Minecraft (as usual), just finished Wolfenstein New Orden again. Just started Breath of Fire (GBA version). Nonogram (picross, android). Maybe I’ll get back to ToTK (what a drag, that game is huge). Not touching my huge backlog yet.
Yes, I’m a parent and patient gamer, how did you know?
For example, would you take a shortcut and make items appear because you’re fishing them in the pond (which makes pond a source of “outworldly” items), or rather come up with something more creative? The logistics of it can tell the story better than 1000 words on a wall made to push the narrative. Of course, at the same time, you don’t want to make this a main focus to the player, unless it’s an objective.
The hardware architecture on the PS2 and PS3 was so radically different, it effectively makes emulation impossible.
The change made in the PS4 and PS5 makes the transfer of those games relatively trivial, but attempting the replicate the now abandoned Core processor of the PS3 is the hold up there, as is the PS2 Emotion Engine.
The reason the PS3 was so expensive was including PS2 hardware to handle the backwards compatibility. They weren’t going to repeat that mistake with the 4 and 5.
Meanwhile, on the Xbox side, Microsoft never had that problem.
Software emulation is very much possible. There is software for x86 and even ARM processors that emulate PS1, PS2(doesn’t work great on ARM I many cases) and PS3 (x86 only currently)which work well enough. If Sony cared to they could develop their own software emulation layer to run on PS5 to run just about everything from the previous generation.
Also Microsoft had similar issues in hardware emulation because, while the original Xbox and the Xbox one were on x86, the 360 was a Power PC architecture similar in some ways to the PS3 which ran Power PC with other proprietary coprocessors. They had to develop a Power PC emulator in software to run 360 games on the Xbox one.
A first party solution can’t work “well enough”, it just has to work.
PS1 emulation at this point should be trivial, 2 and 3 is not. The first time someone puts a disc in and it doesn’t work would be worse for them than not having it at all.
I think the thing holding back PS1 emulation is that once they open that door, everyone will go “What about 2 and 3?”
PS1 emulation is a breeze, but with current hardware in the PS5, I think a PS2 emulator on the platform wouldn’t be too insane. But yeah, PS3 emulation? Not happening.
I think you’re wrong on the disc not working thing though. The original Xbox was only half supported for a long time.
I think the problem with emulating a PS1 is “don’t meet (play) your heroes”.
Most of us played PS1 on dinky little CRT screens before we got used to the graphical fidelity we have these days.
Playing PS1 games on your 65" OLED will probably hurt your eyes.
It’s one of those things that you want to do because of nostalgia, but isn’t really great when it comes to it.
Besides, at the end of the day Sony is selling every PS5 they make, just like they did with the PS4 and PS3.
Adding backwards compatibility doesn’t make any financial sense as long as it’s not a killer feature that shifts sales towards Microsoft then Sony has little insensitive to do it.
They much prefer you buy those new AAA titles or subscribe to PS+.
Playing PS1 games on your 65" OLED will probably hurt your eyes. It’s one of those things that you want to do because of nostalgia, but isn’t really great when it comes to it.
That really depends on the game and upscaling methods used. Duckstation for instance does a pretty amazing job of making most of those old games look good. Check out this video of Crash Bandicoot running at 4K for instance.
I actually go the opposite direction and add CRT/scanline filters, especially since a lot of sprite work back in the day was built to be viewed that way. Those games look much better on CRTs with scanlines than they do in crystal clear integer upscaling.
Honestly, I remember playing full 3D titles on friends’ PS1s back in the day and thinking they’d given me eye cancer, even with the fuzz of an old CRT TV working in their favor. I don’t think I would want to play them now without a boatload of emulator graphic enhancements to deal with all the wonky 3D projection and unfiltered low-res texture mess of OG PlayStation games.
Didn’t stop them putting out a HDMI Mini PSX. You get around that by cleaver pixel replication and filtering upressing, etc. The PS3 PS1 emulator actually had options for this.
I’m 22. I grew up playing my PS1 on with an upscaler on the 55 inch Vizio in the front room. I like the PS1 art style quite a bit and think that a good upscale and maybe a filter is all you need to make things look how I want.
