Alan Wake 2 is an unexpected visual marvel even on older GPUs
xfire.com
xfire.com
Looks like they pivoted into a obscure news site. Will always have fond memories.
I doubt this is related to the current domain, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xfire#Video_game_and_pop_cultu...
Mumble is still big in eve online afaik, due to some funky auth processes with EVE account.
Teamspeak forums are still pretty active too, and updates are still being released at a regular pace. I'm still keeping teamspeak as primary voice chat for my small gaming community and i hear from my users that TS3 voice quality is superior to discord. Plus if something happens with server, i can fix issues myself, since i host TS3 server on my hardware. Which is not the case with discord - if you have issues with discord server, your only choice is to wait.
It's fallen off in terms of features and UX. But I feel the warm and fuzzies knowing that my memes and conversation aren't being fed into some neural network owned by microsoft.
I also love that I can just change the voice codec to whatever I please without me or my users forking over a monthly fee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xfire
I remember.
I think we have different definitions of "older" then. Does the game runs decently on something like rx580?
Ok, the game runs 2 fps even in low res on rx580: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbM433WwY8U
As a midrange card from 3 years ago the RTX 2060 is getting long in the tooth, the 5 year old RTX 2070 is well above the minimum specs. Which seems perfectly reasonable for a new game. You don’t have to upgrade constantly, just put off some titles until you do.
Right, I'm okay with that. But "being a visual marvel even on PS5 era GPU" sounds not at all the same as "being a visual marvel even on older GPU" to me. I do consider RTX20xx modern GPU, even if they are not the highest range for sure.
And to a sibling comment: RX 480 is not 6 years old but actually coming up on 8 years here. Yes, these GPUs are quite old now.
People don't want to hear it but at some point graphics technology is going to have to move forward from Pascal and Polaris. You can't stay behind on legacy technology forever.
AMD knows this very well themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqLea0QUW1k&t=176
As Roy says: Don't be cynical, developers are not going to just stop working. But they're not going to be bound to supporting legacy pathways and obsolete APIs/feature-standards forever either. This is literally the "when developers commit from the ground-up" that AMD was referring to.
Remember, DX12U is just DX 12.2, it would have been a full api release in the past, and that eventually does come along with the old stuff eventually falling out of support. It was a pretty shortsighted move to downplay all these features for all these years, and eventually sooner or later some big titles are going to utilize them to an extent that makes a legacy fallback impossible or un-performant.
Only difference is that nvidia was the first one on the draw with this DX feature set.
GN made the case for the importance of early testing and early adoption of these featuresets, back in 2016. Then they lost their mind over Turing... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qiQH29KAXg
2015’s Bloodborn looks quite dated when you use the kind of mid range settings most gamers would at the time. We can’t see what 2023 titles look like on 2026+ hardware, but I think people looking back will notice a bigger gap than it currently seems like.
Tossing a low end graphics card into a new PC unlocks significantly better back catalog every time with the added benefit of having the most patched version at discounted prices.
If you don't buy DX12.2 capable hardware you don't get the DX12.2 features, it's really that simple. buying fermi or terascale or some other ancient hardware will always be cheaper, but studios aren't just going to not release games because someone is clinging to their 4870. and the situation is not different in kind when we're talking about DX12.0 to 12.2 transition instead of DX9 to DX11 or DX11 to DX12.
If you've upgraded to a current NVIDIA gpu in the last 5 years, or an AMD card in the last 2 years, you got the capability. And when you next upgrade, you'll get the capabilities on AMD too, unless you go out of your way to buy older cards without support, as many people did with DX12.2 (because reviewers lost their minds over Turing).
It is, again, super funny to look back at how uncontroversial this all used to be, when it was AMD who was ahead on DX feature support. Like yeah if you buy a DX11-focused card like Maxwell then your DX12 experience is going to be shit. Doctor it hurts when I do this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqLea0QUW1k&t=176
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qiQH29KAXg
Developers aren't going to not release games just because some people insist on running 10+ year upgrade cycles, or run esoteric hardware with some different tradeoffs because they don't want to pay for newer stuff. I literally don't understand why it's an issue or a confusing topic, other than people having a bit of a rough time with the realization that Turing wasn't a pointless waste of a generation after all.
