I really hope its good. From the YT videos I’ve seen of people who got it early, it looks great.
But I still have a little bit of hesitation about how the roads continue to work. They’re still mostly “plop a road of X type”, and upgrades you just either connect in, or plop on top of an existing road. Finessing lane changes, i.e. merges or adding a new lane, still looks to be mostly an issue of getting the game to do what you want. If you sat me down and asked me to do a fun game based way of drawing road and other networks, I’d probably go with something loosely similar to how OpenStreetMap represents roads, but with more graphical flair. Roads are just collections of points, in whats called a “way.” You can set attributes on a way, which are things such as lanes, speed, lighting, material, etc. For a game, you could basically draw a line of where you want the road, and then set how many lanes it is, and see that footprint, before you apply it. Also lets you do things like take a 5 lane road and split it up into a big mess, so you can make abominations like the hi-5 in Texas, or even things as simple as diverging diamond or SPUI. Not sure if thats possible in CS2, I haven’t seen any youtubers do it. Getting them working in CS1 was possible, but required a ton of mods.
Maybe I’m overthinking it, and maybe the CS2 approach is better. I’ll have to get my hands on it to try it.
As for zoning, its okay, but I wish we’d really start to see some divorce from what SimCity invented back in 1989, and allow for more granular mixed-use zoning. I want apartment buildings that have light commercial at the ground floor, like you see in basically every major city
Also really hoping that it has proper M+KB on xbox. Starfield doesn’t, and it leaves whole sections of the game essentially broking (i.e. crafting 99 items requires you to press RB a shitload)
I never play these types of games but I distinctly remember my friend having a full on meltdown about how fucked up the first Cities Skylines was like a decade ago, lol.
I guess you’re just talking about one person, but I think Cities Skylines was received quite well in general? I just remember a bunch of praise for Cities Skylines (in contrast to Sim City 2013 which a bunch of people had a meltdown about).
My favorites are ffxiv, because the music is very closely woven into the story with motifs and stuff, so it brings me back to it. Its also just pretty as fuck, they do a lot of weaving other songs and musical themes into other songs, so a lot of the time you'll be in a boss fight and recognize a theme from earlier, mixed in with the boss music. Some context is spoilers, so I won't go into it, but the Endwalker final boss has the music shifting from each previous expansions themes, morphing and shifting to fit the overarching boss theme, and its fucking glorious.
Also, the ace combat games have the most insane music, its basically a meme that "everyone's a badass until the sky starts singing latin at you" Its this really cool mix of operatic vocals and rock/synth music and its so fucking good.
The Final Fantasy VII and Kingdom Hearts series have my absolute favourite soundtracks
Others that stay rent free in my head are Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in World of Illusion, halo 3, odst and reach, theme hospital, sonic 1, 2, Ape Escape and Gain Ground
Not sure about my absolute favorite, but the first games to come to mind when thinking about OSTs is Battlefield 1 and V. The music in those games is amazing.
RDR 2. Bought it back in 2019 but my PC couldn’t really handle it too well (less than 45 FPS on medium), so I shelved it.
But now I have a 4090 and I’m enjoying the hell out of the game. It was slow at first but by the second chapter I was hooked. Looks damn good for a 4-year-old game, too; dare I say as good as a modern ray traced title. (I mean it’s close)
I’ve been really enjoying the new expansion for Cyberpunk 2077. I personally loved the game when it came out, specifically for the tone and environment and the main story. I did stop playing pretty quickly though because the progression didn’t click for me and different parts felt too shallow.
I really think the 2.0 update fixed a lot of game mechanics I didn’t like the first time through, and the expansion has a great tight storyline I’ve really enjoyed sinking my teeth into. I’m going back and doing all of the side quests I didn’t get to before I stopped playing too. And so excited to see what the alternate ending they cooked up is. If you had fun with the game, definitely consider picking it back up!
