Things like this and the screen time laws are why I foresee China as a huge threat in the future. Every other country will be mindless zombies staring at their screens and stupid. Easy to take control of.
But think about the CEO’s freedom of abusing gambling addicts outside of a safe environment with virtually no regulation and that can be used by kids and teens!
I actually wouldn’t have anything against gacha games if they all were marked as Adult-only, even the most dumbass parents would think twice about buying EA FC if it had the AO rating.
Well China doesn’t like companies having power so this is a way to neuter them, especially in response to trying to limit online game consumption already.
Edit: Tencent is apparently the most profitable company in china right now so this is a direct attack at their profits most likely, not just China doing good
If it was only money they wanted they would not do this. The limitations they are imposing will cut revenue to their biggest Game companies. I mean, the laws are not in effect and there was already a big crash on Netease and Tencent stock prices.
To add onto what the others have said, the CCP isn’t shy about enforcing restrictions on digital media domestically. For instance, TikTok in China (Douyin) is quite different from the international version with strictly-enforced time limits, content restrictions, etc.
China doing a better job regulating corporations than the west is nothing new.
Even this current one happened while Tencent was barely recovering from another regulation set last year. Kicking megacorps while they’re down lol as they should.
The rating is 77. 77 is the lowest rating a game in the main series of Assassins Creed has received. This means the other games have 78 or up. How in the world is this considered bad? For an entire fucking franchise? Not a fan of the series or anything but I just think it’s ridiculous how this is an actual headline! Don’t the journalists have nothing else to report on regarding video games and the industry? Layoffs? Toxic people and business practices? Microtransactions?
Nah, instead they go: “pretty good (but not great) game is slightly less good than other pretty good (but not great) games in an overall pretty good (but not great) franchise.” Ugh!
The headline says it’s the lowest-rated game in the series, not that Mirage is a bad game. The article bases itself on a single data point, which leaves a lot of room for interpreting. Which the author does a little.
But it’s nowhere mentioned or claimed that Mirage is a badly-reviewed game or doesn’t sell well. It’s just the lowest entry so far. And that’s what everybody should take away from that headline, followed by ignoring the hollow clickbaity article altogether.
I watched a review video that was praising everything in this game. "Finally another good AC." "The vombat is fun and challenging." "Looks fantastic on the new engine."
Then i watched just some guy playing it and it honestly looks janky as hell. He always got stuck while parkouring, the parkour itself seems like the same press one button to do parkour, but this time it's really jank. There is no weapon variety at all. The combat looks really bad, it looks like the least fun combat in all these kind of games. The world looks really good, but the people in the world the jank ass AI and NPC doing weird shit while looking pretty Bethesda like. I haven't played it, but how this got a 77 or anything above a 5/10 is beyond me.
From what I saw watching a few streams it seemed fine, closer to the original games but still having that slight off feeling of modern Ubisoft games. Seems like a good game on sale for $30
I’m playing out of sync. I did Valhalla Odyssey and now I’m playing through origin. I enjoyed a lot of Valhalla. I can see how they tweaked and polished from origins. I think I preferred the scenery in Odyssey and maybe the story and people. Valhalla had best fighting and slo mo. Graphics were outstanding and voice acting was pristine by Valhalla.
Valhalla is a nice action game but it’s no AC game. Especially the stealth part and name-sake Assassination gameplay take up too little space. And the skill tree they copied from PoE is just ridiculously overloaded - symptomatic for Ubisoft‘s approach to the whole game: it’s so convoluted.
I really enjoyed Valhalla but as an AC entry it disappoints.
This Creative Assembly is a dogshit remnant of the past. Until they stop treating their developers like gig workers and stop rising prices under the lie that they’re losing money (record profits once again), I don’t want shit they make. WH3 has been abysmal so far
LOTR would be better. But remember, they have separate teams for historical and fantasy TW. So yeah, maybe Medieval or Empire II will happen still. Probably too early for Rome III because II is still new enough to still be worth playing compared to the most recent games.
They’ve already done 40k But id agree with LOTR I’m not sure how they think dnd fits with large scale battles, and politics. But id also be lying if I said I wouldn’t play it.
Edit: Oh shit maybe it’s Warhammer fantasy that they’ve done
Ok, maybe not Faerun, but just spitballing here - Total War: Blood War. Massive armies of devils vs demons, with yugoloth mercenary forces for hire, spread across the battlefields of the lower planes. Could tie in nicely with a re-release of Planescape as well…
I haven’t paid any attention to Apex since Catalyst. Could someone catch me up to speed on why Revenant needed such a huge rework? His kit always seemed quite situational but still usable.
