Mafia 1 DE and 2 both were largely linear and didn’t waste your time with fluff. I really enjoyed those two. Mafia 3 on the other hand had good story drip fed to you after hours of grind.

Ubisoft like mechanics:

• Each area has wiretaps that help a lot, but are very much like liberating radio towers, less grand.
• Once you open up a district, you’ve to do a checklist of repetitive missions, x2, and then go back to one of the areas from the already done missions to kill the underboss. Rinse and repeat 9 times. So that becomes more like (6 missions + 1) x 2 x 9. Some missions are optional. But it’s quite a lot. There’s some variety and some interesting story beats, but when it’s given in such grindy manner you have to have a lot of patience to enjoy it.
• A lot of the missions are set up like far cry outposts or assassinate a target style. In fact you are incentivised to play stealth, to the point you start feeling like an assassin or hitman.

Mafia 3. I’m probably half way through and starting to get burnt out by the grind and the buggy nature of the game. It is infected by Ubisoft formula, but it’s much more notorious and less fluid. Glad they are going a different route for Mafia 4

I don’t know since I’ve only played DE, but the sound tracks were very nostalgic and reminiscent of game radios like Fallout 3.

Sounds good. I really like changes that just flow from start to end, though they’re rare. It’s easy to forget about collectibles if they’re too annoying, so that’s that.

That sounds great! I’ll be playing it on Series X, should be okay.

I’m planning to play Sleeping Dogs next after completing Mafia trilogy! Hope the base game is not too repetitive.

Just finished Mafia 1 DE and 2 DE. Taking a breather before I dive in 3, which I suppose will require a lot of patience.

I really enjoyed 1 and 2. They’re anti GTA in some senses where there’s basically little to no fluff or sandbox, just pure story telling and some gameplay on the side. But the stories are definitely so well written. The DLCs of 2 showed signs of GTAfication, and the first 30 mins of 3 also reek of it, but I feel the first two definitely feel timeless only because of their writing.

About to finish Alan Wake 2 and its DLCs. It’s a great game but for me it’s bit too artsy fartsy. The flow breaks each time you switch the character, which in turn affects the pacing. Having said that the concept is cool, the fmvs integrated into the game are really high quality, they act as emmisive light sources, causing surroundings to reflect it. Pretty cool.

Doom 2016 and Alan Wake 2. Enjoying both of them!

I think there’s a marketing slide from AMD saying they’re renaming their GPUs to better match competition. So 9070 series cards are supposed to match 5070 series cards, that’ll be 5070, 5070 Ti as of now and super later on.

Stalker 2 had bugs on launch yet it easily sold 1 million copies. Black Myth Wukong uses frame gen to achieve 60 fps on PS5 and otherwise it locks to 45 fps, yet it has broken all records. Elden Ring is still a stuttery mess on PC and barely hits 60 fps on consoles, even the $700 one, yet it’s beloved.

These people aren’t the ones talking about resolutions and frame rates on X, but just playing the damn game in millions.

Just like millions use sub par TV settings and stream music or don’t have much clue about team sports but still have a great time.

I feel it’s a bit like any hobby. You’d see casual film enjoyers and then those who refuse to watch unless it’s a bluray on their 4k Dolby Vision TV with 1000 nits OLED brightness. There are some who just enjoy listening to music on their airpod knockoffs by streaming on YouTube music and then there are those who buy $500 headphones with high quality gold plated aux wire and a custom DAC and use some obscure format to really enjoy music. There are some who enjoy team sports and then there are those who know personal routine of each player and the wetness of the grass or the year of the ball’s manufacturing and its impact on throw.

It’s a spectrum.

I wouldn’t call a game where you build weird vehicles and weapons using things around you, or solve puzzles any possible way a walking simulator.

My point isn’t that, but how unanimous BG3 was. If you look at other years, there were still some juries that prefer one over the other, but not with BG3.

Pretty crazy that BG3 unanimously won despite the existence of ToTK.

Everything that Sony claimed turned out to be true. Games are now exclusive to Xbox, they run worse on PS5, Xbox would get exclusive Call of Duty content and early betas and Xbox is using its market dominance by putting all ABK titles on GamePass.

Oh wait.

If you love me meet me at first floor

Americans 😢 British 🤷‍♂️

Just keep in mind that it is supposed to be difficult in the first few hours. But as you skill it starts getting easier to the point that you’re walking killing machine that can unlock any lock, speech check almost anything and buy the best gear.

Yes it is. It even has schedules for NPCs, activities to do, people reacting to your clothes or cleanliness, your hunger level or sleepiness, day night cycle, an interesting fast travel mechanism.

I also love their pickpocketing mini game.

120 hours in and I’m still playing Kingdom Come Deliverance. I think I like it much better than Skyrim. The only thing I don’t like about it is the missing crosshair for bows, but a simple console command fixes that for me. I’ve not yet completed the main quest lol and there are still plenty of side quests to finish. It’s crazy how the studio pushed CryEngine of all things into this interesting RPG. Puts Bethesda to shame honestly.

If PS4 -> PS5 isn’t a big enough of a leap for gamers and publishers, then I wonder what would PS5 -> PS6 look like? Is higher resolution at 60 FPS with better ray tracing enough?