tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65511417153261377232024-03-19T03:26:35.626+00:00Pronounced /ˈʃɪ.vəʊ.æ/A varied selection of short essays on computer games, software development, and various miscellanea.Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.comBlogger100125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-77816190170504139892023-12-31T23:25:00.046+00:002024-01-01T17:26:43.942+00:00Games of the Year 2023For those of us who work in the tech / game dev sector, it's been a brutal year of layoffs and companies falling over (which possibly potends thousands more job losses to come soon). For those of us playing games, there has been something for just about everyone and a lot of huge AAA releases that missed their original dates arriving all at once. Not all of them great but we'll get into that in my round-up of the new games I found notable in 2023.<br /><br />
So without further ado, let's look at <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2012/12/goitees-2012.html">the twelfth annual</a> rundown of games I wanted to talk about during award season.<br /><br />
<h3>Alan Wake 2</h3>
With a path-traced renderer on PC fed via <a href="https://www.remedygames.com/article/how-northlight-makes-alan-wake-2-shine" target="_blank">a skinned meshlet geometry system that extends all the way to foliage sway</a>, this is arguably the very state of the art in real-time rendering. Nothing matches the DLSS 3.5 ray-reconstructed version of Bright Falls and the less solidly existent locations you visit in Alan Wake 2. Before we even consider how the elements of filmed acted footage (which we once called FMV) are layered on top of the scene in a notable step up from the use of that technique in Control.<br />
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Remedy have grown a lot since the original Alan Wake was an attempt to make an open world action game riffing on horror elements you might find in the writing of Stephen King (in the same way the Max Payne games have a clear reference point; or even a game from Rockstar, who own the rights to Max Payne). A game long-delayed that ended up stripping the experience back to linear sections, including some rather long driving sequences that clearly would have felt somewhat different in a much more open game. They return thirteen years later as a far more confident studio, with Control DLC acting as a soft pilot for Alan Wake 2 and the establishment of a shared world for the games they still have the rights for (while Max Payne morphs somewhat to become Alex Casey).<br /><br />
The result is a game that iterates on the strengths of Control's narrative while moving away from a focus on combat and into the real survival horror genre. You will shoot things (after burning away their shield of darkness) here but that is not what you spend most of your time doing. A lot more time is spent between combat in puzzles and navigation. The themes of Alan Wake return, but covered as if that first game was only a rough draft and the scope of conversation grows from Twin Peaks to encompass a lot more modern prestige TV. Unfortunately it's a game where I think the less you know going in beyond basic genre convention, the better, so that's all you'll get from me. It's a gripping ride even outside of the world-leading technical and artistic talent on show, even if I'm one of the few people who doesn't love all of their facial animation work (I thought it was budget limitations but apparently this game was definitely AAA so maybe it's an artistic choice).<br /><br />
<h3>Baldur's Gate 3</h3>
Another studio who are on my list of recent big hitters built on a long relationship to their complete body of work. I remember going to a publisher's regional offices for some press event for Divine Divinity, the rather "we would also like to make some Infinity Engine WRPGs please" origin of Larian's own universe. That series really found their own in the Divinity: Original Sin games, with the first one being a very funny RPG that gets what fantasy can play with while the second game ramps up the emotional weight of the stories they tackled. Some of the best RPGing this decade, at least once patched up for their complete editions (which is why you've only seen them mentioned in passing in these GotY lists before - I was late to the party).<br /><br />
And, after asking the licence holder for a go at making their own DnD RPG, possibly even taking over one of the classic WRPG series, Larian finally used those Original Sin games to persuade Hasbro to lend them Baldur's Gate. Six years of development later, half of which included the public Early Access release of the first act, and it's finally here and winning GotY awards left and right. A digital version of 5th Edition rules where Larian have tried to account for a lot of player action permutations and respond, "yes, and…"<br /><br />
What results is one of the deepest RPG campaigns you can walk through without the assistance of an actual human GM able to spin out new content on the fly. You cannot do everything but the Original Sin penchant for letting you teleport or physics-sim your way through various encounters has been expanded in every way imaginable here. It's a 100 hour RPG that is more than enough to satisfy a craving for epic tales filled with interesting characters but it's also so varied that you will come back to this several times to feel out the variety of what might be, all backed by combat that is a tactical delight.<br /><br />
<h3>Lies of P</h3>
I went into this game (well, the demo of the first area they released early) not expecting much. How many FromSoft-like titles have we seen trying to be a new Bloodborne or Dark Souls without latching onto what makes some of those games special? And yet, despite the extremely stock Unreal Engine 4 technical construction, what has resulted is both a very accomplished game in that sub-genre with their own spin on lore combined with by far the most technically solid gameplay experience you could want.<br />
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While it may be doing nothing unusual beyond the stock UE4 toolkit, the game is competently put together so you will be able to enjoy a very high and stable framerate while the camera doesn't destroy itself on nearby geometry (so leading you to death - my great complaint about Bloodborne, even if you fixed the frankly unacceptable framerate). When available, I play FromSoft titles on PC and like them for the WRPG-inspired games they are but it's rare you get a particularly great PC port, but here we have a game that just works on every platform.<br /><br />
In a very broad retelling of Pinocchio in a future late-Victorian setting (it's not steampunk but the automatons are there you might associate with that), you must carve your way through a hub and spokes world where shortcuts inside each spoke are regularly unlocked as you progress and xp is not permanently lost when you die (as happens in games that force you back to an earlier save) but rather is dropped for you to chase back to (yes, it's very one of those games). The story keeps you going (with a light smattering of side content and barely explained quest chains), the level design really knows what it's doing, and all the upgrades and equipment unlocks feed into a nice character progression. A very satisfying experience.<br /><br />
<h3>Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name</h3>
Finally, we got a Like a Dragon / Yakuza game <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2017/12/games-of-year-2017.html#yakuza">onto the main list again</a>. Of all the game I've played, going all the way back to my Japanese import copies of the first two games on PS2, this is the most condensed. An action DLC to the turn-based game of Like a Dragon (7) that grew out into a standalone product. This tells the story of how Kiryu got from the end of 6, into that section in 7, and is set up for how he will return in 8 (releasing early 2024).<br />
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If you're remembering how this series works (releasing something new most years ever since 2005), you will be unsurprised to hear that we have a lot of reuse of the city block areas already established (as this happens broadly simultaneously with 7) with a brand new set of mechanics to keep you playing through a new story filled with characters old and new. Your new best friend, Akame, almost steals the show but there's a lot of good stuff to go around (nod to Hanawa as another great new character).<br /><br />
With everything being slightly more compact than in previous entries (even the previous entries that were relatively shorter and avoided multiple protagonists), it's easy to run through this and get a feel for the sort of humour and story-telling this series is known for. It's possibly not an easy point to jump into the story compared to Zero but I do wonder if someone could muddle through here and then dive back into the archive. There isn't anything radically different if you haven't enjoyed the series before but if you want more Like a Dragon, this is great.<br /><br />
<h3>Cocoon</h3>
From the very first trailer, the hook was obvious: each marble is an entire world you can enter and move around in. Find the suitable pool and put a marble on the platform and you can jump inside. Or just use a marble as a weight to activate a switch or use the color-coded ability it has, like revealing hidden platforms. While you're inside a world, another type of jump-pad will help you get back out to that pool. But with every world being a complete area in itself, you can likely also find another pool within the marble world, and if you still have another marble on you, you can keep jumping deeper.<br />
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The striking visuals, economical while avoiding falling into the "pastel indie" aesthetic that it would seem close to, carve out very different worlds inside each type or marble, ensuring you don't get too lost. Although some of the fun is unwrapping exactly what you need to do next to progress - like many puzzle games you can look at what is available to you and understand why every single element is where it is and so what you are intended to do next. It's all very clear with an incremental pace of introducing new elements that slowly build up. Between various sections you also have to fight slightly more action-focused boss battles, although they are still within the puzzle limits and so will not be overly demanding on precision movement.<br /><br />
Short, well paced, visually interesting, and always ready to give praise for solving the puzzles.<br /><br />
<h3>Resident Evil 4 (2023)</h3>
I actually prepared for this remake by doing another deep dive into this series (I just didn't blog about it, unlike some previous series replays). From Zero to RE6 (my first time playing that last game - it's far too long rather than actually being so much worse than RE5), using HD or REmake editions along the way and including both Revelations games. Most of the games being rather short (when you know what you're doing) makes it easily doable, and my appreciation for RE3make has grown with time, even if I stand by <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2020/12/games-of-year-2020.html">my original position</a> that it could have been great with more direction in updating it. The second port (by QLOC) of Resident Evil 4 to PC (with <a href="https://www.re4hd.com/" target="_blank">community mods</a> to bring it further into line with the GC original while retaining "HD" textures) is my preferred way to play the original, a game I didn't think looked good <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp0KdOlYwlo" target="_blank">on the PS2 port</a> or played well until the Wii controls.<br />
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With Resident Evil 4 fresh in my memory, static lighting (if any, in some scenes; which can feel like it's nothing but a flat ambient component and maybe the vertex lighting of your flashlight) and all, I dived into RE4make to find another excellent update of a classic. The visuals, once patched, are going past what RE3make did with only a few areas where I wish they'd go further (RE Engine doesn't really make good use of ray-tracing, and SSR is, when used, about as bad as it can look to create detailed glossy reflections). This is a retelling of the classic campaign and DLC Ada journey, done somewhat less overtly campy and yet still very much not playing it straight.<br /><br />
A major departure is making the combat almost feel modern. Rather than having to plant your feet to aim, giving the game a very measured cautious movement, the RE4make pushes you to be nimble on your feet and really switch up from melee to range to avoidance. This is divisive but I maintain that Resident Evil 4 was always more of an action game than pure survival horror so given how far they went making RE3make into an action game, this change was to be expected. It just means we get a brand new game that feels totally different to play than the original - more games is betterer. And this game is excellent on its own terms.<br /><br />
<br /><h4> Honourable mentions:</h4><br />
<h3>Jusant</h3>
Interesting choice to push UE5's very high geometric density (with amazing LoD transitions) and advanced global illumination in a world almost devoid of textures, outside of some artistic flourishes and broad gradients. This climbing game is a great vertical exploration journey; a real mood.<br />
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<h3>Atomic Heart</h3>
Soviet Bioshock. It's been a long time since we last saw an actual Bioshock game and I'm happy for others to give it a new spin while we wait for 2K to reboot the series under new hands and also wait forever for whatever Levine is up to. We are talking all the way to a lighthouse appearing towards the end of the game so the references cannot get much more direct.<br /><br />
What I really like about this spin is they pushed for an open-world approach to the overworld hub in a way that goes beyond the connected spaces seen in the Bioshock games. Then you have the mix of puzzles, superpowers, and guns to keep you moving forward and exploring every inch of the constrained mission sections and overworld. Apparently the English voice tracks aren't great, but I recommend you play in the original language as you'll be reading a lot of soviet style posters with subtitles anyway.<br />
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<h3>System Shock (2023)</h3>
It's been a good decade for remakes and they're not slowing down. This rebuilding of the very hard to play System Shock 1 manages to update what absolutely needs it while also not touching a lot that could have been sanded away by a more thorough remake. At worst, this makes it interesting and at best it elevates the source material to a new level. Going through development Hell, this project has taken a very long time to finally find where it wants to land on remaking vs replacing and, just like the retro-future visuals, it decides that actually it wants to both be very modern (with every UE4 effect you have come to expect) while also being a pixelated blocky world with lower texel density than most games and a very clear style to that choice. Luckily, it all works and makes a System Shock you can play in 2023 without hating the interface, something no mod or update before has totally managed.<br />
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<h3>Planet of Lana</h3>
Referencing Another World, this is a side-scrolling setting where nothing quite makes sense but you're going to unravel some mysteries and do it via a lot of puzzling in a brisk and quite visually pleasing little puzzle platformer. We've had a lot of that in the last 15 years (did this current push start with Limbo or is Braid a better start date?) but this one knows how to run an evocative text-less story without looking like a copy of a copy.<br />
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<h3>RoboCop: Rogue City</h3>
This came out of nowhere. A licensed game from a developer who does that kind of work, only this time someone has clearly been playing some of those first-person RPGs before detailing out the semi-open gameplay they wanted to build into each hub area. I'm actually going to reference back to Deus Ex here as a grimy world where you get a main mission but are also expected to walk through a lot of hub areas and discover a lot more to keep you occupied between finding somewhat more linear mission sections. On top of the very solid gameplay, the world they've built in Unreal Engine 5 uses all the new tricks in the toolbox to lavish destructible detail into every corner, just don't look too closely at the animating faces as the budget only goes so far.<br />
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<h3>Venba</h3>
What a lovely little game about immigrant families, cooking, and finding how to belong. There is a bit of freeform cooking, where you are not under any real time pressure but just have to play with the ingredients to work out the correct recipe (if you're not already familiar with these dishes) but most of this game is about enjoying where the story goes as a young family grow up and deal with the challenges of moving half way around the world.<br />
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<h3>Persona 5 Tactica</h3>
I finally played the Royal expansion to Persona 5 this year (given the original game was 90 hours and the expansion requires a full replay of all that content and a new conclusion, it was always <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2017/12/games-of-year-2017.html#persona5">going to be some years</a> before I got to this) so the story was fresh in my mind as I dived into this tactics spin-off, sorta set towards the later parts of that main game (but really, they don't do a lot to justify how this would actually have all crammed into that time period so it would almost be better to think of it as an alternative fork for those characters you know so well).<br /><br />
The translation of the turn-based RPG into a grid-based tactics title works well, with a lot of movement freedom and move chains to build puzzles out of (the campaign mixes more standard missions with side puzzle encounters). But what you're all really here for is teens being put through the emotional wringer while asking questions about how we deserve to be governed and how those in charge are all trash. And, like many other Persona side-story content, this one really hits the mark. So if you want to go back to the Phantom Thieves and spend a few more hours with them, you can't do better than this.
<br />
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<h3>The Expanse: A Telltale Series</h3>
I love the show, the books, the cast, and I'm pretty happy with what Deck Nine have been putting out in recent years (Life is Strange stories where <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2017/12/games-of-year-2017.html#lis">the queer subtext is text</a>). So I was really happy to see this manage to tell a decent short back-story using enough of the original cast to get you into the mood (I assume Jared Harris, after Chernobyl, Foundation, etc is a rather expensive casting and so why they had to use a different actor).<br /><br />
<h3>Steamworld Build</h3>
Above the ground you're playing a quite simple Anno-like, building up production chains from raw material to designer goods to keep your population happy and allow you to upgrade their buildings and access new tiers of workers and products. Under the ground, this game offers a mining game (not totally unlike a Dungeon Keeper) with all the combat with critters reserved for subterranean levels (rather than the open seas of Anno). There's not a lot here but if you want an indie Anno without the multiplayer, then this will satisfy your urges.<br />
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<h3>Beacon Pines (2022)</h3>
If I'd played this last year when it came out, it would have ranked highly on my top list. I managed to hoover it up this year and what an absolutely delightful tale, told via a branching path in which you eventually explore all paths to fill in the full story.<br />
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<h3>Chained Echoes (2022)</h3>
As with the above, this would have ranked highly if I'd played it in the launch year so I'm making sure to give it some credit with the honourable mentions. This is a large 16-bit style JRPG with just as much to say about what people should be worrying about in the fake middle ages filled with magic and war. The combat system (on foot and in flying mechs) and levelling systems are quite fresh, to hold it all together.<br />
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<br /><h4> Not making my top lists (despite personal anticipation or being a big hit with others):</h4><br />
<b>Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom</b> - <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2023/11/the-long-2017-with-zelda-totk-reviewed.html">I said what I said</a>. Adding 2015's Besiege (or a dozen other indie games that have been doing this for years) to BotW hasn't improved my views on the new series significantly.<br /><br />
Any of the big Microsoft titles for 2023 - The <b>Forza Motorsport (2023)</b> reboot really tested my patience in working out what was up with the settings menu and why I was getting such an inconsistent result from the in-game benchmark run-to-run, and this is before we discuss the broken progression system that locked car tweaking behind several hours of play despite some cars needing upgrades in a very different order to others; <b>Starfield</b> has basically nothing to get me going, from a settings menu missing basic options like calibrating the brightness from the broken mess it shipped with (unable, in most scenes, to generate values under 1 nit) to a thousand fractured open zones with nothing to do in them and so mandatory fast-travel for most movement around the universe; and <b>Redfall</b>… well, what a mess. Studios whose work I have very much enjoyed in the past but even looking past technical issues galore, these do not seem like solid foundations on which to build experiences for me.<br /><br />
<b>Metroid Prime: Remastered</b> - Somehow the new assets didn't hit as hard with me after all these years because I've been playing all the community updated versions of my original copies with proper mouse-look and so on. Contrast this to how RE4make reinvents the entire game. Maybe this is a me problem, but the community have shepherded this series far better than Nintendo have and this remastering of the game with new assets doesn't quite rank putting into a list above.<br /><br />
<b>Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty</b> - It just didn't hit with me; negative enthusiasm from hour one. I might go back round to this in 2024 and give it another go but it didn't immediately grab me (I'll pencil it in on one of my lists at the end of these articles).<br />
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<b>Dead Space (2023)</b> - This remake almost made it to the list above, despite some very funky technical issues (Vanishing keycards? Broken textures?) and lack of ongoing support for PC but in the end, I didn't play enough of it to put it on the list above because I kept stopping with the thought that maybe everything would be fixed in subsequent patches. This is an issue I've had with quite a few major games this year on PC (which is becoming my only current gaming platform as I have neither current-gen consoles [expected to outlast a new console launch in 2024] nor a current phone [Snapdragon 845 was great in 2018 but it's been some years now]). The atmosphere of this remake almost overcomes all of the above and yet… what if they'd used RT (or a SDF fallback, a la Lumen in UE5) for the reflections to remove all the grainy noise on metal surfaces or did some GI to get a touch of bounce lighting into those dark crevices rather than rendering them in Doom 3 black?<br /><br />
<b>Star Wars Jedi: Survivor</b> - Is this going to get fixed (on PC, where animations do not play back correctly)? How did they release the second game with as many bugs and issues as the first game (which was only really fixed by a next-gen port to what are now the current consoles)? I feel like if you, months after release, have to rip the entire RT rendering system out of your 60fps mode on current gen consoles to try to recover a stable framerate, something went very wrong in the management of this software project. And the first game was all about loving what was being offered here despite the technical issues so why was this game so much more ambitious when they clearly couldn't manage that jump within the budget. I'd love to hear the story of who meddled in this to cause this outcome (which really is tarring the reputation of Respawn as a more reliable pair of hands within EA - who within EA is left because you'll notice it's been a very very long time since I could mention BioWare on these year-end roundups).<br />
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<b>Wild Hearts</b> - Another EA published title that didn't seem to launch well on PC. Show me a sixty second stretch of gameplay and I'll show you 100ms stutters. At least the Dead Space traversal stutter as it loads new areas is somewhat predictable (now they patched out several other launch issues). This is apparently a fun Monster Hunter like and yet I'm unlikely to ever find out for myself if they don't patch this on PC.<br /><br />
<b>The Lamplighters League</b> - Oooft! Didn't launch well so look again in 2024? But it doesn't sound great given that HBS was put up for sale by the publisher immediately after launch. Paradox have somehow squandered the FASA Interactive linenage and a team hot off a trilogy of great Shadowrun RPGs and <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2018/12/games-of-year-2018.html#battletech">the amazing Battletech game</a>. Apparently they slashed up to 80% of the staff months before this game was released so it went through final polish on a skeleton crew.<br /><br />
<b>Cities: Skylines 2</b> - A trash fire launch again courtesy of Paradox publishing. My experience was a totally busted settings menu where you had to fight to get anything close to a playable game, despite quite poor visuals. Once you got into the actual simulation, major sections seemed totally broken, like garbage not working at all, an infinite thirst just for low density housing (that would instantly fill to create endless sprawl yet no demand for jobs or shopping opportunities), and some ratios that seemed to mean I would need about 5% of my total city areas dedicated to primary schools. And this was telegraphed by them saying it was releasing rather hot in the run up to launch yet not flagging this release with the Early Access badge (that normally means you're not going to charge for DLC for a while).<br /><br />
