I expect we'll see it late '26 or early '27; we just won't hear much about it until then, since developing a live service with a skeleton crew is unpredictable enough to give them good reason to keep their cards close to their chest — cross-save was a big feature, and a totally unexpected surprise!
I'm pretty sure IO revealed it unusually early just to make their 1st showcase better; the only other stuff it had was Le Chiffre and MindsEye lmao.
First Light's announcement in 2020 wasn't dissimilar; they wanted to show what they were working on to attract talent, since the studio was expanding.
It also means the game a new player is most likely to get crushed in is her very first; even if she follows the tutorial, the starting deck's so bad that it can drag her down.
And I'm sure there'd be at least a small scene of fans playing it pvp, if only the game wasn't built to be pay-to-win!
It's funny that the weakest part of Fallout New Vegas's card game is unironically that you have to play Fallout New Vegas to engage with it. Half of the game is about building a deck, which requires doing a collect-a-thon where the "collecting" is just picking up some cards from the shops.
And finally, my capitalists have little else to spend money on, so they've gone mad with building *thousands* of railways in foreign countries, particularly China. My best guess as to why is that AI governments always subsidise them, so they're very safe investments.
Some assorted highlights:
- We executed the titular Victoria and established a republic relatively quickly
- The Tories became politically sidelined until the party's corpse was just being puppeted by the military
- Sigmund Freud became a political activist
- I decisively beat Eugene Debs in combat
Trade Leagues seem to just be quite OP. More-free-than-free-trade trade is a ridiculous boon to everyone's economies, and even great powers are willing to remain within them, if catered to properly. You don't have to worry about vassals causing problems, either.
I should note that while it's not a humanitarian organisation, the Commonwealth greatly benefited member states, offering investment, economic specialisation, a defensive pact with other members, and increases to the standard of living -- the top ten countries in the latter regard are all members.
While I banned wars for personal conquest, war for other reasons was still on the menu, so whenever I was in a conflict with a power that was annoying me, I'd make chunks of it independent, allowing me to woo them (and, if weakened by the war, its mother country) into joining the Commonwealth.
Being the toolmaker, engine mechanic, auto mechanic, and electrical engineer of the world demands people to work the industry, so I was swift to remove all barriers to immigration, resulting in an extremely diverse Britain with nearly three times as many people in my 1936 as Britain in the real 2026
The market provided free trade and investment opportunities between its members, giving less developed nations buyers for their goods, more developed ones raw materials to refine, and Britain further influence, as everyone increasingly depended on British tools and engines to do basically anything.
This meant I had to strictly neo- my imperialism, winning the trust of small powers, investing in their economies to build sway over them, and eventually inviting them into the Commonwealth of Nations' common market--which, as of 1936, has 107 members, at least 74 of which actually want to be there.
Just finished a very fun campaign in Victoria 3! I did a run as Britain where I freed all of my vassals upon the ascension of the titular Victoria, and was then banned from conquering or vassalising any lands outside of Great Britain itself.
I'd do this myself, but no version of Hitman will even launch into the main menu on my laptop, and the Switch 2 version doesn't support cross-progression yet.
If you own it on PC and have enough space, you can get a DLC-less copy by downloading the free demo from a platform you don't already own it on, whether that's Steam, the EGS, or the MS Store. It wouldn't be able to test Freelancer, but you could at least do the first tests from the main menu.
...as well as if the DLC-less account would be able to change away from a DLC cosmetic and re-select it.
I'm also interested in testing if DLC items and cosmetics in Freelancer (from the Makeshift, Street Art, Disruptor, Drop, Splitter, Banker, Bruce Lee, Eminem vs. Slim Shady, or Undying Packs) will appear in the safehouse if set on a version that owns the DLC and viewed within another that doesn't,
The specific items I want to see are The Profligacy Suit, the Sieker 1, and The Ephemeral Suit with Eye Patch.
Hello! I need help with a video!
If any of you happen to own Hitman with DLC on one platform, and another copy of Hitman without on a different platform, could you please configure cross-progression so the DLC account is the active save, and tell me which items carry over to the DLC-less version?
A Reddit comment from an IOI staff member saying the following: "Cross-Progression for Nintendo needs a tad bit of polish as we encountered a major problem with Nintendo stats not triggering Achievements on other platforms. We will fix and enable it asap. Sorry for the inconveniences."
for anyone else struggling to connect their nintendo accounts to hitman's new cross-progression:
as an artist who makes most of her money from copyright myself, i couldn't care less if i'll still be getting royalties from facts & features in 2087, let alone if my kids will get them in 2157
you wouldn't even have to do a lot beyond that, and you'd still have a policy that's very generous towards actual artists; only the massive media companies (primarily from hollywood) that outlive us benefit from life+70 years of monetisation
even if we just put it on the table as a threat, i think a lot of media companies would be more aggressive against trump if enough countries threatened to reduce the term to 20 years and put everything before 2006 in the public domain
can the death of american hegemony pretty pretty please push the civilised world to finally do ip law reform, including massively reducing the term of copyright ownership
New Vegas's magazines, in contrast, are next to useless for dialogue checks; unless you either remember the exact points and thresholds of each one, or are willing to reload a save, most key checks are too urgent to let the player to say "Goodbye," eat a magazine, and start the conversation back up
Fallout 4's dialogue system has a lot of flaws, but I love how it finally let you just step away from the conversation for a moment to use any drugs or wearables you needed to pass a skill check.
Now if only Fallout 4 had enough skill checks in dialogue for this to be particularly useful...
i was too proud of this one to make you guys wait until the video goes up on the 31st (hopefully).
It's definitely a fun way to imagine it, but alas, the internet is a tool for communication with people, not voids.
