Phobia-friendly settings/modes. There are so many games that I can’t play or have to find a mod for because the fantasy genre is obsessed with giant spiders. The only way I could ever play Skyrim was with the Arachnophobia mod that replaced all spiders with bears. I haven’t played Grounded, but I know it has an arachnophobia setting that can simplify/cartoonify the spiders or replaces them with floating orbs. I’d love to see these types of settings in more games, and ideally similar settings available for other common phobias/triggers besides spiders and blood.
I’ve noticed that at some point since it came out, Horizon: Forbidden West actually added a thalassophobia relief option into the settings! It brightens everything underwater and allows for infinite breath underwater regardless of if you’ve unlocked it in the story or not
One fun thing about the mod is that it doesn’t disable crawling on the walls/ceiling or descending from a web, so sometimes you’ll wander into a cave and a massive bear will just roar at you as it slowly floats down from the ceiling before it can charge at you properly. All the cobweb/spiders’ eggs items were replaced with “Cave Bear Honeycomb,” too.
One of my all-time favorite games, Barony, just added an option that replaces spiders with isopods. I’m not an arachnophobe, but I thought it was funny and thoughtful that they did that.
This starts to devolve as an idea kinda fast because someone out there has a phobia for every single thing. I do agree though on spiders specifically. I do not have arachnophobia but its so common and giant spiders are kinda overplayed in fantasy anyways, that I dont think theyd be missed.
Definitely it doesn’t need to exist for every phobia or in every game, but for phobias that really are only present audio-visually (blood splatters, certain noises, monster models, etc) and not narratively (quest-lines and dialogue), I think it is simple enough to have a model-swap setting or similar. I don’t mind the ludo-narrative dissonance of an NPC telling me to go fix their spider infestation in their cellar and then finding a den of cob-web surrounded werebadgers or whatever. Games like Don’t Starve already let the player fully customize the spawn rates of difference monsters, while other games let the player disable their character drowning or burning, for example.
Satisfactory swaps the giant spiders with cat heads and even with my slight arachnophobia, I still prefer the spiders. The cat head floating towards you are somehow even creepier.
My favorites are ffxiv, because the music is very closely woven into the story with motifs and stuff, so it brings me back to it. Its also just pretty as fuck, they do a lot of weaving other songs and musical themes into other songs, so a lot of the time you'll be in a boss fight and recognize a theme from earlier, mixed in with the boss music. Some context is spoilers, so I won't go into it, but the Endwalker final boss has the music shifting from each previous expansions themes, morphing and shifting to fit the overarching boss theme, and its fucking glorious.
Also, the ace combat games have the most insane music, its basically a meme that "everyone's a badass until the sky starts singing latin at you" Its this really cool mix of operatic vocals and rock/synth music and its so fucking good.
That's disappointing. Some level of unmet expectations are to be, well, expected for a sequel to such a cultural behemoth as Cities: Skylines, but it sounds like Colossal Order made some sacrifices on the release date altar. Such a shame.
I don’t know, this whole 60fps thing is a new demand from gamers. Frankly I don’t care about reviews anymore. Everyone skews negative, and I’m tired of it.
My hard takes:
60fps doesn’t matter. It’s not a shooter. Even CS1 I could only get 50ish on a new map, and that’s with hardware that’s 6 years newer than the game.
RAM should be used. For gaming it would be wasteful not to use it. If you aren’t using all your ram then you’re loading textures, shaders, and everything from disk, which is thousands of times slower and that would lead to … you guessed it, gamers bitching about lag. What are you using that ram for anyway when you’re gaming that’s a higher priority? If you’re watching someone and they’re complaining that a game is using too much ram shut them off. They don’t how computers work. These aren’t the days of 256MB of ram. I have 32 gigs. I want them to use it.
