I almost never preorder games anymore, but I make an exception for Bethesda Games. I managed to snag a Constellation Edition on Gamestop after the direct, but the order has been fucked up and I haven't been able to see the status for weeks. I had to call like 8 times to get the issue escalated so I could make sure I would get it and just got confirmation that my order was fixed today š
Thing is, it could be a good idea if they didnāt have such strict parity rules - play the game, but not necessity with the exact same features (ie, disabling split screen, but still allowing co-op). Heck, that could even have been a selling point to get people to āupgradeā to an X.
They pitched parity in the beginning which is what I based what I thoughts on, 100% agree with you on that. Even if the dropped the expectations on how well itās supposed to runā¦ Drop it to a 720p console
Do they have any other option than to stick to their guns on this one? Thatās sold the XBox Series S as having feature parity with the Series X. If they go against that now, then theyāve engaged in false advertising and will immediately get slapped with a huge lawsuit and/or fine, plus all the negative PR that comes from it.
Theyāre stuck until the next console generation, which is a long way out. And I wonder if PS5 will continue to gain ground against XBox for the rest of the generation as a result.
It will be interesting to see if they continue with their two-model tiering next gen, but Iām guessing they wonāt.
Having just looked up the equivalent PC specs, it really doesnāt seem like a lot of power.
I imagine the game can run āfineā, but they probably need to do a fair bit of optimisation or people will complain about the way it looks and frame rate.
One of the benefits consoles used to have was everyone running the same hardware, but theyāve lost that now and I donāt imagine console players will be as accepting of lower quality as PC players with low end GPUs.
The main issue, and whatās keeping Baldurās Gate off it, is a RAM issue. Itās got less RAM that the One, and things like dual screen need more RAM than the S has.
Most of time, itās the juggle of time and resource available to you, but there is still a hard limit otherwise how about demand BG3 to also run on my antique knockoff NES? Cause they are too lazy to accommodate the hardware limitation? How about my smart watch? Or someone elseās smart fridge?
Donāt get me wrong, what you said in some cases but most likely the devs are told to push it out instead of make the game run better(on the target platforms.) There are no secret sauce to otherwise fit a game like BG3 to previous gen consoles.
Last, if you are really good at this optimization thing the whole industry will pay good money for your skill set.
From what theyāve said the game can run fine, but the issue is getting local split screen on the S working because it has such a small amount of RAM available
Itās just a business decision. Enough players have strong enough hardware that the invest into optimizing for weaker hardware isnāt likely to pay off.
If there is a weaker platform with lots of players, like the Switch, that can make optimizing financially viable, but obviously, it depends on how much optimizing you would have to doā¦
If they go against that now, then theyāve engaged in false advertising and will immediately get slapped with a huge lawsuit and/or fine,
No they wonāt. Companies arenāt beholden to their commitments from advertisements in perpetuity. In the first place, someone would need to sue, or begin a class action. Thatād drag out for years, and almost certainly lose.
Iād be furious with any company if they pulled that sort of shit with a product I owned.
On the other hand, feature parity means that the full potential of the X because everything also has to run on the S. So all the things that the X can do that the S canāt will, probably, not be used much, if at all, going forward, just to avoid this kind of hassle.
Great deal for people who bought the S, but sucks shit for people who paid a couple hundred bucks more for the X, for features that simply wonāt be utilized.
Since these Xbox consoles came out, maybe even since Xbox One X, they've been talking about being "beyond generations". I figured that would result in more periodic updates, probably with two simultaneous lines of Xboxes, X and S, but it hasn't turned out that way. So far, it's just seemed to mean that you don't have to deal with Sony's BS around PS4 and PS5 versions of the same game.