<b>Forspoken</b> - I don't think anyone was really going to bat for this in GotY lists (and the demo deflated what enthusiasm I'd previously had) but I wanted to round out the list of games where the dev's previous work was something I enjoyed greatly and was a total flop. Given the studio has been dismantled and now does support work for other teams, I assume they're never going to give it a more fundamental rework to try and find the fun inside.<br /><br />
<br /><h4> Didn't play enough of to comment:</h4><br />
I made it through most of <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2022/12/games-of-year-2022.html">my to-play list from last year</a>, but wanted to note one title that I managed to fail miserably to actually follow-through with and didn't even get far enough to put it on the list above as a pencilled in "miss"...<br /><br />
Return to Monkey Island (2022) - I replayed through both (1 and 2) special editions in this series, which hold up quite well and look good, and 3 (Curse), which isn't as to my tastes but is still by far the most visually striking the series has ever been. Then I played the opening scene of this (6; Return), that starts the second after the ending I don't really care for in Monkey Island 2 and failed to go back. I should fix that in 2024 and give it a real chance rather than leaving my replay hanging [I really can't stand the visuals of 4 (Escape) and could never get into Tales - better to just pretend they don't exist; so it was a smart move to not set the new game at the very end of the series].<br /><br />
Seas of Stars - I played Chained Echoes for my 16-bit RPG fix in the later part of this year so didn't get round to playing much of this. But I am looking forward to diving into this in 2024, if it's half as good as Chained Echoes at mining what's timeless about those old games.<br />
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Need to play more of in 2024: Deliver Us Mars; Hi-Fi Rush; Amnesia: the Bunker; Pikmin 4; Terra Nil; Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon; The Crew: Motorfest; Dredge; Remnant II; Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus and Butterfly; The Last Case of Benedict Fox; The Talos Principle 2; Viewfinder; Dune: Spice Wars; Thirsty Suitors; Phantom Brigade; Humanity; Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty; Like a Dragon: Ishin!<br /><br />
Didn't even get to start in 2023: The Exit 8; Assassin's Creed: Mirage; Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader; Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty; Goodbye Volcano High; Atlas Fallen; Slime Rancher 2; Dead Island 2; Immortals of Aveum; Chants Of Sennaar; Lords of the Fallen (2023 rather than same title in 2014); Company of Heroes 3; Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew; Bomb Rush Cyberfunk; Super Mario RPG (releasing for the first time in Europe); El Paso, Elsewhere; Total War: Pharaoh; dotAGE; and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.<br /><br />
No PS5 list (and at this point in the perf vs upgrading my PC scale, I can't see it happening until they really slash the price - a $550 4070 made a lot more sense this year to let me play games looking their best vs a PS5 or Series X, which is exactly the upgrade I made): Final Fantasy XVI; Spiders-Man 2; and anything PS VR2 related. [At least outside VR, these should be coming to PC sooner or later.]<br />
Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-72834738181944140102023-11-30T14:45:00.082+00:002023-12-01T16:05:23.977+00:00The Long 2017 with Zelda (TotK reviewed)2017 was <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2017/03/2017-already-banner-year.html">a big year for games</a> and next month I'll give you my GotY rundown on another year that included a huge open-world Zelda game and the next entry in the Forza Motorsport series (games: they can take a while to bake nowadays). But, given it took quite a space to dig into <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2017/12/games-of-year-2017.html#dreamdaddy">why Zelda: Breath of the Wild wasn't going to come close to making my list of top games</a>, despite being at the very top of so many best-of lists in 2017, I thought I'd break out the Tears of the Kingdom talk into another post entirely.<br /><br />
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<br />
<h2>You can play as a girl?</h2>
And here we start with the great calamity: while BotW was disappointing in how it becomes the solo story of Link the Twink, we come back six years later to find that the intro does a great job of setting up the new big bad and a pair of plucky adventurers. But that's it, sorry. Zelda is now a pre-rendered cut-scene character (excluding some illusions/misdirection) for the rest of the game. And the real killer to my enthusiasm was the narrative payload of 18 pre-rendered videos pointed towards a much better story than is in any of these open world Zelda games. I want to play that game! I want those scenes to be part of my deep RPG progression. Half of the cast of characters you "meet" in this game are in a totally different game you get to see in a handful of video files from that other game about Zelda fighting the original big bad in his origin story or in ghostly form, to explain the plot to you.<br /><br />
I was repeatedly reminded of The Witcher 3 (which I replayed recently) where you <b>do</b> get to play as Ciri, because this is her story even if anchored to the conclusion of Geralt's trilogy. That we see so little engaging story in TotK, despite some clear effort to make areas of the world evolve as the story progresses (as the sequel reforms the world anew), is disappointing. And not just a single moment of crushing realisation. I went through the tutorial and expected to find Zelda at some point, which then becomes the entire central thrust of the mainline quests. <i>"Surely it's more than just some unlockable video files? Surely this isn't a 100 hour RPG constantly saying the princess is in another castle?"</i> Then, by about the midpoint of the main quest, you realise the full extent of the plot design and realise that Zelda is gone and will just be some videos from long ago. Barring the obvious very last scene, where the narrative weight of decisions in that other game (you only see in videos or text entries) is undone by the magic of storytelling for children.<br /><br />
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<br />
<h2>A game written for children</h2>
Because this game is written for children, old enough to read (as very little of it is voiced dialogue, feeling like a throwback to earlier times, especially given how well BotW sold and so the unlimited budget they should have had to make this game) but certainly not written for a teen audience. Nothing makes it into the script that will be too much for a twelve year old. Nintendo knows who they're making these games for, even if many critics who obsess over these titles are in their 30s to 40s and love to reference classic games much older than most of the primary audience when making comparisons.<br /><br />
Every time I read over another line, I couldn't help but notice the word choice, the repetition, and the focus on guidance. For a game all about the freedom to explore anything, it sure is worried you're not going to understand any concept that a dozen other titles have taught anyone who has been playing games for a while. That you need the most plain, simple language and cartoon comedy to keep you clapping. I'm quite old at this point, but I can at least enjoy some good all-ages (especially queer-friendly, which we didn't get much of when I was that age) content into the teen angst (who doesn't like to look back on a misspent youth?) of "young-adult" fiction. But I get almost nothing from this - I'm chasing after ghosts (of a better story with better writing).<br /><br />
The performances are all fine, when there is dialogue (I played with Japanese audio, which is how I play most narrative games from Japan except for some very Americanised releases like a Kojima joint or some Capcom output). But there's nothing behind it (and that becomes all the more obvious when you only get a few audio hoots while reading the text-only conversations). I'm not sure how to engage with a critical consensus that seems to claim that Assassin's Creed: Odyssey (especially in the final patched version with all that freeLC and two expansions) is not as well written as Tears of the Kingdom (or BotW before it). That anyone could put forward that the quest writing and narrated journey through those worlds is better in TotK boggles my mind - it seems openly contrarian in the way someone might push back against a Hollywood period epic (which can be a bit "cringe" in spots) by pointing at a basic children's movie and calling it the more substantial script.<br /><br />
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<br />
<h2>A scattershot expansive open world, doubled</h2>
That the back-story (the better RPG we didn't even get) is told in a randomised order doesn't manage to actually drive my investigative desire. I don't know why it was designed like this rather than each time you find an ancient tablet or a dragon's tear it unlocks the next sequential bit of the back-story. Outer Wilds is one of the games of the decade for me and nothing here implies a familiarity with how deftly that game managed so much back-story that could be unlocked in an order depending on how the player wishes to investigate. I crave for a huge RPG that learns those lessons for this sort of thing.<br /><br />
If I randomised the shrines, you would not know. Outside of the initial tutorial shrines on the first island, they are not really intentionally placed. Lots of tutorial shrines are ones you might encounter in this go-anywhere game in hour 40 of your play. Oh, and of the over 100 shrines I completed, there were a couple dozen types with less than most actually interesting. Lots of very rote combat puzzles or straight up mechanics tutorials which you already had been doing for hours. Many teaching you (combat) controls could have been an on-screen prompt in the open world combat.<br /><br />
The shrines have the double burden of acting as fast-travel points and so being forced to exist in the density and distribution to help feed that system but also be content in their own right. I often found myself asking why this shrine existed, if it wasn't just because they needed a fast-travel point around here. And then we still have Korok seeds and so on. Just a random location with some thing dumped in it with no real connections to the surroundings. <i>"I guess we need a pebble here, as there are no other pebbles around so this denotes a Korok hiding spot." "Look for this tree stump in the woods, because we could have just omitted it but then how would we restrict your carry capacity?"</i> At least most good collectibles are to show you that you found a path less travelled and here is the consolation prize to tell you you have now completed down this dead end, but given how open the terrain is (even in the down below; the sky rarely had multiple paths worthy of calling something a side-path) then that doesn't really apply in TotK.<br /><br />
I played through most of the content I found, both above and below; rather enjoying the dark depths, until I realised how little there was to actually do there outside finding copy-pasted combat (tied into a very long quest chain) or mines. I sometimes got frustrated that it wasn't actually nearly as open as everyone said, with several systems or quest chains locked and no signposts to even note that this would be unlocked later or how to advance towards that.<br /><br />
Some quest lines that seemingly don't have to be finished before rushing to the end boss are locking vital upgrades and features. Some soft signposting that does exist is actually eventually required to be engaged with so how optional are they to the main quests? But also there's not a huge amount of content there (you can very quickly jump from the five cities to the temples without really exploring those areas and sometimes it even feels like the game is uncertain if some stuff is to return to later for collectathons or actual content you should do while there). I know I did the mazes relatively early on but my mind blanks on if they ever tied back into the wider plotlines because so much of the game feels like <i>some stuff</i> designed to chew through that's not even important inside its own internal lore (contrast to the weight of every bit of a Dark Souls game).<br /><br />
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<br />
<h2>Coming apart at the seams</h2>
As I ended up doing a lot of collectathons and exploration, I got to the second tier of batteries, the blue ones. And promptly found out that most of the really cool vehicles, if they don't disappear via leaving them temporarily (once you step over an invisible area boundary) or a level load screen resetting the world (outside chests that are permanently removed and monsters that respawn on the blood moon timer), will blink out of existence before you even get to the chance to fully use them. No gliders going long distance, no balloons actually letting you get to the sky unless you pay for a lot of them so go much faster - it's not that this stuff prevents you sequence breaking, just makes you farm for mats to build larger machines that can go much faster. It removes the fun of Link being a little guy making fun little vehicles to cruise around in (that don't cost many resources). This may well be a technical limitation of an engine creaking at the seams.<br /><br />
Early in my playthrough, although you may encounter this at any time, I was rebuilding a village and after dragging over a dozen tree logs over the hills (using the magic physics gun to stick all the trunks I'd chopped down into a single blob, as there seems to be no limit on what the physics hand can hold, then just sprint over the land because building a vehicle would have been no faster and used up resources for a vanishing vehicle) I had to help rebuild five houses. What fun physics puzzles would the creators of 150+ different shrines [spoilers: the shrines aren't that diverse] have thought up to show me helping rebuild this town?<br /><br />
Every single one of them had two rings and the puzzle was for me to cut down another tree (this time a longer one) and drop it into the rings vertically as a central pillar. Only it was high up enough you always had to climb up to the top to get the height to use the physics hand to drop it in cleanly. In an area where it rained far too often so you couldn't climb up without falling back down (because I'd not yet done the 12 side-quest chain to unlock the "sticky" suit to remove this annoyance) and even when I got half way up, the platforming control on thin geometry show this game is not nearly as polished as you'd want for doing that sort of precision movement. Link fall down (or goes off to get more materials to build ramps).<br /><br />
Again, fine to do once or twice but every single building required the same exact thing to be done. This took 6 years, while starting from an engine that seems to very much be similar to the BotW renderer with much of the interactions preserved, that reuses the basic underlying world shape from the last game (expanded here). Thousands of people worked on this. Because it'll sell tens of millions to make it one of the highest grossing games of the year (maybe the highest without online/microtransactions?) but we get this copy-paste everywhere, next to no VO, etc etc. It's just frustrating what this could have been. Sticking vehicles together isn't enough.<br /><br />
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<br />
<h2>Wrapping it up</h2>
The game is systemic but in that systems are simulated rather than that they build puzzles actually expecting multiple paths (if you sequence break or find another path, that's due to systems complexity not consideration of the puzzle design). Immersive sims build several paths depending on your character and you get to pick a path or use the way systems interact to "break" the game and use none of the paths. Here you can break many puzzles but they are clearly designed for precisely one "correct" answer. Also some of the systemic stuff is very light: you don't have to use these metal blocks put next to the puzzle to connect the electricity source to the detector to open the gate, you can grab any random metal object or even the metal weapons you carry with you but if you use an electric arrow then absolutely not, you can't trivialise puzzles by thinking around the requirements (no cheating like that).<br /><br />
And talking of arrows, this is not the great hope for Far Cry crafting but even more varied and interesting with being able to craft a batch of enemy-seeking flaming arrows which can teleport to mirror jumping enemies. There are 500 items you can combine with your arrows and you will use precisely four of those items 1000 times (via a secondary menu, no crafting batches here or being prepared for combat) while every other item you will use once then ignore. It's not actually interesting or deep, there's just a lot more busywork and possibly even farming depending how committed you are to fully utilising the additional tools open to you (or giving up on a system because I'm not going to farm mats for that). Which is a lot of this game.<br /><br />
At least we can all agree that the fifth ally quest chain feels like it drags on (I'd even pre-completed a few parts of it many hours earlier, those which you are allowed to). That's not to give the game praise for being non-linear, because there are several hours of my life I'm never getting back, which I alluded to earlier in this piece, finding various things in the underworld that you cannot actually progress because they aren't activated until this very late game questline. And then you do a final dungeon run that I also didn't find at all interesting (even compared to the main temples, which are a solid three out of five if ever there was) and get to a damp finale anyone over the age of six sees coming, with <i>meh</i> writing throughout.<br /><br />
It has been a bit over a month since I completed TotK myself, a game I played through May, June, September, and finally October. I possibly liked it significantly more than BotW, especially those first dozen or so hours. And yet I still find it a far more frustrating game, full of half-baked ideas and pointless divergence from slowly established genre conventions (that also ends up replicating mistakes from a lot of earlier games in the open world genre) despite what many say about those issues actually being secret strengths (but to go over this would be to repeat <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2017/12/games-of-year-2017.html#dreamdaddy">my BotW comments</a>). With an injection of a lot more reactivity (like Baldur's Gate 3 offers) or production values (like most AAA games do, especially after the last game sold well over 30 million copies; which Nintendo rarely discounts as deeply as other publishers) or building more narrative framework that embraces a slightly older audience, this could have wedded systems and story into something special. I can see the embers of what others love, but it's all turned to ash in my mouth!<br /><br />
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Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-62558269968674999832022-12-31T21:44:00.021+00:002023-01-01T18:45:17.186+00:00Games of the Year 2022An entire year without posting eh? I'd like to say a lot of exciting things have been happening behind the scenes but actually the cost of living inflation bomb and a constant sequence of national political crises have required a bit more attention than I usually give to making sure my situation stays solvent. It does mean that I have wrapped up a few things and may actually get back into making games over the coming years, as the economic outlook is poor for most but relatively stable for how I have things now set up. At a certain point it would be highly desirable for a few games on Steam to start generating a trickle of income directly back to me, if I can set that up over the next decade.<br /><br />
Outside of wrapping up my old consulting business and managing daily life, I've had some time for games but very little for the more recent AAA productions. The big RPG series I (re)played this year was The Witcher, which I am still in the process of polishing off due to the December release of the latest patch for the third game in the series. Moving onto <a href="https://www.asus.com/uk/laptops/for-home/vivobook/vivobook-pro-16x-oled-m7600-amd-ryzen-5000-series/" target="_blank">a (thin) laptop as my primary (low power) work machine</a> due to exploding local electricity prices has also come with a focus on going back to a few recent titles that can do well out of a 3050 via DLSS (just patched into The Witcher 3) or digging into more legacy AAA games. Although you can actually get a surprising amount out of <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/17124/nvidia-announces-geforce-rtx-2050-mx570-and-mx550-for-laptops-2022s-entry-level-geforce" target="_blank">the lowest-end Ampere GPU you're allowed to call a Series 30</a>, especially when using Tensor-accelerated upscaling to boost quality.<br /><br />
Meanwhile, the crypto nonsense around GPU prices has ended but we're still dealing with inflated prices over what you should expect two years after the SRPs were initially set for RDNA2 & Ampere, which shows no sign of being washed away with RDNA3 or Ada, at least in the near-term (and despite huge warehouses of GPUs that are not selling at current prices and are impacting the quarterly results of every GPU vendor). But it's not just GPUs that are in silly season, with the PS5 getting a Sony official price hike rather than a price cut going into the third year on sale. The die shrinks are no longer providing a major reduction in price per transistor and war instability in Europe plus the continued supply-chain issues from the pandemic - I would say we've got to wait for things to get better but at this point it seems like a never-ending chain of problems that are likely to be joined by ever-more-frequent climate shocks and other issues. This could start to feel like a new normal and the 3080 will be the last truly great GPU to wipe away the previous generation (a card that was near impossible to get at launch and almost immediately followed by silly-season street price spikes due to crypto demand). If Intel ever sort out their driver stack (including ensuring popular older games run their best) then maybe something interesting could happen from aggressive competition rather than AMD happy to sit back and merely price-match nVidia with their raster-first RDNA design.<br /><br />
Enough complaining about the world of gaming hardware. At least I recently picked up a 5800X3D for my AM4 desktop so, when I get back from my laptop gaming break, I'll be most likely to drive a new 120Hz 4K OLED display (which I hope someone will announce at CES in a big desk-friendly size but without white sub-pixels) at the maximum refresh rate in a wide range of titles (using VRR to hide any inconsistencies) and jump back into VR. I present, my games of the year 2022:<br /><br />
<h3> Citizen Sleeper</h3>
This narrative game lives on the atmosphere it brings to a world that has already seen a major collapse but is now teetering on the edge of an actual fall, as everything that can no longer be advanced finally stops being able to be maintained anywhere near where it was during the golden years. You wake into this world as a cloned consciousness in a company-owned body, escaping the indentured servitude your donor placed you into. It's one of those scifi stories and is very happy to linger on classic questions while wrapping it all in just enough detail and character to feel like a lived-in reality. It's the execution that sells it: the characters you meet and the things they've done and want to achieve as much as your need to keep running and make the most of what time you have left.<br />
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The main gameplay system as you move around this large space station is a daily set of six-sided dice that are rolled each morning, depending on the condition of your body the night before, and give you energy to engage in activities during the next day. Maybe a 3 will unlock a specific digital lock you need to decode today or only a 5 or 6 can get you past a check unscathed. All the while, lots of counters are ticking over as the rest of the story progresses forward. You have a decent amount of control over what part of the story you focus on developing next, although all paths will ultimately either reach a natural conclusion point or the end of the road. I never found I was totally on-rails or trapped by the net closing around me, just sufficiently energised to slip through a few moments where it seemed like everything was popping off at once and I couldn't possibly respond with the actions I had allocated each day. Eventually a regression to the mean should mean your pace is rather predictable and so something the gameplay can be tuned around, even assuming the dice rolls are random rather than guided by an invisible narrative hand to keep you where the story wants you to feel you are.<br /><br />
All of the writing and choices you're making throughout this game are backed by some really detailed character portraits and such sleek flat shaded 3D elements that the brutalism seeps from the space station overview back into the story. And the music that underlies everything keeps you in the zone. I was extremely glad to spend a dozen hours in this world, seeing most of the paths the story takes (as when you come to a definitive ending, you can reload back into the game just before you make a pivotal choice about how you are going to try to leave).<br /><br />
<h3> Tinykin</h3>
What if Pikmin was a 3D platformer? No one had asked this question before and yet the answer is obviously joyous. Rather than only collect the little flower creatures to help blow stuff up and move stuff around your large open zones, what if they could help build you ladders to jump to new heights or build bridges or connect up electrical lines? What if your own mobility was far more exciting and your little helpers were just the boost to get you into the various perfectly crafted puzzle parts of this large vertically interesting world?<br />
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This is a world made up of several large connected areas, a tiny person in a very big house where you can collect a lot of different things (don't worry, there is a reasonable "you got most of them, you can move on" goal associated with the real collect-a-thon spam items in each level) as you would in any other 3D platformer but also slowly amass enough of the little critters to power yourself up to climb any gap and cross every barrier as you complete various tasks to ensure the NPCs of each area are happy and their objects have been moved to where they need to go.<br /><br />