Idk, I think it would make a difference in the Microsoft v Sony sales. Nintendo doing the N64 and NES eShop have been massively successful. Xbox doesn’t really have any killer apps, they’ve really just had Sony beaten on software features the past two generations. Sony implementing the software features that Nintendo and Microsoft offer would make a decent difference.
Plus, imagine how well a “play your childhood discs on your xplaytendo switchtion” would work in an ad campaign. Getting people to pull out their childhood game collection would make for a great viral campaign for gamers as well.
Idk, the thing about the internet that I don’t think older people have realized is that it creates an even larger freeze in culture than ever before. If you started gaming in the 90s, you likely heard about older games via word of mouth and got your games at a physical store. There were no minor celebrities that would turn a cult classic into an actual classic. Nowadays? Old media is fully capable of wiping out new media in the right circumstances. Songs like “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac and some Pink Floyd (if I remember correctly) have taken #1 Billboard spots in the past 2-3 years. LSD Dream Emulator went from a game nobody played to a PlayStation classic because of some YouTube videos. We’re in an age where there is an extremely high demand for old media and no way to access most of it without piracy. There is a TON of money to be made by charging money for emulation and moving things to new consoles.
Mark my words, Skyrim will come out on the next generation Xbox, because Bethesda understands that accessibility is good enough to charge for.
I’m 36, not feeling the nostalgia, but then again I was always a PC gamer and never really had to struggle with the lack of support for old games.
I’ve played old games on newer hardware all the time over the years.
The most common realization is that the games were simpler and looked worse than you remembered.
Games also hold up better on PC, PS1 graphics was severely limited, and PS2 was a bit better, sure, but PC graphics were ahead of consoles.
PS3 and Xbox360 finally got to a level where the PC vs. console graphics playing-field seemed more even, and since then console graphics have been properly good in terms of value for money.
I paid more for my 3070Ti than my Series X, but I can’t really tell the difference without spending a lot of time optimizing the settings (or maybe I just need to break out other titles?).
The huge difference is that I can play any of the games I’ve bought over the years, plus most of the ones I acquired in my teenage years - if I wanted to.
Yet - what do I play? Surprise surprise - it’s not the games of yesteryear.
Obviously I’m just one data point, but considering how many gamers I surround myself with and I can’t recall when any of them wanted to play games from the 90’s that weren’t readily available console classics from Nintendo or Sega I’m not convinced it would make a huge difference if the classic games were available.
Maybe they’d sell more consoles, but people just don’t want to pay AAA money for 25-30 year old games. And it’s the games that make them money, not the consoles.
Skyrim is a game that probably deserves to be mentioned along Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac.
But in general comparing games and music is not that simple. Music production and recording has had high fidelity for ages. But pick up a worn cassette and put in an old tape deck and you might feel a bit what playing those old games feel like.
Only if you dramatically lower your standards for what backwards compatibility means. PS3 emulators might be progressing, but they're far from the native hardware in actual functionality, especially with games that actually used the features of the hardware that made the PS3 a powerhouse.
Emulators can wave that away as "it is what it is". Sony advertising backwards compatibility couldn't.
We’re almost at that point. PS3 emulation on the Steam Deck is ALMOST there. Another generation of hardware improvements should push us over the edge. Then it would be up to Sony to decide “hey, we want to make money on the titles we can license and put back in an online store…”
PS2 games work almost flawlessly on my steam deck under emulation and the PS5 is more powerful than that, and Sony have access to the OG system engineers, software and hardware to work from, note they already had PS2 games working on the PS4. The PS3 is the tricky but people do have it working on PC so no reason Sony couldn’t. There’s no excuse not to have PS1, PSP or PSVita emulation games as they’re all easy
Really none. The game walks you through rolls and what each thing does.
Having a little knowledge of how D&D works only serves to make the leveling up process go quicker since you have ideas on how to allocate stats or what specialties you take without reading through everything.
Yeah I think OP is looking at this from the wrong way. As opposed to a normal game you’ve never played before in which you have to learn the mechanics completely from scratch, with BG3, if you have any knowledge of 5e, you’ll be able to pick it up easier.
