kadu

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

Very excited for this.

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.

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

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.

Guess what never happened.

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

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.

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

Perhaps to avoid buying them?

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.

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

Not forced to buy a game, my man.

If it’s Unity, or uses a weird launcher, or uses invasive DRM… Not getting my money.

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

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.

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

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.

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

That’s what I wrote, yes.

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

They’ve removed it, unfortunately.

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

I quite literally just started the SNES original, for the first time, 3 days ago… Guess I’ll stop and wait for the Switch release. The 2D graphics are surprisingly charming, but I bet the new version will have some QoL improvements.

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

But… they’ve just talked about how they’re excited to play with keyboard and mouse…

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

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?

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

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.

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

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.

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

Super Mario World is waaaay better than your Genesis’ Sonic, loser! My console supports the gnarly SuperFX chip! What about yours?

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

I’m going to be honest, I find things that can permanently mess up your save (in the sense that you’ll get a lesser experience or not reach the ending) is extremely bad game design. It’s something I’d expect out of a 2 hour arcade game, not a modern release.

There are a lot of horror games in the PS1 that are “if you didn’t do this extremely specific thing, in the right order, with the right coloured t-shirt, on a Tuesday, without any hints whatsoever… Too bad! When you reach the end of the game in another 60 hours of gameplay we will tell you you’ve failed”

Baldur’s Gate might be a great game, but sometimes it’s “dice rolls makes things spicy and each run its own thing!” mechanic gets unbalanced and by a little bad luck you can have a significantly degraded experience, sometimes without even knowing it.

This is bad game design, even if ultimately the game can be good in the end.

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

He basically invented Luigi’s personality on the fly.

Luigi was just green Mario, right until they put Martinet with a live 3D face animation rig at an event and “talk to Luigi!” was one of the options.

He then came up with Luigi as the slightly cowardly, not as confident, but good spirited and kind, companion to Mario. The voice tone, the mannerisms, he just made it all up and Nintendo loved it.

Without that, no Luigi’s Mansion and the green Mario dude would still have no personality.

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

Martinet himself explains how he made up the “cowardly” trait because at first, when people asked about Luigi, his way of dealing with it was replying that “my brother is too shy! Too scared! He can’t show up”.

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

I get Intel having issues with DX9 ~ DX11 games. These are quite literally the composite of a thousand hacky patches, bug workarounds, engine quirks, and a mix of drivers being developed around game issues and games being developed around driver issues.

But Starfield is DX12… DX 12 was quite literally the standard before Arc was made, during it’s development, and the main graphical API for at least a few more years. It’s also nowhere near as filled of issues as previous ones.

Pretty inexcusable that you buy a full price graphics card, and then need to wait until Intel blesses you with a functional driver to be able to play a game.

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

They actually collaborated with ID Software to port Doom 2016’s per object motion blur.

Reddit (and Lemmy) absolutely hate motion blur, but it’s actually extremely important to create fluidity and it works super well.

The difference in that normally games just blur the entire frame, which can be distracting and look ugly. If you do it per object and actually handle the camera and parallax correctly, 30 FPS with motion blur can feel significantly smoother.

The game is also reasonably good at balancing CPU and GPU loads, so although you’re running at low frame rates, you’re probably getting a stabilized frame pacing.

kadu, 9 miesięcy temu

My perception of Saints Row isn’t that they did something wrong or changed in a bad direction, but to the contrary, the type of humour and “amusement” the game relied on didn’t age particularly well, it comes from the age of le random, LMFAO and similar content.

kadu, 10 miesięcy temu

Yoooo I’m absolutely loving this trend of old Flash games and GBA games being remastered

kadu, 10 miesięcy temu

Yeah, I still can’t get over how GeForce Now is quite literally renting a computer… yet a developer can choose to lock your own purchase away from you, and demand an extra fee.

In fact, I’m quite sure it is illegal here - but the kind of nebulous grey area where someone crazy enough would have to endure the long legal process and get a judge to agree to set the precedent.

kadu, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

I dropped it around the 25h mark, but even I can agree it is a good game that’s probably the current best in the genre

kadu, 10 miesięcy temu

They get memed a lot about this, but I actually agree with that ORAS review. The water does hurt navigation for a huge chunk of the game.