The core traversal of this 3D platformer feels just right and all of the puzzles are just engaging enough to be fun to tick off while never leaving you totally stumped. It's good solid level design and movement fundamentals which has clearly been iterated on a lot. I loved early Pikmin games but was feeling like the announced fourth title needed to do more than just rehash that again to get me excited but here is clearly what I was actually waiting for. I'm more of an open world traversal game fan rather than strict inheritors to those early 3D platformers but this really drew me in and got me thinking through how to 100% the levels, despite collecting literally everything not being a requirement to progression or even the primary completion awards. And then it all wraps up with a very cute story and a gloriously animated visual style.<br /><br />
<h3> Tunic</h3>
This is the Zelda I am talking about when I say I'm a fan of that series (a conversation I had recently where I realised that the other person had no idea about pre-3D or mobile Zelda and so did not understand what I was referring to) - top-down action RPGs with plenty of exploration. Perfectly recreated here with some pastel flourish and very clean 3D edges, which occasionally comes into the gameplay by allowing hidden paths obscured by the camera angle.<br />
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What really elevates this is a dash of Fez making the world slightly more than it appears and injecting some meta-narrative puzzling into the game world, binding you to uncover both the game's story as experienced by the protagonist and the game's story as you uncover the construction of the mythical release of the game you are playing. This mainly, although not exclusively, manifests in uncovering pages of the game manual as you explore the world. These pages are primarily in a made up language you do not ever need to decode (so not exactly like Fez - it is only a drop of essence used) with sparse localised text and plenty of diagrams. These will explain how you play, provide map outlines, and also implies an experience of getting an import RPG back in the day before you could look anything up online and so have to work out how to play and what to do using only the manual, which you could not read. It's a great gimmick for providing hints and letting most of the game tutorialize itself, slowly ensuring you know what's going on and allowing you to dive quite deeply into the game world they've constructed.<br /><br />
This game has been getting hype at conventions for years with early demos available but the final package is more than worth the wait. The clarity of the blooming visuals, the detailed and diverse level designs, the backing music, and the carefully paced progression: it all drives you towards a really nice conclusion. And it got me into the right mood to dive into last year's Death's Door, which shares a couple of mechanical choices and a soft contrast visual style with very clean 3D art.<br /><br />
<h3> Hardspace: Shipbreaker</h3>
We're returning to space for this pick and another corporate nightmare where you don't even own your own body, will seemingly never climb out of the debt that has been thrust upon you, and there will be a lot of days of hard work in a spaceyard between you and the conclusion of the game. But unlike my top game this year, this is more of a simulation of a future job with the narrative acting as trimmings around the edge and justification for the gameplay loop, not the core of the game itself.<br />
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As the eponymous ship-breaker, your job is to use a cutting laser to either carve through plates or burn away components that make up derelict spaceships. Each of the ship templates that you slowly unlock as the complexity of the game advances can be reconfigured in a number of ways before you get to it and each of those can also have requirement changes depending on your current tasks. But no matter the details, the main task is always to work out how to safely cut the ship into pieces small enough to shove into one of three bins: the metal furnace, the material processor, or the component barge. Everything has a price so trash the least amount of stuff with the laser, don't let too much stuff blow up, and don't mix the three types of material when you yeet them towards one of the bins. Oh, and try not to die in a workplace accident; those clones you're using are expensive and they'll be added to your debt.<br /><br />
This is one of those zen games where you get into the zone and just start doing a fake job for half an hour to relax. "Ah, this is a Type 4. I know how to depressurize the inside of this without anything exploding and the extra airlocks they usually throw onto every side is going to make a lot of money once I've burned through all the locking blocks holding them together!" The use of air pressure and some slightly tricky fuel and computer systems that need to be drained in the right order and with a time pressure ensure that even when you're going zen, there is always a chance of that panic as things are not quite going as well as you expected or a tether didn't actually bind hard enough to pull a big block of metal out the way before you needed to dive through, meaning now you're on fire and no one wants that.<br /><br />
As the story ramps up, there's some good space trucker unionisation talk and a fun conclusion. My only criticism I hope is fixed in a sequel is that there are only so many ship types and variants of those types in the game (and you quickly see everything before the story has time to conclude). As I understand it, the way they design everything into the puzzles that are the atmospheric and fuel systems on top of all the basic physics for making everything a surface you can either cut or blow up means it's impossible for modders to be allowed to make new ships or even just shuffle new variants. Steam Workshop support for a moddable ship builder would turn this from a really fun game you play to completion to one of those forever games where you can throw many hundreds of hours into everything the community have built for you to play around with and puzzle out.<br /><br />
<h3> Against the Storm</h3>
This almost made <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2021/12/games-of-year-2021.html">my list last year</a> (I was thinking about both it and Timberborn as my strategy early access picks to throw up before waiting for a 1.0 release). Back then it was in early access on Epic and was already a deeply engaging city builder with a unique twist. Now it is still not quite at 1.0 but has had a year more updates added to the foundations, tuning what was already there and significantly expanding the rest of the mechanics, factions, and art.<br /><br />
In the campaign structure of this game, you are not building a permanent city that will eventually tower over everything around it, slowly consuming all available space. You are just building some temporary settlements with which to extract resources from the local area, send some back to your home capital, and then get out before the conditions get too harsh and eventually the storm arrives and wipes everything away. Between each storm cycle you will usually get in half a dozen settlements of various difficulties, always starting out in a small glade and deciding when to explore into the surrounding glades by chopping down all the trees between you and them. In some of those glades will be hazards that require creature-power and resources to pacify, but if you don't expand then you'll also run through whatever resources you have available.<br /><br />
The way each run of the settlement building process is kept fresh is via a lot of randomisation. Each time your small band of settlers arrive (of several species with different affinities for work and needs to provide for), you only have access to a subset of buildings unlocked. As you complete goals (which are also randomised), you will get to choose between three options to unlock and so extend your construction horizons. Each area has a different subset of resources at play and each glade within the area will only have a couple of them on offer. Some of the Anno-style recipe chains will have alternative formulations that mean missing out on one resource is never the end of the road but if you can't find anything or a range of resources then you need to look at going in another direction.<br /><br />
When you complete your goals and return to the capital, you then use resources gathered in the settlement to permanently unlock new perks and create a meta-progression, ensuring that even if the conditions and randomisation repeat eventually, you'll be at a different stage in your campaign progression and so respond differently. If you play Anno games or any of the Banished-following indie settlement titles, this is very refreshing but also just similar enough that you know quite a bit of how the game needs to work so you're rarely lost.<br /><br />
<h3> Two Point Campus</h3>
Two Point Hospital released in 2018 and, despite absolutely loving Theme Hospital back in 1997, something about the crash-prone experience I had and bits of the fit and finish of the game never quite let me love it. But the sequel, going to a series of campus maps to ask that you balance the books while building out huge institutions of learning, felt a lot more solid to me so I had a blast.<br />
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There is also some very useful cadence in the academic year, where a lot of the virtual people you need to satisfy are only going to be around for a few years. This contrasts with the patients in a hospital whose stay time should typically be rather shorter. Build out facilities, achieve goals, improve grades, and get ready for the next intake that you can probably make larger for a greater tuition and rent contribution as long as you're making sure to expand facilities so everyone can be housed and taught. It's a simple foundation (coming as a spiritual successor to games I was playing literally 25 years ago) but the formula still works.<br /><br />
<h3> Opus: Echo of Starsong - Full Bloom Edition</h3>
This was a game I knew absolutely nothing about going into it. An RPG (advertised as a "visual novel style adventure game") out of Taiwan with a series that apparently goes back two previous games to 2015. Continuing a recurring theme, we are back in space and in a period of somewhat managed decline after a major war, where corporations are busy ensuring the exploitation of the resources available but with some of the more advanced technology being lost to the current inhabitants.<br />
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But rather than the influences of the previous games with this broad outline, this is a lot more like swashbuckling JRPGs like Skies of Arcadia. We have witches and mystical events and space pirates messing everything up for everyone involved. People fall in love, make mistakes, and have great battles as the game, played entirely in flashback, jumps through several pivotal moments for the core characters. The side-scrolling action sections mean there is more here than the very text-heavy choice prompts of Citizen Sleeper (which is most similar to the space exploration sections) but even in the more action-heavy moments it's certainly not going to get confused for a fully open exploration RPG or a mechanics-heavy simulation like Hardspace: Shipbreaker.<br /><br />
The entire thing lives or dies on your tolerance for the rather heightened emotional storytelling of typical JRPGs, which it clearly derives a lot from (even some of the sparse visuals can often feel like they're pointing back towards a previous style of simplistic shapes evoking detail that couldn't be rendered at the time - although looking through how many games are using a similar style on my list this year, it is clearly a production style favoured by indies in the now). This 2022 definitive edition with additional content is helped by the new voice work that provides a lot of dialogue with the emotional notes that a text-only version would lack. I suspect it won't be for everyone but I really appreciated the brisk 10 hours and hope the studio continue to grow their budget and production values for future releases.<br /><br />
<h3> Dwarf Fortress</h3>
The original colony sim. Well, at least the template on which everything has built in the last 20 years it has been around. If you like RimWorld or games of that sort, you should at least try the original. This new Steam release is still not as forgiving as the imitations but you do at least get an official readable tile-set (not ASCII art), a tutorial, and some menu updates. If this game is for you, you probably already know.<br /><br />
<h3> Last Call BBS</h3>
Zachtronics' swansong (although it sounds like the band might be getting back together anyway as Zach Barth didn't take to an alternative career in education so may be starting a new team) wrapped around themes played with in several previous titles (you dial into a retro server to download some illicit software titles - they are actually a set of games that explore the sorts of things previous games have, so expect lots of iterating on designs then looking at histograms telling you that actually you could have achieved that result with one less component or in two cycles less per iteration).<br />
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It might be a good grab-bag to get introduced to a lot of the gameplay mechanics seen in previous games but maybe the light introduction text to each title and short tutorial onramp of puzzle difficulty means this is more for existing fans to play around with (despite <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2017/12/games-of-year-2017.html#opusmagnum">only appearing on my GotY list once before</a>, I generally hold the majority of Zachtronics titles in high regard) while previous titles are the best place to start off?<br /><br />
<h3> Ghost Song</h3>
An indie Metroid-style game that's certainly hewing closer to that model than <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2020/12/games-of-year-2020.html">Ori</a> did while simultaneously walking towards the same emotional notes that that series is adding, along with more NPC engagement. The early parts of the game, as I explored the non-linear map and felt out the various hard gates on progress every Metroid-style game uses to direct progress, seemed rather punishing and lacked a difficulty change option. But as I unlocked better mobility options and new tools in my arsenal, I found the game had a lot to offer. I just wish it was better signposted early on which ways you may want to explore to find the upgrades that would mean most to your play style.<br /><br />
As <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/109404061974863375" target="_blank">I said upon completion</a>, I really wish the boss battles integrated the weapon unlock soft-requirements better into the narrative of the game and also boosted the rest of the story-telling the game clearly wants to get involved in. This is a game that could do great things with some added content and a final pass on the good stuff that is here. It was teetering on the edge of my GotY vs coming in the listings below but looking back after a month, I think it hangs with the rest of these titles in my personal estimation, even if the critical consensus did seem a bit mixed in the few outlets which actually considered it notable enough to review at all.<br /><br /><br />
<h3> Not Making the Top List 2022:</h3><br />
<b>Signalis</b> - This is a retro tech-horror game going hard on that theme but without forcing horrible tank controls (I cannot embrace that retro convention - it's just a frustration; if the character should be slow to turn/move then encode that into their maximum turning speed to create delay between me pointing where I want to go and them executing it, don't force me to use tank controls). And it had some really great atmosphere in that opening couple of hours, richly mining influences beyond just gaming. As soon as it released, some friends were talking about it as their top game of the year (I think Citizen Sleeper would be hard to push off my list, especially given the common scifi themes). They know I'm into a lot of these games.<br /><br />
But I can't get past that aliased flickering mess every time the camera moves. I'm not "looking between the pixels to craft a horror unseen", I'm just getting depressed that the vibes don't match the technical execution. And this is clearly intentional. They wanted this low res retro aesthetic that evokes early games, not quite PlayStation 1 but maybe a PC a year earlier with software rendering doing the absolute most. There is a scene early on where you're at the top of a large hole into the earth and around the snow-white scene there is a dark pattern denoting the edge of the hole. Only the pixel aliasing is so bad that when the camera pans over the hole, it resembles a pure random noise pattern rather than an authored texture implying consistent defined shape. Almost immediately after this, during a more significant cut-scene, the game uses a (full output resolution) perfectly clean depth of field blur effect (on top of this pixelated aliased 360p rendering) so they're not even actually sticking to the limitations of the low res pixel grid.<br /><br />
I find it a shame that <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/109409558758237790" target="_blank">the CRT filter</a> is not enabled by default, because that clearly improves things a bit (especially if you're running it on a nice small 4K monitor so that Trinitron emulation can run some very fine R G B vertical lines through the final result). Unfortunately even this is marred with a flaw I found almost fatal while trying to play in the classic horror settings - night, alone, lights off, sound up, enjoying the perfect inky blacks of an OLED. Some of the noise added in the CRT filter squashes the blacks and whites, destroying pure black OLED output (adding noise compresses the dynamic range unless you carefully account for it, because you can only add noise in one direction to pure white or black - pushing them towards mid-grey).<br /><br />
<b>Immortality</b> - <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2015/12/games-of-year-2015.html">Her Story was a runner-up in my list for 2015</a> and since then, I don't think any of these games have managed to recapture the same novelty and focus of that game. It has started to feel like the only trick they've got to put forward and while this isn't literally repeating the same mechanic of database searches that was reused in Telling Lies, the ability to click on objects in frozen frames of the footage is a step back in my opinion. The search process for uncovering new snippets of footage is now more random (especially how the linking between frames has been chosen here, with more adventure game "logic" binding between some of them than the well-crafted database keyword lists of previous titles).<br /><br />
I got a couple of hours into unlocking footage and so I did not uncover all secrets and <a href="https://twitter.com/austin_walker/status/613803295350636544" target="_blank">know when I'm satisfied</a> but a lot of the themes it seemed to be touching on didn't draw me. While the productions of era content may have been well processed to give archival quality, I think they reached too far with the FMV production itself in trying to make hours of footage from three theoretical movies plus auxiliary content to the point where stuff looked kinda bad in ways that did not seem to be in-line with the intentional aesthetic of cheap old movies. I think a better gameplay hook would have helped push me through that to unlock the actual meaning behind the clips but it would still have been hard for me to love this threequel that some clearly absolutely love.<br /><br />
<b>Weird West</b> - I need to give this game more time but this was not what I expected from the team who moved on after making Arkane (Dishonored) games. The world seems like something it could be fun to learn more about but the top down gameplay did not have anything about the kinetic focus of the stealth from Arkane games which I find so compelling.<br /><br />
<b>A Memoir Blue</b> - I liked this well enough but in a year with a lot of indie titles doing a lot, this didn't quite do enough for me. A biographical exploration story with some quite clear budgetary limitations on the fidelity of the rendering, I feel like this has become a very saturated genre with lots of titles published by this new tier of prestige indie publishers (who do a lot of deals to get these games onto subscription services like PS+, GamePass, etc).<br /><br />
<b>Chorus</b>/Chorvs - Really glad that space combat sim games from the original Wing Commander to Descent: Freespace 2 happened during my childhood, where I absolutely loved every second of them. From the freeform movement and combat to the amazing space nebula vistas, from the hammy sci-fi acting to the rather more interesting underlying narratives being strung together to create reasons for several mission archetypes. Because trying to get into this game, I was completely lost to if this was just a bad game or if I'd lost my tastes for the entire genre. Given how friends have reacted to this and how I've not found a space sim to get my teeth into for literally years and years, I suspect it is simply a genre I can no longer get enthused about (insert pithy comment about how I'll likely feel about the eventual Star Citizen: Squadron 42 solo campaign that I paid for back in 2012).<br /><br />
<b>As Dusk Falls</b> - Not sure if the unusual visual style of mixing static animation frames from FMV into 3D rendered scenes, which is what caused everyone to take notice the second a trailer for this arrived, actually does a lot for me. It's certainly a way of conveying emotion from the actors in a fast effective method over the top of the audio performances but when we have stuff like The Callisto Protocol and The Quarry showing what digitising actors can do in current engines, I'm not sure about this throwback with clearly high production values. Didn't get far enough into the story to know if it goes anywhere interesting.<br /><br />
<b>Norco</b> - Maybe I come back to this in a few years and love it but nothing about that first hour or two hooked me visually or narratively. Another game some are very much loving so worth trying for yourself.<br /><br />
<b>Trek to Yomi</b> - This game seemed fun for the few hours I played it and has a lot of style. The budget limits come through in some of the animations but the post-processing is excellent from a team who have been really able to do stuff with their tech for years (Hard Reset from 2011 still sticks with me as interesting indie rendering choices).<br /><br /><br />
<b>I missed them last year but really enjoyed this year</b> - Death's Door; Boyfriend Dungeon; Omno; Life Is Strange: True Colors; Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy; Road 96.<br /><br />
<b>List of 'Best on PS5' [Coming to PC Later?]</b> games when PS5 is more expensive than last year so definitely not hardware I'm buying yet - Horizon 2: Forbidden West; God of War: Ragnarok; Gran Turismo 7.<br /><br />
<b>To play, hopefully with a new well-priced GPU, in 2023</b> - Pentiment; A Plague Tale: Requiem; Terra Invicta; Syberia: The World Before; Total Warhammer III; Return to Monkey Island; Somerville; Expeditions: Rome; Scorn; Elden Ring; Stray; Marvel's Midnight Suns; The Callisto Protocol; Dying Light 2; Evil West; The Last of Us Part I; The Quarry & The Devil In Me; Hard West II; CoD: MWII (the second, not the remake or the first MW2).<br /><br />
</div>Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-47299386712199012222021-12-31T23:00:00.124+00:002022-01-01T04:00:25.006+00:00Games of the Year 2021With my GPU going well past its fifth birthday (currently sitting next to a CPU that's a bit newer than that but still no longer exactly new), this was a great year for really focusing on older games and those 100 hour RPGs that seem to build up in the backlog. Because PC games will always look better next year, including the ones released years ago (thanks to nice 4K screens and the endless work of tweakers and modders to push what older engines can do). But, despite putting a few games down in anticipation of when the GPU market finally returns to normal prices and stock availability in the future, I did manage to complete some new games too.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: smaller;"><i> Beavers of the Year:</i></span>
<a name="timberborn"></a><br />
<h2>Timberborn
</h2>
This little city builder game about beavers building up a post-human society while preparing for seasonal droughts has been eating up my time this year. In Early Access, plenty of things are going to change before it is completed but there's already something here worth diving into, starting from the question "what if beaver Banished?" The answer is both significantly more adorable and possibly going to end up being mechanically more interesting than that 2014 indie hit. You know the drill: place blueprints, assign jobs, and make sure the needs of your critters are satisfied so that you can continue on into the future. Do it right and you can grow a small community into a thriving town. Mess around and, like <a href = "https://blog.shivoa.net/2015/12/games-of-year-2015.html">Cities Skylines</a>, find out just how water simulation can ruin your day.<br />
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This game had public demos early in the year then went into full Early Access a few months ago, with the first major update to the stable branch hitting a few weeks ago and a public experimental branch for all owners if you can't wait for those changes to percolate down. The development process currently needs to figure out a few teething issues with later colony management (how do I efficiently get resources moved around storage zones and prevent all these beavers from doing lots of inefficient work rather than smartly managing jobs so haulers wait to move logs from the active chopping areas to where they are needed) but you'll take a dozen or more hours to get to the point where this is holding you back. Before that you already have two family types who have interesting tech trees to develop down and slowly master the various scenario locations by building plenty of dams and vertically arranging your cities.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: smaller;"><i> Civ of the Year:</i></span>
<a name="humankind"></a><br />
<h2>Humankind
</h2>
