People do all the time and it makes no sense to me.

I assume it’s people who are highly motivated by hype and the community conversation to play something while it’s in the zeitgeist, the same as people who want to skip stuff to play story games that are direct narrative sequels without bothering to play anything before it, presumably just because it’s popular and catches their eye.

Probably the same drive that keeps pre-orders and day one sales so high, despite it pretty much always being a better idea to wait a year or so for sales/updates/etc.

I’m down for uh… one tiny part of this. I certainly think we could do to make games smaller, I’m sick of massive open worlds and colossal play times, which seem like an astounding amount of developer time to make swathes of stuff that ends up so soulless that I don’t want to play it.

More focus on fundamentals, shorter, more meaningful campaigns with well executed gameplay and ideas would be wonderful, because we’re rapidly finding the limits of every studio on earth trying to make the “forever” game. Players only have so much time.

The best recent example I have is Mario Kart World. It’s a marvellous game, wall and rail grinding are amazing, the tracks are some of the best in the franchise, it’s fantastic. But you can tell a massive amount of effort and years went into the open world, which uh… actively makes the game worse? Free roam is fun for an hour or so, but I have no idea why I’d want to do it with friends, and the game shoves its 200+ “intermission” tracks down your throat constantly. Time trials are the best mode in the game, because it’s the only real way to consistently play the excellent tracks enough to actually unpack and learn the shortcuts and tricks that are afforded by the game’s deep new mechanics. I feel bad that the team wasted so much time on something the community begs for better ways to avoid.

Interesting. I’ve been using XeSS lately, after seeing better results in DOOM TDA, but now I’m curious if this is worth using instead, and figuring out an FSR replacer on Bazzite to use this.

My guess here is that it isn’t Denuvo, it just seems like it’s not designed for Open World games. These issues all also exist on console, where Denuvo isn’t a problem (although it certainly isn’t helping either). Dragon’s Dogma 2 exhibited a lot of the same poor performance and stuttering nearly a year before MH Wilds came out.

By then, I assume the game was too far into development to change course, with it’s ambitious design and a lot of AI that has to always run in each area adding to the engine issues.

Honestly… I’m not sure how much better they can make it, given how much time they’ve had to work on it, and that DD2 never really escaped its issues too. It feels like RE Engine was just… fundamentally not designed for this, no matter how great an engine it is in its niche.