AbsolutSurgen

Well, it must mean it hasn't opened up for me (yet). I have been "trapped" in a relatively small area for most of the game so far. The map that I had suggested there would be four or five other similar areas that would open up as I progressed through the game.

I'm ~5 hours into Witcher 3. What is really shocking to me is how different all 3 games are -- they seem to share very little in game mechanics. They have the same characters, same potions, and signs. But, how they are implemented seems to be completely different in each game. I'm not sure I have ever seen a franchise vary this much from game-to-game. I am enjoying it so far, but my biggest surprise was that the game isn't an open world game. Still way too early to have any good thoughts/impressions on the gameplay.

It is up for pre-order now on the Epic Game Store, Origin and Steam. It will reportedly have cross-play support between all platforms.

Faster storage can equal better gameplay. Am I the only one who remembers the problems cause by loading on the PSX version of Shang Tsung in MK3 vs. the arcade? Pausing gameplay every time he switched characters? Developers will have more freedom in UI (think what used to be called "pause menus") -- many games have had them "slimmed down" because the game needs to keep everything in memory -- these new architectures should reduce this requirement. Better customization visualization in games. The ability to more quickly stream in textures/geometry will allow customization options to happen more quickly, and in a much more visual way. More variation in NPCs/vehicles in open world games (remember in GTA, how you kept seeing the same cars as you drove around)? Better level design -- less of a need to have doors/walls that are only there to enable loading. I am sure the guys who are actually designing games have a long list of headaches they have had to deal with in the past, that will no longer exist that go well beyond this.

I’m really excited about this now. Everything they are saying make it sound like this is exactly the kind of experience I was hoping for. We’ll find out on Thursday.

Keighly confirmed it is 5v5. Also it supports VR on PS4 and PC.

There are places that sell replacement batteries -- I think you can get it delivered for under $20.

Jeff Cannata is a genuinely decent guy, as anyone who listens to him on the DLC pdcast can attest to. IMHO, his analogy was perfectly clear. #teamjeff

Today's trailer was cinematic only. Geoff Keighley confirmed it will be 1 first person cockpit view game, with 5v5 multiplayer and a single player campaign. PS4/XB1/PC -- No SeX/PS5 versions October 2nd for $39.99 Edit: Gameplay at the EA event on Thursday. Edit: It will take place shortly after RotJ.

"We don't actually know if the proprietary tech in the PS5 will make up for the brute strength of the PC combined with DirectStorage". See, I can say it backwards and it is just as true. Who is Matt? Why do you have confidence in what he is saying? What specific claims is he making between the performance of a game engine on a PC vs. a PS5 driven by their relative performance in SSDs?

A couple of things: 1) I have yet to hear a developer (or even Sony) say that what they are doing on PS5 won't be able to be done on a high-end PC (when their game launches) 2) Tim Sweeney's quote was "The storage architecture on the PS5 is far ahead of anything you can buy on PC for any amount of money right now" [emphasis mine]. Linus apologized for sayin that this quote was demonstrably false. The current PC architecture on PC's TODAY, HOWEVER, we don know that the Xbox Velocity Architecture (i.e. DirectStorage) is coming to PC as well. Tim was quite clear in that his team has not yet focused on that architecture yet. Tim made no claims on what impact the PS5 architecture will be compared to that "future PC". [To illustrate my point, I could change his quote, to create another entirely accurate one: "The storage architecture on the PC is far ahead of anything you can buy on PlayStation for any amount of money right now".] Tim did come out and say, after the demo, "On a high-end PC with an SSD and especially with NVMe, you get awesome performance too." I love what Sony has done -- it's pushing the technical capabilities of gaming forward. However, I have yet to see anyone make claims that when PS5 games come out, there will be any game released that a high-end gaming PC would not be able to technically replicate. Personally, I'll wait for the hands on comparisons/benchmarks.

NVIDIA’s Flagship RTX 3090 GPU Will Have A TGP Of 350W, Complete Breakdown Leaked

DLSS uses the tensor cores, AFAIK AMD doers not have something similar on the PS5 chips. (NVidia is devoting ~50% of an RTX chip to RT/Tensor cores -- AMD can't just "do" what RTX chips are doing for free.)

2 trailers in, thinking about dropping out.... These are trailers for the most indie indies that have ever indied.

Un less Unless I am mistaken, only 2 of the best selling games of May were actually released in 2020. Top 10 release year: 2020 -- 2 2019 - 6 2018 - 1 2013 - 1 And we wonder why we are playing our backlogs right now.

I don't think Tim Sweeney will want to dilute his ownership share, and I'm not sure Epic has enough cash to pay for WB games.

You've got it backwards:

My recollection was they were very similar to Ace Combat 7 (which I just played) -- makes we want to go back and play them. I don't think you can make a modern multiplayer game with any staying power based on Rogue Squadron or Crimson Skies.

I don't remember X-Wing and Tie Fighter being all that simmy (like, say Falcon 3.0 or MS Flight Simulator were simmy) -- my recollection is that it was slightly more simmy than Wing Commander/Freespace 2 or the more recent Ace Combat games. You could have multiple factions, from the different eras of Star Wars (and multiple tiers) -- you could have small ships, and "medium ships" akin to the heroes in Battlefront i.e. Galactic Empire Tie/ln Fighter Tie Advanced x1 (Vader's ship from a New Hope) Tie Advanced v1 (The Inquisitor's Tie Fighter) Tie Interceptor (Soontir Fel's ship) Hero: VT-49 Decimator, Tie/D Defender (Phoenix Squadron's Ties) Rebel Alliance T-65 X-Wing BTL-A4 Y-Wing A/SF-01 B-Wing RZ A-Wing Hero: Millennium Falcon, VCX-100 light freighter You could do similar load-outs for First Order/Resistance and Galactic Republic/Separatist. It would be interesting if they could do larger scale battles, and include capital ships as well.

Have you played the game? If not, you're calling out a bunch of people based on them having different opinions than the herd.

Because Clank was ray-traced, doesn't necessarily mean the reflections on the slide were ray-traced.

This would be really awesome if they took the old Xwing/Tie Fighter style gameplay, modernized it and added in multi-player. I could really get behind that.

Those reflections didn't come through in watching the stream yesterday -- I had way too many compression artifacts. The overall lighting, reflections on Clank and on the mirrored slide were really impressive.

Two pieces of advice to enjoy the game more: 1) Listen to all of the audiologs I normally hate audio logs, and I think they are a lazy story-telling mechanism. However, so much of the story/context is told here, you will miss most of what makes the story interesting if you skip them. 2) Experiment with Weapons The combat is different in H:ZD than most other games. What works in one situation will fail miserably in another. Each different enemy requires a different strategy, and combination of weapons (yes, plural) and ammo. IMHO, the combat shines the most in "The Frozen Wilds" DLC. (Which I recommend playing as part of a normal playthrough.)