I say I love Civilization (specifically that sub-genre of historical non-space 4X game) because I've played hundreds (thousands?) of hours of those games and loved my time with them. Civ 2 is very hard to go back to and the undifferentiated civs somewhat flattens it (just like going back to an RTS when everything was mirror matches rather than imbuing factions with mechanical character). I find Civ 4 is starting to get hard to go back to because so much has moved to hexes now and the death stacks plus AI spiral of hatred makes the latter game less than amazing. Civ 5 was my first "wait, do I like the last one more" but probably I'd say that despite the happiness mechanic brutally punishing expansion, it's probably the game I'd play the most today. Civ 6 feels like it tried to fix 5 and failed, even if merging units to create semi-stacks kinda works and the other changes help move it away from constantly butting against constraints (I have not played the expansions - I bounced off it that hard; especially when they sold a New Frontier Pass or Anthology Edition because they wanted even more paid DLC after the two full expansions shipped).<br />
<br />
But before Civ 6 was introducing districts to expand your city on the actual map (despite still only allowing you to grow into the classic 3 tile range of your centre and not allowing more than one of any district type - making them little more than added costs before you could build up the specialist building stack in any city), a little game called Endless Legend was already doing districts. It was a fantasy 4X game which is definitely not a Civ-like: important hero units, customising equipment like a space 4X (MOO style), and turning quests into far more of an RPG layer to name but a few features. That team is now back with their own actual Civ-like and I found it excellent.<br />
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Humankind in some respects resembles Civ 6, although this is certainly not a clone (especially, as noted above, some of those Civ 6 similarities come from a previous game from this team doing their own spin on districts etc before Civ did). Another way to consider it is that this is a look at what an alternative evolution of Civ 4 might look like today. The path not taken by Firaxis. Unit stacks exist but are limited and work very differently as combat resolves in a mini turn-based battle on the hexes around where combat started (including options for reinforcements if any other stacks are close). Districts grow a city (bounded by population and local happiness) but are not unique or a storage block for other buildings but those cities are places on pre-defined geographic areas they control and automatically work by proximity not a population placement mechanic. Each area can be joined to a city to form larger blocks or put under provisional control via a cheap outpost where provisional control does not enforce hard borders so skirmishes happen far more often. The list goes on and on but every inch of this game feels Civ-like (as each actual Civ sequel may change any given mechanic but still retains the feel) - just not a Civ you've ever played before.<br />
<br />
What feels so incredibly fresh about Humankind is the way you can actually have a bit of friction with other Civs without it becoming a diplomatic nightmare or some endless war that builds and explodes in the later game. Endless Legend modelled this as earlier encounters being flagged as in the age of skirmishes - when border conflicts were normal but not formally war between nations - before you developed formal relations technologies. The use of outposts to cheaply control land with only what armies you can muster to enforce a demand for a border there do much the same here. The casus belli mechanics here also feel a lot more like a Paradox title (in fact, I'd love an expansion that moved even further into Paradox war mechanics with preparing frontlines and supply lines when formal war does break out) than how it worked in Civ 6. You also have a pre-city era where you scout the map and hunt wild animals for resources before you establish yourself, so everyone starts out with far more local awareness than a Civ race to found.<br />
<br />
But what I've also done here is buried the lede: each era (which you race towards via getting stars in various categories rather than just racing on scientific research) you get to pick a new civ which combines an eternal perk that lasts into the future with era-specific perks that make it a lot like a modern Civ game but you're not trapped chasing the win condition based on the perks you picked before the game begins. If you need to get a boost to science or your economy or are about to start a large war then you can tailor your perks to that, assuming your pick isn't already taken by someone else getting to the era first and taking them. There are also some catch-up mechanics to give slower players a bit of assistance despite having their choices limited, although I hear this works less well in an online game against other actual players (I primarily play my Civ games solitaire). This is a feature I will find it hard to go back to playing without in other games. But with Humankind and Old World showing there is more to Civ-likes than just Firaxis games, this sub-genre feels healthier than ever before.<br />
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<br />
<span style="font-size: smaller;"><i> Time Loop of the Year:</i></span>
<a name="forgottencity"></a><br />
<h2>The Forgotten City
</h2>
A proven idea prototyped out as a finished game mod (here for Skyrim) then supported via various loans and grants for the arts so it can become a full commercial release (here moving to Unreal Engine)? This is a great example of where things are working the way we say they should from when it used to be a bit more common to pay attention to mods (and the free SDKs that enabled them were more prominent in AAA gaming). It may have taken five years to make but this small team have crafted something that feels both entirely itself and also the sort of thing you'd make if you prototyped everything inside Skyrim, right down to how the conversation camera zooms in to show who you're talking to (without worrying about the budget for a cinematic conversation camera system).<br />
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You are a modern day traveller who has awoken on the banks of a river as a mysterious figure asks you to explore the surroundings and find a missing stranger who just recently walked past. In very short order, you are flung back to a tiny Roman civilization trapped in an underground city and cursed by the Gods to ask what is the nature of sin, for breaking the rules will unleash an armageddon destroying everyone there. But the current leader has done a side deal with one of the deities and when that final day comes, they can rewind time back to the previous morning. This is where you come in: you must talk to everyone here, find out who is going to break the rules, and stop them. If you fail, run for the portal that brought you in and the day will restart.<br />
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What follows is an engaging adventure game that's almost entirely about talking to characters, working out what's actually going on, and making sure everyone does what you want them to on this loop or making sure next loop you have in your pocket the thing you're currently missing (theft is definitely a sin here, but what's one more iteration of the loop if you really need to pickpocket that trinket and know you can make it back to the portal easily from here). Where does the writing land? If this had come out when I was an undergrad, it would probably have topped my GotY list. There is also plenty of smart game design around making sure you rarely have to do things multiple times, because someone will give you a hand if you tell them what you did last time so they can effectively advance the loop how you need it without repetition. There is also about an hour of combat through what I found a very interesting side story, which is entirely optional and warns you that it can get a bit scary and involves lots of aiming (presumably finding that some people found the mod was otherwise fun without this chunk that mixes up the gameplay significantly). Everything here feels polished by having tried it all before during the mod prototype.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: smaller;"><i> Halo of the Year:</i></span>
<a name="outerwilds"></a><br />
<h2>Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye
</h2>
My <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/12/games-of-year-2019.html">game of the year 2019</a> finally got some DLC that expands that solar system with another celestial body while explaining another facet of the history of that mysterious universe? Obviously, sign me up for another trip to Timber Hearth.<br />
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What you get, after discovering how something you could never see before has been hiding in plain sight, is a miniature halo world which, like the rest of the game, runs on its own clockwork timer as you count down to the supernova. If you've played the main game then you know roughly what to expect with lots of discovery and only the computer in your ship tracking what you've found between loops. What you don't expect, unless you've seen the trailer for this DLC, is the significantly more immediate horror elements (rather than the pure existential dread of spelunking between the ruins of a long-dead race in the original) that creep into this world and then creep up on you as you explore into the second new area. I will keep it vague to avoid spoiling any of the major reveals because this game and DLC is all about discovery but I will say that the remixed and expanded mechanics on offer here keep things fresh and I couldn't wait to find out where the story of this particular halo was going. My only complaint is that this DLC integrates fully into the existing game without giving a real narrative close to things with a bespoke ending (how the story concludes didn't have the finality I wanted and the small addition to the main ending doesn't get me to where I wanted to get). Given the main game provides several early endings that provided alternative firm closes to various avenues, I was surprised to not see one more ending available here (unless I just missed the signs and couldn't work out how to unlock it).<br />
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<span style="font-size: smaller;"><i> Survivor of the Year:</i></span>
<a name="belowzero"></a><br />
<h2>Subnautica: Below Zero</h2>
I came to this series a bit late (given it had an extensive Early Access period 2014-2018) and thoroughly enjoyed my time descending into the depths with Subnautica. Combining a single designed underwater world (no procgen or other randomisation more typical of this crafting survival sub-genre) with light narrative hooks (hints of Alien, but not aping that aesthetic at all) and a good mechanical progression through the various survival and habitat building paths, you get just enough discovery and crafted events in the original to feel a bit special. Explore the world, work out what's going on, then work out how you're going to solve it. Build then upgrade the submersible to enable you to travel deeper, which will unlock various parts of the story and access to resources you need to build the next tier of upgrades or a new thing. By the time they stopped patching it, everything was a bit slick and the modding community had even given you a few more options (from new crafting options to an entire map system that filled in the areas you'd travelled to rather than relying on just the navigational beacons and compass).<br />
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Below Zero is the standalone expansion that takes place on an entirely new area with significantly more above-water area and a lot more story. There are actual characters you will encounter and talk with along with a lot more story to discover about the planet the previous character was stranded on and what happened both before anyone arrived and after they left. A lot of the tech tree is back and lightly tweaked with new recipes to match the different resources available in this area. The visuals push things up to show off more land, demonstrate the colder climate and more varied weather, and make sure the different biomes always look their best. While billed as not a full sequel, I took about 20 hours to play through Below Zero (about the same as the original game) and cannot imagine playing an eventual sequel without knowing the story of this (which seems far more like the setup for that sequel, especially given what this one says about what happened after the original game). I will say that I did not hugely care for the new vehicles introduced in this but then my old Prawn was something I'd mastered in the original and took me through this handily. There is just enough of an edge of the horror part of survival horror (which the crafting survival sub-genre is linked to) in this series to keep you on your toes, although it is definitely not a combat game and most of it can be played at quite a leisurely pace, full of vistas that generate awe with only brief interludes of panicked fleeing. Putting this game right next to a section on Outer Wilds definitely gets my synapses firing, even if I'd not say they exactly shared a genre (but the Immersive Sim DNA is evident in both).<br />
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<span style="font-size: smaller;"><i> Sequel of the Year:</i></span>
<a name="psychonauts2"></a><br />
<h2>Psychonauts 2
</h2>
In the years since Psychonauts released in 2005, the abandoned result of a Microsoft publishing deal gone south, lots of people have discovered and loved it. I'm about 60% with them. The other 40% is that this was never a game that was good to play, even before we'd totally standardised joypad action-platforming controls, and something about the actual technical art is just supremely disappointing. You can kinda see what they wanted to do but couldn't, be that from budgetary restraints, trying to get a project to the finish line after being dropped by the publisher, or just tech limitations with the studio dev pipeline at the time.<br />
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In a supremely good turn of fortune, the sequel that was originally crowdfunded but later finished off with the backing of now-studio-owner Microsoft (funny how the circle turns) looks exactly how you'd want it to in 2021. What's more, it generally plays well too. I've never been a huge fan of the 3D platformer and related genres but sometimes the quality of the writing and interesting varied gameplay and visuals will keep me going and this is the perfect example of having more than enough ideas to sustain the duration of the game then also sticking the landing with actually implementing those ideas into something that plays well. No 60% agree on this one - it's a 100% banger!<br />
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We are getting to the place where "of course it looks like an animated movie" is starting to seep into our expectations but that shouldn't take away from how well Psychonauts 2 manages to capture some of the style behind the first game while actually making it look really good. Unreal Engine is once again doing a very solid job rendering everything in pop-out vibrant colours that the artists aimed for while also giving a cohesive set of effects to ground the various elements no matter how fantastical their inspiration. Even looking at it from a purely technical perspective, it's doing most everything right. Wrap it up in the narrative chops the studio is well known for (reaching into the minds of the various characters presented), shake with a few catchy musical numbers, and serve.<br />
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<span style="font-size: smaller;"><i> RTS of the Year:</i></span>
<a name="age4"></a><br />
<h2>Age of Empires IV
</h2>
Ensemble Studios made Age of Empires II in 1999. Over 20 years later, made by Relic Entertainment, this is effectively Age of Empires II-2. Everything you remember (possibly refreshed by the recent remaster of that earlier game) is basically here with a few new spins and a lot of new flourishes around the edge. The several faction campaigns (which I hope will be expended over time with campaigns for the remaining factions and even some new factions added to the game) draw you through some lavishly produced documentary videos explaining the history of the time and then dumping you into a short scenario map that allows you to have a bit of fun on something that approximates what the documentary was talking about, including with additional VO narrating the events as they occur in the scenario itself. It's a good binding layer that ties the RTS together while also offering little bites of historical facts about the actual events from primarily Northern Eurasian history.<br />
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We do not get many classic RTSs and this is as classic as you can possibly get. It feels like how you remember those old games looking and playing, while actually bringing them into the modern era (unfortunately this means the actual game looks a lot more like a nicer version of a 20 year old classic rather than the initial menu and interstitial loading screens, which have an amazing gold-lined style that could look really good if implemented into the game itself). You also get a bit of variation with the faction designs moving forward and offering something slightly different when it comes to things like a nomadic faction who can pack up every building and who are meant to slowly deplete rock outcrops rather than rapidly mining them with many workers. It never feels like you'd be better off just going back to the AoE2 remake from a few years ago.<br />
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AoE4 also ensures that new players who are brought into this series via the ease of GamePass will not feel completely lost. I've been obsessively playing RTSs since Dune 2 in 1992 or maybe even Mega-Lo-Mania in 1991 (depending where you call the origin of the current RTS design) so some of the tutorials are not really something I can fully judge. But giving them a quick look over, and how the first couple of faction campaigns operate as elaborate tutorials for most of the core mechanics shared by all factions, it all seems like the sort of onboarding that will ensure someone isn't lost. If anyone wants to take it further, the game quickly highlights online multiplayer and practicing for that via AI skirmishes. But even if you just go through the campaigns, this isn't light on content.<br />
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<span style="font-size: smaller;"><i> Rest of the Year:</i></span><a name="misc"></a><br />
<b>Forza Horizon 5</b> - The sequel to Forza Horizon 4 is exactly what you expect the sequel to that game to be. Some of the visuals are definitely a step up thanks to being a cross-gen title for a new console generation but the underlying engine is still having increasing issues keeping foliage shimmer and other sources of aliasing under control when it only has MSAA (which is way too expensive if you force transparency MSAA in the drivers on PC to be a realistic option on my current system) to work with. Imagine what this would look like with a DLSS/XeSS patch on PC to clean everything up while also reducing the internal resolution so that it can run at even higher framerates consistently. They also clearly tweaked AI difficulty somewhat, especially in dirt events and it seems even more "win by a mile or never even have a chance because you start at the back of the pack" than before (all assists off, top difficulty) so maybe that could do with a few more iterations (before the expiring car licenses permanently delists this and any accumulated content updates or DLC in a few years).<br /><br />
<b>Outriders</b> - Some have called this a B game or ripped out of the PS360 generation but with a large online endgame, modern look, and responsive gameplay, this felt completely current to me. The disconnect may simply be that the narrative doesn't aim for the Sony house style or where the Call of Duty crowd has ended up. But B game is certainly not an accurate assessment of the assets on show, which are right up there with other AAA releases from big publishers (everything about this is a step up from when this team made a Gears of War title). From a technical perspective, I do not understand calling this "budget" while remaining absolutely silent on how Metroid Dread is priced as a AAA game but competes almost entirely with $20 indie titles (which look no more constrained by budget). Outriders is a good loot shooter with plenty of optional missions to give you reasons to return to the quite linear path through their interesting world. My main gripe is the tone never quite settles down and this comes to a crescendo near the end when they choose to place some combat encounters in an abandoned concentration camp (which would have been a lot more effective as a hauntingly silent walk).<br /><br />
<b>The Riftbreaker</b> - Part base builder, part top-down action shooter. This is one of those little hits that bubbles out of nowhere and possibly will not be remembered by that many in a few years but was fun while it lasted. The use of persistent bases that you move between, with different environmental hazards in each region and a slowly explored tech tree, creates a good campaign flow that feels unlike a traditional RTS but also not just a tower defence level-based game. Layer the (chatty - with generally enjoyable VO) mech suit you pilot on top as a super-unit in a game otherwise devoid of controllable units while infested by a lot of hostile critters and waves of attacks - it's both quite frantic and something where you feel you can usually come back as long as you put your attention in the right place. We haven't had a lot of RTS games, classic or slightly weird variants, for a while so this was something to savour.<br /><br />
<b>Sable</b> - This really wowed quite a few people but I have to say it didn't hit me nearly as hard. The visuals reflect their influence well but something about the aliased edges really rubbed me the wrong way about how to digitise the original art style. To the point I injected FXAA and fixed it for myself (something the sparse graphics options do not offer). It's very much an open world game that's more about the act of traversal (both climbing and by customisable ship) than much of the actual fetch quests you get during your travels. What the story said about finding your place in the world: that bit was a big miss for me.<br /><br />
<b>Exo One</b> - This is just an incredibly visually lush experience. You control a probe, built to specifications beamed into the solar system, and have the power to increase your local gravity tenfold or reshape into a disc that glides on the breeze. Travel through several planetoids as you try to make sense of what happened after taking control of the probe but really this is a game about vibes and enjoying the act of traversal.<br /><br />
<b>Next Space Rebels</b> - I didn't see this bothering too many people's lists but I did want to just make a note of it because Kerbal Space Program but with a full narrative wrapper (around YouTube toy rocket stars and dark shadowy internet land-grabs, all done with FMV) isn't something you see every month. The 2D rocket designer never quite matched the precision of KSP and neither did the actual flight controls but at least people are trying to make their own spin on the formula. More of this sort of thing.<br /><br />
<b>Myst (2021)</b> - Name another game that has, for a single game world - so direct remasters/rebuilds only not stealth sequels or other offshoots - been rendered both by offline render (1993) + real-time (realMyst onward) during different iterations and has used their own internal 3D engine (realMyst using Plasma), Unity (realMyst: Masterpiece Edition), and Unreal Engine (2021). This 2021 rebuild of the classic 1993 game (based on the work done last year for a VR port) completely remakes everything once more and clearly eclipses the original offline renders in every single way. Is it the best adventure game for modern tastes? Not really but if you half-remember most of the puzzles and haven't played one of these 3D remakes in almost twenty years then it's quite fun to go back.<br /><br />
<b>Twelve Minutes</b> - I didn't hate this nearly as much as the eventual critical consensus but I also went in after the discourse had said it doesn't stick the landing so buyer (and pre-release hype believer) beware. I quite liked the VO performances, felt the eventual plot twist was gratuitous but no worse than what many reach for looking for shock value, and enjoyed working out the path through the loop - even if I possibly didn't find them all. (Why was Dafoe playing two different roles in an identical voice? Was that ever explained?)<br /><br />
<b>Unpacking</b> - This hit a lot of people's lists but was a bit too slight for me to rank it in my top games. A short sweet tale of environmental storytelling you can finish off in a single sitting.<br /><br />
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<span style="font-size: smaller;"><i> Waiting for a PS5 or New GPU:</i></span><br />
<b>Everything new in VR</b> - <a href = "https://blog.shivoa.net/2021/04/vr-review-roundup-1.html">The Valve Index</a> deserves it; <b>Scarlet Nexus</b> - Something about how the PC port runs isn't quite right but hopefully a patch, mods, or brute force GPU power can fix it; <b>The Medium</b> - Beautiful survival horror slash adventure game? Can't wait; <b>Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy</b> - I didn't mind the story part of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel%27s_Avengers_%28video_game%29" target="_blank">"the bad"</a> Eidos Marvel game last year so looking forward to a universally liked one; <b>Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart</b> - PS5 exclusive is PS5 exclusive; <b>Returnal</b> - Run-based action shooter that dials the particles up to 11? Ok; <b>Halo Infinite</b> - A year of post-release patches and a new GPU should make this sing (please add DLSS/XeSS because the current TAA upscale is… definitely something); <b>Deathloop</b> - DXR visuals are worth waiting for, along with the online being reinvigorated by what I expect will be a big Xbox and GamePass release in a year; <b>Resident Evil Village</b> - <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2017/12/games-of-year-2017.html#re7">RE7 was very good</a> in VR and on PC but given the lack of the former here, I'm sat waiting for them to fully fix that completely broken PC port; <b>Kena: Bridge of Spirits</b> - Lovely animation and a consistent art design (worth playing looking its best); <b>The Ascent</b> - Top-down ARPG fun but a bit too heavy for my current GPU.
