Everyone’s different, and you can get used to a lot.
So some people might not be able to tell 90fps from 120fps, but I definitely notice. But if I played something at 90 for long enough, I’d get used to it and stop noticing how much worse it was from 120 fps.
I will say they don’t get near enough credit for not only adaptive triggers, but them working on damn near any game that appears on PlayStation even while on PC.
I bought a ps5 just for those triggers, and gave it away (but kept a controller) once it worked on PC.
That’s the direction Playstation needs to go. If they made a new controller with Hall Effect sticks and 4 back buttons they’d absolutely clean up. They came so close with the edge, but didn’t give a back button for half the face buttons. And went “replaceable” sticks that will eventually break instead of Hall Effect.
I can’t tell the diff in FPS performance. I wish I could.
When I got my PS5 and played some games I was like, wow the future is here! Turns out I was playing PS4 games. Also I turned on and off ray-tracing for SpiderMan and couldn’t tell either.
I don’t get it. Borderlands 1 ran at like 720p (less?) on native hardware (Xbox 360) and it looked great, mostly because of the cel-shaded graphics. Cel-shaded was code (maybe still is) for low-res and it covers it up well. So I feel like anyone trying to push 4K Borderlands (Gearbox, or players) is in the wrong here and that may be part of the problem. Now if Borderlands 4 can’t run at 1080p or 1440p on good hardware… that’s Gearbox’s problem to fix. Trying to run Borderlands at 4K sounds about as stupid to me as Animal Crossing at 8K — apparently that has been accomplished with a very powerful computer and an emulator. (AC for Switch is not performance locked to hardware, it’ll scale up to whatever you can run it on.) But it just begs the question “fucking WHY?”.
I feel like the discourse around Borderlands 4 should be “is it fun” followed at a great distance by “is the story compelling enough to draw me in?” I did not have plot expectations for the first one, and it exceeded them.
Disclaimer: played and beat BL1 and all its DLC. Dabbled in 2 and 3. Have not played BL4 yet. Looking forward to a Siren play on my Series X at some point, but not now.
Trying to run Borderlands at 4K sounds about as stupid to me as…
On the contrary, it should be perfectly runnable at 4K because its a 2025 FPS game and the cel-shaded graphics should be easy to render.
‘Unreal Engine’ is no excuse either. Try something like Satisfactory rendering literally thousands of dynamic machines on a shoestring budget with Lumen, like butter, on 2020 GPUs, and tell me that’s a sluggish engine.
This is on Gearbox, who’ve developed on Unreal for 2 decades. And ‘sorry, we’ll work on it’ would have been a fine response…
My understanding is that Unreal is a garbage engine for optimization at face value, it has a lot of useful tools and a lot of incorrect/dated documentation for those tools some of which are also just kind of configured wrong as their default settings. If effort is put into optimization to configure things correctly and only use the various tools like nanite or lumen in their actual use cases (rather than just throwing them on everything) you can get some pretty fantastic optimization.
TLDR: Good but complex tools marketed as low effort with bad defaults and exagerated marketing.
Honestly Cyberpunk’s raytracing runs like poo compared to Lumen (or KCD2 Crytek) compared to how good it looks. I don’t like any of the RT effects but RT Reflections; both RT shadows options flicker, RT lighting conflicts with the baked-in lighting, yet doesn’t replace it if you mod it out.
Most of Cyberpunk’s prettiness is there from good old rastarization, more than most people realize.
PTGI looks incredible, but it’s basically only usable with mods and a 4090+.
Eh, I guess it is. But it also isn’t. We have stagnated a bit in the rasterization and VRAM departments when you talk about affordable entry level cards that most people buy.
And the PlayStation 5 has not changed since it launched…
Sure, newer cards have Ray Tracing stuff and new video encoder pipelines and some other things. But when you look at classic rasterization, and look at xx60 and xx70 class cards, it’s not the sort of leaps we use to have. Node shrinks are not what they use to be.
A 3060 is as fast as a 2070 super. Just as an example I have first hand experience with. There use to be much larger performance gaps between generations.
Yeah, but it’s not just a toon shader/cel shaded shader.
I’ve seen footage, this game has full (highly stylized) PBR and all sorts of fancy lighting along with the cell shaded look. Reducing it all to “cell shading” isn’t the whole story.
Hi-Fi Rush is much closer to classic Borderlands than BL4 is.
Right, I’ve seen the footage too, and I don’t think I’d recognize it as a Borderlands game if the name wasn’t included in the ads. I’m struggling to understand why they chose to go that route, rather than sticking to the beloved, iconic, performant art style of the other games in the series.
That’s a fair take. I’m sure they feared looking dated. I think that’s a misguided fear that you have when you don’t think the other aspects can live up to expectations.
Which is weird because it sounds like they tried really hard with the story, as in they tried to elevate it beyond the usual dick and fart jokes and snark. (They didn’t eliminate that stuff, but rather tried to have a balance) BL3 was terrible in that dept. it went way too hard on that shit imo.
