Even though this is an annoying DRM layer, I do like the innovation attempted here.
Back in the day, you’d hand your disc to your friend and then they’d hand it back to you some time later. Digital has given us a lot more freedom in how we game, but the ability to share had been removed. This at least seems to be offering a solution, at least for those who either don’t want to or are unable to just Arr! the games.
All they need is to remove the asinine local connection piece, and make the timeframe longer.
It depends on how it works, 14 days and then the friend has to buy it or renewed every 14 days. If it is the latter and if it eventually goes online (which I think it will with the online subscription) it is a way, not the best way but a way, to stop scammers from building up massive stolen libraries because, unlike piracy, these games would actually be getting stolen from whoever lent it out since they can’t play them. If it is 14 days and then the friend has to buy the game, it’s a stupid limit.
you should be able to use games within your family completely unlimited anyway.
I would understand the local connection requirement if that was for sharing with people outside your family. that would make it similar to sharing a game with a friend you know in person. without that the floodgates would be open to sharing games with literally anyone online.
How would you make it so you can only share games with your family? As in what technical definition of “family” would you use that can’t include your friends?
apple does it, and i think Google too. everyone you add to your “family” must share the same payment method. so naturally you will limit that to only people you highly trust.
For child accounts the trust might extend to blocking purchases in the general case and having the kids send purchase requests to the parent for approval.
Of course this leaves the child account restricted is such a manner it would be unappealing if there wasn’t an actual parent-child relationship IRL.
Interesting, does that mean there is just one primary account and to be part of a family group with it you essentially can’t have your own account or purchases?
the family manager is over 18 and has a payment method on file (they manage the family wallet).
the family members are in the family managers country, (and if under 13 the account is created by the manager).
I only have direct experience with managing a kid under 13, in that case I have created the account for him and never entered a payment method on his account. For any purchases he wants to make via the “family wallet” it needs my direct approval, which can be granted by using an app on my device or directly entering my password onto his. After either of us has made a purchase we have a “share with family library” toggle that can share the title with the other family member. Note that this only applies to direct title purchases from the store, if a feature is locked behind IAP it can’t be shared. We have his accompanied locked so he needs my approval for any purchases (including free apps) but this is not required by the platform.
For child accounts the family manager can choose between requiring approval for each of the following on each child account:
All content
All purchases using the family payment method
Only in-app purchases
No approval required
I presume the for adult family members the family manager only has control of the Family Wallet but I don’t have direct experience to confirm.
I haven't even started with satisfactory 1.0, I'm still behind on DSP the dark swarm update. Factorio coming out soon and I'm eyeing Alan Wake 2 that's on a sale right now, while I just recently bought the DLC for Against the Storm that I only played for a few hours.
Yeah I played so much pre 1.0 but never really got around to it after release. I knew how much I would be addicted if I really got into it again so I never really got around to it. I really need to get some time to try the base game as released before doing this expansion. But man, I really want to.
Its important to note that patent designs rarely have the final design in them. Most of the time they draw only a very generic, very basic design with the proper technical features. It may look like this and have Switch BC, but it might be completely different.
Also, as I have been saying all along, Nintendo definitely delayed Metroid Prime 4 (a game announced extremely early into the Switch’s lifecycle) to be a Switch successor launch title.
I can only hope their new console gets an emulator relatively quickly, because Nintendo keeps making hardware that is severely outdated and underpowered before it even comes out.
Oh yeah, a patent isn’t definitive proof of anything. The housing could potentially be different, but the pin out would be pretty well defined here. I’m inferring a lot on this one
No idea. But going by the trend of Nintendo, the Wii, WiiU, and Switch were all released so underpowered that they were basically releasing a console that could only compete with the previous generation.
These days Nintendo doesn’t really try to compete on performance. The Wii, for instance, was unapologetically what it was. You played relatively low-poly, low-res, low-texture games on it, but you played them, because they were fun and imaginative.
That’s their main thing. Performance comes, like, 4th.
However, this time, they got burned on their own games. Zelda Tears of the Kingdom had pretty obvious performance issues that even the normiest of normies could notice, for instance. And my memory is short but I think that wasn’t the only first-party game where performance was a challenge.
I think this time they’ll care about performance more than last time. It’s not like they’ve never done it. The really old consoles from the 20th century were competitive on performance, right?
