I upgraded my rig after the beta just for this game. I’m playing it with plenty of frames after the new drivers and dlss 4, no frame gen. I have an i9-1400kf and 4080, way out of average range. It defaults to ultra everything. It still looks like absolute shit. I can’t believe they released this.
It’s a major shame because combat feels amazing. But they are ship of Theseusing MH. So many little baffling decisions. The scout flies aren’t actually as bad as I thought they would be. But there is just so much shit on the screen all the time. And the available settings don’t help so mod is the only hope I guess. They redesigned the item box interface, so 15 years of muscle memory is worthless and I think they removed the ability to sort items cuz I haven’t found the button to do it yet. You can’t simply open the menu and look at your status to include food skill descriptions anymore (or I can’t figure out how). There is no MH language?!? At this point I feel lucky they left in cat noises for felynes cuz the subtitles of their dialogue show me I’d have refunded if it was stuck in English.
I had a sense of awe and…pride?… when world was such a hit after loving this niche title for so long. But I got a sense of the transformation that was coming due to westernization/casualization and it’s just a let down. Idk why they didn’t have faith in their original, more whimsical vision.
Yeah that’s just for the pouch, not the box. It looks like the categorized tabs are supposed to replace the need for auto sorting the box, but it doesn’t feel right with the aforementioned 15years of playing. Guess I’ll get used to it.
Rise isn’t a good for comparison because Rise was designed for the switch. Or course it’s going to run exceptionally well on the Deck. It probably runs better than World, because World was designed for X1/PS4.
Edit: just to clarify I’m not defending the poor performance of Wilds, they did the exact same shit with World. I’m just clarifying that Rise performance was probably never going to happen.
The experiences people are reporting with this game are so strange to me.
I loaded the game today during a 1hr break at work on my Legion Go. It took ~10 minutes to do the shader compilation, I opted to turn frame generation on, and the game defaulted the settings to high, which felt awful. After turning the settings to low, turning the upscaling quality from “Max Performance” to just “Performance,” adjusting the sharpness up from 0.5 to 0.6, and then disabling other features I don’t care about (cloud textures? I barely look up) or outright hate (why games continue to push aggressive motion blurring is beyond me - it looks horrible), I started playing.
I experienced a stutter whenever I step into a new space, or load a new cutscene, but it smoothed out in a fraction of a second. While the graphics don’t look the best, the game plays smooth. I did the opening sequence with no stutters, got to the not-tetsucabra fight, and maintained 45+ fps throughout the entire fight, with no stutters or issues. At points, the monster ran into a cave, which aided my hand-held PC and kept the game running at a smooth 60fps for those sections. This is directly in-line with my experiences running the benchmark on Legion Go, which averaged ~45 fps on nearly identical settings.
I haven’t yet run the benchmark or played the released game on my home PC, sporting a Ryzen 7 5800 and a 3070 ti, but the demo, which was less optimized and frame generation did not work during, played “fine.” I was unimpressed with the performance relative to the graphical fidelity in that play (though I am of the opinion that the more gritty, realistic aesthetic is ugly relative to the vibrant worlds of Generations, or Rise and unapologetically think they look better than even World).I can’t say I had problems or felt that performance or visual quality would impede my enjoyment of the game.
This article notes specific stuttering and runs the frame health tests to demonstrate it. I suspect they’re onto something that I am not experiencing for some reason or another. That said, I ultimately think the 4k, 144+ fps gamers running expensive GPUs are offended that they can’t play this one on the highest settings, and are review bombing the hell out of this title. I’m not sure what the deal with all the “ThAt’S nOt HoW fRaMe GeNeRaTiOn WoRkS!” screaming relevant to low end systems is about, as I am experiencing notable improvements through it.
I encourage people to test on their own hardware, rather than taking reviews at face value, as I’ve begun to believe that whatever issue is occurring is deeper than “Capcom didn’t optimize!” Use the benchmark, and take advantage of Steam’s refund policy.
You had to make the game look as terrible as possible and use fake frames to have an “enjoyable” experience. How is that acceptable? What about that is worth $70?
You should be getting a stable 60fps @ 1440p on medium settings with a 3070ti at the bare minimum. MH is not visually impressive enough to justify how demanding it is. If you think otherwise look at RDR2 performance.
That said, I ultimately think the 4k, 144+ fps gamers running expensive GPUs are offended that they can’t play this one on the highest settings, and are review bombing the hell out of this title.
