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Ah gaming journalism in the 2020s.

Everything we know so far about “product”

unfortunately we know nothing about “product” yet, but here’s an unfounded rumor and a fuzzy picture! Thanks for clicking on our garbage article and giving us as revenue!

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Oh my god I hate those. Those are the real articles and places terrified for AI. they’re excited because they can write more bullshit with it. They should be terrified because AI is great at summarizing and I expect extensions that will summarize it down to a sentence

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The most annoying thing about the cities performance issues isn’t even the performance issues. It’s all the gamers who overnight became experts in game performance that are ranting and raving online about how they obviously know how to optimize games more than professionals. It’s so tiring at this point.

Any software engineer with real professional experience can tell you performance tuning is a nightmare. It’s going through millions of lines of code checking for places you can allocate memory a bit differently. Checking collections and going back to your CS classes to make sure you’re using the best data structures. Watching performance tools and debugging for hours on end to catch that one place that slows down a bit.

People here, Reddit, and everywhere are just so tiring because they act like it’s so obvious. “Oh it’s the teeth”. “If they would have done X”. It’s honestly just so disrespectful to the full time engineers who no doubt have had those thoughts months ago. If items like this were simple, they would have done them already.

I give completely respect to the engineers who worked on this, and I respect Colossal Order’s push to still release early. As someone who is enjoying the game, zero crashes, and in my opinion completely playable, I’m happy they released now.

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They literally said why. Because a lot of players, like myself, don’t care about the performance issues and are happy to play it. That those who wanted to start deserved to get it early, and that by delaying it only punished us. And they’re right, like I said I am enjoying it, there’s a huge discord of people enjoying it. If some people just absolutely can’t handle 30fos then they are welcome to delay it for themselves and not buy it until hardware catches up

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That’s not a fair comparison. I see people upset because the car isn’t a masarati, when they didn’t build a masarati. They built a van. I don’t need to go 100km/h, I needed something that could carry all of these items I have. And for me, that runs fine.

I will say that I have a new(ish) gaming rig, built about 3 years ago. I do think minimum requirements are jokingly out of date, and those needed to be upped to not mislead people. I don’t think even a 1000 series GTX card could play this on minimum settings, let alone a 900. It’s better PR just to be up front and say “Look, those cards just aren’t going to cut it. If you can’t play day one, we’re sorry, but we’re excited to see you at your next upgrade” rather than lie and say it’ll be fine.

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This is why I can’t play multiplayer games anymore, all of them have just focused on difficulty and grinding.

I was looking forward to Halo infinite for quite a while, but the multiplayer just is terrible for me. Halo 4 is probably the last one that I kind of enjoyed. And of course the first three were amazing. All I want is to start up multiplayer and and play against people roughly my skill level. I don’t want to grind, I don’t want to be work for everything, I’m a guy who got off work and has a few hours to unwind after the day.

The last thing I want to do after getting off work is have to be extremely frustrated because I’m struggling on an online game and I should be just relaxing. Kudos to everybody who does want the challenge, but games need modes that allow me just to slack off and have fun

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While some setups on PC have challenges, we concluded the performance is not a dealbreaker for all the players. For us, the number one priority is for the players to have fun with the game, and we had seen enough feedback from players enjoying the game that it would be more unfair to postpone. We know we will keep working on the game and do our best to fix issues as fast as possible, so we wanted to respect the announced release date and allow people to start playing the game.

I’ve gotten a lot of flak here on Lemmy for saying this was their plan, because I’m now… 11ish hours into my game and loving it and I don’t need super high framerates.

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There’s a lot of entitled people who are upset because they kicked everything to ultra and yeah , that’s where that 7-12 fps is. Most people can’t fathom fiddling with the settings a bit and maybe lowering them.

The dev sent out a forum post on what settings are causing the biggest lag. I followed their advice and it is completely playable. I’m about 10 hours in and I’m loving it

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store.steampowered.com/…/3744239011016263869

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I have never in my 20 years of gaming not had to make some sacrifices even with new hardware. The only time I can max out all sliders is when a game is already 5 or more years old.

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Shhhh you gotta jump on the hate train! You can’t just be happy a game is coming out here!

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This is a good take. If I can play, maybe high settings, on my 1440p monitor I’ll be happy. I don’t need ultra day one. I’m excited for a refreshed city builder, I have hundreds of hours in the first one and I’m excited to see the improvements.

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People just think that all new games should be able to run at 60fps on ultra settings on 4 year old hardware or it isn’t “optimized”. If it runs fine, I’m happy ,even if it needs to be on “high” settings until hardware catches up a bit.

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Yes, this is all a horrible post, game engines can’t really be compared directly. There is no one size fits all.

