Coelacanth

I think the BP parallels came from the combination of the art style, it being set in a vast mansion and a “daily energy” mechanic. I can definitely see it from the outside even though it seems like they play nothing alike.

I’m trying to keep myself unspoiled on Titanium Court as it’s getting such buzz about its writing and world building, but definitely curious. I liked the reveal trailer video though.

I don’t own a headset but my brother-in-law does and I’ve played some Pacific Drive VR at his place. It’s amazing, the game was meant for VR in my opinion. Would be even better with full native support of course so you could use your hands on the steering wheel and handbrake etc instead of driving with controller.

How is Seance of Blake Manor? I heard some people facetiously call it the first Blue Prince-like. But despite that I’ve heard nothing but good things.

Also heard some mumbles raving about how good Titanium Court is, so definitely keeping an eye on it.

If you have a headset for it then Pacific Drive is amazing with the UEVR mod. God how I wish it had native VR support.

Rise of the Ronin

Open world slop brainrot hit me just right (been over a year since my last game in the genre) and I’ve been thoroughly absorbed. After some stressful months I guess I really needed the free dopamine of collecting cats and clearing out the map.

That being said, the combat in this game is actually fantastic and just as good as people have been saying. I’m only at the very start of it and haven’t even begun to master the intricacies, but I love that there is a dojo you can train in and I will probably spend some time there practicing stance- and weapon switching. While the movelist seems restrictive at first, it expands quite significantly once you unlock the skills that let you seamlessly flow between stances and weapons and I need to sit down and memorize all the moves I actually have available in my loadout. Add to that stuff like jump-parrying to vault over the enemy, using the grappling rope or shurikens or the handgun…

It’s only been a couple of fights so far where I managed to get into some kind of flow, but those felt absolutely phenomenal. Great, satisfying parry in this game, too.

Damn you, I am a Team Ninja fan and had already heard good things about the combat, but had put off RoR because of the mixed reception it got. Now you’re making me rethink myself. In fact, I just installed the game (though curtesy it Fitgirl for now until I know how I feel about it). It’s been a while since I played some open world slop, I might be in the mood for that…

I am never getting through my backlog am I?

How difficult is the platforming, and how much do the assist modes help with that? I was very curious about MIO because it looks so damn gorgeous, but I suck at and hate precision platforming.

Oh really? That’s interesting, the combat is the only thing I’ve heard praises about that game (which makes sense as it’s a Team Ninja game).

Are you playing on PC? What’s the state of the port these days? I remember when it launched it was struggling with performance issues.

Yeah, especially with age I find myself less interested in those 150+ hour games. One of the reasons I haven’t considered dipping into the Persona series.

For me, I haven’t played that much this week so I’m still on the same games as last week. Chrono Ark continues to be excellent, and a wholehearted recommend if you’re into roguelike deckbuilders. Ninja Gaiden 4 is the best new action game in ages, and Ninja Gaiden 2 Black is even more fun than before with some mods - most recently the Modified Moveset Mod.

I think this is prime for a Netflix animated show. Would definitely watch that.

Okay, good to know. Thanks for the writeup! I am also one of those players that like to keep resting to a minimum in order to maintain immersion, which punished me hard in BG3 as I missed out on like half the campfire scenes in Act 1. Silly me for actually taking the game seriously when it said things were urgent.

I’ve heard a lot of good things about Rogue Trader so maybe I will check it out one day, but the 40k setting never really did it for me personally. I was actually into painting minis for a while in my youth, but it was always the fantasy setting that appealed to me. There were some guys who were into 40k around me back then, but those were all assholes who were incredibly demeaning towards fantasy and constantly denigrated the Warhammer Fantasy group for using a silly and “uncool” version of the game. I think that period has tainted my perception of 40k subconsciously.

Anyway I got wildly offtopic there, sorry 😅

Last third of Kingmaker really soured me on Owlcat and has made me postpone WotR indefinitely. Shame to hear some of the same issues appearing again in it. How does it compare otherwise? I am also somewhat hesitant about the epic setting and godslaying type of story compared to the more grounded Kingmaker. Is the writing good?

I’ve started playing Chrono Ark, a roguelike deckbuilder I’ve heard a lot of good things about. So far I’ve played something like 3 runs, so only just begun. It’s fun so far, it’s not completely reinventing the genre or anything but each run has been fun and the upgrades seem varied enough.

I’ve also heard good things about the story, and it does involve time travel to play into the looping roguelike nature in a seamless way, but that’s about all I’ve been able to glean from it so far. I’m looking forward to finding out more.

Come on GOG, I like you, don’t make me dislike you.

Are you looking for story or gameplay? Chaos Zero Nightmare is relatively new and is a roguelike deckbuilder with really good gameplay. Lots of synergies, lots of combos, lots of variations of every card letting you craft very specific decks that can make almost anything work if you just get lucky with finding just the right pieces and upgrades during a run.

The story is ass though (but at least there is a fast forward button) and some of the character designs do make me roll my eyes with how absurdly gooner-baity they are.

That’s very interesting and sounds cool - though might be above my paygrade.

What kind of delay does the double prompting incur? I can’t imagine it would be nothing, especially for this use case of calling external LLMs via a proxy.

If anything a RAG for certain game related information might be a nice addition to the current system, rather than replacement. I think for a roleplay and storytelling focus there is a benefit of having a persistent character “life story” of long term memories fed into every prompt, creating character throughlines and potentially even character development.

I’d recommend both Dispatch and Blue Prince — I still haven’t completed the latter, but, yes, I’ve unlocked the secret elevator.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but… you’re not as deep into Blue Prince as you think you are.

Well, what I’m working on is a mod for STALKER Anomaly, and most large models already seem to have good enough awareness of the STALKER games setting. I can imagine it’s a much bigger challenge if you’re making your own game set in your own unique world. I still need to have some minor game information inserted into the prompt, but only like a paragraph detailing some important game mechanics.

Getting longer term interactions to work right is actually what I’ve been working on the last few weeks, implementing a long-term memory for game characters using LLM calls to condense raw events into summaries that can be fed back into future prompts to retain context. The basics of this system was actually already in place created by the original mod author, I just expanded it into a true full on hierarchical memory system with long- and mid-term memories.

But it turns out creating and refining the LLM prompts for memory management is harder than implementing the memory function itself!

I’m actually also working on a project using LLMs to talk to NPCs. Though this one doesn’t use local models but online models called through a proxy using API keys, which lets you use much larger and better models.

But yeah it’s been interesting digging deep into the exact and precise construction of the prompts to get the NPCs talking and behaving exactly like you want them, and be as real and lifelike as possible.

There are mods that implement it, don’t know about games. Skyrim has an AI driven follower mod and STALKER Anomaly has the TALKER mod.