It’s been four years since UE5. It’s not that devs lack the experience using the engine - even Epic can’t use it properly - and we’re well past the point we’re you can just write it off as growing pains. The reality is it’s an engine designed to give that AAA style cost effectively to appeal to suits, and last to actually create games that are enjoyable to play.
I fucking hate Unreal Engine 5 so god damn much.
Defenders come in and say the stuttering is an issue of optimization and lay the blame at developers, but fucking Epic can’t even fix it. Fortnite has that shit too.
And god that default UE5 look is so fucking ugly. It’s going to be the piss filter of this era.
You listen to Shadowheart’s story in Baldur’s Gate 3 and, since you pass no judgment, fall in love.
Not that different than a lot of the relationships I had when I was young to be honest.
Dragon Age 2 got a bad rap when it first came out - because it didn’t meet the expectations set by Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening - but honestly it got reevaluated pretty quick. I don’t think you’d find many people ranking it at the bottom anymore.
Inquisition strayed even further from Origins which led to early fans looking back at Dragon Age 2 as more faithful, while the big influx of fans who started with Inquisition found it much more approachable than the CRPG style of Origins. The repeated environments are also a lot less of a disappointing in retrospect than the hollow, padded MMO style open levels of Inquisition.
I think you’d see tier lists divided in to two camps - with either Veilguard/Inquisition at the bottom for CRPG fans and Origins/Awakening for the latter Mass Effect-style fans. Well, maybe Veilguard at the bottom for the latter camp too.
The Forgotten Realms has most of these
Vampire Dragons: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Vampiric_dragon
Demon Unicorns: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Black_unicorn
Skeleton Wizards: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Lich
Fey Werewolves: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Brokenstone_Vale
The only think I don’t have on hand are angel ghosts and lochness mothmen in the Forgotten Realms, though I think you probably could find the former.
In announcing the series, Time Studios President Ben Bitonti said the project provides “a glimpse at what thoughtful, creative, artist-led use of AI can look like—not replacing craft but expanding what’s possible and allowing storytellers to go places they simply couldn’t before.”
Except the whole reason AI can do this is we have gone to this place so many fucking times. There have been thousands upon thousands of works visually depicting the American Revolution which it is copying. It’s not a terribly difficult period to film.
I was able to do it in Firefox. Opened the dev tools, went into responsive design mode, set the screen size to large enough to see the whole thing and hit the camera button to screenshot it all.
I’ve never seen that, around me it’s just an employee hanging by the self checkout (if that) and maybe someone hanging around the exit. The last person I saw shoplifting just went through the one way entrance with a full cart when I entered as that never has staff at it lol
Why emulate it? NFS Carbon had a PC port.
they should have turned the gender flipped version into a movie
Not a lot this year. Technically there were quite a few games I installed, ran for a tiny bit didn’t return to, but not many I actually played. I’ve had a hard time getting into things - I don’t want to learn a new system, I don’t want to dedicated the next 40+ hours to a story and I don’t want to spend a lot of time fiddling with things.
Citizen Sleeper 2 - It’s not as good as the first, but it’s still a short, narrative based game I think I completed in just a night or a day off or something. I appreciate that. Though maybe it is as good as the first post-DLC, it’s a rare game where I think the best time to play it was right at launch as the additional content added in patches robbed a lot of the impact from the alternate endings. 7/10
Dispatch - Another short, narrative based game. It’s just superhero popcorn filler, and an extremely linear “choose your own adventure” but it’s very competently done with some excellent vocal performances. Me and my partner had a great time with it. 8/10
Fortnight - My partner likes it so I got roped into it when we had to spend a few weeks apart as something to do together online. I fucking loathe so much about this game. The predatory cash shop. The constant, massive updates. The fact it has that fucking Unreal Engine stutter that everyone swears is the fault of lazy devs but even Epic can’t fix in their own games. The horrific, aesthetic whip lash. The fact that it performs like shit and looks so blah. The fact that it is buggy as all hell. 2/10 and I only gave it any points because I enjoy my partner enjoying things.
Aeon Flux is the only one I can think of not mentioned yet. 90s, Cyberpunk, Hyperviolent - it’s just not Japanese, though it is animated. It’s weird, and the first two seasons are are series of shorts.
