HolyDuckTurtle

I’d say it’s a matter of preference than anything “next-gen”. I really liked using a hybrid approach with the Steam Controller a few years back for some third person games with archery, but it has its own drawbacks and complexities so I could see why people would prefer the simplicity of the good ol’ analogue stick.

I had to learn more about it after that short clip and found an overview page which is fun to read if your browser can translate it: https://www.dentsubo.net/circle/spe256.html

Keeping details minimal because I can’t for the life of me get spoiler tags to work on kbin:

In the middle of Heavensward we learn that a very dramatic death sequence that led to some major events was a ruse. The character is alive and things will quickly return to normal.

I get what they wanted, but big fakeouts like that are not my thing. It felt like the consequences were walked back so I could never take the rest of the story seriously. Anything bad that happens could just be reverted.

Endwalker has a point after a lot of stuff goes down where I was thinking “Yeah this is edgy and all, but they really held back from doing anything actually substantial” then we get introduced to a bunch of cuteness and silly things. It took until then to really settle with me that they mostly want to tell fun and uplifting stories, so making stuff look dark and dramatic but keeping the lasting impact down is more of an objective of theirs than a narrative flaw.

I can appreciate that, and a lot of other things about the game and its story, but that in particular is just not for me.

I’d go as far to say Heavensward may be the benchmark for whether people will enjoy the rest of the game. It’s where the voice acting and general presentation upgrades to a level that, to me, remained consistent throughout the rest of the MSQ.

Most importantly, at least to me, you get new plot twists to some earlier events which tells you A LOT about the narrative structure going forward. There’s a reveal during the middle of Heavensward that basically killed narrative tension for me throughout the rest of the MSQ.

It’s not that their direction there is bad, I had just gotten swept up in the “omg it gets so DARK” hype so I was dissapointed when it consistently walked back major events. It took me until the middle of Endwalker to realise “oh, right, that’s not the kind of story and experience they want to tell”.

I love how parkplace is literally the kind of single-minded insanity this article talks about (which is significantly longer than 2 paragraphs btw)

Like, skimming through their articles and you get stuff like this https://thatparkplace.com/wish-actor-harvey-guillen-says-he-believes-disney-will-make-a-queer-princess-in-his-lifetime/ where they relay the quotes then immediately jump to:

If this does indeed happen it’s likely to lose The Walt Disney Company millions of dollars as seen with Lightyear.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Yes, it is perfectly possible that the studio’s writing work might be a bit shit, I dunno. If you find they are consistently involved with writing you don’t enjoy, then sure, whatever. The point of this article is the absolute insanity this kind of stuff gets taken to, like it’s a massive conspiracy rather than just the work of another studio managing the struggles and interests of our age.

To quote the 2+n paragraph article:

It’s a conspiracy theory that checks all the boxes: It conveniently explains pretty much everything happening right now, ties it back to organizations of which people are understandably suspicious, links it to a much larger ongoing panic (DEI), validates preconceived notions like “go woke, go broke,” sprinkles in a few kernels of truth regarding powerful interests, and – most importantly – provides a clear and identifiable enemy. It’s also almost entirely bullshit.

I imagine LTT did that for meme purposes more than anything else. Threadrippers are not built for games. They’re built for production workloads which don’t translate to gaming performance.

That said, the point still stands. This game needs the most powerful gaming hardware (e.g. Ryzen X3D series and RTX 4090) on “recommended” settings and 1080p to get averages above 60fps, which is wild. There’s a rather dedicated fellow on reddit who does detailed performance tests after each patch.

I started with Ubuntu and slowly tried getting used to Gnome over the course of a few months (mainly using windows, every now and then hopping into Ubuntu when not gaming). I learned of KDE, tried it in Kubuntu, and it all instantly clicked for me. I switched over in about a week and haven’t had much reason to boot Windows since.

It turned out that front-facing experience was incredibly important to me.

I believe we’re specifically talking VRR, which for me in Kubuntu did not work properly without switching to Wayland.

VRR is fantastic for games, I really notice the difference and I use Wayland because of it.

The downside to that is (from my understanding) Wayland forces some form of Vsync on everything, so if you don’t have a VRR monitor then games can become very stuttery and have noticeable input lag. There is an option to “force lowest latency” which supposedly allows screen tearing for things like games, though I didn’t test how well it worked myself.

If people are interested in experimenting, then VRRTest is a great utility to see what VRR is doing and to test various settings.

Jedi Survivor’s performance issues are annoying but I wouldn’t call it “unplayable” by any stretch. It depends on how you define it. My definition of that would be either “literally doesn’t launch / hard crashes consistently” or “massively fluctuating frametime on appropriate hardware and settings that makes the intended gameplay too difficult to enjoy”.

In my experience, it’s mostly traversal stutter and TAA ghosting at low frames in the giant hub level which you don’t really get during actual combat. I also partially inflicted that on myself by choosing to play on max settings with RT and no FSR. I use a R5 3600, RX 7900XT and 32GB Ram.

Obviously, your mileage and personal tolerances will vary. Definitely consider the refund window and use the big city vistas of the first area to judge if you’ll enjoy it at that performance / quality level you choose. The art direction is really good so I think it will hold up on lower settings.

I’ve always wandered if the Captain or other Senior Officer had that idea in their back pocket just waiting for an excuse to use it.

He’s been dealing with them for years. Probably just finally got worn down enough to say “fuck it, not worth the stress”

It’s a good, but flawed game. I got really into it for a month and developed a love/hate relationship with it, but overall enjoyed that time.

