Happily, PlayStation 5 manages to deliver a creditable rendition of the game, but the now legendary Act Three continues to humble CPU performance - perhaps more than we anticipated going in.
It doesn't even matter a lot if it does have really good graphics capability. Nvidia is good at that (though whether they'd price that where Nintendo wants is questionable). The question is what Nvidia can give in a CPU, because the only ARM CPU out there that's actually interesting in terms of efficient per core performance is Apple.
I'd consider it a slight positive on a broader cultural level, though. The fact that big market games don't have to be heavily censored to exist any more feels like a positive even if I don't find the sex particularly gratifying. (And no, I don't care which of 3 identical looking dicks my character has, BG3 or cyberpunk). I do think, that given how many people find the romance part of the roleplaying enjoyable (and have way before the modern trend of adding explicit elements to them), that having sex is kind of an inevitable part of that, though.
I think there's something like it someone suggested to me once, but something like an RTS where you code up your units with different behaviors seems to me like something that could be fun for novices and more experienced coders alike if done correctly. You probably wouldn't want to support a full coding language, but taking something like Python or another scripting language that supports objects and providing a small set of legal commands to include in your unit code would be interesting to me. If the base was a campaign that encouraged creative problem solving to use your hand coded unit behavior, and you added a simple way for players to share code with each other, pit their unassisted bots against each other, and maybe even added the ability to write/pin commands to change behavior patterns for an actual real time head to head, I might play the hell out of it.
I also might play for 5 minutes and never touch it again though.
That's probably the one I've seen before. It definitely does look like it has potential.
My biggest issue is actually finding the time to really dive into it among all the other stuff I want to play. I could see absolutely getting into a black hole with it some time I start though.
Thanks for helping me find that to at least put on my wishlist. For now between BG3 and Starfield I don't need another giant time sink, but I'll definitely keep it in mind when I'm looking for something different.
Also, I don’t know the difference between game journalists and game critics,
Neither exist in any meaningful format? There's clickbait game stories and people who halfass review games, but it's well under 1% who meet the bare minimum standard to qualify as anything resembling a journalist or critic. Games coverage is way worse than the people reacting to it.
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
If that was the case then they could just stick 100 people in a lobby and get them to square off 1v1 in a tournament until there’s one winner.
And you think battle royales have too much down time?
I don't play them because they're all prey to the modern aggressive cash grab bullshit most online games are, but most of the downtime you're discussing is actually active and engaged. You need to be consciously making a decision during the parachute part to decide where you want to land. All the "collecting" is constantly under stress, because if you aren't aware of your surroundings at all times, you could be dead. The whole game mode has a tension to it that most others don't, because dying in death match doesn't cost you anything but 10 seconds to respawn.
More concerning than Bethesda’s decision to withhold early review codes from certain outlets is how heavily some sites are relying on the game to drive their business.
I was damn near 1k hours in D1. I think I'm still under 100 in 2, because somehow they managed to make every single map in the entire game a heaping pile of dogshit.
Those aren't the same or similar. Those are options in addition to buying that allow access to a large library of games (except humble, which is just buying games). They aren't "pay this subscription or you can't play the game you bought".
I bounce around between games a lot, so I was never going to be done before anything else came out, but they should definitely scratch different itches, also. They might both be big RPGs, but I fully expect to be able to play Starfield with stuff in the background and there's just too much narrative to do that with BG3. I also just itch for more actiony stuff at times (right now that's a 2D pixel art game called Chasm). Even if I drop 20 hours in a game before switching to the next one, one game isn't going to actually be the only one I play for that long, personally.
Everything that size has heavy elements of procedural generation now, but no man's sky's is pretty bad, then untouched by anyone. A little hand tuning goes a long way.
No Man's Sky more or less just made an algorithm, then that's your world. I'm guessing Bethesda's process is more sketch out broad strokes, let the algorithm fill it in, make adjustments, then hand place some meaningful portion at the end. They're using it an an intermediate step and not the whole process.
I do almost all my gaming on the deck. It's great because of what it is as a handheld. If you don't intend to use those features, the lack of power makes a serious dent in the value it provides. And "no fuss" is correct compared to other PC handhelds, but crazy compared to an Xbox.
