one-armed dwarf

Not to turn every FF thread into comparative analysis, but FF generally isn't as weeb baity as other JRPGs I think. To a certain extent at least, I mean some of their characters definitely are the poster for a certain type of archetype (Aerith). But XVI is very much in the same wheelhouse as XII and XIV* I think, with more swearing. I don't think it's a massive departure, it's very Matsuno. Very Vagrant Story. It's familiar territory really, with the Thrones influence offering it more of an 'edge' that perhaps these other games didn't try and go for I think the world and setting is super interesting, and the intro to this is the most visually excellent and impressive opening a FF title has had since FFX. It's something these games haven't went for as much since that title. At the same time my problem remains with the combat being so difficult to see, being one of the most visually unclear games I think I've ever played, that I'm pretty worried it will ruin my initial playthrough of the game. Until they release the patch that improves it. *ok, XIV has a catgirl thing. So it's pretty weeb baity. But still outside of this it's got similar vibes

Not sure what game you're playing if you think it's lacking in husbandos and waifus tbh. Maybe you've got a copy of FFXVII by accident. In terms of story and setting I found it interesting it uses crystals and eikons as this sort of high fantasy take on mutual assured destruction, and seems to be leading in a bit of a FFVII direction in terms of the consequences of using such power/magic for personal benefit ala mako energy

Full fat RT is full of compromise on this anyway. You are effectively playing at 1080p on a 4090 to enjoy the path tracing stuff (it defaults to 'DLSS Auto'), and frame generation will include input lag unless you run at a really high framerate to avoid that. It's really just a tech demo for future graphics tbh. The parts of the game where it makes a big difference are hard to spot, compared with the more vanilla RT options over rasterized which already do a good enough job imo of fixing up blemishes. It looks good in combination with HDR but it feels a bit overhyped, especially as there's a huge amount of trailing 'noise' behind vehicles as whatever way the path tracing resolves shadows seems quite laggy. So shadows near moving objects have insane ghosting. Some objects in the world resolve their lighting in a really glitchy manner, like grated fences for some reason. It's not all the way there. Most interesting is the SSD requirement now. Maybe the level design is more ambitious.

Prince of Persia time rewind is the only answer. Ascend would be a nightmare cause you would get trapped in horrible places without an accompanying 'descend'

Doom Eternal is one of those games I wanted to be good at, and I got pretty good at it on a controller. But this game, this game is a fucking keyboard and mouse game. You cannot get anywhere near as cool gameplay with it on a controller. The way high skill players leverage the momentum available and sort of drift highspeed around in the air destroying things is a thing to see. Like, Cacodemons aren't just enemies to kill, they are grappling points to keep moving. Zombies are anchors to ground you or catapults to swing you in another direction. I guess this is a spoiler cause it's late game gameplay Also look at how clearly colour coded everything is in this game, with all the chaos. It's crazy and fast moving, but you can identify 'oh that's armour, that's one of the big bastards with rockets on his back'. Compare that to some other action games, which get all of this visual language stuff horribly wrong It's the only fps I can think of that has this sort of character action approach to it, so it's a bummer I just sort of hate playing it for some reason. meh

They are looking at adding some motion blur and camera speed options. Nice one. I would be labbing the combat in the demo but for how sick it makes me feel. Looking forward to this more now Doesn't seem like it will be on a day 1 patch though

I will say I was surprised by how practical some of the combo trial stuff was for JP, they even give you a punish combo (which I still use). First thing is just finding one that's consistent and easy to execute in training, and overtime see if you can land it just once in a real match. Also nice to have a punish that comes from a faster button I will say that whenever I find a new thing to do in this game in training, it can take maybe more than a week of trying to land it in a real match before it actually lands. The way I see it though, even dropping a combo is a sign of progress cause it's indicative that you had the awareness to try it out. Even if it didn't work out. It's like the first building block I got to plat with JP anyway and taking a break from him now. They put my DJ in bronze 5 despite losing near every game, I think it looks at your other character and decides based on that as well. A thing I find with the ranking in this is it probably creates an awkward situation if you get a big winning streak going with a 'cheap' move (one that people find hard to deal with) and end up rocketing up into platinum but without the layered understanding you get from getting there more slowly. There's a very strange distribution of skill sometimes At least at plat they change it so you can go back down to gold, which happened pretty quickly with me just after getting there. Gold is more my jam for now anyway

