LadyCrimson

Hogwart's - I am not particularly enjoying all the very tutorial-feeling main quest missions that seem to comprise how you get any new abilities/game mechanics. They go on and on and on. Maybe this is because I'm not a Potter-world-lore fan and don't get anything from all this teacher and classroom stuff, when all I want to do is progress to say, flying broom, trait unlocking, potion making, flying mount, etc and then go back to exploring more freely, but meh. Some of the early side quests are more interesting/fun.

The Last of Us, episode 5: ...that was the best one yet. Had everything. The pacing of this show, episode to episode, is on point. The supporting actors are (mostly) fantastic. Thumbs way up.

^ I was going to say I still had had only that one CTD, but I just had another. No day1 patch yet either. It did have me download a 300MB something that claims it was DLC, but nothing new. Like it re-downloaded the pre-order stuff I already had. Or updated it. I dunno. Regardless, yeah the best thing so far for me is the exploration factor. Game makes you want to explore and figure out what "things" are for. Resources seem to respawn (eventually). You can definitely wander-encounter enemies much higher level then you but on the other hand I think there's some level scaling in the sense that maybe you won't ever have enemies lower then you. not 100% on that.

...what kind of game am I playing?

Hogwart's: Open file: \Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\Hogwarts Legacy\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor\Engine.ini At bottom, paste in: Make the file read-only if you want/if it seems to reset on game start. Before: (this is night, btw) https://crimsonkeep.com/wallpapers/data/media/131/Hogwarts-00006.jpg https://crimsonkeep.com/wallpapers/data/media/131/Hogwarts-00009.jpg After: https://crimsonkeep.com/wallpapers/data/media/131/Hogwarts-00007.jpg https://crimsonkeep.com/wallpapers/data/media/131/Hogwarts-00008.jpg ...the no-bloom I like a lot. Definitely keeping that. ...the no-fog I'm conflicted. I like the less white/green/brown haze, but on the OLED tv, it's almost too dark/contrast-y even if you turn game brightness up (note: less of an issue on non-OLED monitor). Plus very distant low quality stuff can be more eye-catching/distracting without the fog-haze. Outdoors mood feels more generic at times or something too, less "highland hills" or whatever. ...The no-fog applies to indoors as well, so the castle rooms looks more vibrant with colors that pop a bit more. I wish the fog had a half-strength option, that would probably be perfect. Why do dev's always seem to go overboard with "volumetric" anything. Oh well.

Oh, one more tech note re: Hogwart's - if you do get a CTD and then find the game won't load/crashes during the pre-shade screen when you try to play again, you can try going into the appdata/Local for the game. In the Saved folder (not saved games) there's a Config folder. I deleted that - the game just creates a new one - and it fired up perfectly again. You just have to redo all your video etc. settings again. So far only had the one CTD, over 8-10 hours game on. To get consistent fps outdoors as well as indoors (again, 4k) I had to lower a few more settings but outside of lighting looking slightly more flat sometimes, I don't feel the "look" of the game changes that much. At High/Ultra view distance I haven't noticed any distant pop-in, either. Maybe that doesn't show up until low or medium view distance, not sure.

Hogwart's Legacy - this is going to be one of those games where I wander all over by myself, ignoring the main quest most of the time. I had to force myself to stop going farther and farther away from the castle and go back cause I don't even have the mounts or room yet (and I figure some quests will send me hither and yonder anyway), but then I explored the castle even more and ... ...btw if you like less hand-holding, you can turn a lot of HUD elements off individually, including the mini-map. I have as much of it off as possible and only turn on the mini-map if I'm running in circles too long or something.

OH, OH, OH, Ansel photo works with this game! I don't have an distance-border/situation unlocker like I did for FFXV. but it works with my Ansel hotkey, no Experience install required. I wonder if any other games were like that and I never noticed/realized. Game fun-o-meter for me just went up three-fold! But more importantly! Sadly, no camera unlock script means I can't use it at certain times, like when you actually pet the cat. Probably won't work during combat either, is my guess. Good enough tho!

...I do not miss those 10MB, 20MB, 50MB HDD's of ye olden days.

Are you playing it on one your NASA-league, brought back from the future PC's? I would hope it runs ok. Optimizations or not, this game has utterly convinced me, that my next rig is definitely going to have 64gb system ram. Or more. And maybe I should get that 48vram 40-titan. eg, the future is going to be "you can never have too much ram" ... I hear you can just download more, maybe that'll work.

