Werthead

I think that's a nod to the game, where you can get flattened by a deathclaw in combat, quickly take a stimpak, and then be absolutely fine. I mean, you can get your leg blown clean off, hit the stimpak, and be magically fine immediately with no explanation of what the hell happened to your limb. Fallout has only passing familiarity with physical realism.

PF2 handles this excellently. The entire game is built around the three-action economy, so at Level 1 you can attack three times - if you don't want to move or do anything else - and at Level 20 it's the same. But that can be adjusted through the acquisition of feats, weapon styles (monks and flurry swordsmen can get extra attacks at the cost of attack bonus per attack) and the use of magic (haste, obviously). An interesting twist is that as you level up you're more likely to do things to increase AC or get reactions that don't use an action, so you can use your base actions more for attack (so at Level 1 you're more likely to use 1 action for attack, 1 to move and 1 to quaff a potion, whilst at Level 20 you're tough enough to not need potions as much and you can move through a reaction trigger, so you attack three times instead). That was incredibly controversial when PF2 launched, given PF1 and 3E before it had handled things by giving you an extra attack every few levels for the better part of twenty years, but most people don't even notice it now. Spells there's no helping. My firm belief is that spells that rewrite reality, allow you to time travel, etc are simply far too powerful and unbalancing to be in the game in the first place, but it's too ingrained now to remove. We can blame the total non-existence of 1970s playtesting for that.

Both Horizon games are solid from the POV of having very solid plots and pretty good characters and factions. What makes them outstanding are the robot animals/dinosaurs, working out how to bring each one down (although each type has one reliable trick to do it and it can get a bit easy to do that; Dark Souls, this is not) and the extremely interesting, well thought-out backstory/worldbuilding. As well as the great graphics. They are fairly linear though, and you're really just moving around the order of the quests you do. The advancement trees are okay, but not too special. There are some dialogue choices but I believe they have zero impact on anything that actually happens in the game. There is one possible romance choice that happens right at the very end of the expansion to the second game, about 120-ish hours into the franchise. The compression of the map is also very, very silly (walking around a Boston that's 1/8 the size of the real thing in Fallout 4 is fine because the illusion is easier to sell; the Mojave Desert being about 400 metres wide in Forbidden West, and being able to see El Capitan from the tallest tower in Vegas, not so much). They're are very much action games first and foremost and RPGs a very long, distant second. So they're more Far Cry (3-5) in that respect than, say, Cyberpunk 2077 (for all the moaning about it, it is an RPG, and actually far more of an RPG than The Witcher 3), let alone Baldur's Gate. I actually respected Far Cry 6 a lot for actually saying, "Fuck it, we're not an RPG, let's stop pretending to be an RPG and go back to just being an action game," and putting progression mechanics into being able to upgrade weapons a bit. The crafting system in Horizon is optional, pretty barebones and rather simple. It can be almost completely ignored. The game also drowns you in money, so you can just buy and restock everything from vendors and it's pretty easy just to pick up the consumables you need (the healing berries) as you walk around. Like way too many games, the crafting system in the Horizon series might as well not exist, and I wish there was some option to completely disable it. If the entire game is built around crafting as a mechanic and the game is excellent, like Subnautica and Grounded, that's fine. But for 99% of games it's, "well all modern unit-shifting AAA four-quadrant all-demographic appeal-blandathons need crafting, that's the rule now."

And in the games too.

No, it was delayed back to December 2025 a while back.

I don't think either of these two statements are accurate. Baldur's Gate III took me 102 hours to complete in my standard "fast-but-thorough" playthrough style, where the main quest and all side-quests, faction quests and companion quests are completed efficiently, but I did not laboriously check every single nook and cranny of every single location for lore, treasure, hidden information etc. People who did do that have reported putting 200+ hours into the game. It is not a short game, at all. You can complete it substantially faster than 100 hours, but only by ignoring a substantial chunk of the story/characters/events of the game and possibly gimping yourself for the endgame (you can also do this in The Witcher 3, BG1, all three Mass Effect games etc). Baldur's Gate III is also a significantly longer game than The Witcher III (which in a similar style took me 88 hours to complete, including Blood & Wine and Heart of Stone, but not all the optional treasure hunts or monster contracts). The Witcher III is also not massively globe-trotting: you spend ~80% of the game in a relatively small area around Novigrad and in the Velen swamps, and then small-ish chunks in isolated locations with some off-screen travel. This is similar to BG3 where you spend a large chunk of the game near the crash site, another large chunk in the city of Baldur's Gate and several adjoining towns, a small-ish chunk in the Underdark, and then a bunch of episodes in Avernus. Hell, BG3 is slightly longer than all three Mass Effect games combined, which chalk up at around 95 hours in the Legendary Edition including all DLC. BG3 has a fair few number of locations, far more than Mass Effect (especially if you're talking just ME1, and identical barren ice worlds do not count), but the maps are not absolutely massive. They are relatively cleverly designed, though, to fit as much in as possible without it getting silly.

