August 2024 PC Gaming General Discussion Thread

[Pifanjr]

Its pretty sad that this pattern continues, that you can compare old games to newer ones and the old ones come out ahead in almost every comparison.

Progress?
One was made people who cared and wanted to make best possible game they could, the other one is Star Wars: Outlaws.

Shame for Ubisoft that Disney messed that franchise up. 10 or more years ago this would have sold anyway. They wouldn't have to send emails to everyone telling them it exists - I got one yesterday, a friend got 3 of them... 2 from Xbox.

Kay isn't even in the environment... she never gets wet, muddy, burned... she is not really there. Layers should interact. It creates a disconnect.

I don't see the point in comparing games like this. From what I've seen there's a lot of people who are thoroughly enjoying Star Wars: Outlaws, which is the most important part.

 

[Brian Boru]

I don't see the point in comparing games like this

It's fashionable to dump on some companies at any time—Ubi is one of the current ones. Gotta go where the clicks and views are. Remember when Microsoft was all the rage? Now it's Meta, soon it'll be… well, we have to wait for the Influencers to decide for us.

Or it may be a different agenda, like that of say comparing Avowed to Skyrim or your SO's looks to Mr Universe or Ms World.

Then there's the group dynamic, where being 'in' requires hitting down on the group target of opportunity at that time. Works with any size of group, and doesn't matter that a significant majority are quite happy with your group's target.

Who knows, people latch onto victims and shake them unrelentingly for many reasons.

 

[Zloth]

Characters not being affected by the world does annoy me for sure. It's a lot like graphics in that way, or lip syncing not being quite right. It doesn't really hurt the game per se, but it's a bit of a bother. The more it fails to happen, the more annoying it can be, too. If a character fails to get wet after falling into the water but that only happens once over the course of an 80 hour game, I'll forget about it for sure. If they're jumping in the water every hour, then not so much.

RDR2's graphics are great; it's one of the best-looking games in the business. Asking every game to live up to RDR2, Cyberpunk, and the like isn't going to happen, though. Even really big budget games like Forbidden West aren't always going to be that good. If that's what you demand from every game, expect to play about one game per year.

 

[Brian Boru]

Tyler Wilde has a good article on this general phenomenon which I'll put in the Article thread shortly.

 

[Colif]

It can be good looking game if you throw money at it, but its mostly the environments that look good, character models need some work.
Still doesn't change the fact she doesn't get effected by environmental factors.

The physics of some of the trees makes me wonder. If its constantly so windy, how did the trees grow so large?

 

[Colif]

this looks interesting. Might pick up in a few days play in a few days minutes

MEMORIAPOLIS on Steam

Memoriapolis invites you to construct a city that spans 2,500 years of history, from Antiquity to the Age of Enlightenment. Choose your culture, manage resources, face historical events, build "Wonders" to achieve the status of Capital of Capitals and leave your mark in history!

store.steampowered.com

its not as direct as Civ, you don't place every building, some grow themselves. You just place the important ones, and watch city build around them.

 

[BeardyHat]

It's fashionable to dump on some companies at any time—Ubi is one of the current ones. Gotta go where the clicks and views are. Remember when Microsoft was all the rage? Now it's Meta, soon it'll be… well, we have to wait for the Influencers to decide for us.

Or it may be a different agenda, like that of say comparing Avowed to Skyrim or your SO's looks to Mr Universe or Ms World.

Then there's the group dynamic, where being 'in' requires hitting down on the group target of opportunity at that time. Works with any size of group, and doesn't matter that a significant majority are quite happy with your group's target.

Who knows, people latch onto victims and shake them unrelentingly for many reasons.

Exactly the reason I like forums, especially smaller ones. Feels like it's possible to escape the echo chamber and I don't even use social media, at all. Unless YouTube is considered such, though I'm not sure I do.

 

[Brian Boru]

this looks interesting

Mmm yes it does. I'll wait for EA to finish tho, and then some

 

[Frindis]

Oh, look, who would have thought...

Speaking of sloppy work, I have been playing Hogwarts Legacy for a couple of hours and one thing instantly put me off: In one of beginning areas at Hogwarts you are met with multiple NPCs with the same face and clothes. Clothes I can understand since it is a school uniform, but the faces? At least Avalanche Software could have tried to reuse the faces where it would be less likely to spot them so easily. When you have NPCs coded to be at exact places and then two similar faces are planted next to each other, it breaks with the immersion. I am not even sure if I want to play more if this is something that will be an ongoing factor in the game. I will have to check out some more reviews or perhaps one of you has played it and can confirm if this is something of a larger problem.

