chakkman

I wouldn't call them "hardcore stealth", they're rather fast stealth, but, yeah, great games I only can recommend if you didn't play them yet. Arx Fatalis is great too, but, it has some serious balancing problems. Some quests and parts of the games are very easy, while others are way too hard. And, the magic where you have to hand draw the runes is also pretty questionable. In hectic situations, you just aren't able to draw the runes. It's already difficult when there's no hectic. Yes, you have 3 auto spells, but, that's not nearly enough. From Arkane Studios, I also can recommend Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. It's really good.

Dishonored would be the first game I'd recommend to someone with TDM withdrawal symptoms.

Next week, Epic Store has this freebie, which looks interesting: https://store.epicgames.com/de/p/call-of-the-sea

Completing a game demands from you, though. It requires to invest time and effort, and also dealing with things in the game which are not so much to your liking, or dealing with obvious flaws. Which the kids often don't do. That's also why many games have such an action packed first game hour these days: To prevent the kids from throwing the gamepad at the wall, because the game is so "booooring".

Could be due to the difference in gameplay. TBH, I found the rogue like (I think that's what it's called?) gameplay of Prey Mooncrash pretty frustrating and offputting. I loved the original game, but, Mooncrash didn't motivate me longer than half an hour. BTW, a 50% rate of people who finished the game for Dishonored is amazing. Most games are much less frequently finished by the players. TBH, I think that rather comes down to the maturity of players though. The audience is different to other games.

It's probably a massive task these days to develop an engine in-house which is up to par to, say, Unreal Engine. The advantages of an own engine are that you can modify it to your needs, and that you're 100% familiar with it. One of my favorite racing simulation developers, Kunos Simulazioni, switched from their own engine to Unreal Engine for their game Assetto Corsa Comeptizione. They had some real issues in the beginning, and, you can also see that the engine is not 100% perfect for these kind of games, and that they had to apply tricks to make it work for them. It's also not the most performant game, which is probably a combination of the elaborate driving physics calculations, and the lack of familiarity with the engine in general. But, they seem to have run into a dead end with their own engine, as there were issues with the lighting and stuff. As far as I've always read, more and more developers rely on third party engines, development frameworks etc. to make their work easier and better. It also happens in audio software: A lot of developers use frameworks to develop their audio plugins, like JUCE. They simply don't want to mess with the low level OS stuff, or develop their own framework to provide different plugin formats for different hosts and OS's. And, those frameworks also provide GUI resizability or preset management out of the box. In most cases, it will be a time and cost efficiency consideration. Also, of course, because such projects become more and more complex. I often scratch my head these days how huge and complex games have become. TBH, often for pretty useless things, like almost photo realistic graphics, or thousands of random items, or random tasks you can do in the game.

I wonder if they still plan to further develop SS3, or if they ditched it completely. Would be a shame. Although it's pretty questionable if the people involved would have released something decent anyway... Underworld Ascendant (which is Unity as well, BTW) really was very bad.

Mostly mobile games, I think. That said, Unity not necessarily means bad performance. Ghost of a Tale is made in Unity as well, and the graphics are great, and it's also performing well.

Same here, if you need some more people.

I just found out that a new Amnesia game is coming: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1944430/Amnesia_The_Bunker/ I really like their games, although I kinda hated Amnesia: Rebirth (I don't really need games which "immerse" me by breastfeeding children (yikes!)). Penumbra, Dark Descent and SOMA were great though, so, looking forward to this one.

Gotta try it again then. Admittedly, I only ever tried the survival mode. Think I'm rather into exploration in such games anyway.

One thing all those suvival games have in common is that they're too hectic. As if you'd have to work non stop to be fed, have a shelter, and if there were a hundred thousand threats everywhere all the time. I don't know if there's any survival game which is a bit more relaxed, and not so much catered to nowadays' ADHD audience. Would like to try a game which is more that way.

Not that I'd want to worry anyone, but, I've had a bit of a mess with fans in my latest computers... in my current desktop PC, I now had to replace the chassis fans, because the pre-installed ones which came with the case produced a really nasty (although pretty quiet) sine wave like noise which drove me insane. Thankfully the fans I ordered and installed now are as silent as it gets. My graphics card is currently in a warranty repair/replacement case with the shop I ordered the PC from as well, as the left fan is making ticking noise around a specific speed (~1.900 RPM). I recently bought a laptop as well, which I had to send in to repair the main fan, because that one was broken as well. I really don't know what they do with those fans that they mess up so often. Again, don't want to worry you @datiswous. I'm sure you'll be fine with the parts you order. Just saying that I had some really bad luck recently with the fans in my computers.

