UE5 is a shit engine as of now, but what can be expected of a company run by someone just as insufferable? Epic took the advent of tech like DLSS and frame generation as an excuse to disregard performance and functionality.
All you have to do is pick out any UE5 game that exists and Google that + “performance.” Even meeting the recommended specs for Rogue City, I still had to find specialized configs to get the game the game stop crashing on launch, and even then, those specs were based on using upscaling and frame generation. In reality, “recommended” was about 25fps at 1280x720. That used to be, and realistically should be unthinkable.
AND EVEN THEN, the engine’s built-in settings for upscaling and frame generation caused even more crashing. Ultimately, I had to disable it in-game and turn it on in my driver settings because of the busted-ass engine. This is a problem with the state of gaming, and people like Randy, Tim and their supporters are only exacerbating it.
The engine’s not the problem. Personally, I have only played a single game on UE5 that had shit performance on my aging PC (I can’t even use DLSS), and it’s an early access, independently made, survival crafting game. It was never going to perform well or even be finished.
Smith: Now what? Things have changed. The market’s tough. I’m sure you can understand why our beloved parent company, Warner Brothers, has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy.
Neo: What?
Smith: They informed me they’re gonna to do it with or without us.
Neo: I thought they couldn’t do that?
Smith: Oh, they can, and they made it clear they would kill our contract if we didn’t cooperate.
The film itself explained pretty well why it exists and why it was how it was.
Just to provide context for those who didn’t watch Resurrections:
Neo is back in The Matrix as Thomas Anderson and is actually a video game developer and his claim to fame game is The Matrix. His business partner shows a lot of signs of being Smith “reborn”. They kind of lampshade that the people who own the rights to their game were going to make another one regardless of whether the creators were involved so it is up to them to either step aside or make the best of it.
Honestly? Resurrection has grown on me a lot, in large part because the credits sequence of all things recontextualizes the entire movie.
spoilerBasically, the first act of the movie is (re-)awakening Neo so all the marketing makes it feel like a reboot of 1. Except then it takes a pretty big shift as we find out that everyone who fought in the original wars is old and retired, if not dead. And The Machines want Zion to return as a power source except a faction of The Machines believed in Neo and fought, leading to basically the premise of the MMO where there are two big factions. One wants to return and the other wants to stay free. And a key part of The Matrix is that it requires a Neo and Trinity to provide just the right amount of rebellion (which is more power) but to torment them so that they can’t ever move on and have a happy ending. And the rest of the movie is basically The Kids rescuing Trinity and Neo and Trinity both having The One powers. Culminating in basically a repeat of the ending of 1 where they challenge The Machines and fly off into the distance. All while a fucking ska cover of Rage’s Wake Up plays. And… that is kind of what made me really like the movie even if I really fucking disliked watching it? Because… we (GenX/Millennials) fought our fight and… what did we accomplish? The world is a shitty place that gets shittier by the moment (exponentially in 2025…). We choose to go back to our cages because we are too afraid of the world outside of it and our lack of comforts. And that is what the movie was about. Humanity escaped The Matrix because of Neo… and Humanity went back in because the outside world is scary. And Neo and Trinity are going to have to fight our war again and maybe we’ll care this time but we probably won’t. Rage Against The Machine should have been the anthem of a generation and it mostly was ignored or loved by the machine de la Rocha et al were raging against. And… that is also the thing that gets too real. Because we have a generation that were inspired by what we did. But… what fucking kid even cares enough about Rage to want ska covers? Much like… what kids actually care enough about The Matrix to want a sequel? The sequel is still for the crowd that largely didn’t learn the message of the originals.
So yeah. I don’t LIKE Resurrections but I also kind of love that it exists? Even if… it existing makes me depressed?
I think that’s a pretty great summary. When it comes to unnecessary/years later sequels most are just garbage. I think Matrix 4 is still bad, but I have to give it credit for trying something interesting. It doesn’t work ultimately, but it tried something.
Resurrections was basically a parody of the original trilogy, along with the politics going on in the background of producing Resurrections. The Wachowskies didn’t want to do it at all, but ended up taking the reigns because WB would have made it without them, so they used the opportunity to basically shit all over WB and Hollywood and capitalism in general.