I think there's a good few characters that aren't that executional difficulty. DJ definitely isn't one of them, he's powerful and difficult to play and I'll probably hit a ceiling with that dude as well but his pressure seems kind of ignorant and I want to see why. Honestly, Manon is really effective and her gameplan seems like something that doesn't require lots of tricky links and things. I'm probably being reductive a bit there tho. But once you get rolling with her things really snowball and it's difficult to deal with on the receiving end. Because her gameplan is to get medals, which power up her command grabs, which she gets from grabbing. I think being bad at combos isn't that big a deal really unless you're trying to be a diamond or master player. It's all about the fundamentals first. Spacing, awareness, getting a sense of when you are at an advantage/disadvantage and being patient. Actually remembering to anti air. Then maybe combos

Yeah you are fucked for those kinda matchups, in terms of character based defense and offense. But it's a fun combat puzzle to figure out, right. The grappler has to condition the zoner and control neutral in a terrifying way without those long range tools, and that's why grapplers are borderline maybe the hardest to get good at even if the up front execution might make them seem like a more easy approach I'm gold 5 in this now, touching the floor of platinum. But I'm pretty bored with JP and I'm going to start learning Dee Jay this weekend. (speaking of hard matchups, no idea how to control that fucker. So it would be an exercise with a double benefit) I beat up lots of manon's today, but none of them are as good as Mary but then these are short sets after all.

Tbh, I don't give much of a shite either way or the other about Zelda or what it should or used to be. I just think BOTW's approach was very liberating in that particular respect and is in a certain regard one of the only 'true' open world games I've played You don't need to see and explore every square inch.

I watched that whole video, well the 2nd half with the VA. He's so into it. Dude must be mad hype to be the MC in a Final Fantasy game He's an Onimusha 2 and FFVIII fan, an appreciator of fine things

So is Butz, it's a rich tradition of shit names.

Clive's voice actor is a very cool guy. He's way into this games.

Gameplay without commentary, Ravens Quite a bit more expansive in its level design than the ps2 games. Main takeaway, based on the assembly screen it looks like cooling and overheating is a thing to consider again. Vaati analysis, who's now played every AC so can actually offer something a bit more informed now The big thing been noted is a hard lock on. In the older games you have to micromanage your 'FCS', which is your sight, and line it up while also controlling the mech. Which was really quite a challenge, and there was a lot to consider in terms of lock on range (for missiles), how wide the reticle was and how it was facilitated (or not) by the turning speed and mobility of your mech They seem to have streamlined that here and it's not such a concern, but I guess they make up for that with mechanically complicated boss fights (which was not really a thing in the old games at all, from what I saw. Outside of some really fucked up boss fights in Last Raven where the enemy mech uses cheats to go faster) tbh I like the FCS but I sort of get why they go this way with it I at least hope I can build a mech that overheats and goes on fire as soon as I use boost. I love that they let you do that in LR lol

As good as this game is, I prefer the simplicity of BOTW's mission where you can kill Ganon whenever you want. I don't think TOTK does anything like this, it sort of seems to want you to do all the main missions like a more traditional game. It's a bit annoying to me. I beat BOTW with just 3 divine beasts (a few weeks ago I picked my save back up). It was cool how the game was designed for you to spend as much or as little time in its world as you want. Sometimes when you've had enough it's nice to just walk away from it and feel good about the time you spent playing, rather than an obligation to just trudge on forward and check the list off.

