Comments 877

Re: Hitman 3 Recovers Its Development Costs Within A Week

Kirgo

@Ganner
I am not entirely sure what you mean.
Knowing whether a game "sold well" or even an exect number is just giving less information, as we still don't know if it was really successful relative to the development cost.

Saying that they already got their dev costs back in gives a better view on how commercially successful it is.

This is especially interesting in this case, since IO Interactive was left by their publisher after Hitman (2016) because of its commercial failure, which in turn got the company in financial trouble.
IO Interactive, now self publishing, being so successful is just very good news for the future of the franchise and the company behind it.

Re: Review: Hitman 3 - Cloud Version - Not Perfect, But Perfectly Playable

Kirgo

@nimnio
I don't really understand where you see such a huge difference in convenience between Switch and either cloud gaming or PC.
I mean I severly dislike cloud gaming myself, but that reason seems strange to me.

As for PC gaming:

Patches are being downloaded automatically, just like on Switch.

"Store Fronts" and "Downloaders" are the same argument, and even if you just use Steam for everything, you have a much much bigger library than any console still without this "problem", though more options should usually be a pro, not a con anyway.

You mentioning mods just confuses me. You don't need them if you don't want them, they just give more options and can be just ignored?

Crashes, maybe. But this kind of stuff happens so rarely...
Also consoles are not crash free either, in my experience.

Configuration is also entirely unnecessary if you don't care to get the optimum. Also takes about 5 minutes per game, once.

Sorry, I normally really don't want to start a "PC vs console" discussion but these arguments baffle me a bit.
Portability, exclusives... Those arguments I understand very well.

Re: Video: Digital Foundry's Technical Analysis Of DOOM Eternal On Switch

Kirgo

@nessisonett
I get that games. like the ones you have listed, would be held back by the Switch hardware, but the fact still remains that you could port all of this.
I mean, I get it, I mainly use a gaming PC myself, but most of the games you are listing would not even be too much of a problem for the Switch hardware.
I mean, EVE online? Reallly?? A game from 2003?

Europa Universalis 4 as well, sure it would be slow on Switch, but for many people it wouldn't be unplayable.
The PC version of the game can already run with just 4gb of RAM, though it isn't recommended, but it would not be too much of a problem to get this game on the Switch.

Final Fantasy 14 not only runs on a PS3, it also has very low system requirements if you just turn the graphics down on the PC version. There is no way this game wouldn't be able to run on a Switch.
Sure some of the more recent parts of the game could be a bigger problem, but especially MMOs like this are usually made with weaker hardware in mind, so that they don't lose paying customers.
I highly doubt this couldn't run on a Switch.

The only game you listed were I genuinly see big problems on the horizon are modern Total War games.

The big problem I see for some games are the controls, as some should be played with keyboard and mouse, especially said Total War (just the thought of playing this with a controller... D: ).
That is a general console problem though.

At the end of day, sure, all of those games would be better, maybe much better, on a different system but the point was that you COULD port everything and imo that is true apart from a few exceptions.
Wether you think these games would be so much worse that you wouldn't want to play them is subjective. Also keep in mind that there are people who only play on Switch or want to play on the go. Sacrifices, even big ones, can be worth it for them.

Re: Random: Pokémon Red Is Being Played Inside Someone's Avatar On Twitter

Kirgo

@Deltarogue
I don't know if there are things about Twitter that make this harder than necessary, but my first idea would be something like this:

Let an emulator with Pokemon Red run in background and run a script on your computer doing the following things (obviously not actual code, just to make the idea clear):
1: Open up twitter page in text form.
2: Count how many times certain words have been used (with rules like "only one per post"), like "Up" or "Down".
3: "press" corresponding button command on emulator.
4: Take screenshot
5: Upload screenshot via URL as profile picture (whether this is easy or not depends on Twitter)
6: Delete all comments on Twitter account via URLs as well.
6: Wait 15 seconds
7: Repeat from step one.