Nintendo wasn’t always like that though. They only became that way because the Wii printed money, and they have been chasing that success by just trying to repeat it.
Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity in multiplayer had an atrocious framerate.
I really like the way that he thinks, with each game being a way to learn new systems / implement new tools / increase the studio's knowledge and skill. Such a great way to take on projects - it ensures that each game brings something new to the table, and it puts you in an even better position to tackle the next project.
My only request for the next game is: please don't have it start with the player imprisoned on a ship and for the ship to be attacked by monsters so the player can use the chance to escape into a deadly situation only to be rescued at the last second by an unknown powerful being before waking up on a beach. Twice is enough, thanks.
What if you’re imprisoned on a cart and attacked by a dragon? Or just released from prison on a boat and dropped off in a swampy beach town? The fantasy RPG genre requires starting as a convict or prisoner, you see.
Just once I’d like to start a D&D video game like a real D&D game: in a tavern trying to get wasted and then someone barges in saying something about goblins or some shit, and I’m about six deep so I say, “Fuck it, we ball.”
I love starting in a tavern and having some run in in a panic screaming “UNDEEEEEEAD!!” and just drop a horde on the table. No time to think, no time to explain. The story starts later, right now you have to fight for your life together with whomever is able to hold at least a table leg.
Allow me to introduce you to Solasta: Crown of the Magister. It was the OTHER CRPG releases based on the DnD 5e system. Much smaller budget and team, but a pretty faithful recreation.
Including the fact that the game opens in a tavern with your party throwing back beer one of them might refer to as a donkey piss (depending on which personality archetype you selected for them) while they wait for their quest sponsor to show up and tell them what’s going on. In the meantime, each character introduces themselves to the others by discussing the adventure they had on the way to the present location (as an excuse to run through some tutorials). Doesn’t get much more classic DnD start than that.
Yep, that was a good game too. Different focus, and a fairly linear story. Part of what made Baldur’s Gate 3 so good was of course the amazing characters and character development. Solasta is missing that, but still a very solid and complete DnD game.
For sure. My impression is that to focus on character work in the same way as BG3 (i.e. voice acting, mocap, cinematics, etc) would have been an impossibility for the studio that made Solasta. I would guess they did not have the financial support to make that happen.
Personally, I think of it as being of a piece with the old Infinity Engine games. There was the Baldurs Gate series, which, in classic CRPG fashion, was all about player choice and character. But, side by side with those games, you had the Icewind Dale series, which was almost completely devoid of the story focus of the BG games and entirely focused on dungeon crawling and seeing how far the ruleset can be pushed.
I disagree, and now think Larian should start every game like this. Next Divinity? Pirate ship. Games Workshop has them make a game? Escape from a Citadel.
They could turn that into a running theme, like how every Elder Scrolls protagonist is a prisoner to start with…
But Divinity already has a long history and so does Baldur’s Gate so…ehh, doesn’t fit in quite as well. Maybe with a new IP they make it a tradition for.
Am I the only one who no longer cares for GTA series after the Shark Code shitshow series has become ans the dropped promise of single player mods and DLC?
You’re mad that the online component of GTAV had premium currency microtransactions? Just don’t buy them. Also, there are loads of single player mods for V, don’t know what you mean.
You can’t join into multiplayer/gta online unless you disable all mods. For a live service that needs loading Individually it still doesn’t operate as good as it should especially when they have the funds for it. They dont care for the player experience. After 4 times having to enable, test and disable mods just to play online with friends, I dropped gta V all together. Wasn’t worth co figuring 150+ mods just to have them all break when you have to disable them.
No, they’re mad that any singleplayer content planned for GTA 5 (and RDR2) in the past decade was abandoned for the money printing machine that is GTA Online. There’s issues to be had with premium currencies (more specifically the stuff that usually goes along with them like lootboxes), but that’s not just a GTA thing.
Also, just because other people created content for a game through mods doesn’t mean we should give the company that made the game credit. That’s like praising a Bethesda game based on a total overhaul mod somebody made.
