theverge.com

BlinkAndItsGone, do games w AMD claims there’s nothing stopping Starfield from adding Nvidia DLSS

Here’s the most important part IMO:

He admits that — in general — when AMD pays publishers to bundle their games with a new graphics card, AMD does expect them to prioritize AMD features in return. “Money absolutely exchanges hands,” he says. “When we do bundles, we ask them: ‘Are you willing to prioritize FSR?’”

But Azor says that — in general — it’s a request rather than a demand. “If they ask us for DLSS support, we always tell them yes.”

SO developers aren’t forced contractually to exclude DLSS, but outside the contract language, they are pressured to ignore it in favor of FSR. That explains why these deals tend to result in DLSS being left out, and also why there are some exceptions (e.g. Sony games–I imagine Sony knows what features it wants its PC releases to have and has decided to push back on DLSS inclusion). I think AMD is being honest this time, and I’m surprised it admitted publicly that it’s doing this. Hopefully the word about this will get out and more developers will insist on including DLSS.

rivalary,

I wish Nvidia and AMD would work together to create these features as open standards.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Well, FSR is open, as is FreeSync and most other AMD tech, it’s just that NVIDIA is so dominant that there’s really no reason for them to use anything other than their own proprietary tech. If Intel can eat away at NVIDIA market share, maybe we’ll see some more openness.

conciselyverbose,

I guess they could just use FSR as a wrapper for DLSS, but they made DLSS because there was nothing like it available, and it leverages the hardware to absolutely blow doors off of FSR. They're not comparable effects.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Last I checked, DLSS requires work by the developers to work properly, so it’s less “leveraging the hardware” and more “leveraging better data,” though maybe FSR 3 has a similar process.

conciselyverbose,

It's a hardware level feature, though. The reason they didn't support hardware prior to RTX was because they didn't have the tensor cores to do the right math.

FSR is substantially less capable because it can't assume it has the correct hardware to get the throughput DLSS needs to work. I know the "corporations suck" talking point is fun and there's some truth to it, but most of the proprietary stuff nvidia does is either first or better by a significant bit. They use the marriage of hardware and software to do things you can't do effectively with broad compatibility, because they use the architecture of the cards it's designed for (and going forward) extremely effectively.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I think it’s more the other way around. They designed the feature around their new hardware as a form of competitive advantage. Most of the time, you can exchange cross platform compatibility for better performance.

Look at CUDA vs OpenCL, for example. Instead of improving OpenCL or making CUDA an open standard, they instead double down on keeping it proprietary. They probably get a small performance advantage here, but the main reason they do this is to secure their monopoly. The same goes for GSync vs FreeSync, but it seems they are backing down and supporting FreeSync as well.

They want you to think it’s a pro-consumer move, but really it’s just a way to keep their competition one step behind.

conciselyverbose,

They can't improve openCL. They can make suggestions or proposals, but because broad compatibility are the priority, most of it wouldn't get added. They'd be stuck with a worse instruction set with tooling that spends half its time trying to figure out all the different hardware compatibility you have to deal with.

Cuda is better than openCL. Gsync was better than freesync (though the gap has closed enough that freesync is viable now). DLSS is better than FSR. None of them are small advantages, and they were all created before there was anything else available even if they wanted to. Supporting any of them in place of their own tech would have been a big step back and abandoning what they had just sold their customers.

It's not "pro consumer". It absolutely is "pro technology", though. Nvidia has driven graphic and gpgpu massively forward. Open technology is nice, but it has limitations as well, and Nvidia's approach has been constant substantial improvement to what can be done.

sugar_in_your_tea,

CUDA is only better because the industry has moved to it, and NVIDIA pumps money into its development. OpenCL could be just as good if the industry adopted it and card manufacturers invested in it. AMD and Intel aren’t going to invest as much in it as NVIDIA invests in CUDA because the marketshare just isn’t there.

Look at Vulkan, it has a ton of potential for greater performance, yet many games (at least Baldur’s Gate) work better with DirectX 12, and that’s because they’ve invested resources into making it work better. If those same resources were out into Vulkan development, Vulkan would outperform DirectX on those games.