In that regard, it’s an awesome movie. If you expect more of the same kind of stuff from the originals, you will likely be disappointed.
at least in the realm of video games AAA only refers to funding, not quality. in fact it’s pretty consistently shit because terrible business practices almost inevitably result in late and premature releases because they have to meet arbitrary deadlines and believe they can always fix things later. to be fair the community is pretty idiotic and they consistently reward this behavior so they have nothing to lose in most cases.
It didn’t refer to funding. It’s marketing only. If you ask 100 what does AAA in video games, you’ll get a wide breadth off answers, because it’s not a real term, but it sounds good and people will make up their own definition or repeat one they heard.
Legend of Zelda and other big name NES titles were $60 USD back in the mid to late 80s. That’s over $170 today. Average NES games were $40 back then, which is still around $115 today. Discounted $20-$25 games are closer to today’s $60-$70 standard edition titles.
Yes, they were cartridges with chips back then, but prices are a lot better now for a game. Today’s $100+ games are for the ultra/deluxe editions.
That said, I usually don’t buy games at launch unless it’s something from like Rockstar.
A direct inflation conversion like that is not invalid, but it lacks a lot of context. Games might have been more expensive back then, but everything else was orders of magnitude cheaper. People were buying homes and starting families as young adults back then. Now many in that bracket live check-to-check and struggle to put food on the table. It stings a lot more.
also to clarify: I was using Canadian dollars. Major releases are around one hundred bucks here when adding tax, give or take a little.
Now do factor in the growth of the market and also the price to produce a physical copy and digital, the market share between physical copy, and also the bonus the CEO get each year.
The corporate world absolutely idolizes the grift. Being able to “produce value” (=make more money while actually not producing anything more) is the only game left. Shareholders look at something like EA that releases the same old Madden year after year while making money hand over fist, and they fucking salivate.
Edit: and BTW, you know one giant group that grifts profit while producing nothing for the economy? Landlords.
That was a delayed grift release, no wonder they stealth launched it (given it would’ve tarnished them even more). I hope they get a lot of shit for this scammy ‘game’.
I prefer their games over anything Bethesda/Diablo/whatever stuff.
Their games, as clunky and weird they sometimes are, have soul and passion. I’m playing Risen 2 at the moment, and I just love the world. So much too see, every corner has something to find, even if it’s just a bottle of Rum.
Starfield frustrates me, because in many ways its a major step in the right direction. It has much better roleplaying mechanics than Skyrim or Fallout 4, but at the same time the lore is half-baked and the skill system is fairly weak. It has great potential, but a lot of it feels toned down and less “real” because of it. Space exploration has a lot of potential as well, but setting every objective so far apart on planets ruins exploration by filling it with monotonous procgen.
That’s why I’m fairly confident that once properly patched, and mods/DLCs are in full swing, it will probably be remembered very fondly despite the release state. It’ll pull a Cyberpunk.
I think everything you said here is spot on except the idea Starfield will improve pike Cyberpunk at this point because Bethesda’s attitude really doesn’t indicate that they seem to admit anything needs fixing.
With that said I doubt many people expected Cyberpunk to do as well later on so you are probably right and I hope you are for the game and genre. I really like the aesthetic of Starfield and want it to succeed.
I’m just so tired of getting such half baked stuff at release.
One annoying thing about the “make your own stories” concept is that content us going to be recycled. My followers don’t say anything new or have new things to do etc because it’s all baked in but also on this supposedly open RPG landscape.
I would agree with you if Bethesda games haven’t always been saved by modders, rather than Beth themselves. If we had to depend on Beth to fix their own game, Skyrim would’ve been abandoned long, long, long ago, same with Fallout 4.
That’s true and what worries me the most after wanting Starfield to do good. I’ve been playing Starfield for a bit only to find myself moving to Cyberpunk sooner than later lately.
I hope it does and I think it will but again with the reliance Bethesda puts on the community I’m nervous.
Anyway I’ve gotten much of the way through at 100 hours and have enjoyed it - definitely got my money’s worth - but I just sort of hit a wall. To be fair you’ll do that with most games but it seems like Stanfield is just bland.
Yeah, Bethesda games have always been… playable, I guess, but hardly any good, without modding, at least as far back as Oblivion. Morrowind was the last game they made that was just good, out of the box, without needing mods.
