However, it’s clear Game Science, through Hero Games, is keen to control the narrative around Black Myth: Wukong to avoid negative coverage and ensure focus is on the game itself.
Given that this is the first I’ve heard of this game and I know nothing about the game itself, I feel they’ve shot themselves in the foot a little, eh?
Nah for a while now, this was highly anticipated within the gaming community. Journalists have covered allegations and controversies but honestly no one really cared. People wanted a good game and they got one. Politics or not, their steam review is 96% at overwhelmingly positive.
If you faked your death you’d likely never want to tie yourself to any platform that requires you to make an account that could in time be used to identify you
Reading this thread makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. This game was mediocre as fuck. The open world was practically empty. There were like five characters with anything but a superficial motivation. Combat is point and click nothingness, there is no strategy whatsoever and the AI is practically nonexistent. Constant bugs and graphical issues. The big fixes only fixes the very last thing.
Amen to that. Technical issues aside, it’s one of the most shallow open world games I’ve played. There’s nothing to do when you’re not doing missions. There’s no depth to the combat. It’s a 5/10 at best for me.
i think you are being hyperbolic ( although its your subjetive opinion for sure ) id give it ez 7.5 etc… and higher coz i like cyberpunk you know i enjoyed shadowruns better ofc but thats coz i like izometrik
Eh, at least as far as the combat goes I liked doing the Net Runner thing: hacking cameras left and right and killing off enemies before they ever saw me. That being said I put the game down when it became too much of a chore to get much anything upgraded. My combat style may have been suboptimal but I had fun with it.
I also didn’t have any issues with bugs or graphical issues, but I also first played it pretty far into its life after they could fix plenty of things. Don’t remember exactly when it was, but it was after the anime was no longer super relevant but before that big 2.0 update. I also know I played using some mods, and I can’t remember if there was a mod that fixed a bunch of issues.
There is some truth to what you say but the game is more than a sum of its parts. Even though individual strokes of game dev brush may be not perfect the whole package as of today creates memorable, even unforgettable experience.
Have you played it after the 2.0 update? The combat feels awesome, as least my build did. I also disagree with the openworld being empty, driving around, listening to music, was one of my favorite things to do. Occasionally coming across little stories and unmarked encampments was really fun.
Based on everyone telling me BotW and TotK are the finest games ever made, perhaps people just want mostly empty open worlds with basic combat and max five characters with personalities.
I felt the same about BotW. At first I enjoyed the freshness and exploration but it quickly gave way to the sinking realization that it’s an empty world with smatterings of lifeless villages and MMO-style quests. Ew.
Yeah. I’d much rather have the small number of deeper side quests in OoT or MM than, “hey buddy can you catch me ten crickets in exchange for a fistful of rupees? Thanks.”
The average^^@ user watches Twitch from 4pm to 5.30pm twice a week. There is absolutely a delta between what is required to be a profitable service, what is quality entertainment and what the service is and does currently.
No idea how you can come to any of these conclusions given that viewer numbers are publicly visible. If this were true the streamers wouldn’t be live as much as they are outside these hours.
I’ll be honest, if the solution is Twitch, then I don’t need my problem solved. That is, compared to Twitch, I don’t need an alternative. Not having Twitch is a solid improvement over having Twitch. (kidding of course, but all too often it feels like that with just how bad the technical aspects of their site are)
I don’t care about split screen but more evidence that the Series S was a mistake. At the very least Microsoft is going to have to ease up on the requirements.
Edit: It has come to my attention that I need to improve my reading comprehension. This only affects the S. 🤦♂️
I don’t think it was a mistake, it brought next gen gaming to people that can’t afford, or don’t need the highest spec machines. I have a series S so I can play Xbox games with my son, I also have a gaming PC and steam deck. The price of the S allowed me to justify buying this, but I wasn’t about to drop the dough on an X just to play a few Xbox games
It’s less powerful than an Xbox One X. I think the problem is that they didn’t really think through what a console generational leap would actually consist of.
And do you think that would have panned out better if the cheaper console option wasn't available? Not to mention it would only leave them with the console that shared a lot of the same components as the PS5 during supply shortages as well.
I mean, unless their goal is to lose even more money on each console sold, I doubt they were interested in that. But that's not their goal. Their goal is to get people subscribed to Game Pass.
