Videogames - Meanwhile in Poland.

[Fez]

So, was Bungie trying to tell us something with all their Destiny lore?

 

[Kalbear]

On the alt-tab thing - this is oddly something that was engineered as part of Win8 and part of the XBox development cycle with XBox 1. You know how on XB1 you can play a game, go somewhere else and do something, and come back to the game? That's the same tech that makes alt-tabbing not, well, suck horribly. 

Some games will still crash, but the model for keeping games in memory and suspending them came a lot from XBox. 

[Soylent Brown]

I have to say, I try to avoid alt-tabbing where possible as it still fairly frequently causes freezes, crashes, or weird graphical glitches in an awful lot of games.

[Kalbear]

7 minutes ago, Soylent Brown said:

I have to say, I try to avoid alt-tabbing where possible as it still fairly frequently causes freezes, crashes, or weird graphical glitches in an awful lot of games.

Yep. It is likely the case that if it is ported to Xbox it will work pretty well.

Twitch and other streaming platforms has also helped this tremendously; you cannot have a game on PC that can't be streamed. 

[felice]

4 hours ago, Rhom said:

All of that just seems crazy to me.  In what world does taking 8 years to accomplish one project make any sense at all????  People give authors unending shit for taking 5-10 years for a novel.  Movies that go into development hell are blasted.  But actual good products of high level "AAA" level stuff don't take 8 years in those worlds.

A movie is maybe two hours long. Games are many dozens of hours long, need to be rendered in real time on a range of hardware, and interactive. It doesn't seem unreasonable for them to take much longer to complete.

[Heartofice]

I know when playing red dead 2 I often considered just how much work must have gone into that project, the graphic, the scale and the acting obviously had a lot of effort out in ( even if the game itself was rather shallow)

Fallout 4 I know gets a lot of flak , often because it’s buggy and it’s graphics are pretty much the same as Fallout 3, it has no real dialogue options etc.. but actually I think it’s a bloody great game in a lot of ways, and highly ambitious. It really is open world in a way that RDR2 isn’t, the settlement feature really does allow you to play the game in any way you want. I love and hate this game. It doesn’t surprise me that it took so long to build.

[A True Kaniggit]

12 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Fallout 4 I know gets a lot of flak , often because it’s buggy and it’s graphics are pretty much the same as Fallout 3, it has no real dialogue options etc.. but actually I think it’s a bloody great game in a lot of ways, and highly ambitious. It really is open world in a way that RDR2 isn’t, the settlement feature really does allow you to play the game in any way you want. I love and hate this game. It doesn’t surprise me that it took so long to build.

20 years. Just got to last another 20 years and we will be in the midst of RPG/Open world GREATNESS!

(Or am I being too optimistic? It always seems to be just out of reach)

 

Edit: I was actually playing FO4 a few hours ago. Quit right before the attack on the Corvega factory.

Going in with a maxed out pipe rifle and basic T-45 armor the next time I play. 

[Werthead]

Fallout 4 has many legit and many not-so-legit complaints but "it has the same graphics as Fallout 3" isn't one of them. It's easily Bethesda's best-looking game to date (apart from Fallout 76), even if, as with most of their games, it looks about 4 years behind the curve, and it had a lot more hand-crafted locations and environments than FO3 or Skyrim. Both games do benefit from modern graphics mods (though not FO4's high-quality texture packs, which doubles the install size for about a 10% visual improvement at best), particularly the ones that improve the lighting in FO3 and remove the pointless green tint. They can't do anything about DC's dozens of identikit buildings though.

Quote

 

Edit: I was actually playing FO4 a few hours ago. Quit right before the attack on the Corvega factory.

Going in with a maxed out pipe rifle and basic T-45 armor the next time I play. 

 

Yeah, I completed a full replay of the game (plus Far Harbor and Nuka-World) in the last few months. It's held up very well.

[Rhom]

So I had a line on a PS5 last night.  Long story short, I found out on Facebook that a gal I went to high school with that works at my son's school (so not someone I haven't seen in 30 years) had a bundle to sell.  I messaged her and told her I figured she'd already sold it.  She said that her husband has another coming in next week and they have a friend that might sell one they have.  Guess they've been bird dogging these things somehow and tracking them down.  

We were swapping messages back and forth and asking how the kids are doing, etc.  Eventually, she says that since I'm a friend they would only ask $750 for it and if they put it on eBay they would ask $850.

I was polite I think, but I told her "I'll be honest.  I won't pay that much.  I know what they are going for, but I won't do it.  Ethically, I'm just not on board.  Thanks for keeping me in mind though!"

