Heard it’s been getting rapid updates though so that’s always encouraging. Maybe in 3-6 months it’ll be super refined. Keen to give this one a go once I wrap up Pathfinder
I heard that inventory management and transferring items between party members is a chore, which is a shame since it's something that PF games have already solved - shared inventory space for all party members. It makes it so much more convenient and fun to use than the mess DOS games had.
I haven’t noticed it being an issue. When you loot an item you can send it to a specific character and if you want to move lots of things you can hit tab, see the whole party and drag and drop items from inventory to inventory. Maybe it gets worse later on, I’m only 20 hours in.
I’ve been playing on “console” (SteamDeck) so I know the UI is different but the issue I’ve found is that there are three different “inventory” options and two different “loot” options, and each behaves a little differently.
For example if I loot a corpse, you’re right I can send to a specific party member. However if I loot a chest, that has to go to me.
Similarly when I the character sheet inventory view I can sort by certain methods and then L3(?) to exit that menu. If I’m selling something it’s still (L3?) to open that menu, but B to exit it. Also the sorting options aren’t the same. Also switching between characters during a trade event is one button. However switching on the character sheet is three buttons. There is also a third lesser used “put in device” menu with even fewer sorting options and you can’t switch characters.
The game is excellent and you can get used to these things but I do sometimes have to spend time just sorting things.
Honestly, I'm surprised the 360 store was still up and running. At least purchases can still be downloaded and backward compatibility means most of these games will still be accessible.
No, I’ll be using Proton. There’s a chance it won’t work day 1, but I find it unlikely given my experience lately.
Especially with shader caching, it’s even possible that it runs better on Proton while bugs get worked out (that was the case with stutter in Elden Ring, which didn’t occur on Linux or Steam Deck with shader precompilation).
To me, playing a Bethesda game for the first time feels wrong with mods. I definitely want to experience the “original” at least one time before changing anything.
Exciting stuff. I’ve long since vowed never to pre-order anything from Bethesda ever again though, so I’ll be waiting to hear what the vibe is once other folks start playing it. Right now it very much seems like it could either be great or disappointing. We’ll see in a couple weeks’ time I s’pose
Steam muddies this a bit though, since you have two weeks or two hours of playtime to try it out and get your full money back, so it removes a lot of the risk in the first place; in some cases, it removes all of it.
No other game takes that long to compile shaders, so that could have been a red flag for a refund on its own. And you can pay attention to forums and games press in the meantime to find out when it's in a playable state before you repurchase it. But on launch day, you could have it preloaded and smoke test it with no risk.
The shader compilation time varied greatly between users. Mine were 40 minutes tops and later I think around 20 minutes. But you'd have to redo them on every update, just to try and see whether the latest patch fixed any of the issues you had. For me it basically became worse before it got better. It's particularly sad because the game itself is great. I watched countless of let's plays of both Part 1 and 2. So it's a real shame that their entry onto the PC market started with such a terrible port. It left such a sour taste that I still haven't played through it.
It's certainly not the only one though. Horizon Zero Dawn had similar long shader compilation times for me. Social media is unfortunately useless, because there's just too many fanboys that will tell you everything is great, burying any sort of valid criticism (Cyberpunk 1.5 for example).
There are also Steam reviews, reddit forums, etc. One person saying it's still a problem is more valuable than two saying it isn't. I've got Mortal Kombat 1 pre-ordered, and that series has a history of shaky PC ports, with enough cause for me to believe it could happen again. If all's well, I'll know before I finish work for the day from reviews, forums, etc., and I'll get Shang Tsung for no additional cost. If not, I get my money back, and they can earn my money from me some other time.
What do you think I was referencing there in my previous comment? /r/Diablo for example literally permabanned me for speaking out against the predatory FOMO tactics in D4, after I was attacked & insulted for it by several users that also downvoted me into oblivion. And now they can eat their own sock, now that post release the hivemind opinion swapped. Everyone on Reddit and the reviews also said how great of a game CP2077 now was after those updates. Well shit, it isn't, it just got rid of a whole bunch of launch issues, while the core issues were still the same and the game still had a massive performance bug until the next major patch. You simply cannot trust those communities anymore because everyone identifies so much with their product that they see any sort of critique as a personal insult.
But that's why I said one person saying it's still a problem is more valuable than two saying that it isn't. There are more resources beyond those. Quick looks, Digital Foundry, SkillUp, Let's Plays...and as you said, games can still have these issues beyond day 1, so at that point not pre-ordering wouldn't have saved you from it either. But two hours is certainly usually enough to find the obvious deal-breakers if the other resources fail you. Cyberpunk 2077 worked pretty damn well for me even right at launch; I didn't pre-order it, but even if I did, I probably would have been able to tell in two hours if it was horrifically broken like all of the video evidence from other players showed it was, in general. I also really enjoyed it, so that's just a difference in taste between you and I.
