Tau I think kind of need to be a DLC/Expansion faction.

The problem is that a LOT of the people who “grew up with” 40k still think they are just space commies with Gundams. GW, terrified of Politics in their game about space fascists, played their trap card by reminding everyone that the uppermost caste (aetherials?) of the Tau were always kind of… monsters who rip the free will out of their subjects and that is WHY the Tau seem so internally stable compared to every other faction. Which, in turn, made everyone (self included) make even more jokes about them being space commies.

So launching with that is a great way to get the wrath of a million chuds unleashed because their game about space fascists is now woke.

But yeah. As someone who has always loved the Guard, the Tau are kind of that cranked up to 11. With Gundams.

GW has always been about chasing trends and synergy with new products.

In the video gaming space? No.

They’ve gone through a few different waves. Pre-Relic (so 90s) we have a lot less information on since most of those studios were dead long before game journos even realized they could talk to people but it was very much characterized by “whatever looks like a strategy game”. Relic (and the folk who did the underrated Fantasy RTS) kind of had carte blanche in the early 2000s. Yes, there were some clear mandates to incorporate certain armies (largely indicated by Relic outsourcing Soulstorm) but it was a lot closer to what we see with Total Warhammer these days where it was kinda just “make a video game version of 40k”.

Then… Dawn of War 3 happened and everything came crashing down. Probably also the MMO nobody but me played and said fantasy RTS that even the fans can’t remember the name of. But holy crap did everyone hate Dawn of War 3 to the point I am shocked they didn’t remove the number entirely and just call this “Dawn of War: Yo Dog, Primarchs is Back. All them Blood Ravens suddenly feel a strong urge to hang with Magnus But We’re Gonna Ignore That”

Which led to an era of slop where anyone who bought a PR person a six pack of cider could get the license. But from what various studios have alluded to in the 2020s, that is mostly gone (outside of mobile slop which has largely slowed down) and it is very much a case where if a game is being made it is because a specific product is being pushed. With Total Warhammer largely being the last holdout since even GW realizes nobody cares about Age of Sigmar (it amuses me that probably one of the biggest supporters of AoS online is Louise Sugden who can’t go a single video without all but daring GW to come at her and get her to explain why she left).

So if the fricking Mechanicus is an army: There is a reason. And it very well might be the reason for the game itself.

The Games Workshop of 2025 is not the GW of… fucking corpse god, 2004. Modern day GW very much cares about their brand and the “synergy” with tabletop and the like.

So I assume this was greenlit when they were pushing Mechanicus and all the “Armies of the Imperium” very hard as a way to break up the Guard and specialize more with heroes and so forth.

That said: Assume there will be at least one “secret” faction closer to launch. Probably Chaos because… duh.

Narratively, I agree that Crane isn’t a very strong character. He’s a dime-a-dozen government goon turned idealist. I don’t even remember how the story ends, or even most of the major beats except for a couple of major characters.

DL1 spoilers, I guess

The story was ridiculously forgettable but the gameplay was REAL good. It was everything we wanted out of Dead Island (except for the ridiculously emotional beats) but also actually fun to play. And REAL good grappling hook.

Eh, whatever. They’re both the same personality-less void with a buzzcut who will probably be played in an adaptation by Jai Courtney. Although Jade was way cooler than whatever the hell Rosario Dawson was doing.

Its just hilarious how much the marketing has tried to portray (I’ll take your word on it) Kyle as some amazing protagonist that we all missed and that the only problem DL2 had was that it wasn’t about Kyle. And… it is telling that basically every big press release was like “The hero you have all been missing, the protagonist of the good Dying Light, Kyle Crane!!!”.

And don’t get me wrong, I think that playing as a human/zombie hybrid who is powered by energy drinks, zombrex, and the magic pseudo-African tribe (that lived in the Middle East) is a REALLY interesting premise in the same way that the console only Far Cry 1 was.

But it also very much speaks to the mess that DL2 has been and how much of that game’s life cycle has been just undoing all the risks they took. Like, take the guns for example (DL2 sure did!). The excuse for why there were no guns in the entire world was half-assed but… anyone who played DL1 can tell you that they kind of broke late game once you could walk around with full purple AR ammo at all times.

