PCG articles Links and Discussion March 2024

[Brian Boru]

only real barriers

Good to know. I thought game engines, art and sound copyright and similar might be an issue in handing a game off to outside parties.

 

[ZedClampet]

Good to know. I thought game engines, art and sound copyright and similar might be an issue in handing a game off to outside parties.

Most non-pvp multiplayer games except for live-service games offer this already. Pretty much every multiplayer survival game has it.

The problem is usually development cost, although the developer indicated that some games would be more difficult than others to add this to. But modders don't seem to have problems adding it whenever modding is available.

Copyrights wouldn't be an issue because people already bought the game. Not sure why game engines would be a problem, and you wouldn't be handing off the game to anyone, just allowing them to continue playing after you close the servers as you can in most games.

 

[ZedClampet]

How are CD Projekt's side quests so good? Cyberpunk quest designer says they reject 'over 90%' of their pitches

Just use the good ideas. Simple as.

www.pcgamer.com

How do other studios do it? They have just one person writing all the quests?

Wish I could play this game. Sounds like it's pretty good now. I'm just not into all the stealth stuff. Any mission when I'm playing alone that is stealthed is stealthed by accident. It's a primary reason I'm so bad at Outlast. If I can't go loud, I probably shouldn't go at all. I played the mission where you were on the top floor of a skyscraper and you had to do the mission there stealth and then stealth your way all the way to the ground floor and leave. People were shooting at me before I left the original room. Making it to the ground floor while everyone was alarmed was a slog I don't want to repeat.

 

[Pifanjr]

How are CD Projekt's side quests so good? Cyberpunk quest designer says they reject 'over 90%' of their pitches

Just use the good ideas. Simple as.

www.pcgamer.com

How do other studios do it? They have just one person writing all the quests?

I'm guessing at other studios the (lead) writers are more reluctant to shoot down the ideas of their coworkers.

 

[Brian Boru]

How do other studios do it?

Hopefully similar—it's a core principle of business to discard 99 out of every 100 new ideas. Ideas are dirt cheap, it's the execution which separates the wheat from the chaff—but great execution can't save a bad idea.

 

[ZedClampet]

Hopefully similar—it's a core principle of business to discard 99 out of every 100 new ideas. Ideas are dirt cheap, it's the execution which separates the wheat from the chaff—but great execution can't save a bad idea.

I don't believe you meant to make it sound like there is a rejection quota. That would be nonsensical, fortune cookie management. At First Horizon, we had a panel that made preliminary decisions based on viability and then that was moved on to management where we determined if the idea was in alignment with our strategic goals. We may well have rejected 99 of a 100, but that wasn't a goal of any type. At Citibank, at least when I was there a long time ago, we wanted decisions to be made locally where people had a better understanding of what was needed, so ideas were simply forwarded to the appropriate managers. At the last company I worked for, where my wife is now, everything just went through the President, and decisions were based solely on merit. My wife is now President, so when she gets back to town, I'll ask her how she handles it and what her philosophy is.

 

[Brian Boru]

I don't believe you meant to make it sound like there is a rejection quota

Oh no, of course not

It's more like herding cats or rabbits—as Steinbeck said "Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."

 

[Pifanjr]

Here's slice and dice, the roguelike RPG where each of your party members is a different die

Wizard dice, berserker dice, thief dice, guardian dice—you get the drift.

www.pcgamer.com

I've played the Android demo quite a lot, which limits you to 12 of the 20 fights. It's a great roguelite, very well balanced and a with lot of content. And unlike some other roguelites, I never felt like I was playing an incomplete game at the start or that I needed to grind in order to become stronger. You don't have to pay with an in-game currency for unlocks, you just get them from getting achievements in the game and each unlock just gives you more mechanics and build variety to explore.

