conciselyverbose

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

"Almost identical" doesn't cut it. The CPU disparity, especially with the much worse memory pipeline, is a big deal.

The lesser memory isn't a big deal when you use high res assets and can just lower the resolution, but it's a huge deal when you use a meaningful portion of it for actual mechanics.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

Slower is slower. Yes, the fact that it's not literally identical is a massive problem when you're requiring identical behavior.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

Resolution doesn't change the number of draw calls.

There are plenty of CPU limited games, and they wouldn't have bothered giving the X a higher clock if it didn't mean anything. Anything short of actually identical is a problem when you intend to demand identical features.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

On PC, the point is that you can skip RAM and go straight to VRAM. You still need the assets in memory while you use them. It's faster but it's not that much faster. With unified memory there isn't that distinction. That's one of the ways consoles can be better optimized than a general PC build.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

Valve lets you identify the deck. It's probably just a flag that hides the reference to it.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

Even perfectly implemented DRM steals cycles that can't possibly benefit any gamer ever in any way.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

A handheld digital only PS4 could move some units at $200 pretty easily IMO.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

The steam deck is significantly more capable than the PS4. Jaguar's CPUs were absolute dogshit when they launched, let along compared to anything Ryzen.

The problem with a switch 2 is nvidia can't make competent CPUs.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

They're only not CPU intensive because the hardware was fucking pathetic and they had no choice. AMD held the entire gaming space back for a decade.

If you're OK with a dumpster fire CPU the cost of chips goes way down.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

How daunting is it? It's an extra field in your database for Steam app ID with the ability to use a file picker for non-steam games.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

It's funny because it's still 99% CG.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

To clarify, the British complaint about the streaming market is almost guaranteed to be the cause of this, but nothing in that article claims exclusive streaming rights. Ubisoft will be guaranteed a right to stream the games (on seemingly any platform but maybe mobile), but the language used any time the article quotes the blog post seems to imply that they'll still be able to also offer them themselves or license them elsewhere. Their point of emphasis is that it prevents Microsoft from exclusivity of streaming rights, not that Microsoft still doesn't have them or can't also license them to others. (It also mentions Microsoft abiding by other existing rights deals).

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

I don't think that's a bad thing. A big part of effective software development is building things in a way they can be re-used, then adapting that re-use to your use case. You don't want to re-invent the wheel every time.

With UX specifically, user expectations also play a bigger role, and you need to be careful with how and when you violate expectations. There's a reason most FPS games have settled on the same control scheme. Unless you have a very good reason for a change, it detracts from the user experience instead of improving it.

There are issues with the fact that the games are done so fast that none really have their own soul, but shared core UX (that's pretty comparable to most other similar games) is reasonable. It's the fact that it's not as good as it should be (mostly by shoe-horning in all the ads for shitty monetization) that's the issue.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

I'm not surprised. Konami has made it extremely clear they don't respect the series at all.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

lol it doesn't display any screenshot without a twitter account, but I sincerely can't imagine a start screen that would bother me beyond the standard ad filled horseshit 90% of games do now.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

They were good shit before they turned from buy to play to arcade style quarter dumps.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

If real people hate your game because of the changes you made from the last one (that you took away from them), that's not a review bomb.

It's just a review.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

You understand that the game isn't new, just new to Steam, right? Having zero hours on Steam doesn't mean anything when they forced all the people who genuinely wanted to play it to figure out that it was dogshit on their own launcher first.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

A review bomb is when people start jumping down the game's throat with negative reviews for shit unrelated/peripheral to the game. If they're triggered by the actual core design choices of the game it isn't a review bomb.

These reviews are because the game is a money grubbing downgrade from the game people bought and had taken away from them, and this is the first opportunity they had to publish a review on a storefront. The motivation being the actual game means it can't be a review bomb.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

Based on what?

The negatives are extremely bad, and people are legitimately reviewing the game negatively because they legitimately think it's a pile of shit.

It is literally unconditionally impossible for it to be a review bomb if the reviews are motivated by the core design decisions of the game.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

Did bad rats deliberately steal a game people liked to replace it with an addiction machine?

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

The reason Overwatch 2 is the worst reviewed game Steam has ever had?

A bad game does a lot less harm than a game that seems good on the surface then tries to rob you blind.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

There is no such thing as a microtransaction that is not pure unredeemable evil.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

As far as I'm concerned they do. But my opinion doesn't decide the rating of a game any more than yours that's it's supposedly a better game than bad rats.

It's a product of everyone who votes giving their opinion, and the entire steam userbase has come to the consensus that Overwatch 2 is a particularly egregious example of it.

It cannot possibly be a review bomb when the reviews are legitimate opinions based on what the game is.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

By definition, yes, that's a review bomb. It has no connection in any way to the quality of the product, which is what a review is.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

Ray Tracing makes a huge difference regardless of everything else.

Games are still fun at low quality (I mostly play on steam deck), but we haven't reached diminishing returns until every game is fully ray traced for all lighting including special effects.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

Genuinely 3D audio with a full soundscape is awesome. I don't play with headphones frequently enough to comment on what games really shine there, but it can absolutely make a huge difference.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

I'm not sure the actual answer to that.

There are some games that aren't DRM free on Steam that do go on GOG and remove the DRM. In some cases (unfortunately) the GOG version doesn't get consistently updated like the Steam version.

It's kind of a habit for people telling you about GOG deals or promos to mention that it's DRM free whether the Steam version has DRM or not, because DRM free is the primary selling point of the store. (They also sometimes include hacks/patches to deal with compatibility with modern systems that aren't always on the Steam version.) It isn't necessarily meant to imply that any other versions have DRM (though in a lot of cases they do).

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

I thought this was going to be "they added new lines to the main characters using AI to fake their voices" and that would have been reasonable.

