Videogames 2023 pt. II: Can We patreon This Man an Alienware Already?

[Fez]

1 hour ago, Soylent Brown said:

I've heard that the PC port is so bad that even 7800X3D + 4090 machines struggle with the game.

Yeah, from what I've read the problems run deep enough that you can't really brute force past them with a sufficiently over-powered machine.

[Rhom]

This feels like a recurrent problem lately with the AAA releases on PC. 

[Derfel Cadarn]

Finally ‘completed’ Assassins Creed Odyssey. Finished the First Blade dlc, but skipped the Fate of Atlantos simulation dlc.

Just installed Assassins Creed Origin; had this for almost 6 years, tine to pkay it!

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Rhom said:

This feels like a recurrent problem lately with the AAA releases on PC. 

Apparently starting a while back some of the top AAA development studios were told by publishers to stop "wasting time" optimising for PC because DLSS and ray-tracing should take care of the problems, focus on the console versions and if necessary the PC versions can be fixed later.

It's annoying because PC optimisation used to be pretty shit back in the XB360 and PS3 era, but got a lot better for the decade afterwards and now it feels like we're backsliding again, and reasonable mid-entry graphics cards are suddenly really struggling with new games and even top-tier ones are not handling them as easily as they should.

[Ramsay B.]

7 hours ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Finally ‘completed’ Assassins Creed Odyssey. Finished the First Blade dlc, but skipped the Fate of Atlantos simulation dlc.

Just installed Assassins Creed Origin; had this for almost 6 years, tine to pkay it!

That’s a bold move to play them back-to-back. Any reason you skipped the Atlantis dlc, or just had enough? I thought it was really fun, especially the Hades part of it.

Origins is great though. Loved the sprawled out desert map and exploring the pyramids/caverns. 

I just started the Horizon: Burning Shores dlc. Damn this game looks amazing. 

[Derfel Cadarn]

10 hours ago, Ramsay B. said:

That’s a bold move to play them back-to-back. Any reason you skipped the Atlantis dlc, or just had enough? I thought it was really fun, especially the Hades part of it.

Origins is great though. Loved the sprawled out desert map and exploring the pyramids/caverns. 

I just started the Horizon: Burning Shores dlc. Damn this game looks amazing. 

Atlantis sounds weird - essentially Kassandra in a simulation. May go back to it, but after 70 hours time to move on.

Annoyingly, Origins recognises I have the deluxe version items and dlc but gives me an error when i try to download them

Edited April 29, 2023 by Derfel Cadarn

[IlyaP]

On 4/28/2023 at 11:16 PM, Soylent Brown said:

I've heard that the PC port is so bad that even 7800X3D + 4090 machines struggle with the game.

It's shockingly badly optimised. And the UI is quite maddening as well, to add insult to injury. 

That the intro title cards are jerky is not uh...great, either.

[Rhom]

6 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

It's shockingly badly optimised. And the UI is quite maddening as well, to add insult to injury. 

That the intro title cards are jerky is not uh...great, either.

I was reading a thread over on the PS5 message boards on Gamefaqs talking about how poorly it runs even on the console.

[Kalbear]

It seems to be fine on the series x in quality mode, at least so far.

[Rhom]

So I don't really understand.  How is it that part of the quality testing before release isn't to bring in a few average computers outside of the design environment and just load it up and see how it plays?

And I guess I'm at the point where I don't understand the point of consoles anymore when you can just change settings and have a "quality" mode or a "performance" mode.  Isn't the point of a console to have one setting that you always know will be consistent?

[Werthead]

59 minutes ago, Rhom said:

So I don't really understand.  How is it that part of the quality testing before release isn't to bring in a few average computers outside of the design environment and just load it up and see how it plays?

And I guess I'm at the point where I don't understand the point of consoles anymore when you can just change settings and have a "quality" mode or a "performance" mode.  Isn't the point of a console to have one setting that you always know will be consistent?

There's been some interesting reports from inside Q&A departments. Apparently it's very common to not do fresh installs of the game and just upload the new changes into the current build, which isn't optimising the game at all, and also they have a fairly small number of machine configs to test on. There's some Q&A teams who don't have access to AMD graphics cards, at all, and others who have very much uncommon, mega-spec machines which are quite rare in the actual wild.

[Kalbear]

Also, frankly, they know how bad it plays. This wasn't a surprise. They knew it, know it'll not be an easy day 1 fix and shipped it as is.

That's the norm in the industry. The exception is something like cyberpunk, where apparently they did not get the info for consoles and also assumed they could day 1 patch it (which is what they told MS and Sony). But works on consoles, not pc? That's a long old tale.

[RumHam]

I just love how apparently people preloaded the 160gb game expecting to be able to play at midnight or whenever. Then they got hit with a 128gb launch patch. Redownloading 3/4 of the game is not a patch....

