Darvond seems to subscribe to the threads (off GOG) that are instructing their readers to spoil the game.

Bad enough that Darvond injects politics into almost ever post (whether overt or links) and we roll our eyes... but now spoils games? C'mon Darvond

I suppose it follows the spirit of the law even though it violates the letter. But can't you just download a crack instead of pre-cracked media?

No need for apologies. I know how hard it can be to fight the desire of being a smart@ss ;)

Well established facts to avoid the game even though the person in question has nothing to do with its development other than providing the rights license and maybe some consultantancy work, the facts that are so well known that you can't give it to me. In other words you can't support your argumentation other than telling some obvious words like "you don't understand, it's well established already, hate that woman with all your heart and don't forget to f@ck all those hardworking people in game credits as well - they should have known better!". A very comfortable approach, you don't need to explain anything, you just command what to do.

What do you mean about climate change? That in one certain period the Earth was frozen and that at another it's super hot, and it's the ever changing process we can't help unless human scientists invent some spectacular tech? Or should I beleive that we can fight it by blocking the work on coal mines while eating food from plastic bags doing nothing about the waste in the ocean? I think you've been tricked by those who organize it. Here is an example, tobacco companies pays for no-smoking campaings among children. Now do your math.

I would expect you to stick to the topic, there are so many things you and I both have no idea about.

By people and their milisecond justification I get that you expressed your own behaviour traits. I can imagine how hard it might be for you to cancel that and deny cancellation all at the same time.

I for one is against cancelling anything. If the game is bad for me personally for instance for it's agenda and there is nothing else - I would simply never play it. Will I express my opinion about the game being bad for me - why not? It's a normal thing to do. Will I demand / command others to ignore the game because I personally don't like or because there is a group of people which think the same way - absolutely not!

I'm not a fan of JK Rowling books and I don't need any justifications to like something or not. Whenever I see some interesting game the last thing I would do is to search some dirt on rights holders.

But you might be in a very vurnelable position - you can't play games from Take Two, Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft and Microsoft for you know *the well established facts* of their evil deeds against common people. I pity your situation, so many honor in your approach and so little games you can play, and every new one must be scrutinized thoroughly, one must be working in company onboarding departhment to understand your pain.

I didn't know JK Rowling killed people like you insinuate with "Must-Not-Be-Named", I would certainly heard about that, so I guess it's just another exaggeration without anything solid to back up your case.

For me personally she is a proud woman and a feminist, and I'm not a big fan of those but I have to respect her position because it's her right and as far as I know she didn't break any laws. She didn't sexually assaulted anyone or laid off hundreds of people on street while signing a fat check on her name from all the profits.

It must be really hard for you to look at the game you can't play seeking for a justification that you can *borrow* it for free maybe and it would be just.

My justifications are much simpler:
1. Do I want to play that game
2. Can my PC handle it now or should I wait for an upgrade or maybe there is a way to play it through Cloud service
3. Do I have the money I can spend on the game right now
4. Is this game available for sale for me or I have to find other ways to get to play it

That's all. Unless the main holder is eating or killing people (or doing something on par with that) I don't get a dime about it.

And I think the approach described by another user that Wagner's music is okay because he is dead and Harry Potter games are not because JK Rowling is alive is clinically insane. But it's my opinion only so have it or ignore it, or oppose it if you like, this will not change anything.

a. don't believe people who have potatoes for breakfast
b. don't do cocaine, and it is not really about you but about supporting the whole tree of connection behind the moment of purchase

Why?

Why?

Why?

If they are interested in similar stuff, sure.

I don't see how that's relevant. Instead I'd think a person's viewpoint is poisoned not by personal experience but because they are told to dislike something, and it's not even your own personal point of view. I'd consider it a form of brain washing, like advertisements where you are fed an ad about something a thousand times, and then you are unaware you've taken in views and opinion of the ad rather than objectively deciding on your own.

So; if your decision to buy and enjoy something is purely based on if someone is currently alive, then your opinion is flimsy at best and likely useless, and i'd consider hypocritical. I'd respect your opinion if you held it on on principle; At which point you'd refuse to buy, watch, play, or involve yourself in ANY Harry potter or related franchise content, regardless if she's alive or dead. Instead you should look at something objectively based on some criteria and standards that transcend some petty checkbox.

