At the risk of being a negetive nancy, they haven’t done this with crew 1. So that game is still dead. This might just be a perfunctory action to quell support for the movement. They haven’t made any real promises to have EOL plans for all their games.(As far as I’ve seen)
Wait, this is going to be a Funcom game?? Oh man, Funcom has made some of our favourite games! We adored Anarchy Online, and The Secret World is still one of the mmo’s I would recommend to anyone who wants to try a really unique modern mmo with an amazing story.
Unfortunately when they were developing TSW and Age of Conan, someone made the call to go all in on AOC which was just… not unique in a space saturated with that kind of WoW clone.
TSW ended up not having the cashflow (devs) it needed to release updates and expansions and it fell into disfavour once the player base reached end game. Which is really sad, because even as a “dead” game the story and gameplay are so good.
I really hope they have retained the devs that worked on TSW and have enough cash to push everything into this game. Make it unique like TSW and AO were, push a couple expansions, and there will be players.
I only got to play a bit of The Secret World (or was it Legends or something?) and it was really fun! I was sad I had found it at the end of life. My memory is bad, so my only real memory was er…I was helping around some Haunted Indian Reservation, and the daughter of the owner was rightfully complaining about people coming in and white knighting (and being male) and we panned over to my character…chinese ass woman standing there. And it acknowledge that! She was like “Guess not all the time though” and it was like!!! Excellent!!!
Heads up, because I imagine the DF guys were too PC master race to notice, but you can smooth out a lot of the hitches by using framegen.
There's this weird implementation in the game where if you set frame gen to auto it seems to automatically turn it off if you're over the fps cap and then turn it on when you drop below and it's worth giving that a shot. It took some tweaking but I did end up finding a mix where between that and VRR with a low enough cap to maintain it most of the time but high enough to get acceptable latency the game is... mostly playable?
It was still a shock to go outside for the first time (most of the hitches seem to be around outdoors traversal) and it's still not perfect, but it did clean up a lot of it. Well, some of it. Your mileage may vary based on hardware and expectations, though.
Frame gen shouldn’t be a crutch, and by design it’s only supposed to enhance games that’s get above 60fps naturally. It doesn’t do anything good for the open world that constantly tanks to 45. It’s not a master race thing, it’s a poor optimization thing.
No, the point is the DF video never even tested framegen or upscaling before deeming the issue unsolvable in this video. I'm just trying to offer additional options to tune settings they don't cover in the video that may help.
Frame gen, for the record, is fundamentally a crutch. Specifically for CPU limits. It serves no other purpose. If you don't need it as a crutch you don't need it, period. It takes you from wherever you can get natively to hopefully closer to your monitor refresh rate. If you can reach your refresh rate then you don't need it in the first place.
Or at least it does that in the default implementation from GPU vendors where you're locked into uncapped, non vsynced FPS when using it.
I'm calling out that there seems to be a specific implementation here to use it with a frame cap. And with that fame cap if you can get yourself to, say 45-60 fps you can get a semi-decent 90 or 120 cap out on the other end that does trim down some of the stutters, especially if you also have VRR to eat a few extra miliseconds.
So it's not ideal, you're effectively locking the game to 90 or 120 and then trying to scrape by at 45-60 and double up with frame gen just so you can use an AI frame to slide in between the 45-80ms spike and eat the rest of the time difference with VRR. But hey, it kinda works, at least in my setup. Crutch or no crutch it makes the game more playable for me. I don't have the tools to measure exactly how much more playable, and I'd like to see DF test it, but at a glance it seems to help.
That doesn't mean they shouldn't look into the cause and patch improvements, but if it can take the game from unplayable to playable for some people on some setups that's a good thing.
IME framegen hasn’t meaningfully reduced the open-world hitching. It gets the framerate nice and smooth while standing still, fighting a bandit or whatever… until you walk a bit and the game becomes CPU-limited while streaming in new cells, at which point you noticeably hitch.
The performance in interior cells (including cities) is very good even on Ultra settings.
I suspect that this is one of the compromises they made by keeping the old engine running under the hood, because as DF notes this also happened in the original.
That is entirely possible. My setup seems to be in this sweet spot where the normal performance is high enough over the cap AND the framegen gets you enough extra smoothness AND the VRR is able to eat enough miliseconds off the hitches that it is noticeably improved (but crucially not perfect, so if you're more sensitive than me that may also be part of it). Still, even if it doesn't help for everybody it's worth a shot and not covered in the video.
I bet there is something to having to load the world in chunks in the underlying engine and then having to render the chunk all at once in UE5 that makes UE5's struggles even worse. Still, the game was a shadowdrop, you have to assume they could have taken some time to try to figure it out a bit better.
