Oh wow! They’re all-in this time, they’ve never said that before!


To be fair, they’ve been doing a good job of releasing PC versions of their first party games. While UWP is a bit annoying, the crossplay it allows for is nice.

This means Indie studios may be able to compete graphically with AAAs, making gameplay the real difference.
Also, from a lot of what I've seen with these tech demos, the engine runs shockingly well even on modest hardware.

I haven't seen anyone try to show us what tons of *moving parts* looks like, though. Again, I'd like to see something like late-game Satisfactory in this engine.

You too can have Super-Hearing, all you have to do is wear this thing on your head that makes you look like a donk.

The Capy collection includes Critter Crunch, which can be currently purchased for just a few cents over a dollar. Very fun, gorgeous puzzle game.

Huh. I was gonna grab a 10850k at Microcenter next week but if DDR5 is coming *this year*, I may just hold out. My current machine is still on DDR3, it'd be kinda cool to leapfrog an entire ram generation. It still does well enough most of the time still (the somewhat legendary 4790K), but the motherboard has, of course, NO new features. No NVME (or even m.2) drives for me currently.

The devs kept putting resources toward making more content, but no effort into getting the game to run better. played it upon launch, and again a few months back with friends. Ran poorly both times.

The game apparently lets you do some sort of Good Shep/Bad Shep, but a reviewer tried both ways and the results were identical. So the devs wanted there to FEEL like you had some agency in the story, but you absolutely don't. Someone in management couldn't STAND the idea of creating content that might not be seen by every single player. That's not cost-effective!

Sounds an awful lot like the bug queen you save/exterminate in Mass Effect...in the end, you still fight her again in ME3. *That* was the moment that soured me most in the ME trilogy. By the time I got to the ending, I had already given up on there being any real difference to how MY story ended vs anyone else's.

Always intended to pick this game up. And now I have!

Hades ($10 on EGS) is eating up my time right now. I knew it was considered to be good, but I was not prepared for HOW good it is.

Like, pretty much all 4 of those are "Your HDD is dying". It's so rare that anything else actually blows up, unless you spill something in it or drop it. If your laptop still boots off of a HDD, well...it's time to replace it anyway, and likely the entire laptop.

Slashman wrote on May 27, 2021, 10:39:

Interesting. I never really looked at the Uncharted series very closely. Always thought it was basically a male version of Tomb Raider.

I mean....you're not entirely wrong. They're both games about exploring long-abandoned locations, fighting other treasure hunters along the way. The characters are better defined in Uncharted, for sure...Lara's got personality TRAITS, but no personality.
Unlike the new Tomb Raiders, which have backtracking and whatnot, the Uncharted games are a linear story. The second one was so good, I bought the remastered series just to go back and play it again. But don't expect much replayability beyond experiencing the story again.

No, you don’t NEED to play the first 3 games. 4 is quite self-contained, and easily the best one of the series. Uncharted 2 comes in second place, then 1, and then 3’s nonsensical bullshit comes up dead last.

If you don’t have a PS4, UC4 is one of the biggest highlights. Now all they need to do is bring God of War along for the ride.

I mean...it's mostly "WoW-con", with bits for their other games.

I don't have any hatred toward Blizzard Now vs Blizzard Then. They make polished games. That hasn't changed. They've always copied other game types.

I *AM* disappointed in Warcraft 3 Reforged, and that disappointment has fed my disinterest in the Diablo 2 remake. I'll just play Diablo 4 whenever that comes out.

The only Blizzard game I play with any regularity anymore is SC2's Co-Op mode. It's a blast, with a surprising variety of gameplay styles.

The forward compatibility thing is the biggest gain, honestly. Projects currently halfway through production on UE4 can be shifted to 5. I doubt it's a 100% smooth transition, but it's probably not HORRIBLE.

I'll be interested to see what people do with this EA version in terms of trying to break it. They *SHOW* it handling a shit ton of triangles, but in what feels very...controlled. There's only ever a few interactive things moving. Show me a stampede running through the area, with dust being kicked up and the animals reacting to each other.

Would a game like Satisfactory, which has a lot of framerate issues when moving faster than the general run speed (as in, when you're in a train or driving the faster vehicles), see a huge performance boost JUST from switching engine? Would a game that complex make the jump decently? It has a truly mind-boggling amount of moving parts that work *pretty damn well*. Would performance-destroying stunts like what LetsGameItOut still wreck framerate?

Up until this info leaked, Gabe's "console announcement" was assumed to be HL:Alyx for PSVR2. Now it's likely...well, both Alyx AND this handheld.

BTW, for everyone complaining that they stopped making games, may I point to Alyx and remind you that they did, in fact, make a game quite recently. It's so good that when people try my VR kit for the first time, I don't let them play Alyx first. It puts expectations in place that aren't realistic currently. It looks SO DAMN GOOD that everything else just looks lazy by comparison. Sure, it's a very linear game, but so were HL1 and 2.

Hooray, another piece of hardware that they'll abandon!

Well, they roll or otherwise smooth all the edges inside of cases anymore...at least on the ones I've used lately. I work in a computer repair shop, and even the crappy cases are hard to get cut on anymore.

I did get gouged pretty well on an Asus Prime's VRM shield. Those things are like a row of knives stored blade-up.

How about maybe a new game, instead of remaking the same games?

I have a laptop with an H10 or H20 drive in it (manufacturing date puts it at the end of the H10 and the start of the H20). I don't really notice much difference versus a normal SSD. The article seems to assume the drive is the primary reason for purchasing a particular laptop, when it's near the bottom of the list in reality. My laptop has a 1660tiMaxq (yeah, the somewhat slower one) and a gorgeous 144hz IPS screen. The system boasting of having an optane drive wasn't even part of the decision.

Honestly, the article should be more along the lines of "Why the hell do the H-series drives even exist?", as it's such a minor gain. Optane is dead, it was meant to boost HDD load times, not SSD.

I just don't get how a game that's based on only one part of an already-existing game is taking so long, even IF the devs were/are helping other teams. Absolutely nothing in the gameplay videos of it looks different from Black Flag.

What the reviewer fails to mention is that machines with SSDs minimize the performance hit from having 8gb of ram. I have a gaming laptop that had only 8gb of ram initially, and I expected terrible performance. Instead, it ran very smoothly...the data that was getting swapped from the drive moved fast enough to not cause any noticeable issues. Does it invisibly lower the drive's lifespan? Oh, probably, which is why I decided to drop 32gb in the machine and call it done. But to the average layperson, they won't notice a difference.