I want to preface this by saying I’m not a game developer, but I have played a fair share Unreal Engine games and my honest opinion as a consumer is that it is a literal plague especially in the indie game world. Show me 1 second of gameplay of any game and I could tell you with 100% certainty whether it’s an unreal engine game or not. And the main issue isn’t the engine itself, I bet its a fine engine that can do everything that a developer needs it to do.
The main issue in general gaming but most noticeably in UE is the absolute horrible TAA antialiasing. Somehow we went from crisp and sharp looking games in 2010 to absolutely blurry messes today. UE is the biggest offender, every single on of their games uses TAA as its main AA method and only with the sharpening filter turned to a 100, is it barely serviceable. And on top of the blurriness you have visual artifacts especially in Picture-in-Picture (PiP) rendering, so forget realistic scopes or mirrors or particle effects. And if you decide to use any other method for AA, all the characters hair looks like an unacceptable flickering wiremesh. We always see these tech demos of amazing lighting and huge open landscapes rendered in realtime with UE but it all amounts to nothing if everything is blurred beyond recognition.
The second biggest gripe is the abysmal performance. Sure if a game looks good you can expect it to be a little bit more demanding on the hardware side. But thanks to TAA, no UE game actually looks good. So you’re just left with the hardware demands. But in the past, if your PC couldn’t handle a game at max setting you just tone them down a little bit and “viola” your game runs good. That is absolutely impossible with UE. I have 3 UE games that I regularly play, and the difference between lowest and max settings on all of them is ~5 FPS. So your game looks like a PS2 game and you get barely any performance gain, awesome, good job UE. Not to mention that in an attempt to maximize “performance” most NPCs that are further than 50m are rendered at 5 FPS, looks realy good on those big open landscapes with amazing lighting.\
I am sure that all of those problems are solved if the engine is in the hands of a talented developer that knows what their doing and puts value on visual clarity and performance. But that is not what the vast majority of UE developers do. UE feels to me like a modular package. You just slap things together and it supposedly works. But you can’t expect to create art by just slapping things together. It also feels like UE tries to become the jack of all trades but master of none to appeal to the broadest market so that Epic can cash in on all that licensing money.
I wonder why exactly somebody decided that the search for a perfect AA method has to stop TAA. We went from jaggy edges to edge detection and oversampling (MSAA) being the standard in 2000-2012 but people where unsatisfied with the performance tank so we needed a lighter method. So we got post processing AA like SMAA which is a scam and does absolutely nothing or FXAA which simlpy applies a blur filter to edges. Not the most elegant solutions but they will do if you can’t effort to use MSAA. Then TAA came around the corner and I dont even know how it looks so bad, because it sounds fine on paper. Using multiple frames to detect differences in contrast and then smoothing out those diffrences seems like an OK alternative, but it should’ve never become the main AA method.
I’ve honestly expected the AA journey to end with 4K resolution being the standard. AA is mostly a matter of pixeldesity over viewing distance. Mobile games have mostly no AA because their pixel density is ridiculous, Console games also rarely have AA because you sit 10 feet away from the screen. PC being the only outlier but certainly having the spare power to run at higher resolutions than consoles. But somewhere along the way, Nvidia decided to go all in on Raytracing and Dynamic Resolution instead of raw 4K performance. And Nvidia basiacly dictates where the gaming industry goes.
So I honestly blame Nvdia for this whole mess and most people can agree that Nvidia has dropped the ball the last couple of years. Their Flagship cards cost more than an all consoles from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo combined. They cost more than mid-high range gaming laptops. And the raw power gain has been like 80% over the last 10 years, because they put all their R&D into gimmicks.
I got quite the good AA by rendering the screen at 4k and letting the graphic card underscale it into the screen’s 1080p resolution. No AA needed, looks fiine.
That is basically MSAA without the edge dection. Rendering in 4K and downscaling is the dirtiest but most effective AA method. But downscaling the whole screen also applies to UI elements, this often times results in tiny blurry fonts if the UI isn’t scaled appropriately. But more and more games have started to add a render resolution scale option that goes beyond 100% without affecting the UI. Downscaling also causes latency issues. I can run Metal Gear Solid 5 at a stable 60 FPS at 4K but the display latency is very noticeable compared to 1440p at 60.
I miss the time when you could just disable the games native AA and force MSAA through Nvidia control panel. But most newer titles dont accept Nvdias override, especialy Unreal games.
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