Goose Nordic Adventure, Part 1: Schwarze Heide to Rotterdam
I love the PC game Battletech. It’s one of my favourite strategy games of all time – I even prefer it to the XCOM reboot it is based on. Battletech’s story is great and the mechanics are even better. I’ve played the game for about 500 hours in total.
As such, I was anxiously awaiting that the game’s publisher Paradox would announce the development of a sequel. Which will probably never happen now, as The Lamplighters League, the latest game by Harebrained Schemes (which developed both Battletech and the PC adaptations of Shadowrun), has flopped massively. Paradox seems to have seen this coming and laid off most of the Harebrained Schemes staff pre-emptively during the summer.
Apparently, Harebrained Schemes did pitch Battletech 2 to Paradox at some point, but the publisher didn’t want it to happen because the IP for the project wasn’t owned by neither party.
- Paradox to write down Lamplighters League costs, confirms layoffs at Harebrained Schemes, GamesIndustry.biz
- 80 percent of Harebrained Schemes' staff have been laid off + Battletech 2 was pitched to Paradox, but it wasn’t a Paradox IP and Microsoft got a revenue cut so the sequel was rejected, Reddit
Getting Awfully Crowded in My Sky: How to Smuggle in Starfield
In case you ever find yourself in the Charybdis system in Starfield, because you followed a distress signal and are now on a mission called “Operation Starseed”, here’s some info I wish I had when starting that mission:
During that mission, there might come a point when you side with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and you have to kill some other leaders. If this happens, only kill those other leaders, not the random colonists shooting at you. If you kill even one of them, the whole settlement will go hostile after your post-battle talk with FDR. This is because you now have a bounty in that settlement. You can solve that issue by entering the following console command when they all go hostile: player.paycrimegold 0 0 00299F72
Be aware that the console is only available on PC. It can be activated by pressing the ~
key. Also, if you use that command, your saves will be classified as “modded” which means you won’t be able to get any achievements on those saves anymore.
People who know me will not be surprised that I am looking forward very much to Starfield coming out. Fallout 3 was one of my favourite games of all time and I’ve put just about 2000 hours into Elite: Dangerous before finally losing interest in that game. So I was planning on pre-ordering Bethesda’s upcoming blockbuster and I’ve taken off the first week of September to stream it as close to 24/7 as I can get.
But, as it turns out, I will actually also be reviewing this game for heise online. Which means that I’ll actually get to play it now. I just can’t talk about that until my review comes out.
I haven’t been this excited about a video game in years!
A word of warning: I would probably not respec my character in Diablo IV at the moment. When I did this recently, I lost all additional skill points I had accrued beyond pure levelling (via map renown and the like). They are just gone. Apparently, I am not the only one with this problem, but Blizzard hasn’t even acknowledged that it exists, as far as I know. It most definitely does, though. And it is extremely annoying. Skill points are pretty important in that game…
Microsoft Flight Simulator Crashes Because of Capture One
Yesterday, Blood Bowl III was released. And since I am a bit under the weather at the moment and find it hard to concentrate on work, I’ve started a new career as my Blood Bowl coach alter ego Jurgen von Klopp, coaching the Burgdorf Barons (team motto: “Finem Mundi Nobilis”). The game is still a bit buggy at the moment, but a lot of fun, nontheless. As Blood Bowl should be. And most importantly, it’s a faithful recreation of Games Workshop’s tabletop rules, including visible dice rolls. You can even skin the dice… very cool!