April 2025 General Game Discussion

[OldGuy_1947]

I guess something that makes this extra unusual is that there was a warning and then the cheaters went ahead and put their usernames on what is essentially a cheater's list.

I didn't know that. Kind of reinforces the idea they were there specifically to respond to and spite Capcom's warnings, doesn't it?

And, of course I agree that this behavior on both Capcom's part by posting the threat and the cheaters defiant response spoils the game experience for everyone else caught in the crossfire. Just like normal people caught in any war.

 

[Colif]

So far this year I haven't succumbed to FOMO. In recent years its occurred twice but both times were for headphones that were on special... both were smart decisions long term as I wouldn't buy either pair for their normal prices.
PC hardware I can generally resist... looks at his 7900xt, okay... I failed there too but realistically it worked out well as my card became impossible to get after I bought it... probably still is. I bought it within 4 hours of its release here... so I failed to the FOMO test - I had been waiting to buy a GPU for 6 months so it wasn't a spontaneous buy.
But everything else I wait... the closer I get to a goal the harder it is to resist though. I have to wait 6 weeks now to have money to buy all my parts... every other temptation is being ignored.

I am normally fairly resistant to it... mainly as I didn't want anything and I don't see advertising anywhere

 

[Zed Clampet]

I wish that I had been provided some statistics before I purchased the shovel upgrade (turn my shovel into a drill) in A Game About Digging a Hole. That drill drains the battery at way too fast, and I've already maxed my battery out. Now I have to go back to the surface too quickly. I get more done in that short amount of time, but that's not much of a consolation when I'm trudging my way to the surface.

 

[Colif]

FOMO just got me, but only as I seen one item that I want for my PC go in and out of stock the last few months, and it was sort of necessary for color scheme in new PC - and its one less thing I need to buy.

ASSASSIN IV WH - DeepCool

The ASSASSIN returns with a new white aesthetic and efficient cooling capacity. The ASSASSIN IV WH provides exceptional performance and is armed with seven heat pipes and newly designed 120 and 140mm FDB fans. - DeepCool was founded with the mission of providing professional, innovative...

www.deepcool.com

having a non white cooler in an all white build wasn't something I wanted.

 

[March's Ghost]

having a non white cooler in an all white build wasn't something I wanted.

Funny, I had an uncle say the same thing when I brought a (non-white) girlfriend of mine to a family outing.

 

[Colif]

well, my GPU will be black with an rgb strip so build won't be all white but I am trying to color match it, and didn't want to mess with replacing ram as well.

After having a black case with dark tinted glass, I want to be able to see into the next one.

without rgb I would see nothing at all inside it.
Only thing that is darker than my current is from a book

Marvin was able to touch the surface of the ship and open up an entry hatchway, and the interior of the ship was completely black. There were black controls labelled in black, on a black background, with a little light that lit up black, which made it difficult to control the ship. The ceiling and walls of the swaying cabin were also black, as well as the seats, control panel, the instruments and the little screws that held them in place.

Spacecraft

A spacecraft is any type of vehicle or machine which has been made to travel through space. There are several types of spacecraft featured throughout Hitchhiker's, most notably the starship Heart of Gold. Zaphod Beeblebrox and Ford Prefect appear to be avid enthusiasts of spacecraft, with both...

hitchhikers.fandom.com

 

[Zloth]

Only issues so far which could just be my PC is the antialiasing looks terrible. I have in game AA settings at Ultra, and have consulted Copilot about tinkering with Nvidia Control Panel settings, only for nothing to work. Trees in the distance look very pixelated and sharp, and a lot of edge surfaces n the distance have a weird sparkle/white pixelated effect, making the game look quite bad. I believe this is just something with my PC, most likely some display setting in Nvidia Control Panel, that I need to mess around with and fix. I have seen it in other games but never as bothersome as this.

Would it be possible to play the game at high resolution and have the graphics card downsample to your native resolution? Like DLSS but in reverse.

