Hey everyone it's me, Scrooloose. I'm here today with a WRUP because it's WRUP time and we're slow on content these days. I've got a couple of things worth mentioning today starting with the elephant in the room, Red Dead's PC launch.
Right. So, Rock Star released Red Dead Redemption 2 for PC on their own launcher and the Epic Games Store just a couple of days ago and in the typical style of releases these days, it did not go very well. At all.
I did not purchase a copy yet and I think I'm going to wait for the Steam release for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's a little ways off yet. December is the time for that. I figure that'll give a chance for some stability and optimization patches to drop for both the game and the launcher. Because remember that no matter the base launcher you use, the Rock Star launcher will still be what starts the game. And for lots of people the launcher seems to be the biggest problem. And fixes seem to be fairly random making things pretty hard to pin down. And the problems range pretty wide, and deep. We're talking something as simple as the Rock Star launcher not logging people in, to the weird issue of the bios on some motherboards not agreeing with the software. If you've been able to get your copy running with no problems I feel like you should count yourself among the lucky.
Then there's the optimization. The minimum and recommended specs don't seem to line up very well. At least not in terms of a good 60FPS experience. The metric is usually based on a 1080p 30FPS experience, while users on PC would like higher resolutions and higher frame rates. There seem to be a lot of options to make the game run right so chances are you'll be okay. But you'll have to make those adjustments on an individual basis since there aren't really presets, just an overall quality vs performance slider. In any case folks are having issues running Red Dead smoothly and that's weird since it runs on consoles which are much less powerful. There are explanations for that including that some settings for console are actually lower than the 'low' settings for PC but, the fact remains that this hasn't been a good launch.
Death Stranding has also released on console with the PC version to drop in 2020. I was initially kind of interested in seeing this one in action, I still sort of am. But I will say that I can wait a while to play it. I think I'd be more into it if there weren't just a truck load of systems in place to make being a guy walking around difficult. Having to balance your character and not fall over is okay with me, I can get behind a little technical stuff. But when you've also got to rock your baby in a jar to keep it from becoming stressed out, and constantly craft boots, and gather materials, and build structures, and move super slow so you don't get attacked by a ghost that you can't see at all except for your baby in jar who's pointing in a general direction... and more. It's too much padding and book keeping for my taste. Which is too bad cos it seems like a cool mix of weird and interesting and the world build looks really nice. Maybe I'll eventually get it on a sale or something.
And finally, on a side note. Let's please stop calling new hardware information, "Leaks". Huge companies researching and building this stuff don't let information just leak. Not that it can't happen but, it seems like every time I see a headline about a new CPU or GPU or new high speed RAM or what have you it's information that's been -LEakEd to tHe PuBLic!!1one!!1 OMGWTFBBQ! These are strategic press releases that are meant to hype the public. If they were actually leaks there would also be headlines about employees and execs being fired and dealing with law suits for violating NDA's. And if they were actually leaks then these companies would need to put some serious belt tightening on the departments that have access to the information at hand. They're not fucking leaks!
What is games anyway?
AJ: I beat Halo: Reach on Legendary, now I can finally move on to trying out Halo 5: Guardians.
Greywolfe: it's wrup day, wrup day, gotta play games on wrup day :P - anyway. i'm winding my way through rime pretty slowly. it's a beautiful game, but i'm constantly waiting for the bottom to drop out and for it to turn bad, because that's kind of what i think is going to happen. [in the sense that it's pretty peaceful right now. but something's going to come up...] - as for quest for glory iv, i've ground out basically all the stats bar honor and one magic spell, so that's what i'm going to do next. titan quest continues. i'm not sure how that's going to go, since the act iv difficulty spike might kick my butt. and finally, i'm probably very near the end of kyrandia 3. going to have to figure out what to put in it's place.
Yoda: I've been really enjoying the new Nemeis system in Warframe. I've killed one so far and am eagerly excited to hunt down my Second. We also got new basically assassin's Creed style hidden blades for hacking stuff now, and there's some cool mods out there for it I want to farm for this weekend.
Scrooloose: Well, I'd like to keep playing Outer Worlds but I've reached a place where the game crashes on a load screen while trying to transition from my ship to Terra 2. This is a problem that's happening for people other than myself. I can load into anywhere else in the game with no issues at all. But all my quest lines are on Terra 2 and the crash happens every time, no matter if I change the game state or just try over and over. So this has halted my progress until whatever the problem is has a fix rolled out. Hopefully that's soon cos I don't want to forget what's going on before I get to continue. In place of that I've been playing Borderlands 3 and finding it pretty entertaining.