing I had been anticipating since starting the game), I was already checked out and ready for the game to be over. There wasn't much going on story-wise but what was there was fine. Foundation touched on some mysterious stuff from a main game side-quest but didn't really resolve anything. AWE obviously fleshed out the Alan Wake connection but here I enjoyed reading the documents about Bright Falls more than the actual events of the DLC. Also, that better be Alan Wake 2 they're teasing at the end because if they blue-ball us again on this I think I'm gonna have a hard time getting excited about anything Remedy makes in the future. Between never getting sequels/closure and every single game being caught in some shitty exclusivity deal, there's only so much I can take. I think I'll just brace myself for the worst and assume that IF Alan Wake 2 is actually happening (as opposed to just more Alan Wake-themed Control), then it's likely the game being funded by Epic's newly-established publishing arm. Which means it'll likely be a permanent EGS exclusive lol. That would be preferable to the game not existing but not by much...

Couldn't say no to more Spelunky. The good news is it's still good. The bad news is I still suck at it. Somehow worse than before. I mean I haven't played in a while but I honestly didn't expect my first run to actually end within sight of the entrance lol.

The album dropped! I actually listened to the entire thing in one sitting without really intending to lol. I think it would've been unrealistic to expect him to top the sheer brilliance of Bustin but there's a few great ones on it.

Neil Cicierega just announced a new Mouth album! ? Everything is going to be good now. If you have no idea what the fuck I'm going on about, please let me make your day so much better.

Spent most of September binge reading the Witcher books. I read the first two short story collections earlier this year and the first proper novel back in June but only got around to checking out book 2 this month. Mainly because book 1 wasn't amazing. It wasn't bad or anything but it was pretty slow and uneventful. It's mostly set up and no payoff and at the time I really wanted to read The Stand so I did that right after. But yeah, started book 2 at the beginning of the month and boy, does it pick up. I was planning to at least read book 2 and 3 and MAYBE 4 if I was still feeling it (because I really want to finish them so I can go back and play Blood & Wine before Cyberpunk comes out) but they get so good from that point on that I ended up reading all the way to the end of book 5. These books are kinda weird. It's like Sapkowski keeps getting bored and decides to throw in random shit. Like, he got to the final chapter of book 3 and went "Oh! I know! I'll introduce a framing device where the story is actually being told to little kids in a village by a traveling hobo! And I'll never bring it up again lol" To be fair, I'm pretty sure it's meant to tie into some weird timeline stuff in the last two books when Ciri starts doing her thing but at the time it's kind of out of nowhere. I don't mind playing around with format and structure but in this case it was often more distracting than anything else. Also, some of the books are weirdly structured in that what you would think of as the climax is halfway through and then the last few chapters are used to catch you up on world-building or whatever. Like, book 1 doesn't really have a climax but there's this big thing that happens in the middle of book 2 that totally feels like one. Then book 3 just kinda leads straight into book 4 and THAT one sure ends on a more exciting note. It feels like at some point it was meant to be a trilogy or something and it was broken up into 5 books, for some reason. There's still technically a final book but it's a prequel that was written like 15 years after the series ended. I'll get to it later, I mostly just wanted to finish the main storyline so I could get back to Blood & Wine. I played the first couple hours back around March and picked up on some stuff that seemed to be directly referencing the books. And I already had the first 3 at that point, so I figured I'd wait before playing it. And now I'm really glad I did because there's at least one character that I really wouldn't have fully appreciated without context from the books. But man, reading the books kinda reframes the games in a not super positive way. Like they're still great but they feel so fan fiction-y now lol. Especially Witcher 3 with the way it kinda, sorta retcons some stuff that the books can be interpreted at vaguely hinting towards but never really explicitly states. Also, I've wanted to revisit Witcher 2 ever since my playthrough of Witcher 3 at the beginning of the year, but now I'm morbidly curious to go back to Witcher 1 as well, which...

Prey is one of those games that I played months after launch and it was so my shit that I was almost angry at myself for waiting so long to play it. Anyone that doesn't like it is a bad person, as far as I'm concerned. Also, I guess I'm the only one that likes The Evil Within and whatever, it's too good for you jerks anyway!!!

Yeah and if Playstation Now is any indication, it's just not ready to become THE way to play. The experience is just too shit and it comes down to things that can't really be solved on the software side. I'd be fine using it as BC substitute to play older games but it's a garbage way to play the latest games. Now that they're coming to PC, I'm really glad I ended up not playing Horizon on PSNow and I kinda regret playing Bloodborne and God of War. God of War and Uncharted 4 both definitely suffered from the shitty image quality and compression. Like, I could tell they were both gorgeous games but I kinda had to squint and try to imagine how pretty they looked.

Yeah, it doesn't take a genius to see that they mean for Gamepass and their cloud gaming app to eventually converge. Stadia has shown that the industry isn't quite there yet, though lol. And honestly, Microsoft basically becoming a third-party publisher wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. Especially with the insane studio acquisition spree they've been on.

Oh that's a good point, hadn't thought about that. The same logic also applies to Steam. The Xbox app is still trash, so even with Gamepass on PC it's guaranteed plenty of people would rather just buy the games directly from Steam. Their recent releases certainly seem to have sold fine. And I'm pretty sure Gamepass is coming to Steam sooner rather than later, anyway. They already laid the groundwork for a subscription service with EA Play. I think it's just a matter of time.

I really don't find the time of creation of the IP to be a convincing argument, to be honest. Besides, if you go down that road, Doom, Wolfenstein, Fallout and Elder Scrolls all started out as PC exclusives. I agree when it comes to a specific, concrete game. But I don't feel like it's a strong argument when it comes to a whole IP and hypothetical future games. Like, what if it had been Microsoft and not Bethesda that bought the Fallout IP all those years ago? It would've been exclusive all this time and I don't really see how it would make any meaningful difference here. An IP isn't inherently exclusive or multiplatform, it's all about who owns it. Case in point, Horizon and (if certain rumors are to be believed) soon Bloodborne and God of War. And just to be clear, I'm not defending exclusivity here. Everything should be multiplatform as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, I can definitely empathize with this point of view. If you're mainly a Playstation guy then this unequivocally sucks. And I doubt it's just about Gamepass to be honest. 7.5 billions is a LOT of money just to boost the line-up of a service that's probably not super profitable yet. They could've easily just done a deal like they have with EA. I fully expect at least some of these IPs to become Xbox exclusives and "smaller" ones like Doom, Wolfestein, Evil Within and Dishonored seem like the most likely candidates here. If the tweet I posted about Sony trying to secure Starfield exclusivity is true, then I could definitely see this being also one of the (likely many) reasons motivating this acquisition. Not having the latest Bethesda flagship title is a pretty major blow to any platform. Then again, like I said, Elder Scrolls is kinda like Minecraft where it's so huge that it might make more financial sense to keep it multiplatform. Profits from a multiplatform release probably outweigh whatever fanboy brownie points they'd get from keeping it exclusive. Unless their aim is specifically to hurt Sony, I guess lol. Which, at this point, I honestly wouldn't blame them for. Sony has been on some special bullshit this gen. They can get fucked as far as I'm concerned.