Topic: PC Gaming

@BruceCM
Ha! If only…

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/11/neo-the-world-ends-...

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/02/square-enix-admits-...

https://gamerant.com/square-enix-tomb-raider-sales-loss/

@JaxonH I said it before but I'll say it again: SE are morphing into the new Capcom with how much they want their games to sell. It's a niche series and yet they're saying it undersold? NO S***!

@Fizza
They just expect every game to do monstrous numbers. And with Octopath breaking 2m on Switch, that will be the expectation of Triangle Strategy. And if it fails to break 2m, they’ll say it “underperformed expectations” and hesitate green lighting another game in the series.

@JaxonH The end of the HD-2D series due to 'low sales'. What a terrible world that would be...

You guys talking about GOTG? The person who started the conversation must have me ignored/blocked so I can't see, but I remember recently seeing some articles about how they claimed it didn't meet expectations. That was another game I avoided because the combat seemed very unappealing, I picked it up when it went into a deep sale briefly and was very impressed (although the combat is about as messy as I thought it would be, thankfully you can just turn the difficulty right down to effectively skip those sections and enjoy the other parts). Oh and Kassandra has always been my biggest videogame crush ever and the fact lady Hellbender is just a big blue Kassandra awoke something within me. I only got like an hour or two though in before I got the itch for more Cyberpunk and started trying out Elden Ring. Will go back to the game though and finish it eventually, for sure.

Meanwhile in Australia it's not even available for pre-order. I think by the time this thing is readily available for me there will be other options on the table. Valve doesn't exist in a bubble, this thing runs custom silicon and has an aggressive price point but they're not the only ones who have access to better silicon.

I mean this thing is visually competitive with the PS4 with full x86, games not optimised for the specific hardware and often ontop of a compatibility layer. There's also no sneaky tricks here, no AI upscaling, no variable refresh rates. Just brute forcing PS4-like visuals and performance (although usually at a lower resolution) by having a higher spec.

If people thought a PS4-spec Switch hardware revision was not possible? I think Steam Deck should open their eyes. Because as people such as myself have been saying for a bit now, we're pretty close to that being possible. And if Valve can do it? Then there's nothing really stopping other companies. I wouldn't be surprised if demand for Steam Deck opens up this form factor. A couple of years from now we'll probably see companies like Asus and Dell giving it a spin

I think we're entering an entirely new era for portable gaming

@skywake
I certainly hope so.

I do think Valve has a distinct advantage though. Steamdeck is 1.8x as performant as Aya Neo Next, and that thing costs $1,500. Deck starts at $399. That said, Gabe Newell said that lower tier price was extremely painful, and they were absolutely determined to hit that price due to handheld market being more price sensitive. So I imagine they're taking a loss, and more or less breaking even on the mid tier model, and pocketing a small profit on the 512gb.

The fact they're a multibillion dollar business allows them to do that, whereas Aya and GPD can't. They'll be lucky to even price at $1,000 for comparable hardware.

That said, other larger businesses could perhaps hit lower price points, and that will become easier with each passing year as technology marches on.

But SteamOS is what gives this thing a fighting chance at reasonable battery life. The system level frame limiter and FSR option so players can render at 540p and upscale. And not having Windows bloat in the background. There may be some efficiency lost in the compatibility layer but, at least from what we've seen, it's not much.

Either way, we are entering a new era. Switch 2 will be out in about 24 months by my estimation, and should hit right around the ballpark of base PS4 graphics at 720p like Steamdeck (it likely won't be quite as powerful, but thanks to being a closed system games will run more efficiently, as they do on Switch).

And at that point, Deck 2 should be releasing as well, shrinking the size a bit, increasing the battery life a bit, juicing a little more power from newer chips...

With or without other companies, that alone is enough to excite me.

Hmm, well, I remember them saying Bravely Default 2 had surpassed 1m, @JaxonH ..... It'd very nearly reached that on Switch before they did the Steam version, iirc We'll have to see about Triangle Strategy but I'll remain hopeful for now! Almost anything sells pretty well on Switch, though

Since I am almost done with Cyberpunk 2077 and have a few weeks until Wonderlands, I have been looking around for something to fill the gap. I started playing Elex as the sequel came out recently and man, that is like the Eurojank Elden Ring, before Elden Ring even existed.

If you love Elden Ring, you'll love Elex.

It has quests like "just speak to people in town, they'll give you a quest eventually and if you eventually do enough quests we'll let you progress the story I guess".

And then when you finally get an actual quest marked on the map and go there, for some reason every enemy is way above your level, you can literally do no damage to them at all and they can all two hit you.

Never have I felt so lost, right at the start of a game before.

