ashamam

ashamam, 1 month ago

Also playing Necropolis league of Path of Exile. Started with an explosive arrow totem build but it wasn't great for levelling, so rerolled an exploding minions witch. Much much smoother so far, and should scale right through maps for currency farming. Will see how invested I stay, as I'm waiting patiently for S4 of D4 to hit consoles, some really nice updates, and basically its more approachable than PoE.

ashamam, 1 month ago

You have to ask yourself why. Devs are professionals by definition, for them the context is ease of developing along with potential to make a return on investment. Xbox (console) is now a problem on both those metrics. Simple as that, no fanboying or villifying required.

Its just not a big enough market and a good portion of the market is GP'ified and doesn't spend outside of it. Couple that with dual SKU targets with real challenges working around the S memory constraints and here we are.

But I agree that its a transition. Away from the current hardware model.

ashamam, 3 months ago

I'm the opposite on every point. I have both and seriously considering trading both towards a Pro and hitting up Geforce Now every now and again to get some use out of my stacked UGP sub.

But as to waiting or not, if you aren't a dedicated console gamer I can't really see that you would value the extra's a Pro would bring. 80% of the experience will be offered by the base machine anyway.

ashamam, 7 months ago

A very successful troll post as well. Would have thought people were smarter than that these days, especially in the fediverse.

ashamam, 8 months ago

Its a great game, if it was released in 2013. Now its just average. They have doubled and tripled down on the formula, chucked a coat of paint on the engine and called it a day. Whats astonishing is that they spent so long doing it. I've done the MSQ, one faction questline and half of another and I'd say thats at least 1/3, probably closer to 1/2 of the curated storyline content of the game. All of it was ok I guess, but nothing in it jumped out as particularly well written, let along consequential and meaningful. I'm struggling to see how it ate so many dev hours.

I think these days we have a much more mature gamer audience, and Starfield seems squarely targeted at teens. There just isn't the depth of more modern game storytelling. Some I blame on the engine (well alot tbh) but some is squarely on Bethesda for playing it so safe. Does not bode well for ESVI.

ashamam, 8 months ago

I actually can't make a determination until I do buy a game lol. You would have everyone what not buy it in the first place?

ashamam, 8 months ago

Well so did I, but I also bought into whole ecosystem for this game (Series X). So I'm actually pretty disappointed in how its turned out. First it was the 30fps thing, got over that then saw the reviews and thought this could be great. Then I started playing and hit all the load screens. Thats when I realised I was not going to align with the 10/10 reviews lol. I personally have it somewhere between 6 and 7. But parts can be a 4 to me (immersion) and parts can be an 8 or even 9 (working through a 'dungeon' picking locks, sniping, setting up ambushes etc)

So yeah a bit of a head scratcher.

ashamam, 8 months ago

Imho its because the procedural underpinnings are so close to the surface. How are you supposed to stay immersed when you know roughly how many POI's there will be and that you will see the exact same POI on multiple planets, right down to object placement? They will all be within running distance of the ship etc etc.

Its not the first game to do it, NMS is pretty immersion breaking in this respect, but at least its somewhat masked by being able to cruise around the surface, use vehicles etc. But I think proc gen for POI's is a trap for devs. If they do go down that path there needs to be a deep well of content to stitch together so that things feel unique.

I suspect the use of AI in game design (not necessarily in runtime) will go a long way to improving this sort of thing. Its one reason I think the Creation Engine is a dead man walking so to speak and a really bad call for ESVI. I doubt they will be able to shoehorn in AI to the dev pipeline effectively.

ashamam, 9 months ago

Its not the CPU that is the issue anyway. Its the memory both size and bandwidth. Microsoft addressed the size somewhat by making some more RAM available but that doesn't address the bandwidth. The issue is developers are hitting limits in shifting assets around as compared to the X. Its why you see significant texture differences and skipped RT in titles.

I don't have a crystal ball for how it will play out in the second half of the generation but you would have to think it is more likely to become a bigger issue than not. Its also imho another reason why there won't be a Pro series console. More likely they sunset the generation faster instead and just go with a whole new generation that trumps the PS5 pro. Because at least they know that the existence of a PS5 pro extends out the Sony generation enough to give them a window to do this. Or, and this would be a massive shame, this is the last Xbox hardware generation. I don't think its likely but maybe enough generations of trailing marketshare means the bean counters give up on that aspect of it.