For sure, but Microsoft isn't publishing Outer Worlds. That's Take 2's "not quite AAA but not quite Indie" publishing arm, Private Division. There might still be some corporate shenanigans going on, I wouldn't doubt it, but from what I've heard, the game's been in development for a bit over two years now, and with a (likely) late 2019 release, that means a full 3+ year development cycle, which is pretty good.

It's all hearsay, so who knows how things are actually going, but the signs are positive at least.

 

Anyone play MKXL or Injustice 2 on the PS4?

 

Not in any great depth, but I have played Injustice 2. I enjoyed it, but I don't play it enough to really get to grips with the various combo options.

 

With MKXI coming out (and Insutice 2 having aged nicely), I wanted to find people to practice with for the eventual online tournaments. If you're down, my PSN is chintu12

 

I don't have access to online play atm, but when I do I'll look you up. Think I'm shinysavage on PSN too.

 

At 385 hours, I finally managed to win a game of CK2 (play until 1453)

Starting as Eustache de Boulogne in 1066, I only managed to get second place in the first crusade, and so my beneficiary received a duchy in Jerusalem. Which is a shame, because I need to do it again and place first for that one more achievement.

Through a marriage or two, and a few 'accidents', I managed to take the kingdom, and from then on took first place in every single crusade, and managed to form the Empire of Outremer, gaining somewhere in the region of 10 achievements along the way. By the end, there were no Muslims, or Germanic Pagans left on the map. I held three Empire titles (Outremer, Arabia, Persia, and Titular Custom Jerusalem), had about 10 bloodlines, and maintained over 15 vassal kingdoms (all viceroys, except the Ecumenical Patriach and Pope).

The biggest problem towards the end was fighting constant wars against claimants. Not because they were difficult (I didn't even have to raise armies, viceroys would deal it all for me), but because I was at war for about 50 years, which limited a lot of diplomatic options.

 

Attempting to play CK2 was when I finally realized that "EU4 isn't difficult to get into, sure there's a lot of text to read and even more buttons to click but it all makes sense quickly enough, really!" is complete bullshit.

No wonder Paradox games releases a ton of DLC for all their games - if not for semi-regular cash infusions from existing fans that already know the system their studio wouldn't last a year, because getting to a state of even semi-competency takes forever. As a EU4 veteran, CK2 was all but impenetrable for long enough that I just couldn't justify the time commitment required to get into it properly.

 

Thinking of

Anyone know of any good guides? The tutorials for ck2 are crap

 

Arumba on Youtube is supposed to be pretty good, although I don't tend to like watching video tutorials. That said, looking up "quickstart ck2 newbie guide" on youtube gets loads of 20-30 minute videos that should explain most of it.

To be honest, I found the subreddit's Newbie Guide very useful.

Basically, start in Ireland as any Petty King. Your goal is to form the Kingdom of Eire, and hold all the land within it. Ignore everything else.

If you're a 'Petty King' (Duke) then you hold a 'level 2' title (Count, Duke, King, Emperor). This means you have de jure and de facto vassals.

Some people already pay fealty to you (de facto). Then there's some heretics that haven't yet bowed to your glory, but are in land that you have a right to (de jure). As such, you can force them to become your vassals, by stabbing them. You can also send your chancellor off to go and fiddle the books until it looks like you have the right to own elsewhere, and then stab more people in the face until they recognize this.

By the time you've formed your second Duchy, you should have the basics down. Aim to get the Kingdom, and once you've done that, feel free to fuck about - you'll learn most from screwing up.

There's enough depth that you can ignore a lot of the more difficult stuff until you want to use it, because the AI is generally stupid.

 

I've always wanted to do a paradox mega-campaign (CK2-EU4-Vic2-Hoi4) but it's such a huge time investment and I'm pretty bad at ck2 and hoi4. Seems like it would be a lot of fun though.

 

For anyone interested in Persona 5, a short teaser was put up for P5R. Just announces the game and says that more information is coming in march.
https://p5r.jp/

 

Whatever it is, calling it now, it'll also be on Switch.

 

Good news and bad news today.

The good news? Alien: Isolation is getting a sequel.
The bad news? Well, you guys have phones don't you?

 

I hope that meme lives forever.

 

So the open world Star Wars game, that EA Vancouver took over after Visceral was shut down, has now been canceled.

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/01/ea-cancels-open-worldstar-wars-game/

Do we reckon that Disney is pulling away from EA like they have with the Marvel Netflix series? Or am I just a salty bitch for hoping so since they've delivered what amounts to nothing in six years of having the licence?

 

If i was phil spencer, I'd get on the phone. Esp sigh that new 'AAAA' studio they're touting.

 

May EA burn...

 

Given that Disney has been extremely hands-off with the Star Wars license in the past, I don’t expect anything significant to change. I suspect that as long as the BF2 situation doesn’t repeat itself and games are "only" cancelled in the early stages of development and not made into newscycle-dominating clusterforks, EA are not suddenly going to find themselves in hot water until 2023 or however long their deal runs.

Whether they get to keep their license afterwards? No idea. The Star Wars landscape will likely have so significantly shifted by then – depending on what ultimately happens to the Mandalorian show and the Johnson & Benioff/Weiss trilogies – that the status of the gaming license at that point is completely unpredictable. In any case, I don’t expect EA to produce anything of significant value with Star Wars anymore.

 

Not anymore. I'm sure they're looking at how successful Spiderman was for them very closely.

 

I've played a few random games over the last month, and these are my thoughts:

Star Trader: Frontiers - I've often lamented about the lack of a really good space game that encompasses all the various elements I like, while eschewing the ones that bog it down. Elite: Dangerous failed the test, Mass Effect Andromeda failed the test. Plenty of other's failed, but many of them have really cool elements that enjoyed. Star Trader comes closer than any of those into making the perfect space game. It's still not *quite* there, but it's close. The one thing that really annoys me about it is the random encounter rate, and there comes a point after you've done like 10 of them that you just want to skip them all. The only other thing that bothers me is that there's no real impetus in upgrading to a larger ship, which is a shame, because what else are we doing jobs and saving money for? Other than that, I'd say it's a solid B. I will say it's a shame that the genre is unlikely to get any better than this.

Fallout 4 - I played this when it first came out several years ago, and despite putting several days into it, I never finished it. Since then, I've messed around in it a few times, downloaded some mods and what not. Well, this month, I actually put in the time and finished the game, and I put in enough time with exploration and doing RPG elements that I don't feel like I cheated myself by just rushing everything. I will say that I intentionally steered myself away from burning out from some of the repetition. I will say that the game is still buggy as fuck in traditional fashion. Crashes and locks up every couple of hours, and gave saves are a memory hog. But when it comes down to it, It was a good game. Maybe not a great game, and not as good as FO3 and NV, but still pretty good. The DLC is pretty good too, at least what parts of it I managed to do. Nuka-World was very interesting, Automaton added some cool shit, and Far Harbor... well. Far Harbor was actually quite annoying. Having the DLC means that all the random repeatable quests that the factions give you can send you out there, far sooner than you might be ready for. And... it's buggy. I have the game on console because that's what I bought it for originally (my mistake, I know), and as far as I can tell, there's no console commands to fix things like there is for PC. So half the quests I got for Far Harbor broke, including the very first one to get there, so the only real fix was to load earlier saves, which doesn't always help if you have progressed so far. So I never actually managed to do the Far Harbor stuff, which is supposedly very good. Anyways, I'd say the game is a B- for me. It reminds be a lot of Dragon Age Inquisition, in that it's a serviceable game you can put a lot of time into and be satisfied with, but there's a lot of small things that bring the game down.

Opus Magnum - This game is surprisingly amazing. It's part puzzle game, part automation, using a device called an alchemy engine. There's a "campaign" of like 30 or so missions, where your objective it to make increasingly more complex alchemical compounds, or in some cases, take complex compounds and breaking them down into base components for use in transmutation. It's a really cool game, but it can get really tough. Pretty much any of the puzzles can be done through brute force, though in some cases, that could be several hundreds input commands into the engine, whereas there's almost always a slick solution that does it real quick. You start to learn little tricks, like indexing sequences and things like that, that come up in every puzzle. And the last group of puzzle ramps it up completing, forcing you to work in an extremely confined space instead of an infinite work table. It's pretty cool. I give it a solid A. I won't be that surprised if it ends up being my favorite game of the year, though there are a lot of sweet games scheduled to come out this year.