I played Palworld almost two years ago, back when it first launched in Early Access and now I'm trying to decide whether it's worth buying.

My biggest concern is the variety of Pals. If the experience is basically the same as before, just with a larger map, I think I'd probably get bored.

So, for those of you who played both the early version and the full release, how much has the game changed in terms of Pal variety? Are there enough new Pals, abilities and reasons to explore that it feels like a fresh experience or does it still feel mostly the same with more content added on top?

I'd especially love to hear from people who played the game back then and came back for the full release.

Hi there!

My name is Jeff Ashbrook, and I’m the founder of indie development studio Adventure Works. Before game development, I worked on Disney’s Imagineering R&D team for almost a decade and built attractions like Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run. 

Last week, we launched our debut title, LIFTED, a cinematic 2.5D puzzle platformer about an extra credit assignment gone wrong, leading to a student-and-professor buddy comedy adventure across space and time! 

LIFTED pays homage to both classic cartoon films and old-school sidescrollers. I wanted to create a family-friendly game that captures the movie magic of ‘90s animated blockbusters, evoking the same feeling we all had watching our favorite childhood movies. 

Our Steam page is linked here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2184020/LIFTED/

I’m here to answer all kinds of questions you have about LIFTED’s development, including:

• LIFTED’s inspirations (including how a chance encounter with an archaeologist in Egypt led to the game’s creation)
• Development
• LIFTED’s family-friendly, retro gameplay design
• My time working as a Disney Imagineer
• How to make a game that feels like a classic buddy comedy

…and anything else you can think of! Ask me anything.

i've always been a huge horror game fan. i played a lot of first person horror and had fun with those games. then i played alien isolation and amnesia the bunker...

alien isolation constantly had me paranoid with the alien learning and always being a constant threat.

amnesia the bunker with it's highly sound sensitive monster and a flashlight that's loud AF. every single noise you make could attract the monster and you often gotta decide if you crank the flashlight and endanger yourself or if you walk through absolute darkness to avoid the monster.

those games were the best horror experiences i had so far. now every other first person horror game just seems like a walking simulator with stealth that goes like this: crouch to make less noise and dont get into the enemies line of sight.

so now i'm wondering, are there any horror games that give the same kind of feeling? like you're constantly being followed or in danger?

I find them annoying

During the last years i started realizing that i really, really, REALLY, like games that pose at least somewhat of a challenge, rather than being pure power fantasies, and where i have to at least think and study the game a bit to win.

When i was younger i would always play games on the easiest difficulty, using cheats sometimes if they existed, and i always had a blast, but the more i grew up, the more i enjoy actually bashing my head against "hard" challenges here and there, and now it's the most important aspect of any game for me... Which is kind of a problem, as i feel most modern games, singleplayer and multiplayer, not only have extensive accessibility options and difficulty levels to cater to the lowest skill possible (which is a GOOD thing!), but actively remove or refuse to provide anything for more skilled players, which makes me just completally not interested in them.

I am good at games, but not pro-player level good at them, and a lot of games generally considered extremely hard are really...not that hard for me, if not just easy. I genuenly didn't have any trouble playing through Elden Ring in blind at launch, even with me avoiding anything magic related (cuz i just don't like magic builds in RPGs, lol). I genuenly thought that Elden Beast was supposed to be a "Lore Boss" where it's very easy to do because the focus is on the story, rather than the gameplay. Color me surprised when i saw people being stuck on it for dozens and dozens of tries! Another example is Witchfire: while it is a fantastic game that any FPS fan should try, their efforts into making the game even harder were first heavily criticized by the community, and then rolled back and inserted again in a much more watered-down way. A lot of the community like the difficulty of the game now, but i really miss the first time they rolled out the Corruption system, as the game felt extremely engaging at each and every session! Even the "challenges" they introduced via the Torments system, which are pretty varied and interesting and that i see a lot of people having trouble clearing, it took me just an afternoon to clear them all, and i had just a bit less than 50 hours into the game!

I especially feel this "shift" in PvE multiplayer games, for me the entire genre is just dead and i'm extremely sad about it because it was a huge part of my gaming life and from where i met a lot of wonderful friends and made fantastic memories. In games like Destiny 2, FFXIV, Warframe, The Division, Helldivers 2 where the developers are constantly being bullied into nerfing enemies/buffing players, the gameplay just no longer clicks for me, because what even is the point in playing if i can do everything in the game with little to no brainpower required? Why should i care about anything if with minimum effort, even with avoiding the blatantly OP items/equipment, there's nothing that poses a challenge? I'm especially bitter on that front simply for the nature of Live Service games: I had a ton fun during some periods in those games, but that was exactly when everyone else was really angry that the games were harder than normal, and i will never be able to play that "version" of the game even if it was my favorite one!