[Kalbear]

Again, not my experience- bought it the night before, was able to play at 9pm pst as expected.

 

[Jace, Extat]

Bout to play this Jedi game.

[IlyaP]

On 4/29/2023 at 12:16 AM, Fez said:

Yeah, from what I've read the problems run deep enough that you can't really brute force past them with a sufficiently over-powered machine.

It's so bad that this morning, I requested - and received - a refund for the game on Steam, on which I'd spent AUD$119 to get the ultimate edition. Maybe down the line, when the game's been fully patched and made playable and selling at a reasonable price, I'll reconsider playing it. But not right now.

[IlyaP]

9 hours ago, RumHam said:

I just love how apparently people preloaded the 160gb game expecting to be able to play at midnight or whenever. Then they got hit with a 128gb launch patch. Redownloading 3/4 of the game is not a patch....

Yeah that wasn't fun. And was sufficiently confusing that several gaming sites set up FAQs and/or wrote articles providing people with fixes that they'd identified as having resolved the issues they were experiencing. 

Man, Respawn, what happened dude? Fallen Order was such a finely polished game with just a few poorly optimised locations (mainly Kashyyyk and a few parts of Dathomir). 

[Toth]

Well, I've been on a space game binge yesterday. First playing No Man's Sky. Was trying to farm credits by fixing up crashed ships, but after a while my game glitched and I came upon a crashed hauler that was somehow stuck in the lift-off animation and couldn't be interacted with, but the marker pointing at it still didn't disappear, barring me from finding any more ships. Quite a bummer. I guess I will have to move to the next system. Though I probably should give up trying to hope for an S-class ship this way and settle for an A-class. Already sold an A-class Explorer which probably could have been a neat hero ship.

After that yesterday night I jumped briefly back into X4: Foundations. I installed the ridiculously impressive Star Wars Interworlds Total Conversion mod and took the masochistic imperial start where you have to explore the whole Star Wars galaxy in a TIE Fighter. Tried to make my way to the next shipyard to see how much I need to save up for a small freighter, meanwhile cramming plasma conductors into the glove box to fool a little around with trading, while at the same time I stumbled across three 'criminal' ships that the TIE was surprisingly able to one-shot. I suppose when you have no shields, barely any hull hitpoints and no FTL, you at least get some gnarly guns. It sure felt quite epic and were the easiest 1500 credits I made so far.^^

Unfortunately towards the end I figured out again how to do quests and found one where you have to fix leaks on a space station. OF COURSE one of them spawned on the inside of the model and I was unable to get to it without trying to glitch inside the station. Very frustrating. Especially after I had so much trouble getting to reach the ejection panel inside the TIE to go for that space walk in the first place. The cockpit is just so tiny and round that you can't physically reach it while standing up, you have to crouch towards it. But otherwise this mod is just astonishingly ambitious and makes quite a wondrous first impression. I had been slightly confused why New Republic and Rebel Alliance are both factions, but their website states that the mod is set early in the Legends universe and that the New Republic is still in its infancy while Rebel Alliance still nominally exists in order to free more systems from the Empire. Okay. Then it's weird that the Khaak have been replaced with the Yuuzhan Vong, that made me looking forward towards a NJO setting. I guess it's just an amalgamation of the whole timeline then. In any case, being at war with three factions (New Republic, Rebel Alliance and... Mandalorians for some reason) is bad for business, so I will try to figure out how to appease them. And maybe hopefully upgrade to an X-Wing as a hero ship, because that lack of shields gives me anxiety.

Edit: Okay, managed to squeeze myself into some crevice and finish the mission! Yay! But unfortunately after that did a very long escort mission for a Banking clan freighter and all of a sudden when I was nearly there he just said "Thanks!" and the mission disappeared, without me getting any rewards. Booo! But hey, at least it gave me an opportunity to explore some new systems nearby.

Edited April 30, 2023 by Toth

[Impmk2]

5 hours ago, IlyaP said:

It's so bad that this morning, I requested - and received - a refund for the game on Steam, on which I'd spent AUD$119 to get the ultimate edition. Maybe down the line, when the game's been fully patched and made playable and selling at a reasonable price, I'll reconsider playing it. But not right now.

That's really quite depressing. I was very much looking forward to this (as well as the PC TLoU port). Oh well. I guess I'll hold off until the end of year sales. Hopefully by that time it'll be sufficiently patched.

 

[Derfel Cadarn]

It was the reported shitty ports of Assassins Zcreed Unity and Arkham Knight that convinced me if I wanted to play AAA games, it was time to get a PS4.

My PC is 8 years old and barely used now. I occasionally log into Ultima Online (now ftp) for nostalgia. My earliest characters turn 23 this August, and the game turns 26!

Edited April 30, 2023 by Derfel Cadarn