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Cake day: February 18th, 2024

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  • Yeah, there’s a reason any movie attempting 3D CG with any budget at all has used path tracing for years. It’s objectively massively higher quality.

    You don’t need upscaling or denoising (the “AI” they’re talking about) to do raster stuff, but realistic lighting does a hugely better job, regardless of the art style you’re talking about. It’s not just photorealism, either. Look at all Disney’s animated stuff. Stuff like Moana and Elemental aren’t photorealistic and aren’t trying to be, but they’re still massively enhanced visually by improving the realism of the behavior of light, because that’s what our eyes understand. It takes a lot of math to handle all those volumetric shots through water and glass in a way that looks good.












  • The point (well, not his, which is about the absurdity of publishers using it as an actual official measuring stick) is that different people like different things. For some people a visual novel or walking simulator can be a 10/10 “game” for the story. For me, it will never be better than a 0, because I cannot enjoy a game without compelling gameplay mechanics. That’s an extreme example, but the point that different people put massively different value on different elements, many of which many players literally don’t care even a little bit about.

    An 8/10 isn’t objectively a worse game than a 9.5/10. It’s the average of a small handful of opinions, mostly from people who played the game at surface level and not like an actual player would, that’s heavily and inconsistently influenced by a variety of practices by publishers trying to get their grades pumped up. Game reviewers are almost never actual journalists with journalistic ethical standards. They’re not being “less than honest”, but they’re inherently influenced in ways outside their awareness that break the core premise of a score.

    Most reviews (including games) shouldn’t include scores at all. They should break down the different elements of a product, the strengths and weaknesses of each part, and let people draw their own conclusions.


  • I’m not downvoting, but the fact that kernel malware games don’t work is a feature to me. It would be a full time job to keep from installing anything that demands obscene access for no legitimate reason on Windows. “It doesn’t work” is way easier.

    Pretty much everything else on Steam works without effort.





  • I would say the defining characteristic that sets Breath of the Wild apart from its contemporaries is its “chemistry engine”, as they call it.

    It’s traversal. The interactions were cool, but mostly about the puzzles.

    What BOTW changed was how exploration works. You see a landmark in the distance, start moving towards it, and figure out how to get there. There’s nothing you see that isn’t part of the traversal system. There are no invisible walls. Some things are absurdly high to climb, some things are slippery, etc, but everything you struggle to traverse is clearly a product of the systems the game uses and makes sense.

    (The problem was none of that exploration got you anywhere interesting, but the core element of “everything you see is a destination” is the thing about BOTW that was groundbreaking.)