IlyaP

We now have a cover for Neal Stephenson's next novel, Polostan, which is the first book in the Bomb Light Trilogy: (Still hate the name of this book. Polostan? What is this, an independent country founded by the owners of Polo and Banana Republic?!)

Really enjoying The Tortured Poets Department, which has some interesting production credits, including from Aaron Dessner from The National. It's perhaps a bit much at 31 tracks, and some tracks could have been dropped, but there's some clear lyrical growth on display here. The Tortured Poets Department, Clara Bow, I Look in People's Windows, Cassandra, and Peter are all terrific, and the vocals, particularly in Clara Bow, remind me a bit of Megan Washington's early material. Lots of good stuff to enjoy here.

The first gameplay footage for Riven 3D has dropped and I am very excited.

There was a lack of communication overlap between Edmonton and Gothenburg, and no tools in place to foster improved information sharing, and no teams in-between both timezones, to allow for an overlap in communications and creative production. Not sure if Slack, Teams, Jira, Trello, Miro, and Mural were in place back then to faciliate the kind of workflow management needed to get the best out of everyone.

Four offices/teams across Europe and North America and over 250 staff members? With enough smart project management and good communcation tools, I can see how it'd be feasible to manage two projects and organise production pipelines and project milestones.

Any takers for the other game's name? I'm going with....Divinity: Beyond Sin. What's beyond sin? Wouldn't *you* like to know?!

It...works out of the box as far as I know, and even just installing the Fallout Fixt patch will resolve any existing problems?

I think it's a thing he stole from Hitchcock in his youth and never abandoned.

If only she had the chutzpuh to study sculpture at St. Martin's College.

No love for Fallout 1/2, Wert?

Could Fallout 1/2 be played on the Steamdeck? (I have no idea, don't own one my self, but this sub-discussion is interesting, and gives me ideas for friends who own Steamdecks.)

Amalur for the win! Love that game.

'Brought to you by Ubisoft!'

Pentiment took me about 27 hours and I'm pretty sure I'll be right back into it in a few weeks after I've taken a break to catch up on some reading. Solasta: Crown of the Magister, which replicates a TTRPG experience masterfully (and with the same level of silly, cavalier glee as BG3) took about 30 hours to do the main campaign - and I got to make my own party, which I really like doing (I loved doing that in IWD, and writing character bios and the like for each of them). With the expansions/DLCs, it's closer to about 70 hours? But they're not mandatory, and the main screen separates them into different "modules" if you will, that you can access at any point during the game. Wonderful stuff, really. Still my favorite 5e game.

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla takes about 170 hours if you include the DLCs, and about 110 if you include just the base game.

He means the cake is a lie. Right Rod?!

Nah. The kid enjoys it, and I'm a big fan of it as well. But as you said - it's ultimatelly a pointless discussion and I know he means favorite when he says best, I'm just trying to get him to savvy that. It's a fine enough game, that I did three playthroughs to try different stuff out. Won't ever be in my top ten, but it's also not a game that speaks to my tastes, but it doesn't have to be.

Downloading the demo right now, as I think I'd heard of it but never really investigated it. It looks like it has a more complex UI than Pentiment (which I honestly found the need to use) but will definitely give the demo a whirl tonight! Thank you for the recommendation!

It's also just a weird thing to try and quantify full stop where art and personal preferences are concerned. No one asks "what's the best painting of all time?" because that's a preposterous and fundamentally useless question. Why does one thing have to be The Best Thing? This sport-like competitive drive isn't fundamentally germane or relevant to the domain of art and aesthetics. (I blame you, capitalism!) Pull the camera back, and instead, enjoy the tapestry of things we've created, rather than zooming in on one thing and one thing only and planting a flag on it.

Would be quite something to say I dislike a game I've already played through 3 times over the course of 200 hours.

What about them, exactly? I've seen them in several other cRPGs. They're fine, but they don't affect the minute to minute mechanics and narrative options in the gameworld space in any real serious way the majority of the time, unless you've done something that leads to a party member leaving. (Also, I noticed that trying to have a hireling-based party? It's basically just a bunch of rag dolls Withers controls, which is narratively intruisive, and basically telling the player "don't use them", which I found irksome, given the number of cRPGs that let me make my own party.)

I remember when Fallout came out and reviewers yelled out "best RPG ever!". And then BG2 came out in 2000. "BEST. RPG. EVER!" And then KOTOR landed in 2003. "OMG! Most amazing crpg of all time!" And so on. This "best rpg ever!" routine is nothing new - it's just history repeating itself. In a few years' time, some new RPG will come along that will outshine BG3 and we'll hear the same thing all over again. And for those of us who've played an absolutely massive amount of RPGs, we know there's nothing new in BG3 that we haven't seen before in Ultima VI or Ultima VII, as @Derfel Cadarn mentioned. Or in Dragon Age: Origin, which is what BG3 really feels like very often to me. (And turn-based combat? Automatic point against BG3.) Hell, the game can't even do day/night cycles (which many of us observed was missing in Dragon Age III after seeing it in DA1/2), while many of its contemporaries can, because it would cause scripting issues, as stated by Swen himself. There's really not a whole lot in BG3 that's unique or new, it's just all done *nicely* and with a banger of a score that's basically DOS2 v.2.0 by Borislov Slavov. But in terms of build options? Pathfinder 2 beats it hands down. Better lore? Pillars and Morrowind. Other games with emergent gameplay options? Ultima VII. Better writing? Planescape: Torment, Fallout: New Vegas, NWN 2: Mask of the Betrayer. Better UI? BG2/Pillars 1/2/Solasta. Better interpretation of 5th edition rules? Solasta. Better plots? Chrono Trigger, Anachronox. Better ending outcomes (eg variety of Actually Different Endings): Wolf Among Us, Walking Dead Game. Better meaningful character roleplaying options? Disco Elysium by a mile and a half. BG3 is a perfectly entertaining game, but there's nothing in it that players of a wider range of cRPGs haven't already seen, and sometimes seen done better. It's a fun game, but I've lived enough to have seen this "best rpg" shtick several times in my life. It's happened before. It's happening now. It'll happen again.

Even Swen thinks poorly of DOS1. It's...fine?! But the DOS games are more about mechanics exploitation, multiplayer co-op, and emergent gameplay than roleplaying. And DOS1 is also pretty railroady, with no real build choices and very meh gameplay. It's...fine? But not spectacular.

I am adding Pentiment to this list, as I have had a more meaningful and thoughtful rpg experience from that game than anything in years - in part because I can't savescum my way out of a "maximising" situation. The game doesn't let me do that because it learned all the right lessons from Deathloop. And the choices/consequences allow for numerous divergent narrative and character relation outcomes - eg "Your statement will be remembered" and whar background history choicea you choose decides how certain secondary, tertiary, and quaternary stories play out. It's vunderbar and has made for a meaningful and rich experience. This is one of the most interesting and dialogue-rich games I have seen in a long time.

There is no best rpg. Every game and studio builds off what came before, and is in a dialogue with its contemporary audience, seeking to experiment and evolve based on existing technologies. There is no best in art. There are instead works that lasted the test of time. Something can be insanely popular In The Moment but be forgotten over time. Not many remember Gorasul but we remember Planescape, for example. Recency Bias as Ran said is correct, as is our blinkered cognitive bias wherein we forget our personal yardstick for measurement is universally correct and applicable to others, who have different tastes and expectations. There's no best crpg, basically. There's no virtue or point in chasing such elusive clickbaity designations when art by its own nature is a subjective and deeply personal experience. You might like Mark Rothko, but his "classic" paintings still leave me cold.