The difference is that DF actually gives things like this a purpose. They effect stats. They also don’t waste time graphically simulating most of this. (It used to be none, but now we do have some graphical representations of some traits, like beard/hair style, skin color, etc.)
Excellent point. But also, these things absolutely will bring the strongest computer to its knees given a long enough time or a large enough embark area.
Maybe. My understanding is they have a very minor impact on performance. Line of sight I think is still number 1, by a lot, although that’s been improved greatly recently. Temperature is also somewhat bad. Both of these have fairly large gameplay impacts.
The data connected to a unit doesn’t really hurt performance. It could fill up RAM if it were enormous, but the way I think the data is layed out in memory makes it very efficient to utilize. If you’re performing an action on a unit anyway you’ve got to bring their data into RAM, and it’s all grouped together so it’s one big chunk of data that gets pulled in together and can be operated on.
This was due to something that happened between (roughly, very roughly) 2005 and 2015. Games went from being made by a bunch of nerds who really wanted to make games, to a more corporate setting, to a marketing setting.
Fifteen years ago QA would declare Alpha, Beta, etc, in that the build fit the criteria for each state. Then, marketing would set a date, and on that date, Alpha, Beta, etc would be ‘ready.’
This lead to huge problems. There was a time where Alpha meant Feature Complete, and that there were only a few major crashes. Beta meant you had no, or virtually no, reproable crashes, game ending bugs, etc. (Then later) once marketing took over, it didn’t matter. Instead of Beta being a checklist, it was just ‘March 10th.’
In addition to this, innovative and cool game design ideas are harder to sell visually than ‘we doubled the poly’s!’ So more and more focus was put on visuals to the point where marketing would assign things to the design team, IE. “It has to have battlefield COD tarkov CSGO TF2 Popular Game-like mechanics, gameplay, etc.”
So now you get games shipped with incredible graphics and garbage stability. I’ve been on projects where crashes later in the campaign were changed from P1 to P2 because reviewers likely wouldn’t make it to the point where those would come up. (This is called ‘punting’.) In addition, having arbitrary dates decide major milestones means that builds are constantly broken, all through the process of creating them. You know how people get that ‘beta’ build of a game and ask why it’s so crash happy, why it runs like shit, etc? It’s because the game has literally never been stable. It’s been assigned Alpha and Beta based on a calendar, and time is never allowed to delay to fix issues. Add to that that the owners of game companies will give publishers absolutely asinine claims about how long a game will take. Most franchise games, ‘AAA’-wise, are made in 18 months. However, they often also had six months of pre-production before that. Marketing took that out, and focused on a game every 12 months. They used a secondary studio for the ‘B-Team’ and thus every second game in the series was made by said ‘B-Team’. B-Teams were given even less time, and often no pre-production, so the entire game would effectively be made in 12 months.
Then they lay off 50-70% of the staff, and start all over.
So if I may end this way, do not go into games. If you like them make them in your free time. You will be treated like an animal and be unemployed about 1/4 of the time if you choose the industry. Of all the people who I worked with in my first company, maybe six are still in games.
No worries. I see a lot of posts about what’s happening that are close, but don’t quite understand this is a managerial issue. The devs themselves are (mostly) good people who want to make games. The owners of smaller companies don’t get called out enough though, in my opinion. Every time you see ‘EA just bought and closed another…’ keep in mind the vast majority of the time the company didn’t need to be sold. Some guy who inherited a bunch of money created a company of people who do the actual work, then waited till the worth of the company was high enough for them to sell. It happens constantly and it’s easily the most disheartening part of game development.
Imagine spending 80 hour weeks and 30-90 days without a single day off, making a breakout game that is beloved… and realising you’re not going to make it to 5 years at a company, because they’re selling it to Activision.
Maybe the most fucking disgusting part of all of this is that it doesn’t even lead to more money. The shitty western companies are all fucking floundering right now because they have no institutional knowledge, there’s no way to become a veteran game dev at a company that churns through their workforce every 12 months, and suddenly you have out of touch execs at Ubisoft and EA wondering why people don’t play their games. All the innovation that comes from pouring your soul into a project for the long-term comes from indie developers now, and it’s left AAA games feeling as soulless to play as they are to make.
Meanwhile in the east you have companies like FromSoftware and Capcom who are just laughing all the way to the bank, because their competition is all run by idiots.
Oh don’t get me wrong, the execs in the east aren’t immune to doing batshit insane things. Capcom is on some wild shit with their microtransactions. Konami really feels like they’re just taking a shovel to Kojima’s legacy and pulling out whatever they can. Nintendo is trying to find out if they can legally punch developers in the face.
But they aren’t putting out multi-million dollar flops. They’re not decimating their workforce to increase CEO compensation packages. They’re not getting swallowed up by the handful of fish who are too big for the pond. They’re just being kinda weird, which is a fine change of pace.