Like with a game like Hitman, I would not care that much since in that game there are so many people walking about, making it much less noticeable. The same with Skyrim and thinking about it, I can't even remember that Skyrim had that many similar faces, but I would be wrong there, and just something I was not paying attention to.

 

[Colif]

an early screenshot. Fortifying city took a while as where the menu choice was for the ability on town center is same place other buildings show the demolition option, and I didn't want to knock it down. It was pretty easy once I worked it out. I had resourced already. Shame it didn't do all the houses.
Conflict never occurs though. Most battles happen as events and only cost resources.

End of chapter 1.

Think I need more info. Seems there are 4 ages. Unsure what I do now... it appears I can make a new city center.
Its more a city building sim than a empire building one.
I had several places to put town, perhaps I can put the new town center in another location completely.
Only get one save file, so I can't really experiment much... although its only 1st game too

I placed all the big buildings and the service buildings, game places houses and roads.
I place the farms and then game places the fields.
Its up to me to make attractive places for people to want to live in,
And keep service buildings far enough away from houses to reduce disturbances.

Hardest part is I am limited to building within a radius of the city center. So it can be tricky. The radius grows as city center is upgraded.
Another structure increases the area but only a little.
All buildings have their own tech tree, they get better as you lvl them up.

its pretty deep since I have yet to open up two menus on side.
You get factions that move in and have to try to keep them happy.
Can have fires but so far only seen that in the tutorial.

Often biggest problem is having the right number of people to even build the structures.
The ingame help only shows you things you have encountered so far, so you can't look ahead as such. It would be nice if it had a search function in the ingame help screens

 

[Brian Boru]

Think I need more info

Splat did emphasize the need to read all the tooltips etc first time playing, since game does a bunch differently.

 

[Colif]

I read them, I may not have taken a lot of attention at the end of age 1. I will play it again later and see what I can do.

I want to look at my Wonder anyway as I had just finished it and Age ended. It took 200 turns to create it.

We haven't yet achieved our objective, which was that, for every possible configuration, the game should run at 60FPS.
Today without DLSS, you'll be running at around 40FPS in the LOW configuration, 50FPS in MEDIUM, 60 FPS in HIGH 2K and 45 FPS in HIGH 4K.

I wish their system requirements page was easier to read

I guess I must be running in High since I don't have a 4k monitor. I can see they managed 60fps in it...

I didn't even look at system requirements before buying it. Just as well I upgraded CPU a year ago.

 

[Colif]

i will post this in last months post since it relates to a historical game people played then:
If you can't impress this guy, you have problems

 

[Zloth]

Speaking of sloppy work, I have been playing Hogwarts Legacy for a couple of hours and one thing instantly put me off: In one of beginning areas at Hogwarts you are met with multiple NPCs with the same face and clothes. Clothes I can understand since it is a school uniform, but the faces?

Happens all the time - it's a budget thing again. If you ignore the heads, it's rare to have more than two NPC guy bodies and two NPC gal bodies. I think Cyberpunk might have had three or four, plus 'child body' - talk about flaunting your riches! But even in Cyberpunk, it wasn't that uncommon to see twins. While it had a lot more variety, it had a lot more people to potentially get duplicated, too.

Maybe AI will one day be able to help with that by modifying what people look like as they come into existence.

Like with a game like Hitman, I would not care that much since in that game there are so many people walking about, making it much less noticeable. The same with Skyrim and thinking about it, I can't even remember that Skyrim had that many similar faces, but I would be wrong there, and just something I was not paying attention to.

OK, that was actually a bug. I couldn't resist.

 

[Frindis]

Happens all the time - it's a budget thing again. If you ignore the heads, it's rare to have more than two NPC guy bodies and two NPC gal bodies. I think Cyberpunk might have had three or four, plus 'child body' - talk about flaunting your riches! But even in Cyberpunk, it wasn't that uncommon to see twins. While it had a lot more variety, it had a lot more people to potentially get duplicated, too.

I can live with a similar body type, but it is weird to see the same body type in games with different races. I could live with twins in Cyberpunk because of the number of NPCs, but the T-pose on the other hand was a slight immersion breaker, if not a funny one at that.

That Skyrim bug! Always something funny going around in and outside of Whiterun.