Isn’t Thor an industry insider? Like, he works for a game developer? Wouldn’t that be a conflict of interest?
But regardless, “The terms say you don’t own the game” is not an argument against the problem. That is the problem. From a legal standpoint, games with those terms must be required to say in both terms and marketing that you aren’t buying the game, you are leasing the game.
Imagine a car rental company saying in their marketing: “Buy a car for as low as $70.” They’d be sued instantly, and lose. Why isn’t it the same with software?
They want to lease games to us, then force them to market it as leasing and make them take the fat financial L that would result.
He also works for the publisher offbrand games. Offbrand currently has exactly one game in its portfolio: The upcoming smash bros like “Rivals 2” - a game with a big multiplayer focus that might even be free to play.
While Fallout 76 was definitely worse, I feel like their hubris is still on full display in Starfield. So many issues that Bethesda seems fine ignoring because the community can fix it.
I wanted to love you, Starfield, but I was out by the third date. I’ll check back in a year or two and see if you’ve matured enough.
I really just can‘t tolerate how poorly it runs compared to how it looks. They‘d have to double the framerate somehow for me to buy it and that‘s pretty much impossible.
Any chance you’re on an Nvidia card perhaps? It was shipped with only AMD upscaling because for some stupid reason it’s an industry standard to ship with time limited exclusivity for some stuff like that.
I’ve found that the mod (and probably update in the future) to add Nvidia DLSS helps a lot.
Still dumb that behind door deals between executives/sales can hinder otherwise good games like this though.
Ah okay fair enough, I’m not super knowledgeable about the newer software sided stuff like DLSS and Upscaling. I didn’t realize the AMD upscaling worked on all systems.
I saw tests where the upscaling performed comparatively worse on Nvidia and Intel rather than AMD and assumed that the upscaling was actually exclusive, my apologies.
I mean it looks awful unless on FSR quality, so in a way it’s not a super great situation. Ideally it should come out with all the solutions to better leverage the hardware at hand, but exclusivity deals and lack of technical ability are a thing.
I am and I am using a DLSS mod and it‘s working. But getting to a stable 60 in Starfield is just… If it looked like Cyberpunk raytraced then I‘d get it, but it really does not look like it should be a heavy hitter. I smell technical failings.
I was so prepared to love this game today. Woke up early and fired it up almost two hours ago. It’s crashed 5 times and I’ve only made about twenty minutes worth of progress into the intro.
I’m playing on a Series X. There’s no reason for this type of bullshit.
Sure, it’s a first world problem, but this has really set a bad tone for the day and this game in general.
I might try again later, but I’m probably already over it.
But the Xbox OS isn’t crashing. I just suddenly go back to the home screen, but trying to go back into Starfield relaunches the game. My kid said it was happening to him when he played earlier this week, but I thought he was just exaggerating because he’s like that.
Here’s where it crashed: #1: Saying goodbye to Lin. #2: Space pirates land (no combat yet) (I decided to quicksave after talking to Barrett) #3: Conversation after the pirate fight #4: Spaceship combat tutorial (2 ships)
I get the same crashes in the same places. On a windows 10 pc with less than current parts. I thought it was my aging machine.i have 82 minutes in game and may just refund.
I wouldn’t even say anything if I was on PC, I’d just assume I wasn’t up to spec (I’ve never had a high end machine, I’m used to it) but theres not much I can do to improve my series x.
Gameplay-wise, I find it bland at best: A world traversed entirely on rails, and JRPG-style combat with timed dodge/parry moves. These mechanics don’t excite me, but I’m still playing anyway, because…
As a work of art, I find it gorgeous. The operatic soundtrack, despite being a genre outside my usual preferences, is captivating. The voice acting is nuanced and immersive like I don’t think I’ve heard in any other game (so much that I can mostly overlook the terrible lip sync problems in the animation). A few of the facial expressions are… disarming. The environments are so beautiful that I sometimes find myself just staring at them for a while instead of advancing the story.
It’s too early to be sure I’ll stick with it, but I suspect that I will, just as I would a film that indulges the senses.
