Just because Brave comes out as “the best” on privacy tests doesn’t mean it’s worth it to support a commercial browser that pushes AI, cryptocurrencies, that blocks ads while replacing them with their own locked behind their system that they get a cut from, that added their referral links to websites you visited and only removed them after severe backlash, whose CEO is a notorious homophobe that donated 1000$ to a campaign aiming to ban gay marriage rights in California. Zorin might claim they chose it based on merit and remove a lot of these features from it but they still push people to use it and increase its market share.

The fact that they default to Brave Browser already makes me wary. I have plenty of issues with Mozilla myself, especially their recent trend of integrating AI into the browser but I would rather use a fork or even vanilla Chromium rather than Brave. I know it’s just the default and you can switch easily but the fact they landed on THAT out of all available options doesn’t give me confidence, I would go with Mint instead.

Steam specifically designed the system to make it easier for developers to handle pricing for multiple regions, and in their SteamWorks documentation on pricing for developers in the Regional Pricing Recommendations section they say:

“All of these factors have driven us towards the commitment to refresh these price suggestions on a much more regular cadence, so that we’re keeping pace with economic changes over time.”

yet their suggested pricing has not changed since the program was introduced in 2022. If they don’t want to commit to keeping the pricing up to date, as they themselves promise, then retire the program and make publishers set the price themselves on every game.

Skyrim’s followers have a maximum carry weight and won’t let you trade them any items after they exceed it. That is, if you TRADE them the items! You can just Hold E/talk to them and go into interaction mode and order them to pick up things from the ground. They will happily do so without complains regardless of their carry weight status, extremely helpful for collecting a bunch of dwemer junk to smelt down into ingots for smithing - those things are heavy!

Thank you for your reply! One of my favourite aspects of Morrowind is how I can just walk up to a random NPC and ask them about a generic thing like directions to a place I have to get to, local services available, important NPCs or just their trade or a little secret or advice (and how those act as a soft tutorial with useful gameplay tips often being mentioned). If you actually plan to implement and voice most of these I bow before your ambitions!

I’m actually not that excited about Skywind myself as base Morrowind already has such a lively modding scene that is impossible to migrate over. With OpenMW, Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Cyrodiil the game just keeps getting better and better with time. I fully acknowledge that this is a very subjective opinion but I also feel like Morrowind doesn’t translate over to a Skyrim-style gameplay nearly as well as Oblivion does. So much dialogue and random NPC banter will have to be cut out if they want to voice act every single NPC like they to plan to do.

Worry not, I already played it long ago! I’m patiently and eagerly waiting for them to release the Mod of The Decade edition to re-play it again, I’ll definitely try the city guard path and I’m very excited to see what the teased water mage path will be.

I finished my second playthrough of Drova - Forsaken Kin (wanted to see both of the camps + experience the new content added with the last patch) somewhat recently and it gave me the itch to go back and replay the first two games from the Gothic series. I’m already done with Night of the Raven and making my way through the first game now. Getting them to run smoothly on Linux was a bit of a process but other than that they still hold up incredibly well, at least in my incredibly biased view.

Screw Gothic 3 and 4, this is the real sequel us Gothic fans have been waiting for! A genuine delight to play through, and the Polish voice acting was just as incredible as it was in Gothic 1 and 2, despite being a fan project! Waiting patiently for the Mod of the Decade edition to re-play it again and try out all the new things they add (very excited for the teased mage path!)

That addendum is there purely so Bethesda doesn’t sue their asses to oblivion (heh). I am certain it will be very possible to play the mod on a pirated copy but it’s not like they can just write that on their website.

According to their website:

In order to play Skyblivion you will need to own a legitimate copy of Oblivion GOTY Deluxe (ALL DLC) and Skyrim: Special Edition. Our installer will not install the mod unless it can find a non-cracked copy of the original games.

and

Skyblivion will work the same as most other complete overhaul mods. Simply install the mod via the installer and press play.

So you’ll probably need a pure unmodded version of Skyrim for it to install onto, but we won’t know for sure until the actual release date.

I started playing GW2 at the end of 2023 an been having a blast with it! I played WoW for a decade until the combo of Shadowlands and the Acti-Blizz allegations soured me on that company forever. I tried FFXIV with everyone going over to that game and the story was good but the button bloat pushed me away from really getting into it. I then had that MMO itch at the end of 2023 again and decided to try GW2 and it’s been great. Fun story, good gameplay and most importantly no subscription. It’s so nice to be able to play with breaks and come back whenever you want to with no need to open up your wallet every time, just buy the expansions and Living Worlds once and you are done!

Companies realized they can sell cheats as microtransactions instead and people will pay for them. They will likely also include some cosmetic microtransactions like their previous game, which they definitely don’t want people just cheating in. It’s why so many single player games require being always online as well.

Refresh rate is king. I would much rather use a 1080p 120+Hz monitor over 4k 60Hz. 1440p 144Hz is the sweet spot though, big visual improvement over 1080p without the need to bankrupt yourself on a GPU powerful enough to drive a 4k 120Hz display or relying on upscaling making everything a blurry mess.

Yeah, I was very dissapointed by that as well. As far as I’m aware, the only time it matters is when

Big shame that’s all that remains of this system.

Yeah, stuffing more worms into your brain being purely a beneficial mechanic with no drawbacks is a very weird choice. This whole system was honestly better in early access than it ended up being, having the tadpoles be just a dialogue option with a very easy check but consequences the more you used them. The ring that Omeluum gives you was even supposed to help, only to get changes into a boring Charm resistance ring on release.

This looks much better than the last trailer, I appreciate how so many of the animations are clearly inspired by the janky but charming original ones. My biggest complaint from the Teaser was the overly talkative player character. Don’t turn the Nameless Hero into your bog standard “must comment on literally everything that happens” character so many modern games have.

I’ll reserve my final judgment until 2nd of August and the THQ Nordic Showcase but the playable teaser they released doesn’t leave me optimistic either.

The remake is still happening as it’s developed by Alkimia Interactive and published by THQ Nordic, Pyranha Bytes had nothing to do with it.

Modding is one of those few gaming things that still remains a massive pain on Linux compared to doing it on Windows, if they actually commit to supporting Linux and making sure it works on Wine/Proton games as well this would be massive! I’ve been modding my games manually ever since switching but having a mod manager is just so so so much nicer.