I’m only interested in GTA 6 for the single player game. Never played GTA 5 online for more than 30 minutes. I wish they had given us some single player DLC, but I guess Rockstar decided they could make the more money selling a handful of kids fake in game currency so why bother. It sucks for those of us that like the single player because it means we get a new game once a decade now. Used to be that Rockstar released a new GTA every couple years.
Gta online was fun at first, when it was all about fooling around in the awesome big map with friends, but after that got old, there’s nothing else to do but grind boring missions that all feel the same.
I feel like a nutjob in that I just…don’t really care about GTA VI. The graphics look great, I’m sure the world will be awesome, but…after what Rockstar did to GTA V’s singleplayer and RDR2 as a whole (abandoning both in favor of printing money through Shark Cards), plus the whole “Rockstar Magic” working conditions thing from awhile ago (and I even forgot about the whole GTA V PC issue), I’m just not really excited for this.
Maybe I’m just disillusioned, but I was much more excited when the Armored Core 6 teaser dropped - a series I had never even played before.
Yeah not sure why people want the single player to last forever lol. To me it makes sense for them to focus on the Online afterwards since that’s what will stay alive after people finish the single player.
I don’t see an open world game lasting as long as a sandbox game without a ton of bloat… kinda like those super long and repetitive Ubisoft campaigns people always complain about…
I haven’t played online since like 2015, but I personally liked playing through the missions with my friends
For me it’s not about the singleplayer lasting forever, it’s about it being completely abandoned. I agree with the idea of them making a great singleplayer story and using the online to fund their next game, but it used to be that you would see other stories told in those worlds with dlc like the Ballad of Gay Tony or even the wacky fun of RDR’s Undead Nightmare. Today, that kind of stuff is relegated to online mission packs and seasonal events. They didn’t even bother to do simple stuff like put new guns introduced in the multiplayer of GTA V and RDR2 into the singleplayer. If you have no interest in the online component, you have nothing more to do with the game until they release the next one in another decade.
And this isn’t to say that I’m over here being angry about GTA Online. I have my issues with Shark Cards and I had my complaints over how RDR2 Online was handled, but it’s been many years since I cared about that and my Shark Card gripes are about the predatory nature of how mtx are used by the industry at large, not with Rockstar in particular.
I’m mostly just feeling like I missed something. I think it looks like it’s making a big step forward for graphics in games (hair physics has always been incredibly difficult to get right, for example, and the hair in this trailer looks really good) and nails a perfect vibe for a Miami based city, and I’m sure the story will be fantastic. I never finished GTA V’s story, but RDR 1 and 2 are some of my favorite game stories of all time. But I saw the trailer and went “This looks like another Rockstar game, neat” while the trailer was getting 7 million views an hour for at least the first 5 hours after its release. I just don’t understand why this has record-breaking hype surrounding it. Maybe it’s because I didn’t get pulled into GTA V’s story and got turned off of GTA Online almost immediately, but this is falling squarely into “I’ll pick it up eventually I imagine” territory, not day 1 purchase hype.
Maybe you’re not as excited because you’re not the target audience anymore.
Think of the biggest games of the last 10 years, they’ve all been community centered games. Among Us, Minecraft, Call of Duty, Fortnite, GTA Online, Fall Guys, etc.
I think we just grew up in a different era. I grew up playing on the PSX but my younger brother grew up on the PS4. I’m still playing the Tony Hawk remaster by myself and my younger brother is playing online games with like 6 people in the call.
I look forward to the story, but my younger brother looks forward to the online where he can have his own character and create his own story with his friends.
Gaming in general is moving in a community direction and I don’t blame Rockstar for moving in that direction as well.
The GTAOnline situation is super wack, but R* hasn’t stopped delivering great single player campaigns, well technically only one - RDR2 - since introducing shark cards, and it is still completely separate from RDROnline and the paid currency. I won’t pre-order GTAVI still, even once it comes to PC, but I’m going to pick it up if the reviews are halfway decent.
I am still of the opinion that they aimed too small and focused too narrow. Games are a "luxury" anyone can live without and it's hard to rally grassroots support behind protecting something that people only use for entertainment. Yeah it's low stakes to force them to let you continue to play it after servers shut down but the same low stakes also makes the petition itself pretty ignorable to anyone who's not a very invested "gamer".