The same goes for GSync vs FreeSync, most of the problems with FreeSync were poor implementations by monitors, or poor support from NVIDIA. More people had NVIDIA cards, so GSync monitors tended to work better. If NVIDIA and AMD had worked together at the start, variable refresh would’ve worked better from day one.

Look at web standards, when organizations worked well together (e.g. to overtake IE 6), the web progressed really well and you could largely say “use a modern browser” and things would tend to work well. Now that Chrome has a near monopoly, there’s a ton of little things that don’t work as nicely between Chrome and Firefox. Things were pretty good until Chrome became dominant, and now it’s getting worse.

It absolutely is “pro technology”

Kind of. It’s more of an excuse to be anti-consumer by locking out competition with a somewhat legitimate “pro technology” stance.

If they really were so “pro technology,” why not release DLSS, GSync, and CUDA as open standards? That way other companies could provide that technology in new ways to more segments of the market. But instead of that, they go the proprietary route, and the rest try to make open standards to oppose their monopoly on that tech.

I’m not proposing any solutions here, just pointing out that NVIDIA does this because it works to secure their dominant market share. If AMD and Intel drop out, they’d likely stop the pace of innovation. If AMD and Intel catch up, NVIDIA will likely adopt open standards. But as long as they have a dominant position, there’s no reason for them to play nicely.

conciselyverbose,

Cuda was first, and worked well out of the gate. Resources that could have been spent improving cuda for an ecosystem that was outright bad for a long time didn't make sense.

Gsync was first, and was better because it solved a hardware problem with hardware. It was a decade before displays came default with hardware where solving it with software was short of laughable. There was nothing nvidia could have done to make freesync better than dogshit. The approach was terrible.

DLSS was first, and was better because it came with hardware capable of actually solving the problem. FSR doesn't and is inherently never going to be near as useful because of it. The cycles saved are offset significantly by the fact that it needs its own cycles of the same hardware to work.

Opening the standard sounds good, but it doesn't actually do much unless you also compromise the product massively for compatibility. If you let AMD call FSR DLSS because they badly implement the methods, consumers don't get anything better. AMD's "DLSS" still doesn't work, people now think DLSS is bad, and you get accused of gimping performance on AMD because their cards can't do the math, all while also making design compromises to facilitate interoperability. And that's if they even bother doing the work. There have been nvidia technologies that have been able to run on competitor's cards and that's exactly what happened.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Opening the standard… compromise the product massively

Citation needed.

All NVIDIA needs to do is:

  1. release the spec with a license AMD and Intel can use
  2. form a standards group, or submit it to an existing one
  3. ensure any changes to the spec go through the standards group; they can be first to market, provided they agree on the spec change

That’s it. They don’t need to make changes to suit AMD and Intel’s hardware, that’s on those individual companies to make work correctly.

This works really well in many other areas of computing, such as compression algorithms, web standards, USB specs, etc. Once you have a standard, other products can target it and the consumer has a richer selection of compatible products.

Right now, if you want GPGPU, you need to choose between OpenCL and CUDA, and each choice will essentially lock you out of certain product categories. Just a few years ago, the same as true for FreeSync, though FreeSync seems to have won.

But NVIDIA seems to be allergic to open standards, even going so far as to make their own power cable when they could have worked with the existing relevant standards bodies.

conciselyverbose,

Going through a standards group is a massive compromise. It in and of itself completely kills the marriage between the hardware and software designs. Answering to anyone on architecture design is a huge downgrade that massively degrades the product.

sugar_in_your_tea,

How do you explain PCIe, DDR, and M.2 standards? Maybe we could’ve had similar performance sooner if motherboard vendors did their own thing, but with standardization, we get more variety and broader adoption.

If a company wants or needs a major change, they go through the standards body and all competitors benefit from that work. The time to market for an individual feature may be a little longer, but the overall pace is likely pretty similar, they just need to front load the I/O design work.

conciselyverbose,

Completely and utterly irrelevant? They are explicitly for the purpose of communicating between two pieces of hardware from different manufacturers, and obscenely simple. The entire purpose is to do the same small thing faster. Standardizing communication costs zero.

The architecture of GPUs is many, many orders of magnitude more complex, solving problems many orders more complex than that. There isn't even a slim possibility that hardware ray tracing would exist if Nvidia hadn't unilaterally done so and said "this is happening now". We almost definitely wouldn't have refresh rate synced displays even today, either. It took Nvidia making a massive investment in showing it was possible and worth doing for a solid decade of completely unusable software solutions before freesync became something that wasn't vomit inducing.

