What video game are you playing?

[braces_for_impact]

For loading times, the single most effective hardware change I've found is to switch to SSDs.

Agreed, once I got an SSD I could never go back.

 

[Terrell]

Assuming Todd Howard & Pete Hines are telling the truth to us about 2 major games before TES 6 I wouldn't expect TES 6 before 2024 give or take.

Hmm. When was the "2 games first" bit from? My very cursory search seems to put that around March or so of 2017 (Link, but probably not the only reference). Since then they've already released Prey, although I don't know if that's one of the "big releases" they were talking about. They also released a couple of others since then, but I don't really know if Evil Within and Wolfenstein are particularly big endeavors for them. I suspect the newest Dishonored release is really more akin to a DLC, even though it was sold as a completely separate game - it's similar in size to Knife of Dunwall or Witches of Brigmore.

I'd be really happy if they come out with another open-world RPG-style game like Fallout or Elder Scrolls. The outer space market is pretty wide open for that, given Mass Effect: Andromeda's spectacular failure-to-deliver and No Man's Sky's slow, plodding, story-less nature. I could totally get behind an "aliens and spaceships" version of Elder Scrolls. Oooh - Westworld would be a fantastic basis for a game - westerns with good guys and bad guys and robots! Red Dead Redemption sounded like it would hit the same sweet spot as TES/FO, but it missed the mark. Mostly just a really fidgety engine and severely slow story.

I've been a fan of Bioware for a while - Dragon Age and Mass Effect were both fantastic stories with engaging characters... but they shit the bed so bad with Andromeda that I wouldn't be surprised if Bethesda made a plan to usurp the Mass Effect fan-base.

But this is all speculation, so I guess I'll just have to wait and see!

From Todd Howard at E3 2016:



From Pete Hines

 

[Emily Lake]

Started playing Prey yesterday. Someone really shoulda told me it's pretty much Dishonored in outer space, and I'd've given it a go several months back. So far it's both fun and challenging. Haven't made it very far yet, still trying to get to Dr. Galvani's Calvino's Lab

 

[KeepTalking]

Honestly, I'm not as into video games as I used to be. I still play way too much Civilization (the expansion is pretty cool), but more and more I'm having trouble staying interested in any other game.

I haven't picked up the expansion yet, as I have been seeing mixed reviews, and I was in the middle of a long game on a huge map when it came out. Since then I have dabbled with a few other games I had picked up in humble bundles that were mostly disappointing. The only one that had me playing for a while is Luna's Wandering Stars, which is all about the physics of orbiting moons and asteroids. The challenge ramped up a bit too quickly for me, and when they started introducing lasers on your moon to take out asteroids, the "twitch curve" just got too much for me, and I lost interest. I will likely go ahead and grab the Civ6 expansion here before the week is out.

SSD solid state drive
vsync vertical sync. I don't know the technical details, but turning it off improves performance at a cost of presentation.

Vsync synchronizes your video card refresh rate with your monitor refresh rate. If you have a crappy video card, and a decent monitor, turning this off will cause screen judder when panning the camera (or even just moving quickly). If you have the opposite problem, a high end video card on a crappy monitor (or any monitor with the refresh rate dialed way down), turning off vsync will cause screen tearing when moving quickly or panning. If you notice either of these issues interfering with your game play, you probably want to turn vsync back on. That said, I don't think it is generally the cause of the kind of performance problems being discussed here.

 

[Terrell]

Bethesda has put out their trailer for their 2018 E3 Press Conference.

 

[Underseer]

For loading times, the single most effective hardware change I've found is to switch to SSDs.

Agreed, once I got an SSD I could never go back.

Depends.

With later versions of Civ, SSD helps, but having more CPU cores and more RAM generally helps more, even for loading times.

Anyway, am I the only one with zero interest in Injustice or Injustice 2?

On the one hand, I don't care for fighting games. On the other, I don't think anyone[ent]mdash[/ent]game or otherwise[ent]mdash[/ent]can do a "good guys gone bad" story better than the Justice Lords from DC comics. There have been lots of stories that flirted with criticizing the fascistic fantasy at the core of comic book superhero vigilantism, but holy crap did Justice Lords make all of that extra uncomfortable.

 

[braces_for_impact]

Yeah with games you're right. I do all the game installs to the HD, since it's larger than the solid state. I have 16 GB of RAM and a Quadro 3000m and everything runs fine, even at later stages of the game on a large map. The only real difference I've noticed is loading time, and even there it's not a huge difference. Now in terms of the machine overall feeling faster, the SSD is the shit.

 

[Underseer]

Honestly, I'm not as into video games as I used to be. I still play way too much Civilization (the expansion is pretty cool), but more and more I'm having trouble staying interested in any other game.

I haven't picked up the expansion yet, as I have been seeing mixed reviews, and I was in the middle of a long game on a huge map when it came out. Since then I have dabbled with a few other games I had picked up in humble bundles that were mostly disappointing. The only one that had me playing for a while is Luna's Wandering Stars, which is all about the physics of orbiting moons and asteroids. The challenge ramped up a bit too quickly for me, and when they started introducing lasers on your moon to take out asteroids, the "twitch curve" just got too much for me, and I lost interest. I will likely go ahead and grab the Civ6 expansion here before the week is out.

SSD solid state drive
vsync vertical sync. I don't know the technical details, but turning it off improves performance at a cost of presentation.

Vsync synchronizes your video card refresh rate with your monitor refresh rate. If you have a crappy video card, and a decent monitor, turning this off will cause screen judder when panning the camera (or even just moving quickly). If you have the opposite problem, a high end video card on a crappy monitor (or any monitor with the refresh rate dialed way down), turning off vsync will cause screen tearing when moving quickly or panning. If you notice either of these issues interfering with your game play, you probably want to turn vsync back on. That said, I don't think it is generally the cause of the kind of performance problems being discussed here.

I rather like the expansion, especially the loyalty mechanics.

It forces you to keep your cities clustered together as much as possible, which results in empires that more resemble real ones. In fact if you're worried about loyalty pressure from other civs and can anticipate this problem, you can create more loyalty pressure by spacing your cities closer together.

This also requires you to plan out invasions more carefully. You're mostly just going to want to capture cities that are close to your borders because otherwise loyalty will just cause the cities to flip back. Governors play a critical part of invasion plans now thanks to loyalty.

Unfortunately, the AI will still declare war on you from halfway around the world despite the fact that it is pointless to capture cities so far away from your own borders. Do they just intend to raze my cities or something?

 

[Malintent]

This seems to be the thread to ask: does anyone else suffer from absurdly long load times in Fallout 4? Any time I load a game and it is outside in Boston, I can literally leave the room and make myself a cup of coffee whilst waiting. One of the reasons I still prefer New Vegas.

Yes.

Same was true for Skyrim though, as well. There's amod for Fallout called "Insignificant Object Remover" that seems to help - it gets rid of a lot of the clutter that takes rendering time, but doesn't really contribute much. This is way outside of my sphere of knowledge, but I *think* it does something like making the clutter (gravel, grass, broken stuff, etc.) hollow or something so it takes less "space" in processing. But even with that... loads are still slow. I almost never fast-travel for that reason.

I thin it has something to do with the game engine itself, because FO NV and Oblivion both had significantly faster load times and fast travel times. I swear, sometimes it seems like it's faster to walk while overburdened than to fast travel in Skyrim.

making meshes "hollow" is basic optimization. I am a game developing newb in Unreal Engine, and I can tell you, even I understand the impact of polygon count on performance. Meshes (that which makes up every object in the game) can be two sided, if needed, but one-sided is half the processing cost with 100% of the visual quality... as long as the game does not allow you to travel inside of that object and see it is invisible from the inside out.

