ICastFist

ICastFist, 5 miesięcy temu

You know, Hi Fi Rush is a good game, yet Tango still got axed because “fuck them”. Larian wasn’t nimble with BG3 either, they were thorough

ICastFist, 5 miesięcy temu

Now with Funky Mode!

ICastFist, 5 miesięcy temu

Keep in mind, underpowered hardware means lower price, which means more sales. It worked with the Wii, it worked with the Switch. I fully expect people to bitch about the Switch2 being underpowered, using “ancient” stuff from 2020-21

ICastFist, 5 miesięcy temu

Or Ultra Switch, as a throwback to the 64’s name before it was officially announced, which also means lots of Ultra games.

ICastFist, 6 miesięcy temu

When Bethesda began re-releasing Skyrim without ever fixing any of the many, many, MANY bugs, was when I realized they really don’t give a shit about quality. Unofficial Skyrim Patch has over a thousand bugs that haven’t been fixed by Bethesda, some as old as the original release.

ICastFist, 6 miesięcy temu

The very least I’d expect is a patch note that fixes some long standing bugs that are yet to be addressed officially, but have been fixed in the Unofficial Patch. Here’s their changelog, afkmods.com/Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch Version Hi… , there’s one fix that was superseded by an official patch.

ICastFist, 6 miesięcy temu

World of Warcraft hits 20 this year. I was there (via private servers), starting in 2006.

ICastFist, 6 miesięcy temu

+1 for Morrowind. Be sure to play via OpenMW. It fixes a LOT of stuff and gives many quality of life improvements

ICastFist, 6 miesięcy temu

Others have mentioned Elder Scrolls, but nobody recommended Daggerfall yet, so it’s one of my picks. Yes, the 1996 game, which you can play on Unity for a much, much better experience overall. Since the game is free, you don’t need to pay a thing. Combat won’t feel good, tho.

If you enjoy space games, X3 Albion Prelude might be a good option. It’s “open world” in that you can go anywhere right from the start, but the main gist of the game is to get rich so you can get the capital ships. Ship to ship combat is fine, each ship class has strengths and weaknesses. It has a learning curve and can feel needlessly convoluted at times

Kingdoms of Amalur isn’t really open world, but its combat is awesome. Get the original, non-remastered version, and it should run on your stronger PC, hopefully.

ICastFist, 6 miesięcy temu

I put the link on the Daggerfall word, it’s this one - www.dfworkshop.net

ICastFist, 6 miesięcy temu

More like Fallout 4 in space, minus any interesting places to explore, worse characters, story and base building.

ICastFist, 6 miesięcy temu

I’m just amazed that, 6 months later, they haven’t fixed any of the skill related bugs, but “fixed” the visual effects of rejuvenation ~4 times (it’s listed that many times in the changelogs, anyway). That’s bad even for Bethesda standards

ICastFist, 6 miesięcy temu

Star Citizen isn’t being touted as a AAAA+ game, though it’s certainly been selling in game stuff like one.

ICastFist, 6 miesięcy temu

There are two already

ICastFist, 6 miesięcy temu

I’m also on a 1070, but mine’s been trucking along since 2019. I do occasionally play something GPU intensive, but I often avoid going full MAX GRAFFICS because the laptop gets really toasty, which causes visible screen tearing due to most of the hot air being blown straight onto the fucking screen. Great engineering, ASUS, gg.

ICastFist, 6 miesięcy temu

Eh, there’s a huge number of shovelware for every console generation, plus less than stellar titles. The thing is that, due to all the years piling up, the amount of good stuff just increases.

ICastFist, 6 miesięcy temu

Fun fact: The Sims 2 is abandonware. Other than buying used physical media, the only way to get it nowadays is through piracy.

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

I remember the dev of Frog Fractions was doing a kickstarter back then. After the announcement of Facebook buying Occulus, they put up a new bonus goal of 2 billion: “Buy occulus back”

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

I really wish they’d start by not making the EGS program a fucking UE5 app. Seriously, using the whole ass engine to render html is stupid beyond belief

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

If you peruse the folder where it’s installed and compared to any UE4 or UE5 game, you’ll notice all the other similarities in .dll files, folders and whatnot. Even the CrashReporter.exe is the same you see in unreal games. Or you can check the config files at Epic GamesLauncherEngineConfig which has stuff like BaseEngine.ini which, among other networking configurations, also has this:

