HelplmChoking

I recall a mechanic at a dealership once saying that the most common warranty "issues" they dealt with were customers bringing the car in complaining about it making weird noises or vibrations. Almost all of them happened after the driver took the cars through a drive through for the first time, where the tight walls reflect the sound back at you and make the car’s sounds louder.
None of the cars ever actually had faults, the drivers just couldn’t hear the cars before.

If new car buyers are reporting "problems" like that, this list is pointless

Sweet, I’ve been wanting to check out Persona 5 since I first heard about it. But the only ones in the series available on PC have been P4 Golden and P5 Strikers, and I don’t own or want a PlayStation.

As for Nier, I gave it a brief go a year or two back and it was pretty good, if a bit buggy and unwieldy. Keen to try it again now, even if I’d rather have a remake of the original Drakengard (which Nier is apparently a sequel to, somehow)

Huh? If enabling ray tracing on a desktop 2070 or 2080 tanks performance below the 60fps mark, how the heck is it supposed to perform on a phone?
Heck, even the current consoles can’t really manage it and still make you choose between solid graphical quality and high framerates.

Not to mention, has anyone seen how mobile games look these days? There’s a reason they all look like mid-late PS3 era games, phones are very powerful now but they’re still phones.

I suspect these chips will be used more as a sort of accelerator for conventional lighting effects rather than full on raytraced GI. It’s amazing how far technology has come, but it hasn’t come along so far that my phone is going to produce the visual quality of a 700W+ desktop with VRMs bigger than entire Qualcomm SOCs

The fact that I can build games now with a team of almost 10

Uhh… no? First, you already could. You could build them with a team of one if you wanted. Second, you aren’t building games at all, you’re just making small map mods just like players have been doing for decades.
This really isn’t any different to those people that charge money for custom Minecraft builds, and isn’t far off people selling homemade CDs full of custom Doom or Quake levels in the 90’s. It’s just that these people are being paid by brands in keeping with the "everything exists to serve advertising" world of today.

And I’d be shocked if anyone is going to deliberately enter a code to visit some kind of McDonalds map that’s just a bunch of fast food places modelled into Fortnite with no gameplay. Seems like deliberately loading up a playlist of ads on YouTube or something

Damn if it ends up untethered with an M2, I can see this thing being really impressive. I expect Apple to do a good job on the display side; they’re a lot of things but I can’t see them shipping a device with a poor user experience.

The M2 is miles ahead of the Quest 2’s processor, barely even comparable, so standalone performance could well be incredible and may enable some wild experiences.
But, I’m not sure I’d want one. Beside the inevitably higher price, it’s almost a guarantee that it’ll only be able to be used in standalone form – which is fine since the M2 is so powerful – but I can’t see them allowing the kind of wireless PC tethering Oculus does. I don’t understand how that works as well as it does, it should be laggy and blurry and awful, but that’s a big reason I bought one. Slightly reduced FOV over a dedicated PC headset but having no wires and that hand tracking is worth it IMO, and not something Apple would ever allow.

Overall, keen to see what it can do but being limited to standalone only, near-zero chance of ports for most VR games (most of the best are made by tiny teams or individuals, only HL:A and BoneWorks really have the investment to do a port and still likely won’t) and a reliance on the App Store, which is basically a cash-sucking cesspit these days

I’m not entirely sure I get it, 55" is extremely large for a monitor. Even at 4k you’re going to be seeing some pretty large pixels but you might find that something smaller could be harder to see depending on your eyesight and OS scaling values.

What I find more surprising is the 16:9 ratio. I know a common argument against ultrawide monitors is that they’re basically a larger display with some vertical space chopped off – in this case my Neo G9 is basically this monitor cut in half vertically with higher pixel density – but at these sizes that actually could be a positive. It feels fairly natural to use a 32:9 monitor since it’s basically 2x 26" screens side by side and looking left to right is less strain that up and down.
But this thing is immense, roughly 4x 27" screens in a grid and I have to think that constantly looking up and down that much is going to be uncomfortable at that sort of size. Vertical real estate is good, and extremely important for some uses, but I find it unpleasant to use something that tall on a daily basis even for writing/reading code – I actually find being able to have more files open side by side better than more vertical height.

As for the "just get a TV!" arguments that usually pop up around these things, they won’t have that kind of curve (necessary at this size and viewing distance, I can’t imagine using a flat version of the G9 it’d be awful) and, if you’re into games or whatever, they typically won’t have the refresh rates and lower latency you’d get from a monitor. If it’s an OLED (unlikely unless Samsung is using their new QD-OLED) you may not get all the anti-burn in features as well.

In all, seems impressive and cool but not sure it’ll actually be as useful as Samsung makes it out to be. Definitely going to be pricey, though

Yeah and they’re all kinda awful. I’m more thinking about whether the iPhone would have been such a total success and so widely loved if they’d compromised on the very earliest versions to push more revenue into the App Store at the expense of the rest of the experience.

That’s the downside of the Quest (if you can get over the panic people seem to have when that Meta logo shows up), it’s an amazing piece of technology. Comfortable, light, fast, crisp image, awesome hand tracking, wireless connection to a PC for full on experiences and so on. But it’s getting more and more of an air of "we’re taking all of your money, and most of your thoughts"

the Dark Sky API and website will continue to function until March 31st, 2023.

I guess it’s a bit like if Apple knew how profitable the App Store would become before they’d even released the iPhone (which originally didn’t even have one) and were designing and building the device purely around pushing the apps and tracking instead of as a phone.
XR is awesome and I’m genuinely passionate about the possibilities, but there’s a good reason any tech-heavy fiction is focused on awful dystopias where mega-corporations used the technology to squeeze any last cent from anyone they can

Isn’t Zuck basically pumping his own cash into it these days? If that’s the case, they probably don’t need to worry for a while.
I do agree that after the next generation of hardware releases they’ll probably cut team sizes pretty significantly – the Quest 2 has already shown VR headsets have solid lifespans – and the advertising side is definitely going to balloon sooner rather than later. It’s just a balance between making money ASAP and getting enough users on board and invested to take the hit flicking the ad switch will bring

Dammit. I love VR and will often choose my Quest 2 over dedicated headsets that are technically far more capable because it’s so comfortable, easy to just put on and use, the hand tracking is awesome and it’s a solid package (and my PC isn’t as young as it used to be).

The team at Oculus really are amazing and have some incredible R&D going on – though I suspect they can do that because Zuck has hooked up an industrial pipeline of liquid cash right to the front door so they can go wild and worry about profit later.
Sadly, while I love my Quest 2 to bits, Zuck’s involvement always comes with wondering how and when they’re going to take all your money, thoughts and the common sense of your elderly relatives.

I love that whole metaverse thing in concept. A digital world accessed via truly capable VR hardware with near limitless freedom to create, explore and go wild? Amazing! The worlds of Ready Player One or the Matrix come to mind as totally open and exciting concepts.
But that isn’t what we’re ever going to get, we’ll get the full deal of those examples – the ad-focused, corporate control of IOI grasping for every cent you have and the oppressive rule of the machines in the Matrix. See, Zuck? I share the excitement, it’s just people like you that make this whole push feel like a sprint to a dystopian technocracy

Eh if this works like any of those systems where the game can set its settings to a "recommended" configuration for your hardware. Which I can’t actually remember ever working, they almost always just fail to recognise the hardware and default to a standard config.

I doubt this will be very effective for anyone using uncommon hardware combinations or most of the laptop world.
A laptop with the same CPU and GPU as one that it thinks runs the game well could be an awful experience if it’s got a lower wattage GPU, slower RAM, poor thermal/power management leading to low CPU frequencies etc.

Nice idea, but there are so many potential combinations and so many variables beyond just the CPU and GPU and I don’t see how they’re going to make that accurate. More likely, they just want to gather as much info as possible about the systems users are playing on so they can enforce specific performance requirements on developers based on common hardware or to benefit their hardware side

The PS4 came out in 2013. It’s going to be 9 years old in just 3 months, I’m shocked people are still expecting a platform that’s nearly a decade old to still be receiving new releases – although I would have liked them to make the games compatible even if it would run at like 8fps.

Insisting on releasing brand new games on hardware that was pretty midrange nearly a decade ago is exactly what hamstrings developers time and again. If everyone wasn’t trying to run Cyberpunk (which worked fine on PC and pretty well on PS5) on an ancient console, do you think there would have been so many complaints about bugs and performance?
What if Rockstar made RDR2 compatible with the 360 and PS3? Remember how dramatic the difference between GTA V on the PS3 and PCs or the PS4 was, that’s significant.

I get that availability is pretty rough for the new consoles, but that’s no excuse for chopping a game up to try and squeeze it on to obsolete consoles just to sell it to more potential buyers knowing they’ll have a bad experience and the ones who do have the current consoles will be disappointed there’s nothing new.

Sure, that’s very much true. But how much time do you want to spend plodding about grey, featureless dirt pointing a laser at rocks? Might be realistic but that won’t be fun.

Part of me agrees, but part of me doesn’t. The problem with the whole procedural generation thing is that yes, you can manage theoretically infinite possible planets, creatures and plants but there are an effectively infinite possible shapes for trees here on Earth and they pretty quickly blur together into the same white noise.

I don’t really dislike NMS (well, I dislike how incredibly badly it runs, how buggy it still is and truly impressively terrible the UI is), I think it has a decent enough concept even if it isn’t for everyone. Building outposts on distant planets neat but I always felt it lacked a little depth and that new planet is going to be the same basic landscapes in a sightly different colour combination, the same materials, the same basic templates for the creatures with different leg lengths/counts or whatever but nothing really surprising.

If you’re gonna make a game all about going places, your gameplay and your challenge and ideally your narrative has to be focused on travel. Something like Elite does great with near infinite basically identical planets and bases because the flight, fueling, equipment and navigation is the gameplay, the locations are just dots to thread your path through.
BoTW is also a bit like this, all the combat can be pretty samey and the NPCs don’t actually do anything but the fun (for me at least) was in trying to get from one place to another distant landmark and planning routes through valleys, picking my way up a mountain between little outcrops to preserve stamina, making camp under an overhang to avoid the rain/monsters etc.

