I can't fucking believe we're less than two weeks away from Kingdom Hearts 3...

 

My devotion to the Church of Aqua has finally paid off.

 

Two weeks? We're less than one week from Kingdom Hearts 3. Also apparently the review embargo is gone tomorrow so beware of spoilers and all that.

 

Anno 1800, although having its release delayed to April 2019, will soon have its closed beta test, and I got myself a nifty key here that I'll use for the express purpose of building the most efficient product chain for making baked bananas.

Anyone else excited for Anno 1800? 2205 failed me quite hard, since the developers took out the sandbox mode and only let you play a campaign. Not so in the new installment, though, which seems to go back to its roots.

 

The first part of this post is sort of a TOMD crossover, but I think the subject matter lends itself better to this thread.

I concluded my day with an enormously satisfying second place in a GT Sport Manufacturers’ Cup race. Somewhat surprisingly, the quality of the racing was actually really good, and I made two moves in the last two laps to go from fourth to second. I bungled both my quali lap (my practice time would have handed me pole by about a second) and the start, and went from P3 to P4 after three corners. The first-placed car went down the road and was never to be seen again, and I was left watching what was pretty much a race-long battle between second and third from my very comfortable vantage point, which was about a second behind the fighting duo. I felt I was faster, but didn’t have the clear pace advantage I felt I needed to be comfortable with attacking and making a move stick. In the end, I think the tyre management I could do without sliding around too much worked to my advantage, as well as some observations of my opponents’ lines. In the end, I pulled exactly the same move on both of them in successive laps for my last-gasp podium surge. I might have clenched my fist in joy as I was crossing the line.

————

In general, GT Sport is actually starting to feel like a complete game at this point. The track selection has grown considerably and continues to be expanded with each monthly update (even though the last one was a bit disappointing, as the borefest that is Special Stage Route X does nothing for me), and the choice of cars in the classes I mainly care about (GT4, GT3, Super GT & LMP1 / sportscars) leaves little to be desired. I have a couple of personal favourites that I’d like to see added (like the Mercedes AMG GT4 and the GTE cars from the WEC*), but I doubt we’ll see many actual racing cars added to the game at this point. Instead, it looks like Polyphony is rolling out its back catalogue with the occasional new car sprinkled in for good measure. Nothing wrong with that, just an observation.

*I think Project Cars and Forza have their hands on the latter category for the moment, so little to no chance of that in my estimation.

Lastly, DiRT Rally 2.0 releases in a couple of weeks. I’m somewhat decent at the rallying aspect, but actually pretty good at the rallycross portion of the game. By the time I was finished with DiRT Rally and DiRT 4, I was to be found in the Top 100 in terms of pure laptime more often than not. The monster that is the PSRX Volkswagen Polo is waiting for me… I can’t wait. (Final side note: Racing games are the only games I bother to preorder anymore, since I like to get a good grasp of the handling model and some of the other specifics before I delve into the online aspect, if I bother to do so at all. By that point, the online issues that are actually detrimental to the experience are mostly fixed.)
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Update for previous post:

Got another P2 and a win in two more Manufacturer Series (as it is actually called) races today. A lot more people employed a two-stop strategy on Soft tyres today, while I stuck with my proven one-stop Medium tactic. That led to some hairy situations in the opening laps as I was about a second a lap slower, but after two laps the Softs were pretty much done for and I had the advantage.

I think PD really nailed the Balance of Performance for the GT3 cars this time. There were, through both races, a BMW, an Audi, a VW Beetle, a Subaru, a Toyota, a Mitsubishi and my Porsche in the leading group. The only major manufacturer missing was Mercedes, and that moght have been a fluke of the draw. Tyre life was also appropriately balanced, although I don’t quite get why so many people chose the Softs today, as they had only such a brief advantage over the Mediums. That kind of thing usually works if you’re significantly quicker than everyone else and want to show off with the fastest lap as well, or have much longer stints than only three or four two-minute laps. But when the people around you are pretty much all on the same level the one-stop is the much more sensible option. (As I proved when I turned a five-second deficit into a four-second advantage in the race I won, when the previous leader pitted and I passed them for the win.)