There is no such thing as innovation on standards. It's worth the sacrifice for modular PCs. It's not remotely worth the sacrifice to graphics performance. We'd still be doing the "literally nothing but increasing core count and clocks" race that's all AMD can do for GPUs if Nvidia needed to involve other manufacturers in their giant leaps forward.

sugar_in_your_tea,

communicating between two pieces of hardware from different manufacturers

  • like a GPU and a monitor? (FreeSync/GSync)
  • like a GPU and a PSU? (the 12v cable)

DLSS and RTX are the same way, but instead of communicating between two hardware products, it’s communicating between two software components, and then translating those messages onto commands for specialized hardware.

Both DLSS and RTX are a simpler, more specific casez of GPGPU, so they likely could’ve opened and extended CUDA, extended OpenCL, or extended Vulkan/DirectX instead, with the hardware reporting whether it can handle DLSS or RTX extensions efficiently. CPUs do exactly that for things like SIMD instructions, and compilers change the code depending on the features that CPU exposes.

But instead in all of those cases, they went with proprietary and minimal documentation. That means it was intentional that they don’t want competitors to compete directly using those technologies, and instead expect them to make their own competing APIs.

Here’s how the standards track should work:

  1. company proposes new API A for the standards track
  2. company builds a product based on proposal A
  3. standards body considers and debates proposal A
  4. company releases product based on A, ideally after the standards body agrees on A
  5. if there is a change needed to A, company releases a patch to support the new, agreed-upon standard, and competitors start building their own implementations of A

That’s it. Step 1 shouldn’t take much effort, and if they did a good job designing the standard, step 5 should be pretty small.

But instead, NVIDIA ignores the whole process and just does their own thing until either they get their way or they’re essentially forced to adopt the standard. They basically lost the GSync fight (after years of winning), and they seem to have lost the Wayland EGLStream proposal and have adopted the GBM standard. But they win more than they lose, so they keep doing it.

That’s why we need competition, not because NVIDIA isn’t innovating, but because NVIDIA is innovating in a way to lock out competition. If AMD and Intel can eat away at NVIDIA’s dominant market share, NVIDIA will be forced to pay nice more often.

conciselyverbose, (edited )

Every single thing about what you're discussing literally guarantees that GPUs are dogshit. There's no path to any of the features we're discussing getting accepted to open standards if AMD has input. They only added them after Nvidia proved how much better they are than brute force by putting them in people's hands.

Standards do not and fundamentally cannot work when actual innovation is called for. Nvidia competing is exactly 100% of the reason we have the technology we have. We'd be a decade behind, bare minimum, if AMD had any input at all in a standards body that controlled what Nvidia can make.

We're not going to agree, though, so I'll stop here.

sugar_in_your_tea,

The process I detailed does not require consensus before a product can be released, it just allows for that consensus to happen eventually. So by definition, it won’t impede progress. It does encourage direct competition, and that’s something NVIDIA would rather avoid.

mindbleach,

Nvidia of all companies does not get to whine about this.

BlinkAndItsGone, (edited )

Well, Nvidia isn’t directly involved here at all, they’ve only commented on the issue once (to say that they don’t block other companies’ upscaling). The objections tend to come from users, the majority of whom have Nvidia cards and want to use what is widely considered the superior upscaling technology.

mindbleach,

Oh, are they annoyed by vendor-specific software, now that it affects them? My heart bleeds.

AlbertScoot, do games w AMD claims there’s nothing stopping Starfield from adding Nvidia DLSS

I mean, this has always been the case. This is a practice going back decades for video card manufacturers.

nevemsenki, do games w Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down

Well fuck, it’s now 150% we ain’t getting Freespace3 anymore.

AceTKen,
@AceTKen@lemmy.ca avatar

Embracer still owns all the IP. It may still happen if they think it’s financially viable!

nevemsenki,

Don’t give me hope…

echo64,

Embracer is currently the one killing half the companies they acquired a year ago. If embracer is even around a year from now it’s far more likely that they are selling ips rather than developing them

ryper,

I think Interplay still owns Freespace. They still exist, apparently.

