Xolvix
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Everything posted by Xolvix
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My general preference is to have DRM-free games which have no launcher/platform requirement at all, apart from the operating system to run them on of course. So stuff like GOG or the DRM-free titles off of the Humble store for example. This way my ability to play the game is completely independent of the whims of the vendor. I don't have to worry about service downtime, Internet connectivity to authenticate the game, or the health of my account so that I"m not locked out of my collection of games. The problem of course is that puts almost all of the control within the hands of the user and not the vendor, and that's just not gonna work for many large publishers with recent releases. Sure, eventually you'll get things released on GOG a few years later, but the vast majority of titles won't appear there until they've had their time in the light of Steam for example.
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Indeed. I should mention that I haven't and won't preorder the game. In fact throughout my gaming experience I've very rarely pre-ordered any games. The last two games I pre-ordered were in fact the last two Deus Ex games, and while Human Revolution was a good pre-order, Mankind Divided was not - too many technical issues on release, had to refund it. After a while the bugs were mostly fixed and it ended up being a pretty good game, but not at release. So I learnt my lesson without being burnt too much. Never played the Clan mod for Bloodlines 1, just the Unofficial Patch. They're poked and prodded the crap outta that game even without the source code (which is quite impressive), but source code would certainly help. Might even help with porting to other systems like Linux, but I doubt it'll ever be released as Paradox don't seem the type to do anything unless there's a monetary interest. Hell there's a chance the source code no longer exists, that happens from time to time with defunct developers like Troika.
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I think that answers my question. I'm enjoying the mission but I could never devote over 10 hours to it, or any other FM really. That's a lot of time to spend scouring for loot. If you have the time available (and the determination) to do than I give you credit, but I guess it's not for me. At some point my brain would starting asking me what I'm doing. -
I have a question - assuming people are being honest, how do people even get all loot in a mission like this where loot is hiding everywhere and it's so easy to miss a coin hidden in the dark or a crevasse no normal human would look twice at examining? I can only assume it's done via playing the mission for hours upon hours to check everywhere, backtracking into optional areas and then backtracking again and so on, without getting lost, and still getting 100% stealth. I'm not sure I even want an answer, it's more of a "throw-hands-in-air" thing that I can't master.
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I'm fine with jank (eurojank especially). Some of my favourite games have technical quirks and issues that wouldn't be seen as acceptable nowadays and yet are still considered classics. But the continual delays, the lack of any gameplay beyond what was shown in the 2019 E3 demo, the firing (or "letting go") of Brian Mitsoda who did a lot of the character writing for the original Bloodlines and was considered an important part of its development, and so on. Hell they even needed to bring in a consultant formerly from Ubisoft who's sole purpose seems to be to actually push to get the game released, which to be honest doesn't bother me since at some point you have to release something (as far as Paradox is concerned with them financing it), but it's not a good sign of things running smoothly. But you know what, maybe they'll pull it off and it'll turn out reasonably good in the end. All I'm saying is I'm doubtful that'll happen given the troubled development, but I'd be very happy to be proven wrong.
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Well I was looking forward to Vampire Bloodlines 2, but there's been so many developmental stumbles so far that I have my doubts it'll have even a fraction of the quality of the original.
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I'm definitely a fan of imgur and have had no issues with it for basic image sharing. I especially like the fact it's easy to create links to images and you don't need to mess around with accounts or anything if you don't want to. Having said that, if an image is important to you, don't have it only available on a cloud/hosted service. Keep a local copy just in case. There's always the likelyhood of even a popular site like imgur ending up doing shit like Photobucket: https://petapixel.com/2017/07/01/photobucket-just-broke-billions-photos-embedded-web/
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I didn't hate Mooncrash, I just felt a profound sense of indifference. I could see what they were trying to do but it didn't click for me because it was trying to force Prey into a style of gameplay that I wasn't interested in. I got bored and distracted because I wasn't finding things engaging enough, so I stopped. Maybe I'll try it again someday, give it a fair chance once I've dealt with other games I want to get through first.
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Oh and Harvey Smith (lead producer of Dishonored) isn't very happy today either:
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I think this picture sums up what's on my mind today...