If you allow for some cultural differences Nintendo is not really acting all that weird. It’s a conservative (in the original meaning) company in a very conservative country. They play it close to the vest and are very careful about protecting what they feel is theirs to protect.
Don’t get me wrong though, I dislike what they’ve been doing as well and I’m not defending them. From their perspective they probably don’t look at it like that though. For them it’s mostly what they feel like is defensive measures to protect their stuff. I’m certain they won’t stop until they’ve done their best to utterly destroy the emulator market at large. For me at least that’s the only reason I need to completely boycott them.
It fucking sucks, but this is what capitalism comes down to. Hopefully they get some sense slapped into them at some point soon by a judge somewhere.
Konami on the other hand, that shit just boggles my mind. I don’t understand any of the choices they’ve made for a while now.
Meanwhile in the east you have companies like FromSoftware and Capcom who are just laughing all the way to the bank, because their competition is all run by idiots.
The worst part is the CEO’s/whatever of each company know each other, too. You’ll get C-suites come into game companies who not only have never played a game before, but don’t even remotely understand how software development works. I worked for a company where the owner made himself Project Manager and ran that project straight into the ground. Tens of millions on worthless overtime while we sat around waiting for another build that would fail, on a weekend, for months.
Larian sounds like some sort of a bizarro-world company. They even have awful investors but managed to keep creative/overall control.
I remember before the first Fable came out, in an interview or preview of the game in one of the magazines I subscribed to mentioned that you would be able to carve your name into a tree and then see it scar the tree as it aged over time, and even then as a teenager, I was like “bull fucking shit.”
They didn’t even have that as, like, a cutscene. Let alone a mechanic.
Imagine if they used all that resources in do… Fun gameplay. Not trying to be a movie or a simulation of real life. Like just gameplay. 100% gameplay. A game who is not a playable movie. A game with just gameplay. Like a real videogame.
Simulation systems can be very useful assets for fun gameplay, if you make a game that can make use of them. Immersive Sims are essentially all about this. They create a bunch of systems that can interact in all kinds of ways, and then they let the player figure out how to make use of them in whatever way they want.
The issue is these games are just making these systems without any way to take advantage of them. If the nails being long made you better/worse at things, and the nail clippings could be combined with other items to make potions or something, it could actually be a cool mechanic. Just doing it for “fidelity” isn’t useful though and usually just a waste of time/money/effort.
It can also make the incredibly tedious and irritating. Elite Dangerous is an incredible simulation of our galaxy that has terrible gameplay for your average player.
The simulation isn’t the reason for that. That’s just the design of the game. Plenty of people enjoy the Truck Simulator games. Elite is basically the same thing, but for space. Also, I wouldn’t call it a “simulation” of our galaxy, but a simulacrom or representation. It’s not changing. The groups expanding and building in that, the economy, and those systems are simulations, and they actually provide content for the game, regardless of if it’s enjoyable in your opinion.
Simulations that create content are when we should create simulations. Simulations that consume resources and don’t enhance the game should be avoided.
Like those in-game cosmetics that cost real money but represented by a type of in-game currency that can’t be earned by playing the game, instead playing your wallet.
I would say it’s entirely up to you. Though, experience with games like Gothic 3 (don’t even start without the Community Patch and a visual glitch fix dor trees and the sea) led me to mod first, personally. If you dig a bit deeper, there are LOD fixes (buildings from distance) for Whiterun, for example. Btw, the bumpmapping shader of reshade works especially nice for Witcher 3’ roads.
Mods make this game better. I didn’t like inventory management and the equipment repair mechanics in this game, so I modded those things out. Fall damage also sucks, so I modded that as well, Geralt is a witcher, he should be able to stick a landing from 10m up.
Ignore the advice you saw in this thread, except for the one about trying the DLCs, and enjoy the game however you wanna play it. Romance both options if you want, be a terrible dad if you’re so inclined, etc. Have fun, it’s your first playthrough so enjoy it unspoiled ane cherish it, you will love it and go for a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and maybe even more runs and you can minmax things later on in these runs.
The only thing I’d say you shouldn’t do is skip the dialogue and cutscenes, and sidequests. This game has a very well-crafted story (which is the main attraction) and that goes also for the sidequests so enjoy them fully.
When I still had a Gamepass description I streamed the second one to my phone and played it with PS4 Controller during a class. Worst way to play it, but loved every second of it. I can’t wait either for the full release
I love seeing these posts each day as I browse all. I got a steam deck not long ago and I love that you seem to play something different almost every day, you’ve given me some great suggestions 🙂
If I remember correctly, there’s an upgrade you can put on the pens for like a music box or something to “calm” them down.
Otherwise, I think I just merged the quantum’s with saber slimes and put them in their own pen and area off to the side with chicken coops so they wouldn’t wander too far when they got hungry. Just make sure to keep their food stocked and they’ll be fine.
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Aktywne