How easy it is depends mainly on how easily Twitter can be accessed like that, I think, especially considering security measures.
Details change according to that, which is why those lines I wrote lack details on what to do.

At least that would be my first idea, without having much thought put into it.
Though I do feel like I am forgetting something...

Re: Frame Rate And Resolution For Monster Hunter Rise Demo Revealed

Kirgo

@anoyonmus
I will never be able to understand how Monster Hunter combat can be considered "clunky".
Yes, you absolutely have to get used to it, but that is simply because it is different from most other games.
It is practically impossible to be good at it from the first second on because of that.

But, if a combat system that gives me so much control and just works so incredibly well with many different playstyles then I vastly prefer "clunky" combat over everything else.

Easily my favourite combat system of any game I have ever played, and I have played a LOT over the years.

Re: Capcom To Share "Brand-New Information" About Monster Hunter Rise This Month

Kirgo

@Yosher
I agree with @JaxonH on everything.
I don't think I have ever met a single person who didn't have a hard time getting into Monster Hunter, no matter how much they love the series now.

Combat system is probably the key... If you think about it, even something as simple as the fact that you have to sheath your weapon all the time during combat, which a new player probably won't do very much, is already unusual. This isn't too big of a deal for some weapons but a massive problem for other weapons.

I think weapon tutorials of Gaijin Hunter or Arekkz Gaming might be able to help a lot as well.
Not to learn every move, that might be going a bit far for starters (they will be outdated for Rise anyway...), getting a basic understanding of how a weapon is supposed to work is what you might get from them though.

Playstyle differs massively from weapon type to weapon type,
so finding the weapon you are most comfortable with should be step one.

As an example just how greatly different weapons can be:
Greatsword: hit and run weapon, you run around wait for an opening -> attack -> run away again
Lance: You try to always stay directly in the face of the monster, constantly attacking while blocking, or better countering everything the monster throws at you.

These are of course very much simplified descriptions of these two weapons. But on this very basic level they are already fundamentally different.

Re: Monster Hunter Movie's Chinese Premiere Reportedly Cancelled Due To Racist Joke

Kirgo

Let's be honest, there are common jokes about pretty much any country and any group of people and that has always been the case.
I am german and there are about a million jokes about germany and specifically the german language. However, I have never felt offended by any of them.
We are making jokes about ourselves as well...
If we were offended by this kind of thing, the Simpsons would have never aired here from the moment where this german stereotype character was first introduced (forgot his name), at least.

Jokes where people are involved are usually at least a bit offensive and there is nothing wrong with that!
They are jokes, the entire purpose for them is to not be taken seriously!

About this "racism" or just "xenophobia" issue:
Human "races" are a social construct anyway, humanity does not have multiple "races" from a scientific standpoint.
Human races are what we, as a society, define as such and because of that, I don't see much of a difference between "Xenophobia" and "Racism", because both are just arguing about groups of people, however you define them.

Re: Atelier Ryza Developer Clarifies Its Stance On Video Game Censorship

Kirgo

This shows what almost annoys me the most in all of this.
They think it is western culture that wants stuff removed,
when actually it is just a minority that wants this, therefore this isn't the "western culture" at all (whatever that is anyway, be it America or Europe, both have very diversive populations).

It is mostly just a group of people, mainly in the US, that are seen as the representants for all of our cultures including europe.
So the majority has to live with whatever the minority wants and that is just wrong.
Japanese developers need to realise this!
But these puritans scream so loudly everywhere, that I can understand why they don't notice everyone else.

Usually the edits are not that bad, but the fact that some people being outraged over nothing get their will over everyone else is just incredibly annoying and unfair.

Re: Eiji Aonuma Talks About The Possibility Of More Legend Of Zelda Spin-Offs

Kirgo

@N8tiveT3ch
If you talk about developers who love the game, then you can't argue about games with whether the concept is new or the game being to your liking.
Both Hyrule Warriors (especially Age of Calamity, as much as I have already seen) and Cadence of Hyrule are prime examples for games with a lot of heart in them. All the attention to detail alone would otherwise not exist.
Both games also do a lot of stuff that is not present in their respective mainline games, just to be closer to Zelda. There is clearly a lot of effort and love for the franchise put into those.

