What videogames are you playing in 2026?

[Parmandur]

The only one I can think of is Tainted Grail. Skyrim seems to be a tough nut to crack, feel wise. Especially since soulslikes took over the RPG space.

Yeah, nobody is quite going for exactly the same thing: part of it's artistic uniqueness, I doubt Bethesda will recapture it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

New Vegas director had been working on, of all things, a Shadowrun game.

Big if true - Jason Schreier doesn't normally make mistakes and he said:

"Previously, Sawyer had been directing a roleplaying game that was similar structurally and thematically to Fallout but was not part of the franchise."

I don't think I'd ever personally describe Shadowrun as "thematically similar" to Fallout (structurally would be a game design thing so sure) but I need to be aware that I'm a serious game/lore nerd about both settings, and maybe to someone who wasn't, the cyberpunk + magic could seem similar to post-apoc with fanciful elements? I'm not really seeing it though.

Also just as a minor point, Sawyer is Cyberpunk guy, like Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk RED. I know he was/is in a Cyberpunk RED campaign which he mentions occasionally. I dunno if that factors but he's never expressed enthusiasm for Shadowrun to my knowledge. And has expressed the opinion that he never wants to directly game-direct any game he isn't enthusiastic about ever again.

If true though I would have definitely preferred that work to continue over doing another Fallout game. Fallout is a bit of a yawn at this point (esp. as the TV show proved it can almost do the same thing better than any of the modern games).

Microsoft have been strangling some golden geese at a pretty incredible rate here. I think part of it actually goes back to their non-interventionist attitude which seems to have been fairly genuine from what the dev studios said. But it seems like because they weren't intervening as much as certain publishers (including Sony to some extent, who have a better track record by far), we saw a lot of projects kind of get into the weeds - like letting BGS take seven years to fart out the dross that was Starfield (which they must have known was dross at least two years before launch) is crazy work.

The only one I can think of is Tainted Grail. Skyrim seems to be a tough nut to crack, feel wise. Especially since soulslikes took over the RPG space.

It's not just the feel it's the technology.

The TES games from Morrowind onwards achieved what they did by essentially using an engine developed for MMOs, i.e. games where an enormous amount could be happening in a lot of different places, and repurposing it for a single-player game (GameByro). This odd design, which is kind of hard to work with and not necessarily very efficient has the extreme upside of letting you go a bunch of naughty word that other engines could not do without truly massive work on-par with building another engine. It also has downsides though, because to use it to do what they want, you have to have constant bloody loading screens, which might have been acceptable in 2004 or 2011, but is was not okay by 2022.

They then built on that engine with their own Creation engine (which is mostly just more options and better graphics), and because of that, no-one has easily been able to just pick an engine which could do the same thing and simply write a game for it. You'd have to spend like, 2+ years on engine development and then everyone you hired you'd need to train on this fairly unique design approach, which would make it harder to expand and slow production.

Now, should a company do that? OBVIOUSLY YES!

A bigger publisher should drop the $100-200m on that instead of another surefire-failure extraction shooter or hero shooter or whatever (I mean, Sony spent like $300m on Concord, any practically anyone could have told you that was going be a huge flop - Sega spent $150-200m on Hyenas, which I immediately on seeing the first marketing materials said "This is going to flop extremely hard - the aesthetic is too niche (2018 Paris runway fashion meets shooter, lack of swooningly hot characters*, you need to be more declasse and more up-to-date to hit the mass market) and the you are asking for 5 teams of 3 people each match, are you insane? The queues would be hours!"

ANYWAY I'm getting off-topic. Point is, could you do it? Could you compete in that area? Yes. Unreal 5 actually has the same type of tech (available, not mandatory) as Creation/GameBryo (these "cells" - and Unreal 6 is essentially just UE5+ so obviously also does). But to do it would require a lot of money. It would be very hard to do as an AA or smaller (as Obsidian have shown, in fact).

Mandatory: Thanks for listening to my TED talk.

EDIT - Re: Tainted Grail, they used Unity, which in theory could made, with extreme effort, to be Creation-engine-like, but it's very obvious playing it that they hit some pretty hard engine limits (c.f. monsters being on rather short tethers for example, presumably to stop some pathfinding issues).