<span style="color:#323232;">[/Script/Engine.Engine]
</span><span style="color:#323232;">ConsoleClassName=/Script/Engine.Console
</span><span style="color:#323232;">GameViewportClientClassName=/Script/Engine.GameViewportClient
</span><span style="color:#323232;">LocalPlayerClassName=/Script/Engine.LocalPlayer
</span><span style="color:#323232;">WorldSettingsClassName=/Script/Engine.WorldSettings
</span><span style="color:#323232;">NavigationSystemClassName=/Script/NavigationSystem.NavigationSystemV1
</span><span style="color:#323232;">NavigationSystemConfigClassName=/Script/NavigationSystem.NavigationSystemModuleConfig
</span><span style="color:#323232;">AvoidanceManagerClassName=/Script/Engine.AvoidanceManager
</span><span style="color:#323232;">PhysicsCollisionHandlerClassName=/Script/Engine.PhysicsCollisionHandler
</span>

Meanwhile, in Epic GamesLauncherPortalConfig, the “game” part of the launcher, you have DefaultGame.ini and DefaultEngine.ini, the latter’s first 2 lines pointing back to the Engine folder: [Configuration] BasedOn=…EngineConfigBaseEngine.ini

So, yeah, it’s the actual engine. I was going to complain about disk bloat, but my Steam install is currently sitting at 1.3GB and I’m not entirely sure how much of that is from cached stuff. GOG Galaxy is taking ~980MB, but roughly 650MB are from redist installers (MSVC2005, 2007, dotnet, etc), so a “clean” install would be way lighter than Steam or EGS, the latter at 1.1GB on a clean install.

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

Ever heard the saying “Everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer”? Basically, just because you have a tool, it doesn’t mean it’s the best tool for every job. UE5 is great for making games, cinematics and loads of other stuff. But why use it to effectively behave as a browser like Chrome or Firefox, but worse, when there are alternatives made specifically for that?

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

One can dream

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

You mean the near Paradox levels of DLC for Three Kingdoms and Warhammer? And selling blood as a fucking DLC for every Total War game since Shogun 2? Yeah, I’ve heard about it.

The games are good, but Sega’s forced monetization is atrocious.

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

If you look at other games published by Sega, like Yakuza Like a Dragon, Persona 3 Reload, Two Point Hospital, Total War games, it becomes clear Sega’s the one responsible for that

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

probably one of the best space games ever made

Don’t stretch it. Maybe it could be #10 in a top 10, but when you have the likes of Elite Dangerous, Space Engineers, X4, Freelancer, plus little known indies like Empyrion Galactic Survival and Evochron Legends, it’ll hardly be anyone’s top choice.

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

The problem is that NMS is very repetitive and bland. Learning alien words takes for-fucking-ever, finding freighter upgrades is one of the worst time sinks in the game, combat feels more tedious and padded out than that of Everquest, looking for “that one cool ship” or “cool looking weapon” is pure RNG and lucking out on it not coming as a C class, upgrading inventory space is either a system jumping time sink or “planetary exploration” time sink.

Nearly nothing you do in the game gives you a sense of accomplishment and, after 4-8 hours or so after first starting playing, you’re unlikely to look forward to any specific activity because “it’s fun”. There’s a lot “to do” but very little motivation to, like why even bother being the mayor of a settlement?

Even on permadeath the game offers no real challenge once you’re off the starting planet.

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

Isn’t there a “journey to the centre”

Yes, though it’s a cheap “new game plus”, without even feeling like a “new game”. Once you manage to get to the center, you’re thrown in a new galaxy in a random planet and have to get back to your ship, only some upgrades you’ve installed on yourself and your ship might break. Yet you can immediately call your freighter and any exocraft.

There’s also Artemis’ questline, with an interesting concept but overall underwhelming delivery.

Story spoilersArtemis is stuck in a simulation, just like you, player, are stuck in one. The whole universe is a failing simulation created by Atlas.

.

interaction with other players?

From my experience, which pretty much ended around 1 year ago with the game, player interaction could be summed up to:

• finding someone else’s buildings during a community expedition
• finding someone else’s buildings in a quicksilver quest
• someone giving you free stuff while you’re idling in the anomaly

Apparently there are guilds now? In any case, I never saw anyone looking for group, because the game has nothing that only a pair or trio can do, or do faster/better than a solo player, other than base building

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

All breadth and no depth, still the same. Some 12 different planet types, a number of neat looking anomaly planets that exist only for sightseeing (one of my favorites was a planet where everything is covered in a metallic hexagonal mesh). As I said in another comment in this thread, the game is very repetitive with some activities being needlessly padded out to make you waste as much time as possible (learning alien words, going into derelict freighters to get upgrades)

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

The irony is how much Starfield copies from NMS, often the bad things and as a worse copy, like scanning stuff on the planet surface, jump range limitation, space “exploration”, shitty performance

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

Gave it a whirl. Basically, you can now scrap ships to get their components to create a new ship inside any station. Couldn’t find any merchant within the station selling pieces, so you have to go out and explore, or scrap some of your own ships.