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Its life status is unknown. The company that was working on System Shock 3 (OtherSide Entertainment) only has one actually released game to their name (Underworld Ascendant) and that turned out to be something of a disaster. Last year it was announced that good-ol' Tencent had acquired the rights to develop the game from OtherSide. At first I though the studio was being bought out by Tencent, but it looks like just the game itself. Ever since then there's been absolutely no information whatsoever about the game. Hell, OtherSide still hasn't removed the game from their own list of projects on their site. Maybe Tencent just wants to sit on the rights until they get the people they want working on it, who knows.
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Don't be. While I still think the default settings for 2.08 were a bit too dark and needed a little more tweaking before being set as the defaults, I kinda went above and beyond with the level of tweaking that most folks would have bothered with. I don't have ADD/ADHD (I think...) but I'm quite fussy about certain things at times, which is why I said it was embarrassing - it's more a reflection on myself than the game.
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Wait, hol' up... I spend an embarrassing amount of time trying to get 2.08 to have the same brightness/gamma as 2.07, since the defaults were much too dark. I even used @nbohr1more's settings here as a basis, and even then it still wasn't quite enough until r_ambientGamma was bumped up a bit more. So are you saying that if I run the 2.09 beta with a fresh config, it won't need the tweaking anymore? What settings are disabled now?
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Counterpoint - excessive blur, film grain and depth of field effects. Having your vision obscured can dramatically affect the gameplay!
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Yeah but sometimes there's luck involved. Depends on who you get dealing with your refund, the amount of time played, any other factors, etc. Now they're just removing the bar so as long as it was from the Store, you get your refund, no questions asked. By far the best refund policy I've seen though is, funnily enough, GOG - you can get a refund up to 30 days after purchase, even if the game was downloaded, launched, and played. Given they sell DRM-free games with DRM-free installers, that is surprisingly generous.
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Do you want Springheel on your ass again? Actually it's funny, a big deal was made regarding nudity and various naughty parts of the human anatomy, but as far as I know the customization is entirely superficial. It's only evident in the inventory and I guess mirrors, but it makes zero gameplay difference whether your character has male parts on a female or vice versa. It seems like its sole purpose is to make YouTube videos and reactions vids and whatnot. Let me know if I'm wrong though. Also...
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What confuses me most is the PS5 has only been out for about a month. The vast majority of the development time for the game would have been during the PS4's reign. You'd think during this time they'd be continually targeting development such that performance would be satisfactory on it. Even now the vast majority of players are still on a PS4 (in the PlayStation ecosystem that is). Did they just get to the point where it was nearing time to release and THAT was when they started to work on optimization, or at least an attempt at it? Aye, there's spin on this from both Sony and CDPR. But did the developers of Life of Black Tiger put out a press release putting the onus for refunds onto the console manufacturer, making them look like dicks if they didn't hand out guaranteed refunds? Bet you CDPR did not communicate their apology to Sony ahead of time, with the intent that people would be angry at Sony (until they did something like this), taking some of the heat away from CDPR in the meantime. Maybe I'm just mad because I got fucking played. I wasn't overwhelmingly hyped for it, but I was intrigued by the 2018 E3 demo just like everyone else (the first time an E3 demo captured my imagination since the Half-Life 2 one). It looked amazing, and there was no reason to doubt CDPR could pull it off after what they had achieved with Witcher 3. I suppose in the end it's a good lesson about hype.
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Hey, I have an OLD PC, not a crappy PC. (actually it's not even that old - it's just the GPU that's outdated, but it runs TDM perfectly so who cares) In other news, Sony has had enough of this shit... https://www.playstation.com/en-us/cyberpunk-2077-refunds/
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Well, despite my initial enthusiasm for the game I'm gonna give up on it for a while. It's raw, it's so damn raw. Even ignoring the bugs (of which there are varying degrees of seriousness) and performance issues (some of which can be mitigated by patches, others just by upgrading), ultimately the game is just incredibly sterile. You have this amazing looking city that does nothing but serve as the backdrop for quests. That could be argued is common in the open world genre, but hell in GTA V you can interact with random NPCs and potentially piss them off, make them run, react to your reactions. Here they do nothing but crouch if you scare them. Police spawn in behind you, you don't get into car chases unless it's a scripted event... actually you know what, just browse the /r/cyberpunkgame subreddit for things to make fun of. There's a definite rough gem in there, people have praised the quests themselves (when bugs aren't ruining the experience), but it's just dull in-between and too many game systems are broken or not polished enough to make it worth my time. I get more fun out of playing the older Deus Ex games than this. Also I know this is a facet of game development, but looking at the E3 2018 gameplay demo, the character creation menu and how it changed along with how the same quests shown in both the demo and the final product have turned out, is just embarrassing. So much was cut.