Marketers are paid to lie. They don’t understand what the game can do, they’re paid to sell it. Cyberpunk was disappointing for many because they believed marketers running unleashed, saying the game would be a revolution, that it would be gaming evolved. It wasn’t. Instead gamers “only” got a fun open world RPG and they were disappointed by it. (And bugs, they had legit concerns but marketing was stupid around that game and every one of their marketers should have been fired )
I find that people who watch reviewers are exponentially more disappointed in games because they let reviewers tell them how to feel. If you want to start enjoying games more, stop letting them tell you if you should be disappointed. They’re going for clicks and views, and the rage train gets a lot of them. Just try it and return it if you don’t like it.
I haven’t watched anything and I’m excited. I’m not “hyped”, I don’t think it will redefine city building forever. I think I will enjoy my time in a game that is by definition an iteration of the franchise. Maybe it’ll be great. Maybe it’ll be worse than the first, but I’m going to decide that myself, not let some reviewer begging me for a subscribe tell me.
60fps doesn’t matter. It’s not a shooter. Even CS1 I could only get 50ish on a new map, and that’s with hardware that’s 6 years newer than the game
It does not sound like 50 FPS on 6 years old hardware. Maybe half?
RAM should be used. For gaming it would be wasteful not to use it.
Don’t be afraid, I do use my RAM. Like, it’s full of other important programs and filesystem cache.
But the game shouldn’t take it away from other programs, and it should also be aware of the fact that windows starts swapping out programs when RAM usage has reached ~70%. This will significantly affect any programs you run simultaneously, but the game itself tooz because it’s less used memory pages will be swapped out more. Random access for reading back swapped pages is much slower than loading the resources in smaller groups sequentially.
16 GB usage sounds like the game has loaded ALL of its models and resources, even those that are not needed (not in view, and probably not even accessible to the player), and probably has multiple copies of most with different resolution and such.
Loading to RAM that much data would be fine if they managed it to only be loaded to a cache, that can be released for other programs, but I don’t think you can do that in any other way than using the filesystem cache, at which point the RAM usage does not even count against your process, or as usage at all.
If you aren’t using all your ram then you’re loading textures, shaders, and everything from disk, which is thousands of times slower and that would lead to .
Obviously the game does not have to use all the RAM. It only needs to preload textures and models that are useful on your system (based on graphics settings) and are in use right now or can be in use very soon.
Also, loading from disk is not as slow as you make it seem. Yes it is if your users install games to a drive that’s bad for that purpose (like SMR tech hard drives), or if you haven’t placed the resources strategically, by which I mean grouping resources so that commonly-used-together resources are placed sequentially for a quick and efficient read.
The first problem shouldn’t be your concern: the player shouldn’t expect top performance from hardware that was designed for a totally opposite task.
Marketers are paid to lie.
Yes, but they shouldn’t touch any technical information, including the hardware requirements section. Marketers don’t know shit about the game, just that they want to sell at much licenses as humanly possible.
The hardware requirements, however, is to be defined by those who know shit about the game. Preferably core developers or performance testers, who have an idea about the game’s inner workings and about how much is it expected to use in average and in the worst case.
I find that people who watch reviewers are exponentially more disappointed in games because they let reviewers tell them how to feel.
I can agree with that and your point on Cyberpunk. I haven’t played that game, but not because I’m not interested. It looked fun from content that I have seen.
But the performance concerns sound like that it’s actually a huge problem.
I like it that so far it has been described a solid lunch except land leveling and performance, because the first one can probably be addressed in a few months at most if they want it. But even the published hardware requirements were disappointing, and this is a signal that the game will hardly get any better than that, if it can reach it.
60fps complaints go back to the dark days of 360/ps3 ports where HD resolutions on the consoles meant high framerate was no longer a viable option there. Since AAA games started using console as lead platform pc became saddled with 30fps caps as well. It possibly happened even earlier, but that was the time where I started noticing it.
I really dug the music in CP2077 (and, especially, Phantom Liberty). The use of leitmotifs lifted the score. More so than in a similar game (GTA5), I really enjoyed the radio stations, too.
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.
Left handed mode. I didn’t realise how much I liked it until no man’s sky. It moves the body of the character to the right hand side of the screen. So you can see the character holding the items in the left hand.
Most games just mirror the item into the other hand and that’s it.
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