It's pretty amazing to see this released. They first announced it 13 years ago with a super-evocative trailer, which formed a small little cult following for the game on places like the subreddit. Then they stopped communicating for years at a time along the way, so most of the subreddit became speculation about their demise, clue-hunting, etc. In the end they rebooted development once or twice and the current game was made in the last 5 years with an UE4->5 switch inbetween.

It's still a small 3-person dev team I think, with probably some additional support hands from the publisher at this point.

Happy for those guys that they finally managed to get it out of the system. I imagine after living for 13 years with your passion project that must be quite the moment.

I enjoyed the game (played it very-well patched up) and wouldn't hesitate to call it one of the greats, but I still wouldn't call the city "one of the most alive" due to the limited interaction and almost zero exploration. I'd say it really depends on what genre expectations you adopt on that point. It holds its own against a GTA in this department, but against e.g. the virtual Prague in Mankind Divided it's a very barren and sparse place (although it does look fantastic). I've just never had any truly rewarding exploration moments like discovering the literal underground society in MD in Cyberpunk.

And FWIW, I'm a completionist and did just about every quest, including the very very few that are in fact started by optional in-world encounters like the monk. It needed a lot more like that to make the city alive.

Still, I'll likely replay it some day. I unfortunately did a stupid and my last savegame and the only one I kept is past the point of no return, so I cannot play Phantom Lib with my original character. That bummed me out so much I haven't touched it, meaning I still have a re-run with the add-on coming up eventually. I'll probably wait a few more years and then start at the beginning again.

Fantaz wrote on Sep 24, 2025, 21:07:
Why Aspyr?... C'mon. The Tomb Raider Remastered games they did wasn't exactly the best reviewed

FWIW, in the fandom the Tomb Raider remaster is hugely beloved, and they did a real solid by hiring a bunch of community heroes to work on them as the core team. It's a very faithful labor of love.

But that is unlikely to matter in any way for this project for exactly that reason.

Most of the fandom hates this choice, and I have to admit I also have my reservations ... I can't recall ever having seen her in anything where her acting was convincing.

It seems she's quite athletic and physical though, so I can maybe picture her having a passion for that aspect of the character..

Let's say I'm ready to be proven wrong

A demo over two months ahead of release? Solid ... seems they have some confidence in this one.

Any early impressions?

The question is whether the prevalence of AI chatbots will cause additional alienation and social anxieties, i.e. instead of helping people like you, produce more people with the same challenges.

I'm sorta glad I held off on this game since release, the patches have been massive. I think I'll give it another couple of months and play it around the holidays.

Good to see his career resume and his contributions to gaming continue. My impression from following the proceedings a bit was that he got pretty thoroughly exonerated.

Overon wrote on Jun 25, 2025, 16:22:
They are constantly patching it and I don't know at what point they will stop so I can play it. The A-Life stuff isn't too hot and the performance isn't very good either. But this was before this patch. I don't know how much things have improved with it.

This has also kind of been my takeaway. I have it installed, but every few weeks there's such a massive patch that I always think I'd have experienced FOMO now if I had already played it ... so I'm still holding off. Plenty of others on the pile.

I'll probably pick this up, unless reviews indicate it's a lazy effort. I enjoyed the first game a lot back then, the second not so much and then I lost sight of the series.

Re the earlier comment, the trailer looks more like a remake than a "low effort remaster". The original game has pre-rendered static backgrounds. There's a lot of camera perspective shifting here, looks like they remade everything in realtime 3D.

I'm actually not sure I like that. The original had some incredibly iconic "shots", that were beautifully framed and suggestive. It was the kind of game where you see something in the corner of the frame that makes you ache to explore there, and the sense of longing was important to the atmosphere. I hope this isn't the sort of "now you can go anywhere!" fan service that loses the magic.

RogueSix wrote on Mar 11, 2025, 22:12:

Again: The problem is not the requirement to install a chipset driver. The issue is keeping the compatibility database "inside" the chipset drivers up to date which you can not even influence because you 100% depend on AMD in that regard (just like you depend 100% on M$ to keep the Shitbox GameBar garbage up to date). *That* is the problem.

This might be less problematic if you never play any new games/releases anyway but if you like playing new games (maybe even lesser known indie games) or if you do really crazy shit like participating in a Steam NextFest then good luck.
There is going to be a 100% chance that neither the GameBar nor your AMD chipset drivers will correctly recognize most of the game demos during a NextFest as a game application, i.e. you will have to do a ton of manual tuning to get the most out of your NextFest demos.