Re: Japanese Charts: Switch Sales Remain Strong As Next-Gen Systems Hit The Market

Kirgo

@westman98
To be fair, software sales of PS5 can't really compare, since there is no install base yet.
It's less than 105 thousand PS5 out in the wild in Japan and most only buy one game at launch, spreading the few possible sales across all launch games.
It needs an exceptional game like the Switch had with botw, to have one game that stands out at all at this point.

(About the 105,000: Hardware sales of the PS5 digital do not count, since they can't influence physical software sales.)

Re: Gallery: Game Freak Has Moved In With Nintendo, And The New Offices Look Sublime

Kirgo

@Bolt_Strike
All you are doing right now with that comment is confirm my believe, that expectations are way too high...
The 3DS games were 60 - 80% less then expected? How can you seriously even write that?

Games vary massively in terms of scale and content, regardless of the price. If you think that is what should make the price and that games should at least come relatively close to botw for that money, then there are tons over tons of games that are all overpriced garbage.
If thats what you are thinking, fine I guess. Those are some really high standards though.

Btw. being "large and open ended" is not even always a good thing, that very much depends on the game. I would also like to know some examples of that "dozens of games" that deliver in your opinion. I hope there isn't too much Ubisoft in that list, because those games are critized all the time for having way too much boring content for the sake of being "large". For good reason.

Re: Gallery: Game Freak Has Moved In With Nintendo, And The New Offices Look Sublime

Kirgo

@Bolt_Strike
The price increase has to do with games being generally more expensive on Switch than 3DS, thats hardly the developers fault and they will also hardly make 50% more profit out of it.
On the other hand, if fans only wanted a 50% better game, that would have been one thing, but expectations were more like a 500% better game, that is what I find unreasonable.
In reality, we got a 10 - 20% better game, imo. and I can understand the criticism of that, I would want to see more in the future as well.

But the amount of hate these games get is, imo., still unreasonable.
Comparisons with botw still don't work either, I can trash pretty much any game series if I wanted, if I were to campare it to the jump botw made.
Animal Crossing for example, would look extremely bad if we measure it like that, yet that game doesn't get nearly as much hate as Pokemon did.
And don't let me even get started with the typical AAA games going from one console gen to the next...

Re: Gallery: Game Freak Has Moved In With Nintendo, And The New Offices Look Sublime

Kirgo

@fafonio
To me, these games made a lot of things better than previous gens.
The arenas and the league at the end, for example, were just infinitly better in presentation then in any previous gen.

Apart from that the game is just nothing special, but that was to be expected. SuMo tried to overhaul a lot of things, but most changes ended up worsening the game for a lot of people.
What do you do in a situation like that? For at least the next game you play it save and go back to the basics, thats what they did.
And they still tried a lot of, not so important, new things, like the wild area.

It is entirely possible, that they want to expand on such things in the next game, but playing it safe for now was the right business decision and it seems like it worked as well.

And I disagree, expectations were not at 11, they were at 15/10 at least. I and some others were already arguing about ridiculous expectations long before the SW/SH were officially announced.
Fans basically expected they throw away absolutely everything to make a botw of the Pokemon universe. Do I really have to remind people what an exceptional game botw was? To expect any company to just do something similar as if that were easy is unfair at best.

Re: Hands On: Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Calamity Makes You Wish You Didn't Know How It Ends

Kirgo

@MegaVel91 @TheFrenchiestFry
Thinking about it, with that, they could do something like they did with Dynasty Warriors 8, were you normally play a faction and get the "historical" end (as far as you can actually call that historic).
But if you manage to get some special achievements in multiple missions, like saving a character who was normally supposed to die in that battle, you create an "what if?" situation enabling you to change history and get an alternate ending.

I doubt they would do it in this case and I am also not sure that would be a good idea, as it kinda defeats the purpose of this games story a bit.