Gork,

Freespace 2 was such a great game.

I still want to know what lies past the second Knossos portal.

nevemsenki,

If you haven’t, play the mod campaign Derelict. Unfortunately it’s the closest to FS3 that we’ll ever get, Blue Planet aside…

reverendsteveii,

There’s a wing commander mod that’s megadope as well. FS2 is one of the few story games I can go through just again and again.

InverseParallax,

Volition dies.

Literally the only thought that goes through my head :(

Need to finish war in heaven, the difficulty spikes a few times.

Ashtear,

Between this and it now becoming clear how limited the space exploration is in Starfield, it’s a bad day for space sim fans.

Redredme,

Yes indeed, fuck saints row, this is the real loss.

Ah well. We’ll always have the fact that the freespace community was the first community which got pissed of by the great Derek whatshisname. That was fun.

And Fortunately we’ve hard light productions.

Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever,

We were never getting Freespace 3. And, arguably, wouldn’t have “wanted” it because the vast majority of the people who worked on that left literally decades ago.

But a remaster/remake of 1+2 could have led to a revival of the space dogfighting genre.

BallShapedMan, do games w Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down
@BallShapedMan@lemmy.world avatar

I hope someone picks up their IPs. I want a good current gen Saints Row.

aaronstc,

They were owned by THQ Nordic so I assume they’ll retain the rights.

BallShapedMan,
@BallShapedMan@lemmy.world avatar

Got it, thank you!

FatTony, do games w Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down
@FatTony@lemmy.world avatar

Damn, knowing this reboot was supposed to be the start of the new Saints Row franchise. It’s depressing to just see it crumble down like this. I mean seriously in the broad scheme of things what happened here? It’s like after SR4 they were all out of ideas.

Let’s try recreating Saints Row 4 but with Johnny Gat as the protagonist … and also he’s now in hell.

Let’s try being Overwatch!

Let’s try starting from scratch!

Let’s try permanently shutting down!

dog,

Probably just no more actually talented people where they were needed. Be it anything from devs to board of directors.

Damage,

I mean, SR4 was fun, but ideas seemed to be dwindling down already.

DrPop,

A lot of the features in SR4 were DLC in SR3. I think they took the story as far as it can reasonably go. SR2 was the best.

Potatos_are_not_friends,

I’m one of the few who saw Saints Row 1&2 as a discount GTA clone and fell in love with Saints Row 3&4.

Honestly I don’t know who the new Saints Row was for.

canis_majoris,
@canis_majoris@lemmy.ca avatar

I’d say that was probably the general attitude for SR1 and 2 overall - they were largely GTA clones, but when GTA took a turn into gritty and realistic, SR3 took a left on silly and surreal which allowed it to separate itself from the stigma of being a “GTA clone” and into its own category.

Even SR2 has a lot of really silly stuff that they don’t really do in GTA games, like the property value minigame where you spray literal shit over everything. Stuff like that eventually became too absurd for Rockstar to want to do but it was perfect for SR.

3 is one of the only games I managed to 100% because I enjoyed it greatly. 4 was funny at first but then it became boring after a while when you had all your superpowers and it got boring to keep fighting the same alien SWAT cops over and over again.

For Gat out of Hell, I never bought into the “Johnny Gat is the GOAT” attitude that SR tries to get everybody to acknowledge. It was literally just a filler game comprised of mini-games, and I would often opt to play Kinzie instead of Johnny because I just like her character more.

Aielman15,
@Aielman15@lemmy.world avatar

SR1 was discount GTA, but SR2 was its own thing already.

Huge and detailed world, infinite customisation options, and a story that balanced comedic relief with serious moments.

It’s a shame that the game is so buggy, because I’d replay it a lot more otherwise.

In comparison, SR3 had a lot less content: smaller game world, much shorter story mode, less side quests.

odelik, (edited )

This has more to do with Embracer Group’s June announcement for upcoming large scale restructuring, layoffs, game cancelations, and studio closures than anything else. Embracer has even hit hard at studios that were profitable or had games in the pipeline that were expected to be a huge sales success.

As much as I love games, the industry is a tough place to work, and the layoff cycles are striking once again.

GreenMario,

Buy up everything and WHOOPS we spent too much close down everything!

Fucking bullshit.

