That loading screen takes forever. And the dance isn’t even entertaining, but you can tell they thought it was “hilarious”.
Plus all of the non stop talking in that game is ridiculous.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Woof. I want to play BL4, I’ve always been a huge fan of the series, but like…I distinctly remember BL3 and watching Claptrap do that stupid Vanna White thing across the screen for ages after every update. I kind of want that time back.
TachyonTele@piefed.social 1 day ago
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Maybe if there were any variation at all in the dance. Or a cycle of two or three different dances he goes through. Maybe give him a hat at random intervals. But no, just the same nonsense, over and over, for five minutes every time you start the game.
axexrx@lemmy.world 1 day ago
BL has always been one of those series I end up playing with a 3-5 year lag time, picking them up when theyre $5-10 on steam.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
I played BL2 at launch and don’t regret it. But I only just picked BL3 up again over the last couple of months. It wasn’t only the loading screen, but I will say I don’t think the writing shines quite as much as it did in BL2.
MudMan@fedia.io 1 day ago
Supposedly that's why it does things this way, right? Instead of the very long compile up front they do a smaller one up front and then run it in the background.
They seem to imply that because the game is heavy by default this is what's causing people's performance issues. I don't know that I agree, but there's probably part of it.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Yeah.
Fuck pitchford and all that. But this is an increasing problem that most games have. Shaders are getting more and more expensive and compiling them on the fly… when it works it works and when it doesn’t it is horrible. But having a mandatory “sit and watch this load screen for three minutes” starts you off with a HORRIBLE first impression during the period where it is easiest to get a refund.
It is why MS are setting up their convoluted, and destined to fail, system to add those to the downloads. Since people have increasingly been realizing that Proton/Linux weirdly have an advantage in this… that again mostly manifests during the first 30-40 minutes of benchmarking while writing a blog post.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I honestly feel like it would be better if Steam would compile the shaders in the background after the download finishes and before it tells me that the game is ready to play. That seems like a thing they could totally do.
They could even precompile shaders for known setups (the Steam Deck, the last three generations of Nvidia and AMD, that sort of thing) and just add that to the download for people with those devices. It would improve the experience for a lot of people.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I mean, they do (for most games) on Linux. “Allow background processing of vulkan shaders” in Downloads.
The issue is that they can only do so much without support of the games themselves. My, very limited, understanding is they distribute “good enough” shaders with games and then the background processing is optimizing those for the user’s computer. But getting those “good enough” shaders is already a mess.
MudMan@fedia.io 1 day ago
Hey, say what you will, but I do think the solution is technological. MS at least has an approach. About time, too. I don't want to overplay it, because a lot of these arguments is very... terminally online, but it's nuts that the DX12/UE5 combo of tech that has now been a thing for ages is still so poorly understood and unadressed on a wider scale.
Also crazy that dev teams don't have enough systems engineers bitchy enough to insist on figuring this out.
I think for BL4 specifically the problem is the game is just... heavy. Not chuggy or stuttery on good enough hardware, but good enough starts kinda high here.
And yeah, it looks better than previous games, but it's a stylized look and it's taking shortcuts meant for photorealism into a space where a lot of stylization is going to cut into the extra bits of indirect lighting or vegetation or environmental detail you're getting out of it.
Blend the confusing shader issues with the disproportionately high frame budget even when things are working fine and you get this stuff. But I'll say that I was shocked at how playable the game is on higher end hardware given what the Internet was saying.