That’s as somebody who loves sci-fi and got really into building my ship. I was pretty much the target audience so I may have been more willing to immerse myself in it than others would care for.

Also, it was super refreshing to me playing a game where my companions are all in their 30s with a lot of history. It feels quite mature in that sense. Which I guess is why the main story really disappointed me when you get an antagonist who feels like a 12-year old who just discovered the Wikipedia page for Nihilism, but hey ho.

For me it’s not so much the travel; the main story tries to sell this idea of exploring the unknown, but literally everything you find is a known quantity in some form or another.

Her response during the motion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFTNSGu_OoQ

I think usage of that particular phrase was probably overkill or an oversight, but I agree with her that criticising the actions of Israel’s government is not Antisemitic.

It reminds me of when a trans representative was censured for condemning restrictions on gender-affirming care using the phrase “you will have blood on your hands” and opponents jumped on that to say she was out of line. It gives me a strong impression that their motivations go far beyond the language used, using excessive pedantry as an excuse.

The moment I saw HDRP mentioned I thought “Yup, that’d do it”

There is no system in the world, religeous or otherwise, safe from the dangers of radicalization.

You are supporting the rape and murder of ordinary people. Nothing justifies this behaviour. Especially not with the pathetic “but what if any of these people could go on to become the new Hitler? Checkmate!” line.

I don’t know if you’re a troll who thinks this is funny, or something worse. Either way, it needs to stop.

I’ve played a bit and explored the first major city. I love sci-fi games and am definitely starting to get a feel for the world and kinda like it. Not sure at this stage I’d call it “good” though, the gameplay is a bit clunky and the UX could do with a lot of improvements. Gunplay is pretty floaty and the default pistol iron sights are awful. My initial impression is: if you want a Fallout-style space RPG with good writing and characters, and have not yet played Obsidian’s Outer Worlds, then that would likely be a better choice.

I also love flight games, but space combat seems very bland. It seems you’re mostly big and slow, so there’s not much manuevering going on that makes these games fun. Even a simple variation of Star Wars Squadrons boost>drift mechananic would make it much more engaging. You get an opportunity to see what a larger ship feels like and it still only has forward-facing weapons so it feels like you just try to out-DPS whatever is in front of you. If you try to use the environment, like giant asteroids, for cover or to split up enemies, said asteroids get blown up in seconds, a weird design decsion IMO. I’ve not messed with ship customisation yet. I did really like getting to a traffic zone and just hailing other ships to trade and chat though!

There are things I’m liking about the writing. This is, so far, the only game I’ve played which lets you choose they/them pronouns as a third option for voiced dialogue, which is really neat and something I’ve wanted to see for a long time, as opposed to just male/female OR gender neutral everywhere. The first major city has some interesting places and a history walkthrough from the local faction’s perspective, which heavily hints at there being a lot of bias to unravel by visiting the others. I quite like the religeous centre books which discuss the idea of faith being core to human experience in a broader sense than just belief in gods and spirituality. I’m generally enjoying getting immersed into the world so far.

The game’s opening is crazy fast-paced though, a thing happens and a guy gives you his ship within like, 10 minutes excluding character creation. I can’t help but wander if the writers are relying on you having read lore on their website or something, because at creation you get choices for which faction you were raised by, but ZERO context about any of them. Could also just be a thing for repeat RP playthroughs, but I don’t play games this large that way.

Another thing I’ll add is graphically the game is pretty weird. It has some of the worst luminance balancing I’ve ever seen in a game. You’ll see what I mean if you fire a mining laser in the first cave, the laser is dark. They seem to heavily rely on screen colour filters that add a grey/brown tint to everything and crush the dynamic range, Their first big outdoors reveal with a musical flourish is a brown landscape with a grey-tinted sun from the filters lmao. It’s slightly improved on PC by tricking the game into using Windows Auto-HDR (which, amusingly, involves renaming the executable to farcry5.exe), but not by much. For a game that largely sells itself on exploring and finding beautiful vistas (I think at least, I avoided marketing and got the game with my new GPU) this is an alarmingly bizarre art direction choice to me.

Otherwise, the game feels like it’s from 2016. It’s lacking a lot of basic options like FoV sliders (can be edited in a config file, but still). Space travel is a series of black screens presumably because they couldn’t get any kind of seamless loading to work. Besides equipping weapons from the ground, they don’t seem to use alt-actions for anything else like eating food in front of you or reading a book without taking it (the former requires going through menus). Shop inventories do not show how much of an item you already have, etc. After installing the lastest AMD drivers, it runs well on my Ryzen 3600x RX 7900XT, 32GB system on High (not Ultra) settings, but in a way that suggests performance is significantly worse on lower-end hardware (and I am aware consoles are locked to 30fps!). I have yet to see the game justify its intense performance requirements given that, again, it does not look next-gen to me nor does there seem to be much complexity behind the scenes that affects gameplay from the player’s perspective.

Overall I like it, but I would NOT have gotten it if it wasn’t free with the GPU I got from my last one failing. I’m generally happy with playing an immersive space RPG so far, but would not recommend it over The Outer Worlds based on a more objective view of it so far.

Even though it was developed by a different team, they did capture the general charm IMO. The story and characters aren’t terrible, some of it I really loved. Like Inquisition and Anthem, it was primarily let down by a lot of management and studio culture issues which have been made very public.

In my view, Dreadwolf is their opportunity to show if they’ve managed to overcome those callenges or has sucumbed to them forever. I am made hopeful by what appears to have been a well-scoped and managed project in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition.