Yeah, as much as I can give a shit about ray tracing or better shadows or whatever, as a budget gamer, frame rate is really fucking me up. I have a very low end PC so 60 is basically max. Moving back to 30 on the PS4 honestly feels like I’m playing PS2. I had the [mis]fortune of hanging out at a friends house and playing his PC rig with a 40 series card, 240hz monitor, etc, and suffice it to say it took a few days before I could get back to playing on my shit without everything feeling broken.
We’re literally watching that happen to just about every tech company right now. My Lemmy front page right now is “YouTube/amazon/netflix/disney+ are all jacking prices and ruining the services.” Although modern MS has a lot going for it, they have a long, long history of this exact behavior. And aside from that, it’s just a feature of unregulated or poorly regulated capitalism. All consolidation eventually leads to negative outcomes for consumers.
…for now. This is actually why I don’t like that this merger has gone through. My guess is the strategy will be spending the next few years making GamePass such a value that it’s basically a must-have and dominates the market. Then they start jacking prices up and ruining the service.
They wouldn’t have nearly as many problems as they did if they waited another 6 months for the initial release. I have a pc with a 1060 card, and I bought it relatively soon after launch, and it was extremely buggy, and I could barely play even at low settings. I made it maybe a 1/3 into the game before I just gave up and decided to wait until it was improved. I just installed again last week and started another play through, and even pre-2.0 it was markedly better and I could get a consistent 30+ fps on medium.
That’s I think the issue. 2.0 obviously contains many more bug fixes, but that’s not really what that release is about and it’s been past just playable for a long time. I actually really like the idea of 2.0, which is not really a bug fix but rethink of some gameplay mechanics that make a lot of sense. Like, it was always infuriating that the best armored clothes in the game often looked absolutely stupid, so I like them making clothing pretty much just cosmetic, and then moving armor to the ripperdoc upgrades. Sure, they could have probably figured that out for 1.0, but once things get into player hands you are always going to learn something. Conversely, Skryim has shipped on every platform with a screen practically and ships every time with the same garbage ass inventory system from 2011.
So yeah, they (the whole industry) should be releasing games that are fully baked, but I really don’t mind the idea that they’re going to take a game and iterate on it more like a platform. I could see Cyberpunk being something I’m still playing in 10 years as long as they keep adding content and iterating, in much the same way that people are still playing the shit out of GTAV.
Decades old PC software can run on the latest hardware (often much better than it did on its original hardware).
This is increasingly less true as the software dependencies get more complicated. See also, Rockstar selling pirated games because that was the way to get it running…