We have gone from cartridges, to CDs, to kind-of cartridges.
We have kinda gone full circle! Now we need something lile a holocron or like a Cortana AI chip to store an even bigger amount.
I’m pretty sure bethesda said playing starfield with a hard drive isn’t great 1tb SSDs aren’t too expensive anymore I’d really recommend moving away from a hard drive
M.2 SATA drives are still a thing, same port, but different slower protocol as NVMe. They are less common, but still around and available in TB size. Don’t think there is any reason to get this outside of compatibility with old hardware.
There is also mSATA, which is a different port from M.2, but has a very similar look and size. Also slower than NVMe and no reason to get them unless you have hardware that uses them (e.g. some old Beelink miniPC have them).
I definitely support the hypothesis that calling all storage drives hard drives is an old curmudgeon thing 😅 I’ve been doing computer nerdery for way over 30 years, and a hard drive is a hard drive even if it doesn’t have spinny disks in it
I think storage or storage drive is the umbrella term these days. “Hard drive” was always short for “Hard Disk Drive” (which was named in comparison to Floppy Disk Drive) but since it was the only type of drive used for non-volatile internal storage for a good 20 years or so, it became a catch-all term. These days, many people understand there’s two different kinds and a lot of systems have both, so hard drive is becoming recognized to mean the spinning disks; as opposed to SSD, which is now an umbrella term incorporating 2.5" SATA, M.2 SATA, and M.2 NVMe, which are all Solid State Drives but different combinations of interfaces and form factors.
Nah, the "SS" and "HD" bits refers to how each storage disk reads data. HDDs use hard metal disks to read & write data, hence it got the misnomer hard disk drive. SSDs use solid state flash memory to read & write data, hence it being called a solid state drive.
If you want the general category, you'd want to say "storage drive" specifically since if you say "drive", that can also refer to an optical drive (AKA the CD slot) or a USB drive (AKA flash/thumb drives).
The classic, computer science term for all of these devices is “secondary storage”, if anyone’s looking for a way to confuse people briefly before explaining that you mean “hard drives, SSDs, etc.”
Sure. And of course it remains to be seen whether Starfield is worth it, but it’s undeniable that a game of this magnitude isn’t a common occurrence. If they realize the game’s potential, then missing out on it because of a relatively inexpensive hardware upgrade seems like a shame.
I’m guessing one of those is Baldurs Gate, but I’m struggling to think of two more. There’s been some decent games for sure but none other that I’d put on the same scale. Diablo 4 had the potential but squandered it imo.
None are baldur’s gate. While I’m loving baldur’s gate, it’s far from a market disruptor. The three games I was thinking of were TOTK, Diablo 4, and FFXVI.
To be clear, of the ones listed I only care about TOTK and BG3. I’m looking at “megaton games” by a general ascertainment of how relevant they are to the enthusiast gamers, and how much they sell. FFXVI came out and kinda did not great for an FF game so I’ll concede there. No idea about Diablo 4, I assume it was middling or “as expected”, while TOTK sold 18 million in its first 6 weeks; though I may largely be familiar with that due to being in proximity of Nintendo-related circles.
It really is subjective what measure we’re using though. BG3’s been amazing in relative terms to what would typically be expected of “DnD RPG” (maybe there’s a better term), and developers have been reacting to it far more than they would most other megaton games. TOTK’s no slouch on its own, impressing developers over its extremely impressive yet performent physics engine.
All fair points. I wasn’t trying to argue, just to have a friendly discourse :) My calling it a “game of magnitude” is obviously very open to interpretation.
For what it’s worth what I was trying to say was that this game has the potential to be unlike any game before it, so it’d be a shame to miss out on it just to avoid a minor hardware upgrade. But that in itself is of course also subjective. Suffice to say I myself won’t be missing out… :p
Fair say! I’m personally not someone who particularly vibes with the aesthetic of bethesda games so I’ll be missing out, but I hope it’s as good as fans expect ❤️
Is a game like Starfield “missable” though? Games like this’ll realistically be accessible for years (decades?) to come (not even counting Bethesda’s love of rereleasing their latest hit a la Skyrim lol). They might miss out on the cultural discussion if the game’s a hit though, that’s definitely a trade-off of late adoption, like what I’m experiencing with BG3 lol.