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<span style="font-size: smaller;"><i> To Play Next Year:</i></span><br />
<i>Even in another quiet year, some titles I just didn't find time to play. Luckily they will still be there next year, along with everything else in my backlog.</i> The Artful Escape, Shin Megami Tensei V, Far Cry 6, Tales of Arise, Inscryption, Life Is Strange: True Colors, Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes, Hitman 3, Lost Judgment, NEO: The World Ends with You, The Gunk, Oddworld: Soulstorm, Biomutant, Recompile.
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Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-46382295402828849572021-08-30T11:48:00.002+01:002021-08-30T15:01:45.645+01:00Intel XeSS: Joining nVidia in Tensor-Accelerated TAAUBack in May <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2021/05/fewer-samples-per-pixel-per-frame.html">I wrote about</a> the evolution of per-pixel rendering costs, expecting the imminent announcement of AMD's next generation temporal upscaling technique, offering a competitor to DLSS 2.x that would run on hardware from multiple vendors and even provide a fully open source option to inspect or even improve upon (if it wasn't a perfect match to one vendor's underlying hardware) the offered technology. That ended up not happening and <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2021/06/an-initial-inspection-of-fidelityfx.html">FidelityFX Super Resolution, while an interesting alternative to more basic spatial upsampling</a>, didn't quite match my hopes for some real competition to nVidia's RTX-only DLSS.<br /><br />
I had started a draft post on implementing FidelityFX Super Resolution into your own engine but really, I'm not sure how much it adds. If you want to run a more expensive upscale to retain far more sharpness than bilinear (so not something where you're going to be also doing a blur afterwards) or you're already doing an expensive sharpening pass like FidelityFX CAS after an (optional) upscale pass then you absolutely should drop in FidelityFX Super Resolution any place where you'd otherwise be thinking about the value of Lanczos (<a href="https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/status/1423012754718289923" target="_blank">because that's roughly what it is</a>). As <a href="https://twitter.com/Dachsjaeger/status/1422982316658413573" target="_blank">others have noted by now</a>, this is already a choice players make because modern GPUs (when not doing upscale on the output monitor) implement this when setting the internal resolution lower than the output/native resolution of your system - I've often been quite happy running AAA titles at 1800p for a 4K screen (as long as the anti-aliasing was good) and FSR is an enhancement on that path (increasing quality with the option to composite the UI and any pixel-scale noise, like a film grain effect, at native res after the upscale).<br /><br />
<h3>Intel XeSS</h3>
What has recently re-energised my interest in upscaling techniques is the Intel Architecture Day announcement of XeSS. <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/16896/intel-architecture-day-20201-intel-unveils-xess-image-upscaling-technology" target="_blank">A next generation temporal upscaling technique</a>, offering a competitor to DLSS 2.x that will run on hardware from multiple vendors and even provide a fully open source option (at some as yet unknown future date). So I had vaguely the right timescale for an announcement but had bet on the wrong non-nVidia GPU company making it.<br /><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="display: inline-block; margin-left: 0.5em; margin-right: 0.5em;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8XQkO8wFbLDQ4ZjTSvBuv5TAp4h15oIVT2q6Ngrf6HqSBsOefJBi2ll551AiTNa9iHNJEKK_GY91Hw6gDdC8tpTjuRPP8qL9oA_KBZLnZwyaOUCGQOc-KTyjeMleAlFVna1A697GoDdrY/s2160/XeSS+IAD21+92.jpg"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8XQkO8wFbLDQ4ZjTSvBuv5TAp4h15oIVT2q6Ngrf6HqSBsOefJBi2ll551AiTNa9iHNJEKK_GY91Hw6gDdC8tpTjuRPP8qL9oA_KBZLnZwyaOUCGQOc-KTyjeMleAlFVna1A697GoDdrY/s320/XeSS+IAD21+92.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">XeSS outlined</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 0.5em;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRKpwkjKcscuWpUkXUEtj1LmyarawFnI9aGIpHM3c125w-AveZOEuhyphenhyphenAudtyCc1JDyYM3l8jdBP1Et-32k8Yp-rxc4BJqkZ6_xnlAeP7QUzzrkg6bH4wJ37rrtVXqTWJpks8iVyf_Kanlq/s1620/DLSS+GTC20+83.png"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRKpwkjKcscuWpUkXUEtj1LmyarawFnI9aGIpHM3c125w-AveZOEuhyphenhyphenAudtyCc1JDyYM3l8jdBP1Et-32k8Yp-rxc4BJqkZ6_xnlAeP7QUzzrkg6bH4wJ37rrtVXqTWJpks8iVyf_Kanlq/s320/DLSS+GTC20+83.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">DLSS 2.x outlined</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
We do not have full access to XeSS so for now we only have a rough roadmap of releases starting with the initial SDK for use with their Arc series of GPUs (hardware that will not become available until early 2022). <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/16895/a-sneak-peek-at-intels-xe-hpg-gpu-architecture" target="_blank">The design of the new Arc (Xe-HPG) series</a> goes hard on matrix (Tensor) accelerators and so it is a natural fit to offer something broadly comparable to DLSS, which is accelerated by these AI/Tensor cores. Intel is actually investing even more of their GPU into matrix acceleration than nVidia, so expect a major push to ensure software supports XeSS rather than leaving that silicon idle when running the latest AAA releases.<br /><br />
From the outline we have been provided by Intel, it is easy to see that beyond the similar hardware being tapped to run deep learning algorithms, the inputs are also very similar to nVidia's DLSS 2.x. We have a jittered low resolution input frame along with motion vectors noting the velocity of each pixel and a history buffer of previous frames from which to extract information (which, even when showing a totally static scene, provides additional information thanks to the moving jitter pattern). The only additional information nVidia are explicit about collecting with their API is an exposure value (although <a href="https://developer.nvidia.com/dlss-getting-started" target="_blank">the current SDK</a>, 2.2.1, has added an auto-exposure function since these nVidia slides were published) and the depth buffer (which Intel may implicitly include as part of the complete input frame).<br /><br />
Intel <a href="https://youtu.be/9pVO1siJt50" target="_blank">in comments to the press</a> have discussed the possibility of the industry converging to a common standard for DL upscaling APIs, allowing almost drop-in dll swaps to make it trivial to support various alternatives. The way this is talked about as a future development means it is unlikely that the initial release of XeSS will be a drop-in dll replacement for DLSS 2.x (using identically named functions/entry-points and settings ranges). Although it remains to be seen how difficult it may be for ingenious hackers to work out how to bridge the differences and allow current DLSS titles to run a bootleg XeSS mode under the hood in the future (of course, not condoned by Intel itself).<br /><br />
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkPwMZScDt9QIvdteFCApJDVkh8J9o4e6YPR01PrbzqyxFuSN9OqqRYHnmzY3RENIJaK3HRkle6CI209wqmsE4qWxqrKuZsuPEfllwdJvkJ8MS3zVGBIJtzu8zS4D_tY3ftQ2LfMIqqRw4/s1620/DLSS+GTC20+21.png"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkPwMZScDt9QIvdteFCApJDVkh8J9o4e6YPR01PrbzqyxFuSN9OqqRYHnmzY3RENIJaK3HRkle6CI209wqmsE4qWxqrKuZsuPEfllwdJvkJ8MS3zVGBIJtzu8zS4D_tY3ftQ2LfMIqqRw4/s200/DLSS+GTC20+21.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">DLSS time savings</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdudVWINZ3eb6TFyXNu56SaIeDY02P-REmVnkFwp-ZUG-Z7p3pLlXDA5FqFvh5Rb-jw0urnudAa42j2k_tnpAsKeyANValvnpsxb7-kcKvff8HsW7gvWMv_T7ma8FxsBfewlehh89e8Qxk/s2160/XeSS+IAD21+93.jpg"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdudVWINZ3eb6TFyXNu56SaIeDY02P-REmVnkFwp-ZUG-Z7p3pLlXDA5FqFvh5Rb-jw0urnudAa42j2k_tnpAsKeyANValvnpsxb7-kcKvff8HsW7gvWMv_T7ma8FxsBfewlehh89e8Qxk/s200/XeSS+IAD21+93.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">XeSS time savings</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="display: inline-block; margin-left: 1em;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglG1TAIs7Nt1Ykayioc2cvJLTobyCJbQQXIj58da7kFaLfHPSz9DT6rwsBceyNReuVfO02HAQ1sht8gx5joZKATtvYTo9Gtke1ebihO8ZpVZA34EmhuNs_J9f92-7smA0U7BREtOrxSIhs/s1620/DLSS+GTC20+22.png"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglG1TAIs7Nt1Ykayioc2cvJLTobyCJbQQXIj58da7kFaLfHPSz9DT6rwsBceyNReuVfO02HAQ1sht8gx5joZKATtvYTo9Gtke1ebihO8ZpVZA34EmhuNs_J9f92-7smA0U7BREtOrxSIhs/s200/DLSS+GTC20+22.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">DLSS savings scaling</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
This brings us to a major point of differentiation (vs nVidia) and something very exciting to various users stuck with our current supply-constrained GPU market (which <a href="https://twitter.com/EricJhonsa/status/1428139587071664130" target="_blank"> will not improve sufficiently to allow everyone to upgrade to an RTX card even by late next year</a>): XeSS will provide a fallback mode that runs (be it somewhat slower) on GPUs without hardware (XMX) matrix acceleration. <a href = "https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/mixed-precision-programming-cuda-8/" target="_blank">Added to nVidia for Pascal</a> (Series 10), AMD for Vega, and Intel for Xe-LP on Tiger/Rocket Lake (11th Gen Core processors) there are some AI acceleration instructions for Int8 operations (DP4a) that can provide quadruple the throughput for dot products on packed Int8 values in comparison to 32-bit operations - this is effectively a mid-ground between trying to run AI workloads as generic shaders and getting the full acceleration of dedicated Tensor units.<br /><br />
With Intel so invested in matrix acceleration, it becomes more evident that AMD are being left behind - even mobile chips ship with limited amounts of this form of hardware acceleration (<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/08/the-sharpening-curse.html">as I noted in 2019</a>) - so this fallback is providing a vital half-step (which should more than pay for itself with the reduction in rendering cost of a lower resolution input image with no need for antialiasing). This also applies to the current consoles, which notably didn't get left behind on ray tracing acceleration but are starting to look down a long generational window without hardware matrix acceleration. The <a href="https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/03/16/xbox-series-x-glossary/" target="_blank">Xbox Series of consoles offers something equivalent to DP4a via DirectML</a> (and Microsoft have said <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/15994/hot-chips-2020-live-blog-microsoft-xbox-series-x-system-architecture-600pm-pt" target="_blank">they are working on their own DL upscaling technique</a> for use on those consoles <a href="https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-xbox-series-s-big-interview" target="_blank">in the future</a>) but we don't yet know if Sony have an answer for the PS5.<br /><br />
<a href="https://youtu.be/9pVO1siJt50" target="_blank">In interviews</a> it sounds like Intel are, at least initially, <a href="https://wccftech.com/intel-xess-interview-karthik-vaidyanathan/" target="_blank">reserving the XMX path for their own Arc GPUs</a> (despite nVidia RTX cards having equivalent matrix acceleration) so it will be a case of DLSS only on RTX going up against XeSS XMX (fast) only on Arc and XeSS DP4a (slower) everywhere else. But you could read the answers as being open to others coming in and dropping in their own engine (say nVidia Tensor engine rather than being forced down the fallback codepath on DP4a), but maybe not before Intel releases the full source code (for which a timeframe is not provided). In that DF interview there is also the suggestion of potential future developments where laptops do the main rendering on a dGPU then hand it off to the iGPU, where it has Intel matrix accelerators to run the final stages (XeSS upsample, composite UI etc). Given that current laptops with a discrete GPU already pass the completed 3D render to the iGPU to output via direct connection to the screen, this would only be an incremental step forward (rather than completely reinventing the path a frame takes today).<br /><br />
One can even imagine, looking at the announced <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/16881/a-deep-dive-into-intels-alder-lake-microarchitectures/5" target="_blank">AVX-VNNI instructions for consumer CPUs</a> and <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/16796/update-on-intel-sapphire-rapids-in-2022-q1-for-production-q2-for-ramp-h1-launch" target="_blank">AMX instructions for server CPUs</a>, a future where those people working on interesting software renderers could stay entirely on the CPU while taking advantage of DL upscaling, assuming there was enough throughput that was power efficient enough to provide a worthwhile wow factor. Real-time software renderers are not competitive with modern GPU-accelerated renderers (an embarrassingly parallel problem on hardware designed around accelerating just that) but they are still an interesting hobby niche that may enjoy playing with this new area of technology.<br /><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="display: inline-block; margin-left: 0.5em; margin-right: 0.5em;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgImu81rhnU_O2T8Ol5JCqGE07S0eVPCWAaZncidIk92AlKtSTgtl1uGkF0XHxktgh3BBTCtsXMeRCz49ORFaPx5QbgsHrLeL6Voxh-2cEMi5N-_WjUJ8MzESVLqjHVWzPDiDOoiVxOYbtv/s1620/DLSS+GTC20+61.png"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgImu81rhnU_O2T8Ol5JCqGE07S0eVPCWAaZncidIk92AlKtSTgtl1uGkF0XHxktgh3BBTCtsXMeRCz49ORFaPx5QbgsHrLeL6Voxh-2cEMi5N-_WjUJ8MzESVLqjHVWzPDiDOoiVxOYbtv/s320/DLSS+GTC20+61.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Non-DL-based clamping limitations</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 0.5em;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj81DCClmpNwjXGxN4yUZIZet4yVdSErbL8olhNk01itzyhFpShTpMvZiUNIRo8tsU2j_CriLQneDTY92rnh5gDLQf4j6bVZvOd-WdcXNuLK-0c2QAVi3k-IURDKvyzkWFOb7ZlhfDPkoMn/s1620/DLSS+GTC20+81.png"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj81DCClmpNwjXGxN4yUZIZet4yVdSErbL8olhNk01itzyhFpShTpMvZiUNIRo8tsU2j_CriLQneDTY92rnh5gDLQf4j6bVZvOd-WdcXNuLK-0c2QAVi3k-IURDKvyzkWFOb7ZlhfDPkoMn/s320/DLSS+GTC20+81.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">DL-based denoising limitations</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Going back to a more broad discussion, the reason for this excitement around DL upscaling (as I hopefully outlined in <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2021/05/fewer-samples-per-pixel-per-frame.html">my previous post</a>) is that it avoids the poor TAA performance of rejecting or clamping values from the history buffer, which has evident detail loss or failure states around higher frequency information (as nVidia have made clear in <a href="https://resources.nvidia.com/gtcd-2020/GTC2020s22698" target="_blank">their talks on this topic</a>). When the buffer can be fully utilised, a well managed jittered history can reconstruct a lot of detail for any element that has already been onscreen for a couple of frames (with anything that hasn't been onscreen liable to be masked behind a motion blur) despite using an internal resolution significantly below native output. Direct competition between two different implementations should provide even more impetus for advancement in this area. We are only scratching the surface of what deep learning algorithms can do to enhance our current rendering techniques.<br /><br />
Of course, there are some problems that nVidia have considered potentially intractable, such as the many types of noise that their DLSS 2.x approach cannot deal with (as it cannot provide a generalised solution that accounts for all noise types) and so, if it cannot be avoided, must be denoised before DLSS is applied. This is something that can force a traditional TAA stage (at a non trivial rendering and memory cost) back into engines that would otherwise be able to drop it entirely; the ultimate goal being only relying on the antialiasing of DLSS to provide exceptional final results. Intel offers a second set of engineers looking at such problems who may have fresh insights into what is possible. Microsoft are working on their own Xbox DL upscaling. There are signs <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/hzek4q/patent_for_potential_dlsslike_tech_by_sony/" target="_blank">Sony are up to something</a> too. While AMD did not announce their plans in this area with the recent announcement of FSR, I am still convinced that the future of AMD GPUs will involve Tensor units and that they will justify that use of transistors with a DLSS-a-like - but we will maybe be waiting for RDNA3 in late 2022 before we get that piece of the puzzle. For now, Intel are in the spotlight and anyone with a vaguely recent GPU (even the most recent iGPUs) is being invited to come along.<br /><br />
Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-14313455941517484742021-06-30T23:30:00.974+01:002021-07-01T06:51:28.252+01:00An Initial Inspection of FidelityFX Super ResolutionAs I noted in <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2021/05/fewer-samples-per-pixel-per-frame.html">an addendum to last month's post</a>, I really expected AMD to announce that their new upscaling technology (which supplements <a href="https://gpuopen.com/fidelityfx-cas/" target="_blank">FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening + Upscale</a>) would use temporal accumulation to compete with upcoming technologies like Unreal Engine 5's Temporal Super Resolution. It seemed like the obvious pivot after a couple of years of offering CAS, with their previous tech advertised as "designed to help increase the quality of existing Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) solutions". AMD already have a branded option for tweaking and upscaling already-anti-aliased image buffers so to respond to nVidia's DLSS (offering close to or even beyond anti-aliased native res rendering quality at lower GPU loads due to upscaling significantly lower res aliased internal frames) the natural step would be integrating anti-aliasing, upscaling, and sharpening - something likely best achieved using a temporal buffer, to go significantly beyond the limits of previous spatial-only techniques.<br /><br />
<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2021/05/fewer-samples-per-pixel-per-frame.html">Last month I linked</a> to a few examples of where enthusiastic sharpening can have a quite poor effect on image quality (from <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/105972732759312695" target="_blank">effectively wiping out anti-aliasing</a> to classic halo artefacts that any digital photographer well knows from trying to recover additional detail with a careful manual tweaking of Lightroom settings). This has generally limited my desire for CAS in any game where it has been offered (or turning on nVidia Image Sharpening) - when the effect strength is configurable then I'll generally apply it so lightly as to not be worth any performance cost; when I'm not able to tweak strength then it usually seems too much and <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/105083903105658568" target="_blank">I've seen some issues during combined upscaling</a> (which do not seem inherent to the tech but an implementation failure that still managed to ship, although I did say at the time <i>"the tech should be rebranded if fixed to work well in the future"</i>). What we have from the new FidelityFX Super Resolution is something that could be considered CAS-Plus - it's the latest version of CAS (with what seems like a less aggressive default strength, still configurable either by the developer or passed on to a user option) along with a more involved integrated upscaler than the old implementation, one that promises to enable much higher upscaling factors without major quality loss.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVUvg6gSXTMES6rGhQs1N_ujbxFF8Tsf4497N8O2w0yBfx6-y2b64L6dHeXXzy__bOrJr7yqF-gXaao7T6Wnr134XomZ8o0SR3zcPzleHS-6jqS85RjbsVddlIfwAW7Fi-2gngEPDWJNS3/s1927/FidelityFX_SuperResolution_Where_In_Frame.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="551" data-original-width="1927" height="182" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVUvg6gSXTMES6rGhQs1N_ujbxFF8Tsf4497N8O2w0yBfx6-y2b64L6dHeXXzy__bOrJr7yqF-gXaao7T6Wnr134XomZ8o0SR3zcPzleHS-6jqS85RjbsVddlIfwAW7Fi-2gngEPDWJNS3/w640-h182/FidelityFX_SuperResolution_Where_In_Frame.png" width="640" /></a></div><br />
Although FSR is not yet fully 1.0 and public, what we have already received is, like CAS, purely an upscaling and sharpening solution (with instructions that make that sound like this will not change) so <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/106459317914040584" target="_blank">it expects the game to have already applied anti-aliasing</a>. We will be able to poke it in more detail soon (<a href="https://gpuopen.com/fidelityfx-superresolution/" target="_blank">"The source code for FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0 will be coming to GPUOpen in mid July"</a>) but with some games shipping implementations last week, we can give the output a first examination using our version 1.0 eyeballs. My expectations were tempered from not being blown away by CAS before and wondering how the spatial-only upscaling would deal with any aliasing, but it's pretty clear that AMD would not open-source a simple rebranding exercise so this was going to be at least a completely new generation of the ideas originally proposed via CAS and so worthy of examining on their merits rather than previous experiences. <br /><br />