Kinglink,

Truthfully Agents of Mayhem isn’t Overwatch… Which is kind of the problem. It wasn’t saints row, It wasn’t a new game. It just kind of existed.

Carighan,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

Let’s try recreating Saints Row 4 but with Johnny Gat as the protagonist … and also he’s now in hell.

And IMO even that would have been okay (plus playing as Kinzie was far better) if it had been actual DLC. It was alright as a “I played SR4, and wish I had ~12-15 more hours to go in it”. It was essentially the same game, some new areas, swapped main char but it matters little, done. It was clearly once much smaller and meant as DLC, tbh.

ipkpjersi, (edited )

Saints Row 2022 took a very different direction than all of the previous games combined, and it wasn’t a direction the die-hard fans of the series liked for the most part.

The same thing is gonna happen with the always-online likely DRM-filled freemium Skate 3 sequel called Skate. I can see that one end up flopping and that might kill off the series, and that makes me really sad. It makes me even more sad because it’s the first Skate game in the series actually coming to the PC, and they’re almost guaranteed to fuck it up. Corporate greed is killing gaming, modern gaming is shit for the most part.

Kaldo, do games w Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down
@Kaldo@kbin.social avatar

I think everyone was kinda expecting it but it's still sad to see 😥

Myro, do games w Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down

30 year old studio. That’s quite sad. Another victim of hyper capitalism.

CriticalMiss,

Another victim of arrogance perhaps. Before the game even released fans told them that’s not what they want and they said “fuck you, you don’t understand shit” and proceeded to make one of the most uninteresting video games on the planet.

Coeus,

So basically capitalism

Ginjutsu, (edited )

…no? It honestly has more to do with ego than anything, and I say that as somebody who currently works in the game industry. It’s shocking how out of touch some developers can be when it comes to delivering a product that the players want, especially when those developers hold actual positions of power over the rest of the team (directing and managerial roles).

Jackthelad,

Volition also did this with Red Faction: Armageddon. They took everything that was good about Guerrilla, threw all of it in the bin and then made Armageddon.

So Volition have form for not doing what the players want.

Jackthelad,

Under the socialist utopia, every company would be able to make things nobody wants.

Such joy.

EvilBit,

Ah yet another “I don’t understand socialism at all yet it’s the thing I obsess about most” stance.

Jackthelad,

It’s just a joke.

EvilBit,

What, socialism or your statement about it?

kmkz_ninja,

Yeesh

ech,

If Embracer Group wasn’t frantically trying to right the ship, Volition would’ve been left alone. This is on the gratuitously large capitalist conglomerate that’s bought up every studio it could.

Spacecraft,

Damn hyper capitalism. THQ should have kept funneling money to a company that couldn’t make a game people wanted.

hal_5700X, (edited )
@hal_5700X@lemmy.world avatar

Sir, this is Lemmy.world. lemmygrad.ml is that way.

DeadWorld, do games w Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down

RIP to a company that made my favorite game series (SR2-4)

hogunner, do games w Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down

As someone who loved their older games, this sucks; but as someone who has played their newer games, this was expected.

Psythik,

The remake was so boring that I uninstalled the game before I even finished the first mission.

hogunner,

I lasted a little longer but not much. It really was bad. I reinstalled it after their giant patch that was supposed to fix it and gave it a second chance: the shooting was better but the main issues with everything else were still there.

It was like they asked ChatGPT to create a Saints game.

EssentialCoffee,

City Unleashed: Crime Revolt

Default (GPT-3.5)

User Create the plot for a game similar to the first four Saints Row games

ChatGPT Title: “City Unleashed”

Plot: In the sprawling metropolis of Havencross, crime syndicates have taken control, leaving the city in chaos. You play as a street-smart vigilante who rises to power in order to reclaim the city from the clutches of these criminal organizations. As you build your own crew and establish dominance, you’ll face off against rival gangs, corrupt officials, and powerful crime lords.

Starting as a small-time crook with a personal vendetta, you’ll complete daring heists, engage in intense street races, and execute audacious stunts to earn respect and resources. Your actions catch the attention of an underground resistance that seeks to topple the syndicates. They offer you support, guidance, and a chance to reshape Havencross.

