I had to learn more about it after that short clip and found an overview page which is fun to read if your browser can translate it: https://www.dentsubo.net/circle/spe256.html

I love how parkplace is literally the kind of single-minded insanity this article talks about (which is significantly longer than 2 paragraphs btw)

Like, skimming through their articles and you get stuff like this https://thatparkplace.com/wish-actor-harvey-guillen-says-he-believes-disney-will-make-a-queer-princess-in-his-lifetime/ where they relay the quotes then immediately jump to:

If this does indeed happen it’s likely to lose The Walt Disney Company millions of dollars as seen with Lightyear.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Yes, it is perfectly possible that the studio’s writing work might be a bit shit, I dunno. If you find they are consistently involved with writing you don’t enjoy, then sure, whatever. The point of this article is the absolute insanity this kind of stuff gets taken to, like it’s a massive conspiracy rather than just the work of another studio managing the struggles and interests of our age.

To quote the 2+n paragraph article:

It’s a conspiracy theory that checks all the boxes: It conveniently explains pretty much everything happening right now, ties it back to organizations of which people are understandably suspicious, links it to a much larger ongoing panic (DEI), validates preconceived notions like “go woke, go broke,” sprinkles in a few kernels of truth regarding powerful interests, and – most importantly – provides a clear and identifiable enemy. It’s also almost entirely bullshit.

I imagine LTT did that for meme purposes more than anything else. Threadrippers are not built for games. They’re built for production workloads which don’t translate to gaming performance.

That said, the point still stands. This game needs the most powerful gaming hardware (e.g. Ryzen X3D series and RTX 4090) on “recommended” settings and 1080p to get averages above 60fps, which is wild. There’s a rather dedicated fellow on reddit who does detailed performance tests after each patch.

Jedi Survivor’s performance issues are annoying but I wouldn’t call it “unplayable” by any stretch. It depends on how you define it. My definition of that would be either “literally doesn’t launch / hard crashes consistently” or “massively fluctuating frametime on appropriate hardware and settings that makes the intended gameplay too difficult to enjoy”.

In my experience, it’s mostly traversal stutter and TAA ghosting at low frames in the giant hub level which you don’t really get during actual combat. I also partially inflicted that on myself by choosing to play on max settings with RT and no FSR. I use a R5 3600, RX 7900XT and 32GB Ram.

Obviously, your mileage and personal tolerances will vary. Definitely consider the refund window and use the big city vistas of the first area to judge if you’ll enjoy it at that performance / quality level you choose. The art direction is really good so I think it will hold up on lower settings.

He’s been dealing with them for years. Probably just finally got worn down enough to say “fuck it, not worth the stress”

It’s a good, but flawed game. I got really into it for a month and developed a love/hate relationship with it, but overall enjoyed that time.

That’s as somebody who loves sci-fi and got really into building my ship. I was pretty much the target audience so I may have been more willing to immerse myself in it than others would care for.

Also, it was super refreshing to me playing a game where my companions are all in their 30s with a lot of history. It feels quite mature in that sense. Which I guess is why the main story really disappointed me when you get an antagonist who feels like a 12-year old who just discovered the Wikipedia page for Nihilism, but hey ho.

For me it’s not so much the travel; the main story tries to sell this idea of exploring the unknown, but literally everything you find is a known quantity in some form or another.

The moment I saw HDRP mentioned I thought “Yup, that’d do it”

I wouldn’t say “more worthwhile”. But comparing them (in my personal opinion): Outer Worlds trades variety and scale for a more narratively dense world.

Biggest thing is you get significantly more choice in questlines. Bethesda’s approach in Starfield is very railroad-y, almost all the big questlines end up picking between two distinct options while leaving you thinking “you know we could just do a third one, or both depending on the circumstances”. They also, outside of maybe one or two circumstances, have zero opportunity for creative player intervention. If it’s not explicitly mentioned as a quest objective, it’s not an option. e.g. No, you can’t use the EM gun on this guy to bring him in and face justice, the objective is to kill him, so you will kill him and his guards too. No, you can’t go and talk to your superiors for backup before confronting somebody over a major crime. Stuff like that.

