toxicitizen

You're talking about the PC version, I assume? No idea for console but on PC I'm pretty sure even the base game comes with a key that's likely already been used and tied to a battle.net account. IIRC it came out before the battle.net launcher existed and you just typed in your key while installing but I'm not sure if you can still do that. So unless he hasn't played it since launch, the key is likely worthless now. Should probably ask to test it out first, just in case.

Good to finally have a release date, definitely gonna pre-order the full package before Reach launches. The CAD price for the full thing doesn't save you as much, though, so hopefully it'll show up on Humble or GMG for a little extra discount.

I was holding off on finishing The Surge in case the DLC went on sale around Halloween but it didn't so I ended up saying fuck it and getting it off some random site where it happened to be on sale. There's also this deal for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate that might be interesting to some. I got it because it added 3 months to my PC Game Pass sub for just 1 dollar but it also converted my existing sub to Game Pass Ultimate, which means I now have a full year of Xbox Live. I don't need Xbox Live but if you do this seems like an insanely good deal.

Alright, cool. Sounds kinda like the online feature of P4G, which was neat but ultimately pretty useless.

Tonight I decided that I'd activate that PS Now free trial and finally play Uncharted 4. Things went pretty smoothly for about 20mins until: game: "Press touchpad to open note" me: *looks at Xbox One controller* *tries every button just in case* ".........fuck" So yeah, great job Sony! Really glad you put so much thought into having your streaming service available on PC! I'll assume God of War and Bloodborne are equally fucked. To those that played Persona 5, does it require the touchpad in any way? I was gonna wait but if it's my only option then I might as well play it now, at least until I can ask my friend to borrow his ds4 or something...

I'll try to remember that if I ever own a Playstation console again. Wonder why they still don't, though. Even Steam charges me taxes now.

Has the game disc even been near your PS4 yet? Seriously dude, I worry about you sometimes...

Oh man, that's a good point. If it gets bundled, I could totally use that as an excuse to upgrade to a 1660 or something. They're already pretty cheap and it's basically an 80 bucks discount on top of that. And yeah, I always assumed people were exaggerating about SSDs. Then I got one and holy shit, it's night and day. I used to put off restarting my system after any kind of update because it took like 5mins to shut down and boot back up. Now it's basically instantaneous and what I do find to be excessively long now is waiting for my old HDD to start spinning and load up the video file I wanna watch.

Yeah, like 3 episodes in I realized that the weeklong wait just wasn't doing it for me and decided to wait until it was over. Then it ended and I just kinda forgot about it lol. I haven't even finished Demon Slayer, which I started like a month ago. Or shit, make that two months ago according to my post above. I can't stick with a show to save my life these days. The last one I managed to binge until I ran out of episodes was The Good Place and it was the first one in a while.

Trust me, you won't know the true meaning of bizarre until you get to part 3. Stands are such an insane game-changer for this series. ...fuck, I really need to watch Golden Wind already.

No but the fact that they went up simultaneously tells me this probably won't happen. They've gotten so much shit for it at this point that I think most pubs and devs should know not to have pre-orders active if they have any interest in taking an exclusivity deal. Plus, they had to have talked before today for the store page to go live at the same time and you know Epic has to have tried already. I imagine either 505 are confident the game will sell enough to not need a deal or Kojima just wasn't having any of it because he's BFF with Gabe. Seriously, how can one man have so many BFFs?!? edit: Just noticed they actually confirmed it's a simultaneous launch. I guess that rules out even a pathetic 1 month deal like RDR2 lol.

Guess not! Pre-purchase is up on Steam. Also up on EGS, which is weird because I could swear I remember them telling some indie dev that they couldn't add just any games to the EGS due to their process being long and complicated and that it wasn't worth it unless a game is exclusive. Funny how their process isn't an issue when it's a big game release they don't wanna miss out on...

@The Cowboy JRPGing Poet Yeah, calling it "three games in one" makes it clear you got the true ending. Fuck, that game was great. Really hope they'll end up patching the Switch improvements into the PC version because I'd love an excuse to give it a replay at some point. --------------- Destiny 2 Shadowkeep Man, I'm glad I knew to expect a weaker campaign and didn't buy the expansion specifically for it like Forsaken because holy shit I would've been disappointed lol. It's not bad but it sure feels like the expansion was done on a tight budget and the campaign just wasn't a priority. Which makes sense given their breakup with Activision but it's a shame because the setting is actually really cool and creepy. But after that great opening mission, you're basically given a list of filler tasks to go do until it's time for the final mission. Like, at least in Forsaken it made sense with the kind of story they were going for. Doing wanted bounties worked with the western tone of the plot and you were killing your way through the ranks to get to your real target. But here it's almost WoW-levels of "go get 12 monkey butts" shit. I mean, at one point one of your campaign objectives is literally "go do this strike". Like, some strikes are based on certain missions from the campaigns but here it wasn't a mission, it was the actual strike. Had to go through matchmaking and play with some asshole that just kept trying to rush past everything and dying because we weren't keeping up with him lol. So yeah, maybe don't get this one for the campaign. Get it if you wanna chill on a haunted moon and kill nightmares and robots. I know I do, although I kinda hope the soft relaunch was successful enough to fund development of a proper campaign next time.

Oh ok, I see how it is. I say this: and literally the next day Zachtronics just drops this on Steam out of fucking nowhere, making me a liar. I still haven't bought that A.I. visual novel they released over the summer because it honestly wasn't really what I wanted from them but I didn't expect to get a proper Zachtronics puzzle game just a few months later. Even after watching that trailer twice, I still have no idea what I'm getting into here and I wouldn't want it any other way!

