Video game journalism has become such a joke.
Video game journalism has always just been third party PR, but journalists almost all absolutely love Fromsoft games. It’s user reviews that complain about them being too hard.
Video game journalism has always just been third party PR
Nah. Back in the days of print, there actually was some fucking integrity with most outlets. Such as with Computer Gaming World.
Nah. There were a few print magazines with some integrity, but there are still some websites with integrity. The really popular stuff has always been PR though. You just had lower standards as a kid.
What where people complaining about?
People bought a game that is well known for being hard, and then complained it was too hard.
From what I saw the negative reviews were split between complaints about difficulty, and performance complaints. On the performance front it looked to me to mostly be shader compilation studders, which is relatively common with most new games.
Difficulty wise, yeah, it’s hard. That’s a big part of the appeal of Fromsoft games. They have made some adjustments since launch to bring the difficulty down a bit, but it’s probably better that they launched a game that is “too hard” and patching the difficulty down, than releasing something that everyone can steamroll through in a day and getting complaints that it was too easy. The game also rewards exploration, and if you just try to rush the bosses without exploring you’ll make things much harder on yourself.
Shader compilation stuttering only happens if a game was coded incorrectly to begin with.
Shaders should never ever be compiled during gameplay, and if it has to be done, done so asynchronously.
Either way it should never be dismissed as a problem that is “common in new games”. It’s amateurish and completely avoidable.
The fromsoft cult doesn’t like that kind of talk, you’re supposed to ignore performance issues, dictate to people how to play the game or else “they did it wrong”, and tell people to GIT GUD.
Compiled shaders are unique to every GPU model and often driver revision. The console versions don’t studder because they all have identical hardware, so compiled shaders can be shipped with the game.
Steam will eventually download a shader cache specific to your hardware, otherwise if you jump straight into a new game on PC, the game is going to have to compile them during gameplay, or make you wait 30 minutes to play while they compile (similar to how a lot of emulators for modern consoles like the Switch make you wait). And since nobody wants to launch a newly downloaded game just to sit at a boring 30 minute loading screen, they do their best on the fly.
This isn’t about defending Fromsoft, they’re just another company trying to get your money. I’m just saying that’s how PCs work, and new games with complex shaders are probably pick being accused of having performance issues at launch than hitting players who are expecting to launch a game and play right away with a long loading screen (that a patent prevents them from putting a mini game on while you wait).
So after all the people actually playing it came up for air lol?
I miss XPlay on G4. Those were the days.
scythed
Nice to see a new verb used in a headline.