Personally i dislike JK's work. Why? Because the books are written in a way where it's presented much like a mystery you might get a bit in Sherlock Holmes. Then she doesn't sprinkle in hardly any clues what-so-ever, and then presents them at the end as though showing you the puzzle in it's whole when literally half of it is missing and when you look back at the previous chapters and referenced scenes (and i have) you might get some tiny nibblet of a clue but not anything that would actually be useful. If she had sufficient clues to figuring out the plot from those clues (as a form of foreboding) it would make you feel smart, instead when the mystery is explained it feels like you're hit over the head for not figuring it out sooner and person X died in this book when they could have been saved. (This example of course i'm thinking more in the first couple books, i don't recall them being quite that bad in later books, not that I've read past the blood prince at present; The biggest 'clue' i remember seeing in the books was when Hermine was in two places at once and the whole 'i thought you were taking X class' and 'where did hermine go?' bits which stood out more but otherwise there was usable hints. The movie was a bit better, but not by much). Regardless; just because i dislike her style, that doesn't mean it affects if i'd play this game, or if i'd watch the movies or read the books again. If anything, a proper open world game in Hogwarts sounds potentially fun and not just 'relive the movie in this game by doing what harry did but likely with lots more filler and running around'.

And the same thing may come up with Star Wars. I am not a fan of star wars, but i'll play Kotor and probably other Star Wars games but not others. Why? I don't like blaster and shooting play, but like RPG and Jedi/force based concepts. This has zero effect on if Disney owns the franchise, or if George Lucas is still alive or not or if Harrison ford decides to retire to Australia and learn to ride kangaroos. And i'm also not going to refuse to watch Batman and Robin just because George Clooney is still alive and may *gasp* get some royalties!

No i'll hate works if i decide they suck. While i refuse to watch the Disney's trilogy or movies (not just because i have severe reserves about Disney since the late 90's) it's because those three movies sucked. If disney sells off Star Wars back to Lucas, i won't suddenly watch/buy the trilogy 'just because disney doesn't own it anymore' or something more flimsy.

I'm sure i made my point at this point...
But i like having potatoes for breakfast. Got a secret, i do extra baked/boiled potatoes, and leftover potatoes i use in the morning. Slice when cold as they will be more usable, though 3/4" thick or better, saute in bacon grease and seasoning salt, and serve.

Delicious...

I personally don't buy games with denuvo directly on principle alone, however if I get one from a trade or bundle, where I have no means to alter the fund allocation, then I do download the crack alone if I want to play the game. I have a bad experience with the only game I played with denuvo back then (lords of the fallen, also happens to be one of the early games with it), which led to a couple of bsods and eventually windows gave up on life. I had to run windows repair from the usb boot stick and it took me whole weekend to get the system stable again.

I remember reading years ago that there was a court case within eu about a dude downloading crack for some heavy drm'd game and it was ruled in favor of the user, since he couldn't run his legit copy otherwise. I think it was starforce or something similar, maybe not necessarily denuvo.

Regarding the game, 32GB of RAM is becoming the new recommended, with 16GB bare minimum, 24GB on the safer side. Within hardcore flight simulator community (dcs world), 64GB is already recommended for heavy missions for about 2-3 years now.
I think 7700x handled it pretty well, obviously though there are some hogs within the game, whether it is denuvo or not, it's hard to say. I'm sure there will soon be optimizations for game and drivers both. I wouldn't worry about cpu bottleneck unless playing at 1080p and aiming for very high framerates (by 3rd person console game standards at least).

MT framework is a very nice inhouse engine (I consider it a classic by now - I'm replaying Dragon's dogma these days btw), served Capcom well over the years, but iirc it's not very easy to work with (quite important for a potential 3rd party dev, where a lot of documentation is in Japanese-only too). There is probably also a technical reason/limitations why they went ahead developing the RE engine instead of updating MT framework further to like 3+. I wonder if we will see a true successor to MT though, since RE engine is like its own thing/branch and I always thought it being more like a stopgap measure of sorts.

I think the push and need for such high requirements gets rather silly. Some of my favorite games in the world, ran on a PS2 with a mere 32Mb RAM (and older NES/SNES and others, with far less). Having unlimited resources makes some devs lazy, rather than finding limits and working within those limits, or having problems and coming up with.... interesting and practical solutions to the problem, many problems that became defining features of the game(s).

I'm not saying i wouldn't enjoy the PS2 games if they had more ram, larger more sprawled levels and diverse enemies without changing zones in order to act as a load/unload stage, but sizes of games exceeding 10Gb and memory requirements exceeding the same starts to feel like it needs too much damn space.