Reviewers kinda did it dirty, you can argue that it was overpriced at first (2070 was still pretty good tho), but buying a used 1080 Ti instead of a 2070S to save $50 was a mistake, and buying a 2080 Ti for $950 was an outright bargain. There were plenty of deals that got shouted down in the whole "turing BAD!" tantrum from reviewers and gamers, and under the general lack of understanding that indeed the cost-trend aspect of moore's law was over and the price trend was gonna be upwards.
https://youtu.be/tu7pxJXBBn8?t=273
These sorts of videos are just shameful and utterly incorrect to look back on, and it's absurd to think it's the same Steve who made the above videos 2 years before. Nuclear reaction from tech media aside, almost everything tom's said in their article was correct and has come to pass, it's interesting to re-read the article with 5 years of hindsight. This is exactly the sort of "cost to buying outdated tech" that Steve mocks, and the people who followed Steve's "long-term value doesn't real, buy the older cheaper thing without DX12.2 support" will inevitably have to upgrade sooner as a result.
Pascal and Polaris have already received a lot of grace from developers, in the abstract it is crazy that tuning for 8-year-old cards is still such a significant aspect of gamedev today. But there will eventually be a point when Polaris and Pascal fall off, and then eventually can't even launch the game, just like older generations before them. And it seems like it's going to be a very rapid offramp over the next 2 years as studios move onto true current-gen titles and finally stop supporting base-tier PS4/XB1 hardware, because these cards are very very overdue for replacement.
The transition to upscaling being a standard part of the pipeline is going to be another of these "gamer moments" too. People are dead-set on it being "just to boost your framerate", but even if you go back to the original launch presentation, it was always framed as making it possible to run much more intensive effects than otherwise could be. Being behind on this part of the pipeline is problematic for AMD, because it is going to be more and more directly relevant to actual game performance and not just an optional extra. Rendering 4x as many raw pixels is going to throw off all the optimizations etc.
Again, the question isn't whether they should release new games (of course they should!) but whether those new games are meaningfully improved by relying on this new tech (hint: they aren't).
> It is, again, super funny to look back at how uncontroversial this all used to be, when it was AMD who was ahead on DX feature support. Like yeah if you buy a DX11-focused card like Maxwell then your DX12 experience is going to be shit. Doctor it hurts when I do this.
It was uncontroversial because back in the day the new tech lead to real visible improvements that you could tell without needing a side-by-side on/off comparison, not just spec wankery. GPU brand has nothing to do with it. The law of diminishing returns kicks in, and the S-curve slows down. It happens to every category of tech eventually.
> buying a 2080 Ti for $950 was an outright bargain.
Again, you're talking about a $950 purchase that for new tech that maybe improves the level of eye candy by maybe 1%. There is no market for that. There is no possible world where that tradeoff is worth it.
But you're never going to understand that, because all you do is look at is a spec sheet, where "bigger number must obviously be betterer".
you are literally seeing the benefit from upgrading right now, mesh shaders increase performance and reduce VRAM utilization substantially.
the game has a non-mesh-shader fallback, but obviously in that case you don't get the performance or VRAM benefit. And then people get upset that it doesn't perform well... but somehow don't make the obvious connection there.
people basically decide a priori that it doesn't have any performance benefits and then discard any evidence to the contrary, it can't be a performance benefit, the legacy pathway is just unoptimized!
they used up all the ~~glue~~ optimization, on purpose!
And yet, games were able to get on just fine without them for decades. Remedy's previous games worked just fine without them!
What's so special about this one that suddenly prevents it from running acceptably without it? Would anything of value have been lost if they had just reused the Control engine?
I dunno dude, which pebble is responsible for the avalanche? Graphics standards move forward, why wouldn’t you have coded it in DX9 instead of DX11?
Also Alan Wake 1 came out in like 2008 or something, why would we literally want to be stuck in 2008 level graphics forever?
And choosing to compare against AW1 rather than a newer title which still didn't require this kind of bullshit (like Control) says enough about what kind of faith you come into this with.
yes. I had a 7850, then 280. I was an early adopter of gsync etc. I returned a 295x2 unopened (for $450 or something, regret) to game for $270 XB270HU IPS and 780 Ti for $185 after maxwell launched. I've had 1080, I've had 1080 Ti, I know what I'm talking about.
That wasn't the question.
It's very much obvious to everyone that there was something special about q3, but there's a lot less of the special about the games in the current year. This comparison is unfair and manipulative.
