afka Rossini wrote on Feb 12, 2021, 14:33:
Looks like I'm not going to get a new graphics card this year either.

I bought a pre-config from Corsair with a 3080 in it already. Sadly, it's the only way to get a hold of one at the moment.

NKD wrote on Feb 7, 2021, 21:24:
Arguing about whether it takes some miliseconds extra to launch a game one way versus another, or nitpicking about a few MB of RAM and CPU usage that doesn't even cause your processor to come out of idle, seems kinda fruitless.

Maybe I missed a few replies somewhere, but I don't believe anyone - or at least me - is worried about the time each launcher takes to start themselves or a game. What most gamers care about is what you get by using each launcher and what you have to put up with. Epic lacks forums and a workshop and any community, yet it gives deeper discounts and more free games than Steam, which has those community options but doesn't give nearly as much back.

I wish we could go back to the days when you could go into a store and buy a boxed PC game, take it home, install it from the disc and play it without a "launcher", but as of 2010, I stopped resisting this new digital future and started buying on Steam.

You could pirate games and get CD cracks, which I did for a very long time, but at 45 years old, I no longer have the time or patience to hunt "clean" ones down.

Slick wrote on Feb 7, 2021, 15:11:
Poll time!

How many Blues users actually launch the store before launching the game they already own? As opposed to having a shortcut for the game directly?

You'd think that most, if not all here would just launch games directly to forgo the marketing that happens anytime you open a store to play a game (even if you disable the popups, you're far more likely to browse other games or checkout current deals when interacting with a store, rather than a game shortcut).

Slick - launches games directly via windows shortcuts and never looks/cares what store its on other than when purchasing. You?

I launch only through shortcuts. I also have non-steam games (Dosbox, emulators, old pre-digital age PC games) set up to run through the Steam overlay as a desktop shortcut so that I can get in-game chat.

Really, all I do is leave Steam up on one of my other monitors and when friends message me or I want to share something, I can easily call up the window and begin a chat. GOG I rarely bother with since everyone I know is on Steam and GOG's interface, especially its chat, feels clunky to me. As for EGS, I tried a couple games on it and didn't like it. Any game that was exclusive on it (Most recently Metro Exodus) I just waited a year for it to appear on Steam.

As an aside, I don't think this exclusivity chest-beating will help EGS much. It's a bad look for them. A better idea would be to swear to get rid of exclusives and instead reach out to customers and work more on getting equivalents to Steam set up, like game specific forums, game specific workshops, and a friends network.

I'm still having trouble getting a new PC. Even just the parts. Best Buy is out of stock on everything, the boutique builders are back ordered on everything, and I'm running a cobbled together piece of junk Ryzen 7 with a AMD 580.

I'll give Brenda credit for creating Wizardry 8, the best CRPG of the 2000s, back when she was Brenda Braithwaite.

I'm still shocked that anyone would actually *fear* internet-based death threats. How long has this method of communication been around? I've been online since '96 and this is an every day occurrence on both social media and in any and all nerd-related forums, especially gaming and comics, where autism runs rampant. How any person(s), especially a legitimate company full of college educated professionals, thought these threats were in any way serious, is beyond me.

It's far more likely the "company" was just a scam operation looking to get people's credit card info and now that they obtained it, they are conveniently "deleting their social media over fear of fat unwashed basement dwellers killing them".

jdreyer wrote on Jan 2, 2021, 00:24:

Icewind wrote on Jan 2, 2021, 00:15:
On World News tonight a couple weeks ago they had a guy on there who said at best the vaccine would only be good for a year before the virus would change to the point where it would no longer be affected. Point I'm making is, this vaccine won't change much. If people want "Normal" they will have to keep getting it once a year, every year, like what we now do with the regular flu vaccine...and even then, it will never get rid of it. Ever. It's never going away. People learn to live with it or huddle in fear the rest of their lives. That's the choice.

The new mutation is covered by the current vaccine. Given that the vaccine is based on year-old virus, that's a good sign.

