I think the plan is to release all the cosmetic stuff after TI, so they don’t have to share the money with the pros. Probably they already know that in that way they just get more money
I remember when I thought that Bungie self-publishing would make them less evil. But no, they’ve actually become innovators in being the actual shittiest company that isn’t Plarium Games. Maybe they have their eyes on the top spot though? Is that what they’re building up to?
The thing about the series s is that it’s a phenomenal 1080p game console. Anything higher than that and it’s going to struggle without some kind of upscaling technology. I bought one because I don’t have a 4k tv and it just made sense. I also have a PS5, it gets more attention but I mean come on, it’s a PlayStation and it’s a damn good one, but I can’t express how impressive it is that Microsoft packed so much power into that tiny box.
The problem is that with split screen in BG3 the entire game, incl. all background calculations, need to run twice. Split screen is disabled on Steam Deck for that reason but can be enabled via command line and frame rate drops to under 10FPS: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyaeoUdc10A
Geez. I wonder what the performance is like on the PS5 in split mode. It’ll obviously have some sort of performance hit. Maybe it’ll be a drop from 60 to 30fps? Have they confirmed if the main game will be 60?
And so would Baldur’s Gate 3 when it launches on Xbox, it just takes much more effort and dev time than Series X/PS5 would. It isn’t that it is impossible, but that it is a lot of work.
Honestly, it’s kind of on the developer. If they’d taken the Series S as the base line during development, they would have made life a lot easier for themselves. I think Microsoft are right to stick to their guns. It will seriously piss off their consumers if they can’t land good quality versions of equivalent games on PS5.
I actually think it could be more beneficial for players across both console platforms to encourage developers to build games which scale reasonably, and at the low end target a 30 FPS minimum frame rate whilst the Series S/PS5 get 60 FPS+ or improved image quality, or both. Instead of it just being a race to the bottom on performance just so we can have a little bit of ray tracing.
Also, as far as I’m aware, Baldurs Gate 3 hasn’t released on PS5 and is not due until September. I will be very interested to see how that goes, because I think the conclusion of this article is premature until we see that.
I find it hard to believe BG3 would run that poorly at that low quality but I guess time will tell. It’s up to Larian how much they want to release on Xbox
Going back to the article, I think whether it hurts MS more to keep this promise over features or not depends a great deal on what the split is between Series S and Series X consoles. I would suggest it’s worse to sacrifice the Series S audience as there’s less sunk cost there compared to the Series X audience, who we might assume have more of an investment in the Xbox ecosystem from the previous generation, and therefore it’s harder for them to make the switch to PS5.
If they’d taken the Series S as the base line during development, they would have made life a lot easier for themselves.
The problem is that the baseline is actually the PS5. It outsells both versions of the Xbox by a factor of 2. So the Xbox Series S is an afterthought, and always will be.
It would be to Microsoft’s advantage to change that perspective, which would reinforce why they might maintain their hard line of feature equivalence. I agree though, it appears to be the status quo.
Except that they can't. The only thing they can do is to give up on the Series S. Sure, that is a disaster as it means millions of Series S buyers are basically on a dead console. But they're headed in that direction anyways.
that doesn’t mean we get better games on the xss, but that we get worse games on xsx and ps5. I paid for that power, I want my games to use it. I don’t care that it doesn’t run as well on a lesser console I deliberately chose not to buy because of its lesser power
The issue here isn’t frame rate or graphics, it’s that with the memory issues on the series S, they can’t get split screen to run. It runs just fine on X, but won’t on S. Because Xbox demands parity, they can’t just disable the feature like they did for Steamdeck.
If we take the series s as the baseline in development, we’ll get games that don’t take full advantage of the better hardware. They shouldn’t have to make their game run on potato grade hardware. I think they hit a great balance, it runs great on most modern gaming pc’s, and the series x and ps5 will have no issues running it either.
Well this is concerning. I’ve got a PS5 and was going to buy a XSX this week so I could pre-order Starfield, now I might wait and see how this plays out. What’s going to happen with Starfield & Elder Scrolls 6 (whenever it’s released)? The Series S is going to fuck up everything.
There’s a difference between targeting 3-4 console SKUs and targeting 2. If you know what’s going to be your baseline from day 1, you test against that and scale up rather than the other way around. With a first party studio, this is a given.
Completely agree. Remember when people lost their shit over horse armor in Oblivion? That would be seen as reasonable now. They just kept forcing these things until it was normalized, and now we’ve had an entire generation grow up with MTX as the norm.
It was interesting how quickly people fell in line with finding paying for online multiplayer normal too on the console side. Although some do try to hand wave it away by saying they aren’t paying for online, but to subscribe to game rentals.
