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 “the last” because they wanted to make frequent iterative upgrades instead. I feel like they changed to the opposite mentality now, if the lowest common denominator can’t handle it, nobody gets to play.
Do they have any other option than to stick to their guns on this one? That’s sold the XBox Series S as having feature parity with the Series X. If they go against that now, then they’ve 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.
They’re 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 I’m guessing they won’t.
Having just looked up the equivalent PC specs, it really doesn’t seem like a lot of power.
I imagine the game can run “fine”, 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 they’ve lost that now and I don’t imagine console players will be as accepting of lower quality as PC players with low end GPUs.
The main issue, and what’s keeping Baldur’s Gate off it, is a RAM issue. It’s got less RAM that the One, and things like dual screen need more RAM than the S has.
Most of time, it’s 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 else’s smart fridge?
Don’t 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 they’ve 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
It’s just a business decision. Enough players have strong enough hardware that the invest into optimizing for weaker hardware isn’t 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 do…
If they go against that now, then they’ve engaged in false advertising and will immediately get slapped with a huge lawsuit and/or fine,
No they won’t. Companies aren’t beholden to their commitments from advertisements in perpetuity. In the first place, someone would need to sue, or begin a class action. That’d drag out for years, and almost certainly lose.
I’d 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 can’t 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 won’t 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 should’ve 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 should’ve known that RAM is hard to scale on and they could’ve included an extra 2GB or so in the Series S lol
But I’m actually a believer that BG3 could be made to run on XSS even with split screen, it’s just gonna take more work and reduced graphics maybe audio quality too, and smarter data streaming from the SSD
Or they should’ve known that RAM is hard to scale on and they could’ve included an extra 2GB or so in the Series S lol
They really should have. It’s 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 it’s going to be an easy job.
Wasn’t the general idea that direct storage means data moves from the SDD to the GPU skipping RAM, hence the need for less. It’s possible Larian aren’t used to dealing with direct storage since the PC doesn’t have it in most systems even now and so just brute forced things the old way on PS5? That’s 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.
We’re only a few years into the new console generation and problems are also starting. It’s definitely going to get worse as more demanding games start coming out. Microsoft is really going to have to loosen their parity policy, or it’s going to hold either the entire generation back or them back.
Given that there’s 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 they’ve put a splitscreenode in the console game that the PC version doesn’t have and that’s what’s holding things up.
Given that there’s 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 can’t post it publicly before MS discloses it. They are currently migrating more and more GDK docs to the public site, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the link became publicly available soon, but currently one still needs to register a dev account to access it.
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 fixed… Didn’t 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.
I’m still playing through II. It’s 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.
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.
Lmao, I meant to play a good character and mostly I'm succeeding. I still usually do the good thing, if not so much the...altruistic nonpayment thing. But I've gotten a lot of amusement out of the realization he is making me worse.
It's just so fun to listen to his snark that I have trouble turning down an option I know he has an opinion on. The writers, animators, and voice actors all did an incredible job on this game and his actual backstory beyond what I had expected to be lame twilight fanservice is SO much fun for someone as overanalytical as I am to take apart. I find guessing at his psyche as interesting as it is realistic.
However, functionally, Astarion is the demon on my left shoulder. And he is ruining me.
This encounter was contrasted with the player’s first encounter with Morrigan, the much-loved Dragon Age character. “It does everything right to make you like the character, before showing you her darker side,” Clark said of Morrigan’s introduction in Dragon Age: Origins. “I don’t think they did this with Lae’zel.” Gaider dismissed this suggestion, saying “it truly does not matter”.
That’s the best part. Why would you like a character male or female that is openly hostile to you? You wouldn’t. That’s the point. She isn’t your friend (at least towards the beginning), you simply share a common goal with this githyanki. I wouldn’t be more forgiving if she was a guy. She’s still being an asshole to me. But it works especially for evil playthroughs as the relationship works totally fine as something that’s just transactional in nature.
You know who I couldn’t 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.
Lae’zel was my favorite origin character and who I ended up romancing and sticking with through my playthrough.
I wouldn’t have expected that going into it, but I found her writing to be probably the most complex and interesting arc out of everyone.
Whereas Shadowheart, who I went into it thinking would be the one I’d want to romance, was insufferable by halfway though and I was regularly wishing she had less relevance to the core plot.
I’m glad Lae’zel wasn’t male, and honestly I find the suggestion annoying given that the entire plot around the Githyanki is extremely focused on the matriarchal nature of the society.
Shadowheart and Lae'zel both annoy me and I really use neither if I can help doing so. Granted, I'm still getting to the side quests in Act 1 before moving on, so grain of salt, but they both currently occupy one end of an uninteresting extreme imo — Shadowheart the shrinking little flower that needs saving, Lae'zel the shallow, judgy barbarian I'm shocked to hear would have an arc.
I dislike her because she's unendingly rude and violent for no reason, even when the occasion would go over better if she chose to cool it. If she were male, I'd still hate her him because it's every time he opens his mouth. Nobody likes a dick bag.
As noted in the article, Astarion IS pompous and mean, but the important part is he's snarky instead of outright abusive, is rarely outwardly violent, and does what he does in a way that's funny. I keep him on my team purely to hear him backtalk Wyll and reminisce about hedonism and do not get the sense at any point that he would hit me over the head with a club and drag me into a cave.
If he acted all rough and edgy and broody instead of intentionally looking for amusement via horrifying randos just to see what they do, I'd consider him the world's most boring fanservice.
Anyway, the actual shining gem is Karlach and I'm increasingly in disbelief that I've seen no one singing her praises. I usually do find female characters underwhelmingly written and moments like Karlach are very needed reminders that I'm not some weird misogynist, I just hate bad writing and it's everywhere. I fell INSTANTLY in love with that energy and remain so.
Ultimately, I may not like the one, but I am glad we're able to do Warrior Female now and go all the way with actually making them warriors. More Amazonians in media!
I get why she wasn’t super popular during EA, she’s kinda a dick early game. Once you get to the Creche though her story is badass and it changes her outlook a ton.
She’s up with Karlach as one of the best companions in the game.
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