Ran

A look at Dogtown's Black Market with Pawel Sasko, with some little details about the sorts of things you can find there, followed by an interview with Keanu about the game, Johnny, and Dogtown's boss Kurt Hansen.

It depends on what your setup is like. There's a lot of benchmarking videos out there that give a sense of how it performs on various Nvidia and AMD cards, at various resolutions and settings.

Developers breakdown the trailer.

It's been noted that Sasko misspoke when discussing the new car theft gigs, claiming it was Mama Welles who was assigning then. Per CDPR, it's Wakako who gives those missions and has the car market. ETA: Another preview, explicit about the fact that Phantom Liberty is basically a new main story quest hub, like the Rogue and Panam/Nomad stories, and like those it will add new endings to the story. Another video I just saw had the guy asking the devs if players should start new characters and get them levelled up to a certain point so they can launch into the DLC immediately, and apparently the devs encourage a completely fresh start because of how wide-ranging the system updates are. So, September 26th,.new sword-slinging street kid V for me.

Ditto. Looks like people seem to have it confirmed that the DLC will provide additional possible endings to the game, as well. I wonder how re-vamped the fight with Adam Smasher will be, too? Always felt like by the time I got to him I could just drop him with little trouble, but that was because the power curve of the game was rather out of whack and it sounds like they've tried to rebalance things. ETA: Someone on the LowSodiumCyberpunk Reddit has tried to put together a short run-down of all the changes (while noting that the changes are just all from the update that comes from the DLC, and even people without the DLC will get them)

Some more impressions, with an added note that quest designer Pavel Sasko (who has been a great emissary for CDPR, talking to fans via his Twitch livestreams) is part of the group moving to the US base of operations for CDPR with the intention of starting work on a CP2077 sequel.

I think the skill tree/perk changes are legit sounding pretty significant. Relic points sounded interesting but in a more narrow way, super-charging cybernetics. RPS also has an article, focusing on the FPS gun mechanics feeling bit meatier.

Some hands-on impressions:

V: Yes. Yes, I am.

Official trailer! Release date is September 26th.

Nice! And not so long since Sasquan, too.

Probably. They've been doing this lately, with Stranger Things for example.

Also from leaks, apparently someone found the image for pre-orders on GOG, and the price is listed as 29.99 euros.

Live tour that will allow attendees to check out Phantom Liberty. Also saw a report that CDPR says that next year they'll start assigning developers to very early pre-production and research for the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel.

Has someone new gotten the Conan license?

From George's original Iron Islands piece for TWoIaF, which was written after he had written the Dance material, just before we locked the book: That was inconsistent with what he had written before, but we had supposed that whatever he wrote last superceded what came previously, and so TWoIaF was published with Kayce having been taken. However, with F&B, yes, George decided to go back with his earlier version (i.e. it's what he had written in the Dance material originally), where Joanna Lannister and the westerlords were able to rescue Kayce from being captured. We've a long-standing note that we've sent in to RH about fixing that in a later edition ("nearly captured Kayce" is I think the wording we suggested) but I'm not sure if it's gone through.

Seems like a cookie issue. If you look at cookies in (for Chrome) Settings -> Privacy and Security -> Cookies and other data -> See all site data and permissions, expand the westeros.org section, clear the wiki of ice and fire cookies, restart browser, then log in, it should work. Fixed.

Joe notes that a lot can still derail it. But having a director and a lead actor attached is further along than just being in development.

Blade Itself. But at Abercrombie said, they've been trying to get something done. It seems like at that time, it was a proposed tv series (at least, he said it wasn't a film)

Huh. Makes me think those photos from a writer’s room in Studio Culver City from a few years back was put together and possibly led by Miller. Very cool. ETA: Huh, came in to link that thread once I was home, and I see the top response is Mark Lawrence saying that a year ago (i.e. 6 years ago) he was told the Deadpool director was trying to make it happen. So, I guess that's a yes?

Joe adapted Neal Asher's story, "Mason's Rats".

I wonder if his writing a script for Love, Death, and Robots was a hint they were already talking, or if it put the ball in motion...

I am not questioning that figure, as I said. I think it eminently plausible that the books have sold over 2 million copies per year these last two years because of the show. But to me, this means that the number in years prior to the show must have been substantially lower than these 90 million+ figures suggest. I am questioning the figures in the past, though, and the overall global sales mark given now. They do not make sense to me. This is a book series that was tracking at an average of 1.3 million a year in the US, when Sanderson came on, and then we're supposed to believe that his book sales for two books alone were on the order of 12.5 million copies -- maybe we halve that for the US, so 6 million, or 3 million per book, more than double the mark of any previous book outside, presumably, EotW and a couple of the other starting novels -- when we have PW's sales data from distributor channels suggesting that none of his books outsold their print runs, selling like 500k copies each in hardcover, and people years after the fact still getting first print first editions of these books when they order them. From personal knowledge, audio books and e-books are not the hidden secret extra sauce explaining all these other editions that are supposed to have appeared. You mention some place like India being an expanding market. Maybe, but how expanding is it? EotW there has a Fantasy sales rank of 1752... and TWoIaF has a rank of 790, and TRotD has one of #970. The difference between them is even larger in the US Amazon, where EotW is like at 8400 in books (paperback edition) and TWoIaF and TRotD are in the 5500-6000 range. I can tell you that these are not numbers that give you millions of books sold in a year, even when extrapolated from my 2 books vs. the Jordan/Sanderson 14 (15 I guess if we add New Spring?). Hundreds of thousands? Yes, but not millions. If that indicates that between seasons sales are returning to the previous mean, it blows a genuine hole in the "100 million sales" news. We probably shouldn't, to be honest. I've never touted anyone's sales figures outside of what has been published in PW (drawn from distributors), revealed through Bookscan, etc. I trust the 2007 figure that Tor gave, because it was in line with every figure they gave before that point, that the books were selling a little over a million copies from installment to installment. The immense jump allegedly due to Sanderson, when the actual figures we get from PW are nowhere like them, is where the shenanigans started, and the only source we have on that 12.5 million copies, IIRC, is his agent who transmitted that data to you. That, and the 2007 press release being read to mean 44 million copies sold in the US, are where things have gone awry. I can't answer for why Tor's marketing department might willfully blinker itself to sustain untrue figures.

My own take was that in 2007, the NA+rest of the world sales were ~30 million, that with Sanderson's books completed the global number became something more like ~45 million and then we have these new figures. So: 2007: 30 million 2015: 45 million 2020: 50 million 2022: ~55 million. Or, if we believe the new figures are NA only and assume the typical doubling, ~60 million. I still fundamentally believe that that "44 million US figure" (an erroneous understanding of 2007's 14 million in North America and "over 30 million" globally) became doubled by the French publishers in promoting the book as having sold over 90 million copies globally (after all, if they believed the US had sold 44 million copies, it was natural to assume that globally the total was going to be about twice that), and that this number has become a new baseline for marketing, who can just ask how many copies the books have sold since they last quoted the 90 million figure, get the bean counters to tell them they'd sold 5 million copies US in the intervening time, and then they go ahead and double that number, and voila, now it's sold over 100 million copies.

I've been questioning the WoT numbers for awhile. They don't make sense to me. For instance, in this post I point out that the claimed sales went from 30 million to 90 million in the span of 14 years. If that were true, the series averaged 4 million copies sold each and every one of those years, despite (outside of the Sanderson years) none of these books appearing on PW's lists which tracked books that sold 50k or more (which you'd expect EotW to be doing at least at times to justify the sales figure)... and if that's a US+Globe figure, we're still talking roughly half of that (~2 million) was being sold in the US alone every year. But we're being told now that the big Amazon-related boost hast pushed sales to that number of ~2 million a year? It doesn't add up, unless you suppose they are being honest now about the bump... but have somewhere in the past been dishonest about the overall sales figure, such that the yearly sales were under, say, ~1 million per year over that span of time. I have no problem believing this number they give for the Amazon-related boost, but it's pretty obvious that the global sales number has been grossly inflated somewhere along the line.