Ever experience bad geometry in a game that accidently lets you pass into a wall or under the ground? Note how you can always see outside of that which you are stuck inside of? Because that game is optimized to not render faces that are not intended to be seen.

 

[Malintent]

For loading times, the single most effective hardware change I've found is to switch to SSDs.

agreed this is the cheapest (but not quickest) way to refresh your computer and get more performance out of it than when it was new.
It isn't the quickest, because it does involve reinstalling the operating system.
The quickest and easiest (and most expensive) upgrade would be your video card.... if gaming performance is the only benchmark.
That is just a matter of pulling out the old one and dropping in the new (more or less, depending on just how old a computer we are talking about).

 

[KeepTalking]

I haven't picked up the expansion yet, as I have been seeing mixed reviews, and I was in the middle of a long game on a huge map when it came out. Since then I have dabbled with a few other games I had picked up in humble bundles that were mostly disappointing. The only one that had me playing for a while is Luna's Wandering Stars, which is all about the physics of orbiting moons and asteroids. The challenge ramped up a bit too quickly for me, and when they started introducing lasers on your moon to take out asteroids, the "twitch curve" just got too much for me, and I lost interest. I will likely go ahead and grab the Civ6 expansion here before the week is out.

I rather like the expansion, especially the loyalty mechanics.

It forces you to keep your cities clustered together as much as possible, which results in empires that more resemble real ones. In fact if you're worried about loyalty pressure from other civs and can anticipate this problem, you can create more loyalty pressure by spacing your cities closer together.

This also requires you to plan out invasions more carefully. You're mostly just going to want to capture cities that are close to your borders because otherwise loyalty will just cause the cities to flip back. Governors play a critical part of invasion plans now thanks to loyalty.

Unfortunately, the AI will still declare war on you from halfway around the world despite the fact that it is pointless to capture cities so far away from your own borders. Do they just intend to raze my cities or something?

I picked up the expansion mid-week last week, and have had the opportunity to play through one game. I dialed back to Warlord difficulty to get used to new mechanics (I normally play at Prince or King), and played a standard game with Wilhelmina on the new archipelago map. I am not sure I am sold on the loyalty mechanic, especially when it comes to playing on an island based map like archipelago. I never had any problem with loyalty in my own cities, probably because every civ was so isolated from each other. When it came to waging war, however, loyalty became a supreme pain in the ass. I had two civs join together and declare war on me in the mid-late game. One of them was a fairly close neighbor, while the other was half the map away, and I had a friendly relationship with everyone up to this point. I have no idea why they declared war at that point, but these things happen with Civ, so I decided to give the close neighbor (Greece) a bloody nose, and capture their capital while I was at it (their capital was one of the closest cities to my empire).

The initial attack was tough, as we were pretty evenly matched, but with my massive Dutch navy, and a budding air force, I was able to pick off a coastal city to serve as an initial staging area for my invasion. After taking that city, my plan was to knock off the next city up the coast (Athens) to enlarge the staging area, and then plunge inland to take on the landlocked capital of Sparta. I had Athens on the ropes just a few turns after taking the first city, when that initial city suddenly became a Free City. I had started installing a governor a turn or two after taking the city, but the governor did not have a chance to even get settled before this city flipped. First thing that irked me was that the flip itself was bugged. I had most of my navy still within the borders of the city I had taken, including two aircraft carriers loaded down with bombers. I had also moved a fighter plane into the city after taking it. When the city flipped, the fighter disappeared from the game and one of my aircraft carriers had both bombers removed from it, while the other had all both bombers still attached. Of the two bombers that went missing, I found one at my next closest city, the other had been removed from the game along with the fighter. I reloaded a couple turns back and made sure my aircraft carriers were not in the flipping territory, and got my fighter out of the city before the flip, to make things less annoying. Still, I had to deal with a flipped free city, but was not too concerned.