Game Pass does include PC gamers, which is why they're probably more interested in opening up that service to more people with a cheap console SKU than to sell Xbox consoles, likely because outselling Sony by doing the same thing Sony is doing is a very steep hill to climb.
One day they might. PC has taken a larger and larger market share as time has gone on. PCs became easier to game on, consoles became less streamlined, and perhaps even the closed-off nature of consoles compared to the open nature of PCs has played a role. But as of 2023, you're still not making a $300 PC that plays games as well as an S. While consoles have become less streamlined, they're still more streamlined than a PC.
We've already established that the $300 box is not viable for much longer. And since it sold around 1/3 the numbers of the PS5, it didn't even work as advertised.
Did we establish that? Most of the biggest games are not the hardest on system requirements. And while Microsoft would obviously prefer that they sold more Xboxes and reached more Game Pass subscribers (the 25M-30M is impressive regardless), I'd be surprised if they expected the majority of those to be Series S; but they probably did recognize that that customer base is still worth reaching. We're just not at a point in the history of consoles where they all have the same business model anymore, like they did 20 years ago.
They compromised their higher end system with their lower end system. It's time to admit they made a mistake here, and they are only now starting to fix it.
Yes, thank you!
Microsoft has historically never been profitably selling consoles, which is certainly part of their shift towards different business models, including Game Pass and a focus on more than just Xbox, but PC and Cloud as well. They don’t really have much of a financial incentive to sell consoles for that sake alone, they have to get people to subscribe to Game Pass and/or buy games (possibly digitally whenever possible) and the Series S is their best console for that, as the consumer is very much locked in.
Lmao, bruh, no one who has played games on both would ever claim that. It has slightly more raw graphical compute power while having a drastically weaker CPU, slower SSD, slower memory, and slower overall throughput.
It has faster memory than the Series S. More importantly, it has more RAM. A few improvements here and there doesn't make the Series S a real next-gen console.
As someone who has a One X, a Series S, and a Series X, I can assure you that you have no idea what you’re talking about.
The One X doesn’t get used anymore and the Series S gets used ballpark more often than the series X. Pretty much all games play a very comparable experience on it compared to the series X, something that cannot be said about the One X.
Is that because people actually want an S... or because they settled because they couldn't find an X? Everywhere I go there's tons of S's available and almost no X's available. Obviously anecdotal, but maybe it's not so much buying it over the X as buying it because the X just isn't in reach... either because of price (though if you can't afford a hundred dollars extra for a console... you can't really afford the console at all, and you're just justifying it to yourself) or because of lack of availability in general.
Just a note, it’s not $100 difference. It’s $200 difference ($300 vs $500). Having said that, the only reason I got the SS was because I couldn’t get the SX. I tried and failed. I would have preferred a $400 digital version of the SX even. Settled for the SS. Had to get an SSD expansion card, feature parity is apparently not a thing, had to rebuy a couple games digitally.
Lol comments like this are proof that gamers are still toxic fanbois who will make a mountain of a molehill if it makes them feel superior to someone else.
I don’t see how I’m a fanboy. The Series X lost a feature because of the Series S. I’m sure the parity requirement had good intentions but I doubt this is the last time this will happen.
As others are pointing out the Series S is selling well but it’s the weakest link.
Please respect the rules of the instance if you choose to comment here.
The only rule at Beehaw is Be(e) Kind. Your comment was needlessly aggressive and abrasive and you could have made your point just as easily in a kind way.
Thanks for keeping this a positive space for everyone.
I was talking about the person(s) at Microsoft, who decided that it’s a good idea to have less RAM on the Series S than on the Series X…
(And for context: I work in gamedev, and in my experience making games stay within the memory budget is one of the toughest parts of porting games to consoles.)
who decided that it’s a good idea to have less RAM on the Series S than on the Series X…
Supply chains are complicated, and MS probably did their due diligence to ensure minimal blockages. From seeing the memory structures of newer video cards, I’m pretty sure there are supply constraints to memory to think of.
Honestly I think gamedevs leaning on memory this hard instead of compute is a mistake. You can have intelligently tiled, procedurally generated textures and have a lot more of them, but instead everyone is leaning on authored content on disc. This goes against industry trends in non-game rendering where procedural generation is the norm. If Doom Eternal can look that good with forward rendering, there are no excuses.