It's basically all I use, and most of the headaches are more about publisher hostility than any actual issues with Linux (no, you not being able to install your fucking rootkit is not a failing). I basically don't even look at any of those statuses because I don't feel like I need to. Almost everything actually does just work.
But we're comparing it to a console lol. That, to the point of baked in performance settings tuned to the exact hardware, are their whole purpose.
Retro gaming is a massively popular Raspberry Pi application, and while loading your favourite old video games onto an SD card is pretty straightforward, building the physical shell of a gaming system can be daunting for those of us without 3D printers or design skills of any kind. PiBoy Mini bridges that gap by providing...
I genuinely do understand the realities of manufacturing niche stuff making the high price kind of unavoidable, but you have to have high build quality to justify it to the consumer.
I could almost see the "digital foundry can't share it" as not giving their review outlets preferential treatment over everyone else (because the technical breakdown is a separate thing), but the timeline is just not anywhere near sufficient, especially for a game of this scope.
I'm kind of reading it like the Europe team did kind of a shitty job, considering they said some places got codes from the American team.
It's generally a hard balance to strike on when it's good enough for reviewers to get their hands on it with enough time to actually provide meaningful evaluations (because they genuinely are fixing shit up to and through launch. This is the same reason it's hard for reviews to provide a lot of information on general bugginess. They also play a lot of unfinished stuff that's actually cleaned up before launch). But there's no reason to give different reviewers codes at different times. It sounds like different divisions and one fucking up.
Man, in 2023, it's really hard to get heard through all of the macho "git gud" guff but as a fan of Armored Core since its inception: this game is not what I was expecting. I am disappointed....
I mean, it definitely helps. The production quality is insane. But the fact that the choices (or mistakes) have actual real impacts on the game going forward are as big as far as I'm concerned. I ended up with my hand being forced into combat early that made an encounter with a potential party member immediately hostile. That sucks, especially since I wasn't trying to do what happened in the earlier encounter. But in terms of a world feeling alive, having it actually react to what you do is pretty damn significant (unless "you're small and irrelevant" is intentional).
I started back up the first Blasphemous after finally getting around to figuring out cloud saves on the steam deck (I just forced the windows build). I'd definitely like to get through it and into 2, but I feel like I'm bombarded with huge games I need to play this fall. It might work as a game I can play while watching TV. I started back up while watching 24 (I loved it when I was younger, but watching back I really didn't recognize just how great the writing was.)
I'm still hooked hard on BG3, though. A fucking lot of hours in and I'm still on act 1.
It's not that simple. Even using it as a base gets you into a legal gray area. Learning from a work and incorporating elements into your own work is legal, but copying someone else's legwork like this is legally murky even if you don't take the actual code.
While it can be used to hide a bad game, it's more of a general marketing thing in the era of trashy algorithm driven content consumption.
If everyone high profile uploads their review of your game on the same day, it hyper-accelerates the domination of those algorithms and everyone broadly interested in the space you're in is going to be exposed to it, probably significantly.
Wow. It dropped at a rough time, too. BG3 is still going nuts and Starfield is coming soon. It's the kind of thing I'd love to check out but those two (and probably Madden because it's football season) are just going to eat the absolute hell out of my time.
The fact that none of the gambling is happening on their site? The fact that saying it's not allowed isn't magic that allows them to instantly identify bad actors?
I guess they could just use FSR as a wrapper for DLSS, but they made DLSS because there was nothing like it available, and it leverages the hardware to absolutely blow doors off of FSR. They're not comparable effects.
It's a hardware level feature, though. The reason they didn't support hardware prior to RTX was because they didn't have the tensor cores to do the right math.
FSR is substantially less capable because it can't assume it has the correct hardware to get the throughput DLSS needs to work. I know the "corporations suck" talking point is fun and there's some truth to it, but most of the proprietary stuff nvidia does is either first or better by a significant bit. They use the marriage of hardware and software to do things you can't do effectively with broad compatibility, because they use the architecture of the cards it's designed for (and going forward) extremely effectively.