A good thing about this is that i'm branching out into more and different genres and games that i would have never played otherwise! I'm extremely hyped to start my first serious journey into Path of Exile 1 with the new season, and i have guides, patch notes and community tools and sites ready for launch day! I discovered Ace Combat 7 and how good the series is by trying a genre that i never played in my life, and trying to get max rank on all missions on max difficulty is extremely engaging! I'm playing the Fire Emblem games in reverse release order and i'm having a blast going through them in blind at at least hard with no deaths as someone completally new to the genre and the series (ESPECIALLY Shadow of Valentia, i can't reccomend that game enough!). I'm going through my backlog of games that just didn't click for me at the time or i ruled out as too hard and having a blast playing them and fully clearing their hardest levels, Like Granblue Fantasy Relink, where i just didn't bother to figure out any of the advanced systems and got hard stuck at the endgame, and now, after delving a lot into the game and using guides, i'm having a blast and finishing the main story of the newest dlc (which is also great btw!).

It's kind of sad that i just can't enjoying very easy games anymore, but it did give me a new perspective on the gaming landscape and discovered some games that i would have never tried otherwise. Does anyone else also feel the same way as me, or do you prefer easier games on average? I'm kind of really interested in seeing what other people think about it, even of the games i mentioned in case!

So I've been thinking about that one quote from Gabe Newell about game reactivity:

"The point I would make is, if I go up to a wall and shoot it [and nothing happens], to me it feels like the wall is ignoring me. I'm getting a narcissistic injury when the world is ignoring me. So it is like, to me, I was trying to convey to the user a sense of, “Yes, you were making choices; yes, you were progressing.” Which meant the game had to acknowledge that back to you. If you shoot at a wall, there have to be decals. If you kill a bunch of Marines; the Marines have to run away from you, right? You have to have this sense of the game acknowledging and responding to the choices and actions and progressions that you've made. Otherwise it loses any sort of impact."

This is still something that I think games haven't invested enough in. There was a big trend surrounding making more interactive environments, such as through environmental destruction (which is probably the most extreme example of game reactivity), but as of late developers are prioritizing other elements instead.

Games that just devour time like an insatiable monster.

I've been playing the Guildrun demo nonstop and haven't encountered a time gremlin game like this since maybe Balatro.

8 PM, I'll do a run. Look up, it's 1 AM and I don't understand how.

What's yours?

I've recently been playing Final Fantasy X, a game that I love deeply. In FFX you've got the minigame Blitzball, a minigame that I also quite like but I understand completely why people hate it, partially because it's a rather different experience from the main game, but mainly because of the way most people first experience the minigame.

For those of you who haven't played FFX, the way they introduce Blitzball is by giving you a list of 12 keywords, each of which you can click to go through a poorly explained tutorial of how that keyword is relevant to the minigame. Each of these minitutorials is maybe about 2 minutes long during which the music is made more quiet, there's no VA and barely even any sound. In my opinion the tutorials themselves don't even do a particularly good job of teaching you how the mechanics work. So the player has to sit through each of these minitutorials trying to get their heads around how to play the minigame with the game not even trying to meet you halfway.

Once you've sat through all of that, the game throws a cutscene at you and you head off in search of another character who was apparently spotted in town. You go through Luca looking for him, have a few cutscenes to further characterise Tidus and Yuna and you end up at a cafe where you find out that Yuna has been kidnapped. You then travel through Luca down to the docks, fighting robots along the way until you reach where the kidnappers had docked and board their ship. Here you fight a boss and have another cutscene that gives some more information about Yuna's backstory, who Wakka is as a person and Lulu's past with Wakka's brother. After this you return to the locker room where Wakka decides to warm the bench since he was injured during the Blitzball match that he played while you went after Yuna, allowing Tidus to actually join the team.

After all of that you finally get to play your first ever game of Blitzball! Where you play against the Luca Goers, definitely not the hardest team to face off against but also far from the weakest team to play. As if all of this wasn't enough, during your first game of Blitzball the game also sets the default position to Auto meaning that when your team gets control of the ball you're not actually in control as the game will just have the character swim around according to its own AI. And to make it even worse, partway through the second half of the match Tidus decides that this game should really be about the Aurochs (the team he's on), not about him. So he swims off and bring in Wakka instead, and while Wakka is a serviceable player he's not on the level of Tidus.

In summary, the game gives you a long, boring tutorial that poorly teaches you the mechanics, it then takes you away from the minigame for long enough that you're likely to forget most of what you learned, only to throw you into the deep end against a fairly challenging team and to then end it with making you straight up weaker at the end of the match.

TL;DR: FFX is great, Blitzball is also great, the way Blitzball is introduced is just horrendously terrible.

Are there any minigames with poorer introductions than this? I genuinely believe that Blitzball has the worst intro of any minigame ever relative to the quality of the minigame itself (if a minigame is garbage then it's pretty hard to introduce it in a way that's good).

Kind of random, but I'm just realizing I've never been required to string or unstring a bow other than when initially crafting one

Last year I accidentally discovered this was possible to do with Space Marine 2 when it booted on my second monitor for some reason. I honestly liked it quite a bit since I was able to see more of the environment than widescreen hehe

Since then i've been trying it out with all sorts of games with various levels of success, but when it does work, the games can look really cool.

I finally understand the Ultrawide crowd, being able to see more of the environment is really nice.