Re: Poll: Which Will Be Your Second Console - PS5 Or Xbox Series X?

Kirgo

@zupertramp @Ralizah
There are also games like the Total War series, Anno, most Paradox games like Hearts of Iron and Crusader Kings and more.
Those are pretty big games.

Basically almost the entire RTS genre and most stuff generally going in that direction, you can only really play on pc.

Re: Rumour: 'Switch Pro' Could Feature A Mini-LED Display, According To A New Report

Kirgo

@SwitchForce
If the display dies only after 11 years of usage (!), then I really don't see the problem.
That's easily at least 40 years of real time if it was used solely as handheld.
Docked, the screen doesn't detiriorate at all, at least not that way.
At this point it is very likely that the system dies because of some other component.

If "11 years of constant use" ist true then this can't be an argument against OLED, that would be silly.

Re: Rumour: 'Switch Pro' Could Feature A Mini-LED Display, According To A New Report

Kirgo

@WaveWitch
I played a variety of games already, essencially all big Switch games, for example.
Maybe I will try a first person PC game, since my PC is connected to the TV anyway, though it's not like I really want to see that, I guess .

But yeah, I know, other display types can be a lot worse, not including CRT and Plasma.
I have seen horrible things myself in the past, though I wouldn't be able to tell the models anymore.
As for QLED, I only have my Samsung monitor (49RG94) for comparison, that one, at least, doesn't smear too much, thankfully.

Re: Rumour: 'Switch Pro' Could Feature A Mini-LED Display, According To A New Report

Kirgo

@WaveWitch
It's interesting to me, that you notice motion blur on your OLED so much.
On my Philips 803, I barely ever notice that.
Interestingly, I had noticed this at the very beginning specifically while watching sports, but the effect was gone after a few days. I possibly changed some setting reducing the effect without me trying to, but thats just me trying to find an explanation for something that still confuses me.

I since talked to guest in my home if they could still see the blur, since I might just have somehow gotten used to it, but so far no one was able to notice anything like that.

Re: Rumour: 'Switch Pro' Could Feature A Mini-LED Display, According To A New Report

Kirgo

@Krazzar @Zuljaras
I have an OLED TV right here, the screen stays cool even while displaying white for a longer period of time, which is the worst case. OLEDs do not really go above room temperature, under normal circumstances.
Power consumption of an OLED is theoretically lower than than other screen types as well, but this is a topic under debate. I think the problem are the things that TVs do to protect their OLED screens from "burn in", which in turn costs power, but I am not sure on that one.
The brightness of the picture currently displayed also has far more influence on the total power consumption than with LCD.

"Burn in", btw, has nothing to do with actual heat in the OLEDs case (at least not under normal usage).
Single OLEDs degrade by usage, so if you have, let's say, a blue box constantly on the upper left corner, than the OLEDs responsible for the color blue will deteriorate faster than other colors, giving that space where the blue box was a slight red tint, which is noticable because this didn't happen on the rest of the screen.
The only reason why it is commonly called "burn in" is because the result is similar to plasma screens burn in.
All that being said, modern TVs use a lot of tricks to prevent this from happening. At this point "burn in" is not a realistic problem anymore on TVs at least. Though a lot of people still think that it is...

Re: Switch Is No Longer The Only Way To Play Bloodstained On The Move

Kirgo

@link3710
I am not sure why you are comparing sgemm performance, never seen anyone doing that and not sure how that makes sense?

But I did a little more research on the numbers again and have to correct myself.
The most relevant FP32, if you go by the lowest number you can find on the Switch, would be at over 500 GFLOPS.
Some source cite it at the 800 I mentioned, but 500 seem to be correct (some contradictions on the internet here, and I am not just talking about FP32/FP16). So I was wrong about that one, sorry about that.
The Snapdragon 865 is indeed a beast in that regard, as it gets to over 1200 GFLOPs. Doesn't really change the other numbers I mentioned though, the A13 Bionic is an example of a weaker gpu than that and it is not that old either.