They can't improve openCL. They can make suggestions or proposals, but because broad compatibility are the priority, most of it wouldn't get added. They'd be stuck with a worse instruction set with tooling that spends half its time trying to figure out all the different hardware compatibility you have to deal with.
Cuda is better than openCL. Gsync was better than freesync (though the gap has closed enough that freesync is viable now). DLSS is better than FSR. None of them are small advantages, and they were all created before there was anything else available even if they wanted to. Supporting any of them in place of their own tech would have been a big step back and abandoning what they had just sold their customers.
It's not "pro consumer". It absolutely is "pro technology", though. Nvidia has driven graphic and gpgpu massively forward. Open technology is nice, but it has limitations as well, and Nvidia's approach has been constant substantial improvement to what can be done.
Cuda was first, and worked well out of the gate. Resources that could have been spent improving cuda for an ecosystem that was outright bad for a long time didn't make sense.
Gsync was first, and was better because it solved a hardware problem with hardware. It was a decade before displays came default with hardware where solving it with software was short of laughable. There was nothing nvidia could have done to make freesync better than dogshit. The approach was terrible.
DLSS was first, and was better because it came with hardware capable of actually solving the problem. FSR doesn't and is inherently never going to be near as useful because of it. The cycles saved are offset significantly by the fact that it needs its own cycles of the same hardware to work.
Opening the standard sounds good, but it doesn't actually do much unless you also compromise the product massively for compatibility. If you let AMD call FSR DLSS because they badly implement the methods, consumers don't get anything better. AMD's "DLSS" still doesn't work, people now think DLSS is bad, and you get accused of gimping performance on AMD because their cards can't do the math, all while also making design compromises to facilitate interoperability. And that's if they even bother doing the work. There have been nvidia technologies that have been able to run on competitor's cards and that's exactly what happened.
Going through a standards group is a massive compromise. It in and of itself completely kills the marriage between the hardware and software designs. Answering to anyone on architecture design is a huge downgrade that massively degrades the product.
Completely and utterly irrelevant? They are explicitly for the purpose of communicating between two pieces of hardware from different manufacturers, and obscenely simple. The entire purpose is to do the same small thing faster. Standardizing communication costs zero.
The architecture of GPUs is many, many orders of magnitude more complex, solving problems many orders more complex than that. There isn't even a slim possibility that hardware ray tracing would exist if Nvidia hadn't unilaterally done so and said "this is happening now". We almost definitely wouldn't have refresh rate synced displays even today, either. It took Nvidia making a massive investment in showing it was possible and worth doing for a solid decade of completely unusable software solutions before freesync became something that wasn't vomit inducing.
There is no such thing as innovation on standards. It's worth the sacrifice for modular PCs. It's not remotely worth the sacrifice to graphics performance. We'd still be doing the "literally nothing but increasing core count and clocks" race that's all AMD can do for GPUs if Nvidia needed to involve other manufacturers in their giant leaps forward.
Every single thing about what you're discussing literally guarantees that GPUs are dogshit. There's no path to any of the features we're discussing getting accepted to open standards if AMD has input. They only added them after Nvidia proved how much better they are than brute force by putting them in people's hands.
Standards do not and fundamentally cannot work when actual innovation is called for. Nvidia competing is exactly 100% of the reason we have the technology we have. We'd be a decade behind, bare minimum, if AMD had any input at all in a standards body that controlled what Nvidia can make.
We're not going to agree, though, so I'll stop here.
HDDs have been holding back what you can do in open worlds for a while. It (and the PS5 specifically having an extra emphasis on hardware decompression to amp it up further) was the thing I was most excited about for current gen consoles. There were a lot of rumors that PS4 Spider-Man had to cap web slinging speed to allow the HDD to keep up, and we'll see what the movement options are in Starfield and how ships work (unless we know already and I haven't seen it), but even the jet pack boost thing could seriously strain loads in denser areas if it allows enough movement to feel good in opener spaces.
It was a stupid hardware split and a stupid statement to make. Sticking to the ridiculous stupidity wasn't possible. You cannot demand feature parity without CPU parity.
