[Rumours about acquisition by Microsoft]

 

 

 

New exclusive games for Xbox.

**** off. It's like 2000 all over again.

 

 

For MS 'xbox exclusive' just refers to consoles, they've had xbox exclusives on PC before. May mean Windows Store exclusivity or timed exclusivity but I doubt that to be honest. For OEI and InXile there's not much point making either console exclusive just for the sake of it.

 

May well mean no more Obsidian games for me given the attitude MS has to GOG and DRM free in general, but then I wasn't really expecting Outer Worlds at least to be anywhere other than Steam anyway and that's the only 'known' project.

 

 

MS new strategy on gaming front is to get games on all their platforms not only Xbox. 

 

I am personally interested to see what it means in reality that Obsidian and inXile will keep their independency.

 

A load of PC ports, some of them a while after they're released on Xbox. That's what Microsoft were doing with the original Xbox. Halo eventually came onto PC as a **** PC port, a game originally developed for PC.

[A Special Announcement From Obsidian]

Is Obsidian going to still make games with PC led design with optional console ports?

Is Obsidian going to still release games on GoG or Steam?

Is this an off season April Fool's joke?

[Rumours about acquisition by Microsoft]

New exclusive games for Xbox.

**** off. It's like 2000 all over again.

[Finally some sales evidence]

1) PoE was not very learnable, there's not a lot of feedback about what's happening, the log has a lot of information in it, and the combat goes crazy fast in real-time, it's not very visually clear either. I imagine half the players got turned off by that. 2) There's a lot of reading and references to history/philosophy that's going to go over people's heads. There were loads of that backer content that wasn't clearly marked, and probably best skipped. 3) PoE launched a bit a of a mess, quite a few people probably had a bad time. Also a lot of people didn't even get through the first chapter, maybe because of time commitments or maybe because the gameplay wasn't for them.

 

I suspect this means that Deadfire was never going to reach half the sales of PoE, PoE has enough press and good reviews to get people to try it, even though Deadfire improved upon almost everything it didn't have the press and reviews to get people to try it. I don't think anything was going to persuade half the audience to give it a try. It's also a sequel so people aren't necessarily going to jump into it, thinking they'll have missed the story. So if Deadfire can't retain the audience from PoE, generate interest from new players, it's going to sell less.

 

There's room for a sequel to Deadfire, games like this can still make money, whether Obsidian thinks it's worth their time considering the return is another issue. I'd suggest given that they can crowd fund the games, that they own the IP, that should be enough.

[Finally some sales evidence]

BTW, there's a reddit thread where people have worked backwards from the fig dividends to guesstimate sales numbers. This would be reasonably accurate, as otherwise Fig would be committing SEC violations: https://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/9uqx8w/first_dividend_recieve_for_poe2_fig_investing/

 

TL;DR: we're seeing about 125k-ish unit sales, excluding copies given out as part of backer rewards, which seems to mirror guesstimates from an accidental data leak from steam (and suggests gog is a very small proportion of sales). It took about five months for PoE1 to hit 500k copies (according to press release), and fig dividends are paid out at every six months. So Deadfire is very much underforming PoE1 by a significant degree. (The revenue picture to Obsidian might be better because revenue from DLCs don't contribute to fig dividends).

 

(apparently chris avellone has an axe to grind against management for Deadfire. arguably using a lesser-known property like fig to fund deadfire resulted in less free marketing, even if they were able to raise a decent amount of money)

If it was 125K sales that's about $5m from a game that's already funded. Obsidian don't see money from sales from their other games. $5m not including DLC which tends to be higher margin or the ports to the consoles. Deadfire was rapidly developed, with a small team.

 

I think the people in that thread took the break even total and divided it with the dividend given to get the just over 110K figure. I don't think that's how shares work, the dividend system that Fig out laid seemed a lot more complicated.

 

Without the long tail and deep discounts, I would be surprised if a game like Deadfire would get over 300K sales. There's a lot of competition in the market place, even from Obsidian with Tyranny.

[RANDOM VIDEO GAME NEWS - CON SEASON]

Tracer's supposed to be British - not sure what kind of UK accent they were aiming for, maybe Lancashire ?