View: https://youtu.be/c3voyiojWl4?si=82hU_8Hn1_ArzFiW

 

[BeardyHat]

So far this year I haven't succumbed to FOMO. In recent years its occurred twice but both times were for headphones that were on special... both were smart decisions long term as I wouldn't buy either pair for their normal prices.
PC hardware I can generally resist... looks at his 7900xt, okay... I failed there too but realistically it worked out well as my card became impossible to get after I bought it... probably still is. I bought it within 4 hours of its release here... so I failed to the FOMO test - I had been waiting to buy a GPU for 6 months so it wasn't a spontaneous buy.
But everything else I wait... the closer I get to a goal the harder it is to resist though. I have to wait 6 weeks now to have money to buy all my parts... every other temptation is being ignored.

I am normally fairly resistant to it... mainly as I didn't want anything and I don't see advertising anywhere

The white cooler looks pretty neat, but I can see how it would bug you that it doesn't match.

But yeah, I intermittently succumb to FOMO. Prior to today, the last thing was a month or two ago, buying a keyboard that I see scalped regularly. Granted, it's been very useful with my Steam Deck and was useful for my Surface while I didn't have a laptop.

But yeah, I made quite a few FOMO purchases in the last day, but I already posted about that in the Corner Club.

Cyberpunk is growing on me, I must admit. Weird to say that about a game I've already spent 50-hours with. But I kept going back to it and kind of just exploring the open world and feeling disillusioned with it, whereas now, I'm focusing heavily on doing story missions and side quests, trying to avoid stupid stuff like finding the Tarot cards and whatnot.

The world still feels very dead to me, but the story stuff is good and lends some life to things.

 

[March's Ghost]

So I've had a 4K TV for awhile and I haven't gamed on it much, but I tried Alan Wake 2 on it hoping my performance in 4K wasn't too terrible and it isn't as long as I don't use ray-tracing. Still, it didn't seem to be much better visually than on my 1440p monitor, save for a bigger picture.

Well, when going through the setting I noticed that HDR was turned off so I turned it on. My monitor isn't HDR compatible, but my TV is. I honestly though HDR was something I could live without. While I certainly could live without it, after seeing the difference it makes in the lighting I don't want to live without it.

I feel like I've been living in the dark ages until now.

 

[Colif]

HDR is the only reason I want a new monitor. But it can wait until next year. I don't have table space yet you two monitors, I might by then.

Mums new 4k Smart TV has HDR, I only watched a few nature videos on it to see the difference. I don't want to stop enjoying my current screen by seeing too much difference.

The white cooler looks pretty neat, but I can see how it would bug you that it doesn't match.

The black version of that cooler is in my current PC.

There is a normally a magnetic cover over the gap where the front 140mm fan is inserted

Since I will have both soon, I will swap the black one for a white one which coomes with new cooler, to add some colour to current PC, and maybe create a visual link to the black GPU below the cooler in the white build.

My GPU will be only black thing in PC that can be seen from the front otherwise.
All the nvme are either hidden under a heat sink above top PCIe 16 clot or under a shield directly below the top pcie16 slot and ssd (if in PC) will be in a hdd cage behind motherboard
The new case can hold 6 ssd or 4 hdd. I may not have either.

Originally I thought about a checker pattern idea but a friend of mine talked me into all white...
Hardest part to get to match is the GPU, its generally only special editions that come in other colors from most makers.
Some are different , really different

 

[neogunhero]

Would it be possible to play the game at high resolution and have the graphics card downsample to your native resolution? Like DLSS but in reverse.

View: https://youtu.be/c3voyiojWl4?si=82hU_8Hn1_ArzFiW

That probably would work just haven’t tried it. I know it is a real solution to improving AA but I’m afraid my GPU will start to suffer. Won’t know until I try!