The entire console positioning by Xbox is an absolute clusterfuck. Their naming is a shitshow; recycling the naming for a second generation is a bigger shitshow. Making two consoles with different GPU performance for different graphics targets would be fine, but the CPU difference and memory architecture differences are a fucking disaster.
Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 Revive Age-Old RPG Debate About Encumbrance - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
It’s a debate as old as role-playing games themselves: should players have to deal with encumbrance?...
Baldur's Gate 3 on PS5 is effectively the PC version at ultra settings (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Happily, PlayStation 5 manages to deliver a creditable rendition of the game, but the now legendary Act Three continues to humble CPU performance - perhaps more than we anticipated going in.
Nintendo reportedly showed a demo of the ‘Switch 2’ console at Gamescom which included visuals comparable to the PS5 and Xbox Series X. (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Starfield players may get a huge XP boost through sex (www.gamescensor.com) angielski
Your Opinion on my Game Idea angielski
cross-posted from: beehaw.org/post/7671504...
Hi, I'm A Stupid Person Who Gets Mad At Review Scores (www.thegamer.com) angielski
A 7/10 is basically a complete failure, so why didn't reviewers take my feelings into account before publishing their scores?
Starfield Premium Upgrade has actually made the Top Ten in the UK physical charts. It’s at No.7. (twitter.com) angielski
Not counting games that were unfun because of bugs, what’s the most unfun video game that you’ve played and what made it unfun? (kbin.cafe) angielski
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
Switch 2 leaks claim console runs “like a PS5”, FF7R to be launch title & more - Dexerto (www.dexerto.com)
Starfield review controversy traces game journalism's orbital decay (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
More concerning than Bethesda’s decision to withhold early review codes from certain outlets is how heavily some sites are relying on the game to drive their business.
PS Plus price hike: We'll all pay for a subscription-based future | Opinion (www.gamesindustry.biz)
Starfield Review Thread
Game InformationGame Title: Starfield...
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Baldur’s Gate 3 had to be scaled back for the Series S, but the console still has a right to exist (www.vg247.com) angielski
It'll be the cheapest place, by an absurd margin, to play Baldur's Gate 3.
PiBoy Mini: just add a Raspberry Pi and you've got a handheld retro gaming system (www.raspberrypi.com)
Retro gaming is a massively popular Raspberry Pi application, and while loading your favourite old video games onto an SD card is pretty straightforward, building the physical shell of a gaming system can be daunting for those of us without 3D printers or design skills of any kind. PiBoy Mini bridges that gap by providing...
Eurogamer and Starfield, why our review will be late. (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
As a long time Armored Core fan, I am disappointed with Armored Core VI. (kbin.social) angielski
Man, in 2023, it's really hard to get heard through all of the macho "git gud" guff but as a fan of Armored Core since its inception: this game is not what I was expecting. I am disappointed....
Baldur's Gate 3 "feels so alive" because it used mo-cap and 248 actors to bring its characters to life (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Soulframe is Elden Ring meets Ghost of Tsushima, but with 'Disney princesses' - PCGamesN (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of August 27th
New thread! Whatch’a all playing!...
Starfield is Bethesda's Least Buggiest Game to Date, Say Sources (insider-gaming.com) angielski
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Armored Core VI peaks at 150K peak concurrent Steam players on day 1, making it the 4th biggest launch of 2023. It's also the second biggest From Software launch ever, second only to Elden Ring (twitter.com) angielski
Roblox ‘operates illegal gambling ring that preys on children’: lawsuit (nypost.com) angielski
Pokemon Sleep Hits 10 Million Downloads Milestone and grants users a special gift (www.gamescensor.com) angielski
Pokémon Sleep, has already surpassed 10 million downloads worldwide. This notable success indicates the app's widespread popularity among Pokémon fans
AMD claims there’s nothing stopping Starfield from adding Nvidia DLSS (www.theverge.com) angielski
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Starfield Launch Details, PC Specs & More (bethesda.net) angielski
PC Specifications...
Baldur's Gate 3 will be released on Xbox this year, with split-screen features removed for Series S (www.gamescensor.com) angielski