To be clear on the extensive nature of rebuilding in the Fallout universe, there's a bloody Europa Universalis mod which has North America divided between the canonical Fallout factions, which would be completely impossible unless fairly extensive actions existed. The factions, and those factions being big and organised and sometimes capable of traversing the entire continent through vehicles, and projecting power across hundreds of miles, is a big thing in Fallout 3, 4 and 76 (the Bethesda games) as well as 1, 2, Tactics and New Vegas (the Black Isle/Obsidian games).

In Fallout VR you can watch Fallout inside Fallout, dawg.

It's very clear that they're not ignoring New Vegas. I think I've got a better handling on what happened now. It looks like the writing staff fucked up and assumed New Vegas happened in 2277, the same year as Fallout 3, rather than three years later. If you assume that it makes more sense:

As has been frequently said, if that was their position they should have kept the series relatively close to the apocalypse and not 220 years later. That was a call made by Avellone himself, alongside the rest of the Fallout 2 team (note: despite Avellone's PR machine, he was not the lead on Fallout 2), when they decided to set Fallout 2 in 2241, 80 years after Fallout 1 (set in 2161, less than 100 years after the bombs dropped). Bethesda did then exacerbate the problem by setting Fallout 3 in 2277, 200 years on the money since the bombs dropped and showing DC like it was bombed the week before. New Vegas did attempt to make this work by creating more of a realistic landscape of larger countries, armies and factions fighting over the Mojave (based on the original plan for Fallout 3 before Interplay collapsed). As has been said many times, the direction of travel from Fallout 2 through New Vegas was one of the series being "post-post apocalypse," with the immediate post-apocalyptic issues resolved and the world now recovering in some fashion. Fallout 4 leans into that by having a relatively well-developed Boston area with multiple, mature factions but also a good explanation for why the post-apocalyptic vibe has somewhat endured (constant political intrigue by the Institute to deliberately prevent any civilised nation-states from arising and also the destruction of the Minutemen). Bethesda also seemed to accept that the series remaining "post-apocalyptic" given the worldbuilding no longer made sense, so set Fallout 76 in 2102, just 25 years after the bombs fell. Yes, that's a reasonable point. There is also the very simple solution - already explored by Fallout 76 - of simply setting stories earlier in the timeline, closer to the war. It's worth noting Avellone's contribution to Fallout is limited: he did not create the franchise (that was Tim Cain), and he was a simple writer and designer on Fallout 2 and New Vegas, and was project lead on one New Vegas DLC and a strong creative force on another. It's also worth noting that the idea of civilisation rebuilding was present from Fallout 1, where you visit Shady Sands and it's already a considerable town some 84 years after the Great War, and is then a much larger city in Fallout 2. This isn't a late or recent retcon or reinvention, but something fundamental to the series. Wasteland as a franchise is much more immediately post-apocalyptic: the nuclear war happens in 1998, Wasteland 1 takes place in 2087 (+89 years), Wasteland 2 in 2102 (+104) and Wasteland 3 in 2107 (+109).

Alonso staying at Aston Martin cuts off Horner's preferred replacement for Perez. Alongside Perez's increased form, Perez might be doing what he needs to stay put at Red Bull. That does limit Sainz's room to manoeuvre. Toto seems to be getting more balshy about directly promoting Antonelli to Mercedes without an intermediary stop at Williams. Even if he was willing to put Antonelli into Williams, that's only a 1-2 year deal for Sainz. Sainz may figure two more seasons racing in a top four team, and importantly into the 2026 regulation change, makes it worthwhile as he could impress. He probably thinks he'll get the better of Russell in equal machinery, so potentially could stay at Mercedes alongside Antonelli whilst Russell might have to look for another drive. Bit of a gamble tough. It feels like the rumbling at Red Bull has decreased in the last week or so, but then again it could blow up at any time and Verstappen could walk, so Toto might be trying to keep his options open as long as possible.

Even the US has blamed Israel for doing something so stupid as to directly hit the Iranian consulate (effectively Iranian sovereign soil). Even if Iran doesn't want to escalate to a war - and it's clear it doesn't, given it could have started one over the attacks on Gaza and then Lebanon and in Syria - the government might feel it has no choice but to respond or look very weak, endangering its position.