That was surprisingly good
I picked blue, purple and black.
Just going to work through this, but:
I already got ears, not sure what a tail would add. Seems like it might be inconvenient even. Pass.
I don’t need estrogen. If I somehow need it later, it’s readily available in forms other than pill. Pass.
I actually like my body hair, it’s soft and feels nice when people play with it. Pass.
Look $20 is $20 but come on, pass.
I’d have passed on a more competitive board because the person I want to find me attractive already does, but this is still just broadly useful. Taking this one.
The difference between the best pizza I have ever had and the best pizza I have ever made isn’t much in the grand scheme of things. It’s not like there isn’t a difference, but at it’s best it’s not exactly a mind blowing meal. Pass.
I was originally really high on water tasting and feeling like my favorite drink until I remember we use water for a lot more than drinking. Can you imagine cooking pasta in your favorite soft drink? Pass.
I can already talk to cats. They sometimes talk to me too. Mostly it’s “I want food” and “I want you to open this door”. I don’t need a pill for this. Pass.
Not having to sleep is potentially such a brutal monkey’s paw answer but I’m willing to risk it. Taking this one.
I guess I’ve got to circle back, and I’m going for master pizza chef. I almost went with $20, but I guess master pizza chef takes pizza from a fun thing I can make sometimes to a potentially marketable skill.
Never watched the Critical Role campaigns myself, just watched most of Vox Mach and now this. (No spoilers for S2 if you’ve watched the campaign I’m presuming this is based off of, please.)
Having watched the campaign, I’m actually not sure what they’re going to do in Season 2. They have made a lot of changes. Some plot threads are happening much faster while others are much slower in weird ways. It’s very strange in ways I can’t detail without going into spoilers.
Anyway.
I like this a lot more than Vox Machina. That felt like a very unfocused parody and the humour just wasn’t landing. A lot of that same humour is still here - but it works much better contained mostly to a comic relief character.
Also while the changes feel weird, the substantial rewrites I think make for a better TV narrative structure overall where as Vox Machina seemed more faithful to it’s detriment. I realise I’ve only talked about the changes that didn’t really hit for me below, but I do think overall it’s for the better.
The Tiefling Circus performer (of apparently many names) Molly, fun character but having no memory felt a bit too “hand-wavy” at times. Nice tool to use for the GM but, eh… not my personal cup of tea in a character.
Yeah, I’m not sure how I feel about Molly either. He’s used for really clumsy foreshadowing and broody introspection which just wasn’t the case in the campaign. He didn’t really care about his past, and that stuff didn’t really come up until much, much later. It honestly makes me wonder if they’re just going to cut out like 80% of the campaigns middle arcs and try to weld the ends together.
I’m a bit disinterested in the Beacon as this end-all-be-all overpowered contrivance. Hoping there is indeed more to it than seems. Bit of allusion that it could be so, we’ll see?
The beacon seems to be a fumble here. In the campaign, they stumble upon it at about the same point but with little clue of it’s significance. When we do learn about it, it’s not through the lens of Ikithon, who thinks in terms of power and practical usage which strips it of any intrigue, but as a cosmic mystery and an item of religious significance. You get something like Ikithon’s perspective towards the end of the campaign from Essek, but even then it was posing questions, which are currently just absent.
Some of the voice acting, particularly outside the main cast was amazing.
Wow, I just looked up the guest stars for this and it’s honestly crazy. Here’s just some of them:
• Alan Cumming
• Nathan Fillion
• Jonathan Frakes
• Lucy Liu
• Ming-Na Wen
What the hell are they doing in this?
Very cool, though the quality leaves a bit to be desired.
For popularity>0, we got close to all tracks on the platform. The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s. Metadata was added without reencoding the audio (and an archive of diff files is available to reconstruct the original files from Spotify, as well as a metadata file with original hashes and checksums).
For popularity=0, we got files representing about half the number of listens (either original or a copy with the same ISRC). The audio is reencoded to OGG Opus at 75kbit/s — sounding the same to most people, but noticeable to an expert.
The slop ratio hasn’t gotten better from abandoning that format.
There is some recency bias, but Pluribus as well. It’s the only water cooler show I’ve come across in years where people actually want to talk about in real life.
That is a very pretty retro art style.