It’s about time women got more accurate representation in games. How many games have you play as a man compared to playing as a woman? Technically it should be 50/50 to more accurately represent the real world.
I don’t think representation is the main issue, it is more about how they are presented.
Striding for a perfect 50/50, doesn’t really sense if they are all just stereotypes and sexual objectified. Also there are many other underrepresented population groups.
IMO, it is more important to focus good well written and complex characters, that represent real circumstances right.
I don’t complain that AAA studios have gone ‘woke’ because they now include choices to select from marginalized groups, I complain about them because they are often do not offer a deeper perspective of people in that group and are just different skins.
In some way, I can understand, games often happen in a Fantasy world, but I would wish that selecting different characters would do more than just exchanging the player mesh, texture and voice pack.
The well written part is my concern. Or we will get the same quality as a lot of recent movies and shows. Where the characters are stereotypes, poorly written, poorly developed. With plot points that are just randomly forced into the story, and that plot point has nothing to do with the rest of the story. You know the ones, where something has been added to the story and has no reason or meaning or benefit to being part of the story.
Unless you are also complaining about it when white male characters are also surface-level, 2-D, copy-and-paste characters then all you are saying is “Only white male characters are allowed to be simple or a stereotype/trope.” Lets be honest, not every game needs a complex and well written character, and that is fine. If they choose to go that route it doesn’t matter what race, religion, or gender the character is in the first place. So it doesn’t matter if they are a white male, a latina woman, or a black non-binary person.
Now I’m also not gonna shut down your solution without being constructive and providing my own solution, cause I don’t think quotas are the answer either. Instead we should be uplifting and empowering marginalized creators and game designers so that they can make more characters that they want to make. Which is generally characters they can relate to. If people want more characters that are women, then the game industry needs to become a safe space for women and empower them so they can provide more representation for characters. Same thing for any other demographic. That will make sure that these characters are being made in an aethentic and organic way, and not just being pumped out to meet a quota, but also isn’t restricting when marginalized demographics can be used as characters.
Unless you are also complaining about it when white male characters are also surface-level, 2-D, copy-and-paste characters then all you are saying is “Only white male characters are allowed to be simple or a stereotype/trope.”
What? Where am I saying that?
Yes I would complain about all kind of stereotypes. Even the “white muscular tough guy” could be considered sexual objectification. IMO CoD is sometimes pretty gay coded.
Lets be honest, not every game needs a complex and well written character, and that is fine. If they choose to go that route it doesn’t matter what race, religion, or gender the character is in the first place. So it doesn’t matter if they are a white male, a latina woman, or a black non-binary person.
I wasn’t saying that. You can have games without a single character. Or where the character doesn’t really matter, because it just an empty shell you are driving around and not more.
But IMO I mostly play story driven RPGs, where you are someone, and where you want the environment to react to you. It would be awesome if when you run around with colorful hair or tattoos, it would slightly change the disposition of the NPCs or cause them to comment on your appearance. Don’t let this stuff be just cosmetics, it should be more meaningful, and embedded into the game world.
That’s why the trailer has me so hyped for this game. It looks like the game is going to be different because Ciri is the protagonist. Her experience, reactions, and approach to saving a young woman from being sacrificed are totally different than what Geralt’s would be. I hate it when games like Mass Effect are like “Oh! You can play as FemShep! That totally counts as representation!” even though it changes literally nothing about the story.
I want more games that actually address the real and significant differences in the experiences and perspectives of different characters. I’m always disappointed when there’s a “female” option that’s just a re-skin of the male character with no changes in how the character interacts with the world and the story. (This happens a lot in non-video game media too.)
Video games are not the real world. They do not have to follow the rules of the real world. Even if parts or all of the game model the real world, video games are artwork, and artwork invents its own rules. Trying to enforce rules onto art has not worked well in the past, and will likely not work well in the future either.
What I love about being a broke bitch retro gamer is that I own my games. I have a Tetris cartridge that is older than I am and still works. The batteries on some of my GB and GBA carts have died, but that’s something I can fix. No one can send a stealth update to my Sega Genesis that forces me to create on an account to play or even bricks it somehow. There’s no room for human shit behavior, just a war against the realities of mechanical decay. (And it’s easy to rip ROMs in case of the inevitable.)
Older generations of gaming are well preserved. I don’t think the past ten years or the future will be. “Games as a service” is too big a draw - the goal is to turn everything into a subscription model because why make money once when you can make it forever?
GamesRadar has been pushing these “but where gam?” articles for some time. It started right after silksong was delayed past the original hollow knight dev time. They seem utterly convinced silksong will be vaporware, or (more likely) it drives plenty of clicks complaining.
It was way more obvious back when team cherry went radio silence (circa 2022?) - and on some level I can understand “we’re game journalists, no one gets a pass” targeting a heavily delayed game, but I’m admittedly one of those fans that have no problem giving Cherry whatever time they need. I’m in no rush.
All dictated by management with zero input from anyone else. I get sad for developer’s working for EA. Having zero influence on the games they make. I believe that everyone can have a great idea or a solution to a problem no matter what department they’re in.