So I rolled credits on Cyberpunk 2077. Think it took me around 60 hours. Probably closer to 90 when you cover this playthrough and the playthrough I started around launch when the game was so bad I abandoned it, but still not so bad I didn't end up playing over 20 hours.

I hadn't finished everything, but most stuff. Went for the Panam Temperance ending, even though it kinda pushes against the way the game is trying to naturally go. I was still mostly happy with where everything landed. And honestly, I enjoyed my time overall.

The game reminds me a lot of last year's Biomutant. I regard Biomutant as one of the best games of 2021, while also recognising that by conventional metrics, Biomutant is not what you'd classically call a "good game".

Biomutant was carried mostly by it's world, it's loot and it's crafting system. But in reality it was a static, cardboard, game. Reused assets and barely realised loops, held together by duck tape. The plastic backdrop to a chain of unfinished questlines that felt like placeholders.

That is Cyberpunk 2077, too. Even all these years later, all these patches later, Cyberpunk 2077 still feels more like an early access title, than something truly finished. Especially if you have the context of all the things the game was promised to be. Especially if you regard the sheer amount of bugs and glitches the game still has today.

Night City is a drug. Whenever I stopped playing Cyberpunk 2077. It was like I was on a comedown. I was always chasing my next escape from reality, back to Night City. From a visual standpoint I think it is one of the greatest achievements in gaming. Despite being a few years on now, I still think it is one of the few games that looks truly next gen. Helped especially I think by a lighting engine, which even without raytracing, feels years ahead of itself.

But the reality is that Night City is a movie set. Like one of those old western towns where you'd walk around the back and everything is a cut out. Get up close and Night City is a space of locked doors, inaccessible areas and broken promises. Plenty to admire from afar, but get in too close, and all the corners cut, all the unrealised ideas and unfinished concepts stand out centre stage.

Even now, the cities inhabitants barely function, too. Bumbling around before you, trapped in endless pathing circles, looking for life.

Whereas you might argue the best open world games allow you to pick a point on a horizon, say "I want to go there" and then you can, in Cyberpunk half the time you can't even get there and even if you can... you'll find a space still waiting to be fully programmed and maybe some sort of awful hat, that buffs your stats and makes you look like a clown. Thankfully you never see your character outside of menus, photo mode and one cut scene at the end...

Yet as you constantly bang head first against code that feels practically duck taped together and the overwhelming disappointment of just how far short this game falls from the game it was hyped to be, magic happens. It isn't the next evolution of the open world, it isn't the next evolution of RPGs... hell, it is barely an RPG at all. It is a Eurojank Far Cry and it's a damn fun Eurojank Far Cry.

Filled to the brim with awesome vehicles - that still all mostly handle like ass, even with the improved driving physics. And a surprisingly large arsenal of weapons across ranged, melee, novel and cybernetic enhancements. The weapons all follow a fairly narrow template of archetypes, but almost everything just feels so ***** good to use. From insanely overpowered katanas, to pistols shooting around walls, to meaty point blank to shotguns, to tossing poison daggers with stylish flourishes, to crazy cybernetic wire to beating a guy to death with a... pleasure wand.... ahem, I looked forward to every new combat encounter and all the various options I had to cause utter ***** mayhem.

Is the game ***** busted from a stealth perspective? Yup. They counteract the terrible AI by giving them effectively superhuman senses, but it is just way more fun to kick down the door and come blasting through as a God of Death, anyway. And this is all supported from a still somewhat wonkily balanced and oddly placed skill system, to really finetune how you want to murder lots of people as V preaches about how killing is bad or whatever with no control over it.

While the story is this confused, fragmented, convoluted mess, bending to present a story that is both time sensitive without making the player feel like they have to make any real meaningful choices at all, it is carried so utterly by the voice acting and animation. You may be constantly enraged at all of the smoke and mirror dialogue choices, the fact that V seems to be stuck in this weird in between dead zone between being their own defined character and an agent for the player. Like they designed a Mass Effect style balance of giving you distinct versions of the protagonist you could choose to play as, but they simply didn't finish anything but the neutral options. But the characters are just so well performed, so well written, so well realised, you mostly mourn your lack of agency because it is so good you want to be able to engage with these characters on a deeper level.

I dunno how to end this long rambly post. I guess I'm just gonna have to go back and take on last ride one Jackie's Arch. Uninstall the game and try and find something to fill this Cyberpunk 2077 shaped void that is now in my life.

Picked up WWE 2K22 on Friday for a bit of a laugh. Ironically, it might be my favourite game of the year so far. It is undeniably niche, and in some regards even maybe slightly crude and dated feeling. Like I dunno, it just all has a very double AA Euroness to it, with polish not being consistent across the board. However, as someone who grew up with late 90s/early 00s wrestling games, this just really hits right for me.

