Xbob42

I mean, you'd have to be pretty stupid to not be able to find a game you're looking for on a website where you can just type what game you want. What about browsing games? That's always what I spend the most time in a store doing, since obviously if I know what game I'm after it could be the worst site in the world as long as the search function works. Just clicking around shows giant banners with tons of empty space, making it really inefficient and unpleasant to just casually browse titles. An absolutely tremendous amount of empty space for no discernible reason. I don't think it's the worst storefront site I've ever seen, but I think Sony usually does a better job of keeping it at least relatively tight so you get lots of info on your screen. They've had a thing for big banners for the past decade or so, but this is a little silly. Main page, literally just one game: Scrolling down, a few more titles Clicking "Games -> PS5" two awkwardly placed banners Scrolling down... a giant video Scrolling down, giant banners for two games at a time per screen It's so chunky and clunky. I honestly thought it was just a pre-launch sort of thing until the real PS5 store launches, but the PS4 store, while showing many more games at once, still seems weirdly empty? I was looking for a way to just... browse games. But the only option was scrolling all the way down and finding this weird "scroll more" button that you have to keep clicking over and over to show a few more games??

I clicked on it, and all I learned is that Fifa 21 is out. There wasn't anything else to see without scrolling or clicking through menus. So I closed it.

I think Destruction All-Stars looks like a $30 budget game. A game existing does not warrant it being full-price. Indie games get this. Studios like Sony do not. The contrast becomes even more stark when I look at something like Game Pass. If Destruction All-Stars was just a thing that was included in a theoretical Sony version of Game Pass, I think it'd be a great add. As its own thing I have to fork over the same money (actually, MORE money) than something like Cyberpunk 2077? The math doesn't check out. I can accept a "it's less hours but it's really fun" argument if the game is supremely good, but again, we've seen nothing that impresses with this one. As for the rest, if you think the launch lineup looks that good, more power to you. I don't really feel strongly enough about it to argue much more than that, because whatever, I know launch lineups are usually bad, but I never use that as an excuse for their badness. You know this console is coming for years, you can develop some cool shit to hit launch. I never understand why we get bad launches. Just release the console when it's got some cool games ready. Nintendo, for example, can often get at least one really good, unique launch game out. Super Mario Bros. (NES), Super Mario World (SNES), Mario 64 (N64), Luigi's Mansion (Gamecube, almost the worst launch title for a main Nintendo home console, but still a damn good game), Twilight Princess (Wii), New Super Mario Bros. U (The worst launch title IMO, but still a good Mario game), Breath of the Wild (Switch), maybe I'm just spoiled by Nintendo (their home efforts, they've been hit or miss with handhelds) but I really want at least one excellent game at launch. Sure, BotW and Twilight Princess were available on their previous-gen consoles as well, but they were still brand new games and were both better on the new hardware, they weren't expansions or upressed ports of years-old games. Maybe that expectation is unrealistic, but it shouldn't have to be.

See, the issue here is you're judging launch lineup vs launch lineup. I don't play that game. I judge launch lineup vs literally any other part of the library, any time during the console's existence. I don't give special exceptions to bad or mediocre games just because it's launch time. The stars of the PS5 lineup are a remade PS3 game and an expansion to a PS4 game, also available on the PS4. And Destruction All-Stars is being "fixated" on because I can guarantee in no universe is there a world where that game, no matter how "okay" it turns out, is worth $70. You can tell that's going to be the case because we're weeks from launch and they've shown basically nothing.

I mean, you guys are all free to hype up Destruction All-Stars as this year's Knack Souls or whatever, don't let me stop you.

More like MGSV gameplay this time, please. I have enough chores to even consider another mundane simulator.

I dunno if I'd say "FTW." PS5 has a lot more coming, but I dunno, nothing on that last besides Yakuza and I guess Demon's Souls has me even vaguely interested. Seems like a typical middling launch line-up. I'm not exactly thrilled to run out and spend $70+tax on a bunch of 6 hour launch games.

I'M GONNA SAY IT

That's certainly much better speeds than I get on PSN, but still far from what I should be getting.

Yeah, I've never gotten it to go over 100 or so on ethernet. I have a gigabit connection.

Define "great."

No, they're really not.

