Didn't Crytek have a major financial crysis, and recently also tried attacking Star Citizen?

See http://www.pcgamer.com/cloud-imperium-responds-to-cryteks-star-citizen-lawsuit/ [External Link]

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Vega was supposed to be general purpose. But it will take AMD another year to get to a competitive result on high end.

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Quoting: burningserenityIn the past, prominent music was ubiquitous in games, and it was much harder to do atmospheric sound design. I feel that the old approach, which is present in Owlboy, lends to the atmosphere and world building with the same purpose as the ambience of The Long Dark, even if the former is a more abstract method.

I make this argument because it is still rare or impossible (someone go ahead and prove me wrong) to find a game with both excellent, prominent music and rich, atmospheric sound design. Most games these days go for sparse music in favor of more realistic, less abstract immersion, but the old way still works for me.

I agree, it's not common. Old approach works well indeed, one of the good examples is The Neverhood. It has superb music and it sets the mood of each level, but it just plays in a loop like many classic games do.

Still, there are some games that use music only at certain points of the game and make it fit the mood perfectly in time specific manner. I remember for example in The Blade of Darkness [External Link] there was a moment where your character (when you play a dwarf) enters an ancient city, and the game gives a wide view switching to a different music at the same time. It was very well presented. (Unfortunately this game is now gone from GOG catalog, it used to be sold there).

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Quoting: KelsThat's the thing, West of Loathing and Pyre both have outstanding music in their own ways, but the sound design of The Long Dark is critical to establishing the atmosphere and succeeds to a huge degree. So how do you make that choice between effective environmental work and good music? Sure they're both audio, but otherwise they're entirely different concepts.

Yep, I think music definitely should be a separate category. Even integrating music into the ambience well (to provide mood context) isn't the same as good music itself.

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For best audio I voted for Owlboy. Though otherwise I would have voted for West of Loathing. It has a great soundtrack and came out on GOG for Linux in 2017.

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Quoting: CorbenBut I think I can say, that for the break even with the Linux version, they need to sell way more than 1000 copies on Linux. Well, I think we can also accept that challenge, can't we?

I'm sure they'll sell way more than 1000 copies. They didn't even release the game for Linux on GOG yet. So it's too early to count it now, when the release didn't really properly happen yet.

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Quoting: ageresI heard Microsoft forces developers to use mandatory DX12 for XOne.

Same as Sony forces to use their lock-in for PS. Add Apple to the same garbage behavior.

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Great, so GOG release will happen soon?

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Quoting: knroSo, just be thankful we have developers who are willing to release games for this sub 1% market.

Linux market is not sub 1%. Just stop repeating this.

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This [External Link] doesn't sound very promising for those who wanted to get Vega refresh this year:

Also on the list is perhaps the surprise announcement of the day: AMD will be bringing Vega to 7nm, with customer sampling expected to start in 2018. This ultimately means that Vega on 7nm will hit the shelves in 2019, but there is a twist to the tale. The first products off the line will be solely for the Radeon Instinct family and machine learning. Users who want 7nm desktop-class products will have to wait a little longer, but it does give an indication of how GlobalFoundries 7nm process is coming along.
<...>
As mentioned above, AMD plans to start sampling a machine learning focused version of Vega on 7nm much later in 2018, where ‘sampling’ in this case means pre-testing to select partners. This will likely lead to a Radeon Instinct product, initially perhaps with a small die size, being made available in early 2019. The big product on 7nm, however, will be AMD’s Navi GPU architecture. AMD did not go into specific details, but we suspect that Navi will be permeating through most of AMD’s discrete product line portfolio, as well as being implemented into APUs with Zen 2 processor cores. Given the timeframe here, Navi is certainly a 2019 product, although it might be debatable if that means early or late 2019.

Looks like it's another year to wait. Well, my current RX 480 performs well, even though some games like TW3 could benefit from stronger card.

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