I adjusted my tactics, finished taking out Athens, and then went on to the next coastal city beyond Athens, as I still needed more room for staging units. I got a governor in Athens immediately after taking it, and also set off a general there that was supposed to increase loyalty for the city by 2 every turn. Since I was in a Golden Age, I thought this would solve the loyalty problem in Athens. It did seem to mitigate it a bit, as it took a few more turns for Athens to flip than the previous city, but it did flip just as I was about to take the next city. This frustrated me a great deal, so I razed the third city as soon as I took it. Then I went back to the first city, took it again and razed it. Athens was important to me, it was a large city with a lot of land, and right next to Sparta, so I took it back and tried to keep it happy. By the time I took Sparta, however, I had to deal with Athens flipping about 3 more times. Of course, you can't raze a capital, but if you could, I would have razed everything and walked away, I was that pissed at this new mechanic. Instead, I sued for peace, and got Gorgo to cede both Athens and Sparta. This, and installing governors, was all it took to resolve the loyalty issues, I kept both cities until the end of the game, which I won with a Science victory.

So, I am not all that enamored with the new loyalty mechanic. City flipping is buggy with regards to what happens to your units, and I think the mechanic in general will be an extreme pain in the ass when it comes to going for Domination victories. I feel that this is the primary victory that multiplayer games go toward. It might not be as much of an issue maps with more land (and thus closer civs), but it seems like they are trying to discourage Domination play, which can only serve make nearly all multiplayer games 500 turn slogs to victory.

End game spying was a bit different as well, they seem to have tuned the AI a bit when it comes to spying. Getting to a Space Race victory has always been rather uneventful for me, even at King difficulty the AI would never really go after my spaceship builds, and I would sabotage the hell out of theirs. In this game, the AI civs hit me from all angles as I was closing in on the victory. My governor that provided space race bonuses was targeted constantly, and I could only count on having him for 2 or three turns before he was neutralized again. My space race projects were sabotaged over and over again, even with a counterspy watching the launch pad at all times, the counterspy only blocked one out of about 5 sabotage attempts. In addition to those two angles of attack, I had to deal with about a half dozen uprisings in my second largest city during that end game run, all were orchestrated by spy operations. Fortunately, I put them all down before they got anywhere close to my spaceport.

Wow, that was a lot longer than I intended, and I didn't mean for it all to be negative. I like the dark/golden age mechanic, and governors are decent as well, though I think the limitation to 8 governors might be a problem on larger maps, and the time it takes to establish them in a city is not helpful when it comes to waging war. Next game, I think I will try a domination victory on a map without oceans, and see if my feelings on loyalty remain the same.

 

[Emily Lake]

Turns out I love Prey... as long as I'm inside the station. I had to go to Talos Exterior for a bit, got in a fight with a Typhon, went and did a side mission, got turned around... and then spent 40 minutes trying to figure out where my airlock was so I could get back inside. That wasn't so much fun, especially since there really isn't any kind of fast-travel option on the station, you've got to slog it through. And getting lost outside really sucked and was really boring.

Also: Nightmares. *Shudder*

 

[braces_for_impact]

For loading times, the single most effective hardware change I've found is to switch to SSDs.

agreed this is the cheapest (but not quickest) way to refresh your computer and get more performance out of it than when it was new.
It isn't the quickest, because it does involve reinstalling the operating system.
The quickest and easiest (and most expensive) upgrade would be your video card.... if gaming performance is the only benchmark.
That is just a matter of pulling out the old one and dropping in the new (more or less, depending on just how old a computer we are talking about).

I just used the free version of AOMEI Backer Upper and did a sector by sector clone of the HD, optimized it for SSD. It took a couple of hours to do the job, and about 5 minutes to swap out the drives physically. I'm quite happy with that piece of software.