It's meant to be an East End accent, half my family were originally from there. It's more like a **** Van Dyke from Mary Poppins accent though, what Americans think London accents are, it's called Mockney "I am I am". Also the pitch of the voice is very high.

[RANDOM VIDEO GAME NEWS - CON SEASON]

Will Blizzard be able to milk fans they acquired from the last 10 years like they did from the previous 10? They created genre defining titles, beloved franchises, games people still want to play. I don't think they necessarily have the talent to make great games now. Everything is in decline, relying on past successes.

["Realms Beyond: Ashes of the Fallen" Now on Kickstarter]

No dongs in the baths, literally unplayable.

[Star Citizen]

The reason people use joystick or analogue sticks for sims is because it gives you resting position, dead zone, and degrees of motion from rest. You can perfectly virtually emulate this with the mouse but physically you do not get the same feed back.

For the demonstration they probably just didn't want to switch between pad and mouse, they didn't do much outside of vehicles anyway.

[RANDOM VIDEO GAME NEWS - CON SEASON]

We should probably keep in mind that before Bethesda, Fallout wasn't exactly a hot property.

And it still isn't because the Bethesda games aren't Fallout. That doesn't matter, Fallout as a franchise was plenty successful enough as a CRPG series to continue as a profitable venture with teams that wanted to make a Fallout game.

[RANDOM VIDEO GAME NEWS - CON SEASON]

Of course there's going to be a whole lot of interesting touches and influences, any world that had a decent amount of thought put into it will.

That's my point, thanks for agreeing with me.

[RANDOM VIDEO GAME NEWS - CON SEASON]

A lot of work and thought went into Elder Scrolls world building

What?

 

...Fallout is very much a Mad Max with 50s coat of paint...

 

That's not true. There's a lot of influence from 50's sci-fi that's not aesthetic. Also the biggest movie influence is not Mad Max, it's A Boy and His Dog. If you didn't care to look into the lore or immerse yourself in the world of the original Fallout games then you're not going to miss it when it's gone.

[RANDOM VIDEO GAME NEWS - CON SEASON]

Well, to be honest, it's not like Fallout 1 and 2 weren't bland 50's postapocalyptic theme with Vaults.

No? A lot of work went into world building and researching influences for Fallout's theme.

I mean F2 already saw big changes in staff from F1 and it made all the difference in the world with the fairly radical shift in tone between the two games

Black Isle were not capable of making the exact same game Troika would have made, but they didn't **** all over the canon. It's not like F3 wasn't another radical shift in tone from both games.

[RANDOM VIDEO GAME NEWS - CON SEASON]

 

 

I don't get why anyone would root for a major RPG studio to fail.

 

I think what irks me about it is that they bought the Fallout license, but they really couldn't give a **** about it. I mean a bland 50's theme post apocalyptic world with vaults is all they needed. They didn't need the canon, they didn't need the name, they certainly didn't use them. Elder Scrolls is bland generic fantasy themed game, and it's fine, I understand why it's successful, people put their own imagination into it. Their engine is extremely easy to mod and work with. I can't stand the gameplay, auto-levelling, or writing but not every game's for me. It's that they bought Fallout when they didn't have to, they never have and never intended to make a Fallout game with it.

 

I don't think a Bethesda game based on Borderlands, Mad Max, or Rage would look that much different, or be less successful. While they're at it why don't they buy up more classic RPG franchises and **** on them too?

[WTF happened to Xbox? Where are the REAL exclusives? "Console" and "timed" aka FAKE exclusives are NOT enough.]

 

 

Are you one of those angry folk that blames consoles for holding back pc gaming from flourishing to it's full potential?

 

I don't think anyone would phrase like that. It's also not the game engine that's at issue, not in the last decade of multi-platform titles and established more general engines. Ports are different if you design for one platform then have to port it to another one then the developer either adds the features or they don't. In terms of multi-platform then it's the number of AI, the objects, the poly budget, the texture resolution, they could all be bigger on PC. It's not just the PC though, multi-platform games have been doing this to consoles. It's also stupid to blame the consoles for this, it's the developers and the publishers that do this. Some of them do release high resolution texture packs which is cool. It's not been so much of an issue in the last decade on the graphics side, but the gameplay side it's more so, and I'm sadder on that respect anyway. Although PC has many fine exclusives, the most profitable and play games in the world that focus on gameplay anyway.

