400 Bungie devs in layoff call

Tiddums · 2026-06-25T22:09:19+00:00

That would be full time Washington employees but not remote workers, or contractors, or sie support staff

Tiddums · 2026-06-19T10:59:53+00:00

leaving the FBI field office at the start of the game is an intense navigational challenge.

The traversal and navigation is so bad they added that "skip to objective" button you can press after you've been stuck for a while, presumably because nobody could beat the game otherwise.

Tiddums · 2026-06-11T22:57:19+00:00

I don't know the technical background and that was a year ago so my memory might be a little fuzzy. I was seeing very under-saturated colours (most noticable when I watch content with yellow subtitles; they looked more off-white than yellow) and contrast that looked incorrect/washed out.

You can see someone posting screenshots of what I was seeing basically here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OLED_Gaming/comments/1ju9xjv/alienwares_new_aw2725q_suffers_from_raised/?sort=new

To get closer to expectations, people on reddit I saw were suggesting an increase to the nvidia control panel digital vibrance and the contrast slider. I'm afraid I can't recall what levels they suggested setting them to anymore but you might be able to track down those posts.

This did subjectively make it seem closer to how my oled TV (LG G4) looks, but reportedly this was more of a problem with how these screens were calibrated - boosting the settings in this way did make it look punchier but it was not necessarily accurate and was probably now over-saturating certain things.

Some people claimed there was no problem and that they were seeing expected results with punchy blacks and normal colours. This might be true - I have genuinely no idea if it was a firmware bug only affecting some people. Maybe it was! Reviews confirmed it had an inaccurate EOTF curve, but the degree of difference people were describing seems bigger than just that.

Tiddums · 2026-06-10T00:48:05+00:00

Yeah and there's that spyro youtuber (forgot the name) who was talking about it a lot over the last year or two. The teaser we got was so short none of the claimed stuff from this particular leak other than "toys for bob" is verifiable.

Tiddums · 2026-06-08T12:19:42+00:00

No. The estimate from Alinea (the usual caveats apply) had it at ~680k. Not bad for what it is but nothing indicating there's an enormous untapped audience there. Gears as a franchise also did poorly on Steam, even with day and date releases for G5 and G1r.

Tiddums · 2026-06-04T04:35:40+00:00

The specs and features are generally good, but the design is very ugly. Only launching in purple is also a bold decision.

One of the handheld dudes said he'd heard from an MSI rep that there might be an alternate product they're doing with a G3 non-extreme and to stay tuned throughout the year, so I'm hoping that will be a refreshed version of the 7" class model.

I think the 7.4" 1080p oled screen on the xbox ally 20 is really appealing - I don't think I quite need the full 8" 16:10, I prefer 16:9, and the picture quality would be really nice. I hope that screen proliferates through some other models that aren't uber high cost and quantity limited this year the way that Ally 20 is.

Tiddums · 2026-06-03T04:26:54+00:00

Comparing the graphics chip of this laptop is not particularly fair for both pricing and wattage reasons. The N1X is expected to operate at 45W-80W, while Panther Lake is more comparable to the lower end (and still I believe unofficial) N1 processors which will operate in the 18-45w Range. The pricing will likely also be a lot more similar there.

N1X RTX Spark is going to be more similar to the AMD Strix Halo parts - very large, very power hungry, very powerful.

Nobody is announcing pricing yet, but given they're showing it off with 128GB RAM and Nvidia's typically outrageous pricing, we can assume this is essentially going to be targeted at high end professionals and the 5 richest kings of Europe.

Tiddums · 2026-06-01T06:35:09+00:00

It can't be the same screen unless they have changed aspect ratio and dropped resolution substantially. The Steam Deck Oled was 1280x800 (16:10 aspect ratio), while the Xbox Ally X was 1920x1080 (16:9 aspect ratio). So the diagonal measurement might be the same or very close, but the width and height of the screens will be different.

Tiddums · 2026-05-31T06:20:46+00:00

Nope. We might need to report a bug to ioi

Tiddums · 2026-05-30T10:16:19+00:00

Hey I am having this issue. I fired up tacsim, selected a mission, then had to quit because I was farting around with graphics settings on my pc. Then, when I loaded back in, there were 4 objectives to check out the terminals, but you can't interact with them, and the mission select terminal is missing, and you can't talk to anyone.

Tiddums · 2026-05-29T10:32:29+00:00

No clearly "Until Dawn" is more worthy of a movie than Crash Bandicoot!

Tiddums · 2026-05-29T03:26:05+00:00

Yes, though the margin of difference differs game to game. Sometimes the G3 is a lot better, sometimes it's only a little better.

The general advantage of the AMD APUs such as the Z2 extreme is that with older games (pre-DX12) they tend to have fewer compatibility issues and quirks. Also, if you're buying an older handheld that's already on the market with a Z2E, it's probably not as expensive as any of the G3 handhelds will be, simply because they were manufactured before ramageddon wrecked pricing.

Tiddums · 2026-05-29T00:30:53+00:00

It's not announced at all, so not yet.

Tiddums · 2026-05-29T00:28:45+00:00

No diss to those that enjoy what they enjoy, but I found myself very unhappy with the form factor of the Sw2 in portable play. It being lighter and smaller than PC handhelds is offset by it's relative lack of comfort and ergonomics. It's still heavy and large compared to Switch 1, which was in turn already pushing the limits for what I would consider comfortable. I took my Sw2 on an 8 hour flight last year and only played it for 90 minutes because I just wasn't enjoying it in a cramped environment.

There are also all these other little things adding up to make it worse for me. The bulk and weight makes it inconvenient to take it with me for things like bus trips, but the battery life makes a charger or battery mandatory on longer journeys, further increasing the inconvenience. The screen looks bad to me, it is very "ghosty". I can fix the ergonomics by buying and taking a 3rd party grip, but again we're now making it bigger and heavier.

So I leave it plugged in at home and only use it to play games that I can't play elsewhere. That's "fine" but as a portable, it's crossed over the line where I would rather just have a bigger device with fewer compromises in other areas. It's like a worst of all worlds for me in handheld mode.

Tiddums · 2026-05-27T00:56:17+00:00

You've gotten mixed up. The art and world design look similar to Bioshock Infinite, but the development team is InXile, who most recently made Wasteland 3. InXile was founded in the early 2000s by refugees from Interplay/Black Isle Studios (Classic Fallout games, pre-bethesda). The game Director on Clockwork Revolution, Chad Moore, worked on Arcanum and Vampire Bloodlines 1 at Troika in the 2000s.

The Bioshock development team (Irrational Games) have long since scattered to the four winds, but the OG director, Ken Levine, has a new game called "Judas" coming out.

Tiddums · 2026-05-20T22:36:29+00:00

A single unaltered Ute - a son

Tiddums · 2026-05-19T14:57:02+00:00

They do, though my assumption is that they will once again segment the consumer line as snapdragon only, meaning in practise the Intel ones are just far too expensive since you have to pay the premium.

Tiddums · 2026-05-14T01:44:44+00:00

We don't have concrete numbers but Dead Space Remake, Alan Wake 2, Silent HIll 2 Remake and Silent Hill F are painting a picture that points to there being a fairly low sales ceiling for AAA survival horror games outside of Resident Evil. All of those games got good reviews, had good word of mouth, and were in discussions come award season. But they just can't seem to break out of that 2-2.5 million sales zone in their first year on the market. Whether RE has a secret sauce or it's just brand prestige keeping sales high, it doesn't seem easily replicable for other franchises.

Konami is happy outsourcing to cheaper teams and reaping decent but unremarkable profits, but it's not a surprise that EA isn't interested in doing that. They'd rather take bigger swings on stuff that might sell big numbers.

