What are you Playing Now? - Video games are bad for you? That's what they said about rock-n-roll

[Malcador]

Playing Venetica as I got it for free a while back.  It's ok, I guess.  Sort of a pain to play with, the quest system is wonky and the combat is just plaing boring.  But the story isn't too bad and the game world is interesting. Is funny that they never mention how to upgrade your special weapon, unless you just wander around and check everywhere in the city, which is confusing as hell to navigate.

Suitably jank as well, the first boss I fought has a mechanic that didn't trigger preventing me from killing her.

[majestic]

19 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Some friends wanted me to play PoE2 with them, but I've been taking a stronger and stronger stance against roguelikes and games with any significant amount of procedural generation as of late. Just can't be bothered to play games that don't have well-defined endings these days.

I have to admit that I like Diablo IV's seasons precisely because they have well defined "endings" - there's always a given set of tasks to do, and once you've done them all, you can of course still keep playing to push the boundaries of the endgame content, but for me it's sufficient to have done all the tasks and have gotten all the rewards possible. I have no idea what Path of Exile 2 is going to do for its endgame, but if it is similar to the first game there is going to be a goal to work towards in every season.

Plus probably loads of procedurally generated endgame content that really never stops. I tend to not be interested in those unless they offer a sufficiently fun competitive element or they're part of a list of a checklist to tick off.

But I can see why. I had a phase where I tried every roguelike I came across and spent a lot of time with them (like the hundreds of hours I have invested in FTL and Dead Cells) and I really burned out on the gameplay elements that are common to them all. ARPGs don't bother me in the same way though, as its just the maps that are generated procedurally in many of them (Grim Dawn didn't even do that).

On 12/7/2024 at 4:02 PM, MrBrown said:

Seems ok so far. They've definitely moved a bit away from what PoE1 was, to a more souls-like approach I guess? Instead of building up 1 skill to spam all the time, you actually have to think what skills to use.

And the campaign seems tougher. That can certainly make the first run through the campaign interesting, but not sure what it does for game longevity. PoE1, like most diablo-clones, mostly works on the long term because of the end-game, and you don't really want to replay the same campaign through every season. So it's either a skipping option, or rushing through it, and this doesn't look like something you can rush through.

Maybe they already have a solution for this, I haven't followed any of the news about the game.

Yeah, I don't see how there's going to be much of an appeal to go through the content every time a new season starts. The gameplay seems deliberately slower even when it is working and the servers aren't dropping your inputs (in addition to button presses not doing anything, in this case they clearly worked because I could see the cooldown on my skill, but it never got cast), and even some of the regular enemies need to be properly prioritized and anything that's more than a regular monster has attack patterns to dodge.

While I think soulslike is being applied to way too much nowadays, in this case it's quite correct. It does have a slower gameplay pace, very deliberate casting of skills that lock you into their casting animation and you need to properly read boss attacks and dodge accordingly. It's certainly an interesting choice, and not a game to boot up to faceroll through monster hordes to blow off steam after an annoying day at work.

Edited December 8 by majestic

[LadyCrimson]

I spent a lot of time, for a while, on Path of Exile 1 (from the original beta period onward). Gave them a lot of cash (stashstashstash and pets). I haven't touched it in some years. I was mildly keeping an eye on PoE2, but from what I've seen I think I shall pass. That passive skilltree and their constant chr. resets (that applied even to non-seasonal/don't care about seasons, chrs) so you'd have to redo it (and no wholesale respec feature) - had enough of that routine.
================

Anyway, right now it's not "what I am playing" but "what I am downloading."
If I didn't have fiber net, Indy is not a game I'd want to put up with to download. Even with fiber net, because Steam sometimes is 30-50% slower than our "potential max", it's still 30-ish minutes. WAHHH. Gimmie my full speed, Steam, you wankers.

*me playing microscopic sad violin for spoiled, short-attention-span brains*

 

...of course I'm joking. Mostly I'm still worried about it installing/compiling/starting properly. Cross fingers.

Edited December 9 by LadyCrimson

[LadyCrimson]

Ok, I spent my first hour trying settings on the Indy game etc. Here is my very early performance take, with only the mandatory global illumination/not full ray tracing: (2080ti/9900k/32systemram)
EDIT: oh, for whatever reason, despite seeing posts to the contrary, I had zero shader compilation etc steps. It just fired up/went to menu. Maybe it just did it super fast in my case. Or maybe because I don't allow Steam itself to do any caching (steam setting unchecked) - I let the gpu do it.

