ZA/UM gets away with $165 plastic bags because its execs know hypocritical moaners are the same 'ones ordering the expensive items' anyway, says former Disco Elysium writer - Related to gets, one, like, golden, za/um

If showing off that you actually own an RTX 5090 isn't enough, why not show off that you own a golden one for double rarity points

Nvidia RTX 50-series cards are about as ephemeral as Casper the ridiculously expensive ghost right now, with stocks having dipped to nigh-on zero within a few minutes of launching last week. One might even say they're as rare as gold. So, Asus says, how about we add some more rarity to your rare so you can pine while you pine—or gloat while you gloat, if you're lucky enough to actually get your hands on one.

Yes, that's an ancient meme, and no, I don't care. I don't care because I know I'm never going to get my hands on the just-introduced Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 Dhahab OC Edition (via VideoCardz), and that makes me a little bitter. And just like any good journalist, I'm here to share a little of that bitterness with you—you're welcome.

عاجل ‼️ إطلاق النسخة الخاصة بالشرق الاوسط بإسم: ROG Astral GeForce RTX™ 5090 DHAHAB Edition [website] 5, 2025.

And look, I'm not immune to gold-plated lust syndrome any more than the next gamer who enjoys scarce and shiny things. Just ask my Golden AK-47 still lying on the floor in the virtual corridors Call of Duty: 4, or the perfectly cylindrical boreholes adorning the skulls of its countless victims. But come on, owning an RTX 5090 isn't enough? It's gotta be golden, too?

That's what "Dhahab" means, by the way: it's Arabic for "golden". Asus explains that the graphics card is a "celebration of the rapid evolution of the Middle East, featuring a unique skyline silhouette that signifies a transition from the sands to the skies". That explains the rather gorgeous splashes of blue on there, too, then.

Clearly not one for holding back, Asus has followed the ROG Astral formula and thrown an extra fan onto this GPU's shroud, making it a quad-fan graphics card. That's not one of those piddly little ones you find crammed along the side of some 50-series cards, either (which shouldn't be allowed to be added to the official fan count, by my estimation).

No, it's a full-on fan on the flipside, just like you find on the regular ROG Astral RTX 5090, this being the most expensive Asus models and one of the most expensive RTX 5090 models in general. It's currently selling for $3,080 at Newegg—well, would be selling for this if it were in stock. There's no word of how much the Dhahab Edition will cost, but when you get up in the several thousands an extra wad here or there seems to matter not.

Anyway, if you want the blingiest of blingy graphics cards, and if you're lucky enough to catch one in stock, go for it, get yourself a ROG Astral Dhahab. Just please don't send me any pictures of that gloriously gilded GPU inside your rig, and certainly don't show me screen grabs of those Multi Frame Gen frame rates.

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ZA/UM gets away with $165 plastic bags because its execs know hypocritical moaners are the same 'ones ordering the expensive items' anyway, says former Disco Elysium writer

Not two days ago I came to you with the befuddling news that ZA/UM—the studio whose name is still on Disco Elysium even though the game's chief creative talent have all left—was selling a $165 carrier bag based on the one you can get in the game.

I wasn't exactly angry that the rights-holders of Disco Elysium were selling a $165 shopping bag made of a trademarked stronger-than-Kevlar material. That's just the world we live in now. But I was a bit baffled. Isn't this kind of hip poverty-chic stuff—the kind of thing very well-to-do students dress up in for a bourgeois jape—exactly what Disco Elysium spends a lot of time making fun of? Is a $165 carrier bag not kind of contrary to its anti-capitalist themes?

The answer, it turns out, is yes on all counts. Also, it doesn't matter at all because the people upset about it will probably just buy it anyway. So says former ZA/UM dev and Disco Elysium writer Dora Klindžić in a chat with YouTuber The 41st Precinct (via RPS): "This is an incredibly successful business for [ZA/UM], incredibly successful" showcased Klindžić. "The darkest thing I ever heard was—I don't remember who it was from that circle—but they told me it doesn't matter at all what people are saying on Twitter because you can see those same names, of people who say on Twitter that they're never gonna support ZA/UM, they're the ones ordering the expensive items from ZA/UM."

Will that extend to a pricey shopping bag? I think it might. "This loud minority doesn't matter because people covet these items more than they care about these, kind of, morals and integrity," continued Klindžić. "So people are buying this stuff, and it seems like even the people who are outwardly critical, they cannot help their consumerist impulse."

Which is a bit sobering. Ultimately, of course, whether or not you buy an expensive shopping bag isn't really a great moral question. There are far bigger problems in the world, and even in the fashion industry, than whether you own a thing that can carry your groceries and also save you from an assassin's bullet. Still, the fact that, , people's hypocrisy was reliable enough for ZA/UM execs to build a whole merchandising strategy around it doesn't make me feel awesome about the world.

The same goes for Klindžić: "This is one of those things that just makes me very sad about the world, or lose hope. Because if that's the case, I don't know, a lot of people have a lot of explaining to do."

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Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 dev says it deliberately avoids the 'instant gratification' of modern games, channelling the best of Bethesda like Morrowind and Oblivion

I was approximately [website] seconds into my playthrough of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 before I muttered to myself 'Huh, pretty Oblivion-y'. This is the second-highest praise I can offer a videogame, right beneath 'Huh, pretty Morrowind-y,' which I went onto say almost verbatim in our KCD2 review.

Turns out I wasn't just seeing old-Bethesda-shaped ghosts in a fit of nostalgia. Games like Oblivion and Morrowind were right at the forefront of Warhorse's thinking when it was making KCD2. In a chat with GamesRadar, the game's senior designer, Ondřej Bittner, noted Henry's latest adventure was deliberately harkening back to those brilliant open worlds of old.

"I'm more of a Morrowind person," expressed Bittner, adding that "Most of our designers are in their mid 30s—like, 30s to 40s—so these games had a huge impact on us." So, naturally, those classics were a big reference point for the KCD games. "Instant gratification in games has become a problem," Bittner expressed, with so many games that revolve constantly assaulting players' senses with info, stimulation, and direction. That's not Warhorse's approach: "We kind of go back to the roots of RPGs where it's sort of like: well, you can do whatever you want, and maybe go and do the main story."

Which if you're like me—someone who loves a clockwork world to inhabit and make your own goals in—is a dream come true, but it can put others off. A lack of hand-holding "can clash with players from a younger generation," reckons Bittner. "They can be like 'I don't know where to go'—well, have you thought about where to go? If I tell you where to go, it's not really as fun, is it?"

Not wanting to scare off the zoomers—who, I have to say, I feel like Bittner is underestimating just a tad—is why KCD2's intro has a bit more direction than the first game's. Maybe you can think of it as the same kind of leap that Bethesda made between Morrowind and Oblivion, although I don't think Warhorse sacrificed nearly as much as Todd Howard and co did.

"We wanted to make mechanics more approachable," noted Bittner, "so that they're hard, but not so hard that players don't even know what to do." That means you should be able to start exploring Bohemia without immediately getting decapitated by a bandit, and it means there's even someone who is, in essence, a tutorial NPC to give you some direction: Bara, the Troskowicz beggar who was added as "road sign for players who were like 'I don't know what to do'."

I reckon Warhorse pulled it off, creating a world that reminded me of all the best bits of Oblivion (and some of the best bits of Morrowind—Henry never gets to kill god), that doesn't leave you helplessly lost, and that doesn't sacrifice the depth and complexity that made the first game such a rare and exciting thing.

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