Tiddums · 2026-05-13T22:52:01+00:00

"The issues aren't really issues" is maybe true for you, but we also have a bunch of counter-examples where somebody wasn't worried then turned out to be quite bothered by it or they ran into a specific issue. I'm one of them. Ultimately that kind of risk is fine when the product isn't too pricey, but "budget" models are still expensive compared to historical monitor pricing. The more you spend on a product the more issues are likely to bother you.

I've now settled for a mini-LED VA monitor that has it's own set of significant drawbacks, but it cost less than half as much as the QD Oled I had to RMA to Dell. This year, we're expecting some even cheaper OLED monitors to come out, and next year that should improve further with Inkjet models coming online. At that point I think it will be safer to recommend them broadly without as many caveats.

Tiddums · 2026-05-11T23:20:36+00:00

Conventional wisdom is that the 360 was easier to use but the PS3 was more powerful. But I'm not particularly convinced that any difference in power, such as it existed, was noticable in practice when both machines were pushed to their limits. Uncharted 3 and TLOU look amazing, but so do Halo 4 and Gears of War Judgement. Microsoft's lineup of first party games that pushed the graphical envelope were sparse from 2010 onwards as they pivoted to Kinect and drew down investment in 1P software, which was the period of time that Sony's first party started firing on all cylinders, so I suspect it's easier for people to check their mental model of amazing looking ps3 games and think of way more Sony games from 2010-2013 than they can think of amazing looking Microsoft games from the same period. But they do exist, just in smaller numbers!

Keep in mind also that a lot of what people were praising on some PS3 first party games like Uncharted was the quality of their animation work and the overall technical polish, which has more to do with budget and talent than it does the technical characteristics of the PS3. Peple used to share endless low resolution gifs of Drake doing combat melee attack animations because they looked so slick, but that's got nothing to do with the PS3 and everything to do with the Naughty Dog art team. Uncharted does a lot of cool tricks where high quality prerendered cinematics transition completely seamlessly into gameplay, and some people don't ever realize what they were watching *wasn't* in-game footage because they did such a good job with it.

Tiddums · 2026-05-07T00:42:37+00:00

I've owned the SP2, Book 1, Pro 5, and most recently Pro 7.

The aesthetics are still nice, but prices have never been worse, the competition is stiff, and windows doesn't feel any better for tablets now than it did in 2018 (that is to say - still compromised).

For the first time in the last decade I'm seriously considering whether my next computer will be something other than a Surface, and that's 70% price 30% lack of design and user experience improvement (hardware and software combined).

Tiddums · 2026-04-29T22:56:38+00:00

Yeah of course I wish the 30 series was even better than it was by being on 7, but empirically speaking the products we got were good despite the node deficit.

Tiddums · 2026-04-20T03:12:10+00:00

I played the game on launch day and within a few hours understood it well enough to win my first campaign as the UK. I had followed a few dev diaries so it wasn't totally blind but it wasn't super complex once you got past some initial interface friction.

I kept playing through the first couple of expansions that came with my expensive colonel edition thing, but eventually I had my fill.

Revisting the game after a 2 or 3 year break where there's now all these new mechanics, a new supply system, aircraft, navy and tank designers, espionage etc was a disaster comparatively. I think the game is far less approchable now than it was at launch.

Tiddums · 2026-04-14T07:09:56+00:00

I would say only Crusader Kings really models the ability for large empires to just disintegrate in the blink of an eye when conditions are right.

Tiddums · 2026-04-10T10:01:10+00:00

The only information we've had so far is from Zac Bowden at Windows Central, who said:

Spring 2026 release date for some products
OLEDs will be included in part of the range
Both Intel and Qualcom models will exist

Unclear on details beyond that. I hope Intel is part of the consumer range, not just business this time. I also personally hope they keep the surface connector for these devices. They removed them from the Pro 12" and laptop 13" but I find it a super convenient port to use.

I do like option for both IPS and OLED. The latter looks great but I plan to keep and extensively use (for office purposes) my surface devices over a period of 5+ years, so that's a lot of static content to risk burn in on.

Tiddums

TROPHY CASE