I can understand. I haven’t played this game but I do have an expensive rig. If turning on dynamic lighting causes the game to stutter, then the dynamic lighting feature is broken. That’s not my machine’s fault. I don’t know exactly what settings aren’t working, but it seems like there are a few nobody can actually use. Negative reviews for a game with broken features is justified.
Awesome to see them win this. If other games can have poker or other cards games where the characters are gambling and not have that influence their shit, the roguelike that uses playing cards in the same way Go-Fish does definitely shouldn’t be smacked over this.
Fuck EA and all the loot box game makers that don’t get hit with this crap
If other games can have poker or other cards games where the characters are gambling and not have that influence their shit
I doubt it though because the game doesn’t have any gambling in it at all. It just uses the imagery of poker, that’s it. I have no more of an idea how to play poker now than they did before spending 900 Brazilian hours on the game.
That’s what I’m saying tho, it’s bs that Belatro would get hit simply for the imagery they’re using, while other games get a lesser penalty when ACTUAL (both real money and in game currencies) gambling is happening.
I very much think games like Balatro DO need to be assessed and probably have an increased rating because they are unabashedly designed to be as addictive as possible. Same as ARPGs that have been built around skinner boxes basically since Diablo.
But this was never that. It was just “oh, cards and poker theming? GAMBLING!!!”
I can’t speak to factorio since every time that dev has ever opened his mouth it has just been horrific hateful bullshit.
But Civ is more just “addictive” because the gameplay is fun. That is not to downplay that but it is generally closer to “escapism” than not when you get into that “one more turn” cycle and realize it is 3 am.
ARPGs were very much designed around skinner boxes/operant conditioning chambers which are one of the core tenets of how things like slot machines are designed. We can see similar (and it was outright acknowledged by many reviewers/influencers) with games like Vampire Survivors.
At the end of the day, the reality is that the “This is fine if you are 13” system is idiotic and what we actually need is fine grain warnings… which will go down great in an era of “Eww, trigger warnings are woke”. But, like, I have a cousin who is well aware that he is incredibly prone to addiction when it comes to gambling and on many occasions he has texted family and friends to ask if it is “safe” for him to play a new game. And… it is kind of concerning how often the answer is “no”.
Link for context…he didn’t know statutory rape stood for sex with children as he is not a native speaker. This does not excuse other things he has said that may be terrible, but cancel culture is a cancer.
Til both that he’s trash and that Uncle Bob is trash. It makes sense honestly, Uncle Bob was always hyped to no end with his mediocre contributions to software. Also the agile manifesto sucks ass.
He wrote some hyped up programming books and he was involved in the creation of extreme programming (a bust), cucumber (an almost completely useless waste of time), and agile (an ok idea but in reality it’s a huge bust, it’s biggest effect is that management tells everyone “we need to be agile” all the time).
Agile just means that you don’t have a project plan, but you see that’s okay because you planned not to have a project plan, and therefore it’s totally fine.
Extreme programming is basically pair programming. It sucks and doesn’t work. Cucumber is also known as “behavioral driven (design/development)” or BDD. It manifests as test documents written in “plain English” that are executed via code. It inevitably becomes unit tests but worse because it’s based mainly around regex matches to bits of text within the steps.
Civ is a bit exploitative in that they deliberately release a half-arsed base product with glaring flaws, charging big $$$ for it; and then release a chain of expansion packs to flesh it out and make it complete.
I was on the beta team for Civ 5; and it was a real eye-opener to see that this is a deliberate strategy. It isn’t just that games are hard to get right. They deliberately hold back to squeeze more cash out. I haven’t bought any civ game since then.
But yeah, I agree that it isn’t the same type of exploitation as gambling.
My issue with the ruling wasn’t the ruling itself, cause I can understand the argument. It was the non-equal enforcement of it. Games with actual gambling in it were rated lower than a game with the similar aspects but no actual monetary aspects. That’s ridiculous. If you want to make poker 18+, then just do it across the board instead of picking and choosing your ratings.
While the game can be “addicting”, it is mostly because it is fun to play. Not all “addicting” forms of entertainment need elevated ratings because they are fun to consume. We don’t increase the ratings for binge worthy TV shows and we don’t restrict books if they are page turners, so why should we with a video game. At some point people need to regulate the use of their time themselves.
How many millennial/genx gamers have stories about staying up all night playing Diablo 2 or WoW? Hell, it was almost a requirement for any games media person to have an “I almost flunked out of college because of WoW” story.