EA thought that and tried to apply Frostbite to their entire catalogue. What worked amazingly for Battlefield/Battlefront was a disaster for Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect Andromeda, and let’s not forget Anthem. Engine was optimized for small maps and quick gameplay, but was horrible for large open worlds and RPG elements.

The reason Unreal requires such heavy hardware is because they’re trying to be a one tool fits all, but that requires making sacrifices.

OP’s entire post here is incredibly naive. It’s apples to oranges.

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Yeah, this guy is basically harping on the concept of re-usable code. That’s why we praise RollerCoaster Tycoon’s dev, he wrote the entire thing in assembly. Beyond that, everything since 2d has used an engine. Hell, to not use an engine would be wasteful and delay games. What, every game should rewrite an engine?

Even Halo CE, 2002, used an engine. The Blam! engine. Dude’s delusional if he thinks people were drawing individual pixels on the monitor.

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I see a whole new generation of gamers who have grown up on these new games that they think are perfect, who didn’t see the decades of toil and crap that we did growing up. They expect everything to be the most amazing game they’ve ever seen, not understanding that perfect games are in fact, exceedingly rare. That most games have bad mechanics, quirks, boring areas, and things we put up with. But younger folks just stamp it as a “bad game” and refuse to see the nuance.

Things like games are a spectrum. There’s only 3ish games I mark as perfect. Most will have some things wrong with them. If you don’t like that, then just be content with maybe one perfect game a decade.

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Exactly. I still don’t get 60fps on the first one, a now 8 year old game on top of the line hardware. I don’t care. People here act like performance optimizing is just turning a knob they forgot, but it’s hours of detailed work finding anything and anything that may be able to shave nanoseconds off.

If the game is playable, I’m happy. It’s not a twitch shooter. It’s a city simulation.

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I don’t know, this whole 60fps thing is a new demand from gamers. Frankly I don’t care about reviews anymore. Everyone skews negative, and I’m tired of it.

My hard takes:

• 60fps doesn’t matter. It’s not a shooter. Even CS1 I could only get 50ish on a new map, and that’s with hardware that’s 6 years newer than the game.
• RAM should be used. For gaming it would be wasteful not to use it. If you aren’t using all your ram then you’re loading textures, shaders, and everything from disk, which is thousands of times slower and that would lead to … you guessed it, gamers bitching about lag. What are you using that ram for anyway when you’re gaming that’s a higher priority? If you’re watching someone and they’re complaining that a game is using too much ram shut them off. They don’t how computers work. These aren’t the days of 256MB of ram. I have 32 gigs. I want them to use it.
• Marketers are paid to lie. They don’t understand what the game can do, they’re paid to sell it. Cyberpunk was disappointing for many because they believed marketers running unleashed, saying the game would be a revolution, that it would be gaming evolved. It wasn’t. Instead gamers “only” got a fun open world RPG and they were disappointed by it. (And bugs, they had legit concerns but marketing was stupid around that game and every one of their marketers should have been fired )
• I find that people who watch reviewers are exponentially more disappointed in games because they let reviewers tell them how to feel. If you want to start enjoying games more, stop letting them tell you if you should be disappointed. They’re going for clicks and views, and the rage train gets a lot of them. Just try it and return it if you don’t like it.

I haven’t watched anything and I’m excited. I’m not “hyped”, I don’t think it will redefine city building forever. I think I will enjoy my time in a game that is by definition an iteration of the franchise. Maybe it’ll be great. Maybe it’ll be worse than the first, but I’m going to decide that myself, not let some reviewer begging me for a subscribe tell me.

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No don’t you understand? They gathered two other people, who work directly with them reviewing games the same way they do. If they don’t like it it means it’s a bad game. Obviously!

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Don’t know how to feel about their own mod service. Not that workshop is perfect, but I like it being separate. I guess I’ve just been burned by Creator’s Club with Bethesda,

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Congratulations! Your mod has been selected to be auto included in our next re-re-re-release of the game! You should be so proud of yourself!

No, we will not give you a cut of our profits

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Because capitalism! Aren’t we excited to go buy something that we already have??

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Imagine all the money stupidly left on the table. All because they refuse to accept long term investment over short term gains.

So much money these franchises could have made - if they were given an honest chance

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And we get into why everyone is striking. We’re all okay for normal use cases like this, but execs are like “we’ll pay you for 3 hours of work, then build a model and then do 180 hours of voice from that model. And you’ll say thank you for the opportunity”

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It is courteous to other religions by not assuming everyone is Christian, and doesn’t hurt me at all, so why not?

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I like “cost per hour” which is what you’re getting at.