Same deal, and definitely. Before 2.0 I thought Cyberpunk did some really cool stuff with narrative and inter-quest structures, but now the core of the game is a ton of fun all by itself. (The little Edgerunners references in the perk trees are a nice touch, too!)
And god do I love being free of the tedious incentives to check/compare all your attire and weapons for the best stats; standardisation here is a blessing.
I’m running a slightly older computer, that I need to upgrade my memory and graphics card on. The only reason I am going to try this when it comes out and not just keep playing City Skylines 1 is that it is a day one release on Game Pass. I’m not sure with the performance issues my computer will handle it and I haven’t really seen much conversation about specs required, so I’m concerned. My system was mid tier 4 years ago so if it is running bad on high tier systems today…
I’ve got an RTX 4070 and a 4790K. I’m fully prepared for my CPU to have a really hard time keeping up. I think an upgrade will be coming early next year.
This is just a game I’m really really really excited about.
I definitely am going to upgrade, I want their new life sim which they pushed the early release date back on. So I have been saving to do that. I just knew I wouldn’t be able to have everything in time for the release of this game. Hopefully the bugs will be worked out by the time I’m finished. I’m hoping by the summer.
Less a design choice and more a technical feat, but I’m hoping that we start to see the phase-out of loading screens and more of a push toward seamless gameplay. I was watching a video from the newest Spiderman and it was pretty damn cool. Practical for all games? Maybe not for a while. But I certaintly would like to see more investment in leveraging improvements in disk and memory capabilities going forward.
I would guess that loading screens will never fully go away. Especially on consoles, where everyone has a fixed set of hardware resources, and the developer knows what that is and is aiming at optimizing for that target, being able to fully remove one area from memory before loading the next gives you potentially twice as much memory to work with. That’s a big-enough gain that game developers are not going to want to give that up, since the alternative is being able to only have half (or less, if multiple areas are near each other) the complexity for their areas. If hardware gets more memory, at least some developers are going to want to increase the complexity of the environments they have rather than eliminating load screens. Otherwise, their scenes are going to look significantly-worse than their competitors who have loading screens.
There may be specific games that eliminate loading screens, at least other than the initial startup of the game. Loading screens might be shorter, or might just consist of a brief fade. But I don’t think that we’ll ever reach the point that all developers decide that that tradeoff to fully-eliminate loading screens is one that they want to make.
The shift from optical media and rotational drives to SSDs has reduced the relative cost of loading an area. But it hasn’t eliminated it.
I think that a necessary condition for loading screens going away is basically a shift to a memory architecture where only a single type of storage exists – that is, you don’t have fast-but-volatile primary storage and slow-but-nonvolatile secondary storage, but only a single form of non-volatile storage that is fast-enough to run from directly. We don’t have that technology today. Even then, it might not kill loading screens, since you might want to have different representations (more-efficient but less-compact for the area surrounding the character, and less-efficient but more-compact for inactive areas).
See, I figured consoles might actually be more likely to cross that finish line first. My logic is that the controlled platforms would give developers a) potential access to a more bare-metal style of storage medium maybe not practical on PC, and b) a consistent performance target (no needing to account for people using those pesky hard drives!)
I feel like we’re maybe already starting to see this with the PlayStation 5, but it probably also depends on how much work actually goes into optimization for these development teams.
I think the key here is integrating loading into the gameplay. The old Metroid trick of having the player traverse a basic hallway while the game loads the next area in the background is a good, if basic, example.
Most loading screens are just more of a nuisance than anything, but if they don’t remove them, maybe they could get creative in how they work/look?
The main series Danganronpa games did loading screens in a very creative way that made them feel special. The room and all the things inside would start popping up and build the room as it loaded in. More loading screens like that would be lovely if they aren’t able to remove them.
oh man. It’s wild how prestige games are always trying so hard to be like prestige movies and TV, but somehow they have not yet adopted the practice of the recap.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne