Probably an obvious one, but Life is Strange was a pretty emotionally fraught game to play through. Everyone’s probably aware, but it is filled with choices that determine lots of different small outcomes as well as the main ending. So after I finished it, I spent the evening watching streamers react to the ending and sniffling along with them.
Personal story about that, a good friend passed away unexpectedly right before the pandemic, and his wife asked for my help finding some things on his computer. He was a great guy, big burly dude not known for being overly-sentimental but a wonderful imagination/DM. As I was going through stuff she was reminiscing about him. So we opened his Steam library and he had 2 games installed. Fortnite and every chapter of LiS. She had no idea what that game was, but imagining him secretly huddled over his laptop, guiding Max & Chloe along just broke me.
Another game that drew me in instantly was Hellblade: Sennua’s Sacrifice. Seeing the character’s backstory in the first couple of scenes and knowing that this was a story game dealing with mental health and loss was major, and I was immediately motivated to help her get through the healing process.
LIS holds a special place in my heart, it was the very first character focused game I played/actually paid attention to while playing. Really beautiful game.
DLC is also 100% worth it. Adds lots of depth, extra items, charectors and levels, and in level item “mutators” that completely change how important items work if you want.
Super good. Makes a fun and deep game more fun and deeper.
Yes. The bottleneck with games consoles has basically always been how fast you can get into data into memory and optical media has become a limiting factor in the last few hardware generations. I would say games started recommending installation to reduce load times in the late 360/PS3 era and have slowly started requiring it as the latest games are targeted at systems with SSDs and no optical drive at all.
I never thought I would say that but if remote/streamed gaming is a thing and it works fast, I might consider this option. Pretty sad how the media evolved.
There is basically no other choice now as optical drive speeds haven’t kept up with hard drive and SSD speeds. The PS5 for example can read blu ray discs at around 35 MB/s, compared to its internal SSD speed of 7100 MB/s. Doing the math that makes reading the disc over 200 times slower. Imagine the loading screens.
I can't imagine there's any way to make optical drives that much faster. The spin rate is already very high and the media size has been standardized. (You'd get a lot more data throughput with a laserdisc-sized drive spinning at the same speed as a CD/DVD.)
Optical drives were a major bottleneck in every gaming system that used them. They were convenient because they offered a lot of data storage for cheap, but the trade off was that games performed worse than they could. The fact that consoles have moved off of optical storage and onto fast internal storage is a boon to people that care about performance. That may be a sad situation for you, but a lot of people find it to be a good thing.
I once installed a 540MB hard drive in my 486/33, dumped the Wing Commander Privateer CD onto it, and was amazed at how fast it ran, the lack of loading wait, and just how much more smooth it was than my 4x speed CDROM. It was great for a few days until I needed the space (I didn’t buy it just for gaming).
Old farts unite! I’m right there with you, although I think my first wing commander game was 4. I think I did something similar with Myst to escape constant “hunting” on the disc drive. The noise of the cd drive revving up and down 2ft from my head is seared into my brain.
Good news: steamlink can stream your pc games to your tv and you can play with a ds4 or xbox controller. It’s the more environmentally friendly way anyway and it works well.
I don’t mind downloading stuff (ie from steam) on PC as this device is multitasking but for a gaming console aka “appliance”, I expect a plug n play approach. and when i speak about streaming, I mean, plug n play, no downloading time and minimized loading (between 5 to 10sec max).
Don’t forget Cities Skylines and the recently released sequel. They’re both a lot of fun but for the sequel they really listened to the community. It’s a bit of a performance hog. There are performance patches coming but in the interim there area lot of settings one can change to make it run better on lower end hardware.
I’ve got a decently beefy machine but it’s not top of the line or anything (Radeon RX 6950 XT, Core i7, 16GB memory) and with a few tweaks it runs pretty well. Definitely looking forward to the performance updates, though, because it’s a truly beautiful game.
Although it looks like you’re mainly focusing on single player games, Titanfall 2 is a great alternative to Call of Duty. Its movement is insane, it’s fanbase isn’t toxic and it’s actually fun.
Right? When I was a kid I would specifically enjoy the “challenge” of trying to beat something over and over. Nowadays though… I just like playing a game for the experience. I still like feeling “progression”, so things go from difficult to easy as my character advances. But having to repeat something multiple times? Eh… just not my jam anymore.