I am actually ideally situated to take advantage of FSR, being one of the many many people (according to May's Steam survey) <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/106466113798316567" target="_blank">who has not made the jump from a GTX card to an RTX upgrade or AMD alternative</a> (even if DLSS was offered for any of the titles currently shipping with FSR support). With shortages leading to terrible availability and ridiculous prices when there is any stock, many of us would likely have upgraded by now (this GTX 1070 shipping note is over five years old) and just need a bit more longevity to wait out supply catching up with demand. Unlike most of the other people on a Series 10 GPU, I am trying to drive a (desk-mounted, not living room) 49" 4K panel which benefits from both quality anti-aliasing and as many pixels as possible.<br /><br />
This blog has always been written with an intended audience of indie teams and enthusiastic amateurs with an interest in rendering; me and a few thousands visitors. Unfortunately the commentary around FSR's launch has seemed a bit toxic and divisive (especially questioning some press analysis). While occasionally forthright, I hope readers understand the aim here is to evaluate, give context with how things fit into the wider rendering landscape, and to make an occasional light-hearted jab at shipping flaws from the perspective of people who have & will continue to see that stuff in our own work because rendering is difficult (big publisher funded or not) with some hard choices being mutually exclusive.<br /><br />
The questions about FSR can broadly be split into two: how does this new generation of sharpening with an integrated upscaler compare in performance cost & quality to the basic fallback upscaler in the games that integrate it; and how does the combination of existing anti-aliasing solutions with FSR applied broadly hold up when other games are shipping with temporal anti-aliasing upscaling solutions either integrated into various game engines or via AI acceleration from nVidia (<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2021/05/fewer-samples-per-pixel-per-frame.html">previously discussed last month</a>)? But ultimately it can all somewhat collapse down to: how can developers offer the best subjective quality (be that headroom to guarantee perfect frame pacing, less flickering aliasing, or just a more pleasing or detailed final scene) on every hardware platform?<br /><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="display: inline-block; margin-left: 0.6em; margin-right: 1em;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9E42af-U8GmYq3Ljhf8ks8qpUzSybZnciylJn7bPkHlfqrukfyMpMt0ZFFCsbaLVe7xwPXTJepSEjK9xXmQQMVmUwcRsX6aNtHCv3JkPAQHE_yGtR_ZcHmY_JeFm4Ef7HHXv33weFVRYQ/s3840/5+FSR50%2525.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9E42af-U8GmYq3Ljhf8ks8qpUzSybZnciylJn7bPkHlfqrukfyMpMt0ZFFCsbaLVe7xwPXTJepSEjK9xXmQQMVmUwcRsX6aNtHCv3JkPAQHE_yGtR_ZcHmY_JeFm4Ef7HHXv33weFVRYQ/s200/5+FSR50%2525.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dota 2, FSR 50%</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="display: inline-block;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRStrO8plKXWKW-HWDuVd1_BvQho2_MWhy7_S8iXWLP8KUKaau4OGvGBLgU-CypScoQzEQ2kRM5M0tkvDhM24sKCfs9X1qItKaoiWiWr0K8YuAu7ytQ1_4Tpr0-H4WF9fCMPcc6zUAbhuY/s3840/10+Bal%252859%2525%2529.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRStrO8plKXWKW-HWDuVd1_BvQho2_MWhy7_S8iXWLP8KUKaau4OGvGBLgU-CypScoQzEQ2kRM5M0tkvDhM24sKCfs9X1qItKaoiWiWr0K8YuAu7ytQ1_4Tpr0-H4WF9fCMPcc6zUAbhuY/s200/10+Bal%252859%2525%2529.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Riftbreaker, FSR Bal (59%)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="display: inline-block; margin-left: 1em;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQN30fntnILXC56ZIrE8oHy8pxpcoymazVbcWiUNfBVdYHGv9JButXJZ5uM4-SAfbV54BzdWGaPU-wrFTKWc62t3byyXXTOta1m4UHlvKn7jkDKcAr6IhcZ43EfMgMtH4Gv4OtxYE2C04z/s3840/11+75%2525CAS.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQN30fntnILXC56ZIrE8oHy8pxpcoymazVbcWiUNfBVdYHGv9JButXJZ5uM4-SAfbV54BzdWGaPU-wrFTKWc62t3byyXXTOta1m4UHlvKn7jkDKcAr6IhcZ43EfMgMtH4Gv4OtxYE2C04z/s200/11+75%2525CAS.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Riftbreaker, CAS 75%</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<h3>Example Implementations</h3>
Everyone appears to have used Godfall as their primary example due to a recent marketing push combined with that being a relatively "next gen" game using some of the latest ray tracing effects available under UE4 - it's well-covered by a wealth of existing analysis (inner surfaces, sharply textured and somewhat noisy in the native presentation, get progressively blurry while edge detail can hold up but sometimes makes the underlying lower resolution apparent via stair-step artefacts; clearly beats basic upscaling at like for like framerates). I'm going to poke at two free titles (F2P or in open beta) both using slightly more bespoke rendering pipelines. Dota 2 currently uses the Source 2 engine but I'm not sure if the MLAA it uses has been much updated for <a href="https://twitter.com/richgel999/status/1353169725396840450" target="_blank">years & years</a> while The Riftbreaker uses a custom engine that just moved to a TAA solution they liked so much <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/106466073333274311" target="_blank">they completely removed the previous MLAA-optional "raw" rendering choice</a> but, just like the stock configuration of Godfall, this does not offer an integrated upscaler with that TAA - when you use the basic upscaler it does not use the additional information from a jittered sample location in the frame history buffer to more precisely reconstruct the final high resolution image, rather it does a TAA resolve to whatever internal res you specify then upscales that as a spatial-only step likely using a cheap bilinear resample. Both games have internal framerate overlays (baking the numbers into screenshots) and offer a common "camera in the sky" not-truly-isometric perspective while using very different AA techniques as a point of contrast.<br /><br />
I have <a href="https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/G6CFpdxfZTSdwDXMfndo7GgDBsd4sqURpYXgmlyvrQn" target="_blank">uploaded all the png files</a> (to a service that may use compressed jpeg previews for the web viewer but allows you to easily download the genuine bit-identical files), including every 4K capture used for crops. These act as visual aids to the wider points I noted while the games were in motion and I recommend anyone wanting more than this summary, throw up a Dota 2 replay or check out the Prologue for The Riftbreaker to see it running on your own hardware. Accept no (highly compressed video) substitute; everyone ranks fine visual details in subtly different ways.<br /><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="display: inline-block; margin-left: 0.5em; margin-right: .5em;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh16lv2SGrQC6EDpYRW3L6Dc7CW1ow3G2pWkdDmhNkO-Ku4Xtj_8UzwtbI18Pw4M_KQjLOwH0x23yBnwbF2JBM4qDwriob-noppYJCnK1drZ8m82EKn7rtUUcD-6BLhIT8QgklnQzDFOFlJ/s2812/1+100%2525+over+FSR50%2525+zoomed.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh16lv2SGrQC6EDpYRW3L6Dc7CW1ow3G2pWkdDmhNkO-Ku4Xtj_8UzwtbI18Pw4M_KQjLOwH0x23yBnwbF2JBM4qDwriob-noppYJCnK1drZ8m82EKn7rtUUcD-6BLhIT8QgklnQzDFOFlJ/s260/1+100%2525+over+FSR50%2525+zoomed.png" width="202" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">100% top, FSR 50% bottom</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="display: inline-block;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh3F-EXoggBBG3bC7KfQ1v_tje-LaSsiL5V4OrjQBtg5We3IX6yp_TUQ9AwM9I97piPzvA1gQL6DMAivVpwK5d5Ft2IQg1Y5vF_Xl7vxm-6i3mtVAXc4z9NAp6k8vOPyvqw0GLUnFpBfYN/s1900/2+left+down+70+80+90+right+FSR70+FSR80+100.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="104" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh3F-EXoggBBG3bC7KfQ1v_tje-LaSsiL5V4OrjQBtg5We3IX6yp_TUQ9AwM9I97piPzvA1gQL6DMAivVpwK5d5Ft2IQg1Y5vF_Xl7vxm-6i3mtVAXc4z9NAp6k8vOPyvqw0GLUnFpBfYN/s220/2+left+down+70+80+90+right+FSR70+FSR80+100.png" width="220" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">from TL: 70-80-90%; FSR70-80%, 100%</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="display: inline-block; margin-left: .5em;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvKhoc2qI_IHvtGBHW17lx-NF6zCtQCRRTjhj03F-d3p1MdpbATVx1r8F99ArwXrlKDsccvDUDZi-iOPViTAIgZYXxordgHkr2TOd_Rwtg6z5_B5VZUd5EGtg91IBQVEEPPqOxfyOlW9NT/s1600/6+100%2525+over+5+FSR50%2525.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvKhoc2qI_IHvtGBHW17lx-NF6zCtQCRRTjhj03F-d3p1MdpbATVx1r8F99ArwXrlKDsccvDUDZi-iOPViTAIgZYXxordgHkr2TOd_Rwtg6z5_B5VZUd5EGtg91IBQVEEPPqOxfyOlW9NT/s200/6+100%2525+over+5+FSR50%2525.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">100% top, FSR 50% bottom</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Dota 2 offers a simple toggle between FSR and a basic upscaler when the internal rendering resolution is scaled (40-99%) down from (100%) native. There is no option to tweak the sharpness applied and what <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh3F-EXoggBBG3bC7KfQ1v_tje-LaSsiL5V4OrjQBtg5We3IX6yp_TUQ9AwM9I97piPzvA1gQL6DMAivVpwK5d5Ft2IQg1Y5vF_Xl7vxm-6i3mtVAXc4z9NAp6k8vOPyvqw0GLUnFpBfYN/s1900/2+left+down+70+80+90+right+FSR70+FSR80+100.png" target="_blank">becomes immediately apparent</a> (centre image above) is that the sharpness Valve has chosen is significantly stronger than other implementations (where FSR is noted as softening flat textured surfaces compared to 100% resolution). Here, the large flat ground of the Dota map leaps off the screen, with 70% (image top right) and 80% scale FSR (centre right) offering almost equal perceived texture detail due to an aggressive sharpen that makes much of the very low contrast textures pop more than their native resolution presentation. The basic upscaler (image left) shows how linearly interpolating between the fewer samples into the underlying texture due to the lower internal resolution applies a blur that smears what soft detail there is available at 100% so that even 90% scale (image bottom left) is washed out. Moving to <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh16lv2SGrQC6EDpYRW3L6Dc7CW1ow3G2pWkdDmhNkO-Ku4Xtj_8UzwtbI18Pw4M_KQjLOwH0x23yBnwbF2JBM4qDwriob-noppYJCnK1drZ8m82EKn7rtUUcD-6BLhIT8QgklnQzDFOFlJ/s2812/1+100%2525+over+FSR50%2525+zoomed.png" target="_blank">the leftmost image just above</a>, even scaling FSR down to 50% (that is only using a 1080p internal resolution and no temporal reconstruction of any sort in this FXAA title) then we see an impressive retention of perceived texture detail that even zoomed up to 200% (quad pixels to retail original sharpness - this is the only image used that is not at original output pixel-scale) only just makes clear the sharpening artefacts and some lack of genuine detail from the 100% resolution original that rendered four times as many pixels. The grass texture detail and the dappling on the path in the top render is now more clearly absent in the bottom render and objects like the yellow flowers gain telltale dark halos while the transparent texturing of the tree leaves are clearly losing their clean edge.<br /><br />
I applied some generic (non-AMD branded) image sharpening to some of the unsharpened sub-native resolution captures and a lot of this texture detail can absolutely be recovered by any basic competent algorithm so I would avoid calling the CAS a secret sauce but it is at least doing the job required of it (working against the softening of using a lower internal resolution) well enough without a major performance cost. I also pushed the mip bias values way out and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/P8UfRx5EdQpFUq37Us95WIPD6K61JfvbdDSnLowhikf" target="_blank">took a few screenshots of that</a>, which captures how FSR compares to native resolution on edge detail retention when all the inner texture detail is blurred away with much smaller mipmaps. Some of the fine edge detail is starting to visibly break down at FSR 75% but lots of the wider edges are being extremely well retained, if rather darkened like a pencil was sketching over the edges, as long as the AA pass caught them. The strong sharpening is starting to grasp for detail not there, so causing mild posterisation in spots. The increased shadow/AO evident may be a side effect of the internal resolution being lowered (or could be an interaction with the mip bias tweaking).<br /><br />
When we move to a closer camera <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvKhoc2qI_IHvtGBHW17lx-NF6zCtQCRRTjhj03F-d3p1MdpbATVx1r8F99ArwXrlKDsccvDUDZi-iOPViTAIgZYXxordgHkr2TOd_Rwtg6z5_B5VZUd5EGtg91IBQVEEPPqOxfyOlW9NT/s1600/6+100%2525+over+5+FSR50%2525.png" target="_blank">in the rightmost image above</a> and more 3D elements that require anti-aliasing, we continue to see this clear softening on edges and evidence of the enlarging and softening of spots where the FXAA has not sufficiently cleaned up an edge in the internal resolution render. In static screenshots, I find the soft edges with sharpened interior detail to often work in favour of this technique, even if it can verge towards a dithered posterisation at points (even with textures left as intended). In motion, it inherits the issues with any MLAA technique in that elements that are unable to be anti-aliased sufficiently flicker enough to draw attention and the soft upscale here ends up drawing added attention to them not entirely unlike <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2016/08/so-there-has-been-lots-of-talk-about.html">a more basic blur applied over the top of aliased edges</a> (in fact, some of these captures catch artefacts very similar to the ones I noted when discussing that original release of No Man's Sky). Dota 2 will never be at the top of my list of rendering greats, and FSR can only do so much with what it is given (as we know it is not designed in any way to provide anti-aliasing itself), but I was pleasantly surprised with how, looking at paused game replays, FSR significantly increased the framerate with only a mild increase in edge shimmer (when in motion) and virtually no softening of inner detail.<br /><br />
Unfortunately, I then looked at the framerate counter as I unpaused from taking screenshots of a frozen moment in time. My initial impression had been that FSR turned my modest GPU (by 2021 standards) into something capable of making a new generation of 4K144 gaming screens sing with this classic title. Pushing the final step up from the ~100fps with max settings it was previously limited to (in all three of the 100% captures I cropped and discussed above). FSR 50% was able to hit ~165fps with 70% FSR giving about a 30% boost and 80% FSR a 15% boost with that exceptional image quality. But once my Ryzen 2700X has to process the extra load of running replays, which is more typical of actual gameplay, the GPU utilisation dropped. Not for running 100% scale, which sticks exactly where it was before, but even basic upscaler 80% drops from 150fps to 140fps and, more significantly, 50% FSR loses that 165fps for figures between 120-140fps. Higher internal resolution FSR squeezed in below and so was barely paying for the overhead of the FSR pass over native res. As it affects the basic upscale too, this is clearly something common to not having enough GPU load at lower res or some single-threaded weakness of the older Ryzen CPUs with Dota's workload. It's not a dealbreaker but it's why I haven't embossed the paused-time framerates onto all of these clipped shots (they are all printed onto the original so they're not hidden) to show how much framerate improves as image quality changes. Simply put, in actual motion the gains are not nearly as great as the first impression from static scenes. I hope Valve continue to tweak this implementation (as an e-sport, I'm sure their engine is constantly being tweaked to ensure it can hit those highest refresh rates on select machines) so it can saturate the GPU in motion.<br /><br />
My ideal implementation would allow the user to dial in a desired framerate, with Dota 2 dynamically changing the FSR factor to maintain a constant performance (as many console dynamic resolution implementations do, usually backed by a temporal component). The way FSR is implemented here, with a static percentage chosen and framerates changing based on how much is going on onscreen, seems like it would play best on a VRR/G-Sync display. Unfortunately, as you change the setting in real-time in the menus, the edge shimmer can be seen to "bubble" as the percentage scale changes. Although you can only see around the edge of the settings menu into the game itself, that was enough to make me think that the crawling edges of a dynamic FSR in Dota 2 would not be a good experience, at least unless some temporal solution was used to control the edges reshaping as internal resolutions moved around.<br /><br />
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtx9_G4ry90M3ddKQOWXvdCm9rVBjCgUOJo3_CLRCNHyYrfi_7spubdlmADnOjqm3p4qlH-fy_rP4qcHAccH-BgIdwx70jUB0V8_fxjOlCnr-2yiviTADyUKAfJyezhyjTfQChsWLWiS5Z/s2200/13+B+Q+UQ+100CAS+then+P+75+75CAS+100.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtx9_G4ry90M3ddKQOWXvdCm9rVBjCgUOJo3_CLRCNHyYrfi_7spubdlmADnOjqm3p4qlH-fy_rP4qcHAccH-BgIdwx70jUB0V8_fxjOlCnr-2yiviTADyUKAfJyezhyjTfQChsWLWiS5Z/s320/13+B+Q+UQ+100CAS+then+P+75+75CAS+100.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">from TL: B-Q-UQ-100%CAS; P-75%-75%CAS-100%</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 0.5em;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAHofQWOCclXIdBOUgQ2xW8mVhYHsbqtEi5FwkM78OEz5cNC6e029fL-BtZ10WhRCNHEj6FNcUa0npxeE4eoGW5LxAn1CDFLv0i6YBXlh2zMFlpyCTeoDvxvs6cAwUIsXaRtIHyvH7oUDI/s1440/15+B+75CAS+UQ+100.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="82" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAHofQWOCclXIdBOUgQ2xW8mVhYHsbqtEi5FwkM78OEz5cNC6e029fL-BtZ10WhRCNHEj6FNcUa0npxeE4eoGW5LxAn1CDFLv0i6YBXlh2zMFlpyCTeoDvxvs6cAwUIsXaRtIHyvH7oUDI/s320/15+B+75CAS+UQ+100.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">from L: Bal, 75%CAS, Ultra-Qual, 100%</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
The Riftbreaker uses four named FSR levels AMD have suggested but also offers a basic upscaler you can use in 25% increments that allows for CAS to be enabled - this appears to be visually quite similar to enabling FSR, presumably as the game implements the very latest revision of CAS that is based on the same sharpening pass as FSR uses. Those named levels are: Ultra-Quality (77%), Quality (67%), Balanced (59%), and Performance (50%). I would prefer more granular control (or even fixing a desired framerate and a dynamic internal resolution managed by the engine) but this gives us a few fixed points to focus on and compare to the fallback basic upscaler and even using that upscaler but applying CAS. As mentioned earlier, The Riftbreaker uses TAA but does not use TAAU so using a basic upscaler from 50% will not be able to recover all of the texel information via a jitter (looking back four frames to each pixel in the 4K output from four 1080p internal renders), unlike more advanced temporal solutions. (Four frames at 60fps is a remarkably short span of time so even if you think that motion vectors would need to be very good to recover the sub-pixel jitter texel reading, there are likely to be quite a lot of places where TAAU is basically sampling the same spot so doesn't even need great motion vectors.)<br /><br />
This lack of TAAU's recovery of static texture information is quickly apparent when comparing (left image above) the detailed ground texture as the game starts (as our mech basks in the scenery while given orders). The 100% render (bottom right) shows excellent fine grass texturing and the geometry edge detail indicates this TAA errs on the side of sharp with slight aliasing from bright glints unable to be completely cleaned up. This comes at the cost of only just beating the screen refresh, hitting 64fps in this least demanding scene (with the ray tracing effects switched off on this old GTX card). Applying CAS to this 100% native render (bottom left) does make everything pop that tiny bit extra but the overhead drops us 10% to 59fps.<br /><br />
Working up the left side of the image we have quite a different choice made (again, not user configurable) on the strength of the FSR sharpening (and how high contrast the texture work started out) with FSR Ultra-Quality (that's 77% scale) losing quite a lot of that sharply-authored ground detail (while Dota 2 at similar internal resolutions was competitive with native). There could also be a difference in AA solutions at play as Dota 2 just gives FSR the lower res but otherwise barely touched texture detail while TAA could be softening everything before FSR gets involved. The edge detail (eg mech & crystals) gives hints at the lower internal resolution where the TAA couldn't quite suppress artefacts even at native resolution, but is otherwise clean (compare the sword between all clipped captures). It looks good in motion and boosts us to 75fps. Above that FSR Quality (67%) shows incremental softening and texture detail loss but in motion (now 85fps) much of this is less apparent than the direct comparison. At the very top left, Balanced (58%) is where the fine line detail is starting to break into visible stair-stepping in the screenshot and flickering in motion. 93fps also shows it's a point of slightly diminishing returns (although still far from CPU bottlenecked in this engine, which doesn't let you take screenshots of the game when paused so avoided making a similar discovery to in Dota 2). Finally for FSR, at top right is Performance (50%) which is doing well given that it's actually only dealing with a 1080p internal resolution but I'm not sure I'd play a game for extended periods of time looking like this as I'd rather scale back effects to avoid the shimmer that appears in motion and lack of texture detail (wasting the pixel count of the screen) rather than chase that 105fps.<br /><br />