Stations now look slightly different from one another and no longer have those semi-hidden rooms that nobody cared about. Alien vendors now give a discount if you’re at a good standing with their race. Guild “vendors” offer a list of stuff for free, but I don’t get why the prompt is red instead of white. Performance is still mostly CPU bound.

Overall decent update, but the new features don’t warrant playing more than 1 hour.

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

Your comparison makes no sense. Watching a movie in a theater is much like watching a an actual play or a live concert, it’s a “group experience” that isn’t quite like watching a playback on your TV.

If you divide those 870 over 24 months (2 years), that’s 36 dollars a month. If you spent that money every month on games, you could get 1 or more each month and might luck out and get a HUGE “return of investment” if you calculate it entirely as money / time played. Plus, it’d be hours and hours of entertainment any day of the week, not only “each weekend”. Buying on GOG would also mean you get to “own them forever”.

You pledge to support the development of the game

Please act and reply like an investor instead of a fanboy, then. Just because you want to see the game come through doesn’t mean you have to defend everything RSI does to raise money.

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

The inventory has been one of the primary sources of complaints since day one, but despite several major overhauls they haven’t fixed the core issues, just made it slightly less inconvenient to use each update.

Still waiting on them fixing the fucking interaction. Hold E to interact with the thing 5yd behind you instead of the npc right in front.

Another old annoyance that will probably remain until the end: stopped firing your weapon for 1 second? Let me holster it down again, sure you won’t mind the extra 400-500ms animation lag until you have to fire that sentinel again!

PS: Oh, and the teleport list! Another thing that desperately needs more information shown and a way to order/filter it.

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

Significantly less fulfilling than Minecraft, as you have limitations on build area and terraforming simply resets after a number of days.

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

TLDR > A lot of the repetitiveness isn’t a problem of “Lack of disk space”, it’s just a matter of not making good use of procedural generation. Seeing “the same building blocks in a different configuration” is better than seeing “the same thing”.

the space that they would need on your hard drive to make the game really non-repetitive visually would be out of this world

Not necessarily. You can procedurally generate textures, sounds and geometry, but that becomes a huge CPU hog in a game that already blows CPU usage. But most of the repetitiveness can be “fixed” (read: reduced) without adding more than ~20MB of new textures and geometry.

One of the problems is that there’s no variation within a planet. Every grassy planet is the same mechanically. Sure, one might have bubbles in the air, another might have yellow grass instead of red, but they’re mechanically identical. It’s the only planet type to find starbulbs and minerals with parafinum. No grassy planet has an ice cap, or a desert patch, or a volcano. If you ever need to find cactus and pyrite, you have to go to a desert planet. If you need uranium and gamma weed, radioactive planet. Then you have the caves, which are completely identical in every planet.

Some planets may have bio luminescent plants, which are gorgeous to look at, but because there’s no variation within a planet, you see them everywhere. There’s never a point where you think “This is the spot on this planet”. Because everywhere is “the spot”, so it’s just “the planet”, which can also be found on the next star system.

Save for airless planets, if I’m not mistaken, every planet has the same 3 “trap” plants (man eater, whip, spores in a cave). There’s not even a color change depending on the planet. Same damn plant, same damn damage, same oxygen amount on death, whether on ice or on a volcano.

Another thing that compounds on the lack of planetary variation is the same sin that Starfield did, of every point of interest being the same everywhere. Every market is the same, every small settlement is the same, every infested facility is the same. This one is easy to give more variation, just create some building blocks and chain them together, like how rooms are generated in ARPG games like Diablo or Torchlight. You know how each star system has a different market rating? Use that to calculate the maximum size any one POI can reach, or as a weight to the POI that can appear (small settlements become more common in 1 star system, markets more common in 3 star, etc).

They do the above in a limited capacity with derelict freighters, so it’s not like there’s “no way” to do it or “they don’t know how”.

Yet another thing that breaks the immersion and “want” of exploration: the vast majority of the galaxy is “settled”. Star systems without any alien presence are the exception. What the hell are you even exploring if there’s already someone there with a working teleporter in space, plus several POI dotting every planet?