Outer Worlds is like Fallout New Vegas in that the world responds to your actions as well as dialogue choices. Every NPC is killable, and they’ve written a number of scenarios (some of them absolutely gut wrenching) for killing certain people at certain points. Big quests tend to present two options which both have dire consequences, but by doing other quests, talking to other characters, you can uinlock additional options or improve how things will turn out. e.g. You can uncover an internal power struggle in a faction and help choose its leader, which changes how a peace talk can turn out with another faction.

Outer Worlds also gives you more tangible consequences for your actions, like changing the feel of an early town if you deprive it of power. The epilogue is significantly more detailed than the one Starfield gives you, covering a lot of minor quests and each major character you’ve interacted with.

None of that is to say though, that Starfield does not have a rich and interesting world with cool characters. I’ve loved my time with both games and I think SF has more fun combat gameplay, obviously both are similar gun-based RPG games where you mag dump bullet sponge enemies, but hey ho. SF also let me build and fly a ship, go where I want with it and take pretty pictures, which has been a lot of fun. Starfield may have less quest choice, but it offers more variety in what those stories cover, compared to OW’s more narrow focus.

I will also say that SF made a pretty bold narrative decision in its main story that I was not expecting from a Bethesda game. Even though I have a love/hate relationship with how it developed after that, and think the moment itself could have been handled better, I still respect it. OW also really hams up the evil corpo humour in ways some people might find annoying and difficult to take seriously.

A measure of worth between the two games really comes down to what you’re looking for in a space-themed RPG. Personally, I think they complement each other very well as distinct experiences.

The 24 minute video demo talks a little about this. A big benefit of having the Star Citizen alpha be playable is they’ve refined the gameplay a lot due to feedback. I think the changes they made these last few years to UX, flight model, combat design etc in S42 are really nice compared to what’s currently playable.

For better or worse, they appear to have restarted development on Squadron 42 more than once over the decade. It has absolutely suffered from scope creep, whether that gets us a better game than it would have been in 2016/17 remains to be seen. Though that doesn’t necessarily mean the gameplay design is “modern” - the game trades feel and usability for “immersion”. It plays clunkily like ARMA, you can see in the video how throwing a grenade requires equipping it first (the “throw grenade” button is more like a macro to equip then throw), for example. They’ve done a lot of improvements to animation transitions to make the game feel better, but they can’t seem to shake the core rigidness of gameplay.

Visually they’ve obviously done a fantastic job upgrading to modern technical standards combined with stunning art direction, Though again; scope creep, the old visuals would have been great for the time. Gameplay I reckon is still going to be fairly niche, they’re marrying a Space Combat game with ARMA style on-foot gameplay, I imagine the broader gaming audience may like one but not the other.

With the feedback they’ve gotten over the years, it should be a far less clunky experience than it would have been 6 or so years ago. But of course, the standards have changed and the game has only become more of a meme over time, so it’s got a lot to prove.

I do not believe it to be an outright scam. However, it is horribly managed and I do consider the funding model to be predatory.

The whole “pledge” store should not be a thing at this stage IMO. It’s just a cash shop they can justify huge prices with. It’s actively contributed to the scope creep by introducing new vehicle roles, which they sometimes admit to not having designed gameplay for yet. Nor does it currently tell you if you can actually rent or buy the ship in-game (subject to progress wipes). Heck, the closest thing to a scam they’ve had recently was a “new starter bundle” of in-game gear that you lose upon your first death / unrecoverable body. This is a game where 80% of your deaths are to bugs or unintuitive behaviour.

They also keep trying to change their standards to match modern games. Ships have gone through multiple reworks which take months for a single ship. A sensible dev would lock that in and commit to releasing under those standards. It’s been pointed out that with the current rate of progress, they’ll still be releasing currently announced ships into the 2030s.

That’s not even mentioning the single player component, Squadron 42, which got indefinitely delayed a few years back before a major demo showcase which never materialised. Supposedly, it’s been scrapped and re-done more than once.

Their last big chance to show they’ve pulled things together is going to be the upcoming CitizenCon (yes, it has one) where they’ll supposedly be making a big Squadron 42 announcement. A former customer service employee, who recently criticised the company’s spending practices, claimed they’d taken a much more serious approach to the scope creep and that we’d see some results of that towards the end of this year.

I’m not holding my breath though. They’ve been known to create bullshit for presentations before (e.g the infamous sand worm) and I absolutely would not be surprised if Chris Roberts feels pressured to one-up Starfield.

