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This is why my online gaming has kinda died off. I don’t really mind matchmaking and I think skill-based matchmaking definitely has a place in actually competitive games, but I miss the communities that get built up around a dedicated server. My fondest memories of multiplayer games come from community servers, because eventually you just know who you’re playing with and it becomes a place to hang out.
But the story beat is static, it always gives you the same enemy in the same situation. The nemesis system turns that story beat dynamic. Every time you hit that story beat you get a different enemy in a different situation. It doesn’t give everyone the same story, it gives everyone their story. It’s innovation is how the system sets up stories and ties them into the gameplay. The system is designed to draw you into an encounter with a nemesis, there are multiple outcomes to that encounter. Those encounters become callbacks in the next encounter and so on and on until you’ve create a storyarc against that enemy.
For example I remember having a nemesis I couldn’t kill with a sneak attack (which was very much my preferred way of getting rid of nemesis I wanted to get rid of). So I had to fight him head on and I set him on fire. He managed to escape while I was being overrun by grunts. One of the grunts slayed me and became a new nemesis. Meanwhile the one that got away gained a new weaknesses to fire. One storyline branched into two storylines. Not only did my individual story born from the nemesis system branch out, the gameplay encounters with those nemesis also changed from the previous encounter. The next time I fought my old nemesis I had a new trick up my sleeve, I could use fire against them. As for the new nemesis, well get to him.
That’s the innovation of the nemesis system. It’s a story generator that gives you your story and each encounter alters the gameplay for the next encounter. But that’s only the foundation of the nemesis system. The Nemesis hierarchy and relations between them is an extra layer of storytelling. For example that grunt who killed me turned out to become a really annoying nemesis, I really struggled killing him and every encounter only made him stronger. So I devised a different strategy. I ended up turning other orks that surrounded him in the hierarchy and started using them to do my dirty work. In the end I wasn’t the one to slay my new nemesis, it was a different ork (under my control) who challenged him and killed him.
And final note on what really makes all of it work is the presentation. The orks aren’t just a randomized collection of traits, they’re voiced and somewhat visually unique and whatever randomized outcome they get to at the end of the encounter gets properly presented in the next encounter. The presentation is the glue that ties all those encounters together into one story. You’re presented with an actual nemesis and not just some generic mute and they “remember” the things you did to them before. They feel like a nemesis and not just some randomly generated grunt.
If you tried it and didn’t see the appeal I’m guessing the game was too easy. I wasn’t impressed by the nemesis system until the orks had a chance to escape or I was forced to retreat or I got killed. The system really opens up and gets interesting when the game gets so challenging that you’re no longer certain what will happen in any encounter.
And I’m going to say more people wanted official ultrawide support. Now what? Are we supposed to poll every time someone wants to do something? If I feel like important for me to jaywalk and I step in front of a car and the driver feels it’s more important for them to not stop what then? Are we supposed to block traffic to until we figure out whose action is more important so they’d have right of way?
This is why we have laws, because everything does not need to be looked at case by case and sometimes we can collectively agree that one way is always better than the other way.
Right. So whoever did the update at Bethesda found it important to do that update. The developers of FO:London found it important to release their mod. If you ask the Bethesda employee they’d think their work was more important. If you ask the FO:L team they would say their work was more important. How do you determine whose importance was more important?
EAC is one of the most popular anticheats and it has a Linux version. The hardest thing developers need to do is decide to allow Linux, the actual implementation takes less time than a coffee break.
What you’re saying literally isn’t true. For example you can play The Finals on Linux and that’s a multiplayer only game.
The goal is very simple, it’s to get you to use Epic. The reason people buy their games on Steam is because people effectively have Steam start on boot. It’s the default because “all” your games are there. You use gog or EA app or Ubisoft connect only if there’s something that’s not on Steam and you boot them up specifically to that one game.
So if you’re Epic and you want to compete with Steam how do you do that? You grow the user’s library to make sure they start up Epic instead of Steam and you get them in the habit of logging in. Both are accomplished by giving our free games.
It’s probably not effective on the old timers who have 100+ games on Steam, but people like me are not the target audience. It’s aimed at younger people who don’t have a huge steam library and can’t really afford to buy a lot of games.
Tldr: Epic is giving away free games to become the default store for the next generation of gamers.
The one that came off the top of my head is Kynseed. It’s kinda like a more gamified Stardew valley that loses a bit of that personalized Stardew Valley charm due to the breadth of different systems and minigames. The only obviously bad things to say about the game are that there are both too many different systems in the game (which makes some of them feel kinda shallow) and the game takes too much time getting you through the fundamental systems. But beyond that there’s a lot of lore, the different systems work well together, the minigames are all polished, there’s loads of content - I can’t find a good reason why it’s not a popular game, it just isn’t.