That’s what an exploration/traversal game over a vast area needs to be. What will happen here is, you get in a space ship, you point up, now in space you point at the icon indicating your next objective, hit the throttle and zone out for a bit, arrive at planet and point down, land, shoot dudes, repeat.
That’s effectively the same thing as reaching the end of a Doom level, hitting the button and getting an extravagant interactive loading screen.

In response to your first point, performance looked bad but it was only a 30fps video – I suspect Microsoft forced them to show it off on an Xbox and show off its 4k capability (which means 30fps) rather than use anything more powerful at a lower res.
As for the second point, I envisage maybe a dozen actual places per planet and plenty of barren nothing full of resources to grind up (and maybe a shop if you want to skip the grind…)

Finally something to actually go off. You can release all the teasers, announcements, write ups and rendered trailers you want, Bethesda (and you do) but they’re all worthless to the consumer. This 8 or so (not 15) minutes is much more useful.

And it looks… Like No Man’s Sky, but less ugly and smaller in scope to be honest. Gunplay is nothing exciting, could use some kind of verticality or at least more emphasis on mobility (ask your friends at ID for advice, perhaps) so it doesn’t look like slowly sliding about in a wheelchair.

Environments are pretty enough, although those textures will mean the usual ridiculous install size and download times. Interesting to see NPCs in that brief glimpse of a town, Bethesda’s past games were hampered by "cities" being maybe 15 buildings and home to 20 individuals or less so glad they’ve improved that aspect.
What worries me is, outside of those pretty generically sci-fi outposts and towns (and how many of those are there?), what else is there to explore? Are they trying to suggest they’ve meticulously crafted every inch of hundreds of entire planets, full of locations, unique stories, exploration and encounters? Because I very much doubt that. That’s part of what hurts NMS, you can have hundreds, thousands of worlds all technically unique but without care and artistry, they’ll all blend together into a big, bland, barren lump of rock.

This talk of mining resources is a worry, gives the impression of a few dozen little hub areas and miles upon miles of barren wasteland filled with nothing but hostile enemies and rocks to point a laser at. Which is not the crafted world I want to be immersed in.

Less janky than I’d thought, but that’s not going to show up in a trailer like this (go back and watch Skyrim’s gameplay reveals and spot the jank they cut out). Performance looks… bad, partly because it’s a 30fps upload (wtf????) but probably also because daddy Microsoft forced you to use an Xbox at 4k30fps rather than lower the resolution or use the best PC you could find.

Should just be current, hamstringing your games by trying to make them run on mid-range-at-best hardware from 8 years ago is just asking for trouble (hello, CDPR).

Yeah it’s a tough issue. I’d argue we do have a monopoly in PC gaming; it’s effectively Steam or nothing. Epic had a crack but even that’s miniscule in comparison (and heavily subsidised by Fortnite + Unreal’s immense revenue). Across the wider industry, not so much but I don’t think I’d consider that as a positive given the whole platform exclusivity thing is pretty hostile to consumers.

But yes, companies like Amazon are especially bad. They take their immense profits and use them to undercut every player in whatever space they want to enter until they’re killed off and they’re safe to jack their prices. I do wonder if there’s a possibility for restricting profits to specific industries (profits from datacentres cannot be used to fund an entry into the grocery industry, or software sales can’t offset losses on consumer hardware sales) but that sounds like a nightmare to get right and would impact a lot of smaller companies as well.

Yes this is a heavy move by the EU, but ultimately a positive one. The only situations where USB-C is even close to bandwidth limitations currently are (potentially) displays, but even then it’s perfectly capable of carrying any display data you can send at the moment.

200W+ PD is a big win, there really isn’t anything outside the most extreme gaming laptops that would draw that much and still be considered "portable" (mine only needs 180W, but type C couldn’t do it when it came out).

And for the Apple apologists, stop whinging. If some random guy can replace the lightning port in his iPhone with a USB-C port and have it fully functional in a couple days, the world’s second most valuable corporation could have a fully validated change done in a matter of weeks. It’s also not 2011, we don’t have houses full of little radios, docks and crap with lightning ports like we used to with the 30-pin connector. And if you do have a bunch of wired devices like that, they’re at least as likely to be USB-C if they’re not just wireless. Heck, I can’t remember the last time I plugged anything into my phone, wireless charger on the bedside table, on the desk at home and the office and BT in the car. Might plug in on a longer road trip (no wireless charger in a 2009 car) but otherwise you don’t need it anyway

Forever going to be mad about that whole purchase. Apple swooped in, bought the absolute best weather app I’ve ever used, better than anything before or since, immediately shut down the Android version and are even shutting down the iOS version (after waiting a few years).
At least they’re finally starting to integrate it, it was particularly grating for the several years after they shut down the Android app but hadn’t bothered to use any of the tech themselves, it just felt like Apple screwing Android users to drive them to an iPhone.

There have bee a few 3rd party apps pop up that use the Dark Sky API, although none were ever as nice as the real thing, and now they’re all going to die out anyway.