She wrote back some version of I get it, just trying to make my money back.  I told her "I get it.  I just can't support scalping.  Plenty of people will though."

 

You know, if she had come back and said $600; I probably would have done it.  Between tax and a modest convenience fee to track it down; I can justify that.  But I just can't wrap my mind around asking someone I know to do that.

[briantw]

8 hours ago, Heartofice said:

I know when playing red dead 2 I often considered just how much work must have gone into that project, the graphic, the scale and the acting obviously had a lot of effort out in ( even if the game itself was rather shallow)

Fallout 4 I know gets a lot of flak , often because it’s buggy and it’s graphics are pretty much the same as Fallout 3, it has no real dialogue options etc.. but actually I think it’s a bloody great game in a lot of ways, and highly ambitious. It really is open world in a way that RDR2 isn’t, the settlement feature really does allow you to play the game in any way you want. I love and hate this game. It doesn’t surprise me that it took so long to build.

I was fairly underwhelmed by the overall Fallout 4 experience, but I enjoyed it while I played it and it had that awesome moment where you go into the glowing sea.  For that moment alone, it was worth playing.

[Luzifer's right hand]

Well I'm looking to upgrade my PC because I want some sweet RTX. When I got my last PC I got a 1080 Ti which was the high end card around that time because it seemed to offer some advantages in combination with my 3440*1440 screen and it was significantly better than the next best card. It worked pretty well for and can still run most games at decent settings and I don't regret getting it back in the day.

The RTX 3090 is certainly better than the RTX 3080 but not by much according to most sites if you only use it for gaming. The main difference right now is that I could actually get a RTX 3090 while RTX 3080s seem to be out of stock everywhere and a 1000 € difference seems a bit extreme. The price difference between the 3080 and the 3090 is more than the high end card cost me back in 2017.  

[Werthead]

The Long Dark is today's free Epic Game.

[Corvinus85]

7 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Well I'm looking to upgrade my PC because I want some sweet RTX. When I got my last PC I got a 1080 Ti which was the high end card around that time because it seemed to offer some advantages in combination with my 3440*1440 screen and it was significantly better than the next best card. It worked pretty well for and can still run most games at decent settings and I don't regret getting it back in the day.

The RTX 3090 is certainly better than the RTX 3080 but not by much according to most sites if you only use it for gaming. The main difference right now is that I could actually get a RTX 3090 while RTX 3080s seem to be out of stock everywhere and a 1000 € difference seems a bit extreme. The price difference between the 3080 and the 3090 is more than the high end card cost me back in 2017.  

Are you playing to get a 4k monitor, too? No point in getting 3090 if you don't. Even the 3080 doesn't seem necessary.

What annoys me is how overpriced the RTX 2000 series cards are right now, especially the super versions. I was thinking of getting one of them, since all the 3000s are out of stock.

[Luzifer's right hand]

27 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

Are you playing to get a 4k monitor, too? No point in getting 3090 if you don't. Even the 3080 doesn't seem necessary. 

What annoys me is how overpriced the RTX 2000 series cards are right now, especially the super versions. I was thinking of getting one of them, since all the 3000s are out of stock.

I plan to get one at some point. I would like to use max. settings again in games like Cyperpunk and my 1080 Ti is not cutting it anymore. 

It is luxury I know...

I have been looking at 3840*1600 and 5120*2160 monitors...  What can I say I have gotten used to the 21:9 screen and I do not really want to go back and 32:9 screens are too wide for my taste in the other hand.

I think the only cheap way to get a RTX 2000 card is to buy one of prebuilt PCs with them which few people seem to buy now and that only works if you want to upgrade your CPU too. 

[Durckad]

Finally finished up The Outer Worlds this weekend. I sunk a good 40 hours into it (though I was trying to be pretty completionist) so anyone complaining about the "lack of content" is, I think, utterly full of shit. "Oh my god, the shiny, new RPG doesn't have 600 hours worth of content? What a rip off!"

What I will say is that the game is very repetitive for most of those hours. The combat is... fine, it does what it sets out to do and does it fine, but the enemies you face lack variety. Most of the marauders feel the same, except some carry different weapons, and they feel the same as the various corporate guards you face as well. There are animals and robots too, but precious little variety within them and usually each type of enemy is encountered by itself, so you'll encounter a group of robots or marauders or alien fauna and SOMETIMES those marauders might have a robot with them or a trained alien canid pet. So combat is generally fun, but feels weightless and shallow.