Actual right to repair and right to continue to access to the software and services and devices you buy goes SO far beyond mere games, there are other huge impacts to society from exactly the same problem that leads to game servers being shut down, and this petition ignored them completely to focus exclusively on games. I know that was done purposefully, but I think it was a miscalculation.
I'm convinced it could have got a lot of support if it had broader aims. Yes if you go after the big boys who are locking down tractor parts and integrated electronic modules so they become obsolete and unrepairable and directly impacting farmers and our food supply, you're going to REALLY piss off some very big business interests who are going to try and kill your petition, but you're also going to help educate and hopefully get a lot of support from politicians who already know this is a problem and from the general public who doesn't care about games but does care about society (at least once they're properly educated about it, which is hard but also a necessary and positive step to even attempt).
First and foremost: it is an inherently adversarial “movement” name which actively shifts the blame toward developers. One of my gaming buddies was a community manager for one of the studios that got gutted over the past year or so (gotta “love” how that doesn’t narrow it down at all) and he definitely had some Thoughts about getting constant social media spam about how they are “killing games” by not releasing offline versions of old games as they were doing layoffs on the regular.
There is a reason the only dev/“dev” who gave any meaningful feedback was thor the shithead. And while it may suck that he didn’t have the same opinion as the people accusing devs of killing the games they spent the better part of a decade on… Yeah, pirate software is a dipshit who was just trying to put himself as a position of authority because his dad worked at Blizzard.
But most of the key points he raised were sensationalized but not actually wrong if you look at things from a developer perspective. Well, from the perspective of a developer who expects to get fired any second now because funding will arbitrarily dry up. Yeah, the end result will TOTALLY be that you get an extra six months of salary to make the offline client and not that you’ll be held in breach of contract and lose your severance because you couldn’t pound that out in a week.
But even without starting things off at “its just about ethics in game journalism” levels of discourse: Yes, yes, yes, I know that Ross et al intentionally were vague and shut the fuck up. If you push “We need legislature on X” to a governing body without an actionable plan? Schoolhouse Rock doesn’t start blaring and Aaron Sorkin doesn’t… okay, he still gets a boner but for different reasons. What happens is the lobbyists and Jack Thompsons of the world swoop in and make damned sure that those “details get ironed out” the way they want.
It sucks because treating this as part of a larger effort that included actual Game Preservation efforts and worked with policy groups and developers would actually have been awesome AND gotten widespread support even from the studios themselves. Instead it was a flashy campaign that started off by flipping the bird to people getting fired left and right and reveled in its ignorance of how legislature even works. And then managed to get dragged into a slapfight with some jackass who plays wow and sells mobile games.
It was overly narrow in most cases while positioning itself as speaking for some massive swathe of the industry it was actively antagonizing.
There was plenty of off-the-record talk from devs who wanted something to show for the years they put into a project that was shut down in less time than it took to make the game in the first place.
And that always comes up because it is the truth. It is the same problem as “Well, you worked yourself to death for the past five years but decided you needed to take time off for mental health reasons. Unfortunately, we don’t launch until six months from now so go fuck yourself. Hey, send in Fred on your way out so we can tell him he needs to work 90 hour weeks for the next six months but won’t have been here long enough to get in the credits”.
You know what doesn’t get that? Being told you need to architect your game, from the start, to use listen servers while also being unhackable and controlling all progression in the data center AND scaling near infinitely with no host migration issues (oh Warframe…). Or to know that if things even look slightly bad you will have no runway to fix it and will immediately be told to wrap it up and release the “offline mode” in the next month.
People can (and shouldn’t) be nasty about anything. Part of a community manager’s responsibility would be to convey what customers are asking for, and…yeah, games should have listen servers and offline modes and do what they can to prevent cheating. Those are all things that some segment of their customers or potential customers care about. And at the same time, plenty of devs want to make their games live forever but don’t have the ability to make it so. It’s not inherently adversarial, nor does it inherently shift blame toward developers. We all know why we don’t have these things: microtransactions. The people mandating those are the ones with a profit share incentive, which aren’t typically the boots on the ground actually building the game.
No. But “stop killing games” is an inherently adversarial statement. Hell, even a lot of PUBLISHERS would rather keep their games running forever. Let alone the devs who have put their blood, sweat, and tears into it.
