• 5 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
  • smolgumball@lemmy.worldtoGaming@beehaw.org•CMV: PoE blows Diablo IV out of the water
    14·
    1 year ago

    For me, I enjoyed D4 as a nice campaign. Played through a few times, once with my partner and another solo.

    D4 pros: Impeccable game feel, moment to moment combat, graphics and even some nice storytelling. Enjoy the QoL features for alts and the myriad of endgame loops; Helltides are a lot of fun.

    D4 cons: Dungeons are boring to me. Builds that feel fun and powerful are limited to 0-2 per class; a big letdown. Weird network / instance lag which stands out among the otherwise polished aesthetic. Middling open world re: exploration to reward ratio.

    PoE pros: Deeeeeep. Hardcore. Aspirational? Still haven’t cleared the campaign despite getting closer each league. Lots of builds and skill variety.

    PoE cons: Feels like the oldest baguette ever to exist. Wildly stiff gameplay. Ugh its such shit compared to D4. Like DMC vs Skyrim level of difference. Disparate, cheap feeling UI and tacked on storytelling. Exudes HardXCore__Statzz.xls energy and feels practically impossible to navigate a viable build without a guide.

    In the end I think Grim Dawn outplays both D4 and PoE. Check it out if you love ARPGs

  • smolgumball@lemmy.worldtoGaming@beehaw.org•Starfield locked to 30fps on console, Bethesda confirms
    8·
    1 year ago

    I’m curious about this kind of thing from an engine and console architecture perspective. Any gamedevs able to shed some light?

    I work in the industry, but not directly on low-level engine implementation details. Personally, my gut thinking is that the Creation Engine is falling behind in terms of modern asset streaming techniques.

    Similarly, I wonder if a lack of strong virtualized geometry / just-in-time LOD generation tech could be a huge bottleneck?

    From what I understand, efforts like Nanite in UE5 were an enormous engineering investment for Epic, and unless Bethesda has a massive engine team of their own (they don’t), they simply won’t be able to benefit from an in-house equivalent in tech.

    Ultimately, I do think the lack of innovation in the Creation Engine is due to internal technical targets being established as “30FPS is good enough” and frame times below 33ms are viewed as “for those PC gamers with power to spare.”

  • smolgumball@lemmy.worldtoGaming@beehaw.org•Starfield locked to 30fps on console, Bethesda confirms
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m curious about this kind of thing from an engine and console architecture perspective. Any gamedevs able to shed some light?

    I work in the industry, but not directly on low-level engine implementation details. Personally, my gut thinking is that the Creation Engine is falling behind in terms of modern asset streaming techniques.

    In an imaginary world where I’ve poured over Bethesda’s engine source for days, I wonder if I might discover that:

    • Asset formats and/or orchestration code used for asset streaming in the Creation Engine are not optimized to a degree where scene graphs can be effectively culled based on camera frustum or player proximity without noticeable dips in frame-time. It simply takes too long to pause actor simulations or too long to stream assets back into memory and reintroduce objects to the scene graph

    • Virtualized geometry or other magical low-overhead auto-LOD solutions aren’t in place. As far as I understand it, efforts like Nanite in UE5 were an enormous engineering investment for Epic, and unless Bethesda has a massive engine team of their own (they don’t), they simply won’t be able to benefit from an in-house equivalent in tech