That said, it's kind of a shame that not many games let you actually pull back the graphical fidelity if you want to, despite the engines themselves often scaling back even to mobile devices. Maybe I'll upgrade in 3-5 years when Wirth's law will catch up way more. Then again, I can kind of understand companies wanting their games not to look "badly", no matter the graphics settings; it just means that indie games are for me, not AAA titles.
I'll just enjoy games like Valheim, No Man's Sky, Cloudpunk and other stylized ones.
I would suggest learning how to tune them if you really want to pull some performance out.
The game will tell you that during startup.
1. https://ubm-twvideo01.s3.amazonaws.com/o1/vault/gdceurope201...
One the hugest misses of Nintendo to be honest. The art styles they develop are designed to scale down to their hardware, but they also scale way up and they never provide you an official way to take advantage, even on future hardware. The art team is being done a bit dirty in this respect.
I'm convinced that as long as people want those games they will be made available eventually, but probably not on the timeline you want. I think some kind of 'continued availability' provision in copyright law would be more realistic than an appeal to resort to piracy.
It was on sale for a limited time and got delisted apparently. Better than nothing, I guess - but if you missed it - then it might not even exist.
My point still stands - pirated copies of those games are available 24/7. As GabeN said - piracy is a service problem and Nintendo fails to provide a better service.
If pirates stop, there's no alternatives to get a lot of media in many cases. There is zero incentive to stop because you can't get worse than nothing. Nothing being what is available in many cases for older media.
You want to embolden your argument that pirates should stop? Then don't take away all legal means of getting something. I have zero sympathy for copyright holders who refuse to make an IP available anymore yet litigate after those who do.
I disagree - I had a google and found [0]. This is emulated, at 4k with raytracing. It's a good decade behind what we're seeing come out these days IMO. It's dated, suffers from the hallmarks of not-quite-HDR (that lovely shiny surface that we all learned to love during the late 360/PS3 days).
Finished TOTK last week and had a lot of fun with it. I'm not blind and can clearly see jaggies, frame drops and resolution drops, but nowhere in the game did that really interfere with the core gameplay or make it impossible to enjoy it.
While newer systems have more detail, most of the time it's imperceptible since you don't have time to look at the scenery anyway and when it matters (e.g. when rendering faces) it still doesn't look realistic to me. Burning a kilowatt just to get a bit more detail or framerate for the same old gameplay just sounds insane to me.
This gets to the heart of the matter for me. No matter how much hair sways like real hair, skin wrinkles like real skin, or eyes get a glassy look when emotion suggests they should, real humans can spot weirdness from miles away.
That person you see walking towards you, barely visible in the dark and without your glasses on? The tiniest stiffness in the way they made that last step, the way their elbow shifted, have raised your awareness and you’re now considering them a threat, and will watch them carefully and keep your distance.
Or the way they get up from the table they are sitting at clues you into the fact they have a pulled muscle in their lower back or upper right leg and you instinctively watch a little closer in case they fall and you can help somehow.
The scowl and glare of a woman who is playfully admonishing her kids and encouraging them to play along.
While we asymptotically approach ‘perfect’ rendering and simulation, we are still just alongside it, unable to climb out of the uncanny valley.
A game can look beautiful with some creativity and care in its visuals, and it seems like nearly everyone who’s played Tears of the Kingdom or Breath of the Wild is enamoured with their beauty.
I often play just to travel around and enjoy the beautiful landscapes. Even The Depths is enchantingly beautiful, reminding me of what you can see while scuba diving. I wonder if this was intentional.
So yes, while I do appreciate a super high resolution game with rock solid megahertz framerates and physically correct lighting, these are additive in their enhancement, not multiplicative.
Spending effort on these that could have been spread more evenly across art direction, gameplay, music and other aspects serves only NVidia, AMD and those who enjoy ‘high fidelity’ visuals or the game (in its own right) of chasing hardware that is capable of running these games.
To me, there is a parallel with the 'audiophile', who lusts after higher and higher 'fidelity' and perpetually upgrades their equipment but only ever listens to a playlist titled "Songs to test headphones with". Spine-tingling cymbal wash and awe-inducing bass sweeps are amazing.
Others are here for the remaining 90% of the music, and are happy to listen on their phones, and don’t even notice when a live performance isn’t a clone of album tracks.
I personally fall into both camps. I love to put on some headphones and listen to ‘audiophile’ music, but that’s a hour or two every few months. Most of the time I’m having a blast with medium fidelity, ultra fun music … and gameplay.