You seem to ignore what I am saying / the point I'm trying to make. People who say it is still a problem aren't getting heard by those who should read it, because the people who say the opposite will do everything they can to bury them. This results in you looking for opinions and just getting positive ones / yay sayers. Content creators suffer from similar issues. For starters, most of them are just clickbait bullshit deliverers and blocked immediately anyway. A lot of them tend to also fall in line with the devs though, because they often are in some sort of sponsored partner program or don't want to risk losing benefits from those game companies by being "too critical". And with how YT algorithms work, most smaller channels don't even have a chance to appear on your search.
So if those people aren't seeing the information they need, they should not pre-order. I'm confident that if you know these other avenues to find out this information, it's easy to avoid getting burned.
The only “pre-order” I’ve ever done was Elden Ring, and that was only the day before release because there was a small discount on it. I was definitely going to play it anyway, so I would have been spending the money regrardless. I’m usually pretty patient in terms of gaming.
I might if I didn't just get BG3. I'll still get it pretty close to launch barring serious issues, though. Everything I've seen about the scale and what the game is is what I've been waiting for for a while.
I know Bethesda isn't perfect and I didn't love FO4, but it's in large part because of the reliance on VATS for combat instead of making guns feel OK. Gunplay looks a lot better and more dynamic and just that combined with Bethesda's world building/sense of exploration (which exists in Fallout, too; it's just overshadowed to me by the mechanics) are super promising. There are always bugs with anything as ambitious as Bethesda makes, because it takes dozens of hours of testing per 10 minute encounter to comprehensively test one, and you can't exactly unit test video games (though we might not be super far off from training AI to supplement human testing), but I rarely experience anything near as annoying as the vitriol implies and I just don't care.
I get the don't preorder principle, but it's on steam. I get to have it downloaded ahead of time and ready for launch, and if there actually are issues it's extremely simple to get my cash back. Refunds make as much (or more) impact as waiting to buy it, so if a game is actually broken my voice is theoretically louder anyways.
I’m personally not so much worried about it being buggy or broken, that stuff gets patched. I’m more worried that it’ll be fundamentally disappointing in some way, which is something that I probably wouldn’t discover until long past the refund window. To be clear, I’m cautiously optimistic, but that caution leads me to wait until a week or so after release to hear what folks are saying about it.
Uh, is there a kind soul that has a link to a mirror of any of the mentioned youtube videos that were taken down? I’d realy like to see what it looked like - talking to random NPCs on the streets ov GTA V.
Me too. If the sales aren't high enough, Microsoft may reconsider and decide to sell it on the PS5 (probably with some DLC included) a year later or so. It cost them a whole lot of money to buy all those companies, including Bethesda, and they're going to eventually have to recoup a profit from those purchases.
If that means releasing on Playstation again, I think they'll do it rather than risk losing money. Even Disney has learned with Disney+ that having your own exclusive platform and not sharing isn't great business sense. It costs them a lot of money every month to host everything and produce content, and if they don't license out that content to competitors, they can't make their money back.
I can see Microsoft learning the same lesson. Especially given that Disney+ hasn't been profitable ever, and now the red ink is starting to catch up with Disney. If keeping big games from big studios starts losing Microsoft a lot of money, I think they'll fold, at least partially.
Loving the game, do agree though that it starts to get a bit muddled and confusing - at times it feels like I’m not really sure which quests I’m doing, why I’m doing it or what I’m trying to achieve – very realistic to real life in that regard but it can feel a bit of a chore
I kind of stopped paying attention to side quests. In a lot of RPGs, I feel like they’re discrete, separate errands, and usually contained within the area where they’re given. BG3 side quests seem a lot more integrated, in the sense that I’ll often just happen along the next step in one as I pursue main quest. If not, then it may be because the next step is in the next Act. And some of them seem to be mutually exclusive.
Maybe because it’s my first play through, but I’m now in ‘if it happens, it happens’ mode, and I’m confident that there are enough opportunities for me to make different choices to have a substantially different experience next time.
Companies are terrified of AI making their work obsolete. To such a degree they are trying to do it first. Thankfully AI is so painfully bad that the companies that have tried this are failing hard.
I initially suspected we were just looking at simple TAA on PS5, but the options menu indicates that FSR2 is actually in use here - AMD’s popular temporal upsampling and anti-aliasing solution. The weird thing is that every shot on both PS4 Pro and PS5 seems to resolve to a full 4K resolution, meaning the FSR2 is providing anti-aliasing coverage without a performance benefit, as the game is already running at native resolution. There’s a possibility dynamic res is in place, but I didn’t spot any evidence of it in my testing. It’s unusual for sure, but that seems to be the situation. So, in effect, developer Double Eleven is using FSR2 as a temporal super-sampler - and the benefits are obvious. Xbox consoles retain the 2x MSAA of Xbox 360 and while it’s still impressive on One X and Series X in particular, PlayStation just looks smoother and cleaner.
Its unusual for FSR. But the upscaling tech roots in anti aliasing. DLSS was originally designed to be an anti aliasing tech, quite litterally in the name (Deep Learning Super Sampling), so it isnt out of the picture that FSR could be used for the same. It was only later marketed to get more performance at lower resolutions afterword. (Im aware the post is not your thoughts, just more of a response to the specific segment you pointed out)
eurogamer.net
Aktywne