Or, getting rid of the… kind of an obnoxious dipshit callous super spy protagonist who sort of learned to care about others just in time for said tribe to fuck his shit in. So… basically like half of zombie movie protagonists who learn to love just in time to sacrifice themselves heroically. In exchange for someone who more or less grew up in this zombie world and is more focused on a personal story (I think. Never made it much into act 2 of 2).

I assume a mix of testing late stage balancing for the new one and realizing that “Aiden Chase” from DL1 is not the legendary video game protagonist they thought he was and that they have to actually remind people that DL can be GOOD with a good game.

This isn’t an upstart trying to make a name for themselves. It is the fourth game in one of the most legendary sub-franchises (that is part of one of the most legendary franchises) by two of the most established and tested developers out there. Like, Platinum have had a rough few years but the actual combat of their games is still almost universally praised and Team Ninja are arguably even bigger at this point.

I would love to see more actual gameplay. But nobody is going to decide to buy this, one way or another, based on gameplay footage. We already know what the game is. And a story trailer is a better sizzle reel for the keighleys audience.

Already addressed that in the other branch but:

Sitting and standing VR are both a thing and are both supported in Alyx. All you have to be able to do is rotate your chair 180 degrees away from your desk and you can play it. Hell, you can play it AT your desk but I would not recommend waving your arms in front of a monitor…

And if you can afford to walk one step away from your computer chair? Now you can do Standing VR which, honestly, I have always preferred over room scale because I can never get comfortable walking around. But moving with an analog stick (or teleporting) and then moving my body to dodge things and interact? That is the shit.

Or, to put it in Nintendo terms: If you can play Welcome Tour and the game that is totally not wheelchair basketball, you can do seated VR.

Standing and Seated VR are both a thing that are both supported in Alyx.

To be clear: I am not saying everyone should go buy a facebook quest 3 (I would NEVER say that… even if that is usually my begrudging suggestion to anyone who wants to try VR) and that everyone needs to play Alyx.

But if the obsession over Half-Life 3 were anywhere near as big as the memes pretend they are… people spend more to play a tweaked re-release of a game they already have on a new console. We buy new GPUs when we find out our performance will be too low on fricking Dragon’s Dogma 2.

But spend 300 bucks (usually closer to 200/250 on sale) to play their “dream game” ? Oh, nah, I’m washing my hair that… five years. Uhm… oh, I don’t like the head strap. That is why I can’t play it. Yeah…

And… for those of us who really ARE Half-Life sickos? Alyx is GOOD.

If you plug it into a PC that meets

• Processor: Core i5-7500 / Ryzen 5 1600
• Memory: 12 GB RAM
• Graphics: GTX 1060 / RX 580 - 6GB VRAM
• VR Support: SteamVR

Then yes. Well, less plug-in and more pair these days since they do it over the network (so wifi).

And it even works on Linux (with ALVR) although Proton is shockingly finicky with Alyx but it isn’t too much tinkering.

People are buying entire consoles for one or two games. If folk can afford a 450 USD switch 2 for mario kart they can afford a facebook (ugh) quest for 300 bucks that regularly goes on sale.

Can EVERYONE? No. But this is a luxury hobby and plenty of discourse online is “I bought a PS5 for Demon Souls” or “I love Welcome Tour” and so forth.

Nah. Alyx was just completely ignored. Likely due to a mix of chuds not wanting to acknowledge women and… people don’t ACTUALLY care all that much about a new Half-Life. They just love meming about it.

I’m just hoping for some good games moving forward that aren’t trying to milk us for everything we have with slop we don’t want.

… There is plenty of that?

The thing to understand is that influencers pretty much always fall back to the “us vs them” mentality. We could see it with early youtube where they accused magazines/websites of all being corrupt and getting paid for reviews (never forget Jon “It’s about ethics in games journalism” Bain…). And we saw it in twitch when they instead said it was the youtubers and their sponsor deals who were doing the same. And we saw a huge rise in “I need to watch tiktok because that informs me about things that mainstream outlets don’t want me to hear!”