You just made me wish for a Wind Waker like game with a full underwater world ;)
Games could render realtime reflections using various tricks even 20 years ago.
I remember that in Hitman Blood money enemies could spot you in a mirror and mirrors were functional in that game. It's a game from 2006 and mirrors were placed only in small rooms.
But higher resolutions never were about more details. At least not for TV's (and thus consoles).
At the end of the SD era (576p) I had a 28" TV. At the end of the HD era (1080p) I had a 50" TV. That's a very similar pixel density. We're now partway through the 4k era (2160p) and I currently have a 77" TV. 8k TV are not here yet in any significant numbers; my last 4k TV will likely be around 100". When we move to 8k it won't be because we want a more detailed image, it's because we want a wider field-of-view. We need more pixels so our screens can get larger.
Also, I don't think the market will ever get to 100" TVs as a norm. You're an outlier: most people have other priorities (don't want TV to dominate the room, don't have room, don't want to pay for the extra energy required etc).
They didn't neglect the style and art direction, but it absoutely required graphical horsepower. Maybe - though - you need top tier art direction to sell the sizzle of top shelf graphics.
Is this an Ad?
Does it always rain in the game? How depressing.
They have a PS5 review[1], and a 'this is how best to get console quality settings on a PC' comparison with a PS5 on performance settings.[2]
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JawxvOF__4Q 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrXoDon6fXs
I can run basically any game at 1080p with at least 60fps with my 1080ti, except this game.
What they did with the mesh shaders is basically the equivalent of releasing a raytracing-only game.
So now I have to wait until GPUs become affordable again, which might not happen for a couple of years still. Shame, as this was the game I was the most excited about this entire year.
And no, spending money to get the same (or worse) GPU which supports mesh shaders wouldn't be worth it.
And the situation is worse for AMD users, only 3 years since a compatible board came out.
The real culprit here was the chip shortage, cryptocurrency bubble bursting, rising inflation, and overall instability throughout the world (deteriorating China and US relations, for example).
All in all, it's just how things have always worked out, with the exception of external factors that had unforseen consequences.
I'm sure Remedy put on a ton of work, and is trying to raise the bar in graphical fidelity. Decisions like these had to be done early in the game dev stage, since all the game assets would've taken it into account.
At the end of the day, gimping progress in real time CG for the sake of compatibility with a 7 year old card makes no sense.
(I appreciate that GPU prices have creeped up and up over time, though.)
In 2007, CPUs and GPUs were still getting twice as fast (perceptibly) each year. That hasn't been true for a while. Other than lacking a TPM, my i7-3770k machine and GTX 970 runs as fast in desktop use as my i9-9900k+2070 Super, and that machine (which dates to....2019, I think?) still plays new game releases at 1440p just fine.
Recall that most games are designed for the XBox Series X (released 2020) and PS5 (released 2020) and still target that caliber of GPU performance.
This cycle is extremely unusual though, the length of the cross-gen period has been dramatically extended by both covid shortages and also disruptions to the game development pipeline from covid and the Russian war among other things.
Once developers are no longer forced to validate for literal base-tier ps4 hardware from 2012 (8 jaguar netbook cores and an underclocked 7850, oh my), gtx 970 tier hardware is going to immediately drop off a cliff. And frankly even pascal is not going to age well. There were lots of improvements and features in pascal that got downplayed by reviewers from 2018-2022 and now they are really starting to come into play (and would have done so earlier had it not been for the pandemic).
You can hardly say we’ve even seen next-gen games at this point, tbh. Even CP2077 is a cross-gen title - which in many ways functionally means “last-gen”.
"Caliber of GPU" is not just performance, but also features. The Xbox Series supports mesh shader (and PS5 with their equivalent). Nvidia 10-series and AMD RDNA1 GPUs and older do not. This youtube video compared two GPUs released around the same time, one with less performance but mesh shader support and one with more performance but no mesh shader support: https://youtu.be/UiduP4Y7RSw
Because then you always have some capital within the hardware to upgrade again without breaking the bank
But if you upgrade mid life cycle or even worse: to a mid range card that’s already mid life cycle, then you’re always getting less life span and having to do full upgrades again
New or with 10 000+ hours of 100% load mining coins ?
Same for cars but I'll buy a 30k km car over a 300k km car every day
No, you can’t.
I had to take the settings way way down to get to 60FPS and I don’t know as I get older, I prefer things to look nice and smudged vs high frame rates and crummy.
