Gaming thoughts, bite-size chewables - new orange flavor!

[Mental Gear Reduction]

Yeah, I just skipped all that stuff in both games.

I preferred the first: the equipment system is much better, and overrides work really well. HFW nerfed the hell out of most of the really good strategies from HZD, and I just didn't like most of the replacements. And I thought the story was fantastic in HZD; finding out why things were the way they were was something I found extremely rewarding.

There were bits in HFW that were excellent, though. Exploring Ted Faro's safehouse in Las Vegas was one of the real high points for me. And that big underwater area was annoying to play through, but fun to remember.

 

[swiftdraw]

So after going through the two Survivors (Deep Rock and Whisker Squadron) and R&C: Rift Apart, I needed a new game. I downloaded about 30 onto my Steamdeck including one I frankly don’t remember purchasing: Hero’s Hour. So I fire it up, not knowing what to expect outside it’s description (strategy RPG.) Lo and behold it’s a 8-bit homage to Heroes of Might and Magic III. So, have you played HoMM3 before? Did you like it? Do you not loathe 8-bit graphics? Then you should really try this game out. Controls are not the greatest on the Deck, admittedly, but they are functional enough. Biggest reoccurring PITA is trying to drag units into your army with the touch pad when you’re above 8 units. There is just barely enough room to drag and drop the unit, but after that it wraps around and the army makeup screen is usable again.

 

[Diabolical]

Just out of curiosity, @swiftdraw , have you looked at Minishoot Adventures? Top-down Zelda-like except it's a twin-stick shooter (that you can basically turn into a survivor like with some accessibility options). I bet it plays like gangbusters on the Deck. I think there is still a demo if you want to give it a shot.

Just wanted to toss that out there - it's a fairly short game, about 7-10 hours. It's also excellent.

---

I'm about two-thirds of the way through Journey to the Savage Planet. It's... okay.

 

[Xavin]

So what happens if you are not using Unreal, ID, or say Unity?

The whole premise was that Linux could overtake windows. Right now steam's top 10 games played right no, 2 of them don't work on proton, one of them is crashy and has problems, 2 of them work without problems, and the rest fall somewhere in between according to ProtonDB

Thats's not good. It's good for the steam deck because the nature of the machine hides the problems, but go more mainstream and you still have quite a bit of problems

The number of custom engines is quickly dying off, very few studios have the internal tech knowledge and bandwidth to maintain a modern engine and all the required tooling and nobody is competitive with UE5's tools IMO. I think it's something like 50% of announced AA/AAA games use UE5. Even so, Proton is pretty good at translating non-standard stuff. The main hangup is invasive anti-cheat and there's not going to be a solution for that really, it's unlikely anyone maintaining Linux stuff will be as willing to allow the insecure nonsense anti-cheat makers get away with on Windows.

 

[Quarthinos]

The number of custom engines is quickly dying off, very few studios have the internal tech knowledge and bandwidth to maintain a modern engine and all the required tooling and nobody is competitive with UE5's tools IMO. I think it's something like 50% of announced AA/AAA games use UE5. Even so, Proton is pretty good at translating non-standard stuff. The main hangup is invasive anti-cheat and there's not going to be a solution for that really, it's unlikely anyone maintaining Linux stuff will be as willing to allow the insecure nonsense anti-cheat makers get away with on Windows.

Without scouring wikipedia, Snowdrop is still Ubi's engine of choice.

 

[swiftdraw]

Just out of curiosity, @swiftdraw , have you looked at Minishoot Adventures? Top-down Zelda-like except it's a twin-stick shooter (that you can basically turn into a survivor like with some accessibility options). I bet it plays like gangbusters on the Deck. I think there is still a demo if you want to give it a shot.

Just wanted to toss that out there - it's a fairly short game, about 7-10 hours. It's also excellent.

---

I'm about two-thirds of the way through Journey to the Savage Planet. It's... okay.

I will give it a shot. Lord knows I have the time right now.

 

[Xavin]

Without scouring wikipedia, Snowdrop is still Ubi's engine of choice.

