MS Flight Sim 2024 got off to a very rough start, with thousands of eager aviators trying to login on day one, only to be blocked by a login queue and multiple server issues. I logged in around two hours after the global launch and was fortunate enough to get in quite quickly, and it didn’t me long to discover that behind all the online barricades, there was actually a very technically well-built game waiting to be discovered.
Before I proceed, let me mention that this is not a full review of the game. I am not a serious flight sim player, and I am not too much of a casual flyer either, because flying even casually is more stressful than playing a racing simulator seriously. If this title was not on game pass, I would certainly not give it a try. But it is a day one release on game pass, and it seemed like something different from what I usually play.
With that said, let’s look at what this game has to offer to people like me, who just want to play it out of curiosity, and not for actually using it as a flight simulator.
The 16th edition of the India Game Developer Conference was held from November 13 to 15, 2024. I have been attending this conference for quite a few years now, but this was the first time that I took out my phone and pointed the camera everywhere I went.
The resulting “vlog” is linked to this post, but I also wanted to link to the many interesting games I saw at the event, that I could not highlight in the video to avoid it running for more than an hour.
In alphabetical order, here are some of the games showcased at the event. I am only including games that have a steam page or official website available as a bare minimum, to allow for readers to discover more about these games. This is not an exhaustive list. I will add to it as and when I collect more store page/website links.
The video in this post features heavy spoilers for Hades 2, and is targeted at people who have already played the game as it exists in late October 2024. So if you haven’t yet played Hades 2, watch at your own risk.
The Olympic Update is the first major patch for Hades 2, and it was released a few days ago, on October 16, 2024. It introduces the new Olympus region to the surface path of the game, a new main boss, Prometheus, and a new weapon, the black coat, which is said to be the final weapon to be added to the game. Oh, and for those playing on the Mac, this update adds native Mac support.
With these new updates, let’s look at what the game contains now: six weapons, four bosses in the underworld region, three bosses in the surface region, two different game modes that add various modifiers and conditions to keep your runs interesting, and a whole lot of collectables, decorations, and characters with whom you can build relationships. What’s more, there’s more to come, with at least one more boss for the surface region, and maybe some more story surprises before the launch of the final game.
This is exactly the kind of experience I was hoping for with the early access version of the game, and so far, Supergiant games hasn’t disappointed me. There are a group of fans who are intentionally delaying their purchase of the game till the full version is out, because they do not want to experience the game with so many delays. The next major update is not expected until early 2025, and there is no word about the final release of the game. This means you will have to constantly remind yourself about what happened with the story, or how each of the six weapons work, and so on.
I don’t mind consuming the content in small chunks, because so far, it is very much in line with the experience offered by the first Hades game. We know what to expect from the game, and even though there may be a few surprises, the basic structure of the game is expected to remain largely the same.
Occult Chambers is a third person action horror game being developed by BornMonkie, an independent studio from Hyderabad, India. Recently, I was fortunate enough to be given access to a playtest of an early build of the game, and the team kindly allowed sharing of the footage on YouTube.
However, it is very important that I give a disclaimer right away: I primarily play on consoles, and the footage you see in this video has been captured on my really old PC, which is more than eight years old at this point, so it does not represent the best visual quality or performance of this game. I still wanted to use this footage though, because I was surprised to find the game running decently, at maximum settings, and wanted to showcase it as an example of the game running on old hardware. Thanks to some pointers from the dev team, I was able to squeeze out a decent 20-40fps performance out of the demo, while still keeping the visuals impressive, but the footage you see here has very low FPS, because I wanted to record the game at max settings. In any case, the game is still in development, and this level is only a slice of the final game, so don’t let this video give you any assumptions about the game’s visuals or performance.
Last year, I purchased Call of Duty Modern Warfare III at full price, mostly because I had just started this YouTube channel, and wanted to review a big-ticket game to get things started. Sadly, it turned out to be one of the worst video game purchases I had ever made. The campaign was terrible, the multiplayer mode launched with only a collection of remastered maps, and the zombies mode was a reskin of the free game mode DMZ.
This year, I was thankful to Microsoft for including Black Ops 6 in the game pass catalogue on day one, mostly because I thought even if it ended up being terrible, at least I was not spending any extra money. Surprisingly, Black Ops 6 turned out to be one of the best call of duty games I have played in recent times. The campaign was full of twists and turns, the multiplayer mode launched with more than a dozen all-new maps, and the zombie mode…well it did a U-Turn and went back to a round-based format, which is what a lot of fans wanted. So at least at launch, this is a really competent first person shooter that is actually worth paying full price.
Wayfinder has come out of early access and is now available on PC and PlayStation 5, with an Xbox Series release also expected to come out quite soon. The development story of this game has been nothing short of incredible, and it is a small miracle that the 1.0 release of this game is actually available now. Just 14 months ago, when the game suffered extreme server issues at the launch of its early access, and then a drastic fall in player numbers, it was hard to imagine that the game would survive. Watch the video for a full review of the game.
Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment is the latest book from noted video game journalist, Jason Schreier, and over the course of thirty-one chapters, it walks us through the story of one of the most prominent video game developers of all time, Blizzard Entertainment. The history of Blizzard is available on the internet for free, so why should you spend your hard earned money to buy a book that narrates the same story? That’s where Jason’s experience in being a video game journalist comes in handy. He tells us the story that we have known for years, but adds in some interesting tidbits that give a bit more context to some important events.
I have not made a video review of a book before, so I don’t know what exactly you, as a viewer, would be interested to learn. With nothing more than a guess, I have split the video into different sections. To learn more, watch the video!
A few years ago, Bungie announced that the Chinese gaming giant, NetEase, had given them a significant amount of money, reported to be more than $100 million, to take the Destiny franchise in new directions.
More than six years after that initial announcement, we now have a first look at what that partnership has resulted in. It’s a new mobile game called Destiny Rising, and it is being developed and published entirely by NetEase, with Bungie merely providing the license to the franchise and a whole lot of suggestions. Here’s the first trailer.
There’s a lot to unpack in this announcement. My first thought was, Why did it take six years to show this project to the public? Sure, a lot has happened in the background since the partnership announcement. Bungie split with Activision, operated Destiny independently for a while, then got sold to Sony, and is now almost on the verge of losing its independence entirely. But if there’s one thing we know about mobile game development, it’s that they are supposed to be faster to make, right? That’s a huge part of the appeal of mobile games – they are cheaper to produce and bring in more money than PC/Console projects.
It may be a while before we learn about why it took NetEase so long to announce Destiny Rising, but I guess the far more interesting thing to focus on is the upcoming closed alpha, which begins in November, in the US and Canada. It’s a bit surprising that NetEase isn’t including its home country in the test, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a separate announcement for China. I’m a bit bummed that India isn’t part of the first test, but on second thought, I don’t really mind.
I’m currently taking a break from Destiny 2. I haven’t bought the annual upgrade of the current expansion, meaning I don’t have access to the latest episodic content, which started last week. Naturally, I’m not too keen about starting a whole new grind with a mobile game. If anything, I’m just curious to see how the Destiny experience will translate to mobile. That’s why I’m hoping the upcoming alpha test isn’t restricted by an NDA, and that streamers can show off the gameplay.
A lot of the initial feedback to the trailer revolves around regular fans joking (or not?) that Destiny 2 could use some of the features shown in the mobile game’s trailer, such as new supers, weapons and a flexible class system that doesn’t restrict the player to a certain class. Comments also expressed concern about the monetisation system, and for good reason.
The last big PC/Console franchise that NetEase converted into a mobile game was Diablo Immortal. That went on to become one of the most infamous mobile game releases in recent times, with several predatory monetisation practices in place. It’s only fair to assume that Destiny Rising will have something similar in place, since NetEase has to recover the $100 million (and more) it has invested in this franchise.
It’s probably too early to speculate, so let’s just wait for the alpha to begin or until we get more details. For more details about the game, and to pre-register for the alpha, you can visit the official website.
With the one year anniversary of QC Done fast approaching, I decided it was time to dust off the cobwebs on this website and bring it back to life.
When I registered this domain, I intended for it to act as a companion to my YouTube channel, featuring more details about whatever topic I was talking about in the videos. However, I was biting off more than I could chew, since I was running two YouTube channels with a total of four videos coming out each week, and I was learning game development at the same time. There was no time left to build and maintain this website.
Fast forward to today, and I have scaled down operations on one of the channels, and even the main channel has come down to one video per week instead of two. This felt like a good time to see what I could do with this website.
To begin with, I will merely link to all of the videos published on my channel, but by the end of the year, I hope to start adding some text to each of the posts, to give some more context to the videos. We’ll see how it goes from there.
If you have been watching my videos, and would like to provide any suggestion related to the YouTube channel or this website, please do let me know in the comments!
Similar to last week’s video on Frostpunk 2, this video about Ara History Untold is not a full review, even though I have finished one full playthrough. Once again, it’s because I feel I haven’t played this game the way it’s meant to be played, which is a strategy game.
I played it more like a clicking simulator, where I set my game on the easiest setting so that I didn’t really have problems with resources, and after a certain point, I just had to keep clicking to go to the next turn, and the game more or less played itself. I did this because I was curious to see how the game would end. I played other 4X games like Civilisation 6 and Humankind, but never really played beyond the first hour or so. But Ara was simple and approachable enough for a casual player like myself to stick till the end. And the presentation of the game goes a long way to enable this.
Sadly, it appears that regular fans of the 4X genre are not too impressed with this game, and it currently sits at a Mixed review rating on steam. However, 67% of the reviews being positive is still a good sign, and hopefully the developers can push some quick updates that will improve the game.
