A lot of snark in this reviewer's writing style. I get that it's her opinion and her freedom to write like that, but man it was annoying to read.
Still, is a bit of a shame to hear that this title did not seem to execute well, since it has cool art, fits a niche that I like, and is from an indie dev - all of which are reasons that had kept me interested in this game since I first heard about it a year ago.
I’m convinced large video game publishers make deals with graphics card manufacturers to force the end user to upgrade, the AMD and Nvidia deals are not for free access to new technology it’s for which ever bids the highest price to sell more cards. There is little progression in graphics fidelity since 2016. We used to take giant leaps and now we take small insignificant steps.
Fidelity is always going to have diminishing returns. Perhaps there’s something fishy going on in the video card business, I don’t know that, but as someone who works in CGI, the evolution we see year after year makes sense, it’s not like there’s a hidden untapped potential
I’m not sure if it’s such a direct conspiracy, but I’m sure some of this happens inadvertently at least. Developers of big budget games are likely going to target higher end hardware, and API usage that might cause problems on lower end hardware probably sneaks in as a result of that. I’m sure there’s some deals between game studios and Nvidia / AMD to get the latest GPUs for workstations at some discount, which probably means the machines they’re using for the bulk of development are beefier than the average consumer’s (you also probably want a bit of headroom while developing)… But this kind of stuff can naturally lead to higher requirements for software because you don’t run into performance issues unless you’re very serious about testing on lower end hardware… Which you might care about to some extent, but it’s an additional cost that can take away from other aspects of the game, which might make it less marketable (graphics are a big deal for marketing, for example).
Obviously it’s not great if a game uses API calls inefficiently and that means it runs worse than it would otherwise… But I’m not really that surprised when it happens? Working on big projects on deadlines there’s often a “try the obvious solution, worry later if it’s too slow” mentality, and I’m not sure you need any more of a conspiracy than that to account for stuff like this.
Before release CP2077 2.0 and PL please check conditions of your cooling systems in PC. We use all what you have, so workload on CPU 90% on 8 core is expected. To save your time please run Cinebench or similar and check stability of your systems
In other words: CPU load will increase, overclockers with unstable clocks will be more likely so see crashes.
No need to check your cooling, CPUs will be plenty stable unless you messed with your clock speed without significant stability testing.
The game will actually use all of the CPU cores without mods now. The lack of SMT support has been fixed, that sounds like optimisation to me. Currently, the game is struggling to use more than half the available CPU power available on some systems.
You can still artificially limit the CPU to only half your cores, of course (by setting the task affinity for the game process)
Typical Bugthesda. Am only wondering how did they get this big by only releasing buggy products. I can’t for the life of me remember a single product they have made that wasn’t buggy mess that community fixed for them time and time again without any compensation. Not only that community didn’t get any compensation, Bethesda tried to sell their work and pinch some more money.
Any serious bitching about SF seems to me to be nitpicking from folks who were just looking to bitch at Bethesda. It’s a fantastic game with minor issues that are easily overlooked and don’t really affect the experience.
Because Larian is relatively small compared to Bethesda and the game exceeded the already high expectations, it’s a AAA D&D 5e game, which is something people were looking for for a long time. Larian deserves it, and they are actively fixing the game anyway. Bethesda has no excuses to be releasing games that have the types of bugs that they do after having such giant successes like Skyrim. They have the money.
Look I like the game so I’m not trying to say it’s bad in any way but you are just making excuses. Pent up demand doesn’t excuse the bugs. Fuck, they didn’t even need to develop the underlying systems, they already have 5e and the engines.
I’m not making excuses, I’m just saying that Larian deserves to get a free pass on this one for releasing a game that exceeded the already high expectations, not for the demand. And personally, I barely encoutered any bugs in a 90 hour long save…
As for them “already having 5e”, that’s true, but it’s a system that is rather complex and which only gets more complex with higher in-game levels and items which all slightly modify the game - which is easy on tabletop, but I can only imagine what a nightmare it must be to implement this in a computer game. And as far as I know, there aren’t any other computer games that truly implement 5e. Sure, there’s Solasta, but that’s highly modified.
As for the engine: I really don’t see it as a valid point, as they had to massively change and upgrade it between D:OS2 and BG3 anyway, it’s just too different.
I use a Mac and I’ve seen plenty, apart from us being forgotten and the release date pushed back silently twice. For me any dirt ground textures never render.
Larian does a much better job than any other studio, but I paid for the game to play in August at release with my friends, but then they silently dropped the release date and the only viable solution to playing was to pay for GeForce now and stream it.
I’d only be a little annoyed if they communicated their issues.
Once every 20 or so times that I leave my inventory, my viewcone is placed inside of my weapon for half a second and then the game stutters and I pop back into my character’s head (I think the inventory screen may scale up weapons for display and it’s failing to undo that so quickly, but that may be completely false).
That, and one dialogue “loaded” instantly (it started the interaction but wasn’t prepared with the graphics) and displayed a black screen for the first half of the conversation. Oh, also, FSR is FSR and makes spaceship landings look terrible.
