Joseph

Yeah, there are a couple of these that could be replaced with either of those games. In particular, Shadow of the Colossus and Batman could go. They're decent games, but the open-world aspect of them isn't nearly as good as Horizon 1 or 2.

Elden Ring, RDR2, BotW, GTA4, NMS, Death Stranding (Kojima at peak "What the fuck, man?") … right there with the writer.

By the way, do you think that Hideo Kojima knows that he's completely insane? For the sake of the gaming community, I hope he doesn't get treatment. We would lose so much.

Uchiha I mean, they want to sell games. And the number of units of each console in the world means that if you want to sell console games, you have to include the PS.

I'm a PC gamer first, so it doesn't matter to me. But there's a reason that I own a PS5 and Switch 2 (and 1), with no XBox on the TV shelving unit. There hasn't been a meaningful XBox exclusive for a long time, while there have been plenty of PS5 and Switch exclusives.

Kourosh There's a lot of question about whether it will be something that we should truly call an RPG. It seems from the reviews that it might be more of an action-adventure game. It might still be to your liking, but don't expect something that feels like the first one.

Umm, how is Hades an RPG? It's a rogue-lite action game with dialogue thrown at you from time to time.

It's good dialogue, and it's an excellent game. That doesn't make it an RPG in any sense of the term, though.

This is fine. Player choice isn't the end-all, be-all of design decisions. Usually, gameplay is improved by the developer's choices in constraining the players' choices, if the developer is competent.

Also, sometimes, you should factor in a little reality. I didn't care how many times you stab a void leviathan with your little knife. The idea that it would suddenly fall over dead when you exhaust its hit points is ridiculous.

And if you don't like that, mod it.

Oh, they fixed that? Nice. I just started the remaster, before I took a nap today. I haven't made it out of the tutorial cave yet, so I obviously have no idea.

I'm so looking forward to this. I played the hell out of Morrowind and Skyrim, but I kind of bounced off of Oblivion, back then. I was a lot more busy during that point in my life, and then Skyrim came out.

Skyrim's biggest sin is nerfing the hell out of magic. Mage is my favorite class in almost any game. I still played a mage a few times in Skyrim, but it sucked being so underpowered, compared to pretty much any other build.

Why is everyone referring to this resolution-scaling solution as reducing file sizes? That isn't what DLSS and similar solutions do. They render the game at a lower resolution, then upscale the video stream to 4K or whatever.

DLSS has no impact upon what resolution of textures you plug into the game's files. Whoever started this leak needs to learn what resolution-scaling solutions DO. Clearly the person is incompetent.

There could ALSO be some system that they have for reducing file sizes on the cartridges, but that has nothing to do with the resolution-scaling solution. And yes, the Switch 2 was always going to have a resolution-scaling solution. The PS5 and XB-series consoles both have it, and they're 4 years old, now. There was never any chance that the Switch 2 wouldn't. This isn't news.

"Considering how Manor Lords sold 2 million copies in three weeks without these features, bringing these highly requested additions to the title could cement its early access success."

Ummmmm, it's an indie game with a single lead developer and various contractors who handle bits of the game's subsystems. And it's sold well over 2 million copies.

You can stop with the conditionals. It is a success. It has cemented its success. 😄

And I get the feel off of the developer that he's passionate about making his game great, regardless of any future financial gain. He seems like the sort of driven creative nut who actually cares about the game more than the money. Although, I'm sure he'll learn to accept the many millions of dollars he's getting from this, eventually.

Yeah, but a lot of people have enough trouble saving up $500 for a current console. I have enough discretionary spending to put together a new upper-end gaming machine every 4 or 5 years, but that isn't true for a lot of people. Not for most people. I spent around $2,800, this last time around, and I could have effectively spent another $500 or so, if I had wanted to.

Console gamers just need to come to terms with the fact that game developers are chasing that upper-end PC market, and they're only willing to strip down the detail so far. When you spend less than 20% of what the target hardware costs, on your gaming machine, you make sacrifices.

I love my PS5. The XBsX is also a beautiful machine. They did a good job putting together those two consoles. But I don't expect them to perform as well as my PC, because I'm not stupid.

Console gamers need to learn to have realistic expectations, and these articles whining about 30 FPS caps aren't helping.

I don't think we're getting shafted too badly, lately. We still have a number of games coming out with some render pipeline issues and such, but my experience hasn't been too bad.

I mentioned Starfield elsewhere in this section. I have an RTX 4080 and a serious CPU. I ran Starfield with every setting maxed. When I was playing at 4K, I usually turned on FSR at 85%. That meant that I never dipped below 60 FPS, even in New Atlantis or Akila City.

There are some games, like Helldivers 2, which really weren't taking advantage of the hardware I was running them on. They tuned the hell out of Helldivers 2 for PS5, and they just dropped that version onto PC, as near as I can tell. Still a beautiful game, just weirdly optimized.

I've been playing Lethal Company a lot for the last two weeks or so, though. I feel like that game isn't taking advantage of my hardware. 😄

It's mostly just that they want the games to look comparable to the PC versions of the games. And the current top-of-the-line PC graphics cards are 6 or 7 times as powerful as the graphics card in the series-X. That requires sacrifices.

The first, obvious sacrifice is texture quality. The RAM is also a consideration with that. A current enthusiast-level PC (yes, I think that's a stupid name for it, too) will have at least 16 GB of RAM in just the graphics card. That's on top of the 32+ GB of system RAM. Compare that to the 16 GB of TOTAL RAM in the series-X, and you'll see the issue.

But that alone won't do it. They strip both resolution and frame rate to make up for the lesser hardware. The more they strip each, the more they can leave in the pretty lighting and reflection effects.

Take Starfield. You know how they recently implemented a 60 FPS mode that wasn't available at launch? They managed that by dropping the internal-rendering resolution to 900p. 900p! Upscaling that to 2160p (4K) does not look amazing. They also had to strip LoD scaling by a fair amount, and they had to downgrade reflection quality. When you're standing up close to a stationary reflective surface, the reflections look pretty chunky.

In addition to the fact that the end result looks a bit rough, compared to the quality version, simply doing the optimization work takes a hell of a lot of developer time. And they had to push the release back several times, as it was. The additional optimization time would have pushed the game back another year, in order to get the rougher looking version of the game to function. They had to make a decision. They decided to leave the lower-resolution, lower-quality modes for later.

"In a perfect world, this would mean that games look and feel just as good on the Series S as they do on the Series X, but the opposite might be true: Xbox games might be getting downgraded so that they can be compatible with the less-powerful system."

In a perfect world... More like a fantasy world. That's not how reality works. If you're running a game on hardware with less than half of the power and less ram, you have to strip your demands somewhere.

Develop a game to run at a stable 60 FPS at 4K, on an RTX 4080 or 4090, with 16 GB of system RAM. Then run it on a system with a GTX 1080, without turning down the detail.

Even if you drop the resolution to 1080p, you'll be lucky to get 30 FPS. If you try to run it at 4K, keep the fire extinguisher handy. And if you drop the system RAM to 8 GB, get ready to crash to desktop every 15 or 20 minutes, if it'll run at all.