My main beef with the hate on the Series S is that both times it’s been a big deal (BG3 and Halo Infinite), it has been split screen which has held back shipping. The community would be as justified going after split screen as they are going after the Series S.
Tell that to our artists 😉. As a coder I’m all for procedurally generated content. I did replace several heavy textures in our games by procedural materials, to squeeze out a couple of extra MB. However, that’s not the way artists traditionally work. They often don’t have the programming knowledge needed to develop procedural materials on their own, and would need to rely on technical artists or programmers to do so. Drawing a texture however, is very much part of their skillset…
But yeah, the mention of “squeezing out a couple of MB” brings me to another topic, namely that (at least in our games) the on-disk textures are only part of the RAM usage, and a relativley small one on comparison. In the games I worked on, meshes made up a significantly larger amount of RAM usage. We have several unique assets, which need to fulfill a certain quality standard due to licensing terms, such that in the end we had several dozens of meshes, each over 100 MB, that the player can freely place… Of course there would still be optimization potential on those assets, but as always, there’s a point where further optimization hits diminishing returns… In the end we had to resort to brute-force solutions, like unloading high quality LODs for meshes even if they are relatively close to the player… Not the most beautiful solution, but luckily not often needed during normal gameplay (that is: if the player doesn’t intentioally try to make the game go out-of-memory).
But I’m rambling. The tl;dr is: The memory constraints would not be a big deal if there was enough time/money for optimization. If there is one thing that’s never enough in game dev, it’s time/money.
OK so this is now offtopic for the conversation, but…
However, that’s not the way artists traditionally work.
To some extent, it’s authoring tools which affect how they work. A procedural materials pipeline can help them compose on top of already procedural content. In a way, you could see PBR as a part of that pipeline because PBR materials are physics modelled. Having said that I do take your point, even building out that pipeline takes time. Creating a PBR materials library is not super easy, and obviously organic stuff is very hard to model as a material.
meshes made up a significantly larger amount of RAM usage
From watching blender modelling, I thought the pattern was to have minimal rigging on the base mesh and then tesselation via normal maps + subdivision (apparently this is very doable even with sculpting). Obviously for animation you need a certain quality but beyond that I thought everything would be normal maps, reflection maps, etc etc.
I’m not an artist - my 3D modelling experience can be summed up as “none”, so I can’t really answer your last point. I know for certain that we don’t use normal maps to the extent they could be used, and therefore have way more detail in the meshes than they would need to have. I’m also pretty certain that we don’t do any tesselation on player pawns, and I think (but am not certain) that this is due to some engine limitation (again, don’t quote me on that, but iirc Unreal doesn’t support tesselation on skeletal meshes on all our target platforms).
TIL for no tessellation on skeletal meshes. I hope over time Unreal / Epic will put some effort in on minimising memory usage, even though I know they “just” got done with Nanite and friends.
that’s highly debatable if we’re talking about a $600 PC. I mean, yes you can argue that with games on PC you can always figure something out to get acceptable performance, but people in the market to buy a $300 console likely lack the experience, knowledge or time to do that
You might not be able to play the latest and greatest but you can still play many games and you don’t lose access to them. They are shutting down the Xbox 360 store soon, thus they’ll lose access to any games they don’t have downloaded. I have games on Steam older than time itself that I can still download, even if the publisher has delisted them and stopped them from being sold. I know people who still use laptops from 2005 to play indie games. Essentially pretty soon Xbox 360s are going to turn into disc-only consoles where a 600-dollar computer would never revert to that and people today play on computers from 20 years ago. It’s rare but it certainly happens, especially in the Linux crowd.
Lastly, you can always upgrade a computer part by part. Which doesn’t require knowledge of how the hardware connects. Just take it to a shop and tell them you want it to run faster for a game and they usually will do some inspections, charge you 100 dollars in labor and then whatever for parts, and get your machine upgraded.
In what world is “It will last longer” an answer to “I can’t afford that”? I doesn’t matter how long something will last if people don’t have the extra money to spend on something more expensive.
Because they will likely buy another thing in that same time. You don’t need an entertainment box immediately. You can wait, save, and buy an entertainment box that can do multiple things.
If it was a mistake, how the game now coming to Series S proving that? The only thing it proves is that split screen is a demanding feature and MSFT shouldn’t impose parity of that, which they shamelessly accepted after the success of BG3. It’s still a good console to play modern games, of course not at best fidelity, but I don’t think that matters.
