Honestly, the Orks may be the most intellectually honest faction in that whole mess. They mostly just like to fight and think everybody else is a dick. And they're right.
But nah, when teenage me came to the idea of haughty, elitist space elves in hoverbikes there was never any other option. But they're not the good guys. Nobody should be the good guys in that. ESPECIALLY not the human factions.
If that entire franchise's fanbase needs a sanity check for a reason, it's for that.
I know they look cool and they're easy to paint because of all the flat surfaces, but come on.
It's fine for your dark fantasy setting to have no good guys. It's EXTREMELY not fine for your dark fantasy theocratic racists to become the good guys and for you to do nothing to stop it from happening.
There's a bunch more than that, and many just... come and go and often people don't even notice.
I mean, come on, how many people on this thread wouldn't even have known this game existed if Frontier wasn't slightly higher profile than most devs working on these?
The 40K soulslike idea is... probably gonna happen eventually, I dunno. I'm not a big soulslike guy. Hey, maybe Space Marine 2 is good. Looks nice, anyway.
For what it's worth, what I really would like to see is a 40K game that is not about the space theocratic fascists for once. I should go back to play the Dawn of War sequel that nobody remembers happened, either, since that was the last time you got Eldar as a faction. And even then only because it was a throwback game to the first Dawn of War.
It reviewed pretty poorly, but that's no guarantee.
I have to say, even with a good game it would suck to release something kinda niche this year, and the Warhammer brand means so little these days, games under that release through a firehose at this point, it's hard to know what's coming up, let alone if it's any good.
Yeah, it's a bit weirder when Gamespot repackages Grubb's take as news, in that it becomes harder to tell whether it's them being coy about "we know a guy who knows a guy" info or if they're just trying to manufacture a click out of something that's unverified.
But then again, we're rating them against Youtube "influencers" and whatnot, so I'm actively shocked that any standards would remain at all these days.
Look, gaming "scoops", such as they are, boil down to somebody having a friend somewhere that will break NDAs to you on the basis of being your buddy, being somewhat intoxicated, or both. The reason you get much, much looser attribution with people like Grubb or Schreier s that those connections would probably lose their jobs, and for the most part nobody wants that, often including the studios that employ those guys.
But on the flipside, it does mean that you have to take them at their word, and like any long game of telephone that also means you have to take things with a pinch of salt. Things may be lies, the source may just be mistaken, opinions may get passed as facts, things can change later. Rumors are rumors until they aren't rumors.
But that being said, will the vaporware huge triple-A remake that was explicitly struggling during development come out in the middle of the great 2023 game developer purge?
I mean... if somebody has a gaming storefront monopoly in Windows it certainly isn't Microsoft. Concern about monopolistic practices is a great catch-22 between the OS dominance of Windows or the platform dominance of Steam, and I'm about as concerned about both.
FWIW, I have both a Steam Deck and a GPD Windows handheld and, being entirely agnostic about that entire conversation I default to my GPD Win 4, because of ergonomics, usability and compatibility concerns, in that order.
Yeah, I saw that they acknowledged the broken settings and provided a slightly confusing explanation about the technical reasons for it.
I genuinely think they should have locked those settings to a lower default until they can patch them. I get what they're trying to do by being transparent, but... yeah, I don't think it worked out for them or the people interested in the game.
I've been playing a bunch, I now have a large city going on and it's still very playable, at the cost of worse lighting and slow-loading textures in close-ups. Honestly, at this point I'm more annoyed by some UI and sim quirks than the performance, but here's hoping they keep improving all of the above.
Hah. It did lose some fps as the city grew. By the time I expanded to a bunch of tiles I was hovering at 50-60 instead of 70-90, but I'm on a VRR display, so I never felt the need to crank it down further. It may get there eventually, but I'm done for the day
The defaults for high are absolutely messed up, and it's entirely possible that some of the settings are straight up bugged. The game doesn't look that much better than CS1 on reasonable settings... but it also doesn't run that much worse, either.
Honestly, I have bigger gripes with some of the interface and with how much micromanagement there is in here. I think the tech issues are both overblown and could have been mitigated with better defaults.
EDIT: In case someone has use for it, what I did was mostly turn off volumetric clouds, turn off Vsync, turn off transparent reflections and drop the settings for Global Illumination and other screen-space effects to not be full res.
Oh, and also, they seem to think SMAA looks better than TAA here. It doesn't. You definitely want to manually change that to TAA and disable DRS, which defaults to extremely gross FSR 1.0. The way this is technically put together by default is super weird.
Alright, so I got the game and it a) actually has a fantastic options menu with a ton of granularity, and b) it has some really dumb, wasteful settings flagged as "high" with no "ultra" preset.
I went from launching into a default in the 30s for the default map to toning down their nuts global illumination, volumetric clouds and transparent reflections for a neat 100+ fps. And then I cranked it back up a bit to be hovering around 90. I'm sure I'll have to tweak more when I get deeper into the game, but yeah, no, this is gonna be playable.
For the record, I think setting up decent defaults and settings should be a thing in PC games. Tuning the game shouldn't be the first thing you have to do. But whether it's thanks to last minute patches or people overreacting to the announcements I think this was a bit overblown. I'll report back if that proves not to be the case as I get deeper in.
Yeah. In fairness, it IS disappointing to have to target 1080p or 1440p at 30 fps these days on PC... but it's definitely not a dealbreaker for a sim game like this. Seeing early benchmarks and performance I'd say it went from wait and see to "temper expectations and be ready to target 30".
Yeah, it seems weird because you'd think all the simulation load would be in the background and they could scale the visuals. Since it seems like there's a high base cost for them I assume it's possible to make that run at least a bit better at some point.
The console release target is a bit of a question mark, though. You'd think they have just weaker GPUs and they'll need to optimize to fit, but they can also target lower resolutions and do other stuff there. Plus if there's an I/O issue in there, there's a reliable spec for SSDs on those, so who knows.
Hm. So it scales with VRAM and GPU, not CPU? Interesting.
That's less concerning than people had made it out to be, at least for a game of this genre. It still doesn't sound particularly pleasant to play, but hey, less of a dealbreaker.