It’s nice to see portable PC gaming become easy, but at least for me, it’s not just about that. The Steam Deck has raised the bar, by also bringing freedom from Microsoft’s ecosystem by default. I would rather have it.
(And I would rather give my money to Valve, who have been investing significantly in making that ideal a reality.)
Texture block compression exists, and some of the available algorithms have fairly little impact on rendered visuals.
As you noted, asset scaling also exists in various forms, from mip mapping to audio codecs to alternate asset packs. Imagery intended for 4k and 8k displays is wasteful for people gaming in 1080p, let alone 720p.
The techniques required to cut down on bloat are well known. Some games just aren’t using them, or aren’t using them effectively. There’s definitely room for improvement here.
how little goes into optimizing that since “space is cheap”
More and more developers seem to assume everyone else can afford what they consider to be cheap, and feel entitled to gobble up all the resources on other people’s systems as if they aren’t needed for anything else.
And speaking of environmental costs, there’s also the pollution and e-waste generated by constantly pushing people to upgrade their hardware instead of optimizing the software.
As a developer myself, I find it embarrassing and sad.
mage hand requiring a short rest to resummon might be because you are using the gith racial?
Nope. Wizard and bard cantrips.
Since you mention it, though, I think the Gith’s psionic Mage Hand is a cantrip in 5e. Did it require a rest in some past edition?
Feather fall now is a ritual spell so you can cast it before combat and it will last all of combat. It’s just different from the tabletop game.
I’ll have to try that; thanks. It would still be an annoying extra step and wouldn’t cover surprise situations as the spell is intended, but would at least be more useful than it seemed.
In any case, it’s not just those two examples. The point is that a surprising number of little things like these are broken, either by departing from D&D rules in ways that don’t make sense or by just plain failing to do what their in-game descriptions say.
I have found one example of departing from 5e rules in a way that does make sense, though, so it’s not all bad.
A couple minor broken ability examples: Mage Hand requires a short rest to recharge, which is fundamentally wrong for a cantrip, and Feather Fall is a bonus action instead of a reaction, making it useless for its primary purpose. These aren’t game-breaking, of course, but annoyances like this add up, and it never feels good to have chosen an ability that turns out not to work as it should.
One of the more problematic issues is stupid pathing logic, especially around known hazards: Party members absolutely love to spot traps, announce them, and then walk right into them. Sometimes it results in someone getting a minor injury. Other times it nearly wipes out the whole party.
It also crashes (at least for some people) if you set CPU affinity at all. That’s really strange, and problematic if you’re using certain cores for background work, or if you just want to avoid the game having to cross a CCD boundary. Here’s hoping they fix it.
With graphics hardware at the low end of the requirements (which are high for an RPG) the game struggles to maintain 30fps at 1080p, often failing even with the expensive settings turned down. The simplest outdoor scenes often send the GPU fans into hyperdrive unless FPS is capped below 40. Quicksaving sometimes drops FPS to 10ish until another save or reload. And that’s just in Act 1.
Major performance improvements will be very welcome.
Yeah. It baffles me that some people prefer to make excuses for being inconsiderate, and even suggest that anyone who doesn’t like it leave, rather than simply add a spoiler tag.