 

[Zed Clampet]

The last few days I'm starting to get "solo dev small indie game right at release fatigue". Just had some bad luck to have games be broken and unplayable. Normally it hasn't been like that or I would have quit buying them long ago. The dev I talked about yesterday has been great and his game is remarkably better today than it was two days ago, but it was still a little frustrating. Then this morning I bought another one, and I made it about 15 minutes before I was trapped behind a game-breaking bug. I've left a message on the forums, but we'll see how long it takes to get fixed. She was very helpful during the Next Fest demo, so I expect her to take care of it relatively soon. I should start demanding the source code and backend access as a requirement for me buying the game 🙂

 

[dxchase]

Started playing The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered today. Loved the first one, played it, beat it, had a lot of fun with the MP (which the franchise abandoned after the first game) and never got a chance to play the second with it being a PS exclusive.
The game runs great and looks gorgeous. Have no problem playing with max settings at 4k with HDR. Im playing on a hard difficulty and it always is weird to me that you can find ammo around the game, but its always just 1 or 2 bullets, like wtf is everyone just leaving random 1 or 2 bullets everywhere lol.

Still, really gorgeous game that im playing the same way as Avowed, which is couch/tv combo with an audience from time to time. Ive started doing this for games that are a SP story-heavy.

Im still playing Rise of the Ronin, ive started using the unarmed/martial arts style and have really enjoyed it. The game rewards you for using non-lethal tactics, but its also fun to beat little mini-bosses with fists and kicks vs their swords and stuff.

Ive been using HDR for a while now and, depending on the game and what you are using, HDR can make a game look worse to me. Some games overlap their HDR settings with your tv/monitor making stuff look really washed out etc. Its easy fixes but sometimes its a little annoying messing with HDR settings because they change not only per the game, but those settings contend with your monitor/tv's HDR settings and then Microsofts HDR settings.

 

[Johnway]

We're coming up to the 90hr mark in asscreed valhalla and we're no where near finished. i suspect we're looking into the 250-300 hr mark depending on the situation. Not touched any of the DLC, there are still a few areas in england that need to be pacified and norway remains mostly untouched.


Ramp 2024, i've finished the next set of maps and my pick of the set is Erchou Kai ide as it has a story and does a few things slightly differently compared to your regular maps. it tells a story of a Doom marine taking part in hell expeditions and eventually being picked for the phobos project. Whatever the hell that is. Another map that stands out was 9th circle, a slaughterfest map although isn't big is brutally hard and deeply annoying. It has the usual awfulness of having mobs of archviles (so if one hits you, it opens up for all the other archviles to targer you). Even despite having so many megaspheres and all the map contains are megacells, its not enough. It got so annoying that i got a massive headache playing it. i only beat the map when the archviles fried my arse and threw me burnt corpse over the exit. I consider that victory and left as fast as i could to the next station phobos station. Looks like a collection of vanila doom1 ep1 mapset.

 

[March's Ghost]

We're coming up to the 90hr mark in asscreed valhalla and we're no where near finished. i suspect we're looking into the 250-300 hr mark depending on the situation.

I have 125 hours in and while I don't know what my completion percentage is, I doubt it's much over 50% . I do have a bad habit of chasing after POIs though, so a lot of that is unproductive BS.

 

[Johnway]

I have 125 hours in and while I don't know what my completion percentage is, I doubt it's much over 50% . I do have a bad habit of chasing after POIs though, so a lot of that is unproductive BS.

Compared to odyessy, its a lot more lenient on the collecting challenges as opposed to every chest. So in theory it should be faster. i suspect that its taking more longer as there seems to be more meaningful content to do. I mean theres that roguelike game, river raids, asgard content and we have both norway and england to investigate.

Greece may look bigger, but i suspect much of that is the sea so its mostly vast of nothingness. but i'm getting to the point in valhalla where i'm so levelled up that everything will become unlocked. Not quite, but close.

 

[March's Ghost]

Compared to odyessy, its a lot more lenient on the collecting challenges as opposed to every chest. So in theory it should be faster.