Finally got to the early quest that leads me outside. Got there, had a dialogue, turned around, CTD. Heh. If you're someone with a GPU with lower Vram, the Texture Quality setting should probably be set to Low or Medium. Difference between Ultra and High visually was barely noticeable, Medium it's a bit more evident but still not severe/looks good. I'm sticking with High which seems to put my GPU at around 8.5gb vram used (out of 11) instead of maxed out. Should be noted the Day 1 patch on release day may smooth out some of this stuff anyway. Edit: still finding it fun, castle was fun to poke around in, although I'm getting impatient to get to the more-freedom phase vs. every quest feels like an extended tutorial "do this to get your starter spells!" phase.

Ok, got my first cheap cloth wizard hat out of some chest. Also, ooo, pretty.

I've never had any noticeable issues re: Denuvo, in terms of stutter fests or mega lags etc anyway. I mean maybe if it wasn't there I'd see 5-10fps more, who knows, I know nothing. Most of my FPS issues comes from wanting to run in native 4k but not wanting to buy a new gpu yet. The castle is rather large. Managed to find my way to outside sections here and there, see the view, witness all the little atmosphere touches. I can imagine for a lore fan, it must be awesome. RAM use remains around 16-19GB, varies. It works with a controller, but there seems to be a ton of functions via KB/mouse that do not carry over to controller so that might be more flexible. Most of that doesn't worry/bother me, except...while skip-to-next-line of dialogue is r-click mouse, I can't see a way to do it via controller. So I end up using the mouse and then going back to controller.

I liked Dances with Wolves a lot when I saw it in the theater, although it felt a little too long back in an era where 3hr films were not practically the norm of every film trying to be "epic". My memory is I mostly liked Graham Greene. And the cinematography. And Two-Socks. I think today I would find it a bit dull. Costner is decent/good in the right roles but he is kind of ... generic? bland? overall. Or needs strong supporting/co-lead actors to bounce from. The ones with Costner as lead that I liked most would be: No Way Out The Untouchables (but mostly for Connery) Field of Dreams A Perfect World (possible his best acting role, maybe...) Open Range (Robert Duvall is a strong pairing) The Highwaymen

Note: the chr. creation felt generic vs. an ability to make a unique looking chr, but at least the creation screen wasn't a total lie vs. in-game result. This is the sorting hat thing, not an outfit, but I am looking forward to maybe finding silly wearables...

^ I think I've refunded maybe 5 games, I'm not sure. I usually just eat it, but because my track record re: interest in all media lately has been especially bad, plus I'm not a Potter-world/lore fan I was dubious of my interest, especially for the slightly more expensive early-access version. But if I was going to buy/play it, I'm going to have those extra flying mount options, darnit. So, minus my earlier testing, I would say it takes 40-60 minutes to first get to the castle, depending on your speed, get hat-sorted and dumped into a room, which is when you can start manually saving. The game seems to be a system ram hog, getting up to 18gb total and beyond so far. But I did see it "let go" of some during transitions so no memory leak. If you have it, it just likes to gobble it. Found turning a few settings down (shadows, effect particles ... uh, I forget) to medium seemed to get me the 50-60ish fps I wanted in native 4k. I expect there to be lots of ups and downs at times. Game itself: One of the few times I rather liked all the tutorial bits, the small combat, the story bits. Nothing fancy, but I wasn't bored, at least. Note: I am playing on Easy because I'm a casual nub these days. Although from the early taste I might bump it back to Normal. You can increase FoV but indoors it often still feels quite restricted and a bit annoying at times. Anyway, so far I'm impressed/interested enough to keep going/forget about any refund possibility. Off I go to find my inner wizard.

I would like to take a moment to gripe about Steam's 2-hour refund window when it comes to modern open world story rpg's, in that by the time you get past chr menu (even if you rush it/don't care), fancy game logos, long intro cutscenes, long tutorial bits (I can't even manually save yet), alter settings multiple times, restart game to make sure settings take, etc. it's going to 3+ hours or more and one sometimes gives up on the idea of a refund for that reason alone. The actual Hogwarts castle is likely going to be a performance drop for many and I think you don't reach that for a while. That gripe over...at the very start of the game, here's what I see, using 2080ti, 9900k, 32GB, no overlays except an fps counter: --during the pre-shader caching/setup whatever it is, which takes a few minutes, system ram went up to about 15GB for me, so not counting Windows maybe 12-13gb? I forgot to glance at task manager for ram usage after that. >.> ---4k, Ultra, no DLSS/scaling, no RT--- first cutscenes and area you can walk around in (not full open world yet), 35-45fps ----4k, Ultra, DLSS at Quality, no RT--- goes up to 50-60fps, DLSS to me looks noticeably softer but still all right ---1440, Ultra, no DLSS/scaling, no RT--- first cutscenes and area you can walk in, 50-60ish fps ---1440, Ultra, DLSS/Quality, no RT--- 90-110fps ...I tried reducing settings but I sort of felt like not everything was registering within game without a restart, would have spend an hour fiddling with that. But just changing one setting, like shadows, down a notch or two didn't seem to make much difference in 4k. I did try -all low- and graphically it's actually not the worst I've seen, although the fps increase didn't seem mega substantial for it. Debating whether to waste more refund window on testing.