Edit: just realised you’re saying that with an incorrect conclusion that split screen wouldn’t be coming on Series X. Well, that isn’t the case, and probably brings the game to more people with least amount of harm.
Aspyr really keeps stepping on rakes with this one don't they? Rereleasing a classic like this should have been a slam dunk. It's really becoming a trend with Aspyr to have issues with their Star Wars ports, but at the same time I have to wonder if if there was pressure from Embracer to rush this out the door. When you're still desperately axing and selling off studios, rereleasing a fan favorite Star Wars game probably sounds like easy money no matter how much more time the game needs to be finished.
The extent to which you are arguing against overwhelming evidence cannot be understated. You are arguing against something less controversial than evolution.
We know that unions promote economic equality and build worker power, helping workers to win increases in pay, better benefits, and safer working conditions.
But that’s not all unions do. Unions also have powerful effects on workers’ lives outside of work.
You probably haven’t gotten to Act 3 yet, the game is extremely CPU bound. I have a Ryzen 9 7950X and while Act 1 and 2 were basically locked to 144fps the entire time, in Act 3 I have seen dips down to the 40s.
Try turning off “Dynamic Crowds” in settings. I didn’t notice much difference in how the crowds behaved, but it supposedly simplifies their AI and pathfinding to cut down on CPU use. It helped me a lot in the city.
2060 super user here. I’m assuming you haven’t made it to Act 3? The game has some performance issues there. I happily turned down the graphics to continue playing smoothly but was a tad disappointed.
I’m on my second playthrough though and they have patched it since my first experience so hopefully the evil campaign runs (visually) smoother.
Act 3’s issues aren’t GPU bound, it’s entirely CPU bottlenecked. It’s likely someone with a slower GPU won’t see as big a drop in performance in act 3 as you, and it’s likely you don’t see any performance gain from using DLSS in act 3. My 2080 Super was sleeping through it even at 3440x1440 on ultra while my Ryzen 7 3700x was getting thrashed.
If the Switch 2’s OS is anything like the Switch’s current revision of Horizon, it’s an extremely hardened OS. They’ve done a surprisingly good job plugging software holes.
3DS advertised AR from the get-go, even coming with a set of cards and built-in games to show it off. Never ended up being anything more than a neat tech demo that people forgot about almost immediately. Haven’t really seen anything to make me think people are more interested in it now, over a decade later.
VR headsets and the research behind them have made it possible to accurately track the position of the device with very little processing cost from a single camera. Additional cameras are simply for occlusion and field of view at this point. A coupled depth sensor handles any needed resolution of positional conflicts between real world objects and digital objects.
That tech wasn’t there for 3DS, even with 2 cameras it wasn’t stable or accurate, and it was pretty low res and low angle, and it couldn’t tell if the digital content should be occluded by real world objects at it’s perceived depth. Plus there are actual AR games now already established, and the framework and proof of concept to easily on-board new ones. Also, by the time the Switch 2 is released, the mainstream AR headsets and content will be even more established. Currently the best AR content is either on expensive headsets or in limited form on iPhones. But in less than a month the Quest 3 is out, an accessible mixed reality headset. It will have been out for a while by the time the switch 2 would come out.
This is very much one of the directions gaming is going. It doesn’t have to replace all gaming, and never will. But it will be a pretty big part of gaming. Especially once there is enough public trust behind it for people to play augmented reality games outdoors. Us nerds already do so, we know we won’t walk out into traffic even if the headset malfunctions. But the hypothetical “everyman” is apparently worried that they might? That’s just not how anything would work… but whatever. It’s safer than playing a phone game and wearing headphones, since letting the real world in and paying attention to both is the whole point, sight and sound.
You’re absolutely right about VR. But I don’t think AR is ever going to be that big. There just isn’t as much of a point in mixing the real world with artificial elements. The only reason to do so is to get information that can’t be emulated as well for VR. As VR gets better, AR gets more redundant. AR of the style we see on phones (like pokemon go) is even more pointless. AR will stick around for virtual desktops and smart glasses and the like, but for gaming it will always be a gimmick.
The fact that I had to open an app on my phone for voice chat meant that I never ever used voice chat.