Absolutely feel the same. The game systems, graphics, feel, etc are a bit dated. It feels like something from 10-15 years ago. It does inject some modern ideas, mostly in the combat, but it very much feels like an OG final fantasy game in all the wrong ways.
But also all the right ones. The story is super intriguing, and the music is absolutely phenomenal. I’m mostly interested in finding all the records for the player at camp and learning more about WTF is going on in the world than the gameplay.
My biggest issue with the game is that it eats inputs like popcorn. Which is not good when the main gimmick of combat is the dodging and parry QTE mechanics.
I used to like JRPG’s and then I got tired of them. They are so linear. Expedition 33 has such amazing story. I think the graphic is pretty good. Unreal Lumen really shines. The parrying can get very tiring quick and combats are a bit tedious.
The game systems, graphics, feel, etc are a bit dated. It feels like something from 10-15 years ago.
Graphics??
You can dislike the gameplay and stuff, but the graphics? It’s peak UE5 and well optimized, 99% of the players I’ve seen were making “wow” sounds at the prologue visuals and details, the underwater level and many more.
I haven’t tried low settings tho, I’m playing 4K epic, but graphics are definitely 2025.
I was the same until I really paid attention to the story and the music. It is beautifully written. I got this on gamepass and I bought Oblivion at the same time. I haven’t touched Oblivion since.
At first I was frustrated by the dodge parry mechanics but they grew on me. I usually don’t have very good reflexes but I kept at it and actually got pretty skilled to the point where I beat the extra bosses. The music is brilliant and the world is so beautiful and the voice acting is perfect. Such a magnificent game.
Hardware is not the only thing that can be emulated. Here’s an example. To claim that things emulating software components are not emulators is simply incorrect, like claiming that squares are not rectangles. It’s always disappointing to see someone spreading that falsehood.
It’s true that Wine is not a hardware emulator, nor is Proton. But make no mistake: they are both emulators.
The unfortunate backronym made a kind of sense 20 years ago. At the time, lawsuits were flying hard and fast at projects offering APIs and tools modeled after commercial operating systems (Unix variants), and there was no established case law protecting them. The prospect of Wine contributors getting sued into oblivion by Microsoft was a very plausible threat. Rebranding it as “Wine Is Not an Emulator” helped frame it as something different as it grew and gained attention, and although that phrase is inaccurate, “Wine Is Not a Hardware Emulator” wouldn’t have fit the existing name or distanced it from being seen as a Windows work-alike. Also, most emulators of the time happened to be hardware emulators, so it didn’t seem like a terribly big stretch.
That time is gone, though. The legal standing for software based on reverse engineering is more clear than it was then. Microsoft has not sent its lawyers after our favorite runtime emulator. The backronym was thankfully abandoned by the project some years ago. Weirdly, there are still people on social media spreading false statements about what the word does and doesn’t mean.
The term “Emulator” is not well defined and the boundaries are not always clear. But in computer hardware and software, emulation usually refers to CPU emulation. Overall one could argue that WINE is an emulation, because it emulates a certain “thing”. But as said in computer science it has accepted by most people (for the sake of having categories) that CPU emulation is emulation, and otherwise its not. Especially if we talk in context of videogame emulation. Like Virtual Machines are no emulators, because they do not emulate the CPU itself.
Slightly offtopic: I often discuss and justify why I do not consider FPGA an emulator. Sure it emulates another hardware, but in the terms of console emulation of videogames, FPGA executes the CPU cycles native. There is no middle layer in between that needs to be interpreted, it runs the CPU commands that was “programmed into”. So FPGA is mimicking, not emulating.
Just like with many other words in human language (which also is not clear across all translations and dialects of human language), the term “emulation” is just not 100% defined and there is nobody who has the definitive answer to it. And that’s okay. It’s a “domain specific” language; which means, you have to specify it before in order to make use. Otherwise you can assume it from context its “usual” meaning. Does not mean its clear, but it means nobody has the right to act like having a clear definition and saying anyone else is wrong.
as said in computer science it has accepted by most people (for the sake of having categories) that CPU emulation is emulation, and otherwise its not.
