Mhmm. Everyone is shitting on Nintendo, but the reality is their games are literally keeping up with inflation. The problem is that our wages haven’t kept up with inflation, and the cost of living has, at least, kept up. In some cases (rent), it’s grown faster than the inflation of everything else.
Don’t get me wrong, Nintendo is tone deaf for making this decision now, and I suspect they’d still make billions with a $15 price increase rather than a $30 one. I’m not defending them. But the picture is a lot larger than them.
There’s no “sanity” system in Look Outside. The closest thing is a hidden “stress” stat which, last I checked, is literally just combat problems when it gets low.
That said, Look Outside is a fantastic game, and the Dev is super down to earth and active with his players. Highly recommend.
I’m a teacher, and as soon as students figure out I play games, they inevitably ask me this question, but I largely think it’s an unfair question to ask someone who games as a genuine hobby rather than just a kill time.
I like to tell them that’s a really impossible question to answer and instead offer them my favorite franchise of games: Monster Hunter. I feel like I can more reliably say that I am a massive fan of the franchise, with it reliably being my favorite videogame franchise, without that seeming weirdly inaccurate considering the wide variety of genres and sub-genres that make up video game interests.
To say that Monster Hunter Rise is my favorite game would be a massive disservice to the captivating, genre-breaking storytelling power of Hades, my deeply rooted love of the flight mechanics in Elite Dangerous, my history as a brief world record holder for a Mario title, the thousands of hours of Team Fortress 2 I’ve shared with friends, or my experiences grinding World of Warcraft arenas to the top 0.5% of players. And I’ve somehow listed 5 formative titles from the top of my head without even representing my deep passion for rhythm games, with Hi-Fi Rush being a genuine contender for that “favorite game” slot that I am arguing doesn’t exist. So I don’t answer with any of these games, because not only would my answer be fundamentally untrue, but it’s not really the question my student means to ask, either. They want to know what I am into, and giving them a standout franchise that automatically gets my money when a title is released gives them a much better answer than any one title could ever do.
If someone already owns Tunic and is considering this, I would say to just directly donate the money.
Or just like… Donate through the bundle and consider trying out some minor projects created by people who are trying to make something cool? Why turn down access to these games out of some form of perceived superiority? This notion that since you’ve never heard of these other titles they can’t possible offer anything of value to you is kind of a spit in the face of struggling artists of all types.
The experiences people are reporting with this game are so strange to me.
I loaded the game today during a 1hr break at work on my Legion Go. It took ~10 minutes to do the shader compilation, I opted to turn frame generation on, and the game defaulted the settings to high, which felt awful. After turning the settings to low, turning the upscaling quality from “Max Performance” to just “Performance,” adjusting the sharpness up from 0.5 to 0.6, and then disabling other features I don’t care about (cloud textures? I barely look up) or outright hate (why games continue to push aggressive motion blurring is beyond me - it looks horrible), I started playing.
I experienced a stutter whenever I step into a new space, or load a new cutscene, but it smoothed out in a fraction of a second. While the graphics don’t look the best, the game plays smooth. I did the opening sequence with no stutters, got to the not-tetsucabra fight, and maintained 45+ fps throughout the entire fight, with no stutters or issues. At points, the monster ran into a cave, which aided my hand-held PC and kept the game running at a smooth 60fps for those sections. This is directly in-line with my experiences running the benchmark on Legion Go, which averaged ~45 fps on nearly identical settings.
I haven’t yet run the benchmark or played the released game on my home PC, sporting a Ryzen 7 5800 and a 3070 ti, but the demo, which was less optimized and frame generation did not work during, played “fine.” I was unimpressed with the performance relative to the graphical fidelity in that play (though I am of the opinion that the more gritty, realistic aesthetic is ugly relative to the vibrant worlds of Generations, or Rise and unapologetically think they look better than even World).I can’t say I had problems or felt that performance or visual quality would impede my enjoyment of the game.
This article notes specific stuttering and runs the frame health tests to demonstrate it. I suspect they’re onto something that I am not experiencing for some reason or another. That said, I ultimately think the 4k, 144+ fps gamers running expensive GPUs are offended that they can’t play this one on the highest settings, and are review bombing the hell out of this title. I’m not sure what the deal with all the “ThAt’S nOt HoW fRaMe GeNeRaTiOn WoRkS!” screaming relevant to low end systems is about, as I am experiencing notable improvements through it.
I encourage people to test on their own hardware, rather than taking reviews at face value, as I’ve begun to believe that whatever issue is occurring is deeper than “Capcom didn’t optimize!” Use the benchmark, and take advantage of Steam’s refund policy.
Hi-Rez is the king of creating a new game, pretending it’s their “big thing” and then enshittifying it while their good devs are moved to the next “big thing.” They are fad chasers who are constantly in a race to monetize a market and then move on.
I’m glad it caught up with them. Couldn’t have happened to a better company. Apologies to the earnest designers and programmers that got caught in the crossfire.
Kinda hype. Had my eye on this one for a while. I’m a little cautious what “early access” means in this regard, though. I’ve had altogether too many rogue-likes release into early access without enough content to justify it.
Problem is, I own most of the games on the Steam front page, so finding new and interesting games is getting difficult.
This. I feel totally underwhelmed by the sale this year because everything on the front page I already either own or have no interest in. I know the discovery queue exists, but it primarily tries to feed me the same jank I already know exists.