 

[Malintent]

For loading times, the single most effective hardware change I've found is to switch to SSDs.

agreed this is the cheapest (but not quickest) way to refresh your computer and get more performance out of it than when it was new.
It isn't the quickest, because it does involve reinstalling the operating system.
The quickest and easiest (and most expensive) upgrade would be your video card.... if gaming performance is the only benchmark.
That is just a matter of pulling out the old one and dropping in the new (more or less, depending on just how old a computer we are talking about).

I just used the free version of AOMEI Backer Upper and did a sector by sector clone of the HD, optimized it for SSD. It took a couple of hours to do the job, and about 5 minutes to swap out the drives physically. I'm quite happy with that piece of software.

Awesome... I didn't mention cloning the drive as an option. good to know there is something out there optimized for HD -> SSD.

 

[braces_for_impact]

OK. Stellaris looks like fun. I picked it up on sale a couple of weeks ago. It looks like it has a steep learning curve. I do want the expansion for CIV 6 when I can get a little extra cash.

 

[Malintent]

Civ 6 is on sale on Steam.... There goes my weekend!

 

[Patooka]

Civ 6 is on sale on Steam.... There goes my weekend!

All of 2K is on sale. I'm like a five year old in a lego shop right now.

 

[Underseer]

I haven't picked up the expansion yet, as I have been seeing mixed reviews, and I was in the middle of a long game on a huge map when it came out. Since then I have dabbled with a few other games I had picked up in humble bundles that were mostly disappointing. The only one that had me playing for a while is Luna's Wandering Stars, which is all about the physics of orbiting moons and asteroids. The challenge ramped up a bit too quickly for me, and when they started introducing lasers on your moon to take out asteroids, the "twitch curve" just got too much for me, and I lost interest. I will likely go ahead and grab the Civ6 expansion here before the week is out.

I rather like the expansion, especially the loyalty mechanics.

It forces you to keep your cities clustered together as much as possible, which results in empires that more resemble real ones. In fact if you're worried about loyalty pressure from other civs and can anticipate this problem, you can create more loyalty pressure by spacing your cities closer together.

This also requires you to plan out invasions more carefully. You're mostly just going to want to capture cities that are close to your borders because otherwise loyalty will just cause the cities to flip back. Governors play a critical part of invasion plans now thanks to loyalty.

Unfortunately, the AI will still declare war on you from halfway around the world despite the fact that it is pointless to capture cities so far away from your own borders. Do they just intend to raze my cities or something?

I picked up the expansion mid-week last week, and have had the opportunity to play through one game. I dialed back to Warlord difficulty to get used to new mechanics (I normally play at Prince or King), and played a standard game with Wilhelmina on the new archipelago map. I am not sure I am sold on the loyalty mechanic, especially when it comes to playing on an island based map like archipelago. I never had any problem with loyalty in my own cities, probably because every civ was so isolated from each other. When it came to waging war, however, loyalty became a supreme pain in the ass. I had two civs join together and declare war on me in the mid-late game. One of them was a fairly close neighbor, while the other was half the map away, and I had a friendly relationship with everyone up to this point. I have no idea why they declared war at that point, but these things happen with Civ, so I decided to give the close neighbor (Greece) a bloody nose, and capture their capital while I was at it (their capital was one of the closest cities to my empire).

The initial attack was tough, as we were pretty evenly matched, but with my massive Dutch navy, and a budding air force, I was able to pick off a coastal city to serve as an initial staging area for my invasion. After taking that city, my plan was to knock off the next city up the coast (Athens) to enlarge the staging area, and then plunge inland to take on the landlocked capital of Sparta. I had Athens on the ropes just a few turns after taking the first city, when that initial city suddenly became a Free City. I had started installing a governor a turn or two after taking the city, but the governor did not have a chance to even get settled before this city flipped. First thing that irked me was that the flip itself was bugged. I had most of my navy still within the borders of the city I had taken, including two aircraft carriers loaded down with bombers. I had also moved a fighter plane into the city after taking it. When the city flipped, the fighter disappeared from the game and one of my aircraft carriers had both bombers removed from it, while the other had all both bombers still attached. Of the two bombers that went missing, I found one at my next closest city, the other had been removed from the game along with the fighter. I reloaded a couple turns back and made sure my aircraft carriers were not in the flipping territory, and got my fighter out of the city before the flip, to make things less annoying. Still, I had to deal with a flipped free city, but was not too concerned.

