That’s pretty cool. I grew up with an Atari 2600 at home and still think about some of the games today. I remember distinctly playing Parachute (I actually remade this for a personal project) and Pitfall, as well as a handful of others. I also had an NES, and those were pretty much my only consoles until much later when we got a Sega Genesis and later I bought an OG Xbox.
However, I won’t be buying this. They should instead just sell an actual emulator for PC and sell a bundle of games to go with it. Maybe sell each game for $1-2, maximum $5, and maybe offer a Switch port as well.
But I don’t want to pay $130 for single use hardware, that’s just dumb.
It wasn’t a scam, it just kinda sucked. They fixed the suck.
That’s exactly what I want to see from a game dev. If the game sucks, make it right. Ideally don’t release a sucky game, but the next best is to fix the sucky game.
But why only when the player is moving? Surely the NPCs are also moving all the time, so just moving the player and maybe nudging the party members (so like 4 new characters moving?) shouldn’t drop frames by ~30%. Something seems off there.
I hope they figure it out and patch it, because it would really impact the experience on lower end hardware, like the Steam Deck (i.e. stable 30 FPS vs stutters in the late game).
In the Digital Foundry review, they saw huge performance dips when just running in small circles, when standing still had no impact. As in, on a high end system, performance dropped from ~90FPS to mid-60s, just by moving in a tight circle (i.e. not enough to actually move the camera).
That sounds a lot like pathing to me, though other things could certainly be causing it.
It just seems like something there is poorly optimized and it shows when there are a lot of NPCs around.
And the game essentially uses last gen tech (DX11, no RTX, performance drop on Vulkan, etc), so it’s not pushing the boundaries all that much, so it’s probably not fully optimized. It should be feasible to optimize it to at least not get FPS dips when moving vs standing still in towns, if not get a bit better performance on older CPUs (e.g. Zen 2 CPUs like 3600 and whatever is in the Steam Deck). It runs pretty well, it they could probably get a bit more.
That’s optimal if you want to find the best path to a destination, but NPCs milling about a town don’t need the best path, they just need to move toward their goal more or less. And most go on a mostly fixed route, so you can just store the ideal path in memory and let the NPC evade up to some distance from that path.
This makes it a lot more friendly to do a multi-threaded implementation since you don’t need to figure out collision avoidance until it’s about to happen, just look a few steps ahead and course correct as needed.
Enemies should use proper pathing, but NPCs don’t need to be anywhere near that sophisticated.
But I have no idea what they’re actually doing under the hood, it’s just concerning that it gets slow when the player moves without interacting with any NPCs.
Oh it’s certainly pushing it to the limits, which is why they need to change things. If it’s pathing, they have a ton of options to make it smoother, since most NPCs don’t need fancy pathing logic.
Pathing should be low hanging fruit here. Most NPCs don’t need accurate pathing, and can use a much faster algorithm to calculate. Hopefully the devs do a round of optimizations for late game content since that seems to be where most of the issues are.
I don’t think you do need Steam running. If it’s truly DRM-free, just copy the game directory to a new machine and the game will run. Don’t launch through Steam, launch it directly from the game directory.
I’ve run games directly without Steam running on a handful of occasions, such as when someone else is using my Steam account (e.g. my kids on my other computer) and I want to play a game. I could probably play in offline mode I guess, but running it directly isn’t that hard.
It’s not an installer, but I don’t need an installer when I already have all the game files in one directory.
IDK, I think Diablo 2 was peak Blizzard. We had StarCraft and Warcraft 2, and imo World of Warcraft was kind of the sign of the end, at least when it seemed they would keep doubling down on expansions instead of new games. I thought StarCraft 2 was just alright (bought Wings of Liberty on launch), and I didn’t bother with Diablo 3 due to it being always online.
So for me, peak Blizzard was around 2001. Granted, I never played Warcraft 3 (was just too different from the earlier Warcraft games), nor did I play World of Warcraft (didn’t have stable Internet, stable income, or stable time), so maybe the peak should be pushed out a few years.