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OK, avoid disabling the anti-alising. Yes it makes things sharper but the shimmering is fugly as hell. Not worth it unfortunately. Also, INSTALL THE PATCH! It doesn't explicitly talk about performance improvements but it seems to actually provide a noticeable FPS improvement to the point where it's a lot more fun. Not willing to bump up the settings yet so it's not amazing looking (for me anyway) but it's definitely much more playable. Not everyone's seeing the improvements, but it looks like the benefits are best seen by those running into performance issues to begin with. Having said that there's still a lot to fix. Ran into a beggar on the street, turned briefly to see a TV playing an ad or something, turned back and the beggar (and his sign) were gone. Maybe he was able to find gainful employment in the 5 seconds I looked away.
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Here's another tweak: https://www.thenerdmag.com/how-to-disable-cyberpunk-2077-mouse-smoothing-on-pc/ If you want snapper mouse response, do what it says even though the "Response Curve" option is in the Controller section; for some stupid reason it affects the mouse as well. In addition, click on "Show Advanced Options" under the Controller section, and reduce the "Turning Delay" to 0. Again, it seems to affect the mouse as well. I'm fairly sensitive to mouse lag and these settings helped. 8 years development time people.
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I'm not a fan of this "us vs. them" business with PC and console gamers. We're all shit on high by devs/publishers at times, there's no need for conflict. Witcher 3 looks perfectly fine for me, if I didn't know any better than I wouldn't have guessed there was any "downgrade". But in game development sometimes downgrades are necessary in order to get the game to work on consoles. At least it looks like this game works best on PCs (high end ones anyway), but it's not fair to console owners who expect something a little more decent. Also regarding that TAA disabling tweak, I tried it out and it could just be a placebo but I could swear the game runs a bit faster with it disabled, so despite what some suggest, on low end machines it might actually help make a difference. The downside is the engine kinda assumes AA is active so there's shimmering everywhere (very obvious in the corpo intro). Compromises, compromises...
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Since I'm desperate for immersive sim (or sim-like games) I'm gonna give this game another go even with its issues, but there's a few tweaks now that may be useful to some: Disable anti-aliasing to improve image clarity and reduce ghosting/blur due to TAA: https://old.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kb1pw4/way_to_disable_taa/ Disable double-tap to dodge (I remember this from my unreal tournament days, but now it's just confusing): https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Cyberpunk_2077#Disable_double-tap_dodge There's gonna be more tweaks over time, hopefully one to disable the intro splash screens. Oh and one more thing: https://old.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kb2jgj/i_just_realized_that_there_is_no_ai_for_driving/
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From what I've seen, the issue is that Cyberpunk 2077 is probably the most beautiful game right now, IF you have a rig able to run with at the highest settings. It's a game which graphically blossoms with high-end gear, but on low/medium settings it frankly looks worse than Mankind Divided or even Witcher 3 when those are running at high despite being several years older. It's easily the most demanding game currently, which means not many people are going to be able to experience it in its full glory yet until they upgrade. And spare a thought for those with base PS4 machines, which are still very common as the new consoles haven't been on the market for that long yet:
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Well... shit. It looks like my experiences aren't that unusual though; I read a few others with 970's and they had lame FPS even on low settings as well, but there's also people with decent rigs who are struggling to get 60 FPS on medium settings. The game is fickle about what hardware it likes. In any case, I can wait. I'll definitely upgrade eventually because anything new in AAA-land doesn't run the greatest anyway on my GPU, it's just that I haven't cared for much new stuff so there was no motivation to spend the money, but it looks like I've met my match. I could probably grin and bear it on low with modest FPS, but it doesn't matter because the game has issues anyway. The UI is confusing, glitchy (had it ignore keypresses during conversations for examples) and a bit annoying to navigate, but it seems clear that even with all of the good that it promises, it could do with a bit more time in the oven. People said the same thing about Witcher 3 apparently, how it was released fairly buggy but after a few months it was pretty good. I only started getting into it once the GOTY edition came around, so I missed all of that. But people on consoles (especially last gen PS4/XBOX which are still the majority) are complaining about its performance (and crashes) so CDPR has no excuse.