Multiple countries are anticipating an Iranian response for the strike on the consulate in Damascus. Iran has interpreted this as a direct attack on their sovereign soil, and must be answered with a corresponding direct strike on Israeli soil. There seems to be a number of calibrations going on in Tehran on the response. A massive, full-scale assault on Israel could very well provoke an Israeli nuclear response or trigger a massive, wider conflict bringing in the United States, which Iran is not likely to win (and may not survive). However, the damage Iran could inflict in the process across the region would be extraordinarily significant. Amongst the bluster of flattening all of Israel there have also been comments about Israeli embassies or consulates, suggesting that Iran could instead strike Israeli diplomatic representation in a third country. The problem is that there limited targets for such a strike in the region: Jordan, Egypt, UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Türkiye and Azerbaijan. Iran bombing any of these countries would be problematic. I've even seen suggestions that Iran could target the Israeli Embassy in Kyiv, as the closest approximation to Israel striking the consulate in Syria, although there's a nontrivial chance that such a strike would be intercepted by Ukrainian air defences. This would also give Ukraine casus belli to target Iran's drone production systems directly on Iranian soil. However, a limited strike on an Israeli target abroad, in clear and proportionate response to the Israeli targeting of the facility in Damascus, might discourage Israel from further retaliation, whilst a direct strike on the Israeli homeland would ramp up pressure for a retaliatory strike on Iran. Last week it was rumoured that Iran had communicated through back channels with the USA about a limited strike on Israeli targets that would not trigger a wider conflict, but the rhetoric from Tehran has apparently hardened considerably since then. There is also a growing feeling that a retaliation will be at the sharper end of possibilities, with Arab countries uneasily saying they will not permit their bases to be used for retaliatory strikes on Iran. China, which has been steering clear of the whole mess, has apparently dipped its toes into diplomacy in the region through communications with Iran, after an apparent US warning to Beijing of the situation escalating uncontrollably. There is some US speculation that Iran might be sabre-rattling to such a high degree that a limited strike will be seem as a comparative "getting off easily" scenario which Israel can be discouraged from retaliating against. However, that might be wishful thinking. If a strike does come, it could be in the next few days or even hours.

Britain is sending freaking laser weapons to Ukraine. Unclear if they are being sent alongside or separately to the sharks. (No, seriously, Britain is sending DragonFire laser-AA systems to Ukraine for field-testing) Russian police officers broken into the home of Manas Zholdoshbekov, an advisor to the Kyrgyz Embassy in Moscow, and beat his wife when he was unable to produce documents on his migration status, instead producing his diplomatic credentials which they seemed confused by. Kyrgyzstan has filed an official complaint with the Russian government. A former Ukrainian intelligence officer who defected to Russia has been assassinated in Moscow. Lukashenko has extended an offer to Ukraine to discuss peace terms. Ukraine has ignored him. One drone team operating near the front destroyed ten Russian tanks in one night using a number of low-cost munitions attached to cheap drones, halting a Russian offensive. This is probably one of the attacks previously reported. Russians in flooded areas have requested more money and infrastructure support. The Russian government agreed to provide a light aircraft so some priests could fly around the area and "prayer-bomb" it from up high. Subsequent flooding suggested this tactic has been ineffective. Officially the delivery will not be completed until June, but unofficially some have been sent and more will be sent over the coming weeks. They're obviously not putting 1 million shells in the same delivery and sending them along, the Amazon delivery guys got annoyed last time they tried that.

Also worth noting that New Vegas has several entries in the recent Fallout set for Magic: The Gathering, which Bethesda signed off on, and is also represented in the recent Fallout miniatures games (whereas Fallout 3 is not). Bethesda are happy to use New Vegas as a representative of the series, behind only Fallout 4 and usually ahead of their own Fallout 3. I think it's probably fairer to say that Todd Howard is not hugely vocally keen on the game, but other people at Bethesda seem happy to talk about it.

Baldur's Gate 3 won 5 BAFTAs tonight.