In the end, it’s personal preference, and so both play styles should ideally be supported.
I love a challenge, it’s how I relax. If something isn’t challenging for me I quickly get bored and stop playing. I basically need my brain to be stimulated and thinking and trying to properly relax. Which is why I often trend towards “hardcore” or difficult/brutal games.
Just to see if I got that right: you basically set the fire button key on the keyboard instead of a mouse click and it made it easier to aim? Is this a common technique among pro players?
i feel like this set up would be best in a game that is very spammy with mouse clicks, say Minecraft 1.8 pvp. i don’t know how those people do it, but given 2 keys to press on my left hand rather than 1 on my mouse, i could maybe stand a chance with the clicks per second.
Indeed. Theres also burst firing, which can get significantly easier/more “natural”. Or when you are an old chap like me who panicks all the time, lessening the effect quite significantly as well.
That makes sense. “Trigger control” is hard so moving the trigger to another hand guarantees you won’t click with too much pressure adding unwanted movement to the mouse.
I’ll start, having grown a city to 40k, it’s low-medium quality and hovering at 20fps but at least it’s consistent. I don’t get huge amounts of stuttering unless I swap tabs from the game which I have to change my resolution up and down to fix. I’ve been having fun with it despite that and I’m looking forward to a smoother prettier experience later.
Traffic AI is way better, the Industries are much better integrated and freight rail being managed by the player makes it way easier to deal with because external trains aren’t clogging your lines and trucks aren’t in a long queue waiting to enter the station. I like that some citizens like to jaywalk more than others.
I still can’t figure out how to flip one way street directions. I’d like the destination path view of a person or vehicle again. I’d like to be able to assign a stop sign to only two of the four directions of an intersection.
I wish for a way to capture 30-60 seconds of a simulation to go forward and backwards in Photo mode.
I wish for a way to capture 30-60 seconds of a simulation to go forward and backwards in Photo mode.
Pretty sure both Nvidia and the Windows Game Bar (Win+G I think?) have recording functionality. Not exactly what you’re looking for, but an easy way to capture a short vid and then scrub through later for screenshots.
I know I could stream/video edit, but more I’m thinking about setting up a short video within the game. For example, following a train pulling into a station but you want to get the angle and position just right or from multiple angles. Currently the simulation can be slowed or stopped but every time you play the thing the simulation only moves forward rather than returning to the previous state.
Ohhhh gotcha you’re wishing the cinematic camera mod was in the game 😂 that was the name of the mod that did that in CS1. lack of mods is another reason I’m holding off on this one!
I still can’t figure out how to flip one way street directions.
It took me a while too. With the Replace tool selected, click and drag along the length of the street segment in the direction you want the traffic to go.
Words cannot express my gratitude. My solution up until this point has been just relaying them, but that’s obviously kinda annoying. Thank you so much.
Performance is surprisingly bearable, but the lack of optimization is really obvious. For example when you want to place a cemetery, it lags like a LOT., when terraforiming often times the height gets messed up, because of stutters. Using CPP’s 100k population, I get an 30-33 FPS while zoomed in the downtown.
Gameplay features are hit or miss. Road tools are literally amazing, but has it’s drawbacks. Somehow sometimes 90 degree intersections don’t actually turn out as 90, can’t edit lines like TM:PE, traffic sign options are a literal joke. For example you can apply stop signs onto an intersection and it just applies a FOUR WAY stop signs. No other options. Also no bike paths (will come in the future freely), no zoning like in the Industries, University, Parks DLC, lack of props (like parks for example), etc.
Buildings looks pretty cool, but these european buildings doesn’t seem that european to me (Although haven’t checked highrise yet), scaling is weird for schools, like elementary and HS is absolutely HUGE.
TLDR: It’s really really underbaked, should’ve delayed it like 6 months. I have refunded the game and returned back to C:S 1 with DLC unlocker.
I agree with the majority of your points. It does feel a little bit early access and the stop sign thing was a pain point.
