Vidya Games Thread

[ValkyrieAce]

That just means Jinx is coming back.

 

[reinigen]

 

[Kuri Rinji]

>Think you made an attractive character in Dragon's Dogma after an hour of painstaking adjustments in the character creator
>They use any facial expression

 

[reinigen]

In other news, the Helldivers devs keeping killing it.

 

[John Vtuber👁️]

I was going to write an essay about Dragon's Dogma 2, but forget that, YIIK IS BACK, BABY:

 

[The Rrat]

The funniest part of that MTX is you can only buy it once. It is literally just one portcrystal. But not just that, you can ONLY place 10 crystals at a time, so having the extra 11th does absolutely nothing when you collect all of them in the game. Honestly, the MTX aren't an issue, since they are all random-ass items that are easy to get. Adding them half a day post release is pretty shifty, though.

The bigger issue with DD2 is the performance and the fact that there is only one save slot and YOU CANNOT START A NEW GAME AT ALL.

 

[ValkyrieAce]

Does Dragons Dogma 2 also run like shit on PS5 or just PC?

 

[That Chuuba Enjoyer]

So finally had the chance to play more Dragon Dogma 2 today. Even more confused why the game is shitting up CPU hard with NPCs. When you're in the big cities/towns, NPCs spawn right in from of you in a short distance. Visual example of this can be seen in the Digital Foundry video. A lot of them don't do anything unique either, just set dressing NPCs. The amount you see in the city isn't even crazy too.

I remember when Dragon Dogma 1 first came out, it ran like shit on 360/ps3 and was negatively rated for it. However, DD2 is just worse than what DD1 was at launch. It's also funny that I can tell when a network pawn is being loaded in, when the frames dips for a moment and a pawn comes walking down the trail while you're journeying.

It is so weird how mixed bag Capcom has been in recent years.

 

[Superduper Samurai]

Ngl it was like that in the original game, the execs are just being turbojews by forcing you to pay for shit that is only rare in the very early game, prime time to milk whales

i saw some people trying to push this as the director being responsible for the MTX when its designed that way for sensible reasons instead of some bean counters wanting to wring out even more money out of an already 69.99 game ala ubisoft

 

[Kalion]

The MTX is the least of DD2's problems.
It has both Denuvo AND Enigma DRMs sucking down your CPU power. So not only do you have every NPC doing a complex physics calculation just to exist frame to frame, you also have two different DRMs constantly checking to see if you are allowed to play the game and aren't using any of those dirty, dirty mods.

 

[God's Strongest Dragoon]

The MTX is the least of DD2's problems.
It has both Denuvo AND Enigma DRMs sucking down your CPU power. So not only do you have every NPC doing a complex physics calculation just to exist frame to frame, you also have two different DRMs constantly checking to see if you are allowed to play the game and aren't using any of those dirty, dirty mods.

It also doesn't help that they're trying to force the RE engine to play an open world game, as that engine has been known to have issues with that. It's like when Stellaris introduced the Megacorps DLC, which changed planets from having upwards to 20 pops to potentially hundreds of pops. The game simulates all of those pops every in-game day and when you consider the amount of planets in the galaxy, your CPU will cry when you reach late game and a third of the galaxy hasn't been genocided. Turns out trying to make a game engine do something it was clearly not designed to do ends up causing problems, like you're trying to fit a square peg into a triangular hole.

 

[The Rrat]

Well... at least the game runs well remote play on the deck when it is at 800p

 

[That Chuuba Enjoyer]

Deck bros stay winning?

 

[John Vtuber👁️]

yeah, it's cities that Dragon's Dogma has issues with, specifically the more NPCs there are at a time - each of which have their own set schedule and actions within the day/night cycle and can also interact with the various world events and emergent actions

I may not be a professional, but perhaps removing the two layers of DRM may yield performance increases before proper optimization

fun fact, play the game in a long enough session (or have it running in the background), not only will the game crash while saving, but the error reporter that logs the crash also crashes, and your system will have to do a refresh as well. perhaps it needed another year to iron out these issues? but then it would have to contend with Monster Hunter: Wilds...

 

[IdenticalPlateaus]

The funniest part of that MTX is you can only buy it once. It is literally just one portcrystal. But not just that, you can ONLY place 10 crystals at a time, so having the extra 11th does absolutely nothing when you collect all of them in the game. Honestly, the MTX aren't an issue, since they are all random-ass items that are easy to get. Adding them half a day post release is pretty shifty, though.