The writing is also... good. It's not great, or at least, it's only great in spurts. It's regularly humorous, with funny, snappy dialogue and the companions are all well-written and interesting, though their side quests are not all equal in quality. The real problem with the writing is that the "choices" you are allowed to make sometimes feel as if they lack any real substance or weight. For example... (spoilers from Byzantium)

Spoiler

I convinced the Doctor working on solving the food crisis to side with Phineas through a very, very easy set of dialogue "choices" and... despite the fact that this is one of THE MAJOR plot points that are driving the game forward, it's never brought up again. It wasn't brought up in the ending slideshow, I wasn't able to bring it up with Phineas when I talked to him, and the head of Sublight, who sent you on this quest, just mysteriously dies during the ending slideshow.

It FEELS like a major, weighty choice when you make it, but the game never, ever follows up on it and so it elicits a sort of "Is that it?" feeling. Which kind of embodies the game as a whole. Most of the major quests are handled fairly well, with several choices to make, most of the side quests are... not. Some do a very good job at tying back in to the main quest or expanding the lore, but most are just there to provide you with things to do, things to shoot, and sometimes a few skill checks to make. They exist to pad out the game mostly.

So while, I largely like much of the game, I don't think I like it enough to ever play it again. The gameplay loop is fun, but not fun enough to revisit. The lore and background are all funny, interesting, and generally well-written, but it's not expansive enough that I ever see myself wanting to come back. The story is good, but the real stakes don't reveal themselves until the final quarter of the game, so I can't fault anyone for growing bored with it before then. It's a good, fine game that does what it does well enough, but it's not a genre-defining masterpiece at all.

I'm glad I played it, but I'm not sure I'm glad I spent 40 hours playing it. By the end, I was kinda just forcing myself to finish it just so that I could say it was done. And, you know at the end, I'm glad I did, but I probably won't ever come back to it.

B-

[Fiddler]

1 hour ago, Durckad said:

Finally finished up The Outer Worlds this weekend. I sunk a good 40 hours into it (though I was trying to be pretty completionist) so anyone complaining about the "lack of content" is, I think, utterly full of shit. "Oh my god, the shiny, new RPG doesn't have 600 hours worth of content? What a rip off!"

What I will say is that the game is very repetitive for most of those hours. The combat is... fine, it does what it sets out to do and does it fine, but the enemies you face lack variety. Most of the marauders feel the same, except some carry different weapons, and they feel the same as the various corporate guards you face as well. There are animals and robots too, but precious little variety within them and usually each type of enemy is encountered by itself, so you'll encounter a group of robots or marauders or alien fauna and SOMETIMES those marauders might have a robot with them or a trained alien canid pet. So combat is generally fun, but feels weightless and shallow.

The writing is also... good. It's not great, or at least, it's only great in spurts. It's regularly humorous, with funny, snappy dialogue and the companions are all well-written and interesting, though their side quests are not all equal in quality. The real problem with the writing is that the "choices" you are allowed to make sometimes feel as if they lack any real substance or weight. For example... (spoilers from Byzantium)

  Hide contents

I convinced the Doctor working on solving the food crisis to side with Phineas through a very, very easy set of dialogue "choices" and... despite the fact that this is one of THE MAJOR plot points that are driving the game forward, it's never brought up again. It wasn't brought up in the ending slideshow, I wasn't able to bring it up with Phineas when I talked to him, and the head of Sublight, who sent you on this quest, just mysteriously dies during the ending slideshow.

It FEELS like a major, weighty choice when you make it, but the game never, ever follows up on it and so it elicits a sort of "Is that it?" feeling. Which kind of embodies the game as a whole. Most of the major quests are handled fairly well, with several choices to make, most of the side quests are... not. Some do a very good job at tying back in to the main quest or expanding the lore, but most are just there to provide you with things to do, things to shoot, and sometimes a few skill checks to make. They exist to pad out the game mostly.

So while, I largely like much of the game, I don't think I like it enough to ever play it again. The gameplay loop is fun, but not fun enough to revisit. The lore and background are all funny, interesting, and generally well-written, but it's not expansive enough that I ever see myself wanting to come back. The story is good, but the real stakes don't reveal themselves until the final quarter of the game, so I can't fault anyone for growing bored with it before then. It's a good, fine game that does what it does well enough, but it's not a genre-defining masterpiece at all.

I'm glad I played it, but I'm not sure I'm glad I spent 40 hours playing it. By the end, I was kinda just forcing myself to finish it just so that I could say it was done. And, you know at the end, I'm glad I did, but I probably won't ever come back to it.

B-

I really enjoyed my time with The Outer Worlds.  I am not sure how much time I sunk into it, but I did multiple playthroughs.  The thing I would say is, while I did enjoy the game, it suffered from the same thing a lot of "multiple path" type games in which most of the choices really don't matter much.  It's one of those games, to me anyway, in which the second game will be great.