---the "texture pool size" is the main vram controller. If you have an 8gb vram gpu, I'm going to guess that one would need/want that on "Low".
---Since I have 11vram, the game likes to use about 8-8.5vram of it with texture pool at Low, mostly medium settings, DLSS-quality. If I up texture pool to Medium, all other settings the same, that goes up to 9-9.5. I do not know if this will increase later/other areas in the game. If I put it to High, 10+gb and game wanted to warn me I was being stupid.
---the settings I'm using, if one is interested: (4k/55" TV being used) in this image   Motion Blur is totally off, btw, there's two separate setting lines for it. >.>
---altering resolution (I tried native and dlss 1440 as well as 4k) did little re: vram usage, mostly only FPS. Maybe 1gb less vram. Upping certain other settings (shadows, reflections, global illumination etc) will affect vram used a fair bit taken together, so the lower the texture pool size, the higher you can put those types of settings.
---fps for me at dlss-4k is the usual "mostly 60 but I'm sure areas/moments will drop to 50". I did try native 4k, that dropped fps by 10 or so, average.
---fps at 1440 with the same settings in the linked image gained me maybe 15-25fps (depending if dlss on or off) but vram usage remained close to same.

To be honest, the difference between "low" and "medium" texture pool size, visually, wasn't all that noticeable. I suppose some tree leaves looked slightly less crisp. So for those of us that don't have 16-24 VRAM, may as well leave that one at "low" - it's not going to look super better at Medium. High did start to look sharper/cleaner, a little. That said, it still looks good/fine, imo. Faces and rocks don't get low-res fuzzy or anything.

Edited December 9 by LadyCrimson

[Bartimaeus]

I might've said this before, but I was always of the opinion that characters/creatures should be the very last thing that should have their level of detail decreased relative to everything else, and that quality settings that don't take this into account are dumb.

Edited December 9 by Bartimaeus

[LadyCrimson]

Spent another hour fiddling with the Indy game, along with a small story progression. I definitely think one gets more visual "showcasing" by leaving texture pool size Low and upping other things as much as you can, instead. I also tried turning pathtracing (full RT) on for lol's. DLSS-balanced/same settings = 25fps, haha, yeah, no thank you. Not even that different. I read posts saying that 8gb gpu's won't even have the path-tracing option active/usable, but dunno.

Gameplay - game said "best with controller!" so I'm trying that first. It feels ok. Not great, a little clunky at times, but ok. Npc's/Indy cycling of flavor or hint dialogues as I admire/wander  surroundings vs. rush to advance, became tiring almost immediately. It's the rate/speed of repetition. Over and over. You have the usual jump/climb/hang and lift/move/grab type controls. 1st person punching is ok. Throwing things you pick up at people is often amusing (see dunkey video if you want a slapstick guffaw).

But world detail to admire is very good, has nice movie tie-ins/nods here and there, Indy-fans will definitely love the game for that.

Edited December 9 by LadyCrimson

[Wormerine]

23 minutes ago, LadyCrimson said:

Spent another hour fiddling with the Indy game, along with a small story progression. I definitely think one gets more visual "showcasing" by leaving texture pool size Low and upping other things as much as you can, instead. I also tried turning pathtracing (full RT) on for lol's. DLSS-balanced/same settings = 25fps, haha, yeah, no thank you. Not even that different. I read posts saying that 8gb gpu's won't even have the path-tracing option active/usable, but dunno.

Yeah according to digital foundry, while the game does require RT, it is pretty well put together otherwise. According to them texture resolution is precisely what you should tweak depending on your vRAM (for 8GB they recommend Medium for 1080p, and Low for 1440p). On lower spec machines they recommend lowering Shadowns to Medium and hair to Low.

[Sven_]

NOT YET, but I've decided to buy my first ever new GPU since 2017.... and play Indy as well. The Dishonored comparisons finally sold it to me... Also, the RT requirements may look steep -- until you realize that even a crap RTX 3050 applies (not gonna buy it, I'll go with a 12GB one). And even Ryzen 3 and Core i3 Cpus are fine.


