I thought I was going to play this game day one. The performance issues are going to keep me away until they’re fixed at least somewhat. I’m happy to hear that’s the only complaint reviewers have.
That does seem to be a big hurdle for a lot of games these days. It comes out, the performance is bad so not as many people are able to enjoy it. I just hope that CO quickly fixes any performance issues the game might have.
I hope so, too. I am unbelievably hyped for this game. It really seems like they fixed everything that detracted from the first game. Mainly the awful traffic “AI”.
I just experienced this while playing Diablo 4. In the pre-season I routinely got ~120 FPS on my graphical settings and tried out the game again after season 2 release and my FPS shot up to 350.
This is a thing thats (slowly) becoming mainstream I think. Rainbow 6 siege has it (or it did when I last played at least) and Battlebit Remastered has it. In Battlebit you can actually lean left / right all the time, no matter if youre against a corner or not. You can even do it in open fields
I’d rather not have loading screens at all, but if you need them, I’d kind of like a progress bar, rather then just watching some animated doohicky telling me that hopefully the game hasn’t frozen.
I would imagine that it’s probably possible to, if the game emits checkpoints (“loading terrain”, “loading textures”), etc, to record the timestamps for each of those and then, when it emits the same checkpoints next time through, to be able to estimate how far it is through the process.
It's always more complicated than that. Perhaps each load is very distinct from the last, which wouldn't be uncommon in open world games, and it means you're always doing that load "the first time"; perhaps it's dependent on something like a random seed or network connectivity, which are both extremely variable; perhaps you add new content or DLC regularly that throws off this calculation. All that for a return on development time invested that's probably not worth the effort. It is worth it to show progress to confirm that the system hasn't locked up, and consoles often have certain thresholds to meet for this sort of thing in certification, but beyond that, it's just an extremely difficult thing to do, even for Microsoft.
and it means you’re always doing that load “the first time”
So keep the checkpoint list for each world.
perhaps you add new content or DLC regularly that throws off this calculation
If it uses the last checkpoint times, then it should adapt to that.
All that for a return on development time invested that’s probably not worth the effort. It is worth it to show progress to confirm that the system hasn’t locked up
I think that we’re going to have to disagree. I would like to have a progress bar.
A lot of games don't even have checkpoints, and there are a lot of things that could affect load times very differently. I get that you want this to work well, because we all do, but if it was as easy as your high-level explanation, we'd probably have perfect progress bars in things by now. People far more educated than you or I have tried.
The checkpoint I’ve described has nothing to do with “game checkpoints”, where the game saves. This is going to be a checkpoint in the loading process.
People far more educated than you or I have tried.
Let’s pretend for a moment that you aren’t just making an unfounded assertion. Give me a list of names.
I have coded a load screen progress bar before, in the one commercially-released game I worked on (I will not be disclosing), using my own defined checkpoints, like you mentioned. There's still a ton of variability even there, so some percentages seem to take longer than others on different computers. I did research before starting on the task and found the same thing echoed over all the place. Here's an example.
Which is why my above suggestion is adaptive to individual computers.
I got exasperated when I ripped out a “fake” progress bar in a commercial product – not a game – that another dev had previously added that I was working on and put in a real one. I don’t agree that this is some insumountable problem.
Maybe not everywhere, because then it wouldn’t be nearly as special, but I absolutely adored the “asynchronous multiplayer” aspects of Death Stranding.
Viewing the “strand contracts” tab and looking at how many other actual humans used and “liked” the infrastructure you created, or helped to create. Creating contracts with players who seem to appreciate your work, so that you see more of their structures, and they see more of yours. Only a couple examples. Trying to find the most optimal place for a bridge, or watchtower so that other players will appreciate it and give you “likes.” That nice feeling of warmth you get when you finish building a road that others had started…
Just the whole freaking thing fits so well into the “we’re all in this together, even if we’re (forcibly) isolated” message the game is conveying. Working together with real people that you will never directly see or speak to, in order to make an incredibly arduous journey a bit easier for all. Amazing.
At least I think that was one of the messages, Kojima can be cryptic at times lol.
Again, I wouldn’t want it to become the next “climb the tower to reveal part of the map” mechanic, and get ruined. You can’t just shoe-horn it in, it has to make sense in context.
This so much. Hate it when the cat desides to destroy the whole flat for no actuall reason. You test the pause button just to see it is skipping and you did not safe before the cutscene. so no going back watching the scene.
Unless it's an online multiplayer game, let me pause whenever! Playing Starfield now and it's so annoying that you can't pause during dialogue or ship fight by hitting ESC.
Some of the dialogue is sort of a cut scene. Pressing escape skips the current statement. This is good for when you’ve already heard it, but bad for pausing in the middle.
It seems really stupid that trying to pause will just skip the cutscene and there’s probably no way to watch it again, or is there? They could have just used a different button like the spacebar.
If you compare the game on max settings to modded C:S1 (and if you ignore the leveling plot issues), I actually think it looks better than C:S1, or at least pretty close.
…which makes it pretty terrible. What did they change/improve if not the graphics? It should be so ahead that you don’t even have to think what looks better.