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

If you mean mining Active Indium, they nerfed the price hard some updates ago. Using Oxygen + Chlorine for infinite multiplication still works. Another easy-ish way to get money is with a huge plantation of cactus. There’s a recipe that turns 200 into a gel that sells for 50k each.

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

Today? No, I don’t think any game does it.

.kkrieger did that. Not a “real game”, it’s a demo (of a demoscene), a “proof of concept” or a “proof of skill”. Nostalgia Nerd has a very interesting video about it on youtube.

3D models tend to occupy less disk space than textures, as these usually come in at least 2 files: one for the actual colors, one or two more for light mapping (bump map, emission, normals, etc). I don’t know which format NMS uses, but a .obj 3D model with 62k triangles will take around 4.5MB of disk space.

For comparison, this Damaged Helmet in gltf format (which you can see on your browser here) has 15k triangles, a .bin file (the actual 3D geometry) of 545kb and roughly 3MB of textures - The Default_albedo.jpg is the “actual color” and it alone is larger than the .bin + .gltf, at 914kb.

That’s the same problem again, you need hard drive space for all that 3D variation.

Not really. Again, they just need to be smart with what they have. Grassy planet where one third is green grass, another is red grass, another is yellow. No need for any extra stuff to be made, they already have the building blocks. Better yet, mostly grassy planet with patches of radioactive terrain surrounded by desert.

For buildings, just think about player made bases. You can make effectively “infinite” interiors and exteriors with all the stuff players can use to make a base. Write coordinates of “premade” rooms, write some extra lines of code to join specific rooms together and bam, all you needed was less than 10kb of extra text to increase variety.

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

Judging from a quick Lets Play watch, the game is a top down 2D space combat with 3D graphics. You can go down on planets, but it’s a small map and meant mostly to upgrade your ship and repair it. It’s a space game with big focus on combat, but with nothing remotely comparable to NMS, really. Despite the irritating sound effects, I’m actually curious to trying it out sometime in the future.

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

The limitation is coder skill, not hardware. That .kkrieger example is 20 years old. It could make a Pentium 3 “generate an entire FPS game” from less than 100kb of coding instructions alone.

The question is "why don’t other people do it, then?" and the answer is “because having all those media resources as files makes the startup faster, memory usage down and is easier to modify and replace”

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

What you been describing is not 3D models and meshes, which is what takes up the majority of the hard drive space.

My brother in christ, what the fuck do you think i’ve been describing then? I even linked an example of how the 3d model itself, the geometry, the mesh, occupies less disk space than the actual textures

For comparison, this Damaged Helmet in gltf format (which you can see on your browser here) has 15k triangles, a .bin file (the actual 3D geometry) of 545kb and roughly 3MB of textures - The Default_albedo.jpg is the “actual color” and it alone is larger than the .bin + .gltf, at 914kb.

What I see is that you don’t understand how procedural generation works. As is today, how do you think planetary terrain is generated? That it is all saved as a file that is read from your computer/PC? That you could load up a “planetXYZ.file” externally to edit it? That the terrain mesh is this huge file with all sorts of hills and plains that you could import/export and load in Blender?

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

This kind of talk always reminds me of Josh Strife. If memory serves, if what you’re doing in the game in the first few hours isn’t fun or entertaining, it’s unlikely that it’ll be after 100 hours, because it’s very likely that you’ll keep repeating the same activities for all those hours and beyond. What usually happens is that you just get used to it, plus sunk cost fallacy gets stronger the longer you play.

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

It’s a question of cost-benefit spending developer time on a feature not many people would use

Which is super ironic when you look at games that had an obviously tacked-on, rushed multiplayer component in the first place, such as Spec Ops: The Line, Bioshock 2 and Mass Effect 3

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

Even if you gave him a current-day computer to play with (otherwise, even supercomputers of the time would struggle to run UE5), he wouldn’t achieve much, consumer grade computers back then really struggled with 3D graphics. Quake, released in 1996, would usually play around 10-20 FPS.

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

Just according to keikaku*

*TL: keikaku means plan

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

The screenshot of that game reminds me of Grand Knights History on the PSP. I should probably finish that game someday

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

You can’t see the store page anymore, that’s it. I know because I own a delisted game that I don’t even remember when/where I got, an astronaut FPS in zero-G asteroids or something. I can still install and try to play, can’t actually play because it’s multiplayer only and servers are dead.

ICastFist, 7 miesięcy temu

It’s gamergate 2.0: electric boogaloo