Now as to the puzzles, wish me luck. I'm a bit unsure, not expecting too much, just a few varied tasks. Games such as Kingdom Come, Stalker, Elden Ring even Zelda would never make it with one of the major Northern American industry players and publishers. They seem to have "perfected" the arts of playtesting truly.  Was watching Gamespot's "The redesign that saved Deathloop" feature on YT and afterwards wanted to hang myself. Not only because of the feedback they got (some testers found the very idea of figuring things out to be... TEDIOUS!). But because it apparently lead Deathloop to be the numbing and repetitive "go here and do this" kind of game it's become -- including spoiling step by step the actual loop, which is basically the core idea of the game's entire concept... It's as if Hollywood were to screentest every single Nolan movie way in advance -- and react to that by cutting say Memento into chronological order so that everybody in the room would finally "get it" (including the dude who's not interested and plays on his smartphone). Biggest cancer in game biz, end of.

How Playtesting can Make your Game Bland - Polydin

Edited December 9 by Sven_

[HoonDing]

My computer is good enough, but recently getting a NVMe SSD really opened my eyes.

[Wormerine]

16 minutes ago, HoonDing said:

My computer is good enough, but recently getting a NVMe SSD really opened my eyes.

Oh, is it worth it? I have a freeslot for NVMe that I haven't filled yet. To be frank, I can't complain about speed load of my classic SSD, so I have been hesitant in upgrading.

[HoonDing]

It got me <1s loading times in Skyfield and solved all my audio lag issues.

Also helped with DirectStorage of Forspoken

[majestic]

You also boot into your operating system of choice within five seconds of pressing the power button on your computer (unless your system spends a lot of time POSTing). PCIE 4.0 NVME SSDs are noticably better than PCIE 3.0 ones, while PCIE 5.0 ones have pretty steep cooling requirements and offer no real improvement over 4.0 ones in everyday use due to having similar performance for random reads and writes.

[HoonDing]

Eh, so what's the point of ray tracing exactly? It just halves my fps in exchange for a cartoony look.

[LadyCrimson]

1 hour ago, HoonDing said:

Eh, so what's the point of ray tracing exactly? It just halves my fps in exchange for a cartoony look.

To sell gpu's and games, of course. 

I'm not sure what you mean by cartoony look tho. From what I've seen that doesn't occur. It's just for people who think hyper-realistic shadowing, surface/directional reflections, lighting/lighting movement/cycles, fog/particles sun/god rays and all of that enhance their "immersion." 

When I tried turning all the pathtracing stuff on, in this game there's not a huge difference. I mean sure the sun rays through windows, reflections on glass, some shadowing was enhanced, not trying to say there was zero difference, but it wasn't "OOOHHHH WOWWWW". Cyberpunk was better in that regard, imo. In Indy, the base global illumination is already pretty decent.

Of course, the fact they're using RT global illumination (remember this is "separate" from full ray/path tracing) may be part of the reason. The RT-GI already gives a little boost to lighting, sun rays filtering through windows etc, so full pathtracing is less dramatic in some ways. Maybe. I'm theorizing, not a gpu tech.

I don't feel like the RT-GI hindered my FPS at all. I've played some newer games without any RT that were a little harder on the FPS than this one. It's just the VRAM issue and can't use the vaunted 1080 anymore.

EDIT: oh, also, the game engine itself may be a performance factor. It is not using Unreal 4/5, something else, maybe it's easier to optimize.

Edited December 9 by LadyCrimson

[Sven_]

RTX 3060 / 12GB + Indy = 350 bucks

RTX 4070 / 12 GB + Indy = 540 bucks (Indy included for free in a special Nvidia offer)...

 

Then again, the last GPU I spent more than 400 bucks on (Deutsche Mark back then) was my first ever 3d accelerator card, a MiroHiscore 3dfx Voodoo1 with a whopping 6 megs of VRAM. That think cut through Baldur's Gate as nicely as Sarevok cut through Gorion (not that BG shipped with any 3d features to show).  

Edited December 9 by Sven_

[Lexx]

Went approx 1 hour into Indy. So far not bad, will continue. Animations in cutscenes feel a bit janky at times, but oh well. Other than that, getting a bit of a Deus Ex-y exploration vibe so far. Hoping this continues for the rest of the game.

[LadyCrimson]

^ I tried to push forward re: the adventuring. Note: I have it on easy combat mode but less easy puzzling, whatever that means. I have yet to get to any puzzles, initial steps feel the usual elongated tutorial/get familiar phase.

