Hey everyone and welcome to still another WRUP weekend at Twinstiq. It's been a wet and rainy few days here in CA and boy do we need it. I even got a little snow with the first storm that rolled through. Right now the clouds are so low that it looks like fog and it's relatively warm, all things considered. I've just made coffee and built a fire to comfort the house and here I sit before 7:00am to bring the WRUP, even if it's a day later than usual.
Well, the full release of Darktide and Callisto Protocol have been keeping me busy with games I've been excited for since hearing about them more than a year past. Both have come out with some pretty heavy performance issues and both have been updated to largely solve the issues at hand. With Darktide there was a problem with ray tracing being on all the time, even if it was switched off and even on GPU's that couldn't technically perform ray tracing. This was a problem, so Fat Shark actually hot fixed a patch that just turned it off for everyone with an AMD or Intel GPU and within hours had a fix in place. The game objectively runs better for everyone now and all is well at least on performance front. With Callisto Protocol (a game where Josh Dhuamel is very upset) there was a pretty serious compiling issue that was causing stutters and giant frame time spikes even if settings were lowered to potato level. I was playing at 135 FPS but it felt like about 13 FPS in short bursts, even in cut scenes. Which is a pretty major problem in a game where your timing is crucial. Not to mention the immersion breaks. But again by the next day there was a fix that preloaded shaders and the compiling became a thing of a past. Now I'm having an even better time in both titles.
There was a quick discussion in my Discord about why game companies don't just release bug free and complete games and it occurred to me that the answer just isn't that simple. I'll post what I said in an answer to a question on the subject, hopefully it makes sense. And keep in mind, this is just my opinion. -- Well, the answer isn't as simple as it used to be. Back in the day there were tons less hardware configurations and it was less complicated to program and stabilize for PC. Now though with potentially hundreds of system and hardware configurations you can only plan for so much before something goes wrong. That said, the bugs in the game [Darktide] seem mostly software related. Still, [Fat Shark] have a deadline to make on release to satisfy investors and management and various obligations so the best we can hope for is a mostly complete package. For instance the crafting and upgrade system in Darktide was, in fact supposed to come out in full on release, but they found issues with it after beta so they chopped it out in favor of fixing it. However they couldn't delay the release of [the game] just because of crafting not working correctly.
Couple all that with the digital game community as a whole and our current willingness to accept and buy titles before they're ever done in the first place then game companies and publishers have no reason to release a complete and bug free title because we all just eat it up anyway. Even if we do it with a modicum of complaining. I mean think back to the '90s. You could get a box copy of a game and it would work or it wouldn't with your system. But once the internet became a real thing then broken titles could be fixed via patches. Soon after that system building became more complex with hardware accelerated graphics. Then games got bigger with more studios increasing quality of story and multiplayer additions. Popularity increased and that begat bigger studios who took on even bigger projects. Those projects took way more money than the studios could put up so they had to turn to investors who demanded higher quality and even better returns on their investments. And that had to [increase] more and more every year. Take Call of Duty, or the like, they're considered failures if they don't gross tens of millions more than invested. So studios have to rush coding and get releases out faster and faster and make promises they can never make good on because they need that money to flow or their eight and nine figure projects get cancelled. So we end up with incomplete games with microtransactions and 50GB day one patches. But as long as investors get their money then that's what matters [because without them the games don't get made in the first place].
[It's a] long way to get there but that's at least a part of why we get broken games. -- This is a copy and paste of a quote I made and I took from my own Discord and slightly edited to remove time stamps and correct some readability.Of course there's a lot more to that subject and just because that's how it is now doesn't make it right. We'd all love for game studios to just be able to be completely independent and make and release whatever they feel like no matter the cost. Sadly it's just not the case and I really doubt we'll ever truly go back there.
Anyway, what are we playing?
Greywolfe: no more people! so gaming! and i can't really decide what to play of all the things that i've started and abandoned. lol. might and magic 2, below the root, the seventh guest. i just keep sort of poking into these very old games and then shrugging somewhere midway through them. maybe i should start another one :P - yeah. maybe i'll just play spore all weekend :P
AJ: I recently picked up a physical version of Into the breach for the Nintendo Switch, so I may play a bit of that. But I also finally gave River City Girls a shot and it has already firmly cemented itself as one of my favorite beat 'em ups of all time. So, I'll likely be playing that for the most part.
Scrooloose: Destiny 2 Season of Plunder ends soon so I'll be packing in some time there. Darktide is really awesome and I plan on playing a lot more of that. Calisto Protocol is also on the list. I've been very excited for that one for a while.