I think what really helps the game - and here he goes again - it has this super granular difficulty suite. When I first started playing, I didn't really know how I felt about the game. Mostly just shocked at how ***** terrible I was at it. The game exists in a sort of weird space between out and out arcade and something more simulated.

This resulted in some honestly kinda clunky, kinda awkward, controls.

Like this weird guess the input minigame or the incredibly sensitive finisher system, which requires you to be in exactly the right place. Even on easy, I initially found I would dominate the first half of the match, but then the computer would trap me in these endless strings of combos I was just never able to get out of and I would lose, like fighting a 14 year old on an online fighting game who would just stun lock you in the corner. Very frustrating.

But as I have gone through my career mode, I have been tweaking all the various values so the game feels balanced, fair, fun and challenging for my skill level. Things like giving me more opportunities to counter, turning down the amount of damage the enemies moves do, turning down how long I stay on the mat before I can get back up etc I am still very much still going through tweaking everything, it is probably more on the easy end, but God do I wish every game was like this.

The career mode is honestly a real surprise, too. Again, while still very much like the career modes from the early 00s WWE games, with very little innovation at all (in fact, in some regards, maybe even some regression with how so much of the career mode takes place over this weird like internal social network between the wrestlers) but the tone of the career mode is really what surprised me. WWE is notorious for being this sort of weird, gated, cult where it seems like it is kind of ashamed of itself. But here the campaign really embraces like indie wrestling, a promotion that seems very akin to New Japan, you get to wrestle in like Mexico, wrestling is talked about as wrestling. This feels more like a proper fan made game than I really expected. This isn't some sanitised, WWE SUPERSTARS ARE THE KING OF SPORTS ENTERTAINMENT *****.

Oh and blood is back too, and I guess if wrestlers have low resilience, they bust open very easy. I picked the technician class, but actually ended up really making more of a striker moveset. Lots of knee strikes and roaring elbows, and ***** I bust open almost every person I face lol. It is cool too, because at least to some degree, I think the bleeding is contextual - like in one match when I smashed someone with a chair, the blood was coming directly from the centre of their forehead, however, when I stomped a guy, it seemed to be coming to the side, from above their eye. Just a nice little touch.

Oh and the commentary seems better than I remember, too. I guess because a lot of the story lines are heavily scripted with you required to do certain things in matches to trigger cut scenes and events, this allows them to record more stuff, as the events are fixed. But even when it comes to just generally giving like a play by play, the commentary is surprisingly great.

My maybe one big warning right now outside of the general nicheness, is that right now there is an absolutely mind blowing level of customisation just included within the game. From your appearance, gear, move set (and like there are like 100 different contextual changes you can make), entrance, body language, victory stuff - it is ***** amazing, to be honest.

The problem is, at least right now on PC, the game seems to hard crash quite regularly for seemingly no reason at all. A couple of hard crashes I lost nothing at all, but twice I have lost about an hour plus of customisation with the game just hard crashing and nothing being saved. I have since learned to save with every change and since I enjoy this stuff, I kinda just rolled with it - the second time is obviously much faster - but I have hard crashed maybe six times in eight hours? That suggests the game is seriously unstable. So maybe wait for a patch if you are thinking about it.

Is it a lot better than WWE2k2020, @Pizzamorg ....? Which I only got when the ultimate or whatever it was called version was about 80% off, so I certainly won't get the latest 1 until it's discounted a lot

I feel like most things are better than 2K2020 as that game was ***** broken lol.

I can see 2K22 splitting the fanbase a lot, some will - and I'd argue in some regards, rightly - be somewhat disappointed with what 2k22 offers, since they took time away and delivered a game which still lacks a lot of things that were in previous titles and hasn't really innovated on anything it has chosen to include.

However, I am a firm believer that innovation isn't always good, change for the sake of change is usually always misguided. If it works, sometimes it is best to leave it alone. That is probably more difficult to argue when the game feels like it is basically like 20 years old lol but there are some who will enjoy this just for what it is, and I don't think that is wrong necessarily.

However, I think there will be others who out of principle will say they should have taken even more time away and I don't really disagree with these people either.

Well, I hadn't played any WWE before the 2020 1, so I wouldn't compare it to any others, @Pizzamorg .... Hearing mostly good things about this latest one, though, so far!

I guess I just want to make sure that I am setting people's expectations right, if there is any chance I influence anyone into a purchase. Despite my reputation on here, as long as a game is fun, I have a pretty high tolerance for things. By conventional metrics 2K22 is a less than great game, but it is fun, so I feel like it really offsets it's own not so good parts.

