You need to actually look at the changes because that is completely wrong. They’ve made mechanical changes to the game.
Being what? Skyrim style fight? Fuck that. If they were to completly replace moronic, idiotic, retarded level scaling that would be a different conversation.
Not happy about these Indiana Jones type of system requirements. I was coping that DOOM: The Dark Ages won’t have mandatory ray-tracing, even though I knew they’ll be using either identical engine or some “minor” variation of it, because. well, id software, idetch engine, etc. Fitting name!
DOOM (2016) and DOOM: Eternal ran extremely well on my GTX 1080 paired with Intel i5 3470. Now I won’t be able to run the new title with same GPU paired with Ryzen 5 5600x. There’s a lot of people in the comments in various places saying it’s totally fine or just arguing with people that are not in favor of such demands.
I think it’s because they’ve started designing games that use PS5 as the minimum standard for hardware requirements.
I don’t mind about Ray tracing being a requirement in theory I just think that they’re doing it about 5 years too early. If they just waited until Real-Time Ray tracing had been around long enough that some cards had hit the second hand market it wouldn’t be so bad
Wouldn’t have been that bad if the push for ray-tracing didn’t come together with a higher price. Isn’t the point of ray-tracing to make things easier for the developers to work on lightning and shadows and such? Apart from the obvious graphical fidelity.
There’s absolutely nothing good about it. I’ve been reluctant to get into RT because it just doesn’t offer that much to me and seems to have launched us into the upscaling and frame generation era of gaming because the oh-so-wonderful ray-tracing capable GPUs actually need some crutches to deliver their killer features. And mandatory ray-tracing now, alongside the mandatory DLSS to see any benefit from a 5000 series card from Nvidia are absolutely going to contribute to me doing my best not to buy into ray-tracing for even longer.
I know it’s lost battle because of how many have either happily or silently jumped ship, but it’s now a matter of a principle. It’s not even that kind of situation when one is not enough until there’s one too many to ignore - it’s just me not feeling right about it; even less right than before.
This solves nothing if the goal is engagement. Any engagement in corporate properties is a form of engagement which promotes the media being presented. A corporate sponsored video is a corporate sponsored video, regardless of the platform.
Ideally it wouldn’t be, but corporations will use whatever video platform is popular to pump out videos designed to increase engagement because to them it’s advertising. They will try and sponsor their content on whichever content creator is on said platform with a large audience.
I’ll stop you right there: I don’t give a shit if they pirate every single game they play. It doesn’t matter. Because, even amongst the streamers, you are looking at hours of prep per game (to dial in settings, weird streaming hiccups, etc) and on the VOD side it is generally accepted that you have hours of footage and editing for every minute of Content.
And all of that costs money. Being able to stay up late to write a script to make that Dark Souls run really cool? Doing insane after-effects editing to do a stupid joke star wipe? Or just playing the same cutscene over and over so that you can get the right background NPC for your gag. That takes time.
And you know what helps with time? Money. Which comes from revenue and “engagement”.
And this is very demonstrable. Plenty of youtubers and streamers have very clear differences from their early work to their new work. A great example is Michael Reeves (who I assume is not cancelled just yet but…). His early videos are awesome. They also are incredibly low budget and often rushed. Whereas his newer videos (even the one where he just drives around in a sandstorm for a while…) have ridiculously good production values and involve some real feats of engineering. The difference? Before he was part time flunking out of school and tutoring for a living. Now? He… nobody is really sure how Michael Reeves makes money but I assume OTV pays him a good salary for showing up a few times a year?
Also: People vastly underestimate how much storage and bandwidth is required for video. Which is why peertube and the like basically exist for proof of concept one offs and for companies to fork and use in their own products.
But I point it out because a lot of these decisions to create freer platforms without advertising puts the cost of creation on the creator without a way for them to make money. People want their high quality content without paying for it.
The only gaming videos I’m ever likely to put out are tutorial videos.