The game offers an open-world environment, allowing you to explore the sprawling city, engage in a variety of activities, and make choices that influence the narrative. Customization plays a significant role, not only in terms of your character’s appearance but also in building your gang’s identity, from outfits to vehicles to hideouts.

Throughout the game, you’ll encounter memorable characters, each with their own motivations and backstories. As you forge alliances and rivalries, the balance of power in the city shifts dynamically. The story takes unexpected turns as you uncover the dark secrets behind the syndicates’ rise to power and their connections to influential figures in the city.

With a blend of over-the-top action, humor, and engaging storytelling, “City Unleashed” captures the essence of the first four Saints Row games, delivering a high-octane, open-world experience filled with outrageous missions, explosive combat, and a dynamic environment that reacts to your choices.

ChatGPT did way better.

Carighan,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

I’ll be honest, that is kinda how the new Saints Row was probably pitched in the design docs.

The problem is in the details. They failed to:

  • Create other games worth mention.
  • Have memorable characters.
  • Implement motivating vendettas or any personal motivation.
  • Make the city feel alive, which invalidates the whole open-world environment (a criticism I’d level against CP2077 too, it feels way too sterile).
  • Have any meaningful way of influencing your relationship with characters or forces.
  • Have a story worth mentioning.

In a lot of ways, the pitch document probably describe a good game. Just like ChatGPT does, there. But note how your mind is filling in that all of this would end up in the actual game, and be competently done. And that’s where the actual GenZ Saints Row fell apart, too.

CluckN,

It was so boring I deleted my OS before the opening cutscene finished.

Cross_Rhythm,

It was so boring I tossed my tower out a window before I even purchased it.

WhiskyTangoFoxtrot,

It was so boring I rebooted the simulation before it was even announced. Unfortunately, things don’t seem to have gone any better this time around.

DarkThoughts,

I didn't even bother buying it. The trailers looked so bad and then you'd have to wait for a Steam release. No thanks. When the first gameplay videos dropped it looked like absolute trash and really just rehashed all the repetitive content from the previous games, which was plentifully criticized to be a huge weakpoint of them already, with a lame story, idiotic characters and a boring map on top of it. It was just a rehash of all the bad, but I guess that's all they could pull off.

Carighan,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

For me, the big “Nope” was how despite being a modern game and running like arse (and not looking all that well), the streets are mostly empty. I mean at the very least I would assume they could re-implement SR3 one-to-one in more … opulent?

But instead it looks and feels worse than the older games, even in a direct comparison, because everything is dead and empty and still stutters like crazy.

Blackmist,

SR2 was the peak of the series for me. I played 3 and 4 but they already felt like they were being constrained by budget even back then. They were mostly copy pasted mini games with far fewer missions.

Carighan,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah there’s always a lot of divided audience feedback. SR2 was too serious for me still, it felt like a low-budget GTA clone and I wasn’t even a GTA fan in the first place.

But SR3 and 4? They were so ridiculously over the top, they parodied the whole genre. A genre I love to see made fun of, so they were perfect for me.

Blackmist,

SR2 just felt like the crazy Vice City sequel that Rockstar refused to give me at the time.

San Andreas, GTA4 felt too serious. SR3 and 4 felt too silly, to the point of turning into Crackdown.

GTA5 felt back on track though, and that’s probably mostly down to Trevor. You can cause utter mayhem without breaking character.

CheeseNoodle,

3 struck the perfect balance for me, it was like playing an action movie that didn’t take itself too seriously while still maintaining a tenuous grasp on reality. 4 fully jumped the shark for me and was hard to enjoy.

roguetrick, do games w Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down

They had a lot of hits. Descent was revolutionary.

Damage, do games w Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down

We have to remember that it’s the people who make the games, not the companies. I expect the talent will find work somewhere else, and hopefully create something great once again.

InverseParallax,

They won’t.

You don’t understand, it’s not the companies that make everything suck, it’s the management, modern software management crushes the beauty out of both the work and the design, and passionate visionaries are displaced for marketing droids with PowerPoint slides about dlc monetization through nfts.

AllonzeeLV, (edited ) do games w Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down

I enjoyed the new game, just as I did the previous titles.

They made a mistake of setting, placing it in a sparse desert city didn’t do much for visual spectacle, but imho it wasn’t anything close to the irredeemable piece of shit people made it out to be.