Sure, some people enjoy playing the manual core allocation game but personally I'm weird and I would rather focus my gaming time on the actual demos.

I agree with you that approaches based on a database of known processes is icky. This is unfortunately super prevalent especially in the Windows ecosystem (Windows itself and every GPU driver have massive dbs for apps/games that apply various quirks, sometimes for backward compat, other times for perfomance tuning). Of course every engineer prefers a generic, self-tuning approach, because it makes systems easier to predict and reason about, and is more future-proof in the face of unknown workloads.

The stuff I quoted is about what AMD has in place (on Linux, since I know this better than Windows) for the generic, db-less approach - a HW-driven way to classify threads at runtime based on their behavior, and allow the OS kernel scheduler to make useful decisions where to run them. Along with P-state-related mechanisms to handle core preferences dynamically based on their non-heterogenous characteristics.

Hopefully this is enough to make the system behave well decently. If not, I'd advocate for the other approach I mentioned toward the end, where, when the Steam client (or something else) launches a game into a cgroup (a cgroup is a way to track groups of processes and e.g. set quotas and other properties on them) that entire group just gets pinned on the V-Caches or has scheduler hints set, at launch time (and if they launch child processes into the same group the preference is inherited). This is then basically for all games via the context they get launched in, and doesn't need anything db-based or running permanently.

If this also still isn't good enough, then it's time for an API that lets games itself announce a preference for whether they believe they can benefit from being distributed over more cores vs. keeping their threads together on performance cores, as an additional hint to either the OS scheduler or a launcher. This is the one part that could be db-augmented for older games that won't see updates, but then those probably aren't perf-critical enough to warrant the complexity.

Simon Says wrote on Mar 11, 2025, 20:40:
Not to mention I also had to install an Intel driver on every Intel computer I ever owned...

Intel chipset drivers they're called. Took a few minutes, done.

But I guess that's too much of a bother for RogueSix...

Yeah, this is a bit of a nothing burger overall. CPU packages that have a mix of different cores with different performance profiles on them are here to stay, and all mainstream OS ecosystems have to address the scheduling problems they bring with them. Of course this is very much the situation in e.g. smartphone SoCs.

On Linux, AMD has the Heterogeneous Core Driver in the kernel that exposes the core characteristics and thread statistics/classifications to the scheduler to make smarter decisions. I.e. it's wrong that only Intel has a HW "Thread Director", the AMD HW also has HW-originated stats and classification decisions it can make available to the operating system kernel.

Their P-state driver also has dynamic "Preferred Core" handling and there's a sysfs interface to express a preference for e.g. frequency vs. cache.

When I worked on SteamOS-related stuff for the Steam Deck, we came up with a new mechanism to launch apps into dynamically-allocated Linux cgroups for group scheduling and tracking, and then it was patched into Plasma/Gnome/Qt/GTK and the Steam client to use. I think overall it shouldn't even be necessary with good code in the scheduler and sane defaults, but if need be it also wouldn't be too hard to tie it all together and make Steam pin games to the V-cache cores when launching a game by default (I've been out of it for a while, perhaps someone already did this in the meantime).

Some additional detail for those who are technically curious, for how the thread classification works:

The AMD Heterogeneous core design and Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI) provide behavioral classification and a dynamically updated ranking table for the scheduler to use when choosing cores for tasks.

Threads are classified during runtime into enumerated classes. Currently, the driver supports 3 classes (0 through 2). These classes represent thread performance/power characteristics that may benefit from special scheduling behaviors. The real-time thread classification is consumed by the operating system and is used to inform the scheduler of where the thread should be placed for optimal performance or energy efficiency.

The thread classification helps to select CPU from a ranking table that describes an efficiency and performance ranking for each classification from two dimensions.

The ranking data provided by the ranking table are numbers ranging from 0 to 255, where a higher performance value indicates higher performance capability and a higher efficiency value indicates greater efficiency. All the CPU cores are ranked into different class IDs. Within each class ranking, the cores may have different ranking values. Therefore, picking from each classification ID will later allow the scheduler to select the best core while threads are classified into the specified workload class."

(Source)

This along with a 9070XT (already on the way) is what I'm putting into my new build, which is going to see a mix of software dev (the extra cores are nice for long C++/Rust builds) and of course gaming, both mostly on Linux. It's my first new rig in a long time, pretty excited.