Some outlets go political. Most are aggressively “apolitical” and all that entails. But that means that “the game devs are trying to screw you over” is a solid talking point. It is why everyone and their mother needs to say they hate live service games (with the added bonus of avoiding any chance of having a regular game they arer expected to stream) and so forth.

But if you actually PLAY games? It is still a golden age where basically every sicko gets their fetish in game form (and Microprose and Kitfox are apparently the sleazy club I slink off to…). We are in for a pretty bad drought after the past two years or so of funding drying up and studios being gutted. But if you actually are looking you are gonna find a LOT of games that know what you want.

I’ll also add on that “game devs want to ruin gaming” is a great excuse to play “retro” games. Which drastically reduce operating costs for the part timers because… even IF they are showing you their console and cartridge, you can bet your bottom dollar they are running an emulator with a game they grabbed from their local internet library.

Half-Life 3 was already made and it was a VR exclusive. And it was REALLY good. And nobody cared.

People like to meme. They don’t like to think. Silksong will probably have a wave of “is it as good as it was supposed to be” or “DISAPPOINTED BY SILKSONG” and then just go back to being like Hollow Knight: a REALLY good metroidvania with souls-like aspects (also souls games ARE metroidvanias but…).

Personally? I am more excited for the chuds to lose their mind once they figure out Hornet is fem.

Yes… for an individual, those are the prices (if only there was some 3 hour youtube video about adding more memory to cards…).

The issue is that even a downstream isn’t buying 100 dollars of VRAM. They need to buy that in bulk. And then they need to retool their factories to support that configuration. And if they can’t sell enough of those units to justify the retooling and the purchases?

I mean… look at EVGA

And then you have the marketing/brand implications which I already spoke to.

That… really isn’t how things work at all.

But also? That extra VRAM costs money (especially if you want it to be high performance). And you more or less need to produce things in bulk for it to be viable. So if AMD makes a bunch of “AI Accelerators” and nobody buys them because they would rather nVidia (which the video talked about)? it is just a massive flop AND it means that AMD is no longer “the best bang for your buck” option and is directly competing with nVidia in the mindspace of consumers.

That said? I could actually see them cannibalize what little market share Intel got. The Intel GPUs are… moving on. But they have support for codecs that video editors and transcoders REALLY benefit from and a not insignificant part of the Influencer and Editor space actually have those in their editing or capture PCs. Tweaking the silicon to better support those use cases and selling higher memory versions of the Radeons would potentially be a “productivity” space taht can justify the added cost and have knock ons from people who just want to have even more chrome tabs open while they play fortnite. And… it might lead to the more CS side of the ML world actually realizing it isn’t that hard to run pytorch with an AMD card.

Probably THE best “first try” from a studio (I think the only other thing round8 did was a trash mmo?).

The weapon system is very interesting but I am not sure if I would call it good? I love that movesets are decoupled from damage which lets me actually try different movesets with almost no penalty since you upgrade the damage. Except for the unique weapons which I feel were a mistake. That said, this ALSO lends itself very well to ridiculously OP/meta builds and… yeah.

The P Organ system can suck my P Organ. Conceptually it is interesting. In practice it is just a progress gated system that shuts out core gameplay mechanics. Although I hear that got heavily rebalanced for the DLC.

Level design… leaves a lot to be desired. It reminded me a lot of Wo Long and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy: Origins: Chad Garland Edition where you have a LOT of unlockable shortcuts to the previous bonfire… right at the next bonfire. Like the levels were designed to be more interconnected until late in dev.

Encounter design ranges from good to bad but doesn’t swing too hard in either direction and there are some REAL good “fuck you” traps that are usually close enough to a shortcut or bonfire that it is more funny than not.

Boss fights are, mostly, REALLY REALLY good. I admittedly only came in after the NPC summons were added but I found the bosses to be well balanced and quite often beat the boss on one of my “learn their attacks” runs before spending a summon token.

That said, the back half of the core game suffers from “Okay, we have let you try different methods until now but this game is really about parrying” with the gimmick/puzzle boss followed by bosses that basically feel like you are just surviving until you can parry one specific attack to do enough stagger damage to actually hit them.