I adjusted my tactics, finished taking out Athens, and then went on to the next coastal city beyond Athens, as I still needed more room for staging units. I got a governor in Athens immediately after taking it, and also set off a general there that was supposed to increase loyalty for the city by 2 every turn. Since I was in a Golden Age, I thought this would solve the loyalty problem in Athens. It did seem to mitigate it a bit, as it took a few more turns for Athens to flip than the previous city, but it did flip just as I was about to take the next city. This frustrated me a great deal, so I razed the third city as soon as I took it. Then I went back to the first city, took it again and razed it. Athens was important to me, it was a large city with a lot of land, and right next to Sparta, so I took it back and tried to keep it happy. By the time I took Sparta, however, I had to deal with Athens flipping about 3 more times. Of course, you can't raze a capital, but if you could, I would have razed everything and walked away, I was that pissed at this new mechanic. Instead, I sued for peace, and got Gorgo to cede both Athens and Sparta. This, and installing governors, was all it took to resolve the loyalty issues, I kept both cities until the end of the game, which I won with a Science victory.

So, I am not all that enamored with the new loyalty mechanic. City flipping is buggy with regards to what happens to your units, and I think the mechanic in general will be an extreme pain in the ass when it comes to going for Domination victories. I feel that this is the primary victory that multiplayer games go toward. It might not be as much of an issue maps with more land (and thus closer civs), but it seems like they are trying to discourage Domination play, which can only serve make nearly all multiplayer games 500 turn slogs to victory.

End game spying was a bit different as well, they seem to have tuned the AI a bit when it comes to spying. Getting to a Space Race victory has always been rather uneventful for me, even at King difficulty the AI would never really go after my spaceship builds, and I would sabotage the hell out of theirs. In this game, the AI civs hit me from all angles as I was closing in on the victory. My governor that provided space race bonuses was targeted constantly, and I could only count on having him for 2 or three turns before he was neutralized again. My space race projects were sabotaged over and over again, even with a counterspy watching the launch pad at all times, the counterspy only blocked one out of about 5 sabotage attempts. In addition to those two angles of attack, I had to deal with about a half dozen uprisings in my second largest city during that end game run, all were orchestrated by spy operations. Fortunately, I put them all down before they got anywhere close to my spaceport.

Wow, that was a lot longer than I intended, and I didn't mean for it all to be negative. I like the dark/golden age mechanic, and governors are decent as well, though I think the limitation to 8 governors might be a problem on larger maps, and the time it takes to establish them in a city is not helpful when it comes to waging war. Next game, I think I will try a domination victory on a map without oceans, and see if my feelings on loyalty remain the same.

It takes a while to get used to.

For example, there are government policies that affect loyalty. One military policy will give you extra loyalty for having a military unit garrisoned in that city. A couple of other policies will increase the loyalty bonuses from governors.

Keep taking cities, and be prepared to go back and re-capture cities that flip on you. Eventually, you'll get enough cities that the loyalty works in your favor and against the opponent (provided there isn't another civ exerting pressure on you both).

I generally play on continents on huge maps, so I will only bother with invasions of civs that share a border with me. That way the loyalty from my own cities helps with the early stages of the invasion. I have yet to try invading another continent yet.

 

[Mumbles]

Personally, I've mostly been playing Super Mario Odyssey, but with a bit of Stardew Valley (Also for Switch), and Secret of Mana (SNES - I picked up a Super NT to play on my HDTV_ thrown in as well.

 

[Goodchild]

My wife and I just started playing Fortnite about a week ago and are loving it. We're not terribly great at shooting but we do a bang-up job of hiding and surviving