With 27" (my preferred size for a few reasons) 4K OLED launching a month ago as well to replay my midrange IPS stuck at 60Hz, it's truly like everything is lining up this quarter to pull the trigger.

I haven't played this drop yet, but in the aftermath of the old thing they said they intentionally leaned far out the window to gauge reactions, heard loud and clear that people want the remake to stay very close to the original, and did that in the real thing. So I guess this is a test to check whether they did.

Braden wrote on Feb 24, 2025, 13:29:
Is this just a newer version of the "Playable Teaser" they released at the end of 2019?

No. The "Playable Teaser" was a little vertical slice put together with a small core team to pitch the project. After that they set up the studio properly and went into pre-production.

This demo was originally made for press showings at conferences a few months back. It's content not as-is in the game, but a sort of prologue with a different character. After many requests they decided to release it to the fans as well. I guess you could call it a Playable Teaser, but it's using production assets and gameplay systems etc. and isn't just a one-off prototype like the old one.

The game itself is fairly deep in full production now, and reportedly going pretty well.

RogueSix wrote on Feb 18, 2025, 19:11:

?

Like which one(s)?

Because of your comment, I just randomly looked up the PC Games review and, literally on the page I linked to, they are saying to NOT expect a Gothic experience (in terms of a lively game world) from Avowed . If anyone here doesn't believe it, feel free to put it through Google Translate. I'm not shittin' ya.

Heh, the GameStar people in their videos compared it to Gothic a lot, mainly because of the world density and the rewarding exploration loop. As in, you set out to do X and on the way you come across 10 other cool things. At the same time they recommended playing it with quest markers off to make it more like that.

We'll see, I think I'll give it a try in a few weeks. I don't expect it to live up to Gothic (also one of my all time favs), partially because I understand in Avowed the NPCs are just static in the game world and have no routines, etc.

Then again, I'm actually doing my first-ever playthrough of Gothic 3 currently because my gaming PC is out of commission, this is about what my aging laptop can power, and I missed the time window to play it back then while waiting for it to get patched to completion. I'm quite enjoying it overall, but doesn't really live up to 1/2. I suspect Avowed may be a similar "Gothic Lite".

This one got lots of love in the German media for reminding reviewers of the Gothic games ... color me intrigued.

Probably my 2nd favorite game of all time after the original Deus Ex. I hope this turns out good enough that I can get all my younger friends to pick it up

The big news with this one was that no one expected them to actually include TR6, which of course was the original "next-gen" game for the franchise, the first not done on the original engine. It was a disaster at launch, especially the PC version - the controls were so sluggish and bad it was nigh-unplayable, the levels were simplified and more linear partly as a result, it had a weird unnecessary RPG light system, a stealth system that was similarly superfluous since the combat was massively toned down to be at all playable with the terrible controls (i.e. just killing enemies off was generally less frustrating than using stealth, making entire stealth-focused levels kind of pointless), and so on and so forth.

It was so undercooked, it probably needed at least two years more dev time for them to (a) fundamentally change the course they were on and (b) fix the bugs. Instead it was rushed out to come out alongside the second feature film, and flopped so badly the series was taken away from CORE Design and given to Crystal Dynamics to reboot.

Ultimately the games' design flaws are too deeply rooted to be entirely fixable, but the game has some proponents for its vibe and atmosphere. It'll be really interesting to see just how much they were able to do. If at least the controls are OK now for a lot of fans it will be like getting a new TR game they were never able to finish before, and I guess its strangeness gives it an odd meta-game-archeology fascination. That they even tried deserves to be commended for ambition I think, I'm sure it represents most of the work on this since for TR4/5 they basically already had the tech and pipeline from the earlier Remaster trilogy in hand.

Other than that, TR4 is widely considered to be perhaps the best game in the series after TR1 and alone makes this a solid buy for most fans. TR5 was kind of an anthology level cash grab and is very take it or leave it, although some of the levels are good.

RogueSix wrote on Feb 11, 2025, 20:37:

Thanks for the explanations and sorry about my faux-pas (duh). English isn't my 1st language and I thought that "current" is the word for (German) "Spannung" but "Spannung" is actually "voltage".

I'm aware of the P = U * I formula which is Power = Voltage * Current/Amperage. I mistakenly assumed previously that the English word for 'U' is current when it is actually really simple as the correct English term is "voltage" and the unit is "Volt". Mea culpa .

As a fellow German speaker I get it