It is and EA still uses Frostbite for some games, but overall the number of engines being used for games in production is roughly half or less than it was 3-4 years ago. The long nature of development means engine changes happen slowly, there's a lot of inertia there, but a lot of the long standing Japanese engines are going away, CDProjekt dropped their engine, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the recent struggles with RE Engine Capcom has had on Dragon's Dogma 2 and MH Wilds means it's going to be transitioned away from too. Clearly they don't have the technical knowledge to keep it competitive. That's not a knock on them as much as the reality that cutting edge lighting and geometry management is extremely hard. It's kind of like back in the day people used to be able to knock together their own wagons pretty easily, but as things shifted to cars people couldn't just build their own from scratch anymore, there was too much complexity there.

While UE5 certainly has some obvious benefits (and issues) from the end user perspective, from the developer side they are dominating and it's not even close. The workflows and tooling for UE5 are much easier and faster to use than anything else once you are making a game that requires more than 5-10 people working on it and ti's a lot easier to find UE devs than it is to train up new people on your custom engine and tooling.

 

[Mortus]

Just out of curiosity, @swiftdraw , have you looked at Minishoot Adventures?

Literally just heard about this on Geekenders. I look forward to giving it a go.

 

[Diabolical]

Literally just heard about this on Geekenders. I look forward to giving it a go.

I will give it a shot. Lord knows I have the time right now.

I was, in a word? Delighted.

 

[sword_9mm]

Yeah Minishoot is a good time and yes it plays perfectly on the Deck.

Only issue I had is sometimes the sound cuts if you sleep the Deck. Also sometimes the tiny Deck sticks are hard to use in larger fights. Dock with a real controller fixes that though.

Still good fun.

 

[swiftdraw]

I was, in a word? Delighted.

I am a little anthropomorphic space ship. The cover art has little space ship flying. I sink going over water. Immersion ruined.

So far, yeah, twin stick shooter and I struggle with those. Otherwise, charming and the overworld is very NES LoZ inspired. See where I am with it after a couple of hours.

 

[Diabolical]

I am a little anthropomorphic space ship. The cover art has little space ship flying. I sink going over water. Immersion ruined.

So far, yeah, twin stick shooter and I struggle with those. Otherwise, charming and the overworld is very NES LoZ inspired. See where I am with it after a couple of hours.

Go to the options. Turn on the auto-aim option and tweak the settings a bit. It’ll play like a survivors-like. I actually used that on later bosses so I could focus on avoiding the bullet hell shenanigans and my little ship would shoot automagically.

 

[Chito]

I played and finished Return of the Obra Dinn over the last few weeks.

I can't really recommend this game strongly enough. It's a game which is unique in my experience, and has no comparisons. Better to go in without much knowledge. I could compare it a bit to The Outer Wilds, but that'd be doing both games a disservice.

It should run on just about anything.

 

[Ryan B.]

It is and EA still uses Frostbite for some games, but overall the number of engines being used for games in production is roughly half or less than it was 3-4 years ago. The long nature of development means engine changes happen slowly, there's a lot of inertia there, but a lot of the long standing Japanese engines are going away, CDProjekt dropped their engine, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the recent struggles with RE Engine Capcom has had on Dragon's Dogma 2 and MH Wilds means it's going to be transitioned away from too. Clearly they don't have the technical knowledge to keep it competitive. That's not a knock on them as much as the reality that cutting edge lighting and geometry management is extremely hard. It's kind of like back in the day people used to be able to knock together their own wagons pretty easily, but as things shifted to cars people couldn't just build their own from scratch anymore, there was too much complexity there.

While UE5 certainly has some obvious benefits (and issues) from the end user perspective, from the developer side they are dominating and it's not even close. The workflows and tooling for UE5 are much easier and faster to use than anything else once you are making a game that requires more than 5-10 people working on it and ti's a lot easier to find UE devs than it is to train up new people on your custom engine and tooling.

Middleware is good. From my POV, the proliferation of game engine middleware has led to more and better games that are available across a wider range of platforms than ever before. I just wish there were a few more players in the market. It's frustrating that having our middleware cake meant handing such tremendous leverage over the entire industry to two shady companies.

It's that leverage that IMHO has kept any alternative engines alive at all. Megastudios with the resources of Ubisoft or EA can afford the development costs.

 

[Mister E. Meat]

Go to the options. Turn on the auto-aim option and tweak the settings a bit. It’ll play like a survivors-like. I actually used that on later bosses so I could focus on avoiding the bullet hell shenanigans and my little ship would shoot automagically.