The worst case scenario is that further optimization isn't an option, but... I mean, even if it is related to what people think it's related they should be able to find some way to ease some of the load off. The observation that a lot of the performance hit is related to hardware Lumen alone points that way. Especially since having a faster base framerate does seem related to having smaller hitches. But hey, who's to say? I guess we'll see where they go from here.
The old video game industry still blows my mind. Competition was so fierce, there were tons of high quality AAA games releasing each year until things suddenly slowed down in the PS4/Xbone era. Granted, a lot of consoles failed and a lot of companies went under but it must have been wild to see Counter Strike, Baldur’s Gate 2, Diablo 2, Deus Ex, Perfect Dark, Red Alert 2, etc. all launch in the same year.
The indie scene today is great, but the amount of AAA games coming out these years are much fewer, and there’s a 50/50 chance it’s going to be a total flop.
Even if the game is well received, if it doesn’t make more money than the last game, then the studio is shuttered, and you’ll never see an official sequel. You’ll be stuck waiting for an indie dev or original dev on kickstarter to come along 5-10 years later, maybe even more.
Indies are making now what would have been AAA back then. And as many great games as there were back then, we get more now. Back then, it was possible to keep up with just about every major release as it came out. Now I’ve got a backlog of 9 games that piqued my interest and came out this year that I haven’t had time to get around to yet, and it’s only April.
So... will this mean we'll finally be able to restart as a new player in the offline mode? I've wanted to start from scratch with TC2 for ever. It's been such a frustration that you can't have more than one player profile per Ubisoft account.
Vincke says the team finds DLC boring to make, so they don’t really want to make it anymore.
I find this driveby comment rather significant.
It means they are trying to conform to the developers’ strengths, desires, interests. They’re shaping huge business decisions around them. That’s just good for everyone, as opposed to devs inefficiently, dispassionately grinding away at something they don’t like.
That’s huge. I’d also posit “happy devs means happy business.” And Larian has repeatedly expressed similar things.
I’ve mostly been ignoring these Oblivion remake posts. I’ll believe it’s actually gonna happen when/if they actually drop it in the next 24-48 hours. I actually don’t give a shit, and it’s one of my favorite games.
I’m with you there. It’s going to be cool and I really want it, but I’ve already completed it a bunch. I’m never going to be able to get properly excited like I would for ES6
Just in case no one knows this, you can absolutely play multiplayer in Subnautica 1. Takes a tiny bit of work and a mod, but doable.
Of course it’s not official, and may be bugs, but doable.
I’m curious what is going to be new in 2, thought the water genre had maxed out before doing deep and making it a horror game. Feel like anything else would just be DLC or a mod.
Below zero was such a disappointment overall. I liked the characters and some of the story but… The vibe was totally off. I liked exploring islands and alien bases in the 1st one but spending the entire latter half in an icy wasteland just had me feeling sour. If I wanted Antarctica I’d play that, I want to be UNDERWATER dammit. Here’s to hoping they learned their lessons and make it closer to subnautica but bigger.
You so absolutely nailed my feelings on it. I was really excited for BZ and it fell pretty flat for me. The extra time out of the water just felt so forced and unnatural to me. I was moderately excited by the big ice worm until I actually played and just found it to be a nuisance. I couldn’t get finished with the ice shelf soon enough.
Also, why is everything so much smaller in BZ? It’s THE OCEAN. It’s supposed to be huge. If anything it should be bigger than the first game. Anyways I agree I hope they learned.
Imo below Zero has the same problem that subnautica 2 will have aswell. Our stupid pattern seeking brain i so good at its job the enviroment will matches to existing experinces and therefore loose its intended alien nature. Just having some meta knowledge with how the game handle difficulty and depth and how a lush biome is more or less save with just a minor predator is working against the intended alien nature. Below Zero had some incredible bioms with mayor layers of depth like the lilypads islands with surfacing, floating and growing lilypads. But most of the bioms had some subtle telling of how the are intended in their color Palette or choice of Vegetation where i knew how the biome will be before i went info it.
Alien nature or not, the fact that BZ limited the ocean experience both depth, length, and breadth-wise and forced way more gameplay above water was a mistake in my eyes which is why it was never truly a sequel.
I did the same thing. I liked the first one so much I want to go back and finish BZ just for completion sake. Maybe I’ll start a new game without survival mode and just breeze through hopefully.
I played the whole game through with multiplayer between me and my partner. It might be better now, but at the time, all of the danger squids were completely inert, so it made it much easier to get deeper and progress further without fear.
Otherwise, it was a total blast and a great time. Excellent game.
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