I feel you. The first 10-15 hours did feel like kind of a slog. I will say, I hit a point where I’m legitimately enjoying the game and things seem to have coalesced in a way they just don’t in earlier game. I’m 20 hours in though. That’s a slow starter if there ever was one.
This is a great point. Gamers as a whole should not really want every game ever to be on UE, not because it’s a bad engine, but a) it’s owned by Epic, and b) that’s fucking boring.
I’m doing one more playthrough once PL comes out. I may not even get the DLC, but the enhanced mechanics that come in the update to the base game should be interesting. Perhaps closer to what was in my mind at launch (and yes, I enjoyed the game then anyway).
Gaming journalism is in a sorry state. I am thankful that we live in an age where I can just watch someone play something for a while. Seeing how they react and how the game flows can be a far better gauge of quality than a published review.
Of course, it also makes you run the risk of spoilers, which sucks. There are a few YouTubers out there making what I would say are fair reviews, but that could change in an instant.
This is getting a lot of flak, but I mostly agree. I have enjoyed the exploration of random planets as a pleasant aside to quests. Yes, they’re dull. It’s a lot of scanning flora and fauna, if they exist. Wandering slowly around.
But in that sense, it’s actually one of the most immersive activities in the whole damn game. If Starfield has an issue with anything, it’s immersion.
One thing I didn’t like about NMS, frankly, is that every planet seems to be teeming with life. It makes that life feel uninteresting when you find it, because there is no yin to the yang.
I’ve got both a DualSense and a Steam Controller – they’re useful for different things. AAA titles with console ports are great with the DualSense (e.g. I’m also using it for Starfield). But the Steam Controller is the one you want for strategy games or anything that doesn’t support controllers at all.
It’s also surprisingly good for flight simming, so long as you can spend the time with customizing the scheme.
At this point I’ve got the Steam Controller and 2 backups that I bought when Valve was offloading them for $5 each. It’s still one of my favorite controllers, and it’s the only way to comfortably play strategy titles from the couch without KBM on a tray table or something.
I really hope they bring out a new one, in particular if it has quadruple grips on the back like the Deck.
There are 2 versions of XeSS: one which runs on most later Nvidia and AMD GPUs and gives roughly equivalent results to FSR1, and another which only runs on Intel GPUs because it uses their equivalent of tensor cores (thus more like DLSS). I don’t ever see a scenario where anyone is going to support the second one unless Intel starts sponsoring games. And for the first, what’s the advantage over FSR1?
Yeah, it runs very nicely on ultra on a variety of hardware. It’s been optimized and has even improved since release.
I am hoping they improved the controller interface, though. I use that even though I play the PC version, and it was somewhat broken as of a couple weeks ago.
To use the PS5 as an example, it’s based on Zen 2 and RDNA 2, both of which are now deprecated. It would not be surprising for Nintendo to match them at this point in the cycle.
Cyberpunk’s performance was awful for everyone at launch, Windows, Linux and consoles.
But it wasn’t? There were a lot of bugs, to be sure, but PC performance was not among them. Hell, I was on a 970 at the time, and it was still fine.
The console versions specifically were a shit show.
But in regards to running better on Linux, a lot of it tends to come down to shader precaching. Lots of stutters on Windows are the first time a shader loads. That was definitely the case with Elden Ring.