"The Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine expresses the full-length Spike protein of the SARS-COV-2 virus, allowing for the generation of neutralizing antibody responses to multiple domains of the protein," the statement reads in part."The full-length Spike protein is 1,273 amino acids long, so while recent variants involve multiple mutations, for instance up to 8 amino acid changes in the spike protein of the B1.1.7 strain, these represent less than a 1% difference from the spike protein encoded by Moderna’s vaccine."

...

Likewise Pfizer said in a statement, “To date, we have found consistent coverage of all the strains tested,” and it’s now testing against the new strain in the UK.

There have already been reinfections. The doc they had on there 2 weeks ago even stated that all viruses change year to year, and Covid will change like this many times, resulting in the current vaccine becoming ineffective and requiring a new one to be formulated and administered. All this from ABC news, world news tonight, which is the only place I get my news anymore (6:30pm, right after the local news).

Cutter wrote on Jan 1, 2021, 18:19:
Well as the song goes....You load 16 tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt..... At the snails pace the vaccine is coming I don't think there's anything to really rah rah about yet. Wtf aren't governments rolling out their militaries to create vaccine centers to administer it? It's not like they're doing anything else in most places. You don't need doctors or nurses to jab a needle in someone's arm. Just one or two of them on hand to oversee everything in case of an anaphylactic reaction. Here they're talking about only having about 75% of the population vaccinated by the end of July or August which with our government's track record - both provincially and federally - with this sort of thing we'll be lucky if it's actually 25% of the population. For a government that's quick to shut everything down they don't seem all that keen on rolling this out ASAP. I'm betting once Biden takes over he'll ramp up the fuck out of it and make that happen. Hopefully that'll give the rest of the gov'ts out there the kick in the ass they so sorely need.

On World News tonight a couple weeks ago they had a guy on there who said at best the vaccine would only be good for a year before the virus would change to the point where it would no longer be affected. Point I'm making is, this vaccine won't change much. If people want "Normal" they will have to keep getting it once a year, every year, like what we now do with the regular flu vaccine...and even then, it will never get rid of it. Ever. It's never going away. People learn to live with it or huddle in fear the rest of their lives. That's the choice.

You can tell the people talking about that rail system in cyberpunk didn't get far in the story yet, because that chick who leads the Voodoo Boys tells you that during the last corporate war, the system was taken offline, gutted and destroyed and, much like the Grand Imperial Mall, was never finished due to it.

HorrorScope wrote on Dec 27, 2020, 20:00:

Grast wrote on Dec 27, 2020, 17:54:
Exactly. While it is not a perfect game, it is fun. I currently not really fond of the bullet sponge gameplay. I also wanted cyberware to be more involved. IE...You get to chose one set of arms and that is it. Later.

Headshots or bust, if I'm head shoting it's almost always a one shot kill.

If you max crafting and start to learn the systems, enemies are never bullet sponges, even on hard. I currently have a 1,700 DPS smart sub machine gun (iconic) that one shots everything. I even killed the second to last boss in the game in about 3 seconds. He didn't even last half the 30 round clip of that SMG. On hard.

Kxmode wrote on Dec 24, 2020, 01:07:
Most of the people who experienced the file size limit corruption are those who've hacked the game and given themselves an absurd number of items and|or quantities of items. All that stuff has to store somewhere, so CDPR decided it should go into the save file. Sure, one could argue, CDPR should've known people would cheat, but it's not their responsibility to fix self-inflicted pain. That said, they did correct the issue so people can go back to older saves and hack to their heart's delight.

That's what I theorized. I have been crafting like crazy for 80 hours and my file size on my latest save is only 5.25mb

It's a shame, I'm level 39 and have put in 70 or so hours and it's the best game I've played in over a decade.

Camera shot of my samurai outfit

People will ***** me out for saying this, but this is just poor people being poor and not using common sense. Everyone knew this would take decent hardware to run. I never understood why they even *bothered* to have this run on last generation consoles. I couldn't even get Trials of Mana to run without slowdown on the PS4, the system it was meant for. (PC? Like butter)

I've put 40+ hours into this game on my Ryzen 7 2700/ Radeon 580 Frankenstein rig and it runs a decent 45-50FPS on mixed high/ultra settings at 1080p. Very do-able and looks fabulous. I also, just for comparison sake and because I wasn't sure I'd be able to run it on my rig, pre-ordered it for Xbox last month. Turns out my new Series X runs it at a solid 60fps in "quality" 4K mode, only the textures are nowhere *near* what you see on PC....which is probably why it runs as well as it does.