But I see no mention of that. It looks like someone just made a story that you can play in their world and they're being douchebags again.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

You say "shitty"; they say "lucrative".

A lot of stuff is Iike that. Ultimate Team in Madden or FIFA, without the monetization, could potentially be one hell of a game mode (though also maybe hard to balance). The idea of being able to build out a team to your personal preferences and play style and match up against others head to head is awesome.

But "fuck you, we want users dropping $10k on their team", so we can't have nice things.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

That's basically what ultimate team is in practice.

If it had no cash involved and was either tuned to a level where a normal person could build a team that was competitive at the high end in a month or so (since it is, ultimately, an annual game) or you just had a budget and could sign who you wanted (based on "market value" that was set based on overall rating and position or that fluctuated with how many people had a guy on their roster), it could be awesome.

But yeah, it's basically a card game (that I think also has cards expire, though I don't play it at all) that's designed to milk whales for cash. And they replaced a lot of the normal Madden tournaments you could win money playing to use this nonsense mode instead.

The only semi-saving grace is that it's mostly self contained. There are obnoxious ads for it, and other game modes haven't seen the development work they should because they spend most of the non-engine work on that nonsense, but you can still just play online head to head of a great football sim if you tune out the nonsense.

It's super scummy and I would love to see legal involvement shut it all down. Lootboxes are unregulated gambling and in sports games specifically they're very obviously targeting kids.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

I lied. One more obnoxious probable side effect: FIFA has new anticheat that's Windows only and I'm guessing the new Madden might also.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

So I think it was "games played" "contracts" and there were ways to earn extensions through normal play when I briefly played the single player part a while back. I recognized the giant trap for what it was and bailed and am not sure the current state, but if it did exist and is scummy and makes them more money, I'd be surprised if they walked it back.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

I'm in other topics arguing that training on copyrighted content is not infringement in any way, but I think using someone's likeness is different and probably not legal, because there are separate laws there.

You can usually get away with it if you have deniability, but I don't think straight up adding lines to characters gives you any way to argue that.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

Yes, those are also illegal. The character belongs to someone. TakeTwo has no rights to tell you not to use Luke Skywalker. Disney does.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

I'm not going to argue business needs here. I don't have balance sheets.

I do respect coming out and directly acknowledging that the community might not be happy with pricing instead of just straight up ignoring backlash or hand waving it away.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

I might if I didn't just get BG3. I'll still get it pretty close to launch barring serious issues, though. Everything I've seen about the scale and what the game is is what I've been waiting for for a while.

I know Bethesda isn't perfect and I didn't love FO4, but it's in large part because of the reliance on VATS for combat instead of making guns feel OK. Gunplay looks a lot better and more dynamic and just that combined with Bethesda's world building/sense of exploration (which exists in Fallout, too; it's just overshadowed to me by the mechanics) are super promising. There are always bugs with anything as ambitious as Bethesda makes, because it takes dozens of hours of testing per 10 minute encounter to comprehensively test one, and you can't exactly unit test video games (though we might not be super far off from training AI to supplement human testing), but I rarely experience anything near as annoying as the vitriol implies and I just don't care.

I get the don't preorder principle, but it's on steam. I get to have it downloaded ahead of time and ready for launch, and if there actually are issues it's extremely simple to get my cash back. Refunds make as much (or more) impact as waiting to buy it, so if a game is actually broken my voice is theoretically louder anyways.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

I want Valve to encourage developers to use their branch tool like Witcher 3 did with the next gen upgrade to make high resolution assets optional.

There's no reason to have 100-something GB of assets on an 800p device. Same with languages. Support is awesome. Disrespecting my storage to pack them all without any way to cut out the waste isn't.

That's before the heavy duplication of assets for sequential HDD loads that I'm guessing hasn't disappeared yet.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

It genuinely doesn't take meaningful work.

They already do all the relevant categorization for what can get loaded when with graphics settings and presets. It's basically flipping a switch.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

Yeah you can get SATA m.2 drives.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

That's why I mentioned languages, too. I'm not saying that it's bad that more people can access it in their native language, just that a lot of games include it by default when they're not going to be used.

It's possible BG3 is an exception, but a lot of publishers pretty clearly just don't care how much space they take up (and I kind of think a few of the GAAS nonsense see more space as a positive so they can monopolize users's time even more by limiting the number of other games they have). I really wish that Valve had pushed for an alternative "trim the fat" branch that defaulted to less, less heavy assets and let you choose what else you needed for Steam Deck verification (over, say 10 GB, so you only really needed to do it for modernish AAA type games). I think it could have made a difference because the cost isn't high to do.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

So their stuff there's no excuse.

Third party stuff they can't do without contracts.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

I don't know if they do.

I do know that if they do, they explicitly had contracts in the past, when the games were published structured in a way that gives them permission to do so now. There is no way for Nintendo to do the same. They would have to negotiate new deals and it's not actually possible to do so for more than a small handful of third party games at absolute best.

Also, Microsoft is a far bigger company than Nintendo.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

Everyone uses the same engine over and over. Starting from scratch instead of iterating on your previous engine is the exception, not the norm.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

It's a Q&A. People asked about shit they know about from other games.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

It absolutely is.

If you don't make extensibility a core philosophy every step of the way, it disappears very quickly.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

They are reworking their tooling and engine constantly.

If they weren't making a deliberate point of making extensibility a priority, it would disappear on its own as development that didn't make it a focus left it behind. It doesn't just magically happen. It's because of good process.

conciselyverbose, 10 miesięcy temu

It's the core because they spend a sizable portion of their resources on making it that way. Every line of code that doesn't explicitly keep interoperability in mind is a line of code with the potential to catastrophically break it.

It's not something you can do, then you have it. It's like exercise. The day you stop it starts to fall away.