Yeah, a lot of decent to good reviews of Hogwarts had me thinking I'd try to d/l and fire up the game for and hour, to at least see how it performs on my now "outdated" (haha) rig (in 4k I mean), as long as there wasn't a flood of PC-early-access reports of terrible performance issues etc. I was guessing/hoping with no RT/settings fiddling I'd still be in the realm of 50-60 fps most of the time. So I logged on a bit ago and apparently no one who bought the early-access pre-order can access. It won't unpack/start/play. Seems to be a general problem all over the world, not sure if it's 100% or 80% or whatever. Anyway ... it has nothing to do with gameplay itself but hahaha, that won't leave a good impression. Not sure what the problem/whose "fault" it is. Edit: looks like at least some people can access/play it fine. It could be mostly people who didn't buy directly from Steam, and/or something to do with preloading or not preloading.....hmm.. EditEdit: seems like unpacking is working for people now. I just started downloading because I was curious if it would start for me but I guess it will now. I'll test performance a bit on a few resolutions I guess, then wait for the Day1 patch.

I have a hard time tossing any book/magazine now, just because it starts to reach that "do you toss an unimportant but kind of a culture relic" or maybe it's just the memory, syndrome. Luckily I did toss enough away in previous years that I don't have too many left for me to fuss over. I think I still have a book re: HTML 3, as well few other such. As well as likely outdated stuff like oversized comprehensive state city/topographical map books. I used to love maps, books, pamphlets (National Geographic used to put a lot of goods ones inside), even the ones on tourism guides. They were to me what postcards were to others.

^ Yeah I saw most of those SNL clips. Most were pretty good. I haven't watched any SNL in ages, I only recognize one face in that troupe now, lol. Last of Us eps 4 started as more filler in the sense of a lot of slow relationship building. It was good tho and for those that like more direct momentum there's some of that too. I was hoping the Ellie dynamic was being done in part to make some stuff more impactful and I think that's working. By the end of the episode I was liking her more, like I did in the game. I am wondering tho, in all these post-apoc shows, how long *does* auto gas stay viable enough to actually work to make a car go vroom? Everything I've read indicates maybe a few months to a few years depending on various factors, and all these shows, even if they have a toss away line about the topic, having people siphoning/using gas 5, 10, 20+ years later. >.>

Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile via Netflix - family movie, cgi singing crocodile, live action otherwise, Javier Bardem (he's not the crocodile) The 10 minute opening was great, baby Lyle was adorable, I could watch that bit repeatedly. It's not really similar to it/wasn't comical, but that singing frog cartoon came to mind a couple times. The rest becomes a kid/family musical movie that is passable but nothing special. Young lonely teen+parents, + adult Lyle + some mean neighbor shenanigans. There's also a CGI cat. Anyway, Javier's performance as a singing magician was great/fun. Maybe 15 minutes too long for a "kids movie" with one of those overlong memories flashback montage sequences.

Big Picture in menus? I'm not sure what that means. I have anything Steam Overlay unchecked, I see nothing about Big Picture Mode anywhere. But today I noticed that for some reason Steam client had decided to duplicate all my game sorting categories. Two "RPG", two "RTS", and so on. Don't know how long it was like that before I noticed. I was a little afraid if I deleted one they would both delete, so I renamed one of them ... that registered fine, so I deleted the renamed one. Seemingly fixed. Weird tho. The last couple client updates I've noticed little weird things, like new boxes when games launch that didn't exist before, new reminders/popups re: "you can change launch options here via this gear icon!" and ... then they stopped again. Feels like they are having a personality crisis.

...think I'll pre-order that Hogwarts game, but won't download/play it until early reviews/performance assessments. ...hope the release is positive, I could use something to lose myself this month.

I'm now idly curious how you wrote out that long post, since it's the first time alternating sized text registered on my PC screen since not allowing sites to pick fonts etc.

To add, I also have that request is blocked thing going again occasionally. And it still, for me, feels random. I think it's been the quote marks again, or maybe parenthesis, but sometimes they go through, and sometimes it's "blocked". Edit: like that time, the word blocked in quotes triggered no error. Other times it will. Don't know what the difference is.