Here’s what the device is if (like me) you didn’t know what it was (and, if, maybe like me, you didn’t want to watch some random video).
It seems to me that those machines are poor PCs and poor Steam Deck wannabes.
However, they do remind me of my favourite PC of all time, the fabulous Vaio C1 PictureBook by Sony. Mine had 64 Megs of memory (extended to 192 I think) and 12Gigs of disk. And, you bet it ran Linux like a champ (Mandrake, with KDE).
To be fair, the GPD brand has been around for years so it’s not like they saw the SteamDeck release and tried to profit on it. They’ve been THE brand that has been trying to push the portable gaming pc paradigm for a decade, until Valve just “made it right” (price, performances and usability).
It doesn’t speak of the quality of the products nor the viability of their specific solutions, just a reminder they’re not a “random” brand.
I see they have a number of little machines that can come in very handy in a lot of cases. So while I’m not convinced by that one specifically, it doesn’t reflect on the whole lineup. A lot of their gadgets are quite nice.
However I’m more convinced by their “tech in a pocket” systems than by the gaming ones.
Without GPD and others, there likely wouldn’t even be a Steam Deck. They really paved the way and made the case for handheld PCs, which proved to Valve that there was a market worth investing in.
I think digital foundry hit the nail on the head when they said “This isn’t a space simulation like No Man’s Sky or Star Citizen, it’s a Bethesda RPG with space as a background setting”. For a lot of people that’s not a bad thing, but the advertising for this game set expectations wrong.
Still, the seamlessness should be there, I don’t care how they mask it, but it should be there somewhat, again, this is 2023. It doesn’t even do simple fade to blacks, but full blown loading screens everywhere.
Also, travelling with the ship mechanic is incredibly, frustratingly cumbersome. For example, let’s say you wanted to jump to Sol for the first time, in Starfield, you’d do:
Select and mark your destination through map screen.
Somehow exit the map screen (either mash B or hold B and tap B again to exit the menu, cumbersome)
Highlight your weapons with the D-Pad and mash down button.
Highlight GRAV and mash the up button.
Enjoy game stripping controls away from you.
Go back into map screen to mark surface spot you want to go to.
Hold X.
Voilà, you’re there, insantly.
Why have an entire space mechanic, if you’re just gonna make it frustrating to interact with? Game is okay with teleporting you around at times, but not others as well. It literally disrespects your time, but not in a good way. Speaking of a game that disrespects your time well, it’s Elite, which the flow of events would be:
Open Galaxy Map with Y+Left D-Pad and select a destination.
Exit with tapping B, once.
Align your ship with the destination and throttle up.
Tap Y to initiate jump.
Enjoy being able to look around or (albeit barely) interact with your screens.
Open System Map with Y+Right D-Pad and select your destination.
Align the ship with destination.
Open Navigation Panel via X+Left D-Pad, select your target and enable Supercruise Assist.
Enjoy ship taking you there, feel free to interact with panels, photo mode, chat, etc.
Sure, it’s a lot more complicated as it is a sim, but see that you don’t really do redundant actions and you’re in control most of the time. Also, no loading screens as the jumping effect will mask the system change, and the “dropping from Supercruise” screen will mask the second loading screen. Funnily enough, you’ll wait more but feel like it took less.
I don’t want Starfield to be be Elite or Star Citizen, but it doesn’t even have the rudimentary systems in place. For example, I thought you were able to fly anywhere with your ship in the atmosphere and outside it. Just not seamlessly transition between those. That’d be “possible” to have as the game already does this technically. It just isn’t there for whatever reason.
Also this basically breaks exploration as the wast majority of travelling you’ll do is via the menus and loading screens due to the exact same issues. I remind you this game was marketed as an exploration game with 1000 and whatnot.
This is also the case for game play as well. There are just way too many loading screens. Especially weird when they already have airlocks which would mask vast majority of those perfectly.
Bethesda’s engine disallows that entirely. Everything has to be chunked into pieces with loading screens between – every previous Bethesda game has done that, so it’s not really a surprise.
Agree it would be neat, but I also already have No Man’s Sky, and I’m looking forward to Bethesda competing on story.
It blows my mind that Bethesda have owned id Software for over a decade and haven’t at any point got them to make a version of id Tech engine for their games.
There’s literally no reason the graphics wizards at id couldn’t make a Bethesda branch of the engine that uses similar or identical workflows to Creation but also employs all the best practices for a modern open world engine.
Like, modders have made their own Open Morrowind engine from scratch, in their spare fucking time. It runs all the same files and all the same mods work, without any of the drawbacks of the Gamebryo engine. It would be trivial for id’s engineers, with their experience and resources, to make something better. For some reason Bethesda just… keep bolting new shit to the creaking husk of their old engine.
There’s literally no reason the graphics wizards at id couldn’t make a Bethesda branch of the engine that uses similar or identical workflows to Creation but also employs all the best practices for a modern open world engine.