As a side note, does anyone else get the impression this article was written by an AI? It repeatedly lists of buzzword features, like the Hangar module which hasn’t been relevant for years, and barely discusses what the game is actually like.

Yeah, in particular them saying now “You will keep the license of the version you use” rings very hollow when they literally showed they can retract that whenever they want ANd get a lawyer to defend that move in no uncertain terms.

I’ve actually been really enjoying it. It’s a pleasant universe to just get absorbed in.

Sure, it’s got a lot of very valid complaints (performance, UX etc.) but they matter less to me the more I get into it. Writing is not groundbreaking, but it gets pretty good. Since very good voice acting from otherwise random NPCs.

Also the first game I’ve played that lets me use non-binary pronouns as a third option, rather than just Gendered or not. Very cool and I hope to see more games do that.

I’d say the most disappointing thing is how straightforward almost every quest is. They don’t do what Obsidian does in games like New Vegas and Outer Worlds where lots of quests have multiple resolutions, some hidden. In this game if it’s not in the objective list it’s usually not an option. It’s the typical Bethesda experience of course, rather than Obsidian’s, so it’s still nice for what it is.

It’s the closest I’ve personally felt to exploring and interacting with the worlds of Mass Effect 1 and Knights of the Old Republic in a long time. It’s got that sense of wander about it for me.

Yeah the base colour tones are absolutely nuts. I spent a lot of time on launch just trying to figure out if my HDR display was bugging out or something.

Very weird how those were absent from release, but I’m glad they’re getting added. Good to see I’m not the only one who found the lack of an “eat” alt-option annoying as well!

According to the article:

Irdeto has a plan, however: a program that will offer media outlets two versions of games to benchmark independently, with and without Denuvo Anti-Tamper, which he believes will prove “the performance is comparable, identical” between both. Apparently they hope to begin it within the next few months.

To me, this is a pretty good way of going about it. It gives people with professional and established testing methodology access to make the comparisons. Basically a “see for yourself” approach where its impact (or ideally, the lack of it) can be tested per-game.

One of the big problems historically with pre and post denuvo-removal comparisons is time. Casual benchmarkers run tests between older versions with DRM vs new versions without, which obviously have recieved a bunch of other optimizations. Some people don’t even re-run the old tests, which brings their own system differences into the equation (e.g. BIOS and driver updates). Nor is testing between cracked / non-cracked versions perfect; DRM that’s been circumvented is not necessarily prevented from running at all.

This is important to get right because, not only does actually good data take a LOT of work that casual benchmarkers wouldn’t even think of, there aren’t many definitive answers as to Denuvo’s universal effect on games. Sometimes it appears to have had no effect, then sometimes it does, which may be related to different generations of it and how well the devs implement it on a per-game basis.

An example the article gives is [PCGamer] hiring Durante (a prolific PC modder and developer famous for their work on Dark Souls) to benchmark Final Fantasy 15 with and without, finding no definitive measurable difference in gameplay but a possible ~6.7% increase in load times.

The question I have though is whether Denuvo themselves offer these versions or if it’s a program whereby every game with it is obligated to provide these versions to press. In the case of the former, Denuvo would likely have the power to only show off best-case scenarios, whatever the conditions for that may be. If the latter, we may get a positive effect whereby, if they don’t already, Denuvo’s contract with a dev requires that their implementation is done properly and meets their standards, otherwise they don’t allow it. As a company, they do seem hung up on the perception of performance issues, so it wouldn’t surprise me.

Putting on a tin-foil hat, if they’re really scummy they could deliberately impose a performance limit on the non-Denuvo version. Say, something that is designed explicitly to mimic its runtime behaviour. That would be pretty insane though, not only is that tactic likely illegal, it wouldn’t take much for it to become public. It would be a significant risk given how confident they are in its lack of performance impacts (which as we’ve said, appear to be backed by professional testing). If they’re working to resolve their PR problems, it would be an utterly stupid thing to do.

Overall though, I look forward for what this means for testing going forward. Frustrations about DRM aside (I much prefer without for a number of reasons) from a technical level I’m interested in whether this approach will prove the performance impacts a myth or not. Either way, it’ll give us more insight into how it actually works and what it’s doing under the hood.