• Movie at the theater: $16 total.
  • $8/hr
• drinks with friends, at 1 drink an hour for 4 hours
  • $7/hr
• Dinner out, decent restaurant 40/person
  • 20/hr
• Cyberpunk dlc, $30, 20 hrs to beat
  • $1.50/hr

Yeah I’d say that’s a pretty good entertainment value per hour compared to other leisurely activities for me. I apply this to most entertainment things and it does help. I find comparing things to going to the movies is the best, if it’s more per hour than a movie in a theater than no it’s probably not worth it. Those stupid $50 slingshot rides? Nah.

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I’m not convinced whoever pitched it wasn’t joking either, and then studio execs picked it up and ran with it

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Wanna be Aragorn as a ranger? Galadriel in the second age? Elrond during the last alliance? Fuck you, here’s Gollum.

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This is some of the most honest feedback about Starfield. It’s not bad. It’s just horribly dated.

It’s a standard Bethesda game, and it’s great for a Bethesda game. But Bethesda hasn’t updated anything in years, over a decade even. Characters are flat, storylines are fun but not engaging, it’s just… fine.

If this had come out in 2014-2016 as a successor to Skyrim it’d be one of the best games, I firmly believe that. But it didn’t, they took their time building it, which is good, but now we have games like the Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, RDR2, even ME3 came out after Skyrim. The format for story propelled RPGs has changed, and the bar has been raised.

Again I don’t want to be one of the “Oh bethesda bad boooo” people because honestly, I’m still having a ton of fun in Starfield. It’s just that for a brand new game… it’s really showing it’s age.

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Exactly. Compared to games from the early 2010s? It’d hold up. Compared to games in the early 2020s? It just can’t even be compared.

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I really like this, honest feedback to them. The game is obviously made by committee. That’s exactly what my wife and I have been saying, that they did a lot of cool ideas - and then dropped them half way through. None of the ideas are fully thought out or finished, it all screams “Some suit said ‘no this is great, move on’”. Some quick examples

• Base building, awesome concept, I want to build a base on a foreign planet.
  • But what do I do there?
• Automated crafting. Awesome, I love Satisfactory! I can do this.
  • Wait, I can’t limit items in transit, so I can really only transport one item over a link? So it can’t really be automated.
• Oh sweet, I can build my own spaceship?!
  • But you are rarely actually in space and really when you are it’s just a mini game between planets.
• and you get companions to hang out with you on your ship?
  • But they don’t interact with each other or do anything like help you fight other ships.
• Oh and we get to have a fleet of ships?!
  • but they aren’t actually a fleet. You never get to assign someone as captain of another ship to help you fight pirates. You just… pick which of your ships you want to fly right now.

And that’s just some. Like so so so many cool awesome fun ideas that were just… “I don’t want to play with this anymore.” The fleet one especially stings. I was really hoping I could assign someone as captain of another ship, and when we jumped/spawned in space there it would be on my left, and it could help me fight pirates. I mean, how hard would it be to program that? They already have the ship, they have AI for dogfighting other AI, it would just follow behind you until you entered combat.

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These stats are what I have in my head when I am deciding on what to buy. Fact is, most people on the internet are overwhelmingly negative and unable/unwilling to give games a fair shot.

This sounds critical, but look at the numbers. I have a family member who, when asked about Cyberpunk, said it was a shit game, that enemies were too spongy, driving was terrible, and said it was “literally unplayable”. (not bug related, just gameplay) When asked about story he said “Oh I only played a couple of missions”.

Like what? I’m not saying you need to play 100% of Gollum to know it’s a bad game, but come on, talk about judging a book by it’s cover. If you aren’t going to give it a fair shot then why buy it at all, just don’t buy the game?

So many people go into games expecting them to be bad, or expecting bugs/problems that guess what, you’re probably going to find something wrong with it. Maybe watch a few less reviewers ahead of time, maybe turn off the FPS counter, and I don’t know, see if you have fun playing it.

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Oh it was incredibly popular to hate it. I still see threads that are CJ’ing around about how horrible it is. Because it’s fun to hate something on the internet. Now, the people who had bugs or actually “literally unplayable” statuses - genuine. That sucks, I’m sorry, but to everyone who just jumped on the hate train, well I feel bad for people who can’t enjoy things because of that.

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Fair, but I’m talking he spent 20 minutes in there, maybe started one of the main missions.

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Love to see the factory genre taking off. However this looks exactly like satisfactory, even saw the reinforced iron plates in there.

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It looks like it could sit between satisfactory and Minecraft because there is a hole there. Satisfactory is extremely polished and the gameplay is pretty rock solid, but that comes with limitations like having a static game map.

