What happened with the escapist? Can’t say I even paid much attention, but I’ve been a follower of Zero Punctuation and Yahtzee’s handful of novels for years.

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Kingdom Come : Deliverance is basically if Skyrim took place in a ren faire. No magic, no fantasy, just dudes in armor completing tasks for the local lords and monasteries.

Any of the fable games are decent at least; some are better than others. Personally felt the series peaked with 2.

You likely already know about the elder scrolls games, but there was a clone series called Two Worlds that were… interesting? Not fantastic, but good ideas and worth a shot.

If you haven’t played all the Witcher games they are likely exactly what you’re looking for. Personally haven’t played 1, but 2,3 are excellent.

Dragons age 1 and inquisition are good. Might be too turn based for your preference as the fights involve many party members.

Then there’s the From soft games; darksouls, etc. No real story to speak of, but very dark medieval fantasy.

Bungie’s Halo soundtracks were iconic and can be laid at the feet of Marty and Michael.

I had heard that Marty was difficult to work with, but it’s crazy that you wouldn’t try to retain the talent that got your brand to live in millions of people’s heads rent free.

Even stranger from Sony’s perspective. If you bought an expensive race car and the first thing you start doing is throwing away the expensive parts in favor of cheaper ones, you no longer own a race car. You own something that looks like it, but can’t perform.

I had a gigabyte gaming laptop and overall it was a great value… after I fixed the graphics card drivers and updated the motherboard bios. Nothing worked right out of the box new.

If you’re just using the laptop as a browser/ ms office machine for school or something I can’t recommend the Microsoft surface tablet line enough. I’ve used a surface 3 for years for that purpose.

They don’t want to compromise battery in favor of performance and I agree. With smaller games like Hades or cult of the lamb my steam deck battery will last and last. On more demanding games like cyberpunk or Armored Core I get a little over an hour out of it best case scenario.

Beefier graphics hardware will only make that issue worse.

There’s a power levelling method found in many Bethesda games. I’m interested if modern Bethesda will patch this on let it stay in the game for players that want the end game experience quickly.

Cranky because they didn’t let you seduce the dragon, huh?

I think many ambitious games recently get divisive ratings. I remember many cyberpunk 2077 reviews rated it highly praising the (imo excellent) highs while minimizing the lows before many reviewers bashed it for the bugs and incomplete scope. When these reviews come out it almost feels like the reviewers are scared to be the first to open the “hey it’s bad” floodgates

That’s funny, Warframe definitely has a grind to it, but I remember the combat being a joy with excellent flow. (I haven’t played in like 8 years so take that with a grain of salt)