It's absolutely due to technical limitations. Actual reflections are expensive as hell on hardware. Faked reflections where you put an actual copy of the room and NPCs/objects take a lot more work and have their own issues and limitations. That's why even when we do get "real" reflections, they're, like I said, really terrible, or baked on in a limited environment. But with ray tracing, as we see in Control, you (basically) just designate the properties of an object like glass or a polished floor and the ray tracing does the rest, no need for trickery or fancy techniques or low quality reflections that look terrible. Like I said, people might think they wouldn't notice good reflections (that's not even getting into the amazing lighting possible) but you put things side by side and it becomes much more clear. From something subtle that adds to the mood like noticing the reflection of a vending machine in the background... To something a little more interesting, like being able to watch NPCs have conversations in a reflection: To something much more dramatic, like completely changing the mood of an entire room: Even in a game not really designed around these things, I've found myself able to notice enemies in reflections ready to throw projectiles at me, or admire all the shit I'm blowing up reflected from multiple different angles all around me. I cannot wait to see what they do to utilize these things in something like stealth games, including hopefully new Batman titles. Reflections and lighting/shadows aren't just neat and pretty, they have tons of gameplay interaction possibilities, which I think is maybe what you may have been getting at above, but I think we're already partway there.

Mirrors absolutely do not generally work! Most of the time they're conveniently broken or are literally just sort of shiny gray rectangles. If you're real lucky you'll get some shitty looking low-res, murky ass podunk reflection that ruins the entire scene. And I'm not talking about just a single reflection of a character or something, the reflections in Control change the entire atmosphere. A room primarily made of glass windows with all of the windows reflecting the room and everything in it looks SOOOO fucking different than the default look of them being just basically invisible with a generic white light reflection at certain angles built in. But then you mix that with some excellent interactive light sources, colored lighting that mixes properly, oh man, a game can look so different. Even the plebiest of plebes would instantly notice the massive difference between Minecraft and Minecraft RTX. I'm okay with the first step being towards reflections, though. Because most current reflections are fake as shit as you said (which can be okayish in really static scenes, and are absolute trash in dynamic scenes) or use ugly ass SSR, which cuts off at the edges of the screen, is mostly low res, and in some games shows reflections at a set (low) frame rate, like FFXIV.

Nobody notices reflections? Uhh, most people notice that most games don't actually have reflections. We've been living in a gaming world where mirrors don't work for over a decade now.

Enough to where if there's a major difference between the PC and consoles, "who cares it's my $500 box vs your $25,640 PC," but if there's at least a 5% difference between the PS5 and Series X there will be a bloodbath in the comment section.

Without something equivalent to DLSS (reconstruction techniques on consoles thus far have been dramatically inferior, but maybe AMD has something cool in the oven?) I imagine they'll be the same effects on lower settings. But judging by how demanding multiple settings being cranked up at once in Control is far more demanding than just one or two, I can see a scenario in which they'll only go for the most striking effects.

Yeah if you just hit those few buttons your damage is going to be pitiful. Like I said: Saving the Dragoon - Google Docs DOCS.GOOGLE.COM Last updated: 6/12/2020 Art below by Daniela Hristozova-Popova Overview The Brains Behind the Operation Resources Global Cooldown (GCD) Actions The Chaos Thrust Combo The Full Thrust Combo Raiden Thrust The Coerthan Torment Combo Basic Rotation Positionals How do I know if I’m at the Side or R... Yes, your "basic" rotation is that, but there's so much more to do than just hit those abilities in a cycle over and over again. Although it is significantly pared back from the meme it used to be where you had to cycle through like 60 abilities (not 60 different abilities, but quite a few of them) in a specific order with super precise timing, including positionals, or you'd lose out on tons of damage and would have to start over from the beginning.

You know it's gonna be a rough gen when the remasters of last-gen games can't hit 60 FPS with raytracing, but I'm still happy raytracing appears to be being normalized, and hopefully performance modes as well. Shame about this many compromises going on before the consoles are even out, though.

You still start alternate classes at level 1 on the same character, you definitely don't just switch from an 80 healer to an 80 tank. (Level is retained when you switch back, of course, you never lose progress.) And you can get a friend with a multi-seat mount to fly you to the aether currents!

Uhh... but you're not really supposed to do all of them all at once. They're there so you continue to have something to do, not so that you can relentlessly grind them out to clear your map. There's so many because you can level every class on the same character. Having lots of extra quests means that after you get through the main story with your primary class, there's still plenty of content you haven't seen while leveling up other classes. And I kind of get the TOR thing, but FFXIV is about the people in each region, their problems, not just having a giant billboard in your home that offers you every quest from every person around the world. Place, location, regional culture, all those are like huge themes of the game and old zones are generally not just left by the wayside once you've completed the quests in them, we're repairing a huge portion of the first expansion's city right now as well as reclaiming a part of Bozja, which was something from 1.0, as part of the latest update. Getting all the quests from your main city would really kill the feeling of these places being connected and full of actual people who you need to see in person to hear about their problems. I mean, in the end, getting around the world is pretty easy, so it's not like it's a huge deal anyway.