I’m just enjoying the heck out of walking around the forest and staring at necrotizing obese ray traced wieners. The details are astounding!
Also, if you’re looking to upgrade your GPU, it’s a great time. I bought this one off some kid for $400 and 3090s are selling for $650.
The feature sets involving AI in the newest cards are really the key, I think, and why my last gen premium card is lagging behind. DLSS 2.0 on the 4080 and 4090 especially are just revolutionary in how they work. The last gen cards just can’t quite keep up. It’s like magic, making frames out of seemingly thin air.
In my opinion this is a good problem to have! I’d rather have games pushing the state of the art than sticking to what the PS5 and Xbox whatever it’s called these days can do.
Max settings also means enabled path tracing, which current-gen Nvidia's 4000 series have better hardware acceleration for. So you can't really compare performance to previous hardware which don't have that hardware acceleration. No amount of optimization is going to fix that, and it should probably be turned off if you're not on a 4000 series or newer card.
In that same way, AMD's path tracing hardware acceleration falls behind Nvidia's. A current-gen high-end AMD RX 7900 XTX does worse than Nvidia's last-gen not as high-end 3070 in Cyberpunk 2077's path tracing update. https://youtu.be/cSq2WoARtyM?t=503
Maxing everything means enabling path tracing which is a massive performance hit. Basically to do that you need a 4090 or a cheaper 40xx card and use frame generation.
The “PS5/Series X equivalent” settings are a mixture of low/medium without any hardware ray tracing (I think it still does some software ray tracing similar to UE5 Lumen) using FSR2 with post processing effects done before the upscaling (low resolution). On PC if you use high post processing effects they happen after the upscaling and thus at much higher resolution (this is the “heaviest” option outside of the ray tracing stuff)
Remedy hasn’t made a game that targets “native” resolution since Max Payne 2. Basically starting with the first Alan Wake game they have used lower internal resolutions and used the budget for other graphical effects. (On PC you still always had the option to use native resolution)
I truly look forward to a year or so from now when the game finally makes it's way to Steam, fully patched and ready to go for Linux play. Until then, I'm content with playing the vast catalogue of non-exclusive games available.
https://investors.remedygames.com/app/uploads/2023/03/remedy...
They also have 2 more games with 505, max payne remakes with Rockstar and one game with Tencent.
The 2 games with 505 are Control 2 and Project Condor (Control coop spin-off).
Tencent game is Project Vanguard, a live service game, hinted to be related to Control, and the Keystone AWE.
I get the fascination of tinkering with the build, and optimising stuff, and so on. But eventually it's got to come down to actually playing the game, right? This article is a classic case in point: not once, in the entire article, does it talk about the actual game. It only talks about graphics performance. Who buys games just to run them at 60fps at 4K? Surely at some point you've got to actually, y'know, play the game and enjoy that game?
If this isn't you, consoles or mid-tier PCs are a great fit.
I would say I straddle the two - if I buy great hardware, I expect to capitalize on it. But I don't overclock shit or care exactly what speed my RAM is, nor do I need the fastest SSD or top tier everything.
The only reasons I can think of are fear of the controller and slow load times due to mechanical HDD on last-gen systems.
I don't spend time away from gameplay trying to get optimal setting. I'm just the type of neurotic that I will do that stuff even though I absolutely don't enjoy it.
I can jump directly into gaming without anxiety over how my hardware is falling behind. With my PS5 being in my living room, gaming is also time away from my desk, which I, much like doing anything on a Windows PC, associate with my IT jobby job.
A console is an appliance. It's like a toaster or dishwasher, except it lets me play games without any work.
With PS5, I also don't have to worry about weird glitches with audio through HDMI in my living room setup, since that's how I prefer to play. And PS5 now also renders Dolby Atmos, without any glitches.
These are of course all me-problems, but I thought I'd mention it here, since gaming is too much fun to be confined to the tuning-happy garage mindset of PC.
Alan Wake 2 merits specific consideration on this front because its system requirements seemed to suggest it wouldn't even be playable on a lot of popular configurations.
(As a parallel example, I love the idea of seeing films in 3D, 4K, HDR etc, but I rarely notice the difference within ten minutes of the film starting. There's a reason why digital cinema got along fine at 2K for so long: extra detail really, really, really doesn't matter.)