Ok, although I would do it the other way around (upgrade graphics card first). Your 1050 Ti won't do much with modern games. It will be the bottleneck when you upgrade to a faster CPU and more RAM.

Which graphics card are you going for? That's the most important component for a gaming PC. TBH, I would almost start with that, before thinking about the other components. Especially for TDM, by the way. As far as I know, it heavily relies on the GPU.

I own System Shock Enhanced Edition, and played it briefly some months ago. Didn't really click with me. The controls were too ancient for me. I think I'm rather remake audience in this case.

Did any of you play the new System Shock Remake demo? I must say that I'm very impressed with it. Miles better than the first demo they released some years ago. Was really fun to play through. Hyped for the release (I pre-ordered in the meantime).

Hmm.... then I must have misunderstood it. Thought the only change is the animation/indication. Still seems pretty finicky though. Edit: After reading a few pages of the linked thread, I must admit that I still don't fully understand what the changes are. Sounds like Obsttorte wanted to change the way the blackjack works directionally (i.e. that blackjacking from the front doesn't work anymore), but, it seems like some other members intervened and argued that the rules should not be changed, so, I'm puzzled about what has actually changed, apart from the indicator animation. From playing, I would say that the changes, if any, are very subtle.

Well, unlike the original Thief's, the TDM blackjacking always has been ultra finicky. It's still finicky (obviously, as there hasn't been changed anything under the hood about the hit mechanics), but, at least you get a clue now. I still missed yesterday though, when suddenly and immediate, the blackjack went down again, and I didn't have any idea why, once again. But, it's an awful lot better than before, because I actually know and can see now when I can safely blackjack the guard. TDS actually positioned the guard as well when you initiate the blackjacking. Not sure what the technical reasons behind that were. The hit box (if you can talk about that) wasn't nearly as precarious as in TDM as well. Now that you can see when you actually can safe knock out a guard in TDM, you can see how precisely the distance and angle has to be. Which is pretty awkward, considering that you can't really judge distances on a single monitor. It's not 3D in the same way as VR.

Wow, the blackjack indicator is absolutely excellent, great job guys. This will make blackjacking a lot more reliable here. The animation is also very subtle, which I like.

I LOVE the TDS soundtrack. Just recently played the game through, an absolute cracker in terms of atmosphere.

Well, that was exactly what I said. IMO, the market for stealth games or "immersive sims" rather shrunk, proportionally. Most (all?) publishers won't even touch anything stealth or "immersive sim". I think it's pretty distinctive what Ken Levine said, for example. That he feeds on crumbs falling off AAA titles' table.

I saw this a few days ago. PvP/multiplayer is no-no for me though.

The games market in general has grown exponentially. Most play action games or "RPG's" like Assassins Creed though, so, I'm very doubtful that the percentual amount of people playing "immersive sims" (I don't like that genre designation at all, it says nothing about the kind of game really) is higher than it used to be. Steamspy for Deathloop (which is probably the best to compare as it wasn't sold for peanuts yet) says 500.000 to 1.000.000 owners, which sounds high, but, if you compare it to the really popular games, it's a fraction. IIRC, Dishonored 2 was lower at that point, which makes me think that Deathloop is more popular because it's a more modern setting with guns in it. By the way, you may know the game Myst. It used to be the most popular game world wide. Could you imagine that game being the most popular these days? The market has changed, people have changed. To be fair though, one has to say that video games used to be something for nerds, while the market has vastly opened up, of course, with especially console gamers making a big part of the market nowadays.

I'm happy when I find those as well. Let's just say that it's gotten increasingly more difficult over the years. I was really happy about Penumbra, Amnesia The Dark Descent and SOMA, for example, because, I wasn't at all convinced that I would like them. Turned out I liked them, a lot. Especially Amnesia Dark Descent was a really nice experience (and a very nicely rounded game in general, where you notice that a lot of thought was put into the game, and that it just "makes sense"). I think those are still niche games though. But, I guess so am I now. Niche.