Don’t do unskippable cutscenes. Even if you’re using them to cover up for a loading screen or something, at least give me the option to not watch them. Let me tap a button to skip the scene.
I don’t know if it is a console feature or what, but I can “pause” some cutscenes with my PS4 for all the games I tried, and it worked with many games too on my PS3… It annoyed me when it didn’t though.
Hmm. That works for games with static cutscenes. But some games don’t have fixed cutscenes. Like, okay, take Starfield. A bunch of your actions can affect what people say in a given cutscene. So what you’ll see in a given cutscene may change.
If you can store player decisions long enough to assemble a cut scene once, you can store them long enough do it again. The decision tree is already there. It’s not difficult or expensive.
Hmm. I guess that’d work if you have a per-save-game list of cinematics. I was thinking of this more in the sense of games that have cinematics that are unlocked and accessible from the main menu.
Never thought about this but this would help a lot. If you stop paying attention for a short time or something happens, like your drink falling over, where you have to take your attention away, you’ll miss part of the cutscene and rewinding or watching it again would allow you to just watch what you missed again.
Yes, exactly. Or if a loud noise outside keeps you from hearing something important. Or if the voice actor mumbles. Or any number of other things that happen in real life.
Or if a loud noise outside keeps you from hearing something important.
At one point in my life, during the pre-Tivo era, I lived directly beneath the approach route for an airport. It wasn’t the highest-traffic airport out there, and you learn to just tune the airplanes out for most things – but the one thing that there wasn’t a great workaround for was the occasional snippet of television shows getting drowned out when they decided to have a critical bit of plot right when the 8:00 PM flight was coming in.
Modern video games with voice-acting do tend to mitigate this by having subtitles and turning them on by default, though. And video games usually do let you roll back to an earlier save, maybe lose a few minutes of play, but if you want badly enough to hear the thing, you can. So it’s not quite as bad as the television show, where missing the critical bit of a plot could be really irritating.
Absolute favourite game soundtrack? Frostpunk’s OST. The soundtrack really brings home the desperation and harshness of survival in the cold. When the storm is coming and the music swells up… goosebumps. Every single time.
Divinity 2: Original Sin has a great soundtrack too. Kinda surprised I couldn’t find it in the comments. Minecraft as well. It’s very soothing and calming.
Aside from that, some smaller titles with great music: GRIS, What Remains of Edith Finch, and FAR: Lone Sails.
FOV slider and option to disable head bob if present. Games with a too narrow FOV and/or head bob are unplayable for tons of people who suffer from motion sickness, and it's such a shame to have so many good games ruined by it.
High FOV gives you more peripheral vision, which – if you can get used to extremely-high FOVs – is a major advantage in competitive multiplayer FPSes. I know that users used to play with very high FOVs on Quake and the like; I don’t know if that’s a thing today. That’s an argument for constraining FOV in competitive multiplayer environments. Marathon used to incorporate this into the game, have a fisheye powerup that temporarily provided better peripheral vision. So if you want a level playing field for competitive multiplayer games, you cannot let it be changed by players. If you want a level playing field, the only thing you can do is adjust where their head is relative to the display, help them calibrate their head placement.
Even for single-player FPSes, it has some degree of impact on difficulty. Having a high FOV will generally make a game easier, since having more peripheral vision is advantageous.
Games virtually always use a higher FOV than would be accurate for the real world, based on the distance from the eye to display and the size of the display. In the real world, your monitor or TV screen – if at a sane distance from you – provides a very limited field of vision. Trying to play an FPS through a tiny window into the world like that would be a huge disadvantage. They just try to jack it up to a level where it won’t actually make people sick.
The “optimal” FOV will differ on a per-player basis (some people can handle higher FOV without being sick). What would be a physically-accurate FOV also depends on the size of the display and how far away from the display the player is sitting, which the developer does not know and varies on a per-player basis (unless the player is wearing a VR headset).
For consoles, I’d argue that this should probably be implemented at a console-wide level, maybe on a per-user basis, since what a user can handle and where their head is relative to the display should be constant across games. Doesn’t make sense to require a player to set it manually on a per-game basis, since they’re just going to have to be setting the same number.