It's been almost a year since I last played it, so I really don't remember. I just know that being halfway, even with side quests, at 125 hours is too long.

 

[Zloth]

I feel like I've been living in the dark ages until now.

You're still missing an entire dimension. Let me introduce you to a little something called 3D Vision...

Oh, right. NVIDIA killed it because nobody was buying it. <sigh> Back to cyclops mode.

 

[March's Ghost]

You're still missing an entire dimension. Let me introduce you to a little something called 3D Vision...

Oh, right. NVIDIA killed it because nobody was buying it. <sigh> Back to cyclops mode.

I have a Valve Index and UEVR/REFramework and vorpX. I'm good.

 

[neogunhero]

Played a lot of Atomfall this weekend. The more I play it, the more I compare it to Metro Exodus instead of Fallout. The world is broken into large sections, tons of things to explore throughout, there are closed off abandoned mines and caves to explore, and lots of POIs scattered throughout. The world is gorgeous, I'm having fun just running around and finding new places to explore.

The main issue with the game is the enemy AI. They are quite dumb, someone on Steam review they have the "object permeance of a toddler" which accurately describes the NPCs. As soon as you leave sight of enemies, they act like you vanished into thin air. They also do some silly stuff, I hid behind a crate in some bushes and watched ten enemies come look into the bush one by one, all ten of them having to personally ensure I wasn't there.

Besides that, the combat, world, and story are all great. I'm having a great time trying to figure out what the heck is going on, why everyone is acting weird, and what the world was like before this major incident borked everything. Combat can be tough, as you'll die in just a few hits, and while the enemy AI can be janky, they are good at flanking you and surrounding you if you're not careful. Shooting and melee combat feel great.

Besides that, I'm still making progress in Schedule 1. It's starting to get a bit boring by yourself, and after a while I'm getting tired of all the manual crafting. I know at some point you can hire NPC workers to do all of this for you, but that could still be a long way off. I'm 7 hours in and still struggling to make a product worth $60 or more.

I also picked up Cluster Truck on sale for $3. I've played this game before and it's great if you like fast paced first-person platformers. It's very hard, especially as you get further in the levels, and it's incredibly fast paced so you need good reflexes to complete the levels, but man is it fun. It's very chaotic but somehow it sucks me in for a good 30mins-1 hour, until I get frustrated and close the game.

 

[neogunhero]

In an earlier post I talked about how Atomfall's antialiasing looked terrible on anything that was over 20 feet away from my face. Tree leaves in the distance turned into pixelated messes, edges looked very sharp no matter what the AA setting set to, and flora in the distance had a weird white pixely sparkle to it that was very unpleasant. Well, after more research, it appears this is a common issue with Rebellion's Asura Engine. Digital Foundry did a deep dive into Sniper Elite 5 and said to come up with the same visual defects, as well as a few Steam forum posts I found complaining about it.

Before I knew this, I dug deeper into the Nvidia Control Panel and changed some settings around. Apparently, I had a few settings that could actually hurt performance in some games, such as Triple Buffering and a few others I'm forgetting. Not that these settings are tanking performance, but after some research, found out that it is generally better to keep these sorts of things off and turn them on in the per-game settings or in-game settings if needed. I also messed around with my monitor settings with no solution, but I did make the image a bit sharper and more vibrant, so that's nice.

Truthfully, after a while of playing, you don't notice it as bad. It's only when you first boot up the game that it all jumps out at you, and it's only for things in the distance, nothing up close looks as bad or jagged.

 

[Pifanjr]

I tried out the April Fools Craftmine update for Minecraft. It turns it into a roguelite where you generate a new world and have to find the exit, which gives you points to unlock a bunch of different stuff.

It's a fun concept, but it has also highlighted how bad I am at vanilla Minecraft. Maybe I should just turn the difficulty down.