Not exactly the most fascinating stuff for everyone, I know, but I really like digging deeper into that sort of thing when I have the time.

 

Anyone else seeing the rumours the Respawn are about to shadow drop a f2p Titanfall/BR game tomorrow?

It'll have the best mechanics of all the Battle Royale games at least.

 

Yup, been hearing all kinds of rumors about it. It's supposed to launch on Monday, from what I've heard, just in time to either shit on or be shit on by Anthem and Firestorm coming out within the next few weeks, because EA can't even schedule game releases without fucking something up.

 

So, if anyone hasn't seen the drama yet, Metro Exodus has moved to Epic Launcher exclusive at the last minute, although if you've already preorderd on steam it will be honored. People are pissed, and the dev response to people being pissed boils down to a threat of 'if this hurts sales in any way we're abandoning the platform entirely.'

Edit: This is the notice Valve put on the games steam page.

 

Lol, somehow I'm not surprised.

Honestly, the move would have been fine, could even have been a positive, but they handled it in the worst possible way. You don't wait until three weeks before your game comes out to announce an exclusivity deal. That's the kind of shit you announce months or even upward of a year in advance. Then you'll get some grumbling, but no one will actually care all that much.

 

But if they did that, they would've missed out on all that juicy juicy steam advertising.
And, as anyone who has looked at the steam store at any point in the past year, they got a lot of advertising.

 

The biggest non-controversy of the year. Exclusive on pc means you need to dl another launcher, oh boohoo.

I love epic and discord getting in the game. I hate monopolies and I've hated steam for years.

The only leg you could possibly stand on is if it's a multiplayer game and it being on the Epic launcher makes that a hassle. It's Metro though.

 

Eh. There's a few legitimate gripes, insofar as the Epic launcher is objectively inferior to Steam from a customer perpsective, seeing as it lacks many fairly prominent features of Steam, the whole chat and social features foremost among them, plus the whole "the Epic Launcher's privacy policy doesn't actually comply with the GDPR" thing (though I don't know if they've updated the policy in response to that furor, so that may not apply any longer).

With that said, the autistic screeching about it is definitely excessive, especially given that I fully expect something like 90% of the idiots screaming about boycotts are going to buy it anyway.

 

That is always going to be the case, that's the beauty of the internet. No excuse for not seeing it coming.

As far as I'm concerned, any damage the drama does to them is just desserts for being cheeky buggers advertising on steam for as long as possible before pulling the bait n switch and making petulent threats to abandon pc entirely if the drama causes any damage to sales. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

 

You claim to hate monopolies, even though Steam and Valve haven't been as such for quite a while now what with GOG, Origin, UPlay, Battlenet, Rockstar Social Club, Bethesda and probably some others existing that I don't know about, but you're perfectly fine with monopolies on games so long as they're not on Steam? Albeit timed monopolies, but still.

In any case, Epic Store isn't competition for Valve and it's not benefiting anyone playing games on the PC in the long run if they support such a poorly managed, barely secure, online service that's owned at least 40% by Tencent, whom I would not trust with a grain of sand, let alone any sort of personal information.

 

Probably nothing, but this was my favorite game back in the day.

Rumors of a Sequel to Jade Empire

This is literally the only thing that would get me to buy an EA Game.

 

Dammit. There is no chance they don’t just defile the corpse.

 

Meme culture is fascinating

The petition to add Shaggy to Mortal Kombat 11 is over 300k signatures

 

See I'm not sure if you mean Shaggy as in Scooby-Doo or Shaggy as in '"It wasn't me.' Not sure which would be worse/better.

 

Ahem, could Shaggy the singer do this?

 

Mister Luva Luva obviously better.