It's hard to take your opinion seriously with this kind of statement. It has some real "It's 2023, where is my flying car?" energy.
At the end of the day, it's a lot easier to write a wishlist of game engine features than it is to actually develop said engine.
id Tech was already an open world engine with id Tech 5, after being a regular map-based engine for id Tech 4 and the Quake engines preceding it. It was then scaled back to normal maps for id Tech 6.
They can and have made it do whatever they want. What’s missing is the will from Bethesda to pay for it.
I’d argue it would be smarter to upgrade CE to meet modern standards than creating a branch of id’s software while porting all of existing Bethesda tools.
we don’t have access to the source so we can’t really say things are bolted on. it’s also possible that code is removed as it’s made obsolete.
I don’t think you would have to create an entirely new engine to support elite dangerous type of warping, or elevators even now they could make the illusion better
Yeah, as soon as it became known that this is still on the Creation Engine, I knew there would be loading screens galore. Seamless exploration of planets and actual infinite space flight is just not something this engine is capable of. Hell, I’m impressed they managed to squeeze even the little space flight out of it that they did.
An engine doesn’t disallow anything. The engine wouldn’t work with multiplayer, but then it did. The engine wasn’t 64-bit until it was. Bethesda could have added it, but they didn’t for whatever reason they have.
Fallout 4’s elevators were loading screens but you never faded to black and load in again. There are plenty of ways to mask a loading screen (as well just leaving a loading screen while keeping things menu-free), Bethesda just chose not to.
I’m not sure, been trying to find the answer. But FSR3 they’ve stated will continue to be open source and prior versions have supported Vulkan on the developer end. It sounds like this is a solution for using it in games that didn’t necessarily integrate it though? So it might be separate. Unclear.
I unironically love that game. It was equal parts bold and stupid. Where else you can find a game about a cartoon mascot character who can side with a alien-demon invasion to try to kill the president and the hero protagonist? SEGA can be judged for many things but they weren't afraid to dare.
I also really like how they did multiple endings. I know ultimately there is a single canon one but it's still interesting to see all the others.
Compared to Sonic Heroes which was released during the same generation, I like this game much more.
Playing the first mission a bunch of times was a bit of a chore but I did like the multiple endings and branching story. I’ve played around half of the endings many years ago. The “I’m an Android now, I guess?” ending is my favourite.
At the end of book 2, a previously dead character is revealed to be “alive” - which then leads to the activation of the gates and investigation on Illus
Interesting thing is, they never claimed they can 😀
I am not even sure how far along they are with the game, so maybe they aren’t in a position to talk about performance and visual fidelity, but this is going to make people think this is how Witcher 4 will look and run.
No one has been doing that kind of claims directly since… TW3 actually ? Or maybe Watch Dogs. Epic Games and CDPR know that every content creator under the sun will run with that and make these claims for them to start the hype machine.
Yeah… I was going to say this can blow up on their face if the game isn’t that good, but even when it happened with Cyberpunk 2077, they still made tons of money, and everyone seems to have forgotten that it ever happened, so maybe it won’t really matter to them.
I was never a huge fan of the base game (after Morrowind, the far more generic fantasy setting was underwhelming and I absolutely hated the Oblivion parts), but I loved the Shivering Isles expansion. Tempted to get it for that alone. The fugly Oblivion character models needed to be redone BADLY, too.
Shivering Isles rivals Morrowind in my mind. It has a strange and unique setting and most of the content is incredibly well-written, which contrasts sharply with the standard medieval setting of baseline Oblivion (mandatory reminder that Cyrodiil was supposed to be a rainforest, but the devs retconned it to make development easier).
The other expansion, Knights of the Nine, was just a bunch of fetch quests to unlock an armor set and was disappointing in comparison to even the base game (though at least the final boss fight was cool). It also put behavioral tracking on the DLC’s rewards that would disable them if your character gained infamy, forcing you to repeat a bunch of boring travel quests to fix them whenever this happened. There’s a reason KotN never comes up in discussions about the game.
The fugly character models needed to be redone BADLY, too.
I kinda wonder what the NPCs in that one village part of a quest that mimics Shadow Over Innsmouth look like in the remake… They’re supposed to be fugly 🤣
Quite disappointed with how they are now going for $90 (physical, $80 digital for MKW) games, the upgraded versions are paid DLCs and even the tech demo is a digital purchase.
The console looks good, and $450 seems fine for it, but everything else looks overpriced and that has kinda killed my interest.
Yeah the pricing is wild. The console is a fine price, and I don’t mind the paid upgrades that add content. Other games are getting free upgrades they confirmed later.