CPU and memory bandwith can make an important difference, but it should be noted that, if everything is said and done, GPU performance is still much more important for most games, unless the system bottlenecks.
Depends a lot on the individual game.

A Snapdragon 730 would still not be able to outperform a Switch though.

And again, for games we still need to keep in mind that the Switch should have advantages by at least software. (Numbers are not everything...)
Not enough to beat a Snapdragon 865 or something in that region, but still worth mentioning.

Good modern smartphones generally having better hardware than the Switch is something I agree with.
I still feel like they are being overestimated by a lot though.

Re: Switch Is No Longer The Only Way To Play Bloodstained On The Move

Kirgo

@Casual_Gamer95 @link3710
If we are just going by numbers: Even the A13 Bionic processor used in an iPhone 11 (all versions) only gets up to 800 GFLOPS (GPU), which is similar to the Switch while docked.
So an iPhone 11 might be able to beat a Switch in handheld mode...
The Snapdragon 730, used in a Pixel 4a, for example, only gets to meagerly 358 GFLOPS (or 486 if run on high frequency). There is no way those will beat a Switch.

Now, numbers are not everything and just because one system is faster in theory, does not mean it is faster in praxis.
But, if I would have to bet on a system that can use it's theoretical processing power most efficiently for games, I would bet on the specialized gaming platform.

I would really like to know why phones and tablets are always being overestimated so much, they are small pieces of extremely overpriced tech (at least the more expensive ones) which have a lot of their actual value in their (way too) high resolution camera and display.
Example: The iPhone 11 Pro Max has an estimated production cost of less than 500$ with camera and display alone costing about 70$ each, that is almost half of the estimated cost of the entire hardware, including the processor. Rest of the 500$ is for labor and such.

Re: Of Course Scalpers Are Already Listing Fire Emblem's 30th Anniversary Edition

Kirgo

I don't even really see the point in what these scalpers are doing here.
This is being sold for a limited time, but not THAT limited.
If you want one, you can probably get one at some point at you local store...
We had this kind of situations for other products before.

Scalpers, in a case like this, are walking a real danger of not being able to actually sell their stuff, because a lot of people will just wait.

So I am not sure, does this really make sense for them?

EDIT:
And yes, I think it is a different situation with whole consoles at release.
There are usually way more potential buyers for a new console and these things generate enough hype for people to grow crazy about it.
Is that true in this case? I am not so sure.

Re: Poll: How Do You Feel About 'Limited-Time' Games From Nintendo?

Kirgo

@Crono1973 Withhold information?
I am not sure what you mean, it is entirely possible that they gave out all information.
Perhaps the games will not be released individually, in that case: Why specifically mention that?
Perhaps they have no plans to release them later, but want to keep the option to do so, depending on how things unfold. In that case, there is literally nothing to say.

Re: Poll: How Do You Feel About 'Limited-Time' Games From Nintendo?

Kirgo

Companies have done this kind of thing since forever and honestly? It is absolutely their right to do this.
It is a special game and it is limited as special things sometimes are.
I just don't get how normal things like this are suddenly considered "anti consumer". I mean, I am not really surprised people think that way either, we can see people feeling entitled for things more and more for many years now. I feel like I have had this kind of discussion a million times already.

Anyway, I have preordered the game and with that, it being limited doesn't concern me at all.

Re: Start Menu Screen For LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga Supposedly Leaked

Kirgo

@TheFrenchiestFry
I say this as a casual Star Wars watcher, who has seen Episode 1-8.
Episode 8 is, imo, the worst written movie I have ever seen, not just counting Star Wars movies.

The only reason why I had even remotely fun with this movie is because I stopped taking it seriously after a while. If I watch it as the trainwreck that it is, it is at least a bit funny.
And no, this isn't just because of the lore, though that is part of the problem.

It made me skip episode 9 as well.

Do I like episode 1 and 2? No.
Do I like them more than episode 8? Yes.