They interviewed the voice actor for Clive in FFXVI on this as well, it's pretty fun listening I thought I've started to pay a bit more attention to giantbomb recently. For whatever reason now that they aren't doing as much shows I find myself clicking on the subscription more often

Yeah, it's the 'eikonic challenge'. It takes place a couple hours later into the game, so I just skipped all the cutscenes to not get out of context events. You have three stances with 2 skills each, and can upgrade. I didn't complete it tho, got tired with it. Even in the first demo tho you can get a few decent moves. I don't think the mechanics are simple really, not as deep as contemporaries in this genre perhaps but it would be a mistake to try and chase that kinda depth while trying to remain as an RPG anyway

Their insistence on not leveraging the insanely good but unused co-op netcode from DMC5 (seriously, wtf was up with that) for the pawn system continues to frustrate. The emphasis on how physical the gameplay is is exciting again though. I liked that clambering mechanic in the first game, the SOTC style of it. I wonder how dynamic the physics of it are, like in 4:20 how one pawn launches another off a shield onto the ogre's head, another goes for the ogres leg and makes it trip. Do enemies have a 'stability' stat that lets them be toppled depending on damage to limbs and their weight distribution if allies are climbing on them? It could be like posture in Sekiro, but with actual physics underpinning things. Hopefully anyway

I don't think it has to be as extreme as the doldrums of that era, PS2/xbox also had a lot of 30fps games but their performance and image quality was stable. It was mainly ps3 as I remember, and some 360 games pushing the HD envelope too far. PS3 was such a shit system to own for third party stuff. Kinda my issue with this stuff is it can feel like 60fps is a bit of a dogma, and it feels like some issues are oversimplified. Scaling stuff back could be really complicated if, for instance, the reason that free-roaming exploring on a planet runs at 30 is because it is charting the position of the sun and moons in orbit to the planet you are on to calculate the global illuminated light, as well as the environment and day/night cycle. Outer Wilds did this and was hugely CPU limited on last gen systems, so even if the clockwork of Starfield isn't as intricate it is on the other hand much more vast in scale. There's ways that things like that could factor into gameplay in a way that couldn't easily be scaled back, look at what Zelda does with its weather systems, how wind affects your glider and can make smoke and fire move. It could factor into how it simulates and generates its flora and fauna There's also a lot of state maintenance that these games do. Why they do it I dunno, and I know that they don't need to poll it every single seconds, but NPCs do have real schedules and even if they aren't in the viewport or current 'cell' that doesn't mean it might not be important. Some of that stuff seemingly needs to be queried from time to time. Do the NPCs in this game stay in their stations and just roam around, or do they also explore the systems? To be honest, I think it's the former or they would have told us. But even so I could see how a 'radiant' AI system would end up dramatically increasing the variables with multiple planets and intersecting questlines like this. It's a big part of why their games are so buggy after all, unintended consequences as NPC scripting from one questline collides with another cause a player performed quests in an order which had not been covered by QA. To be honest, there's probably lots of sections that would run just fine on 60, but the way they word it makes it sound like it would not be that often and they didn't want the jarring juxtaposition of the game being 60 in a cave (for instance), but dropping down to 30 in space cause of how the physics are calculated with all the customisations you made to your ship. Which makes sense. At the same time, I wish console developers would actually just let the player go 'fuck it' and turn the limits off just to see, it would help a lot with backwards compatibility in the future as well The thing is, these systems do have better CPUs but these CPUs also enable new design concepts with their increased power. Like how physics was such a thing in the early HD era and the gameplay impacts that had over the previous gen. The increase in open world games around that time as well was enabled by this, and I think there are arguments in favor and against going for a hard locked 60 on some games. If this was a DMC6 or Street Fighter 7 thread it would be a different argument happening, but it's a bethesda game so I think the spotlight makes a strong case for running at 30 (but 40 would be nice as well)

negative edge is holding and releasing a button to do an attack, there's a skill in the wheel which charges up your sword so I said I tried out charging it during other lengthy attack animations/teleports and it worked. That's not really a thing games like this will tutorialise tho, there's too many intricacies to how to use and weave attacks together that each skill would need an essay and a youtube guide attached lol Yeah no button remap is weird, tho I dunno if it's a japanese thing or I hadn't noticed. DMC5 let you map buttons, it was the first thing I looked for with the magic combo system cause I wanted to put it on trigger cause of how it reminded me of exceed btw, when i talk about having issues seeing things, it was this room in particular that I found really bad (not my gameplay btw, just one I found)