While customization in any game can always use improvements and FFXIV is certainly no exception with its barebones dye system, I don't really get the first paragraph. It's an MMO, it's supposed to have lots of content to keep you occupied. You talk about all the content you don't have time to do, but then talk about how you just sit around doing dailies. You're not supposed to just hop in and have everything done in a month, that would be a terrible way to retain players, and is exactly why The Old Republic died so hard. It's not a single player game that you just "beat" and move on from. You seem to want all the rewards and to fully understand everything, but with like zero commitment or effort. Also, there's multiple PvP modes, one isn't "too full," as it's just a few people vs a few people, much tighter and more controlled. There are a few giant mob ones, but then there's fun strategic ones like the one where you save up resources to buy giant robots and then use those to absolutely destroy mobs of other players before they can kill it. The game play getting "repetitive" makes it sound like you might not fully understand your class(es) yet. While there's definitely some overlap, especially with tanks, a lot of the classes play very differently, at least if you're actually trying to play in a way to maximize your output rather than to just get whatever you're doing done. You'll definitely want to focus on that output if you want to do any of the endgame stuff, which you're clearly not at yet being only "70+" instead of 80. That said, at the end of the day, it's still the same core game. Bozjat I find to be super fun and interesting, but you're still going around doing something very similar to FATEs, just much harder, with player limits and other interesting restrictions. Just about any quest in most games I can imagine can eventually be boiled down to either "fetch quest" or "kill quest," even outside of MMOs. I could really do with more Secret World puzzles where you're actually figuring things out, FFXIV sadly only has a few brain teaser quests with puzzles and no hints.

Oh yeah, there's a LOT more to Dragoon than the basic rotation. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ua5uewclVNvIaVJ44eX3F3-y3QLKcn2z8R8d9Vvj5B0/edit So much to do for them deep gains! Anyhow, I largely agree. FFXIV starts off really slow, as most MMOs do, but it picks up quite a bit and by the end you have an absolute plethora of abilities to use, and you know when and how to use them, because you've spent so long with them. Unlike WoW, you also GET to use them, I feel like WoW lately, in addition to pruning out abilities, also has essentially always been about using just a few of your several hot bars, or in recent expansions, just a few abilities total. That said, I still really enjoy turn-based combat where you control the entire party, and where it's like a complex game of chess rather than button mashing. Frankly I'm really disappointed in how deep down the pseudo-action-game hole Square has gone with Final Fantasy. Despite me liking FFXIV, and FF7R's combat being a good step up from their previous trash, I feel like on average they still make really bad action combat for the most part. Even with FF7R, I felt like half of it was just really flashy animations. It was definitely combat I'd describe as good, it wasn't sad like FFXV's, but it still didn't rock my world. I was more pleasantly surprised rather than blown away. Xenoblade Chronicles, though, is so much worse than anything else we're talking about. The combat is so bad it's almost pathetic. XC2's was better, but still largely the same thing. Again, just flashier. XCX was more of the same. I feel like the awful combat combined with the sprawling open worlds (which I liked in concept, but their execution was just "big plains of occasional enemies, sprinkled with completely random items that all look like identical glowing orbs") and generally tedious quests outside of the main storyline make each title such a huge, boring, anti-fun chore. Which is a shame, because they tell some interesting stories. I have yet to beat XC2 because it went a little too cutesy weeb bullshit for my tastes, but XC1 had a fairly interesting story and I really liked the entire concept from beginning to end of XCX's, despite it being over fairly abruptly once you cut out the side nonsense. Would love to see more of that world and what caused the events in that game to transpire as they did.

Seems kinda neat, I guess? Seems like it'll still have a lot of weird nested menus, though. When they said 4k video I laughed. Yeah, good luck saving a bunch of clips on your <1TB SSD.

It's been over a month since the last patch and this one didn't even fix any of the truly major issues aside from your character walking off-center which was admittedly a big issue and a wildly stupid one to exist and get past QA in the first place. I'm glad they're still fixing it, but good lord they clearly are having a lot of trouble and should have never released.