More importantly too battery draining. I can’t imagine them making a much bulkier switch but it could be that DLSS and Raytracing is docked only or optional with battery warnings if used undocked.
I am saying they’re doing a shit job at delivering a game to us backers. I just don’t think it’s nefarious, just sheer incompetence. They value making the best thing highly, they think the best thing means the most feature rich and realistic thing, and thus they allow scope creep to literally eat money via man-hours in a way that can only and will lead to CIG going bankrupt long before a game is ever released in a finished state. Unless someone high up over there wisens up. Forces a hard deadline and cuts the scope down agressively to meet it and gets the game(s) released. But I find that exceedingly unlikely.
Haha, that’s not a yatch. That’s a motorboat, we’re talking in the $100k-$1000k range with the topend being unlikely. I agree the optics aren’t the best but it’s not at all crazy to afford something like that on a business leader salary. Sure from a pure ethics standpoint he should take a modest salary and keep at it until the game is released and his obligations to his supporters fulfilled and then get rich. But who has ever been that principled? I can’t really fault him for something everyone does. He’s also been fairly successful for a long time already so he likely had money before SC as well. Now if I’m wrong and another angle shows this is some gaudy 10 million dollar+ yatch he bought recently then I’ll absolutely reevaluate!
It’s just because that irks you when there are layoffs. But office supplies are assets, they’re on the books and while they depreciate over time it’s still something that can be sold and doesn’t cost anything after you’ve bought them. The actual office building is different, since you generally rent it and the staff you need to pay monthly and you can’t sell them to recoup part of the investment. High quality chairs etc cost a fortune, but they also last a decade plus in many cases. Still earlier this year they had 1000+ employees, that isn’t sustainable for a game relying on donations basically. You need predatory microtransactions for that to workout which is of course part of the reason CIG monetizes in the way they do, they need to keep the boat afloat.
If the average salary is just $20k yearly were looking at a salary spend in excess of $20 million a year, not including offices or payroll taxes, benefits etc. And I imagine that the average salary is higher than that. If they are laying people off the reason is that someone in finance is putting his foot down saying this just can’t go on.
The biggest waste is all the employees and the offices to house them. Details like decorations and conference tables are just a red herring, it’s not the real issue. Just look at their road map, and then consider that they have 1100 people on payroll working on that roadmap, not including third parties like voice actors etc. It’s fascinating.
I was an original backer, I’ve played various iterations over the years and it really takes a lot of rose tint to find the game as it is enjoyable. The core loop isn’t even in place yet. The systems that do exist and work are interesting, the graphics and aesthetics are top notch, in parts, and at times it feels like we’re going to get something revolutionary. But then you play for a while and the unfinished jank gets to you, it’s not very fun. It’s cool, it’s impressive, the scope is insane and you can get lost in the vastness of space in ways that other games just can’t even approach. But it’s not fun. You can make it fun with friends or by setting up your own goals disjoined from the gameplay loop. Like try and jump a vehicle into the cargo bay mid flight or see how tightly you can race around asteroids. But if you just play the existing little loops it sucks. This is of course my subjective opinion. You might love the bounty system and the combat. You might love the salvage runs and transport missions but to me it’s like Euro Truck Simulator which is about the most boring shit I can imagine. And both the space and ground combat just isn’t even remotely as good as other games that just focus on that, which is understandable but I’m always left with this feeling of “will I really enjoy the finished product?” And I’m not sure. The game they said they were going to make in the Kickstarter, that game I would’ve enjoyed. I loved Chris Roberts games as a kid, but this monstrosity it has become? I just don’t know.
That said I really do believe they’re trying to make the best game ever. They just don’t fundamentally understand why we need deadlines and a fixed scope to get things out the door.
He isn’t, but he’s not out there buying multiple sports cars and a yatch either. I really do believe there isn’t anything sinister going on, just a whole bunch of good intended people wasting a collosal amount of money on a dream project where devs get to do exactly what they want and don’t need to adhere to deadlines, no crunch, no job security threats and just no pressure. It’s probably bliss working there but they have no hope of ever making an actual finished product because there is literally noone there with the goal to push a product out the door on X date. It will be done when it’s done, and everyone who’s ever worked in such a loose environment knows that means never until someone comes in and lays down the law.
And before someone comes in and says “Y indie project bla bla” remember that there is a VAST difference between a small game with say 1000-5000 man hours behind it and a large AAA game which Star Citizen aims to be which entail at minimum 100.000s of man hours of work. You can be extremely loose and take your time with a small idea like say Vampire Survivor and scope creep it to hell and back and it still won’t take more than a year or two until there just isn’t anything more to do but release it.
There is probably some clever parallel to draw here to utopian political ideologies but my brain is mush after a grueling week so I’ll leave that to someone else.
I’m placing 0 blame on developers here but it’s just a fact that Intel can’t reasonably optimize the drivers for all games past and present in such a short time. And developers haven’t had access to the card for even remotely long enough for it to be part of the testing for any game (outside small titles maybe but they generally don’t need special treatment driver wise) releasing this year or next. AMD and Nvidia have literal decades of head start. So while I would’ve wanted Intel to do a better job I’m not trivializing the monstrous task either, and all things considered they’ve done OK. Not great, not horrible.
If it wasn’t clear in the articles you read then those places wanted the clicks and engagement that comes from vaguely implying that Intel is killing their GPU division.
Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it - Jonathan Swift
That’s a bit disingenuous. It’s Intels own Limited Edition A770 SKU that is discontinued not the A770 as a model. They still ship the chip to AIB makers like ASRock etc. Their second generation, BattleMage, is still on track as well so on the contrary I believe we’ll see much better support for Intel GPUs in the coming years since more game developers will have had adequate time with the hardware. Intels cards are also priced competitively if we’re looking at the entry level cards which is bound to make them end up in many cheaper pre-builts that parents buy for their younger kids. So I expect to be quite commonly used for certain games in the coming years.
Very true, and even if they could replace/remove libraries and dependencies that muck up the build process there are no guarantees that it’ll play the same. So many games rely on strange quirks to function the way they do that would be nigh impossible to replicate purposely.
300 different pokemon shiny or 300 shinies including dupes? While getting a shiny during an event is easy actually being committed and grind out every shiny event is crazy dedication. I can’t bother with the game because the core gameplay loop is just so incredibly boring, and as you say is nothing like Pokemon should be. I’m slowly transferring everything to Pokemon Home and in that regard it has been pretty nice in terms of getting legendaries and mythicals that are really tough in the main series games to get. I’ve never catched the original 151 before and when I combine Let’s Go Pikachu with Pokemon Go into Pokemon Home I’ll actually tick that childhood goal off, which feels nice.
I love the implication here, that they don’t have the proper source (or skills left in the company) such that they can remove the DRM which doesn’t play nice themselves so they rely on a cracked copy of the game instead. Been quite a bit of news lately about how game companies have failed to keep the original source code for their games. Diablo 2, the Transformers games etc and those from active companies, there’s bound to be 1000s of games where the source is lost due to publishers closing down studios.
And I agree, I have multiple TB both ways but if he gives away invites to whomever don’t expect them to have seedboxes / a good torrent VPN etc without asking. It’s hard if you’re the person who only downloads the movies they want to watch and haven’t ever thought about seeding more than leaving the torrent on for a few days. That “works” on RARBG style sites but of course doesn’t work on a tracker like TL which bans permanently and do not give a fuck about your reasons.