They shouldāve figured out a way to communicate that the Series S will last until next gen, but the Series X would get more cross-gen games when next gen launches
Or they shouldāve known that RAM is hard to scale on and they couldāve included an extra 2GB or so in the Series S lol
But Iām actually a believer that BG3 could be made to run on XSS even with split screen, itās just gonna take more work and reduced graphics maybe audio quality too, and smarter data streaming from the SSD
Or they shouldāve known that RAM is hard to scale on and they couldāve included an extra 2GB or so in the Series S lol
They really should have. Itās got 2Gb less than the One, which is where all these problems are coming from.
And as for getting BG3 running on the S, well, Microsoft has had to send out some of their engineers to help Larian figure out how to do it, so I doubt itās going to be an easy job.
Wasnāt the general idea that direct storage means data moves from the SDD to the GPU skipping RAM, hence the need for less. Itās possible Larian arenāt used to dealing with direct storage since the PC doesnāt have it in most systems even now and so just brute forced things the old way on PS5? Thatās why MS engineers have to go and show them how to use the new architecture.
On PC, the point is that you can skip RAM and go straight to VRAM. You still need the assets in memory while you use them. It's faster but it's not that much faster. With unified memory there isn't that distinction. That's one of the ways consoles can be better optimized than a general PC build.
The Series S will become an ever bigger anchor going forward. Eventually, there will be 3rd party games that just choose not to bother with the Xbox at all because of the Series S.
Weāre only a few years into the new console generation and problems are also starting. Itās definitely going to get worse as more demanding games start coming out. Microsoft is really going to have to loosen their parity policy, or itās going to hold either the entire generation back or them back.
Given that thereās plenty of PCs out there with lower spec than the S they still need to scale their game for, I doubt it will be as big an issue as people make out. BG3 is an odd outlier as theyāve put a splitscreenode in the console game that the PC version doesnāt have and thatās whatās holding things up.
Given that thereās plenty of PCs out there with lower spec than the S
Not when it comes to memory. The Xbox SS only has 10GB combined system memory and VRAM. The PC version of BG3 requires 8GB system memory plus 4GB of VRAM, so the SS is a couple gigabytes short in total.
Going by the Steam hardware survey, 95% of PCs have at least 8GB of system memory, with 16GB being easily the most common amount. 80% have at least 4GB of VRAM, with 8GB being the most common amount.
For obvious reasons I canāt post it publicly before MS discloses it. They are currently migrating more and more GDK docs to the public site, so I wouldnāt be surprised if the link became publicly available soon, but currently one still needs to register a dev account to access it.
You know how the Sega Saturn had a four meg RAM cart? There's your solution! Sell a four GIG RAM cart for the Xbox Series S! Maybe it'd have a connector on the other end for storage cartridges. You know, make your own little tower of power.
(Honestly, I get the impression that after all this complaining, a Switch version of Baldur's Gate 3 will mysteriously materialize. So much for your talking point, Larian!)
I seem to recall Xbox making claims they wanted this console generation to be āthe lastā because they wanted to make frequent iterative upgrades instead. I feel like they changed to the opposite mentality now, if the lowest common denominator canāt handle it, nobody gets to play.
After the very first reveal of it being an open-world game, I was hoping for a lot more exploration, world building, and other tasks. While I appreciated some of the fight mechanics, they definitely had worn thin by the end of the game.
Enemy variety was the killer imo. It's so common to fight and there's only like 5 enemy types in the game and you meet them all by the midway point. I am hoping more creatures show up in the sequel.
Man, still need to go finish the 2nd. I stopped playing after a game breaking bug was encountered that was never fixedā¦ Didnāt want the start the entire chapter over and never got back into it to finish it. Once I do eventually do that, I might get the 3rd when it releases.
Iām still playing through II. Itās not as immersive as the first one, but the mannequins in Chapter 3 were able to terrify me in a way none of the monsters in the first game could.
Linux was so unable to handle my 3 Monitors (granted, all with different Resolution and refresh-rate, but still) that i had to switch back to Windows today.
gnome-shell started crashing, Firefox and Gnome-Web started crashing for whatever reason. it was a Mess.