 

[Colif]

New point and click

Elroy and the Aliens on Steam

It's the year 1993. Talking robots, ghosts from the past, and ancient alien technology buried under desert sand. An adventure following Elroy and Peggie in the search of a long-lost father. How far would you go to bring back the ones you love?

store.steampowered.com

 

[BeardyHat]

New point and click

Elroy and the Aliens on Steam

It's the year 1993. Talking robots, ghosts from the past, and ancient alien technology buried under desert sand. An adventure following Elroy and Peggie in the search of a long-lost father. How far would you go to bring back the ones you love?

store.steampowered.com

Snagged the demo of this one a few days ago, but haven't tried it yet, does look interesting.

I ended-up finishing Cyberpunk this week and since then, been going back and doing the endings I didn't get to do. Then with separate endings within those endings, I've been just watching the ones I didn't choose on Youtube. Watching the endings on Youtube, looks like a majority of people are playing a male V, which is weird; I chose female V and the voice acting and character designs are just so much more interesting. Male V is generic as hell, from his voice to his looks and on; I really don't feel like I missed out on that.

Anyway, I have one ending to go and then I'll probably try out the Dogtown DLC stuff. Now, that said, I have some complaints:

• The open world feels dead, completely lifeless. Traveling around the world on foot or in a car, it feels all like cardboard cutouts, nothing really exists and I don't feel immersed. You see the same advertisements everywhere, the same NPCs (often standing right next to each other), the same canned animations, it doesn't react well to the player, it again just feels absolutely lifeless.
• The upgrade/perk system whatever feels pointless. I've got some upgrades on my character, I can double jump, that's neat, but I don't feel like anything has come in handy during gameplay. Being able to smash doors or hack things better, whatever, it doesn't feel like it actually nets me anything and doesn't give me an ImSim vibes of being able to take different routes to objectives. I've pretty much largely ignored the perk system and just let points build-up until I feel like something could be useful, then just dumped everything into getting that. It doesn't feel additive in anyway and just feels like a distraction.
• Similarly, the crafting system is completely pointless and ignorable. I feel compelled to pick-up crafting components and whatnot because it's all different colors that demand my attention, but why? I hate crafting in games as is and it seems extra pointless here, just crap to fill-up another screen.
• Looting enemies, why? I have piles upon piles of guns and none of them really seem to be any better or more interesting than the next. This isn't Borderlands; pretty much every gun feels the same and this one has slightly more damage or whatever than the next, but I feel just fine with what I've got.
• Similarly, I'm all powerful already anyway. I'm "leveling up" (at like level 39 or something) and I've just completed a major section of the game and I feel no real challenge; not that it's something I'm necessarily looking for from this game, but I simply blast my way through every enemy without much trouble and without thinking about it. Again this doesn't encourage me to use any of the other systems in the game, it all just feels like filler.

So yeah. I'm still enjoying just doing the story stuff and ignoring all that other faff and I am looking forward to checking out the DLC.

All that said, I should have probably waited, but I just picked-up Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Gold for $65 on Fanatical. The deal seemed pretty solid, even though I want to finish what I'm doing in Cyberpunk at the moment, but yeah, I probably should have just waited. Now I'm a little worried I'll have some Open World burnout (though Cyberpunk as an open world is meh. It really should have been a linear game) and won't want to play KCD2 and by the time I do, it'll be cheaper.

Anyway, we'll see. I'm hoping to finish that last Cyberpunk ending tomorrow and then get on with the DLC and hopefully that won't take me too long.

 

[BeardyHat]

Oh also, I tried to put my old GTX 1070 in my ThinkServer TS140 today. It's currently running a 750ti and while I kids don't notice how choppy it can be in some of their games, I do and it bugs me. Anyway, the 1070 just won't fit, mostly due to how the cables in the system are.

So I'm thinking I'm going to rebuild an old PC that came back to me last year. It's just an i5-2500k with 16Gb of RAM, but it should be enough with a 1070 to run the games my kids want to play; I'll probably try to overclock it just for fun and worst case scenario, I'll toss an i7-3700k into it as a little CPU upgrade.