Doesn't work with many/most games because they're not built to be played like this, but a good number of games adapt to it really nicely.

PS To do this with Elden Ring you'll need to use the "remove black bars" mod

I made a gallery for the games I got to successfully do this, hope you enjoy em :D

https://realmofthedinokaiser.art.blog/2026/07/20/vertical-pc-gaming-gallery/

As long as we've had voice acting in videogames, in-game voice lines have been played to us repeatedly. It has very often been annoying due to voice lines being too obnoxious, loud, cringe, etc. It's been like 35 years, and even in the highest budget titles this shit still happens.

Examples:
- Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has NPCs that repeat their voice line every 10 seconds while you're in the vicinity. The voice lines themselves draw a lot of attention to themselves while they're just background chatter. Their volume balancing is too loud, and tied to the camera, so if you walk away you hear them the loudest. One party member starts singing like 1 out of 3 times you get on your mount and you are expected to do so like every minute. The voice line is also louder than others.
- Dragon's Dogma has the most annoying party member one liners, notoriously so, reminding you that WOLVES HUNT IN PACKS ARISEN, and that THEIR KIND HATES ICE AND FIRE BOTH. (a very funny comic was made about this)

PROBLEMS

• Everyone has a different level of tolerance for repeating noises, cringe, or information. Due to life circumstances, autism, tinnitus, etc.
• Annoying voice lines are going to exist anyway, especially when translated from japanese.
• Lowering voice volume for the whole game can make higher quality cutscene voices inaudible.

SOLUTION!

• I think the best solution would be to make it standard game industry practice to add a "repeating voiceline play chance" slider to the accessibility menu. This is probably the most easy and cost effective way to solve this issue.
• If you have another realistic solution, please post
• We all complain about it at the same time

Hey,

So I'm looking for some new games to play during my vacation but I have no idea what to play.

I enjoy:

• Elden Ring

• God Of War

• Death Stranding

• Last of Us

• Hades

• Gears of War

• Expedition 33

• Diablo 4

• Hell Let Loose

Games I haven't finished:

• Bladurs Gate 3

• Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth

I'm thinking on buying:

• Ghost of Yotei

• Elden Ring: Nightreign

Games I got but haven't played:

• Mewgenics

• Returnal

Any recommendations?

My pick for this is The Callisto Protocol because of how realistic the faces are in that game. 

They used a custom shading model called The Callisto BRDF to get more realism out of skin and materials. It produces far better results than the industry standard shading model (Lambert).

Striking Distance Studios even made a presentation on The Callisto BRDF: https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2023/SIGGRAPH2023-Advances-The-Rendering-of-The-Callisto-Protocol-JimenezPetersen.pdf

Here’s a concise video if you don’t want to read a whole rendering paper: https://youtu.be/qZtNU-4yqtI?is=2Ig1eEgdZWxipErR

Anyway, all of that leads me back to my original question. Which games have produced the most lifelike visuals?

I've basically migrated to 100% PC gaming through steam over the last decade. I've owned a couple consoles, but ended up giving them away to family because I literally wasn't doing anything with them.

But I'm wondering if people are buying consoles before the upcoming price hikes?

Some friends/family are telling me they're actually having a better time on console - no cheating and not playing against sweaty MnK being the biggest factors I think.

I have an OG LCD Steam Deck, and a fairly capable PC (still on AM4 though), I've been considering a series X or PS5 for a bit, but with all the recent market shake-ups and announcements about physical media lately I really question it.

Thoughts?

Edit to add: one big motivation would be to connect with friends and family who are exclusively on console more easily. When we play together, they see more PC players and get turned off at the sweatiness.

Every manual and box art I could find on Nintendo of America's website in the highest resolution I could find them at.

https://archive.org/details/High-Res-Nintendo-Boxart (181 MB)

https://archive.org/details/Nintendo-Hi-Res-Manuals-2026/ (4.8 GB)

So me and 2 other friends constantly play games (most recently a lot of ARC Raiders) and we are trying to look for more games to play. We tried Bombanana Demo and PEAK, loved it. RV there yet, played for a while but had a lot of fun. Phasmophobia, also fun but they already know how to play and I'm the rookie. Anyways, we're open to suggestions (hard part is convincing them to buy the game lol)

… and for what’s its worth the XBOX section is (and has been for a while) gutted too. Only the Nintendo aisle has games.

Like for me getting game demos from gaming magazines

When I was stationed in Carlisle Barracks in Carlisle Pennsylvania. I preordered two of these. Back then I don’t know but I’m glad I did.

Still package in the original packaging with a street date of 11/09/04.

Found this after we had a tornado warning and I was resetting our router.

Sorry if this isnt really appropriate to post here but no one around me will really understand the bonds we make with our gaming friends. I'm having a hard day at work. I was coming in and heard a song that I would 10/10 send to my gaming buddy and we would laugh about it. However I cant anymore he passed away. Now I'm at work doing my all to hold it together and the worst part is when people in your life pass you get the opportunity to get closure at their funerals I will never get that closure. I get to get online and see their profile and know I'll never get to talk to them again. So just be there for your friends it can happen to anyone at anytime.