I honestly think gamer’s expectations are too high in general these days, and treating an enjoyable game like crap because they didn’t meet unrealistic expectations will just lead to more safely profitable regurgitated remasters and microtransaction games as the industry is drained of any passion or risk tolerance, just as what happened to hollywood abandoning stories in favor of profit formulas and known IPs.

canis_majoris,
@canis_majoris@lemmy.ca avatar

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect progress from a sequel. I think it’s even more reasonable to expect progress from a reboot.

The whole point of rebooting something is to be able to bring fresh ideas into the system, which can include stories or mechanics. At the very least a sequel should have some kind of feature parity with the first game, otherwise you’ve essentially just made a shitty DLC as the next iteration by dropping features.

Saint’s Row 2 had a great amount of content, and even when we were playing over LAN with Hamachi, the game was somehow smart enough to figure out what stupid shit we were getting up to, and it prompted us to play “death tag”. We didn’t even know it was a built in feature in the game, we had just been running around killing each other in various funny ways until the game said “hey, we have a structured way you can do this” and we had a blast.

Saint’s Row 3 expanded on everything SR2 had set up. It drove the story forward, the engine was much better than the original PS2 iteration and there were just as many minigames if not more.

Saint’s Row 4 took everything to the extreme though, which is unfortunate because that’s really where the death starts happening. When they literally blew up the planet as a plot point and turned it into a Matrix parody it lost a ton of focus and grounding that made it enjoyable long-term.

finthechat, do games w Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down
@finthechat@kbin.social avatar

F in the chat

FrankTheHealer, do games w Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down

I mean, I could see this coming.

Saints Row reboot at least had an interesting setting and played okay. But it was let down by awful writing and a lack of scope.

It didnt have all the features of even Saints Row 2. The plot seemed to pander to millennials in a very “how do you do fellow kids” kinda way. Some of the gameplay was repetitive and boring and it had a few bugs.

With a different writing team and another year in development, it could have been a huge success, but they didnt so it wasn’t. RIP Volition.

Potatos_are_not_friends, (edited )

how do you do fellow kids

That’s it! I couldn’t figure out why, a SR fan, had zero interest in their latest release.

It’s because that trailer was oozing with “fellow kids” energy.

Caligvla, do games w Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down
@Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Great, so no more Saints Row 2 fix for PC I’m guessing, just great.

There was this guy working on the patch and he was basically the only person in Volition that cared about it, guy got cancer and instead of spending his last days with his family he worked on it until he died. His dying wish was to get this patch out. Soon after they diverted all their resources to that garbage game, it failed and now we’re here.

Both insulting to his memory and for everyone waiting for this patch for damn years. Fuck Volition and fuck Embracer.

SilverFlame,

Years ago when I played SR2 on PC I needed to download a reverse speed hack (a slow hack) because my processor clock speed was faster than the console the game was designed for. Would that patch have fixed that? If so, very sad indeed.

Psythik,

And here I thought that tying game speed to CPU speed was a concept that died in the early 90s…

Caligvla,
@Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Pfft-- Japanese devs are still doing this stupid shit nowadays. It’s no wonder their in-house PC ports are usually hit or miss.

Carighan,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

I mean with From Software in particular I am surprised they do PC ports at all. They clearly loathe the platform, and they seem to refuse to even have a single programmer that knows anything about PCs that isn’t from Wikipedia, nevermind owns one. Their ports are always so laughably bad in all technical aspects, they feel like comedy.

addie,
@addie@feddit.uk avatar

Dark Souls 1 had the stupid 30 fps cap and rendered at 720p and then stretched it. But otherwise it was very stable and bug free, totally playable from beginning to end. Dark Souls 2, Scholar, 3, Sekiro, and Elden Ring were all fantastic ports, rock solid 60 fps, all the settings that you could ask for, and ran great. If I was picking on a Japanese dev that did shitty ports, wouldn’t really have picked From.

