toxicitizen

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. ?

Destiny 2 That's all the campaigns up to and including the Forsaken expansion. They were pretty fun but kind of uneven. The original Red War campaign is a fun series of missions but has a fairly bland story. Curse of Osiris has some really neat bits of lore and the Infinite Forest is a really cool setting but it ultimately feels a bit samey and padded even at only ~3 hours long. Warmind is super short but so fucking sweet that it might actually end up being my favorite. Fighting a Dune-esque Worm God on Mars is definitely my idea of a good time. Then there's Forsaken. I really like the premise and it was nice to get another meatier campaign but I thought the execution was a bit underwhelming. The opening mission tops anything that was in the Red War but it immediately goes downhill from there. I dig the whole bounty hunter western kinda vibe they were going for but a lot of these missions felt less like a proper campaign and more like the kinda throwaway missions you'd get in a Ubisoft-style open-world game. Plus I'm pretty sure some of them just straight up re-used the same sections of the map. It had some great cutscenes though and I really enjoyed how everything played out in the end, with the final mission at least ending the campaign on a high note. And I'm a year late to this but RIP Robot Nathan Fillion. You will be missed. I think I'm gonna wait a bit to see how the weekly grind to 950 treats me before deciding if I wanna get Shadowkeep or wait for a sale. FOMO is kinda making me want to get it before the current season ends so that I don't miss out on all these seasonal rewards but that honestly just kinda makes the whole GaaS thing seem insidious and exploitative...

So, Cold Steel III embargo appears to have lifted and some reviews have started popping up. Early word seems to be that the script translation is only a tiny bit worse than XSEED (whatever that means) but the dub is as excellent as ever. Personally I'm gonna wait until the game is in the hands of fans before fully trusting any consensus but this does seem to bode well. I was mostly okay with the redone Ys VIII loc so if it truly is that good then I very likely won't see much of a difference. But yeah, if they actually learned from their mistake on Ys, then good on them. Now just announce that PH3 is working on a PC port! And maybe ask them to fix Ys VIII while they're at it. That port is still kinda rough... ?

I played all the free Year 1 campaigns and enjoyed the hell out of them, so I mostly got this to keep doing the story. The game does an absolutely terrible job of explaining itself to new players and I'm honestly still kinda confused about what I should be doing or focusing on (although nowhere near as much as I was at the start when you're just dropped into the tower with little to no explanation). So I'm not sure if I'm getting this too early or how much of the free content I still have to experience but whatever. I already got 30 hours out of the game and I want to keep playing, so Bungie has earned at least the price of this expansion. I might get Shadowkeep next month if I don't stop playing before then, although it really sounds like the campaign is barebones compared to Forsaken.

I won't pretend to fully understand the Hong Kong situation but what they did was spineless, cowardly and indefensible. Even their own employees are pissed off about it. It would be pretty meaningless for me to talk about boycotting them since I haven't played any of their games (or Activision's) in a hell of a long time but I did uninstall the battle.net launcher and I'll definitely think twice about supporting them in the future if they don't reverse their decision. They already got my money for Crash and Spyro on Humble, though, so I'll still be playing those at some point. But Blizzcon is sure to be interesting this year. Watch the cowards not hold a single Q&A lol.

Yeah, I thought that was the nicest one by far. I ordered directly from Microsoft and I was surprised by the amount of options available. There was even one where you actually pick your colors to customize your own but that was way more expensive. edit: YO! The new humble monthly unlocks are kind of insane! Crash alone would've been great because I've been wanting it for months and it's still like 30 bucks even on sale. But Spyro came out on PC literally a month ago. Guess it must've sold like shit because holy FUCK, talk about screwing over your early adopters lmao.

I finally hit my breaking point with the Steam Controller. I still think it's great features-wise (although most of that admittedly comes from Steam Input and not the controller itself) but I've been having some weird firmware issues (at least I'm assuming they're firmware related) for a while now. First off, I basically can't use it in wireless mode anymore because the fucking thing turns itself back on immediately after I turn it off. I've tried everything and it's either wired mode or taking the batteries out after every play session. Then there's these weird issues with the analog stick that are kinda hard to explain. Essentially, movement sometimes feels kinda stuttery where my character will seemingly come to a complete halt (or slow to a walk if the game has pressure sensitive movement) for like a fraction of a second. It's barely noticeable visually but you can definitely feel that something's wrong. This one actually went away for a while but started happening again recently and at this point I'm just having none of it. At some point I went into the calibration settings and noticed that there's some weird pushback against the stick. I'll hold it forward but you can see the little dot trying to move back to the center. I also noticed that when rotating the stick it moves in more of a square shape instead of a circle. Really not sure wtf is going on there... Finally, it always felt like it had a cheap build quality and I recently noticed that the rubber on the part of the analog stick where my thumb usually rests has been completely worn down to the plastic underneath, which has never actually happened to any of my controllers before. So yeah, when you add all this shit up I feel like I'm way overdue for a replacement. Sony also just announced that Uncharted 4 and God of War are coming to PS Now, so I was gonna need an xInput controller to play those anyway. I considered a Dualshock 4 but since PC games that support Playstation button prompts are still kinda rare I decided to go with Xbox. I also have no idea if the DS4 would even work with the Xbox app/Gamepass so better safe than sorry.

About fucking time... Although honestly, I'm kinda wondering if it's only because the PS4 is at the end of its life cycle. Wouldn't be too surprised to see them backtrack once the PS5 hits lol.

There isn't an up to date version of the patch that's available, right? It's only the one that leaked a while back? I tried looking into downloading it a few weeks ago and couldn't find any link on their website.

Atelier Dusk trilogy remasters announced for PS4, Switch and PC! These are basically the last 3 games I was (realistically) hoping to see ported to PC, so this is great news. I think that leaves only the PS2 games now, and I'm not holding my breath for those. I kinda wish they'd slow the fuck down, though. They released like 5 more games within a year of Sophie's launch and I THINK (I honestly lost track lol) there were 3 completely new ones this year alone. Then there's these new remasters. I mean, I'm glad they're all coming to PC but I've still only played Atelier Sophie and at this rate I'll never be able to catch up lol. Especially since apparently the region of Japan that Koei Tecmo operates from doesn't have a word for "discount" because holy fuck these never get sales worth a damn...

I actually looked at the list of confirmed Stadia games just in case, because I'd rather play it there than give a single penny to Epic. Sadly it doesn't look like they'll have it and it's not on Gamepass either. Hopefully it'll show up on the latter in a few months... Ugh, this might actually be the exclusive that hurts the most for me. The two big ones were this and Metro Exodus and I forgot about Metro pretty quickly but I fucking love Remedy and everything I've been hearing about Control makes it sound super my shit.

Pretty much, yeah. I have two friends I play coop with (we're only 3 and we still can't even manage to play at least once a week regularly lol) and at this point any game has to be better than Vermintide 2 or we're just gonna keep playing that. This does not look better than Vermintide 2.

Gameplay reveal for that RE game. It looks... fine. Not seeing anything particularly exciting but it could be fun with friends.

I haven't played Control but yeah, it's pretty clear they intend for at least some of their games to exist within the same universe. See this easter egg from Quantum Break. They own the Alan Wake IP, so they can pretty much do whatever the hell they want with it. But still, I'm surprised because they're clearly hinting at something way bigger than just a little nod here. And who knows, if they're doing a more explicit tie-in then they might actually be leading up to a proper Alan Wake 2 announcement. I mean, probably not... But Maybe! Fuck, I really wanna play Control now. Is it August 2020 yet???

Guess there's no Control thread? Remedy released their post-launch roadmap and.... wait, what's this????