 

[Johnway]

'The Automaton front needs reinforcements': Helldivers 2 players are pleading for help for a bot-threatened planet, but no one's stepping up

Eat your veggies and fight the robots.

www.pcgamer.com

I'll do my part! but uh, someone needs to give me a copy of the game... Consider it conscription costs....

 

[ZedClampet]

Remedy's multiplayer Control spinoff won't be free to play: expect a 'lower initial price' followed by live service updates

The studio offered up a new look at the upcoming four-player PvE game in its latest financial report.

www.pcgamer.com

Here's an article on the Remedy game I was talking about the other day.

 

[Zloth]

Wish I could play this game. Sounds like it's pretty good now. I'm just not into all the stealth stuff.

You don't have to do Cyberpunk stealthy! I do (mostly) because I'm like that. @neogunhero went about it in a more violent way. You'll get yelled at a bit, maybe miss a few paltry rewards, but it can be done.

 

[neogunhero]

You don't have to do Cyberpunk stealthy! I do (mostly) because I'm like that. @neogunhero went about it in a more violent way. You'll get yelled at a bit, maybe miss a few paltry rewards, but it can be done.

Believe me @ZedClampet , stealth was NOT a word in my characters vocabulary. You can go loud with guns, but I preferred going loud with my katana most of the game.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

I used to be a frame rate snob but owning a Steam Deck has made me realise the error of my ways

Turns out I'm the problem, it's me.

www.pcgamer.com

Usually I'm lowering settings to try and get at least 60 minimum. I prefer 80-100 in an action game but beyond that I cant really tell a difference. For something like Baldurs Gate 3 I put a frame limit at 80, just a random number really, 60 would likely have been fine.

Dont have a Steam Deck, only a Switch but I wouldnt even consider buying anything other than an Indie game or a Nintendo one on it. Trying to play Doom or something at 30FPS on a controller would feel bad compared to my PC, either handheld or docked on TV.

I wonder how much VRR affects this, my previous monitor was 60hz. It stuttered whenever Vsync went on and off using the old Nvidia adaptive sync and I was always thinking my 60hz screens (I had 3 different models) somehow didnt feel quite right even if I got a flat 60. Haven't had that problem anymore with the current VRR enabled screen. Might be that the latency and juddering caused by not having the screen frames match the GPU output is more noticeable than the actual framerate.

At the end of the day though its something that is nice to have, but I could probably deal with a steady 30 if it was the only option for whatever reason.

 

[Pifanjr]

I used to be a frame rate snob but owning a Steam Deck has made me realise the error of my ways

Turns out I'm the problem, it's me.

www.pcgamer.com

Usually I'm lowering settings to try and get at least 60 minimum. I prefer 80-100 in an action game but beyond that I cant really tell a difference. For something like Baldurs Gate 3 I put a frame limit at 80, just a random number really, 60 would likely have been fine.

Dont have a Steam Deck, only a Switch but I wouldnt even consider buying anything other than an Indie game or a Nintendo one on it. Trying to play Doom or something at 30FPS on a controller would feel bad compared to my PC, either handheld or docked on TV.

I wonder how much VRR affects this, my previous monitor was 60hz. It stuttered whenever Vsync went on and off using the old Nvidia adaptive sync and I was always thinking my 60hz screens (I had 3 different models) somehow didnt feel quite right even if I got a flat 60. Haven't had that problem anymore with the current VVR enabled screen. Might be that the latency and juddering caused by not having the screen frames match the GPU output is more noticeable than the actual framerate.

At the end of the day though its something that is nice to have, but I could probably deal with a steady 30 if it was the only option for whatever reason.

Like the author, I've also always played on budget hardware. I just haven't gotten to the point where I can afford better and lose sight of how easy it is to get used to a bit of stuttering or having to wait for your PC to catch up when a lot of stuff is happening .

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Like the author, I've also always played on budget hardware. I just haven't gotten to the point where I can afford better and lose sight of how easy it is to get used to a bit of stuttering or having to wait for your PC to catch up when a lot of stuff is happening .

