January 2026 PCG Article Discussion

[BeardyHat]

As it turns out, I said a normal diffusion model couldn't do this, but they actually made a separate model to use with Flux that can do it.

That it can understand age as it relates to human physiology?

Generating images of minors aside, I still would like to get Flux working on SDXL, just because I'm curious to see how it works over various SD models. Can't recall if I tried it on my AMD setup or not yet.

Divinity: Original Sin 2's brilliant armor system is one of a kind in RPGs, and I'm bummed we'll apparently never see it again

Sic transit gloria mundi.

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I absolutely hated the armor system in DOS2. There's some comments attesting to this, but it felt like as soon as you broke someones armor, it just made more sense to try and fully kill them than it did to muck around with crowd control.

Crowd control is what made the first game so much fun. Opening a fight and immediately teleporting someone into some poison and then sending a fireball at them to get them to explode. I absolutely adored this style of combat in the first game and the second one pretty much ruined all of that for me; I never did get into the second game like I did the first and whenever I think about replaying one of the games again, it's always the first game that comes to mind.

 

[Zed Clampet]

That it can understand age as it relates to human physiology?

No, I meant Flux couldn't put a specific person into a picture without being trained on that person, but there's a separate model to use with Flux that will do it inside something called ControlNet.

Flux definitely understands age and human physiology. It also has gleaned lots of other not necessarily helpful things from looking at pictures of people. Like the older you get, the fatter you are and older women have shorter hair than younger women. Of course you can override that in the prompts, but you can't override the physiology, as I found when I was trying to make halflings. It refused not to make them children. If you put an age into your prompt, but Flux sees a physiological discrepancy, it will ignore the age you put in every single time. I ended up manually editing the pictures myself and then doing a training where I explained what they were, and then it was fine.

 

[BeardyHat]

No, I meant Flux couldn't put a specific person into a picture without being trained on that person, but there's a separate model to use with Flux that will do it inside something called ControlNet.

Flux definitely understands age and human physiology. It also has gleaned lots of other not necessarily helpful things from looking at pictures of people. Like the older you get, the fatter you are and older women have shorter hair than younger women. Of course you can override that in the prompts, but you can't override the physiology, as I found when I was trying to make halflings. It refused not to make them children. If you put an age into your prompt, but Flux sees a physiological discrepancy, it will ignore the age you put in every single time. I ended up manually editing the pictures myself and then doing a training where I explained what they were, and then it was fine.

That actually explains some things for me. I was trying to get Stable Diffusion to generate some pictures of my Halfling character in my D&D game and it was basically just making children. My Halfling is older and has grey hair, so...

 

[BeardyHat]

GOG's new owner can't stand Windows either: 'It's such poor-quality software… I can't believe it!'

He's just like me, for real.

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I agree with your comment on this one, Zed.

That said, Linux isn't the way yet, still. I do really like it, for all my grousing. Just yesterday I reinstalled it on my Surface Pro 7, because I was trying to resolve an issue with Civ 6 on that PC. Primarily, running Civ 6 at the native resolution in Windows is very slow, even on the lowest settings. Switching to a lower resolution causes the game to run in an unusable window that is only resolved by lowering DPI scaling to 100%, which causes the OS to become essentially unusable but then also causes the a graphics freeze, even though the program is still running. Think I mentioned all this in the gaming thread.

Anyway, I figured, let's install Linux and see what happens. So I installed Pop!_OS this time and got things (aside from the Surface Pen) working great. I even resolved the issue of the 200mhz throttling bug with the help of Copilot ( ) and I was on my way! Unfortunately, while I could now play Civ 6 at a low resolution full screen, the mouse was completely off. I had to move it half an inch above or to the side (it was variable) to get it to click what I wanted. Going native resolution fixed this, but of course, then the game ran terribly.

So I tried another game. Strategic Command: War in Europe. This one launched fine after a few different Proton selections, but only in a window (go figure), trying to change the graphics settings resulted in the game popping up another window that was half off the screen and immovable, making configuring the graphics options completely useless.

So I reinstalled Windows again.

I do suspect a lot of this on both Windows and Linux has to do with Intel and shoddy drivers in Windows and patchwork support in Linux. Because trying the same games on Steam Deck with the AMD APU works great, no issues at all. I'm half tempted to buy myself an all AMD laptop (wish I could find a tablet PC as nice as the Surface) just to experiment with Linux on it, because I feel like that would work much better. I could try my all AMD desktop, but again, I don't want to have to reconfigure all my server software. Perhaps I need another SSD to throw in there so I don't lose all my data...