Literally what I did on the second boss after failing it about a dozen times.

 

[Diabolical]

Literally what I did on the second boss after failing it about a dozen times.

The fact that it takes just a few seconds to toggle on and off? Is soooo helpful. I kind of wish it was assignable to a key bind or a button on the gamepad to turn it on and off.

 

[AlStar]

I've just gotten started on Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader - after 5 and a half hours, I've finally completed the prologue!

Spoiler: General Thoughts About the Game

It's looking like there's a lot of interconnecting systems and skills to get my teeth into. I seriously probably spent a not-insignificant chunk of that 5 1/2 hours just reading the description of the dozens of skill choices I had the option to pick on levelling up. Honestly, it's reminding me somewhat of Path of Achra, with stacking systems to build crazy combos. For instance, my player character, a Voidborn Officer, has officer skills which buff my allies; I can strengthen that buff by also picking a talent that makes it so that whenever I cast a buff, my target also inherits my character's voidborn luck (20% chance to reroll any failed roll).

I'm really liking how they're handling burst attacks - shooting in general, actually - basically, anything that's not a single shot gets a cone, and you can hit anything along that cone. All shots are modelled realistically, and you can absolutely miss your target and smack someone else behind them (including your allies!).

They've got the 40k aesthetic down. Everything's grimdark and covered with skulls and seals - just really well done.

My favorite play so far was the battle at the end of the prologue - a warp daemon had popped up. Big, ugly thing - took up four squares (normal humans are single square creatures). We'd whittled down its armor and HP by hacking at it with a chainsword, then I have my Sister of Battle ally take the opportunity to dash to one side of the monster (so the rest of my party wasn't in the line of fire) and just unload with her bolter. Run and Gun fires off a burst of shells, followed immediately by a normal burst (at -10% accuracy due to the Run and Gun, but negated by the fact that the daemon's so huge it's nearly impossible to miss). Shell after shell smacks into its side, till it collapses into a very satisfying pile of gore.

 

[Xavin]

It's that leverage that IMHO has kept any alternative engines alive at all. Megastudios with the resources of Ubisoft or EA can afford the development costs.

Sort of, but trying to use their own engines has bitten both of them more than once. I can think of numerous Ubisoft games that had severe technical game engine issues on launch, and EA's mandate that everyone use Frostbite a decade ago led to buggy flops like ME:Andromeda and stalled out a bunch of other projects until they were canceled until they dropped it.

At this point game engines are basically like operating systems, everyone used to make their own when it was a few months of effort to build one, but they kept dropping until we ended up with basically Windows, Mac, and various flavors of Unix, and Mac eventually gave up and decided to skin Unix. So these days things are basically Windows and different flavors of Linux for 90% of the machines/devices out there.

The main question is what is the business case for building your own rather than just modifying Unreal. I'm sure devs wish they could keep the licensing fees, but at some point the math just doesn't add up and you are spending way more on your own engine than you would on licensing. Unreal, Unity, and Godot all have their source code available for devs who need to get in there and change things for their game, so it's not like going from something completely customizable to a black box, the third party engines are customizable too.

IMO the only legitimate reason to go with a custom engine is if you are doing something so new that none of the other engines can handle it. Star Citizen is the only example of that I can think of with some of their crazy plans. Most games are just arena combat of some type or open world, which all of the engines can handle well at this point.

 

[sporkman]

weird thing about a game like horizon is that the robot creatures are...

Sort of, but trying to use their own engines has bitten both of them more than once. I can think of numerous Ubisoft games that had severe technical game engine issues on launch, and EA's mandate that everyone use Frostbite a decade ago led to buggy flops like ME:Andromeda and stalled out a bunch of other projects until they were canceled until they dropped it.

At this point game engines are basically like operating systems, everyone used to make their own when it was a few months of effort to build one, but they kept dropping until we ended up with basically Windows, Mac, and various flavors of Unix, and Mac eventually gave up and decided to skin Unix. So these days things are basically Windows and different flavors of Linux for 90% of the machines/devices out there.

The main question is what is the business case for building your own rather than just modifying Unreal. I'm sure devs wish they could keep the licensing fees, but at some point the math just doesn't add up and you are spending way more on your own engine than you would on licensing. Unreal, Unity, and Godot all have their source code available for devs who need to get in there and change things for their game, so it's not like going from something completely customizable to a black box, the third party engines are customizable too.