But, yeah lot of these things people complain about eventually become the norm, and those who complain about it get seen as cranky entitled gamers over the long run.
Games that sell things like XP boosts always swear the game is balanced around not requiring them but there is always some grindy shit. Just play all this boring filler content for 90 hours.
I'll agree with that. Guild Wars 2 still has a slight amount of "pay for convenience" stuff that makes me twinge considering how much I've already paid for the games and expansions, and I really wish you could unlock mount skins in more ways than just gems, but considering you can farm gold and swap it for gems it's acceptable enough.
Especially because I wouldn't even play an MMO with a sub fee, so for that alone I respect GW2's approach.
For full price games on release? No, they really aren't.
People always says "cosmetics are fine". They aren't. Cosmetics are gameplay. Humans love looking cool. They NEED it a lot of the time. The entire fashion industry wouldn't exist if looking cool wasn't a major part of human psyche. These MTX wouldn't sell if it wasn't. Locking all or most of the interesting looks behind additional paywalls is bullshit. And it's not OK. I don't engage with games that do that. There's plenty to play that don't abuse their customers.
Some microtransactions are fine for free-to-play games and MMOs; I don't really like seeing them in full-priced games, especially if I feel it's engineered in a way to make me pay to play. It's why I avoid mobile games in general, playing them feels very predatory.
I’m pretty excited for this game. Luckily, I haven’t played divinity original sin 2 and it’s available on the switch. After I finish Disco Elysium and Divinity Original Sin 2 I’ll pickup a steam deck and this game.
So despite all of the bitching and moaning about all of the “game breaking” features, the shitty little camera, the lack of original games and the price they still bought it. This is why companies keep putting out crap.
Exactly! Rewarding bad behavior is a understatement in this case. I grew up with Nintendo but as it stands they’re a disgusting corporation in which I want nothing to do with! They LITERALLY ruined Lives! I suggest every Gamer researches NintenDONTs dark history.
I wish critics wouldn’t even bring up the preachy-ness of it. I’m finding other tangibles really fucking annoying like the cringe dialogue itself “Who doesn’t like talking about dragons?” or how fucked the companion and enemy AI is. We haven’t seen AI this bad since Colonial Marines, but nobody’s really talking about it because of the flashy combat animations for the main character acting as a curtain covering how dogshit the rest of the gameplay is.
My character can slam the ground and make a shit ton of visual effects, which is acting as a red herring to my companions that don’t do shit the vast majority of the time at enemies barely smart enough to navigate the terrain to run at me. This is like Doom 1993 AI.
Irritating jokes less amusing than the most formulaic of trashy sitcoms, and they don’t address that either. I think people irked by this article are really put off by the way it adds fuel to the fire of criticisms toward progressivism. It’s well written and does bring out the irony of it, but it seems more of an attempt to undermine the progressive messaging and justify the audience polarity. In reality, there’s no need for the division, people who positively react to the game are wearing rose colored glasses to a game with serious issues that don’t get fixed on the technical backend.
On the technical front, if you ignore the absolute garbage AI and look at the rendering engine’s performance, this is the best release of the year by far.
I have so many mixed feelings on the game. This shit going back and forth over the wokeness just gives everyone a red herring to defend or attack.
I mean despite how I feel the linked article’s author uses a type of language that makes me wary of them, I kinda agree. The utterly Marvel way the game talks about things combined with the inane inability to ever have any conflict, negatives or issues combines to essentially make a mockery of very real issues.
And I’m sorry, it’s one thing to want to use art to showcase real issues and poke at them and shine a spotlight onto them. That’s good, personally I want art to do that. But when you essentially use it as a joke piece due to the inherently non-serious nature of all your scenes, it just becomes even worse than not doing it. 😔 Please don’t shine a light onto serious topics if the only thing you use the light for is to point and laugh and mock.
Whether it has terrible dialogue, too many bugs, lacking in technical prowess, cost way too much to make or is simply too preachy. It all boils down to a single problem: corporate suits sucking the soul out of the project, devoiding it of any passion one could possibly have. It looks, feels and smells like an empty shell of a game because that is exactly what it is. Nothing stands out because every decision was calculated with the goal to moderately please everyone in the room, resulting in compromises stacked on compromises all the way down.
The often sloppily implemented progressiveness in these products quickly starts to look like an afterthought. Perhaps to shield themselves from criticism after they realized what they’ve created or maybe they slapped it on when they realized their story has literally nothing to say about anything and is a hollow shell of a product.
Whatever the case, soulless slob does more harm than good to anything their creators associate it with, so I totally get why someone wouldn’t even want to read about that aspect of the game in a review. It’s just one more of several symptomps of a bad product.
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