Cethin

@Cethin@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'My Advice to Users Is to Accept Reality and Tune, or to Not Play' — Randy Pitchford Is at the 'Get a Refund From Steam' Stage of the Borderlands 4 PC Performance Backlash⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  You aren’t out of touch. Even the worst games don’t get that poor of a review. When you job depends on being on their side, it turns out you can’t voice an honest opinion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  For sure, you can. However, every modern game is trying to be an open world game. It’s stupid. We get ballooning budgets and dev cycles for games that don’t really get anything from being open world. I’d rather get three great less open games than one open world game that is sacrificing things to make the open world work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure. You can make those, but you have to spend a lot of money and time making the open world just to make places for the rooms to live. Is that worth it? Everything is opportunity cost. Did doubling the cost improve the game that much?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I fixed Borderlands 4's stuttering issue by upping my shader cache size to 100 GB, which feels like something I shouldn't have to do in a well-optimised game⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  What? Some systems have worse performance, primarily if you don’t have enough VRAM, but artifacting and blur? What do you mean? Sure, there’s blur with TAA/FSR/DLSS, but that’s always true and cam be toggled.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I dont really understand your point. Devs still curate where you meet the enemies. Its not like its procedurally generated map where everything is random.

  I haven’t played it, so maybe they’ve done something to control it. I doubt it though. If you can come from any direction, that makes encounters much harder to design. Think about older Borderlands games when entering a compound. You’d come through one main gate and enemies would be set up with cover and you’d have to fight your way through. With open world you could do something like fly into the middle of the compound, and that’s has to be accounted for.

  Check out Roboquest, for example. It has some really impressive movement options, but it’s choice of rooms let’s them restrict how much you can abuse them. You’ll always be fighting through the enemies from an expected direction.

  I cant remember single time in my 20 hours of gameplay where i have tought that i hate fighting here, or that these enemies dont fit here.

  This isn’t what I meant. There’s nuance between liking something and it being the best possible thing. It can be good and still be possible to be better. My biggest issue with open worlds is, like you mentioned at the beginning, fast travel. It takes so much time and resources to make an open world, just for players to fast travel past most of it. Is it really worth the that? Did it add that much to the experience? We could have more cheaper games with tighter designed experiences instead of games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. (BL3 cost $140m, and for cost “more than twice” that, so minimum $280m.)

  I don’t think people understand that everything is an opportunity cost. If you make an open world game, that’s at the expensive of so much more. At minimum, it’s going to be less game to play (or longer between games and more expensive). Is getting a lot of space that you hardly interact with worth it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I just have a bias against open world games at this point. Damn near every game thinks they need to be open world, and most of the time it just makes things more tedious and boring. It takes a ton of dev time to make just for players to run past 99% of it. There are some games it really works for, but most would be better off with a tighter design (and it’d also save time and money).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I really don’t understand the open world though. I don’t think that’s the direction they needed to go. I think the best looter-shooter I’ve played recently is Roboquest. It has all the movement you said (and more), but it’s in tight rooms, so the devs have more control of the design. Open worlds means the devs have essentially zero control of encounters and it becomes too easy. The only thing they can do is crank up health of enemies so they don’t die as quickly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I fixed Borderlands 4's stuttering issue by upping my shader cache size to 100 GB, which feels like something I shouldn't have to do in a well-optimised game⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s mostly not UE5 exactly. UE5 just let’s devs turn on features that are performance hogs easily. Squad, for example, just upgraded from UE4 to UE5 but they took their time and did things in a smart way (like not using Lumen), and performance increased for a lot of people, with much higher detail too.

  UE5 isn’t the issue. It’s devs who turn on all the features they can and ignore optimization because “the engine just handles it.” It’s got some really impressive technology, but it’ll ruin your game if you let it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I fixed Borderlands 4's stuttering issue by upping my shader cache size to 100 GB, which feels like something I shouldn't have to do in a well-optimised game⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I mostly agree. I’d say they went uphill though, but so did every other game, but even faster. Each game improved some things, but the competition improved much more. They’ve been coasting off of name recognition ever since the first game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it was a really good game originally. The writing has gotten really fucking bad though, and the gameplay hasn’t really evolved with the times. (I can’t speak on the new game.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just beat Bloodborne for the first today, and it's probably one of the best playthroughs of a video game that i have ever had and stories of one as well.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls 2, and Sekiro?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I suspect it won’t work for them, but I think the idea that they can’t work is wrong. With a really passionate and talented team, I think it could be done very well. It’d take real innovation though, unlike BotW. BotW was innovative for LoZ, but almost everything it’d done had been done before. I would say currently the closest formula they could copy is Elden Ring, and it isn’t as much of a Metroidvania as previous more enclosed entries were.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Former Pokémon Company head lawyer says yeah, those latest Nintendo patents are a bit much, aren't they⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  More profitable is not the same thing as better. For example, Marvel movies are pretty shit, but they make a ton of money. Palworld is better than Pokémon, for many reasons. One major one is that it actually tried to innovate on something. That’s more than Game Freak has done in decades despite having an infinite money glitch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How ICE Is Using Fake Cell Towers To Spy On People’s Phones⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Everyone supports terrorists. The difference is if you support the state doing terrorism. If you’re using violence for political gain, that’s the definition of terrorism. States do that all the time. That’s one of the primary roles of police in the US in fact.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon doesn't enjoy anything⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It also jumps around a bunch, with several people telling, supposedly, the same story but it happens differently each time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨McDonald's criticizes US restaurant industry for uneven wage policies⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It also needs to be pointed out this is a legal requirement, but it doesn’t always happen. If they don’t make up this difference it’s one form of wage theft, the most common form of theft in the US.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨McDonald's criticizes US restaurant industry for uneven wage policies⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s only mad that he has to pay so much. He doesn’t think tipping is bad. He only thinks it’s unfair that he doesn’t benefit from it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I just recently unlocked wall clinging. It feels like now there are several directions to go, but before there was largely just one. Also, because of the way charms are limited (only having two slots for each of three types) finding charms feels much less meaningful. You can only ever have two main combat charms, so you can never find something that’ll let you totally change things like you may in HK1.

