When I first got the game I definitely remember the performance being a handful. Changing some graphic settings would cripple your FPS until you restarted the program. I also used to play via Proton on Manjaro and the performance was pretty bad, I had to turn settings down a lot. I haven't touched those settings in ages so no idea of those things still remain. I can say that I'm running a 1660 Super with a 12100F on Windows 11 at 1080p, and I limit my fps to 90 and it's solid. It's Ultra with a couple of things turned down. I'd say the campaign zones and monolith don't generally change in performance much, but the arena zones have way more mobs on screen at once and those give me frame drops sometimes. Haven't got there in this update yet but I suspect it'll be the same.

And yeah, monoliths are fun while you are still working on your build, but once you are getting close to maxing it and upgrades are potentially gonna take forever, the monolith content alone isn't enough to keep things interesting.

Basically yes, but it's complex and only just got added in this update so the dust hasn't settled yet. When you hit a certain point in the campaign, you have to choose one of two factions. One of them is the Merchant's Guild which means you have access to trading, and the other is Circle of Fortune which means you can't trade but get stuff to help you play self found, like better drop rates and prophecies which help you force specific items to drop deterministically. It's brand new, I'm playing self found and haven't got far in the game in this update yet, but the trading is gold based rather than the PoE system, and items can only be traded once so there won't be item brokering like PoE. I think the trading community hasn't taken off yet because of the servers, who knows how it will balance out once the community swarms over it, and who knows how devs will tweak or update the system going forward.

Interestingly players from both factions can play together in coop because loot is instanced. It's a pretty bold / surprising solution but the devs have been trying to keep everyone happy. Lots of people wanted to avoid self found drops being shit because you are expected to trade, and lots of people love trading and couldn't live without it.

Edit: Here is some info

I've got 300 hours in this from the past couple of years and I'd recommend it easily. It looks decent, not cutting edge but does look modern and stylish. The levelling, configuring skills, crafting and finding items are very strong. The individual class skills can be configured a lot, lots of them can be switched between damage types, aoe versus single target, spammy or channeled or occasional big hits, spawning secondary effects or applying debuffs or gaining resources, etc. It's very freeform and you can really mix and match a few skills together in a way that feels like your own build. The drops are balanced so that loot drops always matter, crafting is really strong but items only have limited crafting potential, and the best affix levels are drop only so you need to keep finding good bases then try craft them up. The game is also very approachable, if you know the genre you'll be tinkering with your items and skills in no time and won't need a wiki.

Lastly it respects your time more than Path of Exile. If you want to throw yourself fully into an ARPG and want it to be as big as possible, PoE is still the choice because they've added to it and honed it for a decade. Last Epoch is great fun but isn't really endlessly replayable at the endgame unless you are seriously dedicated. You can target farm certain items, try to find ideal gear, play the mapping system and see how far you can push it, but probably after 2 or 3 dozen hours you might feel like you've done everything with this character, and roll a new guy or play something else for a while. That fits with the way I want to play, I no-lifed PoE years ago and loved it, but these days I want something I can dip into that does a lot of things very well, and then put it down before it takes over my life.

Edit: oh and the servers are swamped at the moment, you can play offline but if you are looking for online and/or coop it's not working as of this moment. Maybe today or tomorrow the servers will stabilise. I'm playing offline to avoid these troubles.

I do think this game is gradually getting there. It got looked on pretty favourably for the first couple of weeks, then the couple of months after that people seemed to get disillusioned with some of the gameplay problems and AI. I feel like the game took a pretty good step around version 1.1 > 1.2 and the balance + qol pass that they did, I played a game on an early 1.2 beta build that didn't have everything in yet, and I had a good time. The strategic and tactical AI were both passible, not amazing and not a disaster - enough to play against and lose some battles but generally the player will outperform it as you'd imagine. I saw they've been taking dedicated feedback about how the AI plays on their forums so it seems like it will keep improving. I think most of the gameplay changed they put in 4 are pretty good for the game, I like the separate building and unit construction, the tomes now you can't have them all, and the rally mechanic that puts a limit on some of the super units you can get. I think the strategic map graphics and interface are a bit cluttered and unclear though, the flags with stack sizes are small and blurry especially with some colour combinations, and the slight fade on units you've already moved is so subtle that it's hard to see what you haven't moved yet sometimes. This might be because my poor PC can't handle 1440p/Ultra so I have some settings turned down. At least the enemies in your domain get a giant red highlight, I wish they'd do more of that kind of thing. Hopefully they keep tweaking this because it's the main thing you look at and it's less refined than Planetfall currently. With a lot more updates to come and hopefully some mods I can see this ending up in a good place.