Some of that is on GNOME. I had to swap back to KDE after a couple years on GNOME due to lack of VR compatibility. GNOME is good for newbies and productivity, but completely unusable for gaming.
No offence, gnome is great, but there are many inconsistencies on the lover level, I wish it was figured out once and for all. It applies to big DEs like KDE and etc too.
Never had that issue, your experience may vary based on your hardware and software. I use Arch, sway (wayland), AMDGPU, multiple monitors with mixed refresh rates, everything works great.
NixOS with Gnome Wayland, a 4K 60hz TV, a 144hz WQHD and a 60Hz 1080p Monitor
it would often happen that one Screen would just freeze. my Web Browsers would just crash, especially if i was opening a Video.
and the Gnome-Shell itself would crash and put me into the Login Screen.
sometimes the whole Computer would crash and become unresponsive and not even alt+ctrl+n would help anymore
i don't really like XOrg, it just always feels inferior to Wayland or even Windows.
which is why i am currently using windows until [the Problems get fixed | i upgrade my PC (to an AMD GPU)]
It's been a long time since that was the case though. Now you have to update the console, update the controller firmware, install the game, and update the game.
Sure, but they're approaching a convergence. PCs have gotten easier and consoles have become less streamlined. With something like the Steam Deck, it's even more blurred.
Steam is legitimately easier and faster to get games going on than my PS4 these days IMO. Library is laid out alot better and there's no signing in whenever I turn on a controller. Its still easier to do local multiplayer on PS4, but not by much.
and thereās no signing in whenever I turn on a controller
Can you not sync your account to a specific controller on Playstation? Xbox has that for a while, though the whole software experience has generally been Xboxās strong suit imho
While only the Steam Deck has achieved massive success, it shows there are ways to reduce the prep time for PC gaming, to almost as little as modern consoles (since you do, ultimately, have to install drivers on console.)
Don't forget RISC-V, it's really the future i think. Anyone who doesn't want to live under the yoke of proprietary architectures, this looks to be the only alternative to the status quo.
If I was seeing RISC-V get widespread adoption in consumer-grade hardware, Iād be thinking about it (granted, having X86-64 and ARM on the market could make room for a third competitor compared to the 15-year x86 hegemony.) But I donāt see a push for that, and there probably wonāt be unless RISC-V delivers better results than ARM. Keep in mind that you and I probably care more about CPU architecture than the average gamer.
Iām okay with this on the condition that that platform is PC.
You want developers to choose a specific set of hardware requirements and only develop games to target and work on that specific set of hardware specifications?
The context appears to be mainly about how having to develop for different consoles/hardware configurations/etc makes development harder. So, choosing PC as the "platform" in this context would be the worst possible option to choose.
I was over the moon for a second because of the studio switch. But I goofed and was thinking Supergiant Studios, not Supermassive. Still, Supermassive has some decent hitters under the belt. Hopefully everything goes well.
People donāt like laeāzel?? Sheās by far my favorite. Please more strong women who want to fuck me.
My woman friend who I got to play a little co-op was also immediately like āsheās hot. I like herā, and found shadow heart to be a little whiney.
This encounter was contrasted with the playerās first encounter with Morrigan, the much-loved Dragon Age character. āIt does everything right to make you like the character, before showing you her darker side,ā Clark said of Morriganās introduction in Dragon Age: Origins. āI donāt think they did this with Laeāzel.ā Gaider dismissed this suggestion, saying āit truly does not matterā.
Thatās the best part. Why would you like a character male or female that is openly hostile to you? You wouldnāt. Thatās the point. She isnāt your friend (at least towards the beginning), you simply share a common goal with this githyanki. I wouldnāt be more forgiving if she was a guy. Sheās still being an asshole to me. But it works especially for evil playthroughs as the relationship works totally fine as something thatās just transactional in nature.
You know who I couldnāt forgive? Alistair. All he needed to do was shut his damn jackass mouth for 10min. Really hard for me not to see him in Gale everytime I talk to him.
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