* = See this is something Overwatch gets. It's not about boobs and supermodels like some Korean games mistakenly think it is, either, it's about attitude and style. A "scary robot lady" who makes some guys/girls/thirls think "TREAD ON ME MOMMY" will sell better than Generic Boobs LaRue #128. Likewise Overwatch shows a chubby girl-next-door type will make more people swoon than any number of Boobs LaRues, because she speaks to people about what actually revs their engines, what they actually connect to. This is true of male characters too - broad shoulders and square jaws will get you somewhere, but a tall skinny guy with cruel tweak to the lips, a slight sneer, a bad attitude? An exaggerated dadbod type with a winning grin? They'll get you further!

But Hyenas had neither supermodels nor laser-targeted "we know what you're into", just a bunch of not quite generic but quite forgettable characters.

 

[MoonSong]

Currently enjoying Palworld, it's like a minecraft but with pets you can make into little slaves for you base instead of villagers. What I'm not loving is that it has to download a 1gb update almost every day. Id thought that it coming out of beta would have stopped it, but no.

 

[Gradine]

Watching my 11-year-old playing Final Fantasy Remake for the first time. It's been very good so far.

Them (literally two minutes into playing): "Okay, so he's a drama queen"

Them (chapter two): "Cloud, now's not the time for hallucinations..."

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Watching my 11-year-old playing Final Fantasy Remake for the first time. It's been very good so far.

Them (literally two minutes into playing): "Okay, so he's a drama queen"

Them (chapter two): "Cloud, now's not the time for hallucinations..."

The remake foreshadows future developments rather more than the original did.

 

[Gradine]

The remake foreshadows future developments rather more than the original did.

Yeah they got annoyed when I told them that Cloud doesn't believe in such a thing as a bad time to have a hallucination.

They are not sure what to think about Chadley, which is about par for the course

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Big if true - Jason Schreier doesn't normally make mistakes and he said:

"Previously, Sawyer had been directing a roleplaying game that was similar structurally and thematically to Fallout but was not part of the franchise."

I don't think I'd ever personally describe Shadowrun as "thematically similar" to Fallout (structurally would be a game design thing so sure) but I need to be aware that I'm a serious game/lore nerd about both settings, and maybe to someone who wasn't, the cyberpunk + magic could seem similar to post-apoc with fanciful elements? I'm not really seeing it though.

Also just as a minor point, Sawyer is Cyberpunk guy, like Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk RED. I know he was/is in a Cyberpunk RED campaign which he mentions occasionally. I dunno if that factors but he's never expressed enthusiasm for Shadowrun to my knowledge. And has expressed the opinion that he never wants to directly game-direct any game he isn't enthusiastic about ever again.

Shadowrun getting a big current gen game would be very cool. After the success of Cyberpunk 2077 (and Edgerunners), I imagine a lot of Shadowrun fans are wondering about their particular flavor.

Me, I like both Cyberpunk and Shadowrun, though my current preference is for Cyberpunk Red.

 

[Kaodi]

My Jack of All Trades run has hit an important milestone: level 5, where I finally buying and selling because of the proficiency boost to persuasion going up; and where I finally have proficiency in all skills simultaneously. Currently a githyanki entertainer shadow sorcerer 1/knowledge cleric 1/urban tracker ranger knight 1/rogue 1/bard 1. The next three levels will be the remaining spellcasting classes.

 

[GMMichael]

Ground Branch 1.0. I believe these guys were involved in Ghost Recon 1 (remember, the good one?). It's a spec ops milsim with realism features like:

• pushing up against a wall means you can't extend your weapon,
• there's no bullet count - just an educated guess on the mag, and
• your scope doesn't cause the whole world to zoom in.

 

[Kaodi]

I think I am going to buy Against The Storm today. The base game is still 70% off for the next 24 hours still. They had a free weekend from like the 10-13th or something and I gave it a whirl and I thought maybe I would wait for a better sale in months or years to come but, eh, maybe it would be better to just get it now.