Now that I think of it, for consistency, because I have posted game tips on the Fediverse first and nowhere else before, I might actually post to Peertube if I make it a video. But for someone else just hoping to help out their fellow gamers, they might want to make sure the widest audience would be able to actually easily access their tutorial. If I make the world’s best tutorial, but it is never indexed by search engines, I’m probably not going to help many gamers looking up the problem I try to show them how to solve. How many eyeballs will possibly see the content isn’t always a “how much money can I extract” concern. Here it is a “how accessible is my help to other people?” concern.
Origins by a mile. There’s just so much thought put into the overall story and the gameplay really harkens back to bioware’s heyday of crpgs. Mages are a blast to use and there’s still some strategy in the combat.
DA2 was rushed in every sense of the word and it’s blatantly apparent. The whole story takes place in one city, there are like 3 unique dungeon maps that are reused over and over again, and the gameplay was changed to basically be an arpg i.e. hold down M1 and you win.
Inquisition was like they tried to return to form but EA said fill every pixel of the map with fetch quests and herbs to gather. What should’ve been like a 25 hour story driven game becomes a 90 hour slog fest.
I’d honestly just say play origins, then watch a story summary on YouTube for the other two.
Thanks. Sad to hear that. I’ve played and liked Origins, but quickly soured when playing 2. I was hoping that maybe 3 would be worthwhile… Maybe with some mods to reduce grinding, if they exist?
So there’s a mechanic in the base game where to start quests you have to wait X hours in real life. And to unlock those quests to start the timer, you need “power” which is gathered from doing side quests or clearing a repeatable encounter. Combine this with all of the grinding stuff like gathering herbs and unlocking fast travel spots everything is a drag.
There are mods to reduce or even remove those requirements I listed so it’s up to you how “cheaty” you want to get. I essentially removed the timer, doubled my power and XP gain, and removed the harvesting animation (honestly the best mod). Even then, after only doing main story quests, what I felt were important side quests, and like half of the companions quests, and only the final dlc to see the true ending, it still took me 55 hours…
Best I can say is start it up and when the game dumps you into the first map, only do the main story quests and then move onto the next zone. Because each map honestly probably has its own 55 hours of picking up rocks and killing bandits.
Would you say seeing your choices reverberate through the story by importing your saves makes it worthwhile, or no?
I’ve played and really enjoyed Origins, but haven’t (yet) taken on the other two. With the size of my backlog I’d be happy to leave the other two unplayed as I was satisfied at the end of Origins, but the fact that you can import saves and have your decisions matter does interest me.
It is pretty cool seeing stuff you did in the old games relate to what is going on now in the game… But I feel like they didn’t expand on it enough for it to be solely the reason to play the next two games. The biggest highlight is morrigan and leliana, who both have a big role in 3. Alistair kinda pops up every now and then, and the rest are non-existent in the other games besides passing mentions. Same situation for your companions in DA2, one is returning companion in DAI, others are like oh remember them?
I would say the biggest decider on whether or not it’s worth is if you performed the ritual with morrigan. However, the result of that is kind of just swept under the rug since it seems like they were predicting they were gonna use that in the next DA game. But since the original DA4 got scrapped and there’s no real save import for veil guard and I’m sure the choices they allow you to make to are only the huge ones like morrigans ritual, it seems kind of pointless. To me, games like this shine when they remember the small details, a minor npc you thought was cool and randomly pops up again later on.
Ultimately my advice is the same as above; watch a YouTube summary, or if you’re feeling really frisky, read the DA wiki on the people you’re interested in.
Thanks for the super thorough reply, I really appreciate it! I did do the ritual, I think I got the “ring ending” for Morrigan as I entered the portal with her in the Witch Hunt DLC.
I agree with you on the appeal of these long series of games with save-import being the continuity, so it’s a shame to hear it’s not more elaborate than that. I know Welonz did a full Dragon Age series playthrough last year so I might just watch that some day. If Veilguard turns out to be incredible (doubtful) I’ll take your advice and just watch story recaps I think.
youtube.com
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