Recent example, Cities Skylines 2; onereason it runs like shit is that the pedestrians still get fully rendered teeth even though you're far away and can't see them. Why do they even have teeth? It's a city building sim.
Or the latest Pokemon game, it looks like it could've been made 20 years ago in terms of visuals, but it runs terribly.
I remember when CoD 4 being 60fps on Xbox 360 was a big deal.
Virtually unplayable is in the eye of the beholder.
But I think there's most definitely room for articles that nerd out on some specific technical aspect of the work and I don't think they imply that the actual "fun factor" of the game is unimportant.
Spiderman 2 is awesome. It was one of the few preorders that have ever worked out for me. So I’m cautiously optimistic about recent mainstream games, and the preview for Alan Wake looks neat.
As for the story, it’s just Alan Wake 1 retold but louder and in your face about it.
I don't understand why people need to hear whether games are "worth it" based on someone else's opinion.
As an example, I've struggled to get people to fully play one of my favorite platformers of all time, VVVVVV. And then the much vaunted Ocarina of Time bores me to tears and I can't push myself to get through it.
VVVVV appears to be a fairly low budget indie game with graphics that haven't aged very well compared to modern indie games. I'm sure it was fun and it seems it was very well received when it came out.
Ocarina of Time was a AAA game that came out during the first real mainstream transition toward 3D graphics. It effectively kickstarted the RPG and free-roam genres while still presenting a typically polished Zelda experience. It was fun when I played it (when it came out) but it has not aged very well compared to modern games. If you didn't play it when it came out you're probably not going to enjoy it - but at least you can respect its impact on gaming.
Anyway the point is that games don't age well and similar to music, people don't tend to like other people's favorite games unless they're highly aligned in the first place.
Reviews are pretty pointless as well but in general you can tell in the first 2 hours of a game if you're going to like it or not, at which point you can choose to return it or not return it.
It was an instant classic for me.
Ocarina of Time bored me in 1998. It still does. It hasn't "aged poorly" in my view; it was never good in the first place. (Yes, it's my opinion. :P)
Oh my so I am not alone. I always felt like it was terrible, especially compared to the GB and SNES ones, and whatever games were out on PC/PS/DC around that time (not so much about the graphics but the game's pacing, controls, and mechanics). I feel the same about Golden Eye.
I feel like these games got a lot of success not because of what they are but because it exposed a chunk of players (Nintendo die-hards) to a type of game that wasn't previously available to them on their favourite platform.
Alan Wake is a great game but I consider Alan Wake 2 to be much better, but I also enjoyed Control more than Alan Wake and enjoyed all aspects of Quantum Break. Where you fall on those games will probably most affect how much you enjoy Remedy's latest.
How much you enjoy unorthodox multimedia narrative story telling, psychological and cosmic horror meta-narrative weirdness, how much you accept being confused from design jankiness in certain spots as part of the experience, stuff like that will decide how much you enjoy this game. Personally, its only real flaw is mystery solving can be a little too handholdy and bruteforce-able.
The idea that anyone needs another person to tell them what is likable is just sad.
Experience the art and make up your own mind. You either like it or you don't. The end.
Reviewers have been pretty questionable of late with a few obvious gaffes, but Starfield was the last straw for me. A wall on 10s for reviews, but the game is a clear 6, maybe 7 on a good day.
Starfield is Fallout, but in space, Skyrim is Oblivion, but in the north, Fallout is Oblivion, but in post-nuke retrofuture, and Oblivion is Morrowind, but in a thinly veiled roman empire setting.
I mean, from gameplay to quests, it's the exact same thing, reskinned. e.g porphyric hemophilia was cool in Morrowind, but the exact set up + quests is reproduced over and over again in subsequent games (incl. across franchises!). I'm halfway wondering (and would not be surprised) if Starfield had vampires as well.
It's nice if you enjoy the thing a lot (good for fans! I'm all for them enjoying it) but is otherwise so repetitive that what was fun back then is not anymore, and a fresh coat of paint increasingly failed at saving the later entries.
I found it extremely boring at first. I hugely disliked the potato graphics, the clunky animations and the rubbery faces.
Now I find I pick it up to kill time and have fun while doing so. The story is not incredibly deep but it's interesting enough. The gameplay is not 2023 AAA quality but it's decent enough. The endless interruptions with fast travel and loading (even for crossing doors and riding lifts! :-o ) are pretty low effort but they don't bother enough.