I wonder if the algorithm varies by country (I'm in the UK.) My 'For You' page is motor sport, game news, nostalgia bait, and some low quality meme channels. Oh and about 5 separate cat video channels - I swear I've only clicked about 2 videos in my whole life! I don't get politics shoved into my feed even though I sometimes click trending topics that are bitter arguments around culture war / politics etc when I fancy some doomscrolling.

I loved 3, but I've held back for the moment because Paradox games take a year or two to mature and I'm playing other stuff currently. I know that the launch system pass covers 4 DLC lasting the first year.

I've watched a bit of it being played. The game is an evolution of 3 as you'd expect, and the graphics and sound are very polished. The city building looks better than either 3 or Planetfall from what I've seen. You expand your city centre into the regions around, adapt to what terrain/resources are nearby and set up adjacency bonuses a bit. A little bit like Civ 6 but simpler. You have separate production and queues for city buildings and units so there's a different kind of specialisation possible compared to before. I've heard a couple of people say bad things about the AI in its current state, but I didn't particularly pick up on anything being wrong in the little I watched. Some mods started to emerge as well. I'd say it seems like a very good prospect, especially with some more patches/content piled on top in future.

Looking forward to seeing how this one turns out. 3 was pretty much the fantasy TBS I had the most fun with. Didn't really vibe with Planetfall, I felt like they added too much balancing of abstract status effects during combat that it took something away, and I thought the city management with zones and exploitation levels was too awkward. I'm also braced for the chance that it will take multiple years and DLCs to hit its full potential like Stellaris did.

Yeah, definitely have happy memories of Oblivion. The melee / archery / stealth mechanics felt like a godsend versus Morrowind at the the time. It was also the game that taught me that if you throw in too many mods, you end up with a game that isn't stable! I do think that Oblivion had the weakest overworld of the past 3 games though, Morrowind and Skyrim were both evocative with a lot of regional variety - whereas Oblivion didn't feel otherworldly and it felt like you spent most of the game running around a giant grassy valley in sight on the imperial city.

I think the emerging AI text to speech developments are going to help this kind of open world RPG a lot. I really loved in Morrowind that NPCs had lots of questions they could answer about themselves and their region along with the special quest lines. Because it was only text it could be pretty open ended, and the act of reading it fed into your imagination somehow. In the past couple games, the prerecorded lines and shortlist of topics felt a lot more restrictive and gamey. At some point when morrowind-style dialogue can be spontaneously delivered in character voice it's going to be amazing.

This is the first release of the old Golf Club series since 2k bought out HB Studios. Golf Club was great in that it had good mechanics and modes, and a huge number of courses and course designer. There was a virtual currency but there was almost nothing to buy and no gameplay benefit. It was great because it was a competent single/multiplayer/community game that just gave you everything for the asking price. Here comes the next edition, and it has multiple editions, multiple DLC and multiple season passes at launch.

The other great recent sports series, Super Mega Baseball, got bought up by EA as well since the last title :/

Isn't it easiest just to call them by the decade they came out? It works fine with music and movies. 70's music, 80's action movies, 90's shooters.

Retweets are a minor annoyance. The big one is Suggested Topics that started cropping up this year. Some days my feed has been 75% suggested topics that Twitter wants to promote (kpop, US movie and music releases when I'm in the UK, politics etc). They get included by default and you have to opt out of individual topics to try and avoid them. You can get a Lewis Hamilton article, opt out of it, then still get similar articles under the topic of F1 and then Motor Sport. It's persistent and annoying.

The real magic fix is that you can click the sparkles in the top right of the centre column of your feed, and select Latest Tweets instead of Top Tweets. Top Tweets became my default without asking and contains all this bullshit - latest tweets cuts all that out and just gives you tweets from people you follow.

