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Prepare for a dark fantasy RPG, featuring modern design combined with a classic 8-bit look and feel. SKALD: Against the Black Priory is now out on GOG with a -10% launch discount until June 6th, 5 PM UTC!

SKALD: Against the Black Priory is a retro-style party-based RPG set in a grim-dark fantasy world of tragic heroes, violent deaths and Lovecraftian horror. Take a chance and roll the dice as you embark on a compelling story filled with deadly creatures, branching story and tactical, turn-based combat.

You can now also get Soundtrack and Reinforcement Pack – or both of these titles, alongside the base game, in a special Deluxe Edition!

Don’t miss tuning into a gameplay stream on our GOG Twitch channel on June 2nd, at 5 PM UTC.

SKALD: Against the Black Priory – now on GOG!
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.Keys: In my opinion the ram requirements are way too much, as with many other Unity games.
You bring a point I personally never thought though; that is, the OS requirement added to the game requirement.

Indeed "vanilla" (without ISO edits to make it run faster without the bloat consuming ram...) Windows 10/11 is a ram consuming beast. It makes sense.
Yeah, Windows 10 is a beast using computer resources, not only RAM but constant disk I/O and CPU cycles. I use Linux 10+ years and never I thought having computers using less energy running Linux than Windows and yet, here we are.

I assume the game itself don't use more than 500MB of RAM, being 231MB by itself. I can be wrong though, as I usually am :)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a "PC MasterRace" evengelist, exactly the opposite. Stated requirements are just generic guides to avoid trouble, my personal opinion on the matter involves a few swear words and calling a few names to whoever writes them.
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.Keys: In my opinion the ram requirements are way too much, as with many other Unity games.
You bring a point I personally never thought though; that is, the OS requirement added to the game requirement.

Indeed "vanilla" (without ISO edits to make it run faster without the bloat consuming ram...) Windows 10/11 is a ram consuming beast. It makes sense.
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Dark_art_: Yeah, Windows 10 is a beast using computer resources, not only RAM but constant disk I/O and CPU cycles. I use Linux 10+ years and never I thought having computers using less energy running Linux than Windows and yet, here we are.

I assume the game itself don't use more than 500MB of RAM, being 231MB by itself. I can be wrong though, as I usually am :)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a "PC MasterRace" evengelist, exactly the opposite. Stated requirements are just generic guides to avoid trouble, my personal opinion on the matter involves a few swear words and calling a few names to whoever writes them.
Haha :P
Yes makes a lot of sense.
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dtgreene: As I said, it fails on my small laptop with a Celeron CPU. So, that's the issue; there are Celeron and Atom CPUs being made today that are not ancient, bet can't run the game acceptably.

Also, one might want to play the game on a 2GB system running Linux with the help of WINE.
I'm perfectly aware of Celeron being made today (the Atom line was discontinued a few years ago) and are decent machines, but the Celeron Line goes back to at least 25 years back. What I mean is that simply stating Celeron is not enough to define what kind of computer are we talking about, the same as integrated graphics. The variation is far too high.

I am not interested in the game at all, not really something I would enjoy but this requirements issue piqued my interest, since in my view, it's just a game made with modern tools to look like old games, unlike the other "graphics ugly" already mentioned wich I find great to use old BASIC tool set :)

May I ask if you remember what part of the hardware was the game taxing the most in your case (running Linux I assume)? Using large amounts of RAM and making the system unresponsive due the SWAP, pegging the CPU at 100% or the graphic accelerator being unnable to process what the game want?
BTW, it's usually easy to check with tools like HTop and Intel_GPU_Top.
...
Post edited June 01, 2024 by Xarion_99
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Cavalary: In my case, the Win 10 part is the problem. But in terms of the hardware requirements, basically expected something like this to say something along the lines of "If the computer can boot up the OS, the game will run great."
It's just something modern built to look like old games after all.

Quoting Breja: "Or, shocking as it may be, not everyone is blinded by nostalgia."
I cannot express how much this makes sense to me, this whole retro trend (not only in video games) was fun for a while, we're well past that point.

BTW, a bit off topic but something I would like to ask you ages ago. I recall your pc being powered by a old pentium CPU, may be able to get you a bit more powerfull i3 or i5, would you be interested in changing the CPU yourself?
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Reaper9988: The Graphics emulate 8 bit pretty well
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Xarion_99: Well, I'm not so sure that the original Commodore 64 had 8 bit color palette :)

As you can read at the game store page:
"Uncover the grand schemes of the Gallian Empire and explore the vast expanse of Freymark and the Outer Isles. In SKALD: Against the Black Priory, you’ll experience this richly illustrated world of authentic pixel art, built from thousands of hand-drawn tiles and images using a palette inspired by the legendary Commodore 64 computer."

As for the game screenshots, they look like EGA graphics at best.
So I guess the 8bit refers to the Computer and the colour palette to the C64. That does look like way more colours than back in the C64 days.
And it does look way more like VGA Krynn or Gateway of the savage frontier than EGA me thinks.
But I've been wrong before.
Post edited May 31, 2024 by Reaper9988
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Ancient-Red-Dragon: Those graphics look absolutely terrible to me. I'm not sure why this game is apparently popular on GOG.

The other day I was criticizing the Whispers In The Moss game for also have terrible graphics, and Skald's graphics appear to be almost as bad.

I'm also not sure why deliberately making new games with terrible graphics is a fad or a trend. None of that makes any sense to me. I cannot fathom why people would want to buy such games either.

I'm also not sure why nearly unreadable, very-uncomfortable-to-read, ultra-pixelated, text like appears in the screenshots and videos for this Skald game, is considered to be a "desirable" feature.