Pretty much all aspects of the game are good enough but never great. I'd probably give it a 6/10 but with a caveat that it's something I keep going back to.
This is the first time I'm actually playing a Bethesda game by the way. I tried Skyrim a few times and always found it extremely boring and clunky. I tried Fallout 76 and it was the same. This is the 3rd of their games I'm trying to play and so far it's been going ... quite ok! And I'm glad I'm playing it, it's fun despite its (many) shortcomings!
Pretty much all reviewers I follow were giving Starfield reviews explicitly mentioning how boring it is how it feels obsolete for 2023.
So which "reviewers" are you quoting and why aren't you reading the ones that match your taste in games?
And how the heck are random people in the internet more trustable to you, there's thousands of people that lost their shit because Starfield didn't get perfect 10/10 scores.
Going in to the experience with your expectations already dialed in defeats the entire purpose of experiencing art.
Eh let's be real - you decided you didn't like that game the moment you saw any sort of press about it.
So you were just peddling around to confirm your preconcieved bias for it to be bad?
(Pretty much all reviews have been universally VERY good in media.)
Isn’t that exactly how Alan Wake 1 starts out?
Alan Wake 1 had a lengthy walking around/watching cutscenes first part, so this sounds good to me: I like walking simulators (e.g Gone Home, Firewatch). Not every game has to be about blowing things up to smithereens or solving over-rehashed puzzles.
The most recent example for me was Scorn: for me it was fantastic until I got to the area where you get a thinly veiled shotgun thing with mandatory combat + solve those rotating puzzles over and over whose essential logic has been seen a thousand times (in stark with the first big room environmental puzzle whose logic wasn't that complex but was immersive), at which point I dropped the game as it was just killing the mood for me.
Personally I'm hugely fond of it but I absolutely love the weirdness of Remedy's extended universe, and for me it's less about the gameplay but the story and atmosphere. So, my bias couldn't be more apparent but I think there's a lot more to it than what you're dismissing it for.
That said, the references to Control in this game definitely feel a bit hamfisted. You even encounter a familiar character from Control, and they seem to have a lot less depth than in the original game.
From what I was unless you're comparing RTX ON vs OFF side by side it's not noticeable enough to make a difference.
Spiderman 2 uses a very different system.
So I think this article is mostly just an ad for a Unity addon.
You’re right about the new one though, they’ve apparently gone to raytracing for Spider-Man 2’s windows. I wonder if they’ll stick to raytracing always enabled if they do a PC port of this one.
Though if you flip on frame generation at 4K max settings, you can do 60+ FPS
Remedy know what they are doing
https://www.gamedevpensieve.com/graphics/3d/3d_frame-breakdo...
http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2020/12/29/graphics-stud...
http://simonschreibt.de/game-art-tricks/
Not super current, but still a nice overview :)
On my RTX 2070 Super, I played the first hour so far on render resolution of 1080p (with DSLR upscale to 4K), medium settings, no ray-tracing at roughly 30-40FPS.
Also, is the obstruction you speak of really an issue? Never had I thought "God damn, move over!" to the character I was controlling straight from above-behind in ye olde days.
Over the shoulder (offset behind the player) was popularized by resident evil 4. It makes sense because you want to both focus on what’s in front of you with a clear canvas for aiming while also keeping the character in view as part of the game.
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The idiocy of people. A game must be in a shipping ready state when it launches. End of story. If you wait for a game and buy it on T=0 day you do that because you want to experience the whole thing at that very moment, and don't want to wait for possible updates that would elevate it to a level where it would run much better on your hardware.
Have you never watched a film and wanted them to make a prequel, sequel or anything else in the same imagined universe? Never read a book and wanted more in the series?
As for fixes, if you watched a film and there was some awkward CGI in it would you think "wow I really hope they never improve that"?
There is no such thing in movies like bad cgi at a given time. Noone with a sane mind would ruin 10s of millions of investment with bad cgi nowadays. CGI reflects the state of the art, or a level that is acceptable/affordable and won't cause the viewer to be knocked out of concentration.
Maybe for people who work in the industry and have an eye what to look for, cgi might have issues, but viewers won't recognize anything odd.
Also... movies either work or don't work. I even rewatch movies from the 30s. There are movies, like Fritz Lang's M (1931), which were tens of years ahead of the industry regarding pacing and storytelling and still (re)watchable almost 100 years later.
I agree but reality doesn't care about our opinions, it is how it is