I haven't played it yet but in the first game if they game you another Portcrystal early it would significantly change your playthrough time from the travel time it would skip.
You'd hope that they would pace access to crystals in a way that makes the player feel like they are solving an efficiency puzzle with how they ration them or feel clever when they use them in an interesting way. An example of this in the first game would be placing one on the drop down cliff just outside the Witch's house so you don't have to slog through the woods whenever you need to see her, another would be placing one near a healing spring so you can get free healing whenever you want.

I'm not saying that the design was definitely made worse because of the DLC but whenever there is a financial incentive for developers to make a game more tedious, it raises these questions. I think Middle-earth: Shadow of War was a notable example of that, I didn't play it until after it was fixed but people have said it is a much better game after they gutted the monetisation model from it.

Wonder how the speedrunners will rule on it, I suppose they will probably just ban it or do a category split. The devs probably didn't take it into consideration when adding the DLC but the first game did have a speedrun mode/achievement so who knows?

 

[UberSoldat]

Solid bundle, worth it for Turbo Overkill alone

 

[God's Strongest Dragoon]

I'm not saying that the design was definitely made worse because of the DLC but whenever there is a financial incentive for developers to make a game more tedious, it raises these questions. I think Middle-earth: Shadow of War was a notable example of that, I didn't play it until after it was fixed but people have said it is a much better game after they gutted the monetisation model from it.

Shadow of War was pretty bad with the MTX but it wasn't as bad as people made it out to be. While it did give you a leg up and help you progress faster, the game was perfectly fine if you didn't interact with their MTX at all.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey stands out as the king of "we purposely made the game worse to force you to buy MTX". They introduced a RPG leveling system to the franchise with the game proceeding it, Assassin's Creed Origins, and it was perfectly fine. In Odyssey, they slowed the leveling massively and made it so that you would take several minutes just whacking away on a common enemy if they were 1-2 levels above you. They did all that just so they could sell you "experience boost packs". That's the main difference between Odyssey and Shadow of War. You could ignore the MTX in Shadow of War and the game was perfectly fine. If you ignored the MTX in Odyssey, it completely neutered your ability to progress and forced you to do all the shitty and poorly made "optional" content to continue the story. Their goal was to frustrate you with the shitty content to convince you to buy MTX so you could continue the content they actually put effort towards.

In one of the updates for Odyssey, they introduced a "story creator mode" where players could create and share custom-made quests. The most popular quest was a quest that teleported you to a location and automatically completed a "reach this location" objective like 10x or some shit to reward a bunch of exp. So yes, the most popular quest was a spammable exp farm. Ubisoft got really upset about this and started banning those quests and claimed it was giving people an unfair advantage. Yes, an "unfair advantage" in a single player game. Meanwhile they provide XP boosts in the in-game shop.

 

[John Vtuber👁️]

First major/quest NPC dead in Dragon's Dogma II, after being sent on a timed quest to save them from a monster way above my level/skill, so it's probably meant to be one of the incentives to save them in NG+. I could have used a wakestone to revive them, but the boss one-shots my character and used them up to self-rez, it was an "objective: survive" sort of thing. Now to get back to the nearest town to re-supply and hope I don't get a party wipe.

I love this game, and I hope that the performance issues are taken care of. I want the game to be successful enough to get a "Dark Arisen" style expansion.

I also experienced a glitch where every single NPC and monster was removed from the game, and pressing the start button lead to a black screen. I'm sure there's a creepypasta in there somewhere, I'm too tired to bash it out on paper right now.

 

[Tamavitch]

giving money to capcom

 

[God's Strongest Dragoon]

First major/quest NPC dead in Dragon's Dogma II, after being sent on a timed quest to save them from a monster way above my level/skill, so it's probably meant to be one of the incentives to save them in NG+. I could have used a wakestone to revive them, but the boss one-shots my character and used them up to self-rez, it was an "objective: survive" sort of thing. Now to get back to the nearest town to re-supply and hope I don't get a party wipe.

I love this game, and I hope that the performance issues are taken care of. I want the game to be successful enough to get a "Dark Arisen" style expansion.

I also experienced a glitch where every single NPC and monster was removed from the game, and pressing the start button lead to a black screen. I'm sure there's a creepypasta in there somewhere, I'm too tired to bash it out on paper right now.

I'm in the "waiting for sale" camp. I've grown very tired of games for the past few years not running decently on PC when it releases. Jedi Survivor, as much as I enjoyed that game, was the last straw for me.