  Maybe it’s only the beginning (I’m about 12h in, so not that early) of the game that feels this way, but yeah so far it doesn’t feel like extra exploration will bail you out if you’re stuck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨have some standards⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Fallout:Brotherhood of Steel…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree with this argument in Dark Souls. It isn’t quite the same in Silksong though. Upgrades are very limited. You can’t just swap weapons and go farm upgrades for it. You have one weapon and can’t upgrade until a few hours into the game, and after the one you can’t upgrade again until some future point. Health and silk upgrades are also incredibly limited, and you ability upgrade slots are equally limited.

  In DS/Elden Ring, you’re supposed to go explore and spend your souls on upgrades. I’m Silksong there are very few real combat upgrades to be purchased. You can’t just level up or upgrade weapons to get more powerful.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I will say the run backs in Silksong/HK are better than, for example, DS1 for the reason you give. In DS you just run past enemies and it’s trivial. In the HK games running past enemies becomes a platforming challenge. Yeah, you can still do it, but you still have to engage with the enemy even if that’s just jumping over them. DS you just run past them and they almost always too slow to engage with you if you’re sprinting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm saving it for a little QT 🦟⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m in the swampy part of VA, around where we literally lost colonies to mosquitoes. I’m also a mosquito magnet, where most people don’t even get but if I’m outside with them, but they’re all over me. It’s great…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm saving it for a little QT 🦟⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on where you are. On the east coast if the US, the largest mosquito species is invasive and not an important part of the ecosystem. There is a native species, but they aren’t the ones cause issues. If we can destroy the invasive species specifically, that’d be great.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Valve trademark for 'Steam Frame', looks like we're getting new hardware⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Main frame was just an example of a type of frame that aren’t glasses. There are many other types of frames that have nothing to do with glasses. A frame is just the structure of something. The people using that name to say it must be glasses are hyper-focusing on one usage of the word.

  Although, truth be told, I mostly just want a Steam Controller 2.

  This I can agree with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Valve trademark for 'Steam Frame', looks like we're getting new hardware⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s no way it’s VR. They already have the Index name for the VR line. It’d be called the Index 2 without a doubt. Maybe AR glasses, but frame does not imply glasses. Sure, glasses have a frame, but so do so many other things. Have you ever heard of a main frame? Those aren’t a type of glasses.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK Cops 'Ashamed and Sick' of Enforcing Ban on Anti-Genocide Group Palestine Action⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  How can they discipline you for not seeing something? Also, no one is saying to quit. They should keep working, but just become blind to these “criminals.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨sweet temptations⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  But there is plenty wrong with grass yards with non-native species. If they nuked all the native plants, that’s bad. We need native species for native habitats. Sure, GMO can improve plants, but we shouldn’t be planting non-native plants.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨McDonald’s CEO is grappling with a ‘two-tier economy’ as he slashes prices on value meals—and signals backing for a minimum wage increase⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, Ford was horrible, but that’s one thing that’s reasonable about Fordism. He knew that if he payed his employees well enough then they’d have money to spend. I don’t know how the idiots who are wealthy today don’t get that, but they assume their wealth is infinite and comes from nothing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baldur's Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re very different, so you need to figure it out for yourself. Both are great, but we don’t know your tastes. I would recommend BG3 though, for what is worth.

  However, if you’re strapped for cash, I would recommend playing indie games. They’re often more interesting than these larger budget games (though these two are exceptions to large budget games being shit), and they’re usually like $20 max. Most people can get more out of Factorio or Dwarf Fortress, for example, than they can out of these games, at a much lower price.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paper and mobile train tickets to be replaced with GPS tracking in new travel trial⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It still needs somewhere to tap. RFID is short range.