Something that might save Ukraine's arse whilst the US flails around is that Russia seems to be having real equipment shortages at key areas on the front. Apparently Russian forces have been ordered to retake Robotyne in armoured assaults despite their armour being obliterated in frontal attacks, so the last few waves of attacks have taken place in barely-armoured Ural-4320 transport truck charges across open ground, which have...not gone well (protip: if your upgunned T-72 can't achieve an objective, it's highly improbable a truck with some dudes on it will be able to achieve the same goal). In the last four days, OSINT sources seem to agree that Russia has lost 6 Russian SAM systems, 32 artillery systems, 40 tanks, 51 IFVs, 14 APCs, 52 trucks, 10 UTVs, 43 cars, 9 EW systems, 2 comms systems, 2 engineering vehicles and 1 boat. 262 vehicles in total destroyed. This might be a record for any four-day period of the war, but people are checking that. Russian officials are also apparently confused on their own mobilisation plans. The annual draft in May may be delayed until June or July, and the number of troops to be raised for combat operations is apparently being fiercely debated behind the scenes, due to growing disgruntlement about losses and casualties (it also sounds like the prisons have turned up the last recruits they're going to, so the next groups will need to be workers and students). The EU Council has apparently provisionally agreed to pay for the extra Patriot systems that Ukraine has asked for, although the details are still being ironed out. Czech diplomacy has apparently resulted in the acquisition of yet more artillery ammunition from Serbia, India and Pakistan, despite their relative friendliness to Russia. Perhaps factoring into that, the Indian government is apparently extremely unhappy with Russian "security companies" offering high pay for Indians to travel to Russia, where they are promptly pressganged and sent to the front line in Ukraine, with none of the expected money appearing. Several Indians have apparently fled the front and made their way to the Indian embassies in Minsk and Moscow where they were repatriated home. Estonia is apparently considering joining an informal coalition of countries who are prepared to send engineers, technical trainers and non-combat personnel directly to Ukraine. This coalition would likely consist of France, the Baltics, Poland, the Czech Republic and UK. Apparently this plan severely irritates Russia because it introduces a "grey zone" where the consequences of killing large numbers of NATO troops in a non-NATO country would be highly ambiguous, so Russia would probably avoid doing it. There seems to be growing agreement that the threatened offensive towards Kharkiv is a bluff: Russia does not have enough forces on the Kursk-Belgorod axis to defend against Russian partisan attacks, let alone cross the heavily-defended border and advance the considerable distance towards Kharkiv. Russia's most likely next move is a major offensive action to secure Donetsk Oblast's borders and resecure Luhansk (in the face of some Ukrainian attacks in that sector recently), but it looks like even this will stretch their manpower. It's also worth noting that the 2021 Bakhmut offensive was supposed to deliver them both oblasts and so far it's taken two years to scratch forwards to take Avdiivka. Future Russian success may depend on if they can continue to leverage glide bomb superiority; if Ukraine can deploy more Patriots and F-16s, that advantage may be eroded.

I think that gets overstated.

After three episodes I'd say it's been pretty strong so far. Not artistically amazing, but it does nail the black humour of the games, and there's tons of cool shout-outs to the game and some of the background material. All of the actors seem to have gotten the assignment as well. The mcguffin being is genuinely very funny. One thing has ruffled lore hounds' feathers though: Hoping that gets clarified, otherwise it just confirms that the TV show and the video games can't take place in the same continuity.

Baldur's Gate III is certainly in the conversation as Best RPG Evaaaah and I think "recency bias" is a silly reason to dismiss it. It is, very clearly to everyone familiar with the genre, an absolutely stellar achievement in terms of writing, characterisation and reactivity, if within a somewhat constricted envelope. It certainly isn't perfect though, and has various issues that do not make it a total slam-dunk for the position (if less than at launch). Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Cyberpunk 2077, Tyranny, Fallout: New Vegas, the Mass Effect trilogy and The Witcher III I think are all in contention, and that's games released since 2010. There's a plethora of other games that I haven't played yet but am willing to accept from overwhelming critical positivity that might be in there was well (Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, Disco Elysium, Pentiment, Wasteland 3, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader). Their genre is somewhat debatable, but the Banner Saga Trilogy is certainly up there. For older games, Fallout 1 and 2, Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate II, Anachronox, OG Deus Ex, Knights of the Old Republic I and II, Neverwinter Nights II: Mask of the Betrayer and Dragon Age: Origins I think have strong arguments in their favour, but decreasing accessibility is an issue.

Ukraine flexing with its new "Ukrolancet" munitions. It destroyed an electronic warfare station 22km behind the front, a significant increase on current on drone ranges. A Russian Mi-24 Hind was shot down over the Black Sea in a friendly fire incident. A Ka-27 was also destroyed in Crimea by long-range Ukrainian fire. The infrastructure failures in Orsk have led to talk of Orenburg Oblast possibly seceding from the Russian Federation (!), with citizens furious that Crimea gets more money than they do. Orenburg borders Kazakhstan, with Bashkortostan and Tatarstan (which both have historically greater secessionist tendencies) to the north. I would not expect this to happen anytime soon. A Russian drone construction and maintenance facility in occupied Kherson Oblast was blown up by a worker dropping a grenade he was trying to fit to an FPV drone. The initial explosion resulted in him losing his arm. The facility was evacuated as the rest caught fire and burned for two days. Ukraine has requested seven Patriot batteries, believing this would secure airspace around Ukraine for some considerable time. The US is apparently unable to provide them, so other countries possessing the system are discussing what they can do.