Moving down the right side of that image, we have the basic upscaler and 75% internal res upper right. I would say this broadly shares elements of FSR Balanced and Quality - both of which are using significantly fewer internal pixels to reach their final output. Everything seems a bit softer than it should be when surrounded with all these sharpened and native resolution alternatives and the only real positive point is the 88fps, which puts it somewhere between Balanced and Quality - perceptual quality lining up quite well with rendering cost rather than raw internal resolution. Finally the lower right clip is from CAS applied to the 75% basic upscaled option and here we are given an interesting comparison point - this is effectively almost identical to Ultra-Quality in internal resolution and enjoying a sharpening pass, the only difference is the FSR upscaling (assuming CAS does genuinely use a different code path and so still uses the basic upscaler). I would suggest opening <a href="https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/ayTxPkDAzYgXiLqAc8MSdsHndyu4YqjnbAqmWrFY1Z0" target="_blank">the full sized captures and flipping between them</a> if you really want to assess the differences and why this is running at 80fps when UQ sat at a flat 75fps (with only a tiny increase in pixel count). To my eye, CAS on top of this 75% internal res basic upscale is visibly (if subtly) worse at dealing with edge detail. It's also slightly behind on bringing out that ground texture. Much better than the 75% without CAS, but also losing 10% performance to pay for the sharpening pass. The palm tree fringes, the detail both internal to surfaces and at their edge: I think UQ at 75fps is showing that FSR is more than just the latest generation of CAS (CAS-Plus) and worth paying for on top of the existing CAS performance cost. It's not competing with native res but then that's sitting at 64fps (and when things get more taxing, it takes a big hit).<br /><br />
The image above on the right compares four versions of the main base, from leftmost: Balanced, 75% basic upscale with CAS, Ultra-Quality, and 100% natural (no CAS). The thin geometric detail quickly makes plain the difference in underlying internal resolution and is why I like the idea of a next generation temporal solution that could, at least when the scene isn't too busily moving, have a good chance of recovering all this detail at a much lower per frame rendering cost. There's nothing "wrong" with the middle two results (again, I think that you can make out the difference in FSR vs just CAS in how those thin edges are preserved) but they are clearly on a progression towards the leftmost option, which is starting to show breakup of fine detail into aliased blobs and mild posterisation of the texture detail.<br /><br />
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCiHJWzwXN38PcZz2pASfIZOxCRhBBag5m0h9yNAT4It8mu8bLrgUVKPuM68OyLbAlnOCBLLXeLj_RMpvGALtj7-9ffC6ONsHmbYvbf0TVE4jZcXnLmWHHRhEkZepPGPPqcl1shk9C-CqZ/s3840/14+75%2525CAS.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCiHJWzwXN38PcZz2pASfIZOxCRhBBag5m0h9yNAT4It8mu8bLrgUVKPuM68OyLbAlnOCBLLXeLj_RMpvGALtj7-9ffC6ONsHmbYvbf0TVE4jZcXnLmWHHRhEkZepPGPPqcl1shk9C-CqZ/s320/14+75%2525CAS.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">75% CAS traditional shadows</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-kXRR1JwyId5j9qk-8Ea0Hu3F0sYpFI6zjiey3nenVecQHtRZIBGtoJkqgzLztqwBGY4R2W18HLnGzeAf5q95X8WNhtrPQUxJQIoR4fbuz2LH9PxPQKrBimM0aalgWX0fTlbg-CSrisRb/s3840/14+Perf%252850%2525%2529+RTon-ShadowMed.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-kXRR1JwyId5j9qk-8Ea0Hu3F0sYpFI6zjiey3nenVecQHtRZIBGtoJkqgzLztqwBGY4R2W18HLnGzeAf5q95X8WNhtrPQUxJQIoR4fbuz2LH9PxPQKrBimM0aalgWX0fTlbg-CSrisRb/s320/14+Perf%252850%2525%2529+RTon-ShadowMed.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Perf (50%) RT shadows Medium</td></tr>
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<br />
Another way of looking at FSR is that it unlocks new quality settings at the same output resolution and framerate. Above I managed to get RT shadows (at the lowest quality) enabled via the Performance profile and have compared it directly to the more primitive traditional shadows offered (RT does also use more dynamic lights, but these seem to mainly have an added cost when in the scene rather than at daytime with a single dominant lightsource) while using CAS to tweak a 75% internal resolution. Both scenes have more aliasing than I'd ideally like but the RT shadows rendered at 1080p and not the more detailed quality setting combined with the loss of texture detail makes the scene look significantly worse to my subjective evaluation. It is nice to be able to drop all the way down to 50% internal resolution (where a basic upscale would be significantly worse) but the trade-offs are not where I would go to try and unlock new effects, some of which need at least a bit more resolution than is being fed to them by picking low settings at low internal resolutions. Sometimes the best answer is new hardware after five years using something as your daily workhorse. And I'm left with an open question of if that aliasing and softness could both be sorted out (and even unlock lower internal resolutions, without leaning on FSR) if an integrated jittering TAA with Upscaler was offered - especially in scenes like the one above that contain a lot of stationary or slowly moving elements.<br /><br />
As I played through this beta of The Riftbreaker using a range of settings (and experiencing the quite different performance of different sections), I definitely appreciated being able to claw back performance with better image quality than the basic upscaler could provide on top of the mainly-clean TAA presentation. Right now, it offers the ability to at least look at the new ray tracing options at interactive framerates or to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/KvTc0CWE6MFPmkpB1PBqELriqNSURr5tlkaO0B1uBlo" target="_blank">get much the same feeling via UQ to a native render</a> even if it doesn't quite look the same under detailed inspection. In motion the bluring of <a href="https://twitter.com/KostasAAA/status/1368552719393431558" target="_blank">marching ants</a> wasn't ideal but it also softens the intensity of what would otherwise have already been a visible TAA failure. The sharpening here seems quite subtle and rarely something to negatively note adding extra artefacts. In fact, the main issue with dropping down the quality scale into the lower resolutions is my personal preference against the visual result of the FSR pass having to reconstruct a lot of data and producing slightly weird smoothing - fine in motion but something I'd like a VRS-like or temporal solution to be able to spend extra rendering budget on avoiding starving for crunchy detail when it might otherwise be available.<br /><br />
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6DsfzjzEHU2dpK0FYUu-0SBsETjS-nrT_rhgr70QjcanmRDe1FFN8AFy6kbDM4zVGhCfHbQGMiaujA8mX8l09r4ehhz3raLSUox2WE357y_zccCpKi_znS45G5QB_gHR6Cp2307Fn1ZKA/s3840/6+100%2525.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6DsfzjzEHU2dpK0FYUu-0SBsETjS-nrT_rhgr70QjcanmRDe1FFN8AFy6kbDM4zVGhCfHbQGMiaujA8mX8l09r4ehhz3raLSUox2WE357y_zccCpKi_znS45G5QB_gHR6Cp2307Fn1ZKA/s320/6+100%2525.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dota 2, 100%</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 0.5em;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsAVY5K_gts4pz8dC2Ads02nv81RBfRzLBwBiTLAHXRyewM5DwB4rSp6MnqX7uyJ79bvpf22G3uw_sZv7bDflSCL604OAx9RDXs9Bw1-04QXK-y_iPOiDSJ4xRMwPdb45FU7WsrvZifryQ/s3840/12+100%2525.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsAVY5K_gts4pz8dC2Ads02nv81RBfRzLBwBiTLAHXRyewM5DwB4rSp6MnqX7uyJ79bvpf22G3uw_sZv7bDflSCL604OAx9RDXs9Bw1-04QXK-y_iPOiDSJ4xRMwPdb45FU7WsrvZifryQ/s320/12+100%2525.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Riftbreaker, 100%</td></tr>
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<br />
<h3>In Conclusion</h3>
I have had some concerns over FidelityFX Super Resolution, including holding somewhat of an unflattering mirror up to these two implementations we've explored today, but my summation is actually quite positive. As I've mentioned before, I've seen more than a couple shipping sharpening and upscaling solutions that seem to actively work against the underlying renderer's quality. FSR here has performed admirably on two similar canvases (top down terrains filled with creeps) which use completely different engines (with different feature levels) and totally different anti-aliasing solutions. As internal resolution dropped, both showed increased shimmer but it seemed to be driven by underlying aliasing issues not lack of temporal stability of the spatial-only FSR technique - my leading concern going into this. Beyond a certain point the internal resolution simply doesn't have enough information to avoid some slight weirdness (often mild posterisation) in how it recovers detail without using additional samples (like a history buffer) and I've seen plenty of worse examples than anything I've seen so far with FSR - DLSS 1.0 certainly had more than a bit of weirdness to it.<br /><br />
It seems from my inspection that this is a good future for evolving FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening + Upscale and that, especially if more developers provide the power for end users to tweak their own preference for sharpening strength within the bounds the developers consider reasonable, this offers performance without major sacrifices for image quality (until dropping far from the "Quality"-named end of the scale). And, as you can tweak which internal resolution FSR operates at, users can make very informed decisions about which subjective quality they are more interested in boosting. When GPU bottlenecked, the performance cost of FSR is more than reasonable, only slightly increasing the price of the latest CAS pass, and handily goes beyond the blurred result of offering a basic upscale (when comparing at the same output resolution and framerate - ie the lower internal resolution to pay for the FSR pass more than pays for itself vs simply using the cheapest upscale option). The sharpening is mainly adding local contrast where it improves detail while only mildly increasing the visibility of aliasing issues, which are actually just as much of an issue for the upscaling part of the process - often stretching them over more final pixels with somewhat of a blur and not able to reconstruct fine lines the internal resolution couldn't capture properly.<br /><br />
Should you integrate this into your hobby engine? We may have to wait on the source code release to see exactly how easy it is to integrate (I would guess: very easy) but if you've not currently got a good upscaling option and you're not looking at this to replace adding a good anti-aliasing solution (because it is not that) then FSR will definitely be easier than hooking up a complete TAAU solution (or DLSS 2) and tweaking the temporal jitteriness that they all seem to have early on. We will have to see how the next generation of TAAU and DLSS (or competing AI-enhanced anti-aliasing, upscaling, and sharpening algorithms) progress. In the long term, <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2021/05/fewer-samples-per-pixel-per-frame.html">I think we will all join that future</a>. Maybe by version 2.0 of FSR, there will be an optional temporal component that evolves what is possible if you can feed it a history buffer.Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-6329822299012041602021-05-30T14:00:00.052+01:002022-02-16T09:48:55.058+00:00Fewer Samples per Pixel per FrameIn <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2021/04/vr-review-roundup-1.html">my VR roundup</a>, it turned into a bit of an impromptu comparison between various anti-aliasing techniques inside one of the most challenging environments we currently have. VR restricts acceptable (input to photons) latency, so can limit pipeline/work buffer design; uses relatively extreme field of view (close inspection of pixel-scale details) combined with ever-increasing raw pixel counts of screens; and demands more than 60 fps with good frame pacing. Add in lens distortion and a temporal reprojection emergency stage (to avoid dropped frames) and it means even without TAA, you’ve got distortion and potentially an extra reprojection stage exaggerating artefacts in the frames you do render.<br /><br />
I think we’re at another rather interesting point for anti-aliasing techniques, as demands for <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/106242137186284447" target="_blank">offline-render quality real-time graphics</a> at high resolutions with fewer compromises (like screen-space effect artefacts) enabled via ray tracing acceleration becomes mainstream. Per pixel shader calculation costs are going to jump just as we saw during the adoption of HDR/physically-based materials and expensive screen-space approximations like real-time SSAO. Samples per pixel per frame may not be forced to drop as quickly as consoles jumping from targeting 1080p to targeting 4K but we are going to need some new magic to ensure a lack of very uncinematic aliasing and luckily it looks like we’re getting there.<br /><br />
<h3>Sampling History</h3>
It is 1994 and I’m playing Doom on my PC. The CRT is capable of displaying VGA’s 640x480 but due to colour palette limitations most DOS games run 320x200 and Doom’s 3D area is widescreen aspect due to the status bar taking up the bottom area. To make matters worse, those of us without the processor required to software render 35 frames per second (Doom’s cap, half refresh for a VGA CRT’s 70Hz) <a href="https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/doom/screenshots/gameShotId,332365/" target="_blank">would often shrink the 3D window</a> to improve framerates. All of this is very common for earlier 3D games (I remember playing Quake 1 two years later similarly), which often had difficulties consistently staying in the “interactive framerate” category. For most it was a dream to output near the maximum displayable image while calculating an individual output value for every pixel of every scan-out and that limitation was not primarily <a href="https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_PC_DOS/index.html" target="_blank">due to early framebuffer limitations</a>.<br /><br />
It is 2004 and I’m playing Half-Life 2. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KxRXZhQuY8&t=1230s" target="_blank">Rapid advancement then convergence</a> under a couple of API families for hardware acceleration has meant most of the last decade provided amazing 3D games that grew with hardware capabilities (even if many earlier examples contain somewhat arbitrary <a href="https://www.gog.com/forum/freespace_series/freespace_1_resolution#:~:text=Freespace%202%20runs%20in%20resolutions%20up%20to" target="_blank">resolution limitations</a>). Even 1998’s Half-Life 1 has quickly jumped past low resolution 3D consoles like the PS2. Super-sampling (SSAA) where every final pixel was internally rendered several times then blended (used extensively for offline rendering) was usually too expensive, especially as screen resolutions continued to increase (initially for 4:3 CRT then LCDs moving to 16:9). But by this point, it was standard to use MSAA to blend samples from different polygons that partially covered a single pixel (the saving being that if multiple coverage points were covered by the same triangle, the shader for the final value was only run once, unlike SSAA). Two years later, <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/2116/9" target="_blank">nVidia would introduce CSAA</a> to allow more coverage sample points than cached values, making it even cheaper to provide very accurate blending between polygon edges. It was even possible <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/2116/13" target="_blank">to mix in SSAA for transparent textures</a>, where the edge of the triangle is not where the aliasing happens. Note how those 2006 benchmarks are already showing PC games running at the equivalent of 1080p120 with limited MSAA or 60 fps with many many samples per pixel.<br /><br />
It is 2014 and I’m playing the recent reboot of Tomb Raider. MSAA <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/2918/5" target="_blank">continued to get faster and better</a> in the intervening decade but unfortunately the move to deferred rendering made it extremely difficult to implement efficiently into newer engines (it is not possible in Tomb Raider, although some deferred renderers did get hacked by nVidia drivers that injected MSAA at an acceptable performance cost). The answer to major aliasing, which had been developed during the xbox 360 generation of consoles, was to run a (MLAA) post-processing pass that looks for high contrast shapes typical of aliased lines and then employ a blur to ease the sudden gradient. This technique requires very clear aliasing telltale line segments so smaller detail like foliage systems become a huge issue, which really stands out in the sequel, <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2016/01/the-fall-and-rise-of-tomb-raider.html">Rise of the Tomb Raider</a>. It also <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2016/08/so-there-has-been-lots-of-talk-about.html">completely fails if you apply the pass after doing some other image manipulation that distorts the telltale shapes or edge gradients</a>.<br /><br />
In this 2014 era, the use of HDR intermediate values later tonemapped down to the output range, which was <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/1803/2" target="_blank">just emerging after HL2</a>, also makes it so that internal calculations can output a much wider range of values and with only one sample per triangle per pixel, a new sort of temporal aliasing become dominant as the sampled locations move enough for slightly different angles to be calculated grazing incredibly bright light sources in sequential frames. Surfaces sparkle and flicker in regular patterns that become at least as distracting in motion as classic polygon edge aliasing, <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/04/dragon-aged-inquisition.html">as I mention in my Dragon Age retrospective</a>. A combination of the two aliasing types is easily recognisable where an angle creates a strong lighting highlight along the silhouette of a surface that may be less than a pixel wide, creating light <a href="https://twitter.com/KostasAAA/status/1368552719393431558" target="_blank">ants crawling</a> <a href="https://youtu.be/1v0tf9yfVP8?t=18" target="_blank">along those polygon edges</a> which are too thin for MLAA to catch. A better solution was required. (And you may note the journey isn’t over as I just linked that to a trailer for a 2021 game with an engine that already uses...)<br /><br />
<h3>Temporal Accumulation</h3>
The problem is clear. By 2014 we are generally using one (complex) sample per pixel per frame and due to fine geometric detail (older games lacked) plus an extreme range of possible lighting values (not to mention potential ordering issues in how various stages of calculating light and darkness components are blended) this is creating pixel-scale aliased elements that are also often not temporally stable. The screenshots look relatively good but in motion anyone with flicker-sensitivity is immediately distracted by aliasing. By this time the shaders have also become complex enough that various motion vectors (showing how far the object under each pixel has moved in the previous frame) are starting to be calculated to enable somewhat accurate motion blur to be added (very important on consoles targeting 30 fps, where this provides extra temporal information missing when not using higher framerate output - it’s also “more cinematic” because most people are used to 24 fps movies with a 180 degree shutter so accumulating all light that hits the lens for 1/48th of a second before closing the shutter for another 1/48th of a second).<br /><br />
Those motion vectors, if they are sufficiently accurate, can point to the pixel location of the object in the previous frame. So expensive effects like real-time ambient occlusion estimation (checking the local depth buffer around a pixel to see how occluded the point is by other geometry that would limit how much bounce lighting it would likely receive) becomes <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/DICEStudio/stable-ssao-in-battlefield-3-with-selective-temporal-filtering" target="_blank">an area of experimentation for temporal accumulation buffers</a>. Sample less in each frame, create a noisy estimation of the ground truth, and filter for stability while reprojecting each frame along the motion vectors. <a href="https://bartwronski.com/2014/04/27/temporal-supersampling-pt-2-ssao-demonstration/" target="_blank">Here’s a good walkthrough blog</a> from this time period and subsequent refinements have worked to deal with edge cases like an incremental buffer not handling geometry arriving from off-screen (causing some early examples to obviously slowly darken geometry as it appeared along the edge of the screen).<br /><br />
As seen shipping in 2011's Crysis 2, <a href="https://iryoku.com/aacourse/" target="_blank">temporal accumulation for reducing aliasing</a> not only presents the answer to MLAA’s limitations but also can operate after a cheap MLAA pass to rapidly reduce all aliasing. If you consider a slightly jittered pixel centre location (a common enhancement) then a static scene under TAA effectively generates SSAA-quality images, only spreading the samples per pixel out over time. It was popularised further by nVidia with their branding of the process as TXAA, <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/6159/the-geforce-gtx-660-ti-review/6" target="_blank">shipping</a> in <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/08/the-sharpening-curse.html">games in 2012</a>. Some early implementations had major ghosting issues from motion vector precision and understanding when to reject a previous frame’s data as not contributing to this new location. The actual complexity of this problem becomes apparent when you consider how objects in a scene may have changing visibility (especially during motion and animation) or output values (consider a flickering light and the subsequent illumination between frames). Progress has not always been uniform and a couple of times <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/103458050396593947" target="_blank">I've stumbled upon an anti-aliasing fail state that's hard to even explain</a> (Dishonored 2 doesn't have very satisfying TAA due to ghosting thin elements and I don't know what the MLAA is doing here to achieve what's visible in this capture). It is a process under constant refinement but in today’s best temporal accumulation implementations it is often <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQATS4HOxdo&t=406s" target="_blank">relatively rare to see obvious issues</a>. <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/08/the-sharpening-curse.html">As mentioned</a>, it also errs on the side of a softer final frame so can be combined with a sharpening filter. Unfortunately this can be handled poorly, <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/105972732759312695" target="_blank">effectively paying the computational cost of TAA while then also reintroducing exactly the obvious aliasing that it was meant to remove</a>. It also doesn’t help if <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/105066540557321389" target="_blank">your TAA implementation is broken on a platform</a>.<br /><br />