IMO the only legitimate reason to go with a custom engine is if you are doing something so new that none of the other engines can handle it. Star Citizen is the only example of that I can think of with some of their crazy plans. Most games are just arena combat of some type or open world, which all of the engines can handle well at this point.

yeah…but that makes everything basically a reskin of an arena battle. Same thing: take out 3-5 guys in the room.

remember the 90’s and 2000’s when part of the joy of gaming was finding out what the devs could do with their own engines. Uncharted managed to tap the full power of the ps3, god of war pushed ps2 hardware pretty hard, id tech had colored lighting and round surfaces before anyone else. Then there were loner autists like Derek smart and battle cruiser 3000

 

[JiveTurkeyJerky]

I know most folks here dislike Ubisoft, but Snowdrop is great [as a Div1/2 fella]. Doubly so if they can realize Scalar's potential.

As far as I was aware, it's only Massive that uses Snowdrop [Divisions, Avatar, Outlaws]. The rest of the franchises are on other engines [Anvil, Dunia, other?], at least Siege/Ghost Recon/AC/FarCry/Riders were the last I knew.

 

[grommit!]

As far as I was aware, it's only Massive that uses Snowdrop [Divisions, Avatar, Outlaws].

The Mario + Rabbids games too, and supposedly the upcoming Splinter Cell remake.

 

[invertedpanda]

I know most folks here dislike Ubisoft, but Snowdrop is great [as a Div1/2 fella]. Doubly so if they can realize Scalar's potential.

As far as I was aware, it's only Massive that uses Snowdrop [Divisions, Avatar, Outlaws]. The rest of the franchises are on other engines [Anvil, Dunia, other?], at least Siege/Ghost Recon/AC/FarCry/Riders were the last I knew.

Snowdrop is an impressive engine. What they did with Division 1/2 was just incredible, and Outlaws? Beautiful. Super performant and great rendering in general.. Much better than AnvilNext (which has all sorts of issues with performance).

 

[Backstop]

Welp, I'm a little over 150 hours in Skyrim and I think I should probably stop. I completed all the storylines except for the civil war (not my problem) and dawnguard (vampires are fine by me if they behave). Except I haven't restored the Thieves' Guild completely. The Malaak story seems like a good place to stop.

 

[MrLiNcH]

remember the 90’s and 2000’s when part of the joy of gaming was finding out what the devs could do with their own engines. Uncharted managed to tap the full power of the ps3, god of war pushed ps2 hardware pretty hard, id tech had colored lighting and round surfaces before anyone else. Then there were loner autists like Derek smart and battle cruiser 3000

The difference being that consoles today aren't so different, because even the hardware has been consolidated. They're all basically PCs.

 

[Ryan B.]

The difference being that consoles today aren't so different, because even the hardware has been consolidated. They're all basically PCs.

Except for the ones that are basically phones. Looking at you, Switch.

 

[Quarthinos]

Except for the ones that are basically phones. Looking at you, Switch.

I thought the switch was basically a chromecast? Isn't it based on the same processor the Shield used?

 

[sporkman]

The difference being that consoles today aren't so different, because even the hardware has been consolidated. They're all basically PCs.

I’m aware of that.

I dunno, to this day much of half life 2 feels more advanced than even the latest unreal engine. I think half life 2 simulated bone structure? While most games today its motion captured or the animations feel like clay. Anyways, that was the sort of engine difference which made gaming wondrous.

it also seems like modding was a bigger deal in the past, because game releases were fewer and so if you wanted your favorite universe you would mod doom yourself.

 

[sporkman]

Remember how ea made dragon age 3 with frostbite? I actually liked dragon age 2 quite a lot but the new engine had a different look for all of the characters. It all felt quite different. It was the small things like how acceleration and momentum worked for movement, but it added up. Still was a good game.

 

[Lt_Storm]

dawnguard (vampires are fine by me if they behave)

which suggests you should become a vampire and MAKE them behave!!! You don't even have to be particularly evil to do so.

 

[Backstop]

which suggests you should become a vampire and MAKE them behave!!! You don't even have to be particularly evil to do so.