It was hard to care TOO much with D2 because any additional monetization was mostly illegal gold farmers (and let’s ignore the various former devs who have acknowledged they were involved in those…). But starting with WoW? That was a subscription model. That “I need to run this raid 500 times to get the drop I want” equated to increased subscriptions which was profit. Again, there were limits-ish in that very few people ran multiple accounts so it was a fixed cost per year. But it was still there.
Fast forward again and we have the same concepts going into loot boxes and, eventually, gacha games where it is 100% predatory and basically what the majority of successful live service games are built around.
Like anything, it is about understanding what you are and aren’t susceptible to. But it is also important to actually think critically and wonder if you REALLY like the gameplay of that game or if you just like the flashing lights and sparkles of a good drop?
To make it clear (to the people who have read beyond just getting pissy and smacking the go away button): I love Balatro and Vampire Survivors and play the ever loving hell out of them. But any time “Oh god… they have a mobile port. This will be the end of me” is even jokingly uttered… that is when you take a look at what you are doing and add some restrictions.
Because, at the end of the day ,time is not just money: it is life. Yeah, there is the aspect of “I stayed up all night and performed worse at work/school and got fired/expelled”. But there is also just “I spent all night locked in a room and didn’t interact with a single human being or spend any time improving myself” to worry about.
Ugh, I remember those days well. I saw personally what MMOs did to two friends of mine (one from high school and one from college), and how the high school friend was able to really pull himself together and make a good life for himself after we helped pull him out of MMO addiction, and how the college friend we couldn’t help just wallowed in a sea of empty energy drink cans and turned EVERYTHING into WoW during that time. I don’t know if he was able to build a solid life/career after college, but I could imagine him looking back at that time and wanting more from it. Either way, I saw both their situations and vowed to never pick up an MMO because I didn’t want the same to happen to me. Just because an addicting game isn’t extractive of one’s money doesn’t mean it’s not harmful if you have a hard time with self-control and moderation. You either lose your money directly or your time, which may cost you money in other ways in addition to other indirect costs. Ultimately you’ll end up losing something of great value you will unlikely get back, if ever.
In college, circa 2005, I played about three hours of WoW during a free weekend. I installed the game (from a CD!), started it up, and played for an afternoon. When I got up to go to the bathroom, I realized that I was at a crossroads: I could either make this game my life for the next indeterminate number of years, or I could leave it behind forever. Those were literally the only two options for me. My brain would accept no third option.
I deleted the game and went out to get pizza. Since then I’ve never picked it up again, and now it’s so big and unwieldy I’m not even tempted anymore. But that was a touch and go situation for those few hours.
A few games have given me similar pulls over the years, but I’ve gotten better about it. Balatro is the most recent one to grab me, since I got it only when it came to mobile. And yeah, it grabbed me pretty hard, but I also know that once I unlock all the Jokers I’m unlikely to go much further in it.
Like anything, it is about understanding what you are and aren’t susceptible to.
Hard agree. I get sucked hard into good stories and know I’d lose a lot of time to them, so I refused to let myself start anything over 30,000 words for a period of time.
It should be a cost/benefit evaluation of “how much enjoyment will I gain from this game and is the time spent enjoying worth it compared to all the other things I could be doing?” Sadly some things hijack this decision-making, and with some things you really only get to try once before you get hooked. “Try everything once” shouldn’t include heroin. I think that’s part of why knowing if a game is addictive is helpful for some people, so they know if they can try it or have to stay away forever. I have heard enough stories of MMO addiction that I’ve decided that I should never play one. Reviews are also really helpful, because what takes one person in might not interest another. As much as I fear MMO addiction, I know I am good at not getting addicted to gacha.
Factorio has extracted £60 from me for the base game and new DLC! I’ve only played 2100 hours, that’s almost £0.03 per hour. Complete bullshit how expensive everything is now…
I don’t know that I’d agree with the notion that games that are engaging need to be rated higher. Is there harm to playing one game a lot?
I’ve read books that were so engaging I kept reading long after I should have stopped for the night. The author very much intended for the book to be engaging and to hold my attention. Should we rate the book as more mature because I kept reading it?
I don’t think balatro is any more addictive than most other games, it just has a low barrier to starting and a quick turn around.
Ratings should be informative and harm based. “This game is full of violence” and “this game has gambling”. Factual.
A game being prone to being played alot isn’t factual, it’s just an observation that some people find it fun. Without an associated risk of harm you’re just putting a scary number on something because of your opinion about it.