 

[Pifanjr]

GOG's new owner can't stand Windows either: 'It's such poor-quality software… I can't believe it!'

He's just like me, for real.

www.pcgamer.com

I agree with your comment on this one, Zed.

That said, Linux isn't the way yet, still. I do really like it, for all my grousing. Just yesterday I reinstalled it on my Surface Pro 7, because I was trying to resolve an issue with Civ 6 on that PC. Primarily, running Civ 6 at the native resolution in Windows is very slow, even on the lowest settings. Switching to a lower resolution causes the game to run in an unusable window that is only resolved by lowering DPI scaling to 100%, which causes the OS to become essentially unusable but then also causes the a graphics freeze, even though the program is still running. Think I mentioned all this in the gaming thread.

Anyway, I figured, let's install Linux and see what happens. So I installed Pop!_OS this time and got things (aside from the Surface Pen) working great. I even resolved the issue of the 200mhz throttling bug with the help of Copilot ( ) and I was on my way! Unfortunately, while I could now play Civ 6 at a low resolution full screen, the mouse was completely off. I had to move it half an inch above or to the side (it was variable) to get it to click what I wanted. Going native resolution fixed this, but of course, then the game ran terribly.

So I tried another game. Strategic Command: War in Europe. This one launched fine after a few different Proton selections, but only in a window (go figure), trying to change the graphics settings resulted in the game popping up another window that was half off the screen and immovable, making configuring the graphics options completely useless.

So I reinstalled Windows again.

I do suspect a lot of this on both Windows and Linux has to do with Intel and shoddy drivers in Windows and patchwork support in Linux. Because trying the same games on Steam Deck with the AMD APU works great, no issues at all. I'm half tempted to buy myself an all AMD laptop (wish I could find a tablet PC as nice as the Surface) just to experiment with Linux on it, because I feel like that would work much better. I could try my all AMD desktop, but again, I don't want to have to reconfigure all my server software. Perhaps I need another SSD to throw in there so I don't lose all my data...

I've had issues with games not recognising where the mouse cursor was before (on Windows). I think that some games just don't do well if you screw around with the resolution.

As for Windows, I've been waiting on Steam OS to become available before I try to switch to Linux, because I don't want to spend too much time researching and trying out different Linux distros and I trust Steam OS to just work. Hopefully it becomes available for desktops before my extended Windows 10 support expires.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Gaming on Linux has just gotten better with the launch of Wine 11

We can expect better and more robust compatibility.

www.pcgamer.com

And we get closer....This will greatly help SteamOS apparently.

 

[Pifanjr]

I just saw this pop up in the news reel in my Steam library:

A 'deeply social, psychological' Fallout Shelter reality TV series is coming from the producers of the Squid Game reality series

The success of the Fallout series on Prime probably made this inevitable.

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I would think that there isn't much overlap between Fallout fans and reality TV fans, but maybe I'm wrong.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I just saw this pop up in the news reel in my Steam library:

A 'deeply social, psychological' Fallout Shelter reality TV series is coming from the producers of the Squid Game reality series

The success of the Fallout series on Prime probably made this inevitable.

www.pcgamer.com

I would think that there isn't much overlap between Fallout fans and reality TV fans, but maybe I'm wrong.

"Reality TV Slop"

 

[Zed Clampet]

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/prince-of-persia-the-sand-of-time-remake-is-cancelled-as-ubisoft-announces-major-internal-restructuring-and-more-layoffs-and-studio-closures-on-the-way/

Why is Yves Guillemot still the CEO? They are so dysfunctional they fail at making half of their games and have to cancel them.

What I would do is look at the Expedition 33 model, divide up into teams of 50, and give them all creative freedom that doesn't include input from the marketing department. Tell them to make beautiful, fun games that work day 1.

 

[Johnway]

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/prince-of-persia-the-sand-of-time-remake-is-cancelled-as-ubisoft-announces-major-internal-restructuring-and-more-layoffs-and-studio-closures-on-the-way/

Why is Yves Guillemot still the CEO? They are so dysfunctional they fail at making half of their games and have to cancel them.

What I would do is look at the Expedition 33 model, divide up into teams of 50, and give them all creative freedom that doesn't include input from the marketing department. Tell them to make beautiful, fun games that work day 1.

yeah at this point ubisoft is just a car crash in slow motion. Its gutting studios and theres always projects that seem to die by the way side. Presumably they're making money releasing the usual ubisoft experience but i can't help but feel that its days are numbered. They seem content to rest on their laurels rather then push out more quality content. Expedition 33 showed what their ex talent could do, but the studio can't catch a break.