But charging for the welcome tour is madness. And $80 digital for Mario kart is insane. At least dk is $70 digital so like I hope most games aren’t $80 but Jesus. And like $70 is a lot too don’t get me wrong but that’s what it’s been the past couple years so I’m not surprised at that number
The +$10 for physical games also worries me they might be trying to push more people to digital games only. But also there seems to be the new “game key” cards which might be an improvement over codes, if they are not tied to accounts.
Also yea, I am still not used to $70 for games and even that seems too much.
I am very curious how they’re going to tackle regional pricing on games. $80 USD converts to $115 Canadian. No other console is pricing their games that way. At least not yet (thanks nintendo) But that would be a $25-35 increase compared to Ps5 and Xbox games.
For being a family console, it seems like a very weird decision when we’ve been hit with such bad inflation and wage stagnation in the past 5 years. I cannot see as families springing for a switch 2 as they did for the switch 1.
I am seriously considering waiting until a must have title comes out at this point because the price to value just isn’t checking out at the moment. It seems odd. The only thing I can think of is that Nintendo has to have some very good games cooking for the future because this immediate presentation was…underwhelming?
Edit: Thinking about it more, if they did price their games that way, I think it would completely price me out of new games all together. I would have to absolutely know 100% that I’m going to love a game and play it for a very long time to justify that kind of price. Very few games do that for me. I feel like that kind of price increase would encourage illegal downloads too. Especially for countries with weaker currencies
I feel like that kind of price increase would encourage illegal downloads too. Especially for countries with weaker currencies
I wonder if that’s why they’ve been more aggressive against emulators lately.
But yea, same for me: there’s very few games I’d spend that much money on, and I can’t imagine myself paying 80$ for something I don’t even know if I’ll like. I hope it doesn’t become the new standard.
I wish. I will say that the devs understood that JK is an absolute piece of shit, and put things in the game that would probably piss her off specifically.
There’s at least one lesbian witch couple (who are married, and somewhat interracial), and then there is a confirmed trans witch in the game as well. Playing the game I thought “this is just a big middle finger to Rowling.”
Also in the game, literally a third of the NPCs aren’t white or British. Half of the student companion quests are about students who aren’t white. They talk about other countries and the other schools all the time in side dialog. Four of your teachers aren’t even from Britain in the game.
I really feel like they tried to distance it as much as possible from JK’s harry potter and I honestly kinda liked it.
But I do still understand that a small portion of what I paid for the game went to Rowling and I do feel a little bad about it. But most of it went to the studio that made it, some went to Steam.
Racism and bigotry is so intrinsic to the world building of HP, that I find it kind of impossible to completely avoid it even by pirating the game to give no money to JKR and her allies.
Yeah… every time people do the “Well Harry Potter as a universe was great. It is just the creator that is shit” I just think of all the threads about the underlying racism, slavery, etc. The reality is that most of the die hard supporters never read the books and just watched the movies that already whitewashed over so much of the bigotry.
But yeah. I generally put it on the same level as stuff by watsuki and the like where it will be a REAL simpler world when that bastard dies and, until then, it would be a real shame if that linux iso happened to contain a copy of Rurouni Kenshin and Harry Potter.
Just REALLY annoys me when people are caping for it and trying to say “oh, its fine. She makes money off this but she would be really annoyed if she saw that there was a black person in it”
I honestly just think that most people have bad text analysis skills/lack of proper reading comprehension. The book is told by the perspective of a specific character, and that character says “the sky is green”, so people believe it because they can’t detach the POV from what they are reading. It happens every time, such as people believing that the Space Marines are the good guys, or that the fascist dictatorship in Starship Trooper isn’t that bad after all.
The movies whitewashed a lot of bad stuff, and I still felt creeped out by them when I was a kid. I’m happy that some people is finally coming around to understanding it now that JKR is more vocal of her outlandish political views.
I think it is more that people identify with a character that they REALLY should not. Scarface (first remake?) and Taxi Driver are pretty infamous examples of that. It HAS definitely gotten worse as media literacy has dropped to an abysmal level but it is still that fundamental concept of “This is the protagonist. I want to be like them. What they do must be right”
I can’t go too in depth on the harry potter movies since I never watched them. I was the cool kid who instead read about Harry Dresden and… that is a whole different bundle of misogyny, grooming, and copaganda. Yay…
But yeah. I still think so many people would benefit from sitting down and watching Yu Yu Hakusho of all things. That was a show that spent 2-3 major arcs tearing apart (what we would later call) toxic masculinity and pointing out that it is okay to like the cool as fuck thing but that you also need to understand what it actually is and reassess.
Just give a wealthy person a pass on their bigotry. COMEON! PUH-LEEEEZ! They agree with us on other stuff! Why can’t you compromise your values and just give her a pass!
Well, when you think about it, it makes sense. It’s a versatile and cool sounding word format or whatever you call it. You can use it for literal stuff, such as Titanfall, where robots fall from the sky or comets or whatever. But also in a collapse kind of thing, like here. And fallen civilizations and apocalypses are a popular themes, so…
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