Like I said in this and the branch below it, many games, balatro included, include game and visual design that evoke psychological experiments and concepts that are basically the foundation of slot machines and the like.
And these are the same concepts people deride when we call them loot boxes (but not gacha for some reason).
I don't understand what you're talking about. Balatro does not contain loot boxes/gacha. In a world where so many modern AAA games are exploiting all kinds of shady dark patterns, Balatro took off by not doing any of that shit. It's just a sincerely fun game, and it sounds like you're literally just complaining that it's too fun and that should somehow be policed.
The guy is clearly an idiot. He made this stupid comment and he can’t justify it but rather than admit that it’s a stupid comment and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he’s trying to back it up in some bizarre way with this mumbo jumbo non-logic.
The difference is one is manipulating a continuous flow of money out of your wallet and you pay once for Balatro to get the same rush without getting psychofinancially milked for the CHANCE at a hit of dopamine before you pay again for the privilege.
Hmm. At least in my experience, the people decrying loot boxes also condemn gacha for the exact same reasons, but we could have had separate experiences.
it’s 7 card monti but with the gambling replaced with strategic decision making. the fact that lootboxes aren’t considered gambling, but removing gambling from poker is, it just puts on display how the big corporations are desperate to keep us locked into their entertainment machines and away from innovative art
I think it’s more that hysterical moral guardians and corporate boobs only see the traditionally casino-like superficial imagery of cards, dice, spades, clubs, slots, etc. and instantly knee-jerk themselves into declaring it “immoral” without actually bothering to take the twelve seconds required to experience the gameplay. At which point they would immediately realize that they are wrong.
This is Kyle’s Mom’s version of only reading the headline, or not bothering to look beyond the dust jacket and only screeching about imaginary content that exists only inside their own assumptions and based purely on the picture on the cover.
I will add that Sheila Broflovski (a.k.a. Kyle’s Mom) through her sheer incessant nagging (and also blame shifting away from herself and the other parents as spelled out in “Blame Canada”) misses the mark so far that she manages to incite a hot war with Canada that gets enough people killed to spill sufficient blood to fulfill an ancient evil prophecy that literally incarnates both Satan himself and Saddam Hussein’s revenant form back onto the face of the Earth.
Note that this not only predated Saddam’s actual real world death, but Matt and Trey also successfully predicted the eruption of the Karen trend, probably a good decade or so before it’d risen to the height – or sunk to the depths – it’s achieved today. Although senseless moral panics were well known and quite popular in the '80’s and '90’s already, to the extent that they not only managed to accurately predict the response to their own movie, but also parody it within the same movie.
While the win is good, the fact that it’s still a PEGI 12 game while FIFA is a PEGI 3 shows what an absolute joke the whole process is.
Australia had to deal with similar levels of bullshit for way too long before our ratings board finally capitulated to common sense and introduced an R18 rating (for games like The Last of Us, not even XXX content!).
We have an endemic gambling problem too, so I don’t foresee much common sense coming out of that mob anytime soon - either.
self censoring bodies like pegi are there to protect the industry, so it doesn’t get actual censorship from the government. EA is the industry. of course they get special treatment.
also gambling is the blueprint of AAA gaming now, so pegi loves it. they only do this shit to small devs so they can pretend to care while protecting industry giants from the actual scrutiny that they deserve.
Very true, same applies to the ESRB in the US. The ESA literally only formed the organisation to self-censor rather than leave it to the Gov’t following outrage over Mortal Kombat — if I’m remembering correctly?
Here in Australia, the ACB is a government body — but just about as useless, if not even more so! For the longest time, we had to have our games additionally censored because they were viewed as for children and therefore couldn’t depict excessive violence, any sexual themes or drug use. Manhunt, Grand Theft Auto 3 & Vice City were notable examples.
What am I getting at, even I don’t know. I guess to say that both implementations can be shit…? 🤷🏻♂️
Awesome, I’m glad the dev held his position! He’s right that it’s incredibly moronic to have games like FIFA with actual gambling mechanics rated lower.
Balatro will get you hooked on lovely indie games, not gambling :)
The PEGI management board is people that publish games, people that make consoles and trade organisations.
None of whom want to see sales go down.
They’re behind the bonkers decision that representations of gambling are worse than actual gambling.
PEGI mainly exists to save publishers bothering with each country’s classifications boards. Before that you’d have like BBFC in the UK, and each country having to rate it. It’s industry self regulation, and like any good fox guarding the henhouse, they’re not doing a great job of it.