Yeah that’s fair. It might even be worth waiting a year so the community can fix all the bugs :p I know I’m too impulsive to wait that long though. Played through Cyberpunk at launch and loved it!
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.
One QoL improvement I’ve not seen here is a better journal system. When I can’t further a quest line even something vague like ‘Continue your journey so learn more’ would be great. I have spent time on some quests hunting down a person to discover the quest can only be completed in the next act multiple times now.
This was an issue I had with DOS2 as well. It was at the point I literally wrote stuff down in a notebook so that I could keep track of the side quests and what the last step was. Eventually they did overhaul the journal in that game to be a lot more useful though.
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.
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)
In case anyone didn’t want to open the article, the feature is improved image quality due to AMD’s FSR2 on PlayStation being used over 2x MSAA on Xbox.
There’s also a slightly different gamma on PlayStation, combined with the different anti-alliasing it results in cleaner looking frames. The article has side by side comparisons as well.
I don’t really understand the purpose of showing FSR2 vs FXAA/MSAA with still frames… FSR2 struggles most with motion and thin/dense high-contrast areas, none of which are showcased in the screenshots, so of course FSR2 is going to look better.
One qol improvement I’d like to see is faster team roster selection. Like every time you leave camp, you should get to select which companions will go with you (similar to many other CRPGs). Right now I find myself not using certain companions as often, mostly because I don’t want to go run around my camp for a minute rearranging my squad. It should be a simple drag and drop interface.
i like modding as much as the next gal but this type of relationship bethesda has with their fans is not good, at all, and i never see anyone ever mention it
It’s not good that the games are broken and they are relying on modders to fix them. It would be totally fine if they released a fully functioning thematic sandbox for modders to play in though.
The thing about Bethesda games is that their modding tools are far and away from any other game, making serious improvements much more accessible. That’s one of the major draws of them.
I just wish every game didn’t have an unofficial patch requirement to keep it from crashing too often.
People talk about it all the time. Longtime fans just don’t care. I’ve been playing these since Daggerfall. Bethesda Softworks makes a very particular kind of game this is very appealing to some of us, and nobody else makes them like that, not that I’m aware of. You think Skyrim was buggy on release? It’s got nothing on Daggerfall, but I loved it anyway.
Mods make the game better, give them a longevity they wouldn’t otherwise have. Skyrim with Frostfall and a needs mod is almost my dream game. But I was perfectly satisfied with the game on Day 1.
Im no stranger to daggerfall either but that just highlights the problem with the company but some fanatics who blindly follow then
Their games don’t have to be buggy messes till modders do bestesdas job for them, mods should primarily enhance, not fix.
And these people who don’t care (as you that is) are one key problem why bethesdas and other companys launch their games like an alpha they’ll never fix (hows their ducttape held severly outdated engine gonna cripple this title I wonder)
We have multiple generations of developers releasing like this. With a few rare exceptions (which are the only games from 15+ years ago most people remember), all games release buggy. Even on console, for every Super Mario Bros. that played the way it was supposed to, there were ten unplayably buggy examples of licensed shovelware. And half of “Nintendo Hard” was just that these games were janky as fuck.
Games are hard to make. Ridiculously huge and complex games are even harder to make. If you think you can do better, please do so.
dont you see the inherit problem that these devs all themselves created with the increasing cost, increasing scope, increasingly forcing bigger retention spans? these games dont need to be this needlessly huge and even than there is no need to have them almost broken (have you SEEN how cd project red always releases their games?)
i never said it was that much better back than, its just much easier to have all of this garbage available than it was back than cause now its flooding the online stores
and of course “do it better yourself than”, i dont have to be a mastercoder to recognise subpar quality, i dont need to be a masterchef to know when something tastes bad
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