I’ll just offer a counterpoint to your comment of Industry, Park, University district. Although the latter two don’t have much besides individual buildings to place, Industries feel way better integrated in 2 than 1. In C:S1 you had generic and specialized industry zoning which was entirely separate from the Industry district. This sort of zoning made things brought by DLC feel tacked on. We might see DLC for C:S2 work the same way but there’s an opportunity to integrate it more fully with base Cities Skylines systems, like satellite campuses and sports arenas being an “upgrade” for a college for example.
Oh yeah I have completely forgot about the specialized industries. Yes you’re absolutely right, that system works way way better than the Industries DLC version.
TLDR: It’s really really underbaked, should’ve delayed it like 6 months. I have refunded the game and returned back to C:S 1 with DLC unlocker.
You could also just put it on a list to keep an eye on and look at it in six months or a year later.
I think that a number of times, publishers put out a half-baked release but do ultimately see the issues at release fixed. Fallout 76 was horrendous at release, and while it’s still not Fallout 5, I think that the updates have made it a decent game. Cyberpunk 2077 also wasn’t ready at release, and while I haven’t looked at it recently, my understanding is that with updates and DLC, it’s also pretty decent. Paradox does have a history of titles that see a lot of post-release work.
I think that in many cases, the patientgamers crowd – wait at minimum a year after release before looking at a game – has the right idea. They may not get the absolute latest, blingiest stuff. But:
Many bugs are often fixed by then. You aren’t the guinea pig.
The hardware it runs on is cheaper and/or performance is better.
People will have done up wikis to refer to.
The game itself may cost less.
DLC is out. For many games – Paradox games in particular – a lot of the content is in the DLC, and the base game is kind of dwarfed by the DLC. For a number of these, a new title in a series isn’t going to be as good as the last before a lot of DLC has come out.
Mods are out. For some games, particularly on the PC, mods make the game vastly better.
I’m not saying that everyone should do that. But in this case, we knew going into the release – and the developer announced – that the performance wasn’t where they wanted it to be at release. So I think that this is a good candidate to wait on. Either they improve performance post-release or they won’t. Either way, you’ll know prior to purchase. Plus, hardware keeps getting faster, so to a certain degree, performance problems solve themselves.
Eh, I wouldn’t disparage the parent commentor for giving the release-day version an earnest try. Some people will be okay with the game in the state it’s in right now, some won’t, and that’s fine.
I think they also would agree they expect it to get better with another 6 months of active development, especially preparing for console release.
For almost $100 bucks at release (over $100 for any deluxe version), I personally expect finished products without excuses. The odd bug is of course not an issue, but I’m not a beta tester at that price. At $20 or $30? Meh. $89 and up? No dice.
I’ll remain on the sidelines until the issues are resolved and see if it grows into a quality replacement for the first one. Hopefully on sale someday. That’s for sure my stance. These game releases are getting less and less exciting, because we are seeing more and more issues at release. I’m not ready to admit it’s excusable.
I won’t disagree with your stance, but I have just one question…
In which currency are you getting $100 for the basegame? Canada it’s $70 (rounding up), but pre-release it was C$60, USD it’s $50, in NZD it’s $80. The deluxe version isn’t worth it at all, you basically get the Golden Gate Bridge and the promise of a few assets and a DLC over the next year… for double the price.
Yes that can be a wise solution, can’t argue with that but I don’t want to normalise the idea of releasing games in a heavily underbaked condition, which unfortunately became the norm in the recent years (although releasing too early was common in the 2000’s as well).
EDIT: I know your comment wasn’t about normalizing underbaked games at release, but I just wanted to rant a little bit.
It’s funny how you can build out a grid and find out it’s all off slightly. They’re doing some rounding somewhere and it gets clearer the further out from the start of a 90 degree you get
Pasting my comment from elsewhere in these comments here: The first time I run a game, before anything else, before a developer logo, a splash screen, ANYTHING: I want a screen with volume sliders. This setting needs to be saved upon completion and then ask if you want to see this screen on every launch, or just this one.
I know I am not alone. I am tired of having my eardrums blasted to hell every time I launch a newly installed game. Some games even go back to eardrum-destruction every launch until it loads the user settings.
This shit needs to be standardized. A lot of us wear headphones and are on voice chat or listening to music or whatever when we launch a game, and the deafening EA logo or whatever it may be is NOT welcome.
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