So I figured in a year or two Starfield will be good, with mods, just like Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 were all bland at best on release, until mods made them good.
100% I actually think Starfield has the best bones, even if it has the worst meat, so to speak, so adding meat gives it a much higher ceiling in a few years time.
The problem is that starfield is modern warfare III of Bethesda but people trying to see it as next skyrim, Bethesda ai generated almost all this game and looped it in roguelite shape, the only things evolved is mechanics as you’ve said yourself, and again as you’ve said yourself, this game will be saved by modders
Oh I’m anti-Bethesda and Bethesda practices, I’m just sure it will eventually be a great game once the community steps in and fixes it. It isn’t an excuse for Bethesda, but rather admiration for the modding community, and an example of why FOSS and a rejection of the profit motive is so good.
i dont know why people shit on bethesda for “letting modders fix the game”
i dont really know any other developer that embraces the modding community as much as bethesda does, and i wish other games had the same amount of modding capability that bethesda games do
I think it’s fully possible to criticize Bethesda’s incomplete and highly flawed game design and praise their willingness to support the modding community with great tools at the same time.
The world is now full of technology that used to have real names, but is now called AI so that investors spunk themselves as they high five each other in shareholder meetings.
The president of Capcom can lick the wrinkles out of my sweat steamed scrotum if he thinks I’m buying another Capcom game after this.
Yeah, games cost more to make than they did on the SNES.
But theres also an absolutely massively bigger customer base buying more games than ever before. So if your big name games are failing to bring in big numbers, that sounds like you and your fellow executives need to step down and let someone who knows what customers actually want run the company. But I bet that thought never crossed his fuckin mind.
Just to add to what you mentioned, Capcoms Street Fighter 6 in my region on steam is $100 AUD, assuming you don’t want the deluxe or ultimate editions (Not that the store page bothers to explain the differences}. On top of that you can buy the Year 1 character pass for $45 which adds 4 characters. The ultimate pass for $75 which adds the previously mentioned characters and some cosmetics for those 4 characters. The soundtrack for $50 holy shit that’s an expensive soundtrack.
And on top of all that you can buy the games in game currency, fighter coins. Which are used to unlock costumes and characters including classic costumes. Wanna buy a character? You’ll never be able to buy just the right amount of coins, coz fuck you give us money.
It’s bad enough these people want to raise prices whilst making record breaking profits, but they monetize their games in so many different and often scummy ways on top of the purchase price.
I want to say thats an example of out of touch executives.
But we both know predatory practices like that wouldnt have gotten this far if there wasnt a plethora of short sighted idiots out there, with more money than sense, refusing to do without their instant gratification and, as a result, not only throwing literally mountains of money at predatory companies, but actively complaining online about how they wish they could get even more financially exploited.
The AAA market seems to be chasing a business model that isn’t there any more. I don’t know why game developers still chase photo realism, it isn’t what makes money.
There are still good AAA releases, it’s just that 95% of AAA games are not worth the price.
I would argue the old business model still works, it’s just that most AAA games studios don’t follow that model anymore. Back in the day, a full priced game didn’t have DLC or MTX, was an actual complete game, and focused more on the fun than the profit making. Games tried new ideas, they innovated instead of chasing whatever fad is popular at the time. It’s the modern AAA game business model that is the problem and doesn’t work anymore.
If 95% of the games aren’t worth the price, then there is something wrong with that business model.
Yeah, a full priced game might not have had DLC or MTX, but it was more expensive adjusting for inflation and didn’t have nearly the quantity or quality of in game assets as current games do.
And old games definitely chased fads, they were just different fads at the time fed in part by the differences in game economics.
Not to mention until it's actually photo-realistic, it looks uncanny. It's better to find a style and use that than to chase realism imo. But then again, these AAA games just add a bunch of foliage, some god rays, maybe a sprinkle of rain and people are oooh, aaah-ing and coughing up their cash.
This is all software, companies keep finding excuses to tack on “features” that increase development cost which eventually lead to necessary price increases.
In the professional world you will rarely ever hear project managers and leaders ask the question “would our customers rather pay extra for feature X or save money by sticking to their simpler feature set?” This is because development is nearly always started with the long term goal of incorporating a feature into the product to increase the overall “value” of the product. This increased “value” of the product then means that the company should charge more for it.