This is less of an issue in multiplayer games, as they rarely have very narrow FOVs by default. The worst offenders are often console ports and slower first-person games.
FWIW while it's a competitive advantage with high FOV, if there is a slider, it's still fair since everybody can use a higher FOV if they want to.
It's not all advantage though, aiming gets harder (aside from the distortions).
I don't see why it matters at all in single-player. So what if it makes the game easier? Who cares?
The fact that I don't have to stop due to almost vomiting also makes it easier in a way, but I really don't mind.
The fact that the optimal FOV differs on a per-player basis is of course exactly why I want a FOV slider everywhere. I usually prefer about 105 degrees horizontal (in 16:9), while some modern games default in the range 75-85.
Ray tracing isn’t worth how horrible TAA can make some games look, imo. We’re getting close, but it’s been years of this and I’m so tired of choosing between ghosting and jaggies. Or worse, some games that just force the ghosting TAA onto you anyway (cyberpunk you fuck)
RT being a thing + deferred rendering for larger and more complex scenes pcaused rendering engines to change in ways that make AA work less good
Things like MSAA are now basically worthless due to these rendering changes, leading to TAA proliferation as it’s the best AA for it’s cost in modern engines
MSAA is pretty old at this point and the reason it doesn’t work well anymore is also because there’s now a lot of details in games that doesn’t require more geometry and that’s a good thing. That’s why we now have AA that doesn’t rely on the actual geometry. TAA isn’t the only one though, my favorite is SMAA and FXAA is honestly not bad either (even though it seems to depend a lot on the implementation). Both of these don’t have ghosting and they detect edges that aren’t actual geometry.
Yeah, I’m aware MSAA is old but I’m comparing current AA to that because it was an output that matches what I want from games now in looks, if that makes sense
Those games that allow SMAA or FXAA I will 100% use one of those options, even if the implementation is hot dogshit (I seriously hate ghosting), but so many games either force TAA (again, fucking cyberpunk) or only offer TAA or nothing (or TAA and upscaling, which works but isn’t a great solution, imo)
I wish I didn’t notice this shit, my wife thinks I’m insane for being bothered by them and I’m so jealous of her for it
If I wanted a mature, well-performing city-building game experience I’ll play Cities: Skylines 1.
From the reviews on that page, it sounds like Colossal Order delivered on the features it promised, but has lots of performance optimization left to do. By the sounds of it, on my laptop I’ll probably get 20fps and occasional stuttering on my gaming laptop by 10k population. I will see whether it is playable for my standards once it officially releases. I’d probably expect many game updates addressing performance and bugs in the first 6 months of release.
The demand and happiness mechanics are fundamentally different so it’s important not to try to play it like CS1 and expect the same results.
I’ve been looking forward to this game for months. Can’t wait for Tuesday, I’m theirs to disappoint.
3D audio or HTRF or whatever the right term is. Being able to hear what direction a sound comes from makes the game sound so much better. It also kind of sounds clearer imo because you can actually discern the individual sounds and they don’t get “mushed” together.
I’ve never heard any difference among the 3D audio settings. Even with Pulse headsets on PS5, which are allegedly designed for this sort of thing, all of the settings sound exactly the same.
Between this and Star Trek: Infinite seems like Paradox’s new MO is to set unreasonable deadlines and rush games to release. You should basically consider all their games early access at this point, except they’ll charge you for updates. They’ve learned that a buggy half-baked release wont effect their sales, and they can just patch the game and crank out new features as dlc.
Find me a performance patch in any Paradox game that requires you to buy a fucking DLC to apply.
Or maybe just quit bullshitting.
FFS, we're talking about a relatively small developer/publisher that continually supports and develops most of their games for the better part of a decade (or more, like EU IV). I thought this shit is what people wanted but what it seems most gamers want is just any excuse to fucking whine.
Way to completely misread my post there bud. Its not about the dlc, its about Pdox (who isn’t exactly a small indie publisher anymore) rushing buggy, feature-bare games to release with the intent of abusing their dlc-centric business model. FFS I guess wanting a game that’s complete and works on release is whining.
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Aktywne