I think the best we can do about the ROG XBox Ally X is buying a regular ROG Ally X, format it and install Steam OS or Linux. That way we have an excellent piece of hardware without the pesky Windows stuff.
Agreed! The coverage I’ve seen suggests that the Ally’s build quality and ergonomics are great if not top-of-class. As long as the price is right, I’m sure it’ll find a niche among hackers and enthusiasts who might otherwise pull the trigger on a Steam Deck or even an AYANEO.
I'm not even a CoD hater: I actually quite like the series but at this point I don't know what could convince me to buy one save a remaster of the original Black Ops. it has run its course threefold.
That tag line from the BLOPS announcement about "weaponizing fear" just made me think wistfully about MGS4's weird, maybe hallucinatory mechanics about using chemical weapons to induce certain mental states like fear and despair in enemies. It'd be cool if a game that made you play it for more than 3 minutes at a time between cutscenes did something with that idea.
Regarding your query about KDC DLC - I just finished the Brushes With Death story a week or so ago, and I found it to be right up there with the best sidequests in the game otherwise, albeit not necessarily something I would call 'essential' to the game. When looking back at the first game's extra content, I believe we're getting a similar collection of ideas in the sequel, although in a slightly different order. BWD reminds me most of The Amorous Adventures of Bold Sir Hans Capon, which was KCD1's second story DLC, while the upcoming Legacy of the Forge looks to be very similar to From the Ashes, which was the first DLC for KCD1, and had you managing the rebuilding efforts for a lost town [incidentally, the very place YOU were supposed to have ejected Runt from, if you could ever get your shit together!] just as you're apparently going to be building up a business in Kuttenberg in the new one. Finally, the first game had 'Band of Bastards' which was mostly combat, and "A Woman's Lot" which was pretty divisive, mostly because people accidentally started it and thought the game had forced them into it, but very important, if for no other reason than it introduced Mutt, the dog companion who is a significant part of KCD2.
I'm trying to wrap up my first playthrough BEFORE Legacy of the Forge comes out, because I don't want to get tied up in it and drag my first playthrough out any more than I already have, and because I want to let the game sit for a while before picking it back up again once all the DLCs are out and I'm ready to do a hardcore run. And the main thing I'm waiting for is what I presume to be the sequel's counterpart to A Woman's Lot, which will almost certainly involve all those church interiors people conspiratorially insisted the game was secretly anti-Christian for having them be inaccessible, just as so many spaces that were eerily barren at release were filled in with Brushes With Death. I'm hoping it's heavily focused on the ecclesiastic life, maybe even with additional play time as Father Godwin, the way part of A Woman's Lot was seen through the eyes of Theresa.
And regarding Daimon Blades - I didn't even realize it had GOTTEN a moment at Gamecom. I didn't see a single person mention it afterwards, I didn't see any notification in the Steam News feed, and I only skimmed some of the trailer compilations. The Steam News thing is especially frustrating - I can check the library page for E.Y.E and if I go to it's 'news' feed manually, I can scroll up to find the 'cross promotion' post they made announcing the store page and trailer, but it doesn't show up at all in the general News feed. I don't know if it's a mistake from the developers for tagging the post in such a way as to not get looped in properly, or if it's something on Valve's end, but while I find it pretty reliable for keeping track of new releases and developers I have my eye on, I've had one or two similar problems in the past. Most memorably, the fifth and final Skautfold game by Pugware released without me ever hearing a single peep about it, until I looked myself and realized it had come out six months earlier. At the time, the developer was complaining that he'd been somehow sidelined by the inscrutable machinations of the algorithms, and if it was anyone else I'd chalk that up to scapegoating, but I'm pretty sure I'm the one person on the planet that should have heard about the last Skautfold game releasing.
No worries — now that I've blitzed through Just Cause 3 way ahead of schedule, KCD is my next reinstall for sure. Thanks for the thorough breakdown of the DLC, by the way! Good to know that Warhorse has its ducks in a row given the considerably greater hype around the sequel. Watch this space, I'm sure I'll have plenty to say about the whole enterprise over the next few weeks.
And yeah, Daimon Blades' lack of purchase on the discourse is kind of startling. I've gradually come to accept over the years that E.Y.E was not the universally beloved classic that I like to think of it as, but the fact that you can't even find the announcement for the new one without digging is just straight-up weird. Even the news outlets that you'd expect to carefully index every last announcement seem mostly to have missed it altogether. It reeks of some communications failure, but God only knows where along the line it happened.
I think the best we can do about the ROG XBox Ally X is buying a regular ROG Ally X, format it and install Steam OS or Linux. That way we have an excellent piece of hardware without the pesky Windows stuff.
Agreed! The coverage I’ve seen suggests that the Ally’s build quality and ergonomics are great if not top-of-class. As long as the price is right, I’m sure it’ll find a niche among hackers and enthusiasts who might otherwise pull the trigger on a Steam Deck or even an AYANEO.
I'm not even a CoD hater: I actually quite like the series but at this point I don't know what could convince me to buy one save a remaster of the original Black Ops. it has run its course threefold.
That tag line from the BLOPS announcement about "weaponizing fear" just made me think wistfully about MGS4's weird, maybe hallucinatory mechanics about using chemical weapons to induce certain mental states like fear and despair in enemies. It'd be cool if a game that made you play it for more than 3 minutes at a time between cutscenes did something with that idea.
Regarding your query about KDC DLC - I just finished the Brushes With Death story a week or so ago, and I found it to be right up there with the best sidequests in the game otherwise, albeit not necessarily something I would call 'essential' to the game. When looking back at the first game's extra content, I believe we're getting a similar collection of ideas in the sequel, although in a slightly different order. BWD reminds me most of The Amorous Adventures of Bold Sir Hans Capon, which was KCD1's second story DLC, while the upcoming Legacy of the Forge looks to be very similar to From the Ashes, which was the first DLC for KCD1, and had you managing the rebuilding efforts for a lost town [incidentally, the very place YOU were supposed to have ejected Runt from, if you could ever get your shit together!] just as you're apparently going to be building up a business in Kuttenberg in the new one. Finally, the first game had 'Band of Bastards' which was mostly combat, and "A Woman's Lot" which was pretty divisive, mostly because people accidentally started it and thought the game had forced them into it, but very important, if for no other reason than it introduced Mutt, the dog companion who is a significant part of KCD2.
I'm trying to wrap up my first playthrough BEFORE Legacy of the Forge comes out, because I don't want to get tied up in it and drag my first playthrough out any more than I already have, and because I want to let the game sit for a while before picking it back up again once all the DLCs are out and I'm ready to do a hardcore run. And the main thing I'm waiting for is what I presume to be the sequel's counterpart to A Woman's Lot, which will almost certainly involve all those church interiors people conspiratorially insisted the game was secretly anti-Christian for having them be inaccessible, just as so many spaces that were eerily barren at release were filled in with Brushes With Death. I'm hoping it's heavily focused on the ecclesiastic life, maybe even with additional play time as Father Godwin, the way part of A Woman's Lot was seen through the eyes of Theresa.
And regarding Daimon Blades - I didn't even realize it had GOTTEN a moment at Gamecom. I didn't see a single person mention it afterwards, I didn't see any notification in the Steam News feed, and I only skimmed some of the trailer compilations. The Steam News thing is especially frustrating - I can check the library page for E.Y.E and if I go to it's 'news' feed manually, I can scroll up to find the 'cross promotion' post they made announcing the store page and trailer, but it doesn't show up at all in the general News feed. I don't know if it's a mistake from the developers for tagging the post in such a way as to not get looped in properly, or if it's something on Valve's end, but while I find it pretty reliable for keeping track of new releases and developers I have my eye on, I've had one or two similar problems in the past. Most memorably, the fifth and final Skautfold game by Pugware released without me ever hearing a single peep about it, until I looked myself and realized it had come out six months earlier. At the time, the developer was complaining that he'd been somehow sidelined by the inscrutable machinations of the algorithms, and if it was anyone else I'd chalk that up to scapegoating, but I'm pretty sure I'm the one person on the planet that should have heard about the last Skautfold game releasing.
No worries — now that I've blitzed through Just Cause 3 way ahead of schedule, KCD is my next reinstall for sure. Thanks for the thorough breakdown of the DLC, by the way! Good to know that Warhorse has its ducks in a row given the considerably greater hype around the sequel. Watch this space, I'm sure I'll have plenty to say about the whole enterprise over the next few weeks.
And yeah, Daimon Blades' lack of purchase on the discourse is kind of startling. I've gradually come to accept over the years that E.Y.E was not the universally beloved classic that I like to think of it as, but the fact that you can't even find the announcement for the new one without digging is just straight-up weird. Even the news outlets that you'd expect to carefully index every last announcement seem mostly to have missed it altogether. It reeks of some communications failure, but God only knows where along the line it happened.