It's a slightly odd hybrid mix of gameplay, part 4x, part wargame. It kind of plays like a turn based RTS to me, the way players spawn in and fight to kill each others' bases - there isn't really a passage of time, you just get your economy running, research more powerful units, then outproduce and outfight your enemies with no diplomacy until they're all dead. The game does focus on action though and the combat is a lot of fun. The AI is also a lot of fun to play against, it attacks in waves with tight formations, pulls its injured units off the front line to heal, retreats when it starts losing and so on. The game is also surprisingly flexible, you can play 1vAI, coop versus AI, 1v1, team versus team etc.

Interestingly a bit like old school games, there is no safety net when planning your bases and a few of the races make it quite easy to bankrupt yourself. (The classic is races where units cost minerals, unit upkeep is minerals, new buildings cost minerals. You pump out early units, empty your mineral reserves, then can't afford mineral buildings to get out of trouble and have to scrap your units to get flowing again!)

The downsides are that the UI and information in general is frequently cluttered and unclear, the combat focus doesn't make the game feel as replayable as a good civ game, and it's also very expensive if you want the DLCs. (It somewhat follows the Paradox formula, the extra races are genuinely different but collectively bump up the price a lot.)

Tip: In the video options set "Fixed Time of Day: 89%" - the time of day feature sounds fun and the changing colour palette is OK, but it also changes the angle units are lit from, so a lot of the time you end up struggling to look at units that aren't lit from the front. This option keeps them lit from the front like every other game does.

Presupplied Steam Link apps seem pretty hit and miss. My Amazon Fire HD10 can't maintain a stable connection either, no matter what I try. My old and new iPhone can stream fine though (although I don't want to play anything on a screen that small.) PC to PC using windowns seems to be in a very good place, I played some Civ 6 today streaming to my shitty laptop that only has 2.4GHz wifi and it's pretty much flawless.

(I've only watched a bit of Hades so I don't know all the details)

Both games have more in common with God of War than Torchlight / Diablo, they are both best with joypad and have direct control of the guy. But they have roguelike-style runs in the region of an hour a time, with permadeath and some meta progression in between runs. Hades has an overworld with characters to talk to and do quests for, which unlocks more content and progresses the story as you complete runs. Curse has a more basic system of collecting unlock currency to unlock the 3 chapters and buffs to start a run with.

Both are more indie in feel rather than AAA, but Hades is way ahead on looks with beautiful 2d artwork and a great deal more content. Curse is a bit more modest on looks and content but I think the combat system is fantastic as I said, and it's a lighter game that's easy to just pick up and play when you feel like it.

Yeah inevitably this is going to live in the shadow of Hades which is pretty much a masterpiece. But to my boomer hands Hades is a bit too high speed with spammy attacks flying everywhere. I get on a lot better with the more deliberate style of Dead Gods combat with its focus on spacing and timing. The combat's extremely fluid and satisfying, and genuinely different with each weapon loadout.

Yeah this series was pretty good fun on DS, but the free to play thing here is pretty offputting. The classic RPG puzzler remake that I'd love to see most would be Might and Magic Clash of Heroes.

Mr. Tact wrote on Nov 9, 2020, 12:33:
I'd rather have a faithful release of the video game "Tapper".

I bet Bartender Sim doesn't even have a Soda Bandit!

I can definitely understand that it's not for everyone because the gameplay is pretty minimal and the theme is a bit mundane, but in many ways it's an analogue to Tetris. You have a continuous stream of quick problems to solve, you need the right inputs to deal with the current problem but at the same time continually reappraise the situation and organise your priorities to manage what comes ahead. It's good for your concentration and mental agility, and when the balance between your skill and the difficulty is in the sweet spot, not only is it extremely satisfying but it makes you hit that flow state that makes you forget about the news and your asshole boss in a way that's pretty therapeutic.

WorthABuy made a video about the HOTAS support too. Apparently the deadzone is such that the first 50% of stick travel doesn't steer the ship at all.

Based upon my folks' place, ducks love something with water in even if it's like a foot or 2 across. They have a plant pot shaped like the bottom of a barrel, and with some rainwater in it the ducks managed to find and play in it even though it's 500m from their pond over a road and a garden fence.