Saboteur is one of those games I’m afraid to replay because I have such vivid memories of it being really fun and I don’t want to lose that.
I already somewhat ruined Morrowind with modern hardware doing distant rendering. Back in the day Morrowind had perpetual fog and you couldn’t see far, so all the places felt so far apart. It felt like a journey going from Vivec city to Ebonhart. But modern hardware has no problem with distant rendering and now I can see that I could spit from Vivec City to Ebonhart. It’s no longer a journey, it’s just an annoyance because “it’s right there”. The magic of traversal is lessened because things no longer feel like they’re far away.
And that’s what I’m afraid of, that some illusion of Saboteur gets shattered and with it the game will also feel lesser than it was.
I’ve very rarely disliked “prepping”. For example building boss arenas in Terraria or setting up my equipment for a hunt in Monster Hunter or learning about the monsters in Witcher 3. Anything that lets me prepare for future encounters is a system I enjoy, even if it’s only superficial.
I hate it only when it’s turned into somekind of a survival element that exists solely for the purpose of resource management. For example I hated hunger and water in Subnautica. From a certain point forward those two things become just mindless busywork because when you plant it in your base it just grows and whenever you need to fill up you just go to your base and eat and drink and there’s no upside nor a real downside to those two mechanics.
The downside is the wallet cost.
The wallet cost is tied to the performance cost. Once the tech matures companies will start competing over pricing and “the wallet cost” comes down. The rest of what you’re saying is just you repeating yourself. And now I also have to repeat myself.
If you argued they Raytracing is a money grab at this very moment I’d agree. The tech isn’t quite there yet, but I imagine within the next decade it will be. However you’re presenting raytracing as something useless and that’s just disingenuous.
There’s no reason to argue over the now, I agree that right now raytracing really isn’t worth it. But if you’re going to continue arguing that raytracing will never be worth it you better come up with better arguments.
Game engines don’t have to simulate sound pressure bouncing off surfaces to get good audio.
Sure, but imitating good audio takes a lot of work. Just look at Escape From Tarkov that has replaced its audio component twice? in 5 years and the output is only getting worse. I imagine if they could have an audio component that simulates audio in a more realistic way with miminal performance hit compared to the current solutions I think they’d absolutely use it instead of having to go over thousands of occlusion zones just to get a “good enough”.
They don’t have to simulate all the atoms in objects to get good physics.
If it meant it solves all physics interactions I imagine developers would love it. During Totk development Nintendo spent over a year only on physics. Imagine if all their could be solved simply by putting in some physics rules. It would be a huge save on development time.
There’s no reason to have to simulate photons to get good lighting.
I might be misremembering but I’m pretty sure raytracing can’t reenact the double slit experiment because it’s not actually simulating photons. It is simulating light in a more realistic way and it’s going to make lighting the scenes much easier.
This is a way to lower engine dev costs and push that cost onto the consumer.
The only downside of raytracing is the performance cost. But that argument we could’ve used in the early 90s against 3d engines as well. Eventually the tech will mature and raytracing will become the norm. If you argued they Raytracing is a money grab at this very moment I’d agree. The tech isn’t quite there yet, but I imagine within the next decade it will be. However you’re presenting raytracing as something useless and that’s just disingenuous.
Easy is relative. I’m pretty sure the easy way is if the game developer creates a separate “beta” branch. The other way is to turn off auto-update, manually download depos and extract them into the same folder essentially reinstalling the entire game with the updates you want and then putting them in the right steam folder. I personally wouldn’t call it easy. I’d say it’s tedious, prone to user error and unnecessarily time consuming.
It would be easy if Valve took their “beta” branch feature and expanded it to be an actual rollback.
I’m not taking it personally, I just don’t like when people spread misinformation. If you live in a world where you don’t need to mix max performance don’t make statements that you get flawless performance on ultra settings, because you’re not. I get the patient gamer sentiment, I have a vast catalogue of games that I don’t need to get the latest and greatest of games, I get them only if it’s something I really want to play. For example I will get Monster Hunter wilds because I love monster hunter, but the Indiana Jones game went into my wishlist because that’s something I can wait to go on sale. I support people waiting to buy games.
However what I don’t do is in the year 2027-2028 I tell people that if they buy a 40 series card they’ll be able to play Indiana Jones natively at 60+ FPS with ultra settings. That would effectively be misinformation because unless you’re buying a 4090 (which I doubt would be reasonably priced 3 years from now) that’s just not true.