The manual checkpoint seems overall ok (even tho I dislike such), although what it means is I'm constantly watching for the corner save-hat symbol, or checking main menu to see how long it's been since last checkpoint-save, and then pondering if I want to continue or stop.

I'd say I like the game so far but it's not really grabbing me in the sense I'd want to "binge play". Although I do like looking in nooks and side rooms for the occasional loot - eg, first play there's a tiny bit of "fear" of missing some important side-loot (like the point-giving books) which helps inspire looking around. I kinda want to look up whether I'm wasting my time or not tho...

EDIT: forgot. It seemed that when I died (jumped off a ledge, game didn't like it), when respawned at checkpoint, I had full health again. Probably by design (or the modes I selected) but I kind of wish it didn't.

Edited December 10 by LadyCrimson

[BruceVC]

7 hours ago, Sven_ said:

RTX 3060 / 12GB + Indy = 350 bucks

RTX 4070 / 12 GB + Indy = 540 bucks (Indy included for free in a special Nvidia offer)...

 

Then again, the last GPU I spent more than 400 bucks on (Deutsche Mark back then) was my first ever 3d accelerator card, a MiroHiscore 3dfx Voodoo1 with a whopping 6 megs of VRAM. That think cut through Baldur's Gate as nicely as Sarevok cut through Gorion (not that BG shipped with any 3d features to show).  

Is that price in dollars or Euros?

[Humanoid]

I was doubting that any place that uses a non-dollar currency would use the colloquial term "bucks" for their money, but then Wikipedia told me that South Africa does indeed do that. 

EDIT: I now have the inverse question on whether places like Singapore and Hong Kong ever call their dollars bucks.

Edited December 10 by Humanoid

[Sven_]

3 hours ago, BruceVC said:

Is that price in dollars or Euros?

Yeah, it's in Euro, sorry!  Prices have actually gone up a bit, just in time for Christmas. I was looking for them on a German site for deals / price comparison in Germany (the most common ones are probably Geizhals.de (that's literally cheapskate) and Idealo.de). Oh, forgot to say: The Indy Nvidia deal is only for RTX 4070 cards and up! The RTX 3060 costs ~280 Euro, the game 70, so that's 350 TOTAL.  The 540 for the RTX 4070 would be the regular price for the card plus the game bundled with it.


@Humanoid I was actually under the impression that the term "bucks" would be used anywhere, e.g. just common English language slang (British, American, whathaveyou). Can't tell naturally, as I'm not a native speaker. Picked it up someplace and rolled with it. May actually have been here, dunno!  And if it wasn't, it must have been from Al Bundy (Married With Children legend and TV's last ever American action hero). 

Edited December 10 by Sven_

[melkathi]

Bucks is usually (US)Dollars.

Quid is GB Pound.

 

Edited December 10 by melkathi

[LadyCrimson]

Indy Game:

---"Take photos with this camera" oh god, I have never liked this in any game.
---find the thingies, get camera icon prompts, try to take picture. "Need better angle"
---move about, zoom camera in and out, taking 30 photos of the thing. Eventually seems successful.
---Look at quest log book - still says 0/4 photos needed. Try another spot/location. Same result.Yes I am certain I am pointing the camera at the correct item (I looked it up).
---Don't know if it's my stupid brain or a bug. There have been posts regarding some photo-mission bugs/soft-locks for some people - I guess there will be more.

Quit game.

Also, so far, Tombraider adventure vibe it is definitely not. Edit: it feels much ... lighter. Modern audience, cinema into a game, adventure. Whether that's good or bad is YMMV. I think I'm neutral.

Edited December 10 by LadyCrimson

[Bartimaeus]

Zelda: Breath of the Wild had 395 different bugs, animals, monsters, and items that you needed to take pictures of to fill out your knowledge compendium thingy. Or you could just pay an obscene amount of money to have the game automatically fill them out with pictures the devs took for you. I took exactly one picture during my whole playthrough of that game.

Edited December 10 by Bartimaeus

[LadyCrimson]

14 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

to fill out your knowledge compendium thingy.

Difference here is as far as I can tell, this is the main quest. If I can't get it to work, I can't progress. >.>

[Bartimaeus]

1 hour ago, LadyCrimson said:

Difference here is as far as I can tell, this is the main quest. If I can't get it to work, I can't progress. >.>

Thank goodness for refunds...