Yea thats fair enough, its not like I'd rather not play than play with a bit of stutter. I dont think I'm all that sensitive to it, apparently Digital Foundry thought Dead Space Remake was a proper mess, I played it through and thought it looked and played perfectly.

I built the first iteration of this machine in 2012, but before that my PC's were mostly either older or lower end pre builts with CRTs. There was definitely a lot of CPU stuttering. The kind of slightly off feeling I'm describing above is different though, for years I just thought it was an annoying property of flat screen vs CRT's, turns out its something else.

 

[ZedClampet]

@Pifanjr @Kaamos_Llama I was used to low frame rates (20 to 30fps) at one time, but now that my PCs have gotten slightly better I struggle if it drops below 50.

One thing I've found is that nearly every game's FPS varies by a decent amount depending on what is on screen, and the lower your FPS, the more severe these changes feel, the more noticeable they are. If you drop 10 frames from 100fps to 90fps, you only experienced a 10 percent change, but if you go from 40 to 30, you've had a 25 percent change, and it is much more noticeable and becomes almost unbearable if it is going back and forth quickly.

So I haven't had this problem in awhile, but my goal in this case is to lock my frames at the lowest framerate that I generally get in that game. This smooths out the fps hills and valleys and makes the game seem much more smooth. That's one of the reasons people could stand to play 30 fps on console for so long, I think, because it was a smooth thirty.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

@Pifanjr @Kaamos_Llama I was used to low frame rates (20 to 30fps) at one time, but now that my PCs have gotten slightly better I struggle if it drops below 50.

One thing I've found is that nearly every game's FPS varies by a decent amount depending on what is on screen, and the lower your FPS, the more severe these changes feel, the more noticeable they are. If you drop 10 frames from 100fps to 90fps, you only experienced a 10 percent change, but if you go from 40 to 30, you've had a 25 percent change, and it is much more noticeable and becomes almost unbearable if it is going back and forth quickly.

So I haven't had this problem in awhile, but my goal in this case is to lock my frames at the lowest framerate that I generally get in that game. This smooths out the fps hills and valleys and makes the game seem much more smooth. That's one of the reasons people could stand to play 30 fps on console for so long, I think, because it was a smooth thirty.

Yea steady frame rate is most important I think, dropping from 144 to 60 regularly would be worse than a flat 60.

 

[Pifanjr]

@Pifanjr @Kaamos_Llama I was used to low frame rates (20 to 30fps) at one time, but now that my PCs have gotten slightly better I struggle if it drops below 50.

Yeah, it's really easy to get used to an upgrade in pretty much anything and it can be really painful going back to something worse.

One thing I've found is that nearly every game's FPS varies by a decent amount depending on what is on screen, and the lower your FPS, the more severe these changes feel, the more noticeable they are. If you drop 10 frames from 100fps to 90fps, you only experienced a 10 percent change, but if you go from 40 to 30, you've had a 25 percent change, and it is much more noticeable and becomes almost unbearable if it is going back and forth quickly.

So I haven't had this problem in awhile, but my goal in this case is to lock my frames at the lowest framerate that I generally get in that game. This smooths out the fps hills and valleys and makes the game seem much more smooth. That's one of the reasons people could stand to play 30 fps on console for so long, I think, because it was a smooth thirty.

I've never manually locked the framerate of any game I've played, at least not as far as I can remember. I can also only remember one game I've actually given up to because of FPS issues: Far Cry 4 (I think). But there the issue was constant microstutters, especially when driving a vehicle, that made the game unplayable to me.

 

[ZedClampet]

Phil Spencer says he's open to bringing stores like Epic and Itch.io to Xbox consoles

Could PC digital storefronts end up on Xbox? Apparently anything is possible.

www.pcgamer.com

Apparently Phil Spencer really wants to be sued by Epic like everyone else who lets them sell games on their platform. Must be feeling left out, like Apple and Google are having all the fun.