For a company with almost limitless access to user data, surely they must be aware that VR, while growing, would give them sales nowhere near those that a non-VR, mainstream Half-Life would. They could release absolutely anything else with the Half-Life logo and people would flock to it, there's still a community around the Half-Life series just like with their other titles such as Left 4 Dead, while the only group I regularly see going back to VR are people who wear anime avatars in VRchat.

Since this would be a VR-only title, would something like this push you towards buying a VR kit if you were on the fence?

I've had the opportunity to try out Oculus CV1 with ETS2, IL-2:BoS, DCS and Alien:Isolation quite a while ago as well as some tech demos and static museum-type presentations on a decent hardware and the VR technology just isn't there yet. Tech demos and static presentations were great, in regards to other titles - it was okay for casual, short intervals (coincidentally the type of gameplay that dominates the VR market at the moment), but overall it felt like trying to play the game while having a bag on your head while it was making you nauseous at the same time. I'd give it 5 years before trying it again.

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After adding Battle Royale to CS, now they seem to be adding Rainbow 6: Siege. Well at least they're not giving CS the Team Fortress 2 treatment.

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I bought the base game from Humble Bundle about two years ago, booted it once but ended up not really liking it (unlike HoI4 or EU4). Following a certain recent Youtube review I decided to try it again about a few days before the PDXCon sale, only to realise that having only the base game solid half of it was behind a paywall including more broadly speaking my ancestors, since our first kings were pagans (thus I needed The Old Gods DLC) in the earliest period I could start the game in without paying for DLC. The sale rolled over, so I decided to grab the Dynasty Starter Pack, out of which The Old Gods is the single most expensive part. Now the base game is F2P anyway and this happens. If anything, this makes me less inclined to buy further packs.

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I'm a humourless person so here's some banter:

Spoiler, click me

The next year will be The Year of Linux.

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RTS

I recall it being more like Mount and Blade, where you would scour the open world with your fleet looking for trouble while having some basic objective, then once combat starts it would mostly play itself with some minimum input on your end, then you'd return to port, fix/upgrade/level up and accept another mission. I mean you had to micromanage early encounters, but as soon you had battleships and carriers it would boil down to whoever can lob the most onto the other end of the map and with AI being what it was it would quickly turn into a face roll on the players end. Good naval game, but a bit shallow no pun intended.

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Last time I tried it was when it went standalone from Doom 3 circa 2013. How time flies...

All we need now is for the Thievery mod to detach itself from UT'99.

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Meanwhile in Drift Stage development...

(which I backed in 2015)

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Found my fanboy card and I can now proclaim that it's a Day One buy even if it's SS1's enemies with SS3's graphics with more open world, which is what the current trailer seems to be implying.

When it comes to SS3, I've always considered the first half of that game to be either a parody of EA/Activision brown and bloom military shooters or an attempt to pander to their audience.

Now (assuming it will actually be open world) I'm wondering whether they'll go for the same, but with Ubisoft open world themeparks like Far Cries/Asscreeds as these seem to be the thing at the moment.

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Word of advice to any new users - skip Arcade mode and go straight into the Realistic mode, this is where the game shines and actually differs from miseryware such World of X series. You can also skip the PvE mode which is pretty bad.

For anyone on the proverbial fence, now's the best moment to check the game out as (as usual this time of the year) devs will add an April Fools mode, which so far every single time has been far superior to the actual gameplay in any of those vehicular MMOs.

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Played it soon after release and found it extremely buggy (though it was entertaining to watch cars drive on a bridge built underwater) and somewhat unexciting compared to SimCity 4. Other than that it was okay and I'm glad it sold 5 million copies, it gives me schadenfreude knowing that someone at EA Maxis must be pulling their hair out right now.

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