Haven’t got to the DLC yet. But I am really excited for a sale or to just have an Urge to play it. Is Lies of P perfect? No. Is it even on par with most of the From-Souls (let alone the Niohs)? No. But it is probably The Best Of The Rest and I will probably be there day one for Lies of P 2 (especially if it really is about Them).

Well… nobody is right all the time?

But yeah. It came out at a REALLY weird point. Titan AE and the other one I always forget were fairly high profile animated movies that actually had REALLY good computer graphics but they just didn’t get any traction. I want to say Disney was also suffering around that time? But yeah, it was basically a case where we very much saw what would define “film” 20 years later… and nobody cared.

That said, my understanding is that motion capture in the sense of directly processing The Balls matters a lot less than just having someone on set. Like, animators can’t actually do much more with a bunch of tennis balls taped to Andy Serkis than they could by just overlying/tracing his body. But there is a ridiculous amount of value in just having SOMETHING in that scene to cast shadows and show what the lighting should look like and to simplify making sure all the other actors are actually looking at his face and so forth.

For what its worth, I actually thought Spirits Within was cool. And it led to a brief moment where my father actually liked me because I wanted an issue of Maxim… until he realized it was to look at the computer girl. But yeah, I have no fricking idea who that movie was for. Final Fantasy fans didn’t care because it wasn’t really a Final Fantasy and normies/adults didn’t care because it was just some video game bullshit.

I can actually see this as being fully accidental in that light.

Community sourced content is always a minefield. Was it a recent EVO adjacent contest where like three of the finalists were discovered to have used AI Generated Content? And a friend of a friend has explained to me the shockingly painful process of actually determining if the various Gunpla Builders events have 3d printed anything in the submissions.

So I can 100% see an exec or even a community manager wanting to make a name for themselves suggesting they source it through tiktok and let tiktok’s filters handle it for them.

That said, this is also 100% The Future. Just think of the various twitch pre-rolls where they have a bunch of streamers selling bounty paper towels. Occasionally I might have a “hmm. is that Fuzlie under the ninety layers of filters and horrible lighting?” but the vast majority are people I have never heard of. Now imagine if those nobody streamers were fully owned AI property of the advertising firm?

And… this shit is not at all new. In recent years there has been a huge rise in vtubers and the vast majority of folk will never know if Project Melody gets a new VA as long as she sounds enough like the past one. But also?

In mother fucking 2001 we had Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and a huge part of the marketing was that the two leads (voiced by Ming-Na Wen and Alec Baldwin) were so photorealistic that they could be actors in a wide range of films and ad campaigns.

And as dystopic as it is? That company owned AI model is never going to suddenly start supporting Palestine and… Okay, they actually will definitely start calling for the eradication of trans people. But no worries on the anti-genocide front. That model will never complain that doing a Pringles ad is demeaning. That model won’t use their appearance on a youtuber ran game show to start a solo career. And… that AI model won’t need to get scale plus 10 to whip it out “at their peak” and so forth.

Like… this is gonna happen. It might not have been intended to happen this week but… it is coming.

The issue is that nVidia are increasingly marketing their consumer grade GPUs to “prosumer” users. Whether that is small research groups working with “AI” or people farming the latest memecoin or… the other things you would need REALLY REALLY high bandwidth linear algebra from and let’s move on.

Whereas AMD are actually still targeting that consumer market. I think it was the nvidia 40x generation where their consumer cards had like no memory at all and AMD were pumping out 16 GB on their cheap(-ish) models? My brain can only remember card generations while I am actively shopping and… yeah.

And yeah. I would LOVE an AMD card with 32 or even 64 GB of even slower memory. But games are still going to target nvidia because people keep buying it and that means that you just won’t have much use beyond the 8 (or apparently now 16) GB that nVidia are going to let you buy. At which point… why waste money?

As for the prosumer and enterprise space? nVidia… have a long history of being assholes and previous GN videos have talked about the behind the scenes pressure they allegedly apply to system integrators and the like. And I will leave that there for Reasons.

But yes, many mid-tier and even high-tier companies could benefit from just buying AMD cards and there is very much a market for “high end” AMD cards… it is just that they have so few customers to make it worthwhile.