Like I said before, if you want to say fuck Nvidia that’s fine. If you want to suggest they get AMD cards, that’s fine. But don’t tell them they’ll get something they definitely won’t get, especially with AMD cards.
So you don’t actually know if you need upscalers or not and your argument for getting flawless performance in ultra graphics is based on a game that at that point was almost a decade old and your current experience would be based on almost top of the line current gen AMD card.
If you just wanted to say "fuck Nvidia"and tell people to be patient gamers that’s fair, but the rest of your comment is just bullshit. Cards from a few years ago won’t flawlessly play games from a few years ago on ultra settings (because games from a few years ago will already have raytracing), unless they’re top of the line Nvidia cards and even then you might still need to resort to DLSS because 4k raytracing is so taxing. AMD cards are great bang for the buck, especially if you don’t care about raytracing, but in terms of raw performance, especially with raytracing, Nvidia cards are superior.
As for upscalers, developers have been using it as a crutch for the past 5 years. Getting good FPS natively usually means just playing on lower resolution which defeats the purpose of running native resolution. And on higher resolutions, unless you have a high end card, you have to choose between good FPS or upscaling.
Can you give an actual example because it makes no sense to me if you buy (for example) 2 gens old cards to play games that released 2 gens ago and you somehow get flawless performance with the highest settings? Just doesn’t make sense unless you’re omitting some key information like overclocking or not actually using raytracing etc.
I think the data shows that advertisement is super effective, not that people prefer to be advertised. If people preferred advertising over a better product then games like Balatro, Vampire Survivors etc. literally couldn’t be successful, because those games had effectively zero marketing budget. Their success came from word-of-mouth because the game itself was great.
It was there to calm the fans. TES fans wanted the next TES but Bethesda didn’t really have anything about the next TES. They had FO76 (which is not a traditional Bethesda title), Elder Scrolls Blades (that nobody remembers) and Starfield (which they didn’t really elaborate on). To throw a bone to the TES fans, because nobody gives a shit about a mobile game, they said the game after Starfield will be TES6.
It was just something they did to prevent what Blizzard ended up doing a few months later with the Diablo Immortals reveal. And it worked because what do people remember 6 years later? Nobody cares about FO76 or TES: Blades or Starfield. All people remember is “Bethesda announced TES 6”.
Steam hardware survey puts 4090 at 1.16% and 7900xtx at 0.54%. That means if we look at only the 4090s and 7900xtx-s then just between the two of them the 7900xtx makes up about a third of the cards. So yeah, you are a minority of a minority.
As for this number jargon. I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to prove here but I’m sure you’re comparing an overclocked card to a stock card and if you’re saying it’s matching the 4090D then you’re not actually matching the 4090. 4090D is weaker than 4090, depending on the benchmark it ranges between 5% weaker to 30% weaker. If you were trying to prove that AMD cards can be as good as Nvidia cards then you’ve proven that even with overclocking the top of the line AMD card can’t beat a stock top of the line Nvidia card.
It’s already Nvidia or nothing. There’s no point fighting with Nvidia in the high end corner because unless you can beat Nvidia in performance there’s no winning with the high end cards. People who buy high end cards don’t care about a slightly worse and slightly cheaper card because they’ve already chosen to pay premium price for premium product. They want the best performance, not the best bang for the buck. The people who want the most bang for the buck at the high end are a minority of a minority.
But on the other hand, by dropping high end cards AMD can focus more on making their budget and mid-range cards better instead of diverting some of their focus on the high end cards that won’t sell anyway. It increases competition in the budget and mid-range section and mid-range absolutely needs stronger competition from AMD because Nvidia is slowly killing mid-range cards as well.
the high end crowd showed there’s no price competition, there’s only performance competition and they’re willing to pay whatever to get the latest and greatest. Nvidia isn’t putting a 2k pricetag on the top of the line card because it’s worth that much, they’re putting that pricetag because they know the high end crowd will buy it anyway. The high end crowd has caused this situation.
You call that a loss for the consumers, I’d say it’s a positive. The high end cards make up like 15% (and I’m probably being generous here) of the market. AMD dropping the high and focusing on mid-range and budget cards which is much more beneficial for most users. Budget and mid-range cards make up the majority of the PC users. If the mid-range and budget cards are affordable that’s much more worthwhile to most people than having high end cards “affordable”.
