Happy to help. Forgot to mention: Make sure to check the difficulty options and disable things like automatically placed cables.
Also, keep in mind that any prices in there tend to be widely out of date. If you want to use this to plan your build, use PCPartPicker to pick out the parts you can afford and then find them or the closest equivalents in this game. The sequel is obviously going to be a bit more up to date.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a whole lot closer to the real deal than most other job simulators. You can genuinely use this to pick up the basics, but there’s no substitute building in the real world. The sequel got better reviews (79 on Opencritic vs. 70 for part 1), but I haven’t tried it yet.
What I’d recommend once you know which part goes where is getting some scrap parts from somewhere and assembling something functional out of them. I’m talking random parts found by the side of the road to at most 20 bucks in total for everything, case included. That’s how I built my first PC as a kid. It was only a 486 with 100 MHz (which came out in 1994) years after the GHz barrier had been breached (~2002ish), but it was mine and I loved it.
The presentation was genuinely astounding. An absolute marvel for the hardware it runs on and it still holds up today, at least visually. Gameplay-wise, not so much, unfortunately.
I didn’t see it until its tentacles had already engulfed my little submersible. I screamed like a little girl and didn’t touch the game again for weeks. No other game has ever managed to scare me like this.
Yes, exactly! Coming from one of the best-made mindless game series to essentially gaming high art is quite the transformation. There has always been a lot of talent at Kroteam, but I’m glad they have finally found their true calling.
The small handful of nods to Serious Sam in The Talos Principle are quite amusing, by the way. I almost got a heart attack from suddenly hearing the sound of the headless kamikaze…
I’m currently playing through this game. At one point, it totally hit me that the non-linear structure and even the way secrets are scattered throughout the world is very reminiscent of Super Mario 64.
Small clarification: Satellite imagery is only used where higher quality aerial photography isn’t available. For cities with full photogrammetry, a plane needs to fly over the whole area twice (the second time at 90 degrees relative to the first pass) in order to capture buildings from all sides.
More than that, actually. I measured well over 250 over large cities. Others have reported more than 300.
That’s not how cache works.
In this case, it does. The cache for this simulator is a disk cache - and it’s completely configurable. You can manually designate its size and which parts of the world it’ll permanently contain. There’s also a default rolling cache (also on SSD - this program doesn’t even support hard drives), which does get overwritten over time.
Only the installs were slow. Terrain streaming worked just fine right from the start (I played it from day one) - and once it’s cached on your machine, they can shut down the servers all they want, it’s still on your machine.
But…that’s what you’re doing? Streaming the game at 180mbps…
No. Map and weather data is being streamed, cached on your SSD and then the game engine loads it from there into RAM and uses it in combination with other locally stored data and locally performed physics calculation to render the game on your machine. You get an uncompressed, high quality image and low-latency input, freshly baked by your graphics card for your eyes only. At 1080p and 60 fps, that’s already 2.98 Gbit/s per second generated by your GPU and sent to the screen as is. At 1440p, we are at 5.31 Gbit/s and at 4K, 11.94 Gbit/s. DisplayPort can handle up to 20 Gbit/s per lane and use up to four lanes, by the way.
Xbox Cloud Streaming only uses up to 20 Mbit/s (and that’s very optimistic). At the advertised 1080p, this means that only 6.7% as much data as generated on the server is reaching your screen.
The problem with game streaming is that in order to limit latency, they have to compress the image and send it very quickly, 60 times per second, which means they have just 16.7 milliseconds for each frame - and do this for potentially millions of users at the same time. This cannot physically be done at any decent level of quality. It is far easier to send much larger amounts of map data that is not time critical: It doesn’t matter if it’s even a few seconds late on your machine, since the game engine will render something with the data it already has. At worst, you get some building or terrain pop-in, whereas if even a single of the 60 frames required for direct game streaming is being dropped, you’ll immediately notice it as stuttering.
That sounds like a great reason not to buy this game.
If you don’t have the hardware to play this game locally, then I would not recommend it. If you have - and a base Xbox Series S is enough for a reasonable experience, which costs just 300 bucks new or about half as much used - then there is no reason for using the streaming service, unless you absolutely have to play it on your phone at work.
FS 2020 had an offline mode. I don’t see why this one wouldn’t have one as well. It’s either using procedurally generated or cached data.
You can not get the same visual fidelity and low latency with game streaming. I’ve tried nearly every service there is (going as far back as OnLive - remember that one?) and they are all extremely subpar, including Microsoft’s own game streaming service.
FS 2020 is available for streaming, by the way, and FS 2024 is likely going to be as well. You’re only getting the console version though. Officially, the resolution is “up to” 1080p, but due to extremely heavy compression, it looks far worse than that. It’s comparable to 720p at best, which means that nearly all fine detail is lost behind huge compression artifacts. On anything larger than a smartphone screen, it looks horrible. That’s on top of connection issues and waiting times that are still plaguing this service.