People can (and shouldn’t) be nasty about anything. Part of a community manager’s responsibility would be to convey what customers are asking for, and…yeah, games should have listen servers and offline modes and do what they can to prevent cheating.
And here we get to the crux of things. And the good news is that we already fucking went through all of this.
“Nobody should have to put up with harassment. But, really, it is your job to deal with that and we have our demands. So give me what I want and this all goes away”. Am I talking about “Stop killing games and give us an offline server for your MMO” or am I talking about “Fire that bitch and stop talking about woke games because I care about ethics in games journalism”?
And we saw the exact same responses from the dev side (and the smarter/older influencers). Either completely ignoring it because they don’t want to get doxxed or “Yeah… there are parts of that I really like. But I don’t know enough to really comment too much. Anyway, back to talking about the new Silent Hill game”.
Harassment is not an inherent part of Stop Killing Games. If publishers (or really, whoever the financiers are for a given game) wanted their game to live forever, they had the power at the start and opted not to.
Neither time was that my response. I have asked developers via social media for LAN or listen servers or offline modes, and I’ve never been nasty about it. Being doxxed or getting hate campaigns is not okay. Customers asking for features for a video game that are important to them are not harassment, and listening to requests for those features is part of the job. If everyone at a company wanted their game to live forever, from the bottom all the way to the top, and it didn’t launch with an offline mode, then I don’t believe they wanted it to live forever; it simply didn’t make their list of priorities.
Hell, even a lot of PUBLISHERS would rather keep their games running forever.
This is such a shit take that publishers want games running forever. The whole reason they get shut down is because they don’t make a profit and if something that’s not earning them money might as well be something that’s going to take gamers away from their new game. So they’ll of course shut it down. It’s in their incentive.
But most of the key points he raised were sensationalized but not actually wrong if you look at things from a developer perspective.
they were also not really relevant to the campaign, which was the biggest problem with his comments. there was no expectation that studios do extra work to keep servers up, or make offline clients. the expected legislation was to have publishers allow external use of the relevant source code of the product when the publisher deems the work no longer profitable, to spare people the effort of reverse-engineering protocols and building their own servers. a knock-on effect of that would be that future services would have to be built with eventual shutdown procedures in mind, which, let’s face it, they should already have been doing.
thor was saying “this isn’t feasible because it’s a bunch of extra work for the developers”, completely missing the point that this is not on the developers. it’s on the company sitting on the IP. they can publish source trees no problem, no developer involvement necessary. and the legislation would have made sure of that fact.
There is a reason that there are regularly listicles about “top 1000 horrifically angry comments on github” and the like. And that goes up even more when you are working on a closed source product and have been up and pounding through tickets for 26 hours straight.
Not to mention proprietary or re-used code. Like… I think Call of Duty is STILL technically the quake 3 engine if you go deep enough into the source code? And while Q3a (presumably licensed at some point since it is GPL from a google) is open source, there is going to be a lot of code in there that isn’t. It is very common to use other libraries and suddenly needing to open source your account management system because one of your games is dead in the water is a huge problem. ESPECIALLY if the goal is so that “fans” can… reverse engineer it to build their own servers (and nobody would EVER profit from one of those…).
And then you just have the kind of “spirit of the law” shit that Apple et al love to abuse. Is that game fundamentally unplayable “offline” because it did REALLY cool stuff with sharding so that players can drop in and out of a game seamlessly? Or is it a bunch of phone homes for every single achievement for a fully SP game? Because that would NEVER happen.
thor was saying “this isn’t feasible because it’s a bunch of extra work for the developers”, completely missing the point that this is not on the developers. it’s on the company sitting on the IP.
Which can be the difference between “Okay, we’ll give you two months to get this shit popular again” versus “Well, it is going to cost X engineering hours to clean up the source so we are just gonna kill it now and get on that. Oh, and if the source isn’t cleaned up within, let’s say, one month, that is a breach of contract and none of your team gets severance”
The other aspect this tends to ignore is the use of proprietary software libraries and even having expert consultants come out. My understanding is nVidia have mostly stopped doing it (for gaming) but for decades they would fly out a solution engineer or five to look at the game, help optimize the graphics and physics pipelines, and even document what needs to be added to the drivers on release.
Not all of those contractors who have ever touched the code are going to be okay with it being released. Since this would be the equivalent of having potentially entire mega companies worth of software libraries and the like change their license overnight.
that was sort of the point though. a big case with a narrow focus can later be used as a fulcrum for a wider scope, given that the original case has the right spin. it’s also easier than going after the anti-repair people.
But politicians will actually be prepared to get behind right to repair. But they regard games as a bit infantile, and don’t really want to be involved. A point that was made right at the start of all of this and was then completely ignored.
I don’t understand, the arguement is whether or not they should have equated this to the right to repair movement, and then you say you think that’s a bad idea but I don’t understand your justification. Your justification seems to be that people don’t care about software, but my if they do not care about software, then they also do not care about hardware, and therefore your comment is irrelevant.
I literally don’t understand your justification for not equating game preservation to right to repair.
i was on mobile so i was keeping it terse. let’s see if i can expand a bit now that i’m at a keyboard.
the right to repair movement is fighting companies that deliberately make it harder to fix things, so that customers will have to use company services to repair their stuff, or buy new stuff. john deere and apple are two big players here, with cryptographical signatures built into parts that void the warranty if they don’t match. this is actively adversarial behavior and should plainly be illegal. skg, on the other hand, is fighting companies that just leave their stuff to rot. they’re just neglecting their product once there is no profit in it, which you can’t really say about e.g. john deere; they are obligated by law to provide parts for the things they sell for x amount of years after they no longer sell the product itself.
so, the two are in different legal frameworks: right to repair is trying to stop capture of the spare parts market, while skg is fighting for there to even be a spare parts market. and that’s where my previous point comes in: while machines are inherently understood to be repairable (because they used to be) and the fact that companies are trying to clamp down on that is plainly obvious, software has never been generally understood to be changeable by the end user. it has always been an enthusiast/professional-only thing.
so, equating the two may harm either
a) rtr, because of the assumption that only people with the correct credentials should have access to repair parts,
b) skg, because of the assumption that they want companies to provide support for things for up to several years like in the parts market, or
c) both, because of the assumption that they want the same thing, which, if implemented, would make neither side happy.
i’m not 100% sure i’m making sense here, because on some level i do think they share similarities. of course they do. but how do you present that to a group of amateurs (legislators) in a coherent way? i don’t think you can without harming either cause.
Am I the only one that doesn’t really give a shit about ray tracing? For mediocre gains, you get a punch in the face on performance. I’ll take 144Hz on a game over ray tracing any day.
Same. It depends on the game though, obviously. If I’m playing Deadlock or something similar (fast paced and competitive) I’m not going to go for graphics fidelity. But anything single player? 60 FPS is perfectly fine and ray traced lighting can make a huge visual impact. Both Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk looked great with RT and well worth forgoing 100+ FPS.
I find when I play, if I’m not looking around focusing on the graphics (like playing the game) I don’t notice it. Cyberpunk 2077 at 3440x1440 with ray tracing on makes me get like 24FPS. Without it, I can get above 60.
In general, I agree, but I think you underestimate the benifits it provides. While ray-tracing doesn’t add much to more static or simple scenes, it can make a huge difference with more complex or dynamic scenes. Half Life 2 is honestly probably the ideal game to demonstrate this due to its heavy reliance on physics. Current lighting and reflection systems, for all their advancements and advantages, struggle to convincingly handle objects moving in the scene and interacting with each other. Add in a flickering torch or similar and things tend to go even further off the rails. This is why in a lot of games, interactive objects end up standing out in an otherwise well-rendered enviroment. Good raytracing fixes this and can go a really long way to creating a unified, but dynamic look to an enviroment. All that is just on the player’s side too, theres even more boons for developers.
That said, I still don’t plan to be playing many RTX or ray-traced games any time soon. As you said, its still a nightmare performance wise, and I personally start getting motion sick at the framerates it runs at. Once hardware catches up more seriously, I think it will be a really useful tool.
Yeah, also does anyone else remember when the best video card was like 600 bucks? I never did buy one of those. And I’m not buying the top end cards at 3k or whatever they are. I built my whole last computer for less than that.
IMHO it was a nice, but not worldbreaking gimmick, that was overhyped to sell. Like polygons count, like antialias, like monitor refresh rate... things that of course have their utility but over the years have been the target of marketing.
I don’t really either. Once it gets fast enough it’ll be common, but we can do really good approximations right now.
The thing that really hurts HL2 in terms of looking less dated is the old low-poly BSP geometry. Modern games and engines use landscapes and models because they can do it fast enough now. But I don’t think Source can handle that level of detail.
What blew my mind was how I heard Titanfall 2 uses the source engine. That game looked really good. I did only play it on the steam deck though, so my resolution and screen size weren’t crazy.
Better visuals and much faster/cheaper for the developer to make.
We are still in the infancy of the technology and the vast majority of games with ray tracing doesn’t fully utilise it as they must compromise to support normal raster, leading to half baked implementations on engines not designed with ray tracing in mind.
That’s fair. I did watch a video comparing them, and what stuck with me was how they mention how good we got at faking lighting and making it so convincing that the reflections are real, it’s hard to sometimes tell the difference. For me on a 2070s with 3440x1440 resolution, it’s not worth it at all.
I tried out Portal RTX, found the room where the light ball is casting shadows all around. It looked nice; but I also felt like I’ve seen the same effect imitated with regular rendering. Sure there might be slight differences, but I wouldn’t have spotted them.
Starfield has fundamental issues that no amount of modding or DLC is going to repair. I don’t think I’ve ever been less excited for a content update for a game I own.
Not going to lie, I haven’t played a competitive shooter in years, but I used to play the shit out of CS back in the day. I kind of want to jump into this again.
Indeed. I was pretty decent back in 1.3 days playing on a friend’s server who had a frickin T1 line at home. It was just as competitive play was starting to develop and there was no voice chat until Roger Wilco came about. That’s partly why I’m not a WASD guy. Gotta keep the fingers on the home row ready to type “I had sex with your mom.” not just say it.
Ah, memories.
Played some CS2 last night and it was death match rounds on Dust 2. Unbelievable how fast I die. I just can’t even…
However, the game did feel really well polished. Very snappy except for a few lag spikes. I started to limber up and even earned a positive K:D in one round. Well, for most of the round. I fell to - 3 in the last moments, but overall it was pretty fun. Don’t think I could hang in a regular match though. Too much time sitting around dead.
I get that, especially when the map is fairly small, but I’m talking about the insane twitch reflexes and aim of these players. I feel like 90% of the time it’s just thp-thp! and I’m dead, from practically any distance, whereas I’m firing bursts and need a second or three to actually kill someone.
Plus AWPers are unreal. The crosshairs in the scope blur if you move at all, so I can’t fathom how these folks are so accurate, but there you have it.
I’m not calling anyone a cheater, just saying the average skill level is far beyond me. I still had fun. Gotta remember, it’s easy, just click on their heads.
These games are inherently competitive with an unbelievably steep learning curve, so people git gud, which drives off casual players, repeat ad nauseam. The only people who regularly play CS are either absolute masochists, or very good at clicking heads even if by that game’s standard they’re only silver or gold or whatever.
To be halfway decent at CS means that no singleplayer shooter will ever be a challenge to you again, because there’s no intersection between casual gaming and competitive shooters.
Don’t they have a mechanism for filtering you into games with people who have similar stats so there’s a bit of balance? Play a while and get wrecked until you fall down to your own level?
Developers? Panicking? Developers will rejoice that they don’t have to build these garbage mechanics. Publishers and game studio execs? Yeah they’ll panic
So this is a hiring drive for a studio that laid off half of its personnel about a year ago? For a series that lost its way a long time ago with no indication that it’ll get back on track?
Sounds about right. I suppose they also want to distance themselves as much as possible from the antics of frank o’connor’s 343i with a brand move like this.
I wonder which retcons they’ll retcon. Will the foreunners be human again? Will the events of 4, 5 and infinite just be one big fever dream?
It does stand to reason that if they’re dropping all in house engine development, a lot of roles will be freed up. It’s not great and I’m personally not a fan of this consolidation of engines.
You might want to root for Capcom’s REX engine licensing to take off then, because off the shelf AAA game engines are going to be much more necessary as time goes on. Then stuff like Godot for lower end games.
Oh as someone very familiar with the field, I perfectly understand why things have come to this point and I honestly have no idea if there’s any way things could retain the way they’ve been before. I just find it worrying in different ways.
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