 

[Zed Clampet]

It's amazing that the main site's moderation won't let me suggest they fire Yves Guillemot, one of the richest men in France. It's not like he's going to be living under a bridge somewhere. The guy has just lost his way and driven Ubisoft into a catastrophic mess. He was also the one in charge during all the...employee complaints. It's like we've moved the comments into a post apocalyptic authoritarian nightmare where every person on the planet has to feel cozy and unoffended, although the only person who should have taken offense at my comment was Yves Guillemot. I'm sorry if it makes you sad that people get fired. My suggestion is to grow up a little and develop some resilience because your insanity is driving us straight into nightmare.

 

[neogunhero]

The latest graphics cards are all increasing in price, but it's a bloodbath for those that have 16 GB or more of VRAM

So either face the storm now or ride it out for a year or so.

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AMD has stated that they're going to try to hold on for as long as possible and it's evident right now. AMD RX 9000 series cards are beating RTX 5000 series cards in price. You can get an RX 9060 XT 16GB at Best Buy for $449, while the cheapest RTX 5060 Ti 16GB they have available for shipping is $579. They had another model of the 5060 Ti for $429 but in-store only. I wonder if this high-speed changing of prices is giving AMD a slight sales boost, if only temporarily. Some people are going to be panic buying while others will wait it out.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Forza Horizon 6 races into Japan in May with the series' biggest map and widest day one car selection, but stubbornly refuses to confirm whether the kei trucks will be drivable

Also there's a giant mecha, I guess.

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May? Oh hell yeah. Pre-ordering the "deluxe" version is a thing I'll be doing.

 

[neogunhero]

Forza Horizon 6 races into Japan in May with the series' biggest map and widest day one car selection, but stubbornly refuses to confirm whether the kei trucks will be drivable

Also there's a giant mecha, I guess.

www.pcgamer.com

May? Oh hell yeah. Pre-ordering the "deluxe" version is a thing I'll be doing.

I generally don't like racing games but Forza Horizon is the exception. I like how it can be as casual or as realistic as you like. I had a ton of fun in FH4, and Japan looks like an amazing location, so I'll definitely keep an eye out for that.

Fable is coming this fall, will let you kill a giant Richard Ayoade and possibly destroy the local housing market in the process

That sounds like Fable, alright.

www.pcgamer.com

Fable looks pretty awesome. If this game and Crimson Desert turn out to be good games, this could be a very great year for singleplayer RPGs.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I generally don't like racing games but Forza Horizon is the exception. I like how it can be as casual or as realistic as you like. I had a ton of fun in FH4, and Japan looks like an amazing location, so I'll definitely keep an eye out for that.

Fable is coming this fall, will let you kill a giant Richard Ayoade and possibly destroy the local housing market in the process

That sounds like Fable, alright.

www.pcgamer.com

Fable looks pretty awesome. If this game and Crimson Desert turn out to be good games, this could be a very great year for singleplayer RPGs.

Those are both made by Playground Games, which is one reason I'm pretty excited for Fable. I'll be buying Forza 6, but will probably just play Fable on Game Pass. I've never played a Fable game. They are on sale now, but have never been remade, so they are probably pretty dated.

 

[neogunhero]

Those are both made by Playground Games, which is one reason I'm pretty excited for Fable. I'll be buying Forza 6, but will probably just play Fable on Game Pass. I've never played a Fable game. They are on sale now, but have never been remade, so they are probably pretty dated.

My friend and I tried to re-play Fable 3 co-op a few years ago. Even back then it felt outdated, and it's the newest in the series. I've only ever played Fable 1 back when it was new, and back at that time it awesome! There was a good and evil system, so as you did more evil deeds, your character would look more twisted and people had negative opinions of you. That's all that I really remember from it, so I'm glad to see them doubling down on that mechanic for the new game. I think players really like seeing consequences to their actions, as long as the game stays fun and isn't punishing you for being a bad person.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Asus says it has started an 'immediate review' of its 800-series motherboards in light of X3D chip issues

Raptor Lake carbon-copy or just wonky BIOS settings?

www.pcgamer.com

 

[Zed Clampet]

After killing its multiplatform mod manager, Nexus revives its spirit with an announcement that its Windows-only app will support SteamOS in future

Which means someone else can faff with that version to make it play nicely with your Linux distro of choice.

www.pcgamer.com

vortex was awful. hopefully this is better.