Actually AMD has said they’re ditching their high end options and will also focus on budget and midrange cards. AMD has also promised better raytracing performance (compared to their older cards) so I don’t think it will be the new norm if AMD also prices their cards competitively to Intel. The high end cards will be overpriced as it seems like the target audience doesn’t care that they’re paying shitton of money. But budget and midrange options might slip away from Nvidia and get cheaper, especially if the upscaler crutch breaks and devs have to start doing actual optimizations for their games.
A company should be free to sell its game in any way at any price without any restriction coming from one vendor.
People keep bringing this up like it’s some kind of a fact but any time I ask for a source I get no reply. So I’m going to ask again, can you please link the source because I’ve searched for it and I haven’t found it.
I always felt iffy about their pro-XYZ stance as well. I’m not against bringing awareness to bullying or burnout or supporting marginalized groups, but it feels so disingenuous when your game (Destiny) is obviously predatory. I guess getting people addicted and organizing their lives after the game is not something to oppose.
Yeah, that’s not the best example. I think the ac-130 mission is a much better example because I don’t remember it getting a lot of controversy despite it being pretty non-chalant about you decimating the ground forces like it was just another day in the office (or rather in the air). It’s the ultimate “dehumanize the enemy” mission because you could replace the targets with pretty much anyone and the mission would play exactly the same.
There are so many games that I don’t even care about all the games available on Steam (that I’d be willing to play). We have so many games coming out that I’d have to play game for a living to play all the games I want to play, and even then I’m not 100% sure I’d be able to play everything I’d be open to play. I have multiple games that I’ve purchased and installed thinking “I’ll get to them soon enough” and they’re just taking drive space. I also have multiple games on my wishlist that are “waiting for a discount” but I’m probably never going to pick them up because actually they’re waiting for my backlog to clear and it will never clear.
Does it suck that Alan Wake is Epic exclusive. Sure. Does it really matter to me? Not really because I’m oversaturated with games I want to play. Missing one great game doesn’t matter when I already have a backlog of great games I won’t purchase because I have a backlog of great games I’ve purchased that I won’t play because I have a backlog of great games I really want to play.
I think that’s really the issue with Ubisoft, they just don’t make “must play” games anymore. Seriously, what’s the last universally liked Ubisoft game that everyone wanted to play? Far Cry 3. Close second is probably AC: Black flag but that was already suffering from AC fatigue and its critical acclaim has come retroactively. Those games are over a decade old. Ubisoft hasn’t released anything in the last decade where the mainstream gaming goes “We must play that”. Ubisoft simply doesn’t make exciting games anymore. They make games that are for everyone which also means they’re for no-one.
I guess I’ve gotten lucky. I have stable FPS, performance doesn’t tank in the first village, no crashes and the only stuttering I had was when I was killing everyone at the military base and I had about 20 bodies at the building entrance because they just kept coming.
Looking at the reviews and what others are saying I think I’m very much the exception here. I can attest that if the game works it very much is the STALKER experience and if STALKER is your jam then the game is worth playing.
My only negatives so far are the key binds (I checked, I can’t set them how I want to because some actions can’t be changed from the settings menu), there’s no overview of your standing with a faction or who belongs to what faction (maybe it unlocks later as I’m still in the first area, but I do miss that feature) and some mutants seem too beefy (would’ve never imagined running away from a pack of flesh, but I do run away because they eat buckshot for breakfast).
My first hour of gameplay didn’t feel like as bad as the reviewers put it. I have a relatively beefy machine (5800x, 4070 and 32gb of ram), the game defaulted me to epic settings (with DLSS and frame gen) and I’m getting a pretty stable 50 FPS. The only bug I’ve encountered is the audio not playing, and I guess also the sun not reflecting correctly off of windows.
The first hour isn’t much but I was expecting a much worse initial experience. My biggest issue so far has been the default keybinds but I’m hoping to solve it when I have more time to tinker in the settings menus. I’ll update my experience when I’ve had more time to play. So far I’m happy.
To be honest, I also can’t fathom it being such a massive flop. On Steam it peaked at 700 players. Shadows of doubt release peaked at 2200. Something had to go seriously wrong when a niche indie title with no mainstream appeal has a better launch than a AAA game. I don’t think it should’ve been a success, but it definitely should’ve done better than that.
Counterpoint. Get out of here stalker.
I think Stalker 2 needs a mix and match option where we can choose the language of the dialogue line by line. Or at least a future “meme” language option where the best lines of every translation is used.
Rise isn’t a good for comparison because Rise was designed for the switch. Or course it’s going to run exceptionally well on the Deck. It probably runs better than World, because World was designed for X1/PS4.
Edit: just to clarify I’m not defending the poor performance of Wilds, they did the exact same shit with World. I’m just clarifying that Rise performance was probably never going to happen.