I think what the game’s like right now won’t matter as much as what it’ll become. I don’t think CO need to do a ton to make it as good if not better than the first game. Really excited for it, personally!
Yeah agreed. I’ve been following along with a lot of the influencer videos over the last few weeks and whilst the performance seems choppy, the base game looks like a really solid improvement over CS1
I’ve been encouraged by the acknowledgment of the poor performance by the devs and letting the embargo lift relatively early. If people want to wait for a few performance patches before buying I think that’s really fair- but personally I’m looking forward to messing around with it on release.
It’s pretty much par for the course for Paradox games to have a sequel that isn’t as fleshed out but has a bright future. I’d still wait a few years to pick it up with DLCs.
I played both CK2 and CK3 and have to say I love CK3. The create your religion system is so awesome and the events are great. I dont even feel like touching CK2 anymore aside from some mods
For CK and Vic they changed their design philosophy to be more “sandbox with realistic parameters” vs older games’ “sandbox with prescripted events” to make historical events happen. It’s an ambitious idea but so far the results have been pretty mixed. I’m hopefully they get it right eventually. Stellaris has really only gotten to be as polished as it very recently.
Probably difficult for technical reasons, but it would be cool if I could rewind the game arbitrarily in games where you can quicksave/load. Like I can save and try the thing and reload if I don’t like the results, but it’d be neat if I could just rewind.
Rewinding is technically possible, and there are games that incorporate rewinding into the game, like Braid or Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Probably some newer ones. However, that only works if the game developer conforms to a lot of constraints. I don’t think that it will ever be a standard feature on all video games.
Not all functions are “reversible”; you can’t just run everything “backwards” easily on a general-purpose computer. One specific operation that is famously not-easily-reversible – and that we are so confident that this is not easily reversible that we make a lot of computer security rely on it – is multiplying two prime numbers together. So you’d have to impose dramatic constraints on how games can be written to provide the ability to just say “start running the game in reverse”. (Related trivia: the question of whether the real world can theoretically be run in reverse if you could look perfectly at everything in the universe for just one moment, the arrow of time, is, as I understand it, something of an open question in physics.)
One tactic for “rewinding” is to basically store checkpoints periodically and then retain enough information, like the player’s inputs, such that one can basically “fast forward” from a checkpoint. If you can “fast forward” cheaply enough in terms of CPU time, then rewinding to a checkpoint, and then fast-forwarding to a given point, once for each frame, looks like you’re running in reverse. This is basically how modern movie codecs work today: you have keyframes that are basically a “checkpoint” of a frame that are stored, maybe every few seconds or so. Then you have information necessary to compute the next frame from the existing one. So when you seek backwards in a movie, internally what a movie player is likely doing is seeking backwards to the keyframe prior to the time where you’re trying to seek to, then playing forward. That “seek back to a checkpoint, then play forward” is a lot more technically-easy to do than to require a game to truly be reversible, since in many games, it’s possible to store a fairly-small amount of information to record the game world at that point in time – and “play forward”. But many games also can’t store their entire world in a small amount of space, and for some, it’s hard to perform saves cheaply-enough in terms of CPU time – constantly and frequently-enough, maybe every couple seconds. If you can’t reduce the game state to a very small amount of information, then you are only going to be able to rewind so far. Implementing this is, today a requirement of a number of multiplayer games – nearly all multiplayer game engines basically rely on each computer involved being able to deterministically generate the same world state on each participating computer. One technique to reduce apparent latency to other players is to do client-side prediction, predict what the other user is going to do, like continuing to walk in the same direction that they’re walking, and then render each frame as if they had done that. Sometimes, that prediction is incorrect, and in those cases, they’re going to need to be able to re-generate the world state; what they do is constantly internally checkpoint and then roll world state forward by replaying inputs when they actually learn what that other player was doing. So some games and game engines already basically implement the internal functionality required for this sort of approach, at least over a limited period of time. But it requires the developers to constrain what they do throughout the game to some degree.
I feel like Payday 2s sound track is underappreciated in general conversations about game music.
It has gotten a driving beat to it and instills both anxiety and courage. Not to mention how they have a system similar to the L4D2 Director system where the gameplay is perfectly matched and foreshadowed by the music.
Make the story automatically skippable. Every time. Many games explain the mission/objective in a short sentence or in the minimap anyway. Don’t make me watch a long cutscene or press/hold a button to skip the dialog. I’m never going to care.
Always have a tutorial or practice area to remind me how to play the game after I put it down for a month or so. Bad enough that the controller map is hidden in the menus (if there even is one). It don’t help much to just say what all 16 +/- buttons do, depending on what mode I’m in. I have to actually use them to get back into the swing of things, and I’d rather not jump right into the action (and potentially lose progress) right away.
As someone who is a little bit more interested in the story, I would love it if games had better story recaps for when you put the game down for extended periods of time too. If it’s a game with player choice track the major choices the player makes as well. I restart games so much because I like to jump around between games and then when I get back to some I can’t remember enough about what was happening to have any investment in the story anymore.
In the complete opposite direction, “I just want to enjoy the story” mode, which simplifies or removes more mechnically difficult sections of the game. A few games have this and it’s great. I appreciated it in Danganrompa.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne