True. I wish my app had better space for spoiler tags.
But also, I feel these are covered by the title of the thread. If you don't want the best gaming moments of the last decade spoiled maybe don't click on the "What are the best gaming moments of the last decade?" thread.
I loved Obra Dinn and yet when you said that I drew a complete blank. What I remember of Obra Dinn is figuring out the metapuzzle. And maybe the Kraken.
I think the problem with "gaming moments" is you need a kind of universally communal experience of a game. The reason the Mexico ride in Red Dead became the prototype for THAT is it was maybe the last time we were all playing the same thing at the same time and reading the same things so we could all talk about the same bit at the same time.
Flavio: "The guys from GOG are great, and they contacted me directly once to talk about Heroic, and they totally support the project and what we are doing, especially on Linux. I would say we have a really good relationship with them."
Paweł: "Adding to what Flavio said, we currently have the affiliate deal with GOG, so any purchases made using our link support the project financially."
Huh. I didn't know this. This seems like a big deal. Makes me even more willing to consider Heroic's GOG support semi-official, considering they support autopatching and cloud saves under GOG. It really feels close-to-native, especially given how sluggish Galaxy can be on Windows for large libraries.
The fashy outrage engine where any trailer with some amount of melanin triggers endless "WOKE FAIL" videos is in full force.
The process is watch trailer>check for nonwhite>RAGE video>if game bombs: GLOAT video> if game is a hit: quietly STFU and move on to the next target.
I have to assume the algorithmic boosting of this garbage is the result of someone at Google arguing that groceries haul videos and reaction videos were the bottom of the barrel and someone grab-my-beering that shit.
I mean, these idiots spent months doing "Expedition 33 is WOKE" outrage videos. That was, in fact, the top couple of threads on the Steam community forum for the game on launch day. I checked. Besides one thread hilariously trying to do "It's a hit because it's not WOKE" on the top page, the word "woke" is no longer in the first ten pages of discussions.
It's such an obvious grift and it's so pointless to even call it out. Everybody knows it's bullshit. The creators know it, the fascistoid children following them know it, the game makers know it, the politicians taking advantage to indoctrinate young men know it. And yet here we are.
Honestly, I seriously doubt that the harassment is from the AC fanbase, and as a side sucky thing in an ocean of suck, it also sucks for Ubisoft that their game is getting associated with the backlash. It really seems like these are just political actors and opportunists exploiting the nazi child outrage farms for views, more than anything else.
I'd be shocked if most of the outrage, even the one whitewashed as "Asian men erasure" was genuine at all. Especially in the game series that opened with "hey the Crusades were bad, maybe" and spiraled out into assassinating the pope and playing as multiple black people murdering slavers.
Oh, man, you may be right. I've gone back and forth the Igavanias so much I definitely don't remember which "go underwater" upgrade goes where.
Gonna look it up because it's gonna kill me otherwise.
Okay, yeah, got it. I remember now. They do a weird thing in that one where you have a bad way of moving underwater by using a weapon and you unlock the proper walking underwater thing after. So yes, you do need to kill enemies to get it as a random drop. It's a super high drop rate, though. I think I didn't remember because you have to be fairly unlucky (or be speedrunning and not killing enemies, I suppose) to not get it naturally, but you are correct.
RotN doesn't have any progression requirements that aren't scripted drops, off the top of my head, but I could be wrong about that. What ability are you thinking of?
Dawn and Aria of Sorrow do, but in fairness those are communicated in other scripted drops and are part of the "get the good ending" puzzles.
Yeah, well, the original Zelda flagged bomb spots even less, so...
It's weird to me that Simon's Quest gets so much grief for this when Zelda 1 and 2 (and particularly the localized version of those) were full of that exact "defer to the guide" nonsense.
In fairness, some of that stuff comes from trying to play older games out of context, since a lot of tutorializing used to happen in the manual, but not on any of those NES examples.
I don't know, man, I ran around hugging every wall of deserted Doom and Wolfenstein 3D levels that a) noclip became the default way to play those games, and b) Half-Life felt like an amazing breath of fresh air.
Well, Quake 2 did, I guess. Half-Life felt like the next-gen take on that idea.
Such a great hangout game. As a kid with a vivid imagination and not enough English understanding to follow the plot I enjoyed my time just roaming around crafting spells and exploring samey dungeons a whole lot.
I think it's almost definitely nostalgia speaking.
Granted, by the point Oblivion was made I was the nostalgia guy talking about how Bethesda games kept getting smaller and less ambitious. Most people saying that then did so because they were coming from Morrowind. Not me, I am a proper dinosaur and I was just pissed that after Morrowind dropped everything interesting about Daggerfall to make a console game they just kept moving further in that direction.
Was also not a fan of Fallout getting turned into Oblivion 40K instead of a proper turn-based CRPG.
Which goes to show this conversation isn't new and gaming is old enoung now that it has gone in cycles.
I mean, seriously, Daggerfall was continent-sized and was using procedural generation to make dungeons and build dialogue and quests and essentially reimagining how games could be made in ways that wouldn't resurface until what? No Man's Sky? Oblivion is bad Lord of the Rings. If anything it's the awkward middle child now, because man, the Imperial City in Oblivion feels hilariously tiny and basically deserted against modern RPGs. There are five people running loops and having canned conversations. Coming from Baldur's Gate 3 or Cyberpunk to this is... a bit of a shock.
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.
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.
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.