And I think a certain amount of expectation still works in the games favour, like the game is surprisingly content rich and lacking in the kind of predatory, cynical, monetisation one might expect. You can literally spend all day in the customisation if you wanted and while there are some DLC packs, the sheer volume of stuff you have means you'll never need to go there if you want and it is never pushed in your face. Maybe that is a low bar, but it is the bar we have.

And like I say, the granular difficulty options are ***** huge, too. Like literally anyone with the smallest amount of interest in this will probably have fun with it, because rather than having some edgelord director deciding for you what equates as a challenge, here you have the freedom to make it as challenging or easy as you want in ways that are specifically tailored for you as a player. This is why the initially somewhat clunky, somewhat convoluted control scheme, makes sense. It exists between arcade and simulation, because it needs to meet different functions depending how you tune the game for yourself. Just an absolute gold standard.

Yeah, I'm not a serious wrestling fan to be too concerned about who they've got in or anything like that, @Pizzamorg .... By the time I got the 1 I have, they'd addressed the worst issues it launched with &, as it was so discounted, I got the 'ultimate' version, with all the dlc! I certainly won't be getting this until it's got a good discount, either but the people that are playing it in my other forum say it's pretty good, so that's encouraging

The Azeron Cyborg

It's arrived...

Spent a day setting it up, using the included tool to customize it to my hand perfectly (adjusted distance away of each tower, angle between towers, tilt of towers, put a restrictor ring on the analog to minimize required movement range, calibrated analog, mapped keyboard keys to the keypads for all keys my mouse doesn't already do with buttons, etc), then spent a day playing Gears 5 with it.

And oh ya. This thing is every bit as good as I'd hoped. It's so ergonomic and incredibly fast and easy to perform in game actions now without worrying about a keyboard.

It also stores 2 profiles on board so you don't need the software running. I made them identical except Profile#1 uses Xbox360 analog, while Profile#2 uses 8-direction WASD keyboard mapped to analog. That way if a game supports true analog and mouse simultaneously, I can use Xbox360 analog, and if not, or if it causes button prompts to flicker back and forth, I just use the 8 direction, which honestly feels almost just as good. It's the action of using an analog that makes the difference, versus using 3 fingers on 4 keys.

Muah! Highly recommend. It may look odd, but this thing is designed ground up for gaming unlike the 100-year-old typewriter design.

@JaxonH It's a little off topic but that is an absolutely sick gaming room. Blurred out, yes, but it appears very well organised, and with lots of steelbooks to boot. I'm super jealous of the Xenoblade vinyl!

I am really happy to say Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is my game of the year so far. I was kinda worried we'd have another Outriders on our hands, but TTW really hits. I haven't even made it to end game yet, either.

It is funny because Borderlands sorta started the modern wave of looter shooters, but yet there is still nothing quite like a Borderlands game. As all other looters throttle the player at every turn in the name of some abstract "balance", Borderlands games actively encourage you to push against them as hard as you can, to see if you can make it break. I think a looter should always be about investing time into your character to feel overpowered by the end, but really only Borderlands allows you to actually do that.

I won't argue it is a perfect game - it is very much built on a Borderlands 3 foundation, so if you didn't like that game, you probably won't like this. I will say, I do feel like I liked Borderlands 3 more than most based on the common narratives I see online, but even I am a little tired of the antiquated map and UI.

The map is a little less frustrating to use than it was in Borderlands 3 as spaces aren't being designed around vehicles this time, but it is still ***** horrible by all other metrics. And if anything I think the UI seems worse than I remember. Like you are showered in loot, given these wall of stats and not even a base foundation of knowledge to be able to translate the information you are given. I will often get loot which looks like a clear upgrade until I use it and for some reason it is worse and I never get to understand why.

I will also say, it is certainly more than just a reskin of Borderlands 3, for sure, but if someone told me this was an expansion for Borderlands 3 that late in development they decided to expand this into a full game, I would believe them.

Like I say, for me, this isn't really a problem but if people felt like Wonderlands wasn't a meaningful step forward for the franchise, I wouldn't necessarily say those concerns are invalid here. Like most of the changes are just smoke and mirrors and window dressing, the moment to moment is pretty much identical to Borderlands 3 for good or for bad. You might think with like the addition of spells, or new gear types etc, it will open up new mechanics or loops, but fundamentally it really doesn't.

Again, not a problem for me but I think worth keeping in mind if you still exist in the nostalgia universe where you think Borderlands 2 is the height of the franchise, I am not sure Wonderlands will change your mind if Borderlands 3 didn't. But if you loved B3 then there is almost no reason why you wouldn't love this.

Oh and on the topic of looters, looks like Division 2 is finally getting new content, a PTS drops today in fact!

@TheJGG
Wow, you have a seriously sharp eye!

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