Ah, like the games!

The Avellone situation is interesting. It's clear that Avellone's stock in the industry had already dropped precipitously. He was not well-regarded at Obsidian in the several years leading up to these accusations, and several attempts for him to fully take charge of a new game consistently failed, with him being downgraded to a guest writer. He got a reputation as a "human Kickstarter goal," since many games had "Chris Avellone will write a quest!" as a goal during videogames' Kickstarter boom of about ten years ago. There were grumblings for some time before the accusations serviced of unprofessional behaviour, though more along the lines of partying at conventions and getting constantly interviewed and generally engaging in a lot of PR, sometimes out of keeping with the scope of his actual contributions to the project, and doing more PR than actual work. I think that led people to be very ready to believe any other stories of impropriety against him. Regardless of that, I do think it is very notable that every gaming site under the sun covered the initial accusations against Avellone and his blacklisting from the industry, but only Kotaku (IIRC) amongst mainstream sites covered his subsequent legal victory. Many of the other sites refused to cover that end of the story, and I know a couple refused to answer queries about why they joined in on the dogpile and not on the resolution (Polygon and Rock Paper Shotgun refused to comment on it, which is odd given the enthusiasm with which they covered the start of the story). It is worth noting that on the same day as Avellone's story breaking, the stories about Cas Anvar broke and that story was much more serious and believable, given that over 20 women accused him of impropriety at events going back several years, and apparently spanned people he'd worked with in the industry, attendees of conventions, professional voice actors and possibly staffers on The Expanse, so in that case it was clear that he had committed wrongdoing. There was a BBC News radio report many years ago (I think close to ten years ago) and police and legal services seemed to pull a figure that they believed the number of false accusations in the case of rape, sexual assault and harassment was something like 1 in 16, or for every falsified case they had 15 genuine ones. I have zero idea on what they were basing that on (definitely not convictions!), but that still seems to fall on the "generally believe the victim until evidence proves otherwise" side of things.

Hmm. 1979: Asteroids 1980: Pac-Man 1981: Donkey Kong 1982: Zaxxon 1983: Star Wars 1984: Elite 1985 (the year I started playing video games, on the BBC Micro): Tetris 1986: Rampage 1987: Dungeon Master 1988: Carrier Command 1989 (the year I acquired a Commodore Amiga 500): Populous 1990: The Secret of Monkey Island 1991: Lemmings 1992: Flashback (after a furious charge by two great Dune games) 1993: Syndicate 1994: TIE Fighter 1995: Command & Conquer 1996: The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall 1997: Final Fantasy VII 1998 (the year I got my first PC): Half-Life (by far the toughest year, with StarCraft and Baldur's Gate also seriously in the conversation) 1999: Homeworld 2000: Ground Control 2001: Anachronox (after a fierce bullet-time shoot-out with Max Payne and Hostile Waters) 2002 (the year of my second PC): Grand Theft Auto: Vice City 2003: Max Payne II: The Fall of Max Payne 2004: Rome: Total War (another very tough year, with Half-Life 2, Dawn of War and Far Cry in the conversation) 2005: FEAR 2006 (third PC): Company of Heroes 2007: Portal 2008: Fallout 3 2009: Batman: Arkham Asylum 2010: Mass Effect 2 2011 (fourth PC): Deus Ex: Human Revolution 2012: XCOM: Enemy Unknown (after a very harsh showdown with Dishonored) 2013: Metro: Last Light 2014: The Banner Saga 2015: The Witcher III: Wild Hunt 2016: Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun 2017 (fifth PC): Horizon Zero Dawn (Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock also having a word) 2018: BattleTech (a most worthy challenge from Subnautica) 2019: Death Stranding 2020: Cyberpunk 2077 2021: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2022: Grounded 2023 (sixth PC): Alan Wake II (after a furious headlock with Baldur's Gate III) By far the hardest years to pick were 1998, 2004 and 2023 for having too much stuff, and 2013 and 2021 for having too little stuff.

Star Wars: Outlaws launches on 30 August. Looks fun, though I worry about it being Ubisoft-style generic. Hopefully it's good, and the ground-space transitions are interesting.