Making this more like Minecraft means that the gameplay may not be as crystal clear but that you can be free to explore outwards.

But, they really need to break from the obvious satisfactory links

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Man I’m real tired of the constant negativity around new games. I rarely see positive stuff online.

You don’t like a game? Just move on. Hell, downvotes and move on. But leaving comments on things like screenshots about how idiotic a game is, man find something else to do.

I agree OP, it is a gorgeous game. The landscapes are incredibly striking

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There’s a thousand places to leave negative reviews. I’m just annoyed at the “Hey look X game has a cool thing” and the immediate “You enjoy X game? You’re an idiot for finding enjoyment out of this, you’re stupid, look how cool I look for shitting on it”. It’s transparent and annoying.

Voice your opinions sure, but if all you do though is shit on people for enjoying something, then that’s a dick move.

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Quit politics and rage baiting. Go find any of the other thousand threads

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Big reason why I just never understood why Meta bet the farm on VR/metaverse. Such a stupid move, literally everyone knew that VR wasn’t ready for mainstream. The only people willing to get it were tech nerds and some gamers, and really that had nothing to do with the metaverse, it was because they could play games in it.

Until it gets stable and doesn’t feel like I’m strapping a brick onto my face, it’s not going to happen mainstream. It also can’t just connect to a PC, average people don’t want to be strapped down to something. And I know, that’s a lot to ask, but if you want to base your entire company on VR, those are the hard realities. People want something like sunglasses, not something that feels like duct taping a laptop in front of their face

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Good, after seeing that Skyrim mod that added a chatgpt follower I immediately saw corpo execs salivating over all the free content they’d get.

I think most gamers love the idea of NPCs that you can have active conversations with. However I think we should fully compensate the voice actors who are lending their voice to the trained model. Something like that can easily be exploited by companies to underpay workers.

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+1 for satisfactory, and the 3000 hours I have logged in it.

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I’d be interested in reading that. I know personally on bad days I’d sometimes have over 100 comments. (Bad meaning too active). Since the first day here on lemmy I haven’t even logged into my reddit account. They burned me hard by killing Sync for Reddit.

It follows the 90-9-1 rule though, so while they have users who use it, I think they burned a lot of the people who posted and commented.

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We were not ready to fully reveal our plan of monopolizing gaming quite yet.

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No it’s good! It’ll give them twice the power to make games and it’ll be better! They totally won’t just sit there with their monopoly, monopolies are good! Plus we still have Sony. Wait they want to buy Sony too? Even better!

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The Razer Wolverine is by far the best controller I’ve ever purchased. Got it now… 7 years ago and it’s still just an absolute champ. The initial price may scare off some, and the fact that it’s wired, but it’s the best damn controller I’ve ever used.

Flappers are 2 can be mapped to existing buttons (I have mine as up/down on the D-pad), and the other 2 raise/lower sensitivity of the sticks. So I can hold a flapper while sniping to get real precise.

It also has two little toggles on the inside between the bumpers which I have mapped to left/right on the dpad, which is really nice because I don’t have to take my fingers off the sticks, Witcher 3 this is amazing because what’s how you pull out a specific sword.

Cannot recommend more, Razer Wolverine.

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This makes sense to me, it looks like it’s $0.20 for each install, only if

• you have passed a threshold of installs
• you yourself are charging for your game

Which, I know Lemmy has issues with proprietary software, but if you are charging for your software and it’s built off this, I don’t think $0.20 is too much to pay them. Unreal takes a percentage I believe, sounds like this is a “keep the lights on” charge.

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Yeah of course I figured it out, but after a lot of trial and error. I have 3000 hours in Factorio and Satisfactory so I’m very well versed in the industry mechanics, but had to figure out the quirks of this game. Like interstellar launchpads are 1:1, how to power them with fuel, how to transport fuel for others, do other sides require fuel? And this is just a theme in the game, spaceship design also you are just plopped into it and have to play around a lot before you understand how things work. Things like “You can’t put a bay directly above where there will be a ladder” I learned last night after a frustrating half hour trying to figure out why one of my portholes wasn’t showing up. Or that the top port must be the topmost part of the ship, even if the engines are only cosmetically sticking out by less than a foot on the other side of the ship it will give a generic flight check failure saying “It’s in the wrong position”.

Don’t get me wrong I love the game, but it clearly goes in the “happy path” way of “they’ll figure it out”, which we will, but some help text/tooltips would go a long way. Things like

Warning, Interstellar pad is transporting fuel but none is provided. (have you connected fuel to the fuel intake?)

Tooltips like that would make it a lot more easy to play. Beyond that loving it, just hit level 19, it was just a struggle getting my first base and ship built.