 

 

 

Self shadowing is specifically what I was talking about... As shown here.

 

Specifically shadow volume in the case of Doom 3. Per pixel lighting and normal mapping were also very important new features in Doom 3.

 

 

 

You remember wrongly.

And here's the proof, a framerate test:

 

a) Why is that video at 30 fps?

 

 

 

"We're going for this filmic look, so one thing that we knew immediately was films run at 24 fps. We're gonna run at 30 because 24 fps does not feel good to play. So there's one concession in terms of making it aesthetically pleasing, because it just has to feel good to play."

 

b) That video has frame dips? At around the 6min mark. Also that game is blurry as ****, I forgot how bad it looked. Forget depth of field, it's depth of cataracts.

 

 

 

And why would you expect me to appreciate Shadow Of The Tomb Raider's new lighting when it does worse than it's predecessor at merely every angle

 

I can't really take your opinion of graphics seriously. I'm not going to be able to convince you otherwise. I guess you just prefer less fidelity and you don't know what it is or can't see it. Making it pointless for you to judge. Some people like low poly games, some people like 2D games, apparently you prefer games with less fidelity.

[WTF happened to Xbox? Where are the REAL exclusives? "Console" and "timed" aka FAKE exclusives are NOT enough.]

 

 

which came bundled with Doom III Half Life 2. I don't remember either being made specifically designed to take true advantage of pc hardware though

 

You remember wrongly?

 

 

 

that was when lighting and shadowing first became a thing

 

What, lighting and shadows became a thing in 2004? Normal mapping became a thing. Nvidia had released a card with hardware lighting in the 90's and before that it was done on the CPU. What do you think Glide, OpenGL, and DX7 were doing in the 90's?

 

 

 

Engines before that aren't really worth mentioning as developers on consoles such as PS1, N64 and what not were doing polygonal techniques far better than pc.

 

What? Maybe at launch but by '98 PC high end graphics and the Unreal Engine/iD Tech were superior and it would be 6 years until Half-Life 2.

 

 

 

Crytek made maybe the biggest advancement in game engines with the CryEngine, and look what happened there. People with high end pc's couldn't run the game stable for years.

 

How long did it take consoles? It would have taken the PS4 to run the PC version of that game at a stable 30fps on high quality settings at 1080p. It was released 6 years later.

 

 

 

that was an initial vision for what they were going to create in the first place.

 

In the case of the The Order 1886 it just happened to be that they wanted to push more polygons than the hardware would allow at a higher frame rate. If I remember correctly that game even had frame dips.

 

 

 

When you play The Order 1886, you don't see or feel any choppiness that you would from a game designed to run in 60fps

 

Yeah right.

 

 

 

If I was wrong then alot of pc users wouldn't own a PS4 or Switch for exclusives and consoles would already be dead..

 

That doesn't parse at all. I've owned consoles and a gaming PC since '95. I don't play consoles for graphical fidelity because for the majority of the time I've owned them my PC has been way in front of the latest console. I play consoles for the games, that are fun to play, you know gameplay. I don't play the prettiest games, sometimes I play the ugliest games. Exclusives tend to have really good gameplay, especially Nintendo exclusives, and Nintendo hasn't been anywhere close to even the other consoles fidelity for over a decade. Also Steam link is a thing now but for the longest time playing PC on your TV in another room was a pain in the arse.

[WTF happened to Xbox? Where are the REAL exclusives? "Console" and "timed" aka FAKE exclusives are NOT enough.]

That's the whole point of developers calling their games next gen and the expectations of next-generation software alike. If it was dependable on pc like you said, then we wouldn't have to wait on pc for graphics to shift in tide. If the developers acknowledge this, no reason why we shouldn't either.

We saw many engine major engine developments in between console generations. Just look at the history of the Unreal Engine and iD Tech. Also Nvidia and AMD haven't spent the last 20 years waiting for console generations to continuously develop their GPUs. First two Xbox consoles launched with cutting edge GPU, but the development cycle meant they were surpassed in under a year. The Xbox One launched behind the PC market, well behind.