On a positive note, I respect the devs for including Galaxy Achievements.
Subjective opinion is subjective. I can't understand why would people want to buy game with achievements either.
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Breja: Or, shocking as it may be, not everyone is blinded by nostalgia.
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BreOl72: True.
Many are easily blinded by pure eye candy.

Edit: typo
Dear gods, are we really going to discuss/comment about perceived beauty of such shallow thing such as graphics? Have we became so shallow? True beauty comes from inside people! Haven't we learned that from cartoons as kids?
Post edited May 31, 2024 by Mafwek
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Xarion_99: Well, I'm not so sure that the original Commodore 64 had 8 bit color palette :)

As you can read at the game store page:
"Uncover the grand schemes of the Gallian Empire and explore the vast expanse of Freymark and the Outer Isles. In SKALD: Against the Black Priory, you’ll experience this richly illustrated world of authentic pixel art, built from thousands of hand-drawn tiles and images using a palette inspired by the legendary Commodore 64 computer."

As for the game screenshots, they look like EGA graphics at best.
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Reaper9988: So I guess the 8bit refers to the Computer and the colour palette to the C64. That does look like way more colours than back in the C64 days.
And it does look way more like VGA Krynn or Gateway of the savage frontier than EGA me thinks.
But I've been wrong before.
It looks like the first two Krynn games, the EGA ones, but with Those brown colors classic in the C64 palette here and there

But to test it you need to look at the proper background scenes. Not exactly to the world tile based map. Compare one of the still illustrations in Dark Knights of Krynn and the ones in this game.

Oh. And about the performance if you fit the relatively medium high reqs for a game like this it does not tax excesively your rig. It does not make your fans crawl like other Unity games. But in the options/menu screen the game weirdly lags your mouse. It could be worse.

Fun, addictive, charming and modern interface wise. Any fan of old school, Ultima or Gold box kind of games should be playing this game. But it can be played like any latter generation of RPG. Pillars of Eternity, Dragon Age etc...because of the more modern UI concept (unified inventory, flexible and configurable difficulty options, weapon stats comparison like in action ARPG etc...)

Loving what I am playing so far.
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Lexor: Can you expand your opinion on this?

Is it about the Unity as the company (rules of use, build-in telemetry, their quite recent and bad decisions on pricing) or about something else, connected to the quality of the engine (like the coding itself)?
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eric5h5: Getting pretty off-topic, but briefly: mostly bad management, directionless development, and increasingly strict online DRM.
Ah, so you selected "the door number one", Unity as the company, the thing I already know about.

Thanks for the reply!
Is the offline installation file the correct version??? It says version 0.4.4. Almost sounds like a demo or beta version. I always thought release versions started at 1.0.
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OldFatGuy: Is the offline installation file the correct version??? It says version 0.4.4. Almost sounds like a demo or beta version. I always thought release versions started at 1.0.
To the best of my knowledge, yes. I also asked the same question to myself. In game, it states that the version is 1.0.3d
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OldFatGuy: Is the offline installation file the correct version??? It says version 0.4.4. Almost sounds like a demo or beta version. I always thought release versions started at 1.0.
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SultanOfSuave: To the best of my knowledge, yes. I also asked the same question to myself. In game, it states that the version is 1.0.3d
THANK YOU! I'll go ahead and install it then.

Have a great weekend and enjoy the game!! (and thanks again).
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SultanOfSuave: To the best of my knowledge, yes. I also asked the same question to myself. In game, it states that the version is 1.0.3d
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OldFatGuy: THANK YOU! I'll go ahead and install it then.

Have a great weekend and enjoy the game!! (and thanks again).
You're welcome. Considering that your time is more precious than mine, it would be remiss of me to not advise you that I would recommend patience for the average consumer, and wait until next patch for full enjoyment. Take care!
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Dark_art_: May I ask if you remember what part of the hardware was the game taxing the most in your case (running Linux I assume)? Using large amounts of RAM and making the system unresponsive due the SWAP, pegging the CPU at 100% or the graphic accelerator being unnable to process what the game want?
BTW, it's usually easy to check with tools like HTop and Intel_GPU_Top.
The keyboard on that particular laptop isn't working at the moment.
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Gudadantza: But in the options/menu screen the game weirdly lags your mouse. It could be worse.
On my small laptop, it would lag the mouse to the point of being unusable. (Frame times might have reached 1 second or more.)
Post edited June 01, 2024 by dtgreene
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Dark_art_: BTW, a bit off topic but something I would like to ask you ages ago. I recall your pc being powered by a old pentium CPU, may be able to get you a bit more powerfull i3 or i5, would you be interested in changing the CPU yourself?
Yeah, we are going off topic, but since you asked, I remember that several years ago I was looking into what was available for this socket and saying that the i7-5775C was the only one that'd have been worth the trouble, being quad core. But it really wasn't worth the cost. And as of some 5 years ago I gave up on any thought of doing anything to this computer unless I'll be able to keep that part for the next one, really not worth the trouble.
And besides, it does well enough for what I generally need, and do have quite a number of games in my backlog that work fine on it, and for quite a number of others the problem is the OS, Win 7 and especially since it's 32-bit (64-bit would just increase the RAM use and that'd be a problem when it's limited to begin with), and most definitely don't want any reinstall. So basically just... I wouldn't even say necessarily looking for, but mainly curious about what other interesting games may run on it as it is, while it'll still work and I'll still be using it, not to do anything to it to make more work.
So that's also why it's a bit annoying when a game that should have low requirements has artificially higher ones because of poor optimization or the engine used or even just because the dev doesn't test on older stuff so just lists way more than is actually needed and offers no support in case of any problems if you have less. And again, the OS part comes before the hardware part.