Something like Zelda Twilight princess HHD to Zelda Breath of the wild was a huge leap in just gameplay. (And also in graphics but that’s not my point)
Idk. Breath of the Wild felt more like a tech demo than a full game. Tears of the Kingdom felt more fleshed out, but even then… the wideness of the world belied its shallowness in a lot of places. Ocarina of Time had a smaller overall map, but ever region had this very bespokely crafted setting and culture and strategy. By the time you got to Twilight Princess, you had this history to the setting and this weight to this iteration of the Zelda setting.
What could you really do in BotW that you couldn’t do in Twilight? The graphics got a tweak. The amount of running around you did went way up. But the game itself? Zelda really peaked with Majorem’s Mask. So much of this new stuff is more fluff than substance.
What? Botw was awesome! There was so much to explore, the world was interesting, the NPCs are good, and so on. Oot and Majora’s Mask are both amazing too of course, but botw is a modern masterpiece.
I’m looking forward to doing LASO with my friends, i’ve already got two of them recruited to help. The customization of your character sticking to your Noble Six definitely makes it more fun too. So instead of 4 master chiefs or Master Chief, Arbiter, and two Elites, it feels more like it’s actually you and your friends.
For sure lol. I’m definitely the calmest out of my friend group and I think even I would get a little ticked off at the game if we had to restart a whole level. So definitely making sure the friends I recruit to help know what they’re getting into
Never said I bought it. Why would I buy a 70€ game without running the benchmark tool first?
I just still find it ridiculous that it looks and runs like ass when MH World looks and runs way better on the same PC. Makes me wonder what’s really behind whatever ‘technological advancements’ have been put into Wilds. It’s like it’s an actual scam to make people buy new hardware with no actual benefit.
I don’t understand why developers and publishers aren’t prioritizing spectacle games with simple graphics like TABS, mount and blade, or similar. Use modern processing power to just throw tons of shit on screen, make it totally chaotic and confusing. Huge battles are super entertaining.
The dream of the '10s/20s game industry was VR. Hyper-realistic settings were supposed to supplant the real world. Ready Player One was what big development studios genuinely thought they were aiming for.
They lost sight of video games as an abstraction and drank too much of their own cyberpunk kool-aid. So we had this fixation on Ray Tracing and AI-driven NPC interactions that gradually lost sight of the gameplay loop and the broader iterative social dynamics of online play.
That hasn’t eliminated development in these spheres, but it has bifricated the space between game novelty and game immersion. If you want the next Starcraft or Earthbound or Counterstrike, you need to look towards the indie studios and their low-graphics / highly experimental dev studios (where games like Stardew Valley and Undertale and Balatro live). The AAA studios are just turning out 100 hour long movies with a few obnoxious gameplay elements sprinkled in.
The problem as I see it is that there is an upper limit on how good any game can look graphically. You can’t make a game that looks more realistic than literal reality, so any improvement is going to just approach that limit. (Barring direct brain interfacing that gives better info than the optical nerve)
Before, we started from a point that was so far removed from reality than practically anything would be an improvement. Like say “reality” is 10,000. Early games started at 10, then when we switched to 3D it was 1,000. That an enormous relative improvement, even if it’s far from the max. But now your improvements are going from 8,000 to 8,500 and while it’s still a big absolute improvement, it’s relatively minor – and you’re never going to get a perfect 10,000 so the amount you can improve by gets smaller and smaller.
All that to say, the days of huge graphical leaps are over, but the marketing for video games acts like that’s not the case. Hence all the buzzwords around new tech without much to show for it.
Well you can get to a perfect 10k hypothetically, you can have more geometric/texture/lighting detail than the eye could process. From a technical perspective.
Of course you have the technical capabilities, and that’s part of the equation. The other part is the human effort to create the environments. Now the tech sometimes makes it easier on the artist (for example, better light modeling in the engine at run time means less effort to bake lighting in, and ability for author to basically “etc…” to more detail, by smoothing or some machine learning extrapolations). Despite this, more detail does mean more man hours to try to make the most of that, and this has caused massive cost increases as models got more detailed and more models and environments became feasible. The level of artwork that goes into the whole have of pacman is less than a single model in a modern game.