For cameras:

 

24fps = cinematic and natural

30fps = mid-ground and meh but made a benchmark lol

60fps = crisp and sharp

 

Not sure if you were aware of this or not but Discovery Channel films their professional video at 30fps and edit 60fps shots for slow-motion in parallel with 24fps or less when you see animals running on water, humming birds and such. 24fps is and will always be the go-to for cinema though, because 60fps looks absolutely horrble when trying to make a high action movie with something like explosions or what have you, this is not going to change unless you see a 3D movie which is still going to be split in half per eye anyway - dual lens cams.

Games are not movies, you can't apply the same effects to them. Also the reasons for 24fps or 30fps in film is historic and due to technological limitations, not because anything above looks bad.

 

I think that is probably the main thing consoles suffer from as lighting and shadowing is so gpu taxing in a detailed photorealism aimed game.

That's one of the most important features for fidelity and the things you want $600 worth of GPU for, and yeah the GPU in a console has half the processing power of the RTX 2080/GTX 1080 Ti. It does make a ****load of difference. Nvidia spent over a decade developing RTX just so they could make lighting more realistic and it looks incredible. You can't live in a world where consoles struggle with lighting and are also on par with the highest PC graphics.

 

If we're not talking photorealism and lighting, we're talking artistry and that's down to preference.

[WTF happened to Xbox? Where are the REAL exclusives? "Console" and "timed" aka FAKE exclusives are NOT enough.]

 

 

engine/graphical evolution only pushes towards new console generational releases

That's not even a little true.

 

 

A camera that features 60fps video capture is quite pointless unless you are shooting in slo-motion. 24fps/30fps is natural.

That's not true. I mean what? 24fps is "natural"? That doesn't mean anything. If you're suggesting that's what the eye can interpret that's just flat out false.

 

 

Then why mention all the games you did in one as the same? Far Cry 5, Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, and whatever else you compared to the Sony exclusives I mentioned...

Fidelity wise, console version to console version those games are on par with the Sony exclusives. You just can't seem to understand that there's different priorities and time investment. You can't even appreciate the improvement in lighting on the new Tomb Raider game, well of course you're not going to appreciate the PC version of games. You can't tell the difference between the artistry that goes into games and the improvement in performance the PC has overwhelmingly, it's not even close.

[WTF happened to Xbox? Where are the REAL exclusives? "Console" and "timed" aka FAKE exclusives are NOT enough.]

 

 

...not cost of graphical fidelity...

 

 

...cinematic experience...

 

That's just marketing bull**** because of weak hardware. Cinema used to use 24fps anyway? So aiming at 30fps doesn't make any sense. And the history of frames per second in Cinema is down to cost and what they can get away with without causing people's brains to hurt and for them to not see fluid motion. In video games that thresh hold is higher than 24, and it's certainly not 30. Also they forget that cinema has frame processing that smooths the 24fps experience that video games cannot have.

 

So it's an absolute lie to change the "aim" so that fidelity means something else. In truth fidelity is to realism, and higher the frames the better, although you do get diminishing returns. I can definitely feel the difference between 60 and 144hz.

 

 

 

This has nothing to do with stylizing the graphics

 

I don't think you understand what that is.

 

 

 

Uncharted 4 having a further draw distance, more reflection shaders, detail in general, better texture mapping

 

On draw distance that's different priorities. Playable areas? Uncharted games are linear. Ryse had more fidelity than Crysis 3 on consoles. More reflection shaders doesn't even mean anything. Detail in general is just vague and also bollocks. Better texture mapping is artistry which I've tried to explain to you before.

 

 

 

^For example, her face, equipment and clothes are actually less detailed in Shadow Of The Tomb Raider.

 

No. And I think we've thoroughly established your bias towards aliasing, higher contrast, and unrealistic lighting. **** is it more detailed. WTF are you talking about.

[WTF happened to Xbox? Where are the REAL exclusives? "Console" and "timed" aka FAKE exclusives are NOT enough.]

I didn't play Soul Reaver in the 90's, I remember playing Soul Reaver 2 and not liking it. So I couldn't really comment on that comparison before looking into it.

 

The PC is a straight port of the PS version. The two characters in the in-engine cutscene of that comparison are updated models, the game was released 6 months after the other versions. Most of the models in the game did not get an update, and the extra detail is not about PC performance. Soul Reaver is a terrible PC port.

