I really enjoyed the base game, I just waited a little after launch (like always) to play with some bug fixes updates.
I was just coming back from a gigantic period in my life where I didn’t game much, and never on PC - Cyberpunk was the first AAA I played right after coming back. This meant I wasn’t following the game for years and building a lot of expectations, and it didn’t disappoint me because “mechanic X was missing!” because I never knew I could expect X anyways.
I also wanted something a bit more linear, but still an open world, which is something this game balances pretty well.
The end result is that I really liked it. In fact, I prefer it to GTA V, which is a game that, in my opinion, struggles with balancing it’s mission structure with the actual game world.
They claimed the Xbox One (the original last gen model) would be decades ahead of any other competitors because games would be, wait for it, cloud hybrid. Some things would render locally, but Microsoft servers would calculate complex collisions, volumetrics, crowd AI, and so on.
what they could do with actual up to date hardware?
It’s honestly hard to tell, given their history. When they first got 3D hardware, their first attempts resulted in a literal revolution in game design, with Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time changing how 3D games would look and control from that point onwards.
Their first time getting access to HD hardware? They didn’t have the experience and tools to design HD assets, which delayed pretty much all internal projects and resulted in several drought periods that helped kill the Wii U.
So if the Switch 2 suddenly had much better hardware… Would Nintendo make the most beautiful game you’ve ever seen, or would they stumble around and ship yet another booster pack to Mario Kart 8 with barely improved graphics? Would they struggle with balancing realistic ray tracing with their cartoony look? Hard to tell.
I personally have a weird habit of uninstalling and reinstalling games a surprising number of times. If I know there’s a fee associated with it, be it for the dev or Valve, and the money goes to vultures at Unity, I won’t be buying.
Yeah I agree. They’re super inconsistent with the verification.
Sometimes a game plays perfectly, with zero crashes, at 60 FPS and great graphics… But it’s not verified because one line of dialogue uses a font Valve considered too small.
Then you have a game barely running at 20 FPS and potato graphics, crashing every 43 minutes, and yep totally verified, ready for the Deck.
We will truly live in a world where 95% of games are based on Unreal Engine, 4% on Godot or GameMaker Studio, and 1% custom engines.
Which is such a shame… When Unreal does something bad, like absolutely messing up shader compilation, pretty much all games start suffering with this for years. And there are some amazing engines out there… Resident Evil’s scales surprisingly well and looks way better than it has any right to.
It reminds me of the absolute insane stuff arcade manufacturers would do to keep control over everything.
Capcom used to sell full blown arcade systems where the game’s ROM was actually volatile - in 2 years, it would vanish. You needed to pay them a monthly fee so that a technician would come up with a special device capable of rewriting the data periodically.
If it ran well on a PS4, it runs well on the Deck (at 800p). The Deck is really close to a portable PS4 in performance, ignoring architectural differences.
The Deck struggles with modern titles targeting the PS5. It technically can play these games… But the kind of “technically” that really doesn’t result in a good experience.
The point isn’t that it’s quite literally free. It’s a figure of speech.
Between taking a game you’ve already completed and is already popular and reworking it to sell to a brand new audience… versus creating a new AAA title, which one is more expensive?