Restarted the Demon’s Souls PS5 remake. It’s going much better than my previous attempts. Not quite back to where I was last time but got there aot faster.
They’re all big companies. They’re all shitty somewhere. If you want to play something just play it. I find the worst of them are also making games that don’t interest me in the slightest, but even Activision put out the Tony Hawks Remaster and EA put out It Takes Two so I was all over them.
If you spend all your time worrying about shitty companies, you’ll be living in a cave eating moss. It’s OK to lament the state of things and then do them anyway. It’s on the workers to unionise and shaft the management back, because without them there’s no product and no money.
It is very similar, but you don’t need to know anything to start playing. Just a basic understanding of turn based RPGs. The rest will come with playing the intro tutorials.
Indies really are the way to go for both customers and developers if they want a better, more ethical and respectful environment. It is a risky career path, but given how many major publishers treat the developers under them, it's not like sticking with mainstream would lead to a comfortable stable livelihood either.
Baldur's Gate 3 really put me in a dilemma, but I think I'll ultimately buy it because I want to support Larian Studios more than I want to avoid Wizards of the Coast. I wouldn't trust Wizards enough to get One D&D and the likely tabletop lootbox hell they are scheming, but BG 3 is delivering a good product that deserves support. Though buying the Divinity games is an alternative if you don't want WotC to get any money.
Baldur’s Gate 3, naturally. I was enjoying it until I reached the zone border and I got a warning I was underleveled. I was like, really, Larian? We’re doing this again?
My biggest complaint with Divinity: Original Sin 2 was that the level differences were so stark and the XP was so tight that it felt like the game was forcing me to comb through the entire map. Absolutely kills replay value, and BG3 is a game I’d really, really like to save something for a replay.
This ended up being a constant issue in D:OS2 but turned out mostly okay in the first D:OS after a really tight first act. I hope this ends up being more like the latter. Or there’s some way to grind this time around.
Im in act 3 and only encountered the “you’re underleveled” message once at that same point. I havent scoured the areas for everything nor speed run the main story. I think act 1 is tight like you said, but it seems to be much looser as you progress.
That’s good to hear, thanks. I’m not gonna say I did a speedrun on the first area but I was definitely skipping around.
I’m going to finish up these two quests and just leave from that point. If it’s too hard, I can always drop down to Explorer difficulty. As much as I’m enjoying the challenge right now, I’d rather do that than stop roleplaying because I’m XP hunting. I felt like I had to do that a lot in D:OS2 and it was one of the few major negatives in the game.
Is taking on encounters while underleveled as much of a death sentence in BG3 as it was in D:OS2?
I’m early still so only got into one such fight at this point where I got the warning message recommending me to flee. I was level 3 versus level 5s, and the encounter was perfectly doable (playing on medium, not Tactician, mind).
Hmm, I haven’t seen that particular message. I’m still early on plus I have little experience with D&D 5e. I suppose it could go either way at higher levels. Right now it feels challenging but doable. Two levels was definitely pushing it in D:OS2.
I’ve been in two encounters with enemies two levels higher and both resulted in a party member death. Not nearly as big a deal as it was in BG2, but not something I’d recommend allowing every fight. Party comp might play a role here: maybe some are better able to handle it than others.
Party member death in BG 1&2 could be pretty rough yeah, especially in 1, and there were plenty of effects that prevented resurrection, even. Plus, characters dropped all items on Death, so picking everything up and re-equipping it after resurrection was punishment itself, haha.
Death is basically a non-threat in D&D 5E, but I haven’t looked into whether Larian has added any house rules to make it more punishing. In general I’m not a huge fan of the 5E ruleset so we’ll see how I feel about BG3 combat as I get further in. So far it seems more like death is handled like it was in Divinity, with plenty of Revivify Scrolls already.
I turned off Karmic Dice on principle, but maybe that was a mistake. So far the biggest challenge has been terrible luck. I’ve missed so many 80%+ attacks, often in a row. Feels very frustrating.
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