I actually felt this way when it came to the PSX releases. It felt like some PSX developers had gotten lazy with just including FMV cutscenes rather than getting the hardware to do the work in a reasonable amount of space. (Final Fantasy 8 is one offender here.)

There's also the fact that, due to the change from cartridges to CDs, the PSX (and the Sega Saturn, but not the Nintendo 64) lost the main advantage that consoles had previously enjoyed; the complete (or near complete) lack of load times.

(And yes, I would say that 700MB is still more space than a game really needs to be fun. I'd rather have near-instant load times.)

I go further: Any trade that would give me a DRM-encumbered game is not a trade I would do.

Any bundle that includes DRM-encumbered games is also out. If the bundle contains both DRM-free and DRM-encumbered versions of the same games, that still might be acceptable, but I'd consider that bundle to be worth less than an equivalent bundle that lacked the DRM-encumbered versions.

(Yes, this means I consider steam keys to have negative value.)

The sudden increase in space did some odd design choices for games. Interplay i remember getting BattleChess on CD, and the rest of the space was Demos (well, 200Mb of demos... vs the 20Mb game). Real lazy games were full FMV with random interactive boards to try and do things, and any mistake could result in a failure/death. They really didn't know what to do with the space.

And it is curious how much space is needed for a game. A CD for Castlevania Symphony of the night, was something like 300Mb, but strip the video and it takes up something like 20Mb for the core of the game to play it (not sure about the music though, i could never tell if it was synthesized or CD playback somewhere).

Dropping attempted 3D titles, plenty of games with a handful of features (card games, bubble-bobble match games, Platformers) would definitely have everything it needed on one disc. But there's a balance of space/content, where i think 700Mb just wasn't quite enough space.

Also the PS1 video quality felt a little weak to me, and they really had to sacrifice quality to fit both the game and the videos on, as well as do weak CGI creation because the TV's, the weak bitrate and max read speed really got in the way. And many games ended up doing multiple discs (Final Fantasy, Legend of Dragoon, Chrono Cross, quite a few but heavy JRPG)

Personally i liked the balance in PS2 games, while it might be 4Gb, games like Ar tonelico, Disgaea, and many other games which may have a good intro and a few videos, but it had tons of content to keep you busy dozens of hours, while also the improved hardware was powerful enough to do a lot. And unless you had to, generally videos were a last resort and otherwise would be preferred to be rendered on the actual hardware. Few (if any games that i remember) needed more than one disc on the PS2.

I hope the 16GB RAM and 6th gen i5 as minimum system requirements are both boggarts trying to strike fear into the hearts of all who own potatoe-class PCs. I thought space expanding spells were easy so I don't understand the 85GB SSD space requirement either. I don't see myself or many people with older PCs playing this unless they somehow accio a new CPU, some RAM and a GPU (and possibly an SSD) to upgrade their rig.


Still, I hope WB removes that DRM that must not be named from HL and releases the game on GOG like they did with Mad Max and Shadow of War series.

I believe the music is mostly redbook audio, to the point where one could play it on a CD player.

(One exception is the shop music; that actually is synthesized, and is stored in a format closer to MIDI rather than as a waveform.)

Truly precious!


The game is so flat, annoying and boring so we have to resort to talking about who's left and who's wrong (I mean right), other games, and lastly climate change? I call this a game-changer. :P

I actually don't have a problem with the strong recommendation for an SSD. Ultimately, they've been mainstream for a good ten years now, so anyone with a machine good enough to play new non-Indie releases will have one. They're not expensive, so there's no reason not to have at least a 1TB SATA SSD in a build (obviously I'd recommend a decent PCIe3/4 NvME drive as well or instead)

I think it's just that hot button issues easily derail any thread. I was actually curious about the optimization issue. I run older hardware, and I end up being shocked now and then when I see stuff with PS2 level graphics that want a GTX 1080.

As for the political stuff, I agree about taking it to Twitter, especially when it's this boring topic where people on "my side" have kneejerk reactions to defend people who were considered woke 3 years ago, and who probably helped to pave the way to where we are now. This all could have been avoided by not taking the bait...and we can let people NOT enjoy things too regardless of their reasons. I know I'm annoyed when I have to justify my dislike of junk.

Fear not though, if even educated, graduated, working age peeps don't not be able to keep the politics out of a game review then yea...... you know