Graphics are only part of it, with the power that is there I am disappointed in the low quality put to rrlease. I loved Jedi survivor, a brilliant game but it was terribly optimised. I booted it today and had nothing but those assest loading flashes as walls and structures in my immediate vicinity and eyeline flashed white into existence.
Good games arent solely reliant om graphics but christ if they dont waste what they have. Programmers used to push everything to the max, now they get away with pushing beta releases to print.
That mission was one of the best in all of Halo. Where you really feel how dire and ruined everything is. Mixed with running around actual civilian places contrasted to the numerous forerunner built, bunkers, or nature locations or the other games and it really hits home.
(Outskirts and New Mom asa got close, but with the graphics of the time and mostly being outside it didn’t quite hit the same)
from the image it seems like you’re expecting a fourth dimension in games now? I don’t think you’d like the development cycle on that. miegakure is still on the way is it?
I guess I have the fact that I wasnt alive for that ‘era’ of gaming, so its maybe a bit more fascinating to me to see a more utilitarian design over what we get now.
I dislike the move in PCs and consoles where everything has RGB (you’ll see it everywhere on SBC retro handhelds), or just looks garish. To me this boxy-box just looks BEAUTIFUL. Gray/beige hardware wins me over every time
Similar to how the NES was made to look like a VCR, the PlayStation was made to look right at home as part of a fancy 90s home hi-fi setup. Functional/industrial grey was the aesthetic du jour, and gave it a look that said this isn’t just a toy; it’s the future of home entertainment.
Yeah, to me, the PlayStation might seriously be one of the ugliest major home consoles of all time (beaten out by the PSOne which looks like a cheap toy). And this isn’t even a generational thing: a grey N64 and Sega Saturn stand head-and-shoulders above the PlayStation in terms of looks. Cool how compact it was, at least.
I dunno. I think you just prefer rounded aesthetics. IMO the Saturn just looks like an oversized CD player. Boring and no personality. The little ridges and whatnot on the PlayStation were just plain neat to me , and I greatly prefer boxy to rounded. It’s why the PS One was such a disappointment by comparison.
I’ve been playing Crash Bandicoot on an R36s recently, it’ such a nostalgic game. Amazing that you can play it on a ~£35 handheld! You can’t beat the gameplay in some of the old classics.
I got one around Christmas on sale and I’m a big fan of mine, I’m replaying Crash Team Racing and Final Fantasy Tactics at the moment. They’ve got some quirks, there’s a lower powered variant floating around, definitely read through the subreddit and do a bit of research on the device. I will say that it’s awesome for what it is, but there’s places where it feels like a ~$30 gadget.
Yeah it’s great, my daughter has been enjoying all the old games as well so i bought her one too for her birthday. It’s much easier as a parent to give her the R36s and the retro games because they are all self contained offline things unlike a lot of modern games.
Some things I’d say to consider before buying:
Factor in the cost of a good quality SD card (or two, one for the system and one for ROMs) to replace the one that comes with it. There are loads of warnings in forums etc about the cards that are supplied, but even so I was shocked when the card that came with mine broke after 2 days. Get a decent card like Samsung Evo Plus 128GB.
It’s easier to start fresh when you get a new card than it would be to clone the one that comes with the device. Get the OS from here: github.com/AeolusUX/ArkOS-R3XS/releases
For ROMs, search archive.org for “tiny best set go”
Not everything being sold as the R36s is able to use ArkOS (although I think there’s been progress on getting the other ones to use that OS), more deets here. Also, not every micro SD card works in that second slot, but yeah, just get a Samsung Evo Plus (I’m running dual Microcenter cards, don’t do this lol). There is a huge enthusiast community doing cool things with these devices, there’s a bit of tinkering to get them set up but it’s easy enough.
Alpaca, got anything set up through PortMaster yet? I’ve been meaning to get Stardew Valley and Half-Life on there.
Aliexpress. I bought from a UK website first time and it was double the price but still shipped from China, making it a bit pointless. This is the aliexpress link I used, I have no connection to the seller and only bought from them once, but it arrived in good condition and I’ve tested it works as expected. The unit I received was a “v5”, or “screen panel v4”, I paid £25:
lemmy.world
Najstarsze