I don’t really care if the next Nintendo console has a camera. But I extremely do not want to be forced to use some app on my phone to play the game on my Switch.
Its a collectors game with nothing good to collect. This might seem like a silly take, and with 813 pokemon now in the game, it should be. But the way pokemon are laid out in this game is just horrendous.
In the main series games, you LOOK for pokemon. You might just wander around the grass for a while and take what you get, but at some point, you have a shopping list. In order to find specific pokemon, you go to a specific location. You find the pokemon you are looking for, often with others similar in type.
Well, in pokemon go, this isn’t the case at all. There are maybe 20-40 pokemon in the spawn pool at any given time. Go somewhere, ANYWHERE around you, and you are going to see more of the same. Once you have them, you wait for the next spawn rotation (sometimes thats 1 month, sometimes its 8) or events. The events are somewhere between 3 hours and 1 week long, and then you might actually have some cool shit, and the game is exciting for a bit. But after that, its back to the same old bullshit.
Now the game is just about collecting shinies. This is really what niantic has tried to monetize. The (often only) way to get them is to either hatch eggs (buying incubators) or doing raids (buying raid passes). The other way to get them is by doing certain events where they hand them out like candy. I stopped a couple years ago when i had well over 300 shinies, because there just wasn’t a point anymore. The whole “cool collectible” factor came from them being rare, if everyone gets them in events, why is it special?
300 different pokemon shiny or 300 shinies including dupes? While getting a shiny during an event is easy actually being committed and grind out every shiny event is crazy dedication. I can’t bother with the game because the core gameplay loop is just so incredibly boring, and as you say is nothing like Pokemon should be. I’m slowly transferring everything to Pokemon Home and in that regard it has been pretty nice in terms of getting legendaries and mythicals that are really tough in the main series games to get. I’ve never catched the original 151 before and when I combine Let’s Go Pikachu with Pokemon Go into Pokemon Home I’ll actually tick that childhood goal off, which feels nice.
Definitely including dupes, I got rid of tons of dupes from events but the spawn pool was so limited you were bound go get more. I was dedicated enough to grind out wild shinies, but if it was locked behind incubators or raids, forget about it.
Well, no. Rates are higher at different times of day, near bodies of water, in different weather, closer to high-foot-traffic zones, in forests, from eggs and from raids.
Not to mention continents.
Personally I just find it to be a location data collecting app with a light video game skin over top of it. I love Pokemon and wore out of the game when I realized player fun isn’t niantic’s priority in the slightest, it’s how to squeeze more and more data to sell out of the player. If it wasn’t for the blue chip IP they landed the company would be gone already. Literally every other game they’ve launched has been a flop
I tried it for the first time a few months ago. It was bad. The in-game tutorial does not cover half of it and the game play that I could figure out was super shallow. I could probably look up third party getting started guides, but I did not think it was worth the bother.
I’ve been playing since launch, although admittedly not much the past few weeks, and I think it’s fun depending on what you find fun.
I’ve never been big on the Battling (PvP or Raiding) but I’ve enjoyed the “Catch 'em All”.
I do however agree that even the “catch” part of the game is poorly put together. For example while the game may contain 800+ Pokemon, realistically you can only ever catch ~30 different species at a given time. If you started a new account today and did ALL the activities available, really grinding for a month, you’d probably only have ~200 or so Pokemon. If you played for a year, maybe double that.
For this reason why isn’t Pokemon HOME considered the game with the most Pokemon?
I lost a bunch of legendaries when my Pokébank subscription lapsed.
I’ve been collecting legendaries in Go for ages to rebuild my stable, and I’ve only just realized that Go legendaries don’t count until you’ve had one in the destination game. Which means that Go legendaries are totally without value in terms of collecting a first of anything.
Seems like a coin toss on whether or not your mons got wiped when your subscription ended.
If you can dig up a 3DS with Pokébank and whatever the intermediary app was, you might still be able to pull them all out, now that Bank (the service) is now free.
Well now it’s free forever, you just need to sideload the application itself.
Some stuff got wiped. It was never clear why it happened to some people and not others.
I lost interest in catching them all when I got to the point where the main pokemon I don’t have are behind ridiculously low egg rates. Add in the few pokemon where I’d ether have to buy plane tickets to Alaska and Greece or violate the TOS by spoofing my GPS signal and I just decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze
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