 

DF Retro: Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver - A Classic Revisited on PS1/PC/Dreamcast!

 

Soul Reaver wasn't the best looking PC game of 1999. I notice you didn't decide to pick Quake III for comparison.

[WTF happened to Xbox? Where are the REAL exclusives? "Console" and "timed" aka FAKE exclusives are NOT enough.]

 

 

60fps is sacrificed to 30fps whoch is the catch bit that's how this cheat for performance vs fidelity is often granted.

 

30 frames per second is dog **** and massive cost to fidelity. You can take that out of the equation and you're still wrong.

 

 

 

Okay, I'm going to go a bit further with this I can literally see more detail, from pores on characters faces and threads on clothing in PS4 games on like Spider-Man, Uncharted 4 and God Of War than I can on any AAA multi-platform PC on ultra settings.

 

That's a stylistic choice to do with colour and contrast, not performance or optimisation. You are trying to say that these games look a lot better than other 2018 games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Hellblade, or Far Cry 5 on the Xbox One X and that's just not true. They look even better on the PC.

[WTF happened to Xbox? Where are the REAL exclusives? "Console" and "timed" aka FAKE exclusives are NOT enough.]

That's your opinion about the artistry of the game, not about the fidelity. It's not about optimisation. Consoles gain very little through optimisation to the GPU, they gain a lot for the CPU, even more before Vulkan and DX12, but the CPU is so under powered that it doesn't even compete with a mid range Intel CPU. You experience games differently on a console than a PC, you're further away from the screen, the FOV is wider.

 

I can say Deadfire is one of the best looking games I've ever played, I can say that about games on every generation of console, artistically but that's not the same as fidelity. In terms of fidelity PC is way ahead, it's not even close. In terms of artistry then that's just your opinion, and it has nothing to do wit the power or optimisation of the hardware. If you're suggesting the fidelity is better on consoles then that's just delusional because it's not even close.

[WTF happened to Xbox? Where are the REAL exclusives? "Console" and "timed" aka FAKE exclusives are NOT enough.]

I mean, we have yet to see a 4K game on PC which looks as good as a PS4 exclusive at 4K and even when it does, it lacks the higher quality animations and what not.

I just can't agree with you at all on that one.You contradict yourself in that sentence because you know that's not true. I'm not sure about the animations, you could argue there some of the best in the industry but I don't think you could argue they're a step above.

 

Pc will never have that, unfortunately. I mean, we can dream...

At certain times in the past the PC has been a cut above, UT/Quake, when 3DFx arrived, then Nvidia, Half-Life 2 animation quality and physics (could not run properly on consoles), Crysis (had to be cut considerably to run on consoles). Physics effects have always been a PC strong point because console CPUs have almost always been awful. There were definitely numerous games in the 90's and 00's that could only run on high end PCs, if they had ports they were stripped down and ****. Many mutli-platform games have high and ultra settings that have effects unavailable to consoles.

 

PC exclusives in terms of pushing graphics have been very few for a long time, exceptional gains in graphics architecture has not been there on PC or console for a decade. Metro: Exodus and Squadron 42 spring to mind as games on PC that will be far better. Real Time Ray Tracing is going to be revolutionary, but it's not going to be on console for a long time.

[Rumours about acquisition by Microsoft]

 

https://twitter.com/klobrille/status/1050655990385790976

 

I feel like an alien reading the replies.

 

As someone who's owned Sega, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft consoles over the years I don't understand the fanboys. Them talking about "Team Xbox" makes me sad, I hope they're wrong.

[WTF happened to Xbox? Where are the REAL exclusives? "Console" and "timed" aka FAKE exclusives are NOT enough.]

the fact that a "weak" console can run games that look as great as high-end pc's

That hasn't been possible for a very long time. Not since the 90's. Consoles really fell behind when the 360 was released. Just in terms of resolution and frame rate PC has been way ahead. Lets be realistic here, high GPUs have cost as much as consoles in that time as well. On PC you can either crank up our fps to 144+ or set it to 60 and play at 4K. Consoles targetted 30 for a long time. What may be confusing you is that exclusives obviously can't have PC comparisons, and artistry does not equal fidelity.