While I’m no fan of paid sponsorships holding back good games, this is untrue.
Neither nvidia nor amd block their partner devs from supporting competing tech in their games. They just won’t help them get it working, and obviously the other side won’t either, since that dev is sponsored. There are some games out there that support both, some of them even partnered.
So yes, it’s bullshit. But it’s not “literally paid” bullshit. Bethesda could have gone the extra mile, and didn’t.
As for game subscriptions, I’ve not looked into it much, but I know Apple’s service at least is based on hours played, which has resulted in some games on the service attempting to stretch out their playtime using things like mandatory grinding to progress in their games. With this model, developers can literally shoot themselves in the foot financially, by allowing the player to sprint. It’s stupid.
Games can’t be reduced to that simple a value. You can get the same amount of hours out of God of War as you can Binding of Isaac, but their production and purchase costs, are not, and should not, be the same.
But I did want to make the point that there aren’t as many corners to cut as some might think.
And while lossless compression of course exists, better compression is usually also a processing trade-off. You can use more storage and less processing, or use more processing, and less storage.
Compression is not a magic tool that reduces file size for free, its doing math to store some given data using less bits, which then has to be done in reverse to get at the original data.
I’m fully behind the idea that you should be able to opt for not downloading the biggest texture files and 3D assets, if you’re gonna play at low settings, anyway.
But it’s worth noting that “optimizing” the file sizes of high-fidelity games isn’t really possible. You can’t compress textures or 3D assets the same way you might an RGB image. Game textures contain a lot more layers than just color, in modern games they can contain material, depth and specularity maps, just to name a few. And that’s before considering any accompanying bre-baked lighting data that entire levels may come with, which trades in the need to real-time render stuff for doing it in advance and storing how something is supposed to look, and shipping it alongside the game.
None of this can be easily compressed. It has to be retained losslessly, or you risk rendering artefacts.
Also, most game distribution services will send you an AGGRESSIVELY compressed (as in packed as a whole, using great amounts of CPU to pack it smaller without data loss) format, which your PC/console unpacks as it downloads. They too have every reason to save bandwidth.
But even then, you seldom see data savings of more than 10-30%. There just aren’t that many corners to cut.
There was talk about making “steam deck optimized” versions of games that would ditch high resolution assets as they would be pointless on a 720p display. Nothing seems to have materialized.
That said, there are reasons why games are taking more and more space. Game assets cannot be compressed the same way image files intended for humans can. They have to be stored losslessly, or there WILL be rendering artefacts. And a material or texture in a game is composed of a lot more layers than just an RGB image (normal maps, specular maps, material maps, depth maps). And modern game-engines can pre-bake a lot of things that otherwise would have to be rendered in real-time. That pre-baked render data has to be stored, preferably in high resolution to avoid aliasing, and shipped along with all the other game files.
Games aren’t ballooning in size for no reason. Stuff like pre-baking essentially trades storage for the ability to get the same looks for less processing. More data layers in textures and materials allows rendering to take shortcuts in how the appearance of a surface is calculated, etc. etc. etc.
But none of this would prevent the option to not download these resource files for ALL detail levels. If you’re not gonna run a game on ultra textures, you don’t need those files sitting on your drive.
Don’t overuse dodges, a lot of attacks will miss if you’re just boost-moving around the boss, so save the dodges for stuff that you actually need it for, so you always have EN to spare.
Don’t be afraid to burn your EN on flight when warranted, the spinny thing that the Spider does in its final phase is really easy to avoid if you just fly over it.
Don’t stop doing damage, consider having something that you can use to at least poke at the enemy just enough to keep the stun bar from decaying, so you can build it up to get a stagger. Or switch to weapons that have a high impact stat to build stagger faster.
Don’t sleep on melee weapons. They do MASSIVE damage if you can land the hit.
It’s just an idea I had from a game design perspective.
Nier: Automata is one game with which I saw a lot of people complain, as the game does nearly nothing to get you to actually experiment with different weapon combinations and plug-in chips, and a lot of people overlook those systems because of it. And hence the experience of some players suffered.
Pre-set loadouts in arenas could have been used to address that design problem by showing players the possibilities.
Although, it wouldn’t necessarily need to be mandatory. Each arena fight could come with a “recommended AC” for countering the opponent, while still allowing players to take in their own mech should they want to. This could have come with the fights being a lot harder as well, making using your own design viable only if you know what you’re doing.
Arena should have been increasingly demanding fights that each require a unique build to conquer. Or even better, each fight should have made you use a pre-set loadout, so you’d have to explore and learn new builds, and that knowledge could then be carried into designing mechs for the campaign missions.
I bet theres a lot of people out there not changing it up at all, missing out on an a lot that the game has to offer.
Ideally each one could have made you adapt to and learn new mechanics.
But it seems each one is just a randomized loadout or a character from the story, with the exact same AI slapped on.