For some reason I still haven't grabbed Diablo 1 and Hellfire. Looks like now's the time. I have the discs for both, but this is so much easier.

Quinn wrote on Dec 12, 2020, 03:49:

Bumpy wrote on Dec 11, 2020, 22:21:
The roughness comes in with blah gameplay and bugs. Performance is tolerable considering the top tier graphics.

Top tier graphics?! In medium/low settings the game looks fucking terrible and yet the performance is abysmal. It's like the game is calculating every NPCs behavior in the entire city and generating them as well even though you're inside in some ugly appartment. One of those first missions in the appartment complex? Or the night club? It all looked really mediocre to me yet my 1070Ti was on it's knees getting thoroughly abused by this game.
No excuses. Terrible, horrendous optimization and I'll eat my left testicle if one of our friendly neighborhood GPU manufacturers hasn't anything to do with this, just to up the sales of a product they can't provide.

a 1070?? You seriously thought you could run this on a 1070? Run it decently, I mean?

It defaulted to Ultra on my Radeon 580 with a Ryzen 7, and after removing a few things (Motion blur, running at 1080p) it's very smooth and looks terrific. Definitely makes me anxious to get a 3080 when they become available again.

I think everyone belly-aching about the game is doing so on wal-mart level rigs.

heroin wrote on Dec 10, 2020, 13:14:
It's fucking fantastic so far, I don't know why there are so many people out there that just chew away at the sails of awesome shit. Depressing mfers.
It runs great too, from the specs they released I should only be playing this on Raytracing Light, but the game put all my settings to Ultra by default and still running at 60fps.
About 4 hours in the Cyberpunk logo/intro is finally ran and I did run into a bug right before that, couldn't get something off someone, reloaded and that person
reloaded/floated outside the building where I couldn't get to, so had to reload the whole mission. A little aggravating but definitely not a dealbreaker besides that haven't seen too many glitches so far. Looks, sounds and plays awesome - combat is better than expected.

Agree 100% on everything you said.

What bugs me is the people complaining are playing on last gen consoles (PS4, XB1) or out of date PCs with GPU/CPUs from more than 3 years ago. You can't expect to get any decent performance from the game when using such outdated tech. This is the Ultima 9 launch all over again. People trying to play a game using bleeding edge technology while on ancient hardware.

I have a Radeon 580 and a Ryzen 7 and it runs on Ultra at 1080p just fine. A good 50-55fps. Very playable and only a few odd visual glitches usually involving the lighting.

I'm playing on a Ryzen 7 2700 and a Radeon 580, and the game auto-set to Ultra settings at 1080p and I get around 50-55fps, depending on how many actors are on screen. Runs fairly decently and looks about as good as the last Deus Ex game. Seems good for the 4 hours I played after work tonight.

Definitely want to upgrade with a new rig next year to see this thing in 4K with ray tracing.

eRe4s3r wrote on Nov 24, 2020, 15:53:

Saboth wrote on Nov 24, 2020, 15:49:
But wait! There's more! If you sign up today, we'll not only give you 1,000 V-Bucks, we'll give you 500 Digio-Dollars. In addition, your avatar can change their eye color, and add a glowing effect to their big toe (right toe only).

Why makes games when you can make people buy no game whatsoever at twice the cost of 1 game. It's a GREAT DEAL.

There are 20-something gamers who would laugh at us for saying this and they've accepted these kinds of schemes as not only normal, but preferential to our old way of going to the store, buying a box with a disc in it, and installing it.

Kids today. Really.

How about a woman, who is a famous actor, a novelist, and a PHD holder?

Danica Mckellar.

Surprisingly, POE plays pretty good on Xbox. I took a barbarian build through it out of curiosity and was surprised. Looks and moves good on One X. Still prefer it on PC, however.