Duderino

Combat just keeps getting better and better. Each character brings such a unique element to combat. Weapons skills and Materia mix it up too. Really appreciating the character swapping now. Combinations like building up ATB with Aerith, casting Arcane Wand, then swapping characters to move into the effect range for 2x spell cast adds a whole new tactical element. As the game progresses they keep introducing more strategic reasons to swap. Learning when to do it becomes essential to maximizing synergy of your party. There's something very cool about it that IMO justifies FF7:R not having AI routines manage more.

I agree that TF counts will not be the biggest defining factor next gen. Whether or not Lockhart will undermine next-gen games though depends on what individual developers' intend uses are for the true generational GPU bump with the Series X and PS5.

As I see it, the biggest potential pitfall of Lockhart is not it dropping to even lower resolutions. Instead, It's maintaining enough parity with Series X and PS5 as the generation progresses. Further resolution drops alone are not gaurenteed to get this hypothetical 4TF console capable of running games its big brother can. There is a possibility here that this sku could require special considerations and different solutions from developers. Keep in mind the compute gains of lowering the res are relative to the GPU's output. The more future games leverage resolution independent compute tasks, the harder it will be to port to Lockhart.

Which speaks to the difference between Lockhart and lower spec PCs. Lockhart, as part of the Series X line, will not be an optional target for developers as the generation progresses. That means, for the next 6+ years, devs will need to ask themselves "can the tech we're developing and/or utilizing scale down to Lockhart in an acceptable state?". In many cases the answer will be yes, but in instances where the tech can't scale that low (most obvious being raytraced lighting) Lockhart could require additional considerations, separate solutions, or in the absolute worst case, become a limiting factor.

The existence of Lockhart would mean developers will need to consider Lockart's GPU throughput as the baseline for tasks that utilize parallelized compute jobs on the GPU. Think GPU accelerated physics, deformation, raycasting, etc. How much of a limiting factor that could be depends on what the ambitions for next gen games are beyond the GPU's primary rendering responsibilities.

Just got to chapter 8. I’m struggling to think of another game In recent memory paced quite this well. Maybe God of War? So far nothing has overstayed its welcome for me. Maybe the padding will become more of an issue in later chapters and I’ll change my view but for now I’m very engaged, even with the new content. The pros vastly outweigh any cons I have.

DLSS 2.0 is certainly a major step forward, but its existence does not make checkerboarding techniques any less valuable to console developers in the here and now. A good checkerboard implementation can still be quite convincing and serve its performance purpose. IMO the bigger quality difference between the two has more to do with DLSS's utility as an anti-aliasing alternative/enhancement. At today's resolutions, temporal AA artifacts are arguably a bigger detractor to the overall image quality than reconstruction artifacts.

Playing Uncharted 2 for the first time too and boy does it have some cringe inducing dialog at times. I don’t mind a little tongue and cheek sexual humor here and there but it’s pretty relentless with it. Was expecting Indiana Jones style comedy but getting more Sean Connery era 007, minus the punch lines.

These controllers need to be adaptable to all kinds of games though, including tittles that get more face button use. The WiiU Pro controller missed that mark. The only combination that felt decent together was a thumb on each stick. It's just not a very universal design.

The asymmetrical stick position thing was far worse prior to the DS4. Something about the new design made it much easier to adapt to and forget about coming off the 360 controller. Think I even prefer the layout now for the opposite reason; an offset d-pad has never felt comfortable to me.

Interesting. FFVII is not a sacred cow for me so I'll be going into it with an open mind.

Telling me it's nothing like Disney screwing with the plot and characters of one of their beloved franchises is quite the parallel to shoot down. It's not exactly leaving many possibilities left. You get why this is puzzling, right? I've asked you to help me better understand without going into spoilers. Your response? Telling me to fuck off. Getting short over such a small request is not the way to go about convincing people to trust your take. I can understand the frustration of not being able to lay it all out. Clearly something specific is illiciting a strong response. So here's my follow up question, are the changes really so out of left field that it puts the FFVII Remake into a category of its own? Keep in mind there have been some pretty big misteps in recent years. On a scale from one to the Ghostbusters reboot, how poorly did Square misshandle this? 😉

A blurb of spoiled text that lacks hours of context is not how I will be forming my opinions.

Disney’s re-imagining of Aladdin reframed the story and characters in a way that is both unnecessary and hard to unsee. Some, like me, would say the additions and changes detract from the overall film. Because of its success however, the live action Aladdin will be the how many experience/remember the story and characters moving forward. Please explain to me what makes FFVII:R a different situation in your eyes. Btw, I’m not going into spoiler territory either.

I don't know the extent FFVII:R changes the plot and character motivations yet, but trust me on this, modern Disney took plenty of liberties with the new Aladdin.

As someone who has endured the Aladdin reboot, I believe you have a very backwards take on Disney’s adherence to their source material.

Clearly concern trolling.

Interesting take (first quoted post) on the SSD relative to both the PS5 and Series X. tldr: Keep in mind this is still speculation. Also:

It's worth reading Maximov's full twitter thread: An SSD that, with decompression, can push 8-9 GB/s will allow for higher levels of detail. Why? Because LODs no longer have to sit in RAM for quicker access. Something else to consider, this could also have big implications for other memory intensive tasks. That means more animations, more asset variety, more audio, etc. Also worth noting that Raytracing BVH trees are quite memory intensive.

I'd prefer not to speculate that company X will produce better results than their competition because, well, faith.

I hate to interrupt this discussion about interpreting a bunch of PR Tech speak, but perhaps we should consider how Minecraft RTX is expected to run on nVdia cards? Minecraft With Ray Tracing Will Likely Require RTX 2060 or Better for 1080p at 60 FPS If true, that puts the current Series X efforts below the 2060, given Digital Foundry’s 30-60 FPS they are reporting. That’s still quite a feat for what is likely a less costly GPU. If you have inflated expectations though this news might come at a bit of a disappointment.

How about we just say we don’t have real proof of much outside of a path-traced Minecraft running at 30-60 fps at 1080p?

The big benefit to for future games, aside from the raw speed increase, will be eliminating data duplication on disc to account for the needle delay.

Keep in mind that NVME drive should punch above it’s weight with the DirectStorage decompression: When this tech eventually arrives on PC it will surpass the Series X, but the console will be competitive with today’s SSD speeds.