A bit more Baldurs Gate 3 coop. We just made it to the Githyanki Creche and next time everyone will die.
Then I got back to Vampire Survivors. Played a bunch of different “Survivors-likes”, but nothing really is as good as this. There’s so much stuff I have to catch up on, tons of unlocks and characters.
Finally, I started the Solasta: Crown of the Magister - Palace of Ice DLC. I really liked the more intimate setting of the previous one, Lost Valley, but this one is a straight-up sequel campaign to the base game. So far it’s not as good as Lost Valley, but it’s a higher level campaign up to level 16 (base game is up to 12), you get to play around with the higher level spells (also my ranger can attack one more time now). However, performance in some areas is horrible, with huge frame drops. Also ran into a potentially game breaking but, but luckily a full game restart helped.
I’m getting my ass repeatedly handed to me in Stalker 2 but enjoying it. Also continuing to dump hours into Vampire Survivors. Started replaying Road Redemption also so I can get my modern day Road Rash fix.
For the first time ever, I am at the very end of Fallout New Vegas, Mr. House run. It’s been a couple years with long breaks, but I cannot wait to be able to say I’ve finally completed the main story of a fallout game.
Also been enjoying Anomaly Collapse on my laptop. Fun enough rougelite (rougelike?) with metaprogression. Though I’d recom skipping the small amount of dialogue present in runs after the first few times because it’s the same dialogue regardless of what characters you play as.
Last week I handed over too much money for a game that I’m now determined to grind until there is nothing left to grind.
Raiden NOVA
I might even write a review for it.
It’s essentially Geometry Wars set in the Raiden universe with a roguelite aspect (other users say it is like Vampire Survivors, but I haven’t played that game). Graphics are (very) dated, but gameplay is satisfying. Main arcade can be beat in about 1.5 hours but if you want all the ships and buffs and achievements you need to commit yourself to grinding over 80 hours.
Either way, it is one of the few physical Switch games (other than all the flagship Mario games my son loves) that I own and plus it is an import which is neat.
Currently I’m back on Neverwinter. I stopped playing some time ago and this weekend I was lost in all the quests the younger version of me accepted. It’s still quite fun, though.
I tried finding others but kept coming back to the one. Helped that i read a lot of fantasy and they used a lot of content i was already familiar with, but it was also the remorting system that entranced me
To jakaś odwrócona stacja dokująca, ładowarka? Przeważnie ludzie nie chcą nosić ładowarek i baterii dlatego w firmie mają stację dokującą, albo drugi zasilacz.
It might not be the engine. Some companies just don’t care much about optimization when they can just tell their players to buy better hardware.
Take GTA5 for example. It had a notoriously long load screen when starting up. Ranging from 2 minutes to 10 minutes depending on the read speeds of your storage drive. A modder ended up finding the problem. The code to load up the items in the game opened and read a file, but there was a bug that caused it to read through the entire file for each item loaded. The file was being read thousand of times. The modder changed one line of code and the loading time was reduced significantly. This was a bug that plagued GTA5 for years, caused by a single line of code, that the company didn’t fix because their fix was to buy better hardware.
My impression of it is that you can achieve good performance in UE5, but you won’t be using the newer tools for that in most games. Many of the newer tools, like Nanite, comes with a large up front cost, but scales well after that. So you can make a beautiful game that runs stable 30 fps with some effort, but reaching 60 or 120 is trickier when using the newer systems.
Since there are so many different systems in Unreal 5 it’s also a beast to understand. Understanding a system is in many cases a key to performance optimization. Performance is also something that spans most disciplines, adding more people that need to understand it.
UE5 is targeting capabilities of newer hardware, compared to UE4, so it tends to push the limits more.
UE4 has had a lot more time being refined than UE5, so it is understandable that it performs better.
Making a game look nice and run well on newest hardware and do the same for lower end hardware takes a lot of effort. You may need to fall back to older systems with different visuals and spending time on getting it to look similar enough. Sometimes two systems may even not be feasible to switch between, so then in most cases the newer system with better quality takes precedence.
I could go on about this at length but I mostly want to communicate that people underestimate how hard it really is to make a game that is a good investment, fun, beautiful and performant. There is always a balance to be struck.
UE5 is just a tool. Developers are the ones who are responsible of the game performance, more than Epic.
There are some problems that plague UE5 games like transition stuttering (moving from one zone to another) among other things, but overall I couldn’t blame the engine when the ones who use it are not me, but the developers themselves.
Same flak for Rocksteady and Batman Arkham Knight. They used Unreal Engine 3 instead of 4, and ran like crap anyway.
Studios and publishers will happily pay UE fees if that means pushing the game on schedule than wasting 2 years creating an engine from scratch that can’t resell or reuse (there are exceptions , tho)
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Aktywne