Well, guess I'm all-in now. Wasn't sure if I wanted to get it right away but then I realized that, outside of Halo Reach likely launching soon-ish, there's essentially nothing coming out for the rest of the year that I want to get. So, fuck it! Got the Deluxe Edition so I'm good for the full year's worth of season passes. Looking forward to playing another story campaign but I also felt like at this point I just wanted to have access to all the content and be able to participate in limited seasonal events that are going away at the end of the seasons, like Vex Invasion.

That's the thing I don't get. They've been on their own for a while now and there's no way they're only just now underperforming on Origin. So what changed? It's hard not to look at the timing and wonder if Epic's bullshit played a part in this. Just a year ago, you had all the big publishers looking like they were getting ready to jump ship away from Steam. Then Epic started poaching games left and right and suddenly Microsoft is putting their games on Steam and Bethesda and EA are coming back. Things were starting to look pretty dire just a few months ago, so it's hard to believe the timing is just a coincidence here. It could be that Epic lit a fire under Valve's ass and forced them to reach out to publishers. Or maybe them entering the market so forcefully ended up hurting other publishers' efforts and brought them back to Steam. Another possibility could be that even with exclusives they're still not doing too hot, which could have scared the other publishers and made Steam more appealing. I mean, even when claiming a game did well Epic are still being super cagey about actual sales figures. And since we know their exclusivity deals come in the form of them essentially "pre-purchasing" a certain amount of copies, it's unclear how many of "X copies sold" are actual sales the developers benefit from since X could easily include those copies Epic "pre-purchased". The latter two scenarios would be some delicious, god-tier irony. ?

Welp, there it is and it's starting with an even bigger game than anyone actually anticipated.

It's published by 505 Games, for some fucking reason, so pirate bay I mean EGS is a distinct possibility.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Put some more time in Outer Worlds today and yeah, this is pretty much New Vegas 2 in all but name. The first fucking main quest of the game already hit me with a choice like

Yeah, if/when they announce a PC port, that'll be my cue to start my NG+ run mainly to get a refresher on the story but also clean up achievements and get the black records. No idea wtf they're about but I hear they're super important to the point where hiding them behind NG+ was a really weird decision.

Put a couple hours into The Outer Worlds thanks to Game Pass. If you like Fallout but not what it's become under Bethesda, then definitely don't sleep on this one, guys. So far it's basically Fallout in all but name, except good and actually funny. It also doesn't look gray/brown and depressing as fuck. I'm definitely excited to put more time into it over the week-end. Also, I can't help but notice the irony in how Epic turned me off of ever using their store by taking games away from Steam and having a garbage launcher. Meanwhile, Microsoft is doing basically the opposite by committing to putting their games on Steam and offering a great service with Game Pass. And that's earned them enough good will for me to be willing to use their shitty Xbox app. Funny how that works... ?

So, people noticed some backend activity on SteamDB for Dragon Age 2 and The Saboteur, the latter not having ever been available for purchase. This led to speculation that EA is planning a return to Steam and, well... That cup sure is steaming! Most likely they'll only be releasing older single-player titles such as Dragon Age, Mass Effect and the likes. I wouldn't expect the latest Battlefield or whatever. Then again, a Steam release for Anthem could potentially give it that little boost it so desperately needs... Personally, as long as I can finally play Mirror's Edge Catalyst without having to reinstall Origin, I'll be happy. The timing for this is also pretty interesting considering all the Epic fuckery going on over the past year. EA returning to Steam now of all times would kinda speak volumes. We're also already seeing companies like Devolver trying to backtrack and talking about "resetting the discourse" on the whole "Steam cut too high and bad" thing. Seems like perhaps Epic wasn't quite the saviors they were trying to position themselves as? Steam sure as hell didn't flinch one bit and indies like Devolver are obviously the ones with the most to lose here, so it's not too surprising that they'd be the first ones trying to rebuild that particular bridge lol.

We're now 3 weeks out from the Steam/free to play launch and Destiny 2 is still hitting a daily concurrent players peak of 200K+. That consistently makes it one of the top 5 most-played games on Steam, usually sitting at number 4 under only CSGO, Dota 2 and PUBG, which is kinda nuts considering how huge these 3 are. PC is also now the platform with the highest player base and while we don't have numbers for battle.net, I've seen reports that player count on PC has essentially doubled. So I guess it's safe to say the move to Steam has worked out very well for them. Now I'm really curious to know how abysmal the sales were for the last two Call of Duty games because, even before they left Steam for Battle.net, the series had kinda been dying a slow death on PC. They likely lost a good chunk of players in the move lol.

Yeah, since the campaigns are the main appeal for me I had to get Forsaken first and paying for the two at once is a tough sell. I feel like they should've reduced the price of Forsaken a bit more considering everything they made free in New Light. As for the old stuff being obsolete, I'm not sure how it was previously (I think they just overhauled how the seasons work again?) but this is what I'm talking about: Not my screenshot but the bottom row are the season pass rewards, so for me they remain locked. So as my season rank goes up I only get the rewards from the top row and buying Shadowkeep/the current season pass would retroactively get me everything I've "missed" from the bottom row up to this point. It's so shamelessly designed to manipulate you into wanting to buy the fucking season pass lol. But in my case, this GaaS bullshit ends up backfiring more often than not. Once a game gets its hooks fully into me, I start to feel like I have to play optimally and make sure to get everything I can and it just kinda starts to feel like work. So I just lose interest and stop playing entirely. ?