Those are the only notable graphics issues I’ve experienced aside from widespread poor performance, and they might not even be graphics issues. I mean, the game doesn’t run too great, but the core gameplay is definitely less buggy than FO4 or Skyrim at launch. I’m sad to hear people are having more serious graphical issues, especially Arc users.
I’ve had 1 full crash, and a good handful of NPCs running into walls or levitating through ceilings.
Performance is fine, I guess, but I got the game as part of a promotion while upgrading my graphics card so it had better be. I believe folks who say it runs like dog on hardware that’s only a couple years old. It’s apparently unplayable if installed on a hard disk instead of an SSD.
All in, it’s the smoothest Bethesda launch I’ve ever seen (I skipped fallout 4, maybe it was better IDK) but that’s honestly not saying much. It’s way better than cyberpunk was at launch.
The problem is so severe, in fact, that the aforementioned translation layer had to be updated specifically to handle Starfield as an exception to the usual handling of the issue.
“I had to fix your shit in my shit because your shit was so fucked that it fucked my shit”
This is how games and drivers have been for decades.
There are huge teams at AMD and nVidia who’s job it is to fix shit game code in the drivers. That’s why (a) they’re massive and (b) you need new drivers all the time if you play new games.
I read an excellent post a while ago here, by Promit.
It’s interesting to see that in the 8 years since he wrote it, the SLI/Crossfire solution has simply been to completely abandon it, and that we still seem to be stuck in the same position for DX12. Your average game devs still have little idea how to get the best performance from the hardware, and hardware vendors are still patching things under the hood so they don’t look bad on benchmarks.
Your average game devs still have little idea how to get the best performance from the hardware, and hardware vendors are still patching things under the hood so they don’t look bad on benchmarks.
Yes they do. We know they do because current gen consoles are frequently providing better fidelity and better stability than PC games. Not because PCs have inferior hardware. But because optimization is actually incredibly hard when your custom base is all running different hardware AND different drivers. So even when the hardware is “the same”, it’s not.
This has been true forever. It just took 30 years for high performance computing to be affordable enough to put in consoles. 30 years was a long time for PC gamers to feel superior. Now they enjoy humble pie and make comments like this on the internet to explain why things are so “bad”.
PC games are still great. Don’t let this bother you more than it should.
To attribute this most recent failure to an overabundance of hardware variety is a joke. This issue persists on all Nvidia and Intel cards. Why? Because it’s an oversight pertaining to one thing they all share in common: their shared interaction with DirectX.
Let me repeat myself for the people in the back. The number of items they had to account for with this failure is one. One API.
This sounds more like hardware manufacturers haven’t provided a good enough abstraction layer across their devices, or they did (vulkan) but everyone is just stuck on bad apis that don’t properly map to the abstractions for the hardware. Or even more likely the publishers cheaped out and pushed something to release when it wasn’t ready like they have been forever.
It’s also a lack of specialized talent. There’s lots of great “talent” at game devs and even middleware devs. There’s just not much great talent that deals with renderers and API development. The vast majority of devs just lean on the middleware developer to push out the renderer codebase. In a situation like Bethesda running their own studio engine, they just don’t have the right people for it. This plagued the 90’s when people were trying to code for Glide, OGL, DX5,6,7,8, and 9. Many studios folded because they couldn’t get their tech to work with hardware acceleration.
Pc gaming is and forever will be way better then games on consoles.
Why?
I’ve 3 letters for you.
R G B
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
tbf pc gaming was always a fight for performance, I never felt superior back in the day fighting with qemm, irqs for the soundblaster or glide3d, it’s always had been a shitshow. It was a super shitshow in the nineties, it was a bit better in the zero’s and nowadays it again became a tad better.
I’ll give a different perspective on what you said: dx12 basically moved half of the complexity that would normally be managed by a driver, to the game / engine dev, which already have too much stuff to do: making the game. The idea is that “the game dev knows best how to optimize for its specific usage” but in reality the game dev have no time to deal with hardware complexity and this is the result.
It’s poorly optimized code, and the comments from the top brass has been “lol your PC sux” when they can’t even get it running right on their own hardware.
It’s not the variations of PC that’s the issue, it’s a design and quality control issue. Direct X and Vulkan are the bread and butter of PC gaming. Microsoft developed direct X to establish a common graphics framework for Windows and Microsoft game studio still fucked up working with it.
This is just classic corpo shit, developing their own proprietary stuff when no one asked for it. Apple with Metal too. Then it falls on developers to write abstraction layers
As far as I know that’s what graphics drivers do, like, all the time. Every major title is handled specifically. I am not a developer. I heard this from engine developers
only issue I see with the game at the moment is that they did not use those fly/land/dock sequences to mask the loading times. I think that would enhance the experience a lot
It really would have. Considering that my loading screens are scarcely longer than those sequences anyway it could have, should have been nearly seamless.
I think that’s what he means, he could load faster if the animation didn’t exist and instead of using the time for the animation to load, you get the animation then a loading screen.
I’m so glad steam hired this guy cause if he was doing this sh*t to cover slack for Bethesda and the huge publishers all for just a personal side project I would lose any hope I had for humanity.
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