Lots of developers have overlapping skills from making they’re own games that aren’t being utilised.
Working under EA is probably alot like working for McDonald’s, yeah if they did it ‘this way’ they would sell more burgers but good luck getting your voice heard.
$30 cosmetic microtransactions are reasonable in Path of Exile, imho. But it’s free-to-play, and most of their MTX are purely cosmetic.
To get the “full” experience, I suppose you’ll want to drop a retail-box-price on a supporter pack to get some stash tabs, but you can reasonably play the game to end game content (30+ hours of play time for the first time for a new player, I’d guess?) without spending a cent.
But MTX in a game that’s over $100CAD on release? ಠ_ಠ
Reasonable? Big pass from me chief. Grinding Gear Games isn’t some indie studio that needs every penny anymore, they just used the inertia to get people used to dropping 300$ on a game
I haven’t played much since before Ascendancy Classes were added to the game, so I’m well out of the loop (although I do keep up with some of the news), so maybe I’m still emotionally attached to the studio I started following in alpha.
That said, I don’t really have a problem with their business model. They need to get paid, and they don’t sell game-breaking MTX, beyond needing a map tab, a currency tab, and a premium quad tab. I don’t regret the money I spent on supporter packs; I got over a thousand hours out of the game.
$300? I’ve met people that buy the highest supporter pack tier every year plus the highest supporter pack from the seasons. That can add up to over $1k/year.
I think at this point I probably have more than $300 in MTX too, but I paid much more than that to FFXIV sub since 2014.
There's no such thing. It's just milking people who are crazy enough to fall into the trap of buying them.
$30 is not a microtransaction, thats a macrotransaction, thats an entire other video game.
Free to play doesnt give a game a pass on predatory business tactics, they are free to play for one reason only... to sell you worthless pixels for ridiculous prices. F2P games are designed for that purpose and that purpose only.
But I agree that any paid game should have zero MTX, cosmetic or not. Industry is killing its creative aspect with all this monetisation shit.
I spent about the same on a couple of stash tabs during a sale. I don't regret it. The game gave me a couple of hundred hours of fun. That's more than most games
Like with any skill, the yt videos feature the 1% of the time when they get to show off progress. But of course the other 99% of the time is spent on the struggle bus. And like with any skill, if you can learn how to slog through the lows, the highs can be a very rewarding experience.
There’s really nothing like seeing someone play your game for the first time. I assume it’s similar to a musician showing off their music, or a director showing off their film. But that interactive element is very unique; getting to see how people interact and respond emotionally to this thing you built. Actually, maybe it’s like being a toy maker.
50,000 reviews now. It’s a shame, I used to play OW1 a lot even after they stopped providing new content for it. Came to OW2 and I just couldn’t be arsed to grind for characters I don’t have unlocked. You need to win 35 games, and since there’s a basically forced 50% winrate that means you need to play 70 games to unlock a character each time. Wanted to play Ramattra, saw he’s locked, uninstalled and didn’t look back. The monetization is terrible. The balance feels worse than it’s ever been.
This wouldn’t be such a problem if they didn’t literally SHUT DOWN OVERWATCH 1 to shove people into the cash shop grind sequel
I know next to nothing about neither Ow1 or OW2, but from the sound of it they turned OW2 into a game focused on grinding, where you can pay to skip (part of) the grind. Is my assessment correct? If so they must’ve looked at War Thunder and taken that idea.
Yes. OW1 cost money, but you got all the content. The only paid service was cosmetic outfits for the different characters. You could buy loot boxes for cosmetics. But you had all of the characters, maps, game modes, etc available to begin with. You got the whole game, then could grind for cosmetics.
OW2 takes that and flips it on its head. The game is free, but each character costs money. The problem is that they shut down OW1, so now the players who owned 1 are having to grind for everything. They’ve also had some weird server bugs, with players getting indefinitely locked out of characters they already own.
Wait. I bought overwatch 1 but stopped playing a few years ago. If I go back into overwatch I would have to grind for characters that I used to previously have access to?
Yeah, but honestly I don‘t think it ruins the game. Sure, it’s not the best idea, but I don‘t care too much. I actually care more about the fact that the gameplay currently sucks and is completely different to Overwatch 1. 5v5 and the overall balancing sucks.
That’s not the balance, that’s the gameplay. There are still balance problems like the era of Mercy damage amping.
And while they’ve solved the CC and barriers problem, they’ve made teamfights too swingy. With only 5v5 and a single op tank, teamfights are often basically over after a single death or a single Rez. Especially for the tank. That’s just too much pressure, so nobody wants to tank anymore.
So don’t? You get the new hero like a month or so later then. I haven’t put a dime into ow since I bought it. You don’t need the cosmetics. Let the dumb whales fund the game.
It’s important to understand that Angel1c (Jade) and Baj were the only two players with the skill level who could have possibly had a chance to beat unmodded, unseeded 64 heat. They already beat 64 heat runs with mods or seeds, so it was a matter of getting that insanely luck RNG to reach the goal.
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