Don't know about it. Hearing Soken music to such big AAA scenes made me emotional, but what made me emotional in a bad way was how hard it is to read any of the fights in the 2nd demo or in the night sections in the first demo Basically I think the mechanics are actually really good, and the timed magic button press thing is an interesting system I wouldn't write off. Reminds me of DMC5's exceed system a bit but you've got to decide do you want the fast attack string or the more powerful but longer combo. Works with stingers, overheads, so not only can you jump on people's heads with a sword you can also set their hair on fire. You also can buffer the negative edge of charge attacks in other animations, so you can do an eikon ability, hold down square during and release for the charged attack. Or keep it held while dodging, teleport up with circle and release square. But I don't feel much connection to what's going on in its fights, because I'm unable to read a lot of it. I'm mashing buttons against enemies I don't see rather than fighting them. The day time sections are fine, the morbol fight was excellent at onboarding you to how it works. I thought it was really well done, everything communicated really well by enemy tells and tooltips (FFXIV style). But when it gets dark the particle effects become the only thing you can see even with brightess adjusted, and the QTEs as well. It's very poorly balanced in terms of its visuals, and that's a pain with a game like this. Also screen shake and motion blur don't help Could be great, but needs some updates for accessibility. I can't enjoy it like this. Comes down to how much of the game feels this way I suppose tho, and performance mode did help a bit. In terms of visuals, sometimes it looks excellent and othertimes it feels the IQ is falling apart a bit. FSR still looks bad imo. But in-game cinematics approach FFXIII pre-rendered FMV glory. We're at that point, but not all the time. On story and setting, I like that stuff. But I'm predisposed to liking this style of Final Fantasy from FFXIV. Main difference here is they say fuck a lot more. edit regarding plot and setting, apparently this scenario is being written by the writer of FFXIV Heavensward. Until Shadowbringers I would have considered Heavensward the best modern Final Fantasy story. It's all about this bloody 1000 year war with dragons, with a bunch of pathos and betrayal and all sorts of cool shit. It's not an area I really would doubt them on, they built a really convincing and cool world with FFXIV and will probably do well with this too Watch its FMV, it's got dragoons doing cool shit.

I also don't want to give any impression of subject matter expertise, to be clear I have none. Or at least it doesn't go much beyond looking at a framerate graph when my own CPU is bottlenecking something. But I find it a reasonable guess that with its ambition (having skimmed through the video now, it's doing a lot) it could be simulating enough stuff that can't simply be scaled down without turning it into a different game. DF have come to that conclusion anyway Also in general I think it's exciting when a game pushes things so hard that it has to make a compromise like this to run on modern systems, it also means that it's a game that will age very well (60fps patch on ps5 pro/ps6, with all these same systems). Look at how long people played Skyrim after its release, that kinda longetivity.

Chances of Drag Dog seems promising 🐶

In what sense? I'm talking about when a game seems to be CPU bound in a more game design sense. eg, physics, AI, and whatever procedural and simulation elements this thing is going for. Maybe that isn't actually the case with Starfield and it's just graphics optimising, but taking PC completely out of the equation, if someone where to ask would I be ok with them cutting back on their game design to escape a CPU bottleneck, I'll take the 30fps. Like that is a problem which can't easily be fixed with a performance mode (maybe make the draw distance a lot worse could work, I dunno) TOTK is a good example of that too. Tons of systems in that game

Following from what nag said in another thread, wrt 30fps, the thing is at some point the penny has to drop with games of this type. You either get these hugely ambitious games with tons of scope simulating tons of different things at once, or you get 60fps. It can be either/or with a game like this and it's not always a case of just turning the resolution down Though I will say that MS should probably embrace VRR a bit better here and give people a 40fps option as well, cause that really is just almost as good as 60 at times.