I already noped out of becoming a werewolf. The next thing on my list was to find the guy's were-bear brother but I'm thinking that would probably lead to further were-tanglement,

 

[Ryan B.]

I’m aware of that.

I dunno, to this day much of half life 2 feels more advanced than even the latest unreal engine. I think half life 2 simulated bone structure? While most games today its motion captured or the animations feel like clay. Anyways, that was the sort of engine difference which made gaming wondrous.

it also seems like modding was a bigger deal in the past, because game releases were fewer and so if you wanted your favorite universe you would mod doom yourself.

Valve did some pretty complex (for the time) simulations for big moments in the games, like building destruction at the end of HL2:E2, or the room deformation/destruction at the beginning of Portal 2. These were typically moments where the player didn't have control, because the computers of the day couldn't run the sims in real time, so they had to be precalculated and baked in.

I don't know if anyone is doing stuff like that anymore. Computers are a lot faster these days, so maybe they don't have to as much?

 

[whoisit]

Hrm,..Control is getting HDR (officially) and DLSS 4 support, updated Ray Tracing to fix a variety of temporal and flickering issues, Ultrawide monitor support, 10-bit SDR support to reduce color banding, and some of the pre-order outfits/costumes/skins are now included for everyone. Now might be a good time to play the game, if you haven't already.

 

[GloatingSwine]

Also the Hideo Kojima collaboration is added to the PC version no longer just in the PS4 version.

 

[ajk48n]

yeah…but that makes everything basically a reskin of an arena battle. Same thing: take out 3-5 guys in the room.

That's not really true, at least for Unity. A vast array of game types can be written within Unity. Unity has lost a lot of focus over the years, and certainly doesn't have as good of graphics, geometry management, and other things that Unreal has.

But there are lots of games made with Unity that don't really look or play the same.

Just with my own tiny example I've made, there was a collection game with a time-rewinding mechanic, a 2d exploration/shooting game, a solar system simulator, a fighting game, and a painting simulator.

 

[ajk48n]

These were typically moments where the player didn't have control, because the computers of the day couldn't run the sims in real time, so they had to be precalculated and baked in.

I don't know if anyone is doing stuff like that anymore. Computers are a lot faster these days, so maybe they don't have to as much?

As far as I'm aware, large destruction type things are still pre-made as a combination of 3d objects, 2d animated sprites, and GPU shaders.

Then during the game, combinations of those pre-made things are played in the engine.

An exception of this could be the player interacting with items directly. Think walking into a stack of boxes or throwing an object. Those can definitely be running on real time.

Take all that with some grains of salt though. I've worked on small games, and know the concepts behind some other parts. But I've never worked on a AAA game.

 

[Frosty Grin]

Hrm,..Control is getting HDR (officially) and DLSS 4 support, updated Ray Tracing to fix a variety of temporal and flickering issues, Ultrawide monitor support, 10-bit SDR support to reduce color banding, and some of the pre-order outfits/costumes/skins are now included for everyone. Now might be a good time to play the game, if you haven't already.

I played most of it with DLSS 1.9, which was groundbreaking at the time - but DLSS 4 is on a whole new level. And this game is still one of the best showcases for raytracing, plus probably the best game from Remedy.

 

[Frosty Grin]

It's a bit amusing how Remedy launched Quantum Break with forced temporal reconstruction, meaning 720p rendering for 1080p monitors - and back then it was highly unusual, and quite controversial. But it turned out to be the way of the future! To the point that even DLSS Balanced (626p) looks good in Alan Wake 2, and now, presumably, in Control too.

 

[sporkman]

I do wonder why hasn't ID tech been widely adopted compared to unreal? Carmack was the original game engine genius. I also liked the feel of the source engine quite a lot, and it would be good business for valve to make it a game engine platform.

 

[grommit!]

I do wonder why hasn't ID tech been widely adopted compared to unreal? Carmack was the original game engine genius. I also liked the feel of the source engine quite a lot, and it would be good business for valve to make it a game engine platform.

Supporting an engine for third-party use requires a different set of skills than building one. Unreal has long had good tools, developer support and documentation, and were willing to work cooperatively with their clients.

 

[LordDaMan]

Can Id Tech do anything the then a 1st person/3rd person game? I don't recall it being used in anything else,.

That in itself may be why your don't see ID tech used for other games