Carighan,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

I mean just looking at Elden Ring here:

  • The engine was apparently optimized for stutters on PC, not the actual game.
  • Keybinds were incomplete, and you couldn’t even rebind the ones that were doable properly because of the fixed nature of some keys. (An incredibly common problem for so many games)
  • Lots of auto-combo keys (where one key does a lot of things instead of using all the buttons available), too.
  • Mouse acceleration completely broken, and they never fixed that. Mods can somewhat rectify it, granted.
  • The re-auth to the online server makes sense from the way a console handles launching/closing games, but not for a PC. Makes going back out for settings (since at launch a lot could not be changed mid-game) really fun. 😑
  • The UI makes no use of the keyboard or mouse, and in fact seems to actively hate them.

All of these would be trivial except maybe the stuttering if they had developers that regularly do PC games. They’re just part of basic development or basic UX evaluation.

TechieDamien,

Apart from your first point, I think this just indicates that they hate m+kb users. There is a reason people say that people that use m+kb in a souls game are masochists!

canis_majoris,
@canis_majoris@lemmy.ca avatar

Bethesda games up to the Xbox 360 era were mostly processor-bound prior to community patches.

Oblivion on the 360 would actually secretly reboot your console during long loading screens to clear the cache when it started running out of RAM due to memory leaks. Bethesda is hilarious.

SkyezOpen,

Let’s not forget that in fallout fucking 76 speed was tied to framerate on launch. An online game. With a beefy compy and graphics set to low, you could look at the ground and absolutely zoom across the wasteland.

Mind you, that error was already patched in fallout 4, so they literally copy pasted an old version of 4 to base 76 off of. Here’s hoping starfield isn’t literally just skyrim with space textures added.

canis_majoris,
@canis_majoris@lemmy.ca avatar

That game was so fucked I actually blocked out my memories of playing it. Now all I remember is going to the office to get fans to get screws to repair my shit because I was trying to upgrade something and my guns broke because weapon degradation is fucking bullshit.

I heard that Bethesda was being told by Microsoft to adapt the Idtech engine that runs Doom and Id games to be moddable, and (if you can believe this) media are reporting that it’s the “least buggy Bethesda game on launch to date” so maybe something did happen. Or they’re lying.

SkyezOpen,

Talking about starfield? I guess I wouldn’t be surprised that they’re being forced to shape up, and the reviews seem pretty good so far. I’m still gonna give it a few months before looking at it seriously though. I tend to wait on all triple A games just because how launches traditionally go (baldurs gate being an exception, girlfriend was too hype to wait).

canis_majoris,
@canis_majoris@lemmy.ca avatar

I play a lot of games on Gamepass so I am basically just renting it.

Carighan,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

Here’s hoping starfield isn’t literally just skyrim with space textures added.

Bold of you to assume anything wil ever change with their total lack of QA.

wutBEE,

I thought that was Morrowind on the OG Xbox? Or did they do that on both? Still a hilarious fix, I remember Morrowind taking so long to load and thought it was due to the cheese collection I was building up in Balmora.

Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow,

Haven’t played any Japanese games recently?

Psythik,

Nope. It’s been years.

canis_majoris,
@canis_majoris@lemmy.ca avatar

SR2 is unplayable without stuff like Gentlemen of the Row on modern machines. Fixes a bunch of baseline bugs on the port in addition to removing the processor-bound bullshit.

SinkingLotus,
@SinkingLotus@lemmy.world avatar

I recall a few games where I’ve had to limit the processor speed.

The weirdest one was an old adventure point and click. It was either “The 11th Hour” or “The 7th Guest”. It had a puzzle where you need to beat the CPU in a board game.

At the time it was released, it was possible. On a modern PC, not so much. The more powerful your processor, the more skilled the CPU was in the board game. Made it impossible.

BudgieMania, (edited )

Great, so no more Saints Row 2 fix for PC I’m guessing, just great.

Which would be kinda fucking wild considering it was literally someone's dying wish and something they passionately worked on even while they were dying... That project not coming to fruition due to financial quarter this, franchise expectations... that would be absolutely ghoulish.

mostNONheinous,

Who died exactly? I ask because I work less than a block From the Volition offices. I’ve tattooed a few employees their, but there was a guy I would see walking around in a sort of Cowboy hat that I think worked there and I havent seen him in what feels like a year or two.

BudgieMania,

He was known as IdolNinja on the internet

https://www.pcgamer.com/saints-row-modder-and-volition-community-developer-mike-watson-aka-idolninja-has-died/

He passed away mid 2021 but had been convalescing for a while before that as far as I know

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