To be fair, while unreal isn’t FOSS, it’s source code is at least openly viewable so devs would find it easier to make easily transferable alternatives
Also if theirs a engine bug you can crack it open and fix it yourself, handy if you’re not a AAA studio who has epic Devs on speed dial. Though I believe you do have to share any code alterations with epic if it’s hosted on a private repo
I can see why you would think that, but there’s alot of stuff unreal just isn’t that good at, things like 2d games are a massive struggle to work with in unreal, so it’ll gain more popularity, but mainly from devs making 3d games with a focus on high graphics
My issue with it in Starfield (and any game in its genre) is that the game seems to be confused about how it feels about encumbrance. Am I supposed to be looting everything I see? If not, then why is it the major income source, why are so many random objects worth selling and taking? If so, why do merchants have such low credit stores? Am I supposed to be collecting cool stuff to display? If not, then why all the display objects? If so, why have my companions constantly nag me about bringing junk? Why make ship storage so low? Or, am I supposed to be carefully considering what I want to bring as loot? If so, why is there so much of it and why isn’t there some way to quickly see what’s worth taking? Am I supposed to spend an hour after each combat carefully weighing what to take home?
It’s entirely unclear what they want. If they want looting to be less of a game loop, junk items should have no sell value and missions should be more of a reward, and item value/kg should be easy to assess. We should be quickly able to discard valueless items from inventory. Otoh if they want looting to be a bigger part of the game, I should be able to readily carry and sell my loot and doing so shouldn’t make me so rich it breaks the economy.
It’s one of my main complaints, not so much about starfield, but pretty much anything in this genre. It feels like they can’t tell if they want me to loot everything or not, the design is fundamentally at odds with itself.
I have a friend who says it needs to go one of two ways - either encumbrance matters hard and is super realistic, where you can reliably carry 30-60 lbs of gear for long distances, and that’s it, or it just doesn’t exist and you can lug around as much shit as you want and abstract out the rest, because the middle ground where PCs can carry like 250 lbs of shit leads to a game where you’re constantly just sorting through your inventory about the best vendor trash you think you can packrat to sell while moving through a dungeon, and that’s slow and unfun. The low carry weight turns every interaction into “is it better than my current gear?” which is really easy to answer in the moment, and when weight doesn’t matter, you just hoover it up and sell it when you get a chance.
I don’t agree with that dichotomy in a game like this. Certainly in the deeply simulationist roguelike I stan (cataclysm dark days ahead plug), that’s appropriate, but this game is fundamentally silly and arcade style so I don’t think the trouble has anything to do with realism. The solution I’d have personally in something like this is to eg. allow you to carry up to 6 weapons, 1 of each wearable type of item, and a certain amount of aid items in your “active” inventory, and then have everything else you loot automatically go to your ship inventory which is huge or infinite, but restricted in how you can access it (personally I’d still have ship inventories be finite, but enormous). Let perks increase your number of slots in a particular category, rather than increasing carry weight. Have resources and ‘notes’ go to the ship automatically as well, since it doesn’t really have any impact on the game to be carrying these on your person. Plus, I’d do what modders have been doing for a while and make decorative junk items have no value or weight. Let me pick up as many blenders as I want, I’m just going to use them to decorate my juice bar and play house, who frigging cares.
I’d also remove vendor credit caps, but make the amount of cash you get from loot pretty trivial compared to what you get from missions, so it’s just not that appealing to sell 15 cheap machineguns. And while I’m wishlisting, I’d love to be able to set up an auto-sell filter, eg. ‘sell non-unique weapons below a particular dps’
Yes and it flows through to the skill system too. 8 points for carrying more crap across yourself and the ship, and 4 more for increasing companion inv. Even more if you include pockets upgrades on suits.
Are these good skills? Not for the player to choose but to be available in the game. What’s the balance here? What’s the decision, carry more crap at the expense of doing more damage? Is that good choice to give the player? How do you balance encounter difficulty around that? You can’t the player has to choose encounters based on their gimped pack rat skills.
Every part of the game needs a single big mod overhaul to pick a coherent direction.
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