The Gamers Arms

Ehh, that's been happening for so long that I don't even notice it any longer. In fact I think clickbait goes through phases. For a long time the thumbnail of choice was outlining some element of the image in a thick coloured line and sticking a giant red arrow pointing at it with some variation on text of "DON'T DO THIS!!!". Bonus points could be awarded if the content of the video could not be guessed despite this.

The problem is that it works.

My favourite clickbaits are "The [insert topic] rumours are getting INSANE", which often don't even involve actual rumours, just wild speculation.

I like "My BRUTALLY honest opinion about x", followed by largely unreserved praise for said game.

But to bring it back to TLoU, pretty gutted about how it's turned out. I've never played the games but having loved the recent show I was really looking forward to experiencing them for the first time, but it's going to be a long time before I do so now, and that's assuming they eventually fix the hot mess that is this port.

I'm going to assume Sony pushed this out the door to coincide with the end of the TV show and try ride the wave of positivity for it. Obviously nowhere near fit for release and they've totally shit the bed.

It's a real shame you didn't get to play it Sly, was interested in what you would have thought of it.

I have no idea what the hell Sony are doing purchasing a full-blown and well respected porting studio complete in Nixxes yet then end up directly suffocating their own ports, putting Iron Galaxy on the job instead. Why?

And they wonder why their PC ports are selling far below expectation as each new port becomes consecutively worse than the last and all are launching with medium to major technical issues...

Returnal
186 players right now
488 24-hour peak
6,691 all-time peak last month

Uncharted LOT
716 players right now
1,261 24-hour peak
10,851 all-time peak last month

Sackboy ABG
69 players right now
179 24-hour peak
610 all-time peak last month

Addition - It has since come to light that Iron Galaxy were in actual fact working on both of their recent PC ports AT THE SAME TIME.

Lennyquantum wrote: ↑

Wed Mar 29, 2023 10:25 am

I have no idea what the hell Sony are doing purchasing a full-blown and well respected porting studio complete in Nixxes yet then end up directly suffocating their own ports, putting Iron Galaxy on the job instead. Why?

Yeah pretty much this.

Yeah, I'm not going with this swirling falsehood Sony is intentionally putting out broken PC releases to push people toward the PS5 platform. What I will go with is that Sony are too bloody cheap to put their true porting talent to work and due to the tv show airing wanted it timed directly with no matter what state the game was in.

Iron Galaxy the Arkham Knight port team will work with Naughty Dog you say? They will suffice. Make it so. What do we have to do to get a new PC game in 2023 that isn't a complete right off at launch. It's so very, very tiring and explains exactly why I hardly buy new PC games either at launch if it all in the first year these days and Arkham Knight released in 2015. Cash grab and to hell with the quality.

Nothing learned. Nothing at all.

There doesn't seem to be any set of standards for releasing games as a finished working product. Just fuck it out the door and fix it later while still charging full price.

I bagged this as I wanted to play it through properly and it was pretty cheap on CD Keys.

Downloaded on the Deck while I was off holidaying in the Cotswolds and it is broken on there, lots of crashes that caused the deck to reboot, so I binned it off. Home now and downloading on my PC here, will update once I have given it a go.

Edit 1:

DjchunKfunK wrote: ↑

Wed Mar 29, 2023 9:04 am

At this point people should be staying away from PlayStation PC ports at launch.

Not sure I agree with that sentiment - Days Gone, Horizon Zero Dawn and God of War were all spectacular ports.

Edit 2:
About an hour on the menu screen (I was doing other stuff) and at 30% shader build. Absolutely woeful. Will jump in and see how we go.

Edit 3: Gameplay-wise it is fine, but mama is it fugly. I am guessing it is due to the shader build not having completed, but the way it looks at the moment some of the textures are worse than HL2. Will report back post texture/shader-nonsense.

Snowy wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 31, 2023 11:37 am

I

DjchunKfunK wrote: ↑

Wed Mar 29, 2023 9:04 am

At this point people should be staying away from PlayStation PC ports at launch.

Not sure I agree with that sentiment - Days Gone, Horizon Zero Dawn and God of War were all spectacular ports.

Yeah but when half the games they put out are terrible ports it's basically 50/50 as to whether it is going to be a mess or not and in that situation you are better off waiting.

Hopefully this debacle will make Sony choose their porting studios more carefully. I don't want these PC releases to flop just because the port has been handled badly - the more games brought onto other platforms the better.

The stats for some of the games are not great. Returnal managed a 6.6k peak player count on Steam, Uncharted 10k, Sackboy 592 and the Last of Us is at 24k. For reference Days Gone managed 27k, God of War got 73k and Horizon 53k

Well I have let the shader config complete, and texturally it is still an ugly-bug. Walls and wood are HL2 spec textures and signposts, wanted posters etc are just smudgy blurs up close. My GPU (8Gb) is the bottleneck as far as I can tell, and if you go above what the GPU can take it will crash almost instantly.

Am replacing my base unit soon, and am interested to see what the new rig will do for visuals. The game plays fine, and textures aside doesn't look bad, but when I compare it with the visuals that my current rig will produce on, say, RDR2, it really shows what a weak job they have done with the port.