Japanese game companies are allergic to modern, working ideas. I’ve always dislikes how Japanese games look terrible. They don’t even try sometimes and you have ps5 games that look like ps3. They have game series like mega man that they refuse to Move past side scrolling, you play their games and they even leave out basic shit like “pick up item” animations and voice acting. I find Japanese games antiquated and even if they’re fun, they feel like I’m playing a last gen game when I play a Japanese saga or similar dev game.
Pokémon is a good example of a series that refuses to make a current gen game. They all feel like ds games on a switch
Side scroller games ARE fun, sometimes. Imagine if if no game had ever evolved past it though. Mega man is my favourite game character and I sit there playing games like ratchet & clank and wishing we could get a modern mega man to match it.
There was a 3D Megaman platformer. It was called Megaman Legends and it got a sequel, but for some reason they never made a third one.
Meanwhile… If you like the gameplay of Ratchet & Clank why not just play that? I like JRPGs but I’m not upset that Psychonauts isn’t a JRPG, for example…
I’m coming at this from the perspective of a Sonic the Hedgehog fan. The Genesis/Mega Drive platformers were peak. The 3D games were… well, some of them were okay, but all the money and effort that was poured into them meant that for a long time, Sega wasn’t making the kind of game I actually found fun. The problem with changing up the entire style of the game you make is that you’ll inevitably leave fans behind.
Because what they said was, They have game series like mega man that they refuse to Move past side scrolling, you play their games and they even leave out basic shit like “pick up item” animations and voice acting. Implying that the kind of games I like should have stopped existing as technology marched on.
Have you played any games outside of those genres? There’s plenty of great modern games that are side scrollers. The idea that side scrollers are antiquated is frankly absurd. All that aside, Armoured Core, Yakuza, Street Fighter, Tekken and MH Wilds all look pretty good.
Also considering the power of a Switch, it seems like a no brainer that it would look like a PS3? It’s chipset is almost a decade old and operates at a fraction of the power of other platforms.
Bro I started my professional game development career in 1996 and retired in 2015. I played video games in the early 70’s that existed before Pong. My father had one of the 5 supercomputers in the world in the meteorological service of Canada, where I used to hang out with nerds that would let me play with shit, and play the games they made when they weren’t modeling weather. I have studied nothing in my entire life more than the tapestry of what we call game development. So kindly stop.
How is that related to his/her opinion at all? Are they not allowed to dislike something? You don’t have to agree, but wtf.
I don’t really care for japanese style games either, whether it’s rpg games like Chrono trigger, or sailor moon, or any final fantasy games. Are you going to shit on me too? Because I don’t like something that is popular? I just never got into them and other things interested me first. I do love secret of mana though.
Definitely deserved. I’ve played it for 10+ hours so far and it’s such an improvement on the already excellent first game. It even runs much better on the same hardware.
Pretty sure the first game was just not optimized very well. I can run KCD2 at a very stable 60+ FPS on my RTX 3060 on high/ultra settings. The first one had about 20 FPS less in comparable environments. Not too surprising, considering that it was the dev team’s first CryEngine project. It’s notoriously hard to work with.
We know someone working at Warhorse and he arranged us to get a tour at the company after hours by the HR person which was great. I recall one of the devs saying “You know why they call it the CryEngine right? It’s cuz you cry everytime you have to use it”
Steam Deck seems pretty amazing. Unfortunately, in my case, it’s too big to travel with and I doubt my small hands will find much comfort.
Really hope they come out with a Steam Deck Lite. I know you can buy smaller handheld PCs but last I checked they were quite pricey (tbf I haven’t checked recently)
The Switch OLED is already a bit big to travel with for me but I make do and I’d prefer it to be smaller in hand. I had the lite and much preferred its form factor. OLED does have a much, much better screen. Different strokes for different folks. The Deck doesn’t meet my use case, nad that’s fine.
I love the thing and use it extensively whenever I can, but it is bulky and hard to fit into bags with other stuff. If there was a way to separate the palm rest bits and have most other things be flat, and thin enough, that’d make a huge difference. But the bulky palm rests attached to the thin body, it just unavoidably wastes some space, and even more if one wants to be safe and use the case.
But it’s not that bad, easily lived with. Doesn’t remove the fact that it could be much better in that regard though.
Still easily more portable than a laptop though! And much more comfortable to use for gaming, if that’s going to be the most common use case for a computer while you travel.
I play my Switch docked 99.9% of the time. One thing holding me back with Steam Deck is I keep hearing about complications with trying to play it docked on TV.
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