Mr Party Hat

This remaster face lift is nice but I'm pretty sure Skyrim still looks nicer. 🤔

I just wish the colour palette wasn't so muted. It's a mad decision, everything is so brown. When I think of Oblivion, I think glowing green forests and blinding white stone.

The lighting is pretty incredible though. It's the first game in a long time where I've stopped in my tracks to stare at some uncanny detail, usually the torches flickering in the city at night.

I can't imagine that the first-person combat in Oblivion is going to be as good as Avowed's.

It's not.

And yes, the first stable I came across gave me some free horse armour.

Turns out the freezing this morning was shader compilation, which they forgot to put a loading screen in for. So the game just hangs for 10 minutes. I do love a bit of Bethesda jank.

It precompiles all the shades at the first load doesn't it? There are other places too?

I downloaded a new GPU driver last night, so it was just doing the initial load again, without telling me.

On the techy side of things, I couldn't normally give a crap about ray tracing, but the 'hardware lumen' mode on this is beautiful. Outdoors at least. Indoors I can't tell the difference. But it makes my 4060 cry, so I'm playing it capped at 60fps with motion blur on and a controller.

I can't imagine that the first-person combat in Oblivion is going to be as good as Avowed's.

It's not.

And yes, the first stable I came across gave me some free horse armour.

Turns out the freezing this morning was shader compilation, which they forgot to put a loading screen in for. So the game just hangs for 10 minutes. I do love a bit of Bethesda jank.

It was going really well for me last night. They've altered the colour palette, which is a shame, but otherwise I was right back in 2005. This morning, the game won't load. I can't think of a more fitting Oblivion tribute.

Play. Dragon's Dogma 2. I think this is brilliant but it might also be crap. It's one of those Japanese games that's resolutely its own thing, an open-world RPG that has completely ignored the last 20 years of open-world RPGs.

It's got Elden Ring's aggressively confusing UI/item names, stunning visuals, terrible framerates, and it couldn't care less what you think. It is the way it is, and if you don't like it, screw you.

It's lovely that games like this exist alongside eager-to-please, paint-by-numbers Ubisoft stuff. Although on balance I probably have more fun with those games.

So far my biggest complaint is that I knocked it down to Casual because it was too difficult, and now that I've gotten to grips with the mechanics and want to bump things back up to Normal, I can't. Again, a decision from the 'fuck you' school of design.