It’s important to keep in mind that things said in computer science for the sake of having categories are usually said within the very narrow implicit context of a particular field of study, like microprocessor design. It makes sense there for the sake of brevity, just as arcane acronyms make sense when everyone in the room understands what they stand for in that context. But the context no longer applies when we’re out in the rest of the world using a word that is not so narrowly defined, as we are now.
I think we mostly agree, because you pointed this out yourself:
It’s a “domain specific” language; which means, you have to specify it before in order to make use.
However, I want to clarify my position in response to this:
nobody has the right to act like having a clear definition and saying anyone else is wrong.
I often encounter people on social media chiding or mocking others for referring to Wine as an emulator, which is disheartening for a number of reasons. Importantly, the people reading such comments are being taught that it’s wrong to call Wine an emulator, when in fact it is not wrong at all. Wine’s very purpose is to emulate. This is plainly visible not just in how it is used, but also in how it is developed (many of its behaviors are reverse engineered Windows behaviors, departing from the API docs) and how it functions (it does a heck of a lot more than translating system calls).
The Wine project’s FAQ acknowledges the misunderstanding, a bit indirectly, by pointing out that it is “more than just an emulator”.
Unfortunately, since most people in the discussions I mentioned have no visibility into Wine’s internals, they don’t know any better than to accept what they were told by multiple people on the internet. They are misled by a smug few who love to tell others they’re wrong by repeating that officially abandoned slogan that was never really true (at least not in the context that framed it) in the first place. And then some of the misled people adopt it themselves, so we end up with more of the “you’re wrong” attitude, perpetuation of a ridiculously narrow understanding of the word, and people who publish about the topic performing awkward linguistic gymnastics to avoid simply saying “emulator” for fear of rebuke.
I think all three of those results make the world a little worse, so I’m here to let everyone reading know that it’s perfectly appropriate to call Wine (or Proton) an emulator. Anyone who claims it’s wrong to do so is perhaps a hardware field specialist who has lost sight of the importance of context in language, or (more likely) either honestly mistaken or an internet troll.
Besides those toxic people who claim something and everyone else is wrong, its not too bad. In the end, all it is about is just one tells someone else a specific definition of a word. And in a sense he is always right, because he (or she) is defining it at that moment.
I understand what you are saying there (last paragraph), but, there is context if one says Wine is not an emulator (not because of its name). The reason is, we are talking about software emulation in the sense of gaming. And there are emulators to play videogames literally emulating other systems. And we have other words to make a category for distinguishing reasons such as Virtual Machines or API compatible or ABI compatible too. I’m fully aware of the fuzzyness of the terms. I’m also fully aware what upsets you when people tell others Wine is not an emulator. But they do it with intentions to teach (such as you and me here), at least usually. Trolls aside or “idiots” aside.
So looks like you are right; we agree each other us here.
Not a fan of someone who uses the r-slur and makes a show of not being “woke,” but I agree that that list is utterly ludicrous. Flagging something like it’s practically unplayable because you can if you search for them find a couple of same-sex characters in the ass end of nowhere holding hands is kinda mind-blowing.
They even complained about someone claiming to be asexual. Seriously?? Someone not wanting sex is the big horrible Woke Agenda™ being shoved down poor, innocent Gamers™’ throats? Look here, it’s incels doing reverse wokism “making” a game engine because Real Men™ never use a premade one! Don’t think about why they would want to associate with a general-purpose game engine despite also claiming that every dev must make their own! Thinking is WOKE! You’ll turn gay if you think!
Because of idiots like them, either not understanding what woke means, or by taking it to comical extreme, real issues get buried under. I wouldn’t be surprised if this list was created by an Ai or was meant to be funny in the first place. I would say some stuff there has nothing to do with wokeness at all, such as gay relationships is too woke for them. I go this far and say whoever made that list seems to be anti-gay.
And that’s my take, going too extreme is always bad and destroys any nuances and makes real problems hard to find and discuss.
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