Craymen Edge

A couple of Epic exclusives like Borderlands 3 are starting to appear on third-party sites like Humble and Green Man Gaming, which is a good start (and they're where I buy most of my games tbh), but as yet they're the same price wherever. Hopefully this leads to a little bit of price competition down the line, but I'm not optimistic it'll be soon. It seems to me Epic's priority right now is delivering value to publishers, not customers, I think they'll discourage discounting.

It's a shame Raptr tried to become a social network at the expense of the game tracking thing. I think I could have logged 100 hours in games like Forza 2 and 3, and Bad Company 2, and maybe Rainbow 6 Vegas. I spent ages in those Forza games in the livery editor, and significant time both online and in the fastest lap modes. R6 Vegas was the de facto online game for a while. Most sessions would either begin or end with a long session in that game. It was kind of replaced later with Bad Company 2 for a while. By the time it started to peter out with the release of Battlefield 3, I was already my days of playing on xbox live were starting to wane. Hating Battlefield 3 might have hastened the process. I don't have time to play many games for that long these days, but a few have hit the 100 hour mark: I absolutely rinsed Hitman 2016, but there were still things I could have done in that game, if I'd wanted to. Hitman 2 will definitely get there and Witcher 3 will most likely reach the 100 hour mark in time. Borderlands 2 and Divinity Original Sin times are just how long it took me to get through everything (with maybe a little time on a second character on B2). XCOM comes from multiple play-throughs. I spent a hell of a lot of time on Guild Wars back in the day, but don't have the client to check. My top played game currently is Overwatch by a long way. At the moment it's a 560 hours, and I still play that a couple of times a week, sometimes more.

Fighting monsters in Skellige in the middle of a big storm was really atmospheric

I've only just watched it, and it's just a standard reveal trailer. I don't know why this one in particular is getting such criticism for not having gameplay when pretty much all games are revealed like that. It didn't do a lot for me - the first Knights of the Old Republic is the only Star Wars game I can remember playing for more than an hour or so, definitely the only one I ever finished, so I'm not the type to get hyped by a trailer like that. I did like the Titanfall 2 campaign though, so hoping from something good from Respawn.

Those pictures are now in a different order that when I posted them. Weird.

I decided to stop doing sidequests and head to Skellige, which is basically Northern Ireland but Vikings? The scenery is gorgeous, and the music as you ride to the first quest marker after landing on the island is amazing. I definitely noticed a slight increase in difficulty, the Drowners and Wolves I encountered take a little more to put down than the ones I was fighting just before I left Novigrad.

I'm officially spending far too much time using Ansel in The Witcher 3

Don't really know why, other than my existing physical copies are god knows where, and it was less than £3 to get them both on Steam the other day.

Love the cover art, that's one of the best I've seen since Red Alert 3.

A long but interesting read from Jason Schrier at Kotaku: How BioWare's Anthem Went Wrong

We got confused by Overwatch's April Fool prank on PC, partly because it wasn't quite April 1st yet when we were playing. Yeah, I voted for myself.

More Witcher 3/Nvidia Ansel shots:

I really should be finishing some of my existing games before buying new ones, but:

Randy Pitchford is such an oily repulsive prick. Ugh, oh god. he's doing his shitty magic. I liked the trailer though, it captures the character of the other games pretty well.

Playing around with the Nvidia driver photo mode stuff. The amount of camera control you have in The Witcher 3 is fantastic compared to other games I've used it with. You can move the camera pretty much anywhere, including through open windows if the opening is large enough.