<h3>Ray Tracing with DLSS and The Future</h3>
In the last couple of years, the new hotness that really explodes the computational costs of working out a stable final value of each pixel in a frame of a modern game is real-time ray tracing. Thanks to <a href="https://developer.nvidia.com/what-is-gameworks" target="_blank">nVidia looking to brand the future</a>, they have shipped all RTX GPUs with dedicated silicon to accelerate BVH intersection tests and machine learning tensor operations (big matrix multiplies, often with sparse data) and at least the former part of that is now also available on current AMD GPUs and consoles plus upcoming Intel discrete GPUs. If you thought the aliasing issues from rasterisation going to physically-based materials and HDR were a concern, welcome to a problem so far beyond that that if you look at the underlying data from a single frame using around one sample per pixel, <a href="https://developer.nvidia.com/optix-denoiser" target="_blank">it looks more like white noise than a coherent scene</a> - accumulation with <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/105773367397316496" target="_blank">temporally reliable motion vectors</a> is a must and site of ongoing research. The addition of Tensor cores to RTX GPUs was initially proposed as the place to run AI denoising on that ray tracing output, although most games today still denoise in the general purpose shaders. Luckily, another branch of research was to use those Tensor units to AI-accelerate all anti-aliasing and it has been wildly successful with many reviewers <a href="https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-image-reconstruction-death-stranding-face-off" target="_blank">now noting that DLSS 2 outperforms native resolution TAA</a>.<br /><br />
DLSS 1 was <a href="https://youtu.be/MMbgvXde-YA?t=85" target="_blank">a bit of a mixed bag</a> as the AI had to be trained on each game and took an aliased lower resolution image from the game then applied the classic AI Super Resolution techniques to “dream” or “hallucinate” the missing details and softened edges. However, <a href="https://youtu.be/d5knHzv0IQE" target="_blank">DLSS 2 changed the inputs</a> (this presentation originally convinced me AMD would add AI cores to RDNA2) and so required a buffer of previous low resolution input frames (including depth buffers and motion vectors) while removing the previous individual training requirement, effectively giving the AI the power of temporal accumulation information to generate the final output. So each new frame generated by the game can be run at a much lower resolution than the output, reducing the samples per output pixel, and yet will retain the look of a cleanly anti-aliased native resolution render. We are back to 1994 but rather than peering into a small box, the games <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/106242137186284447" target="_blank">look almost as good as offline rendering</a> and output fullscreen. <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/105906099408892740" target="_blank">Even when not trained to give the exact same result as native processing</a>, the AI seems to be quite stable and creates pleasing results in motion. It’s a game changer <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/106108109859339858" target="_blank">when targeting new screens</a> that can accept 4K frames at or above 120Hz.<br /><br />
But nVidia do not have a monopoly on upscaling while anti-aliasing and more significant upscaling without compromises will be the new normal if my reading of the tea leaves (on samples per pixel per frame) is correct. Reusing information from previous frames is clearly a smart efficiency saving as long as we can reliably determine what information is useful and what isn’t (avoiding failures that create significant artefacts which are as distracting as the aliasing we’re trying to move beyond or the framerate drops we’re trying to avoid). The target of 4K on the PS4Pro forced engines to pivot to smart upscaling strategies such as <a href="http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2017/index.html" target="_blank">the use of checkerboarding and a rotated tangram resolve in Horizon: Zero Dawn</a>, reducing GPU costs of each new frame by alternating which pixels in a checkerboard were rendered (then blending on the diagonals for that frame while adding in contributions from the previous frame). Recent years <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/105282794231911956" target="_blank">have seen an excellent execution</a> of targeting the fixed scan-out time of non-VRR displays by managing the rendering load around modifying the internal render resolution then upscaling for the final presentation (usually with native UI compositing over the top for maximum text clarity). Even when dynamic resolution scaling is not available on PC, it has forced renderers to <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/102274249080471119" target="_blank">provide visually pleasing upscaling</a> that gracefully handles even fine texture transparency and pixel-wide polygon details.<br /><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="display: inline-block; margin-left: 0.6em; margin-right: 1em;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpEZyCu0p-WjaiRx1hRCsXQWTKaMClWtDrbIesci3onBW_pZcuGmJvDYzaW0qx3ZX6Ua8Pfz0yUoCjj-69nD7DzXLqnc51ftQAjpuJaHp6SiXHc85nSZ2_tE1rckCv8Hl21G-NdNHF-SvW/s3840/The+Medium+05_05_2021+01_00_19+50.png"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpEZyCu0p-WjaiRx1hRCsXQWTKaMClWtDrbIesci3onBW_pZcuGmJvDYzaW0qx3ZX6Ua8Pfz0yUoCjj-69nD7DzXLqnc51ftQAjpuJaHp6SiXHc85nSZ2_tE1rckCv8Hl21G-NdNHF-SvW/s200/The+Medium+05_05_2021+01_00_19+50.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Medium, TAA 50%</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo_EuvziUr685ASmKG7UFs5CoMNmraI4zDYxgehYXFBXR8sZi3OKmdeI-Shxoyz0TzF8yWJCpDLfA7XtMDmNNt253EUBQ-zygr0GXZ4pOkdksUme0EqJJGEH0Gd1fa7hPcJ35g4gXHCsoF/s3840/The+Medium+05_05_2021+01_00_37+75.png"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo_EuvziUr685ASmKG7UFs5CoMNmraI4zDYxgehYXFBXR8sZi3OKmdeI-Shxoyz0TzF8yWJCpDLfA7XtMDmNNt253EUBQ-zygr0GXZ4pOkdksUme0EqJJGEH0Gd1fa7hPcJ35g4gXHCsoF/s200/The+Medium+05_05_2021+01_00_37+75.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Medium, TAA 75%</td></tr>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="display: inline-block; margin-left: 1em;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSU_5VXNkbQ9kDlp3rFpn2c8FtrcRGJWtqQZP-OJNVcBEW5ef2atECDjRZyCJIaoYrZNG6oUBT7kdBirtS7s9X6zZ1B13l0YAdRS1WDZWHvBPoM3XyFeyj-I263QKmNtTXPcNcBdp0s3JZ/s3840/The+Medium+05_05_2021+01_01_01+100.png"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSU_5VXNkbQ9kDlp3rFpn2c8FtrcRGJWtqQZP-OJNVcBEW5ef2atECDjRZyCJIaoYrZNG6oUBT7kdBirtS7s9X6zZ1B13l0YAdRS1WDZWHvBPoM3XyFeyj-I263QKmNtTXPcNcBdp0s3JZ/s200/The+Medium+05_05_2021+01_01_01+100.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Medium, TAA 100%</td></tr>
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<br />
The last few years of Unreal Engine 4 have had quite a clean TAA with integrated upscaler (sometimes called TAAU) for dynamic internal resolution (it tracks the sub-pixel jitter so the samples can be correctly distributed even when changing the ratio of internal res to output res; primarily used on consoles, where the APIs for precise frame time calculation and estimation have existed for longer and the fixed platform make it easier to define an ideal internal resolution window for reliable results that still come close to maximising GPU throughput - the skill is not underutilising the GPU by being too conservative and so being ready for scan-out milliseconds before needed). In the best cases, I am completely happy to run UE4 around 80% resolution (just under 1800p) and let the TAA upscaler reconstruct a soft and clean final image on my 4K PC big screen (getting close to home cinema levels of consuming my vision so making aliasing issues more apparent than someone looking at a distant TV or small monitor). It doesn’t compete with DLSS (in Performance mode that is a 50% resolution so 1080p internal renders when the output is 4K) but then head to heads show <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/105642410323655837" target="_blank">DLSS 2 reaches close to image quality parity with UE4 TAA running at 100% internal resolution</a> on PC so clearly dropping down to 1800p is under 70% of the actual sample count (previous percentages are edges vs sample count is area) and ensuring a relatively aliasing free result without AI will err on the side of softer than DLSS Perf. The above captures from The Medium show a clear quality loss at 50% while the differences at 75% are more subtle compared to native internal resolution. The captures from Man of Medan below are where I think TAA with some upscaling is showing quality levels that you would not even imagine possible in the MLAA era (expecially noting these captures have significantly fewer samples per pixel per frame than those games from a decade ago).<br /><br />
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG0cJp3mRZEwQuP4GI67jDkeCnev0IFoa-o2Pjr-P_nU5p8Az74cwEbcrEf04_lmTfJSbLQhyYFmLhgShqBhdD1vB7J4hv6C-DZkNji3ErmTeLlKjFhhTHtko4Kjsx8y6UgNPNROwXOPEB/s3840/Man+of+Medan+2021.05.07+-+17.49.21.72+85.png"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG0cJp3mRZEwQuP4GI67jDkeCnev0IFoa-o2Pjr-P_nU5p8Az74cwEbcrEf04_lmTfJSbLQhyYFmLhgShqBhdD1vB7J4hv6C-DZkNji3ErmTeLlKjFhhTHtko4Kjsx8y6UgNPNROwXOPEB/s200/Man+of+Medan+2021.05.07+-+17.49.21.72+85.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Man of Medan, TAA 85%</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="display: inline-block;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8282mvu1eqERNUjSoL4njZ3l8L96pyolZGGNVSOLSqUo_KvzXO_jE-FK45TWhqYYx_z2h9jLEES6Bq4mkzK5j_0OukWbGqvqBXU094xXJzQRiy8GKTAhkuRUXoPDEpOzOYPCnMFhhn1Ys/s3840/Man+of+Medan+2021.05.07+-+17.50.09.40+85.png"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8282mvu1eqERNUjSoL4njZ3l8L96pyolZGGNVSOLSqUo_KvzXO_jE-FK45TWhqYYx_z2h9jLEES6Bq4mkzK5j_0OukWbGqvqBXU094xXJzQRiy8GKTAhkuRUXoPDEpOzOYPCnMFhhn1Ys/s200/Man+of+Medan+2021.05.07+-+17.50.09.40+85.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Man of Medan, TAA 85%</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="display: inline-block; margin-left: 1em;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_-4dIL5a24IVU91aww4JmO5eyUsBl5erzhwX-MWngoEbQlz9Kjg55ii9a3_aiS_fonGu4LMzFx2wjYi_inKrVRGAg_pZ3Y_dFyEmpGfTBgcdrNVZeQKlXesI-UvongvmoSVD768tOizAM/s3840/Man+of+Medan+2021.05.07+-+22.55.44.78.png"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_-4dIL5a24IVU91aww4JmO5eyUsBl5erzhwX-MWngoEbQlz9Kjg55ii9a3_aiS_fonGu4LMzFx2wjYi_inKrVRGAg_pZ3Y_dFyEmpGfTBgcdrNVZeQKlXesI-UvongvmoSVD768tOizAM/s200/Man+of+Medan+2021.05.07+-+22.55.44.78.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Man of Medan, TAA 85%</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
With the public release of Unreal Engine 5’s beta shipping with default-enabled Temporal Super Resolution, we are looking at the beginning of non-AI (or at least not running on Tensor cores) TAA plus upscaling that aims to hit the same milestones as DLSS when it comes to low internal resolution. The PR for the UE5 release announces <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/106301929122893238" target="_blank">1080p internal render resolution, aiming to hit the quality bar of 4K native</a>. That is an ambitious target and running the editor (which also uses UE5 TSR by default) there is a lot to appreciate about this beta’s visual quality, well beyond the 50% screenshot above from UE4’s technique (and that was already significantly above <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/105083903105658568" target="_blank">some previous branded sharpen plus upscale techniques as implemented in shipping games</a>). We are approaching a point where continued refinement of this path of research will be able to pick away at the final issues and retain detail without turning the results into <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/08/the-sharpening-curse.html">a mess of sharpening halos</a> or lingering aliasing. From there we have a far more interesting future in which some games will be able to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_of_the_Obra_Dinn" target="_blank">explore the artistic choice to reject such smoothing</a>, <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/106212595443549198" target="_blank">rather than fall into them via broken PC releases</a>, or even take the performance wins of significant upscaling while tweaking output to retain more of the underlying grainy component of ray tracing or other contributions (while adding noise to areas where it does not naturally occur and so approach something close to movie film grain that <a href="https://youtu.be/RdN06E6Xn9E?t=880" target="_blank">actually looks good but reduces render cost rather than increasing it slightly</a>).<br /><br />
<i>Edit (June 2021): This was written on the assumption that the imminent reveal of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution would confirm a very similar technique to UE5's Temporal Super Resolution, directly chasing after DLSS's impressive results at similarly low internal rendering resolutions (using fewer samples than checkerboarding and far fewer than where other TAA upscaling, such as in UE4, shines). It has since been announced that AMD are zaging where others have zigged and will not be using a temporal solution. Worryingly this has come with <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/106335173265713169" target="_blank">rather weak results on the one pre-release promotional image</a> used to sell the technology. As I mentioned above, DLSS 1 did not come out of the gates a winner so AMD have plenty of time to iterate or to provide an open equivalent that replicates what Epic are doing with UE5.</i>
Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-38244470432164133892021-04-30T17:48:00.005+01:002021-04-30T19:31:56.017+01:00VR Review Roundup 1Since last month, I've had some time enjoying <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2021/03/my-presentpresence-in-virtual-reality.html">my new PC VR setup</a> [I also switched domain hosts so if anyone has had any problems with this site or any of my other subdomains, <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa" target="_blank">let me know</a>]. I can definitely feel the growing room that exists for really pushing the fidelity of this VR display (and with displays only getting higher resolution from here, that will continue), so all of this is currently being given with the caveat that we are fast-approaching <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/10325/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-and-1070-founders-edition-review" target="_blank">the fifth birthday of my GPU</a> - at some point I'm going to be able to get more games looking nicer or enjoying far less time viewing reprojected alternating frames, maybe even at the highest 144Hz refresh rates that this headset can do. One of the difficulties I have in VR is always being able to be as analytical as I'd like while wrapped inside the virtual space and the default tools for capturing moments are not raw grabs (into the actual deformed view fed to the headset) while adding actual DirectX frame capture into the rendering chain might mess with latencies etc (I've yet to look into it). Let's run down some notable things I've played recently and what my perceptions are of the rendering going on:<br /><br />
<h4>No Man's Sky</h4>
I just couldn't get this working correctly. Not sure if I'm still finding my "PC expert" legs on how to set things up correctly for VR but the flying-through-space loading screen (along with very unstable movement to photons delay) was enough to make me feel slightly unwell & the framerate once I'd landed on a planet simply wasn't where it needed to be (even after tweaking the Index scaling option well below the automatic value). Maybe I needed to poke more at the in-game settings or wipe my previous config file (from before VR was patched into the game) because aiming for 2D 4K60 and aiming for VR numbers are not remotely similar optimisation processes and the game isn't reading the SteamVR requested resolution correctly. It's important to not take this initial post as being my final decree on modern PC VR (from the perspective of someone who previously has mainly been configuring console VR experiences) - it is still early days and I'm still finding my legs for tweaking VR games.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuArobl8bDp5NX6Q2w5aMd3e5U-Ir9X0xzrGo9f1qaVjwTXSTvWT_SDBe3lZ74JN3gpuvuWGrn2yI8mfKDEb9P_y4JkEq_VSkhTLM65kdKz2_il3FqQoQNGoDViAi0WLJR39p9EDYfGqay/s3840/1222730_20210403004147_1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2160" data-original-width="3840" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuArobl8bDp5NX6Q2w5aMd3e5U-Ir9X0xzrGo9f1qaVjwTXSTvWT_SDBe3lZ74JN3gpuvuWGrn2yI8mfKDEb9P_y4JkEq_VSkhTLM65kdKz2_il3FqQoQNGoDViAi0WLJR39p9EDYfGqay/w640-h360/1222730_20210403004147_1.png" width="640" /></a></div><br />
<h4>Star Wars: Squadrons</h4>
<a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/105988147733344476" target="_blank">The scale is wrong</a>. Digital Foundry noted something similar during <a href="https://youtu.be/V2GW4fUOkBo" target="_blank">their stream of Doom VR for PS VR</a> last month and it's immediately very noticeable as soon as you get into this game. When sat down, the floor in the game is about at the level of your actual floor but everything is scaled as if you were standing up. If you do stand up and reset the position (your screen initially going to black as soon as you move out of the sweet spot it expects you to be in, avoiding letting you walk and clip through too much geometry) then the virtual floor is clearly at the wrong depth, as you might decide in a game designed only for seated play.<br /><br />
Getting into the game design choices, the cockpits may be accurate to the fictional universe but the often limited front-only (or slit window) view into space removes the field of view advantage of VR while the instruments feel insufficient to give a good sense of where things are around you (again, this may be true to the source material but I'd much rather they offer "upgraded" in-world interfaces rather than lean on an optional floating HUD). There was a later mission around setting off floating reactor cores as large ships passed them (while also skirmishing with fighters) and I realised I basically didn't have a good idea of the 3D space while playing for the majority of that mission. That seems like a failure to really utilise what VR can do. It didn't help to find plenty of threads of others swearing out that mission design, despite being something that theoretically should be cool if it was easy to judge 3D relationships - ultimately I restarted the mission rather than keep banging my head against the third checkpoint, just so I could swap to a ship with a somewhat better canopy and by then I had almost learned it rote (fly here, shoot this, then fly there, shoot that at this timing, etc) so if that had involved a more dynamic setting then I might well have just given up.<br /><br />
The Frostbite temporal anti-aliasing is surprisingly good (considering FoV & pixel density requirements) here. Zero ghosting issues, even with the added difficulty of regular reprojected frames because I couldn't get a high res VR output at a stable frame time budget close to what you'd want, even with lots of settings dropped and including the new [lighting: Low] forward renderer mode that was patched in precisely to try and offer higher framerates for VR. The way fine detail starts to flicker out of reality at certain distances can become visible (even in only one eye at a time for a real headache) but is generally very rare and it's a lot better than constant <a href="https://twitter.com/KostasAAA/status/1368552719393431558" target="_blank">"army of ants" edge aliasing</a> (especially how that works the other side of lens inverse distortion to be even more distracting than in 2D). As we get higher and higher res panels in VR, we will need to find a better solution than brute force (very high res super-sampled internal rendering) for cleaning object edges and DLSS or TAA (without introducing significant latency) seems like something that's going to be the future (not just for 2D). I was also recently playing Battlefield V (with settings trying to hit a stable 4K60) and the TAA there caused significantly more issues with thin objects fading out of existence so something in the TAA used here (with a decent 'TAA sharpness' slider that's not <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/105972732759312695" target="_blank">90% way way too much sharpening for anyone to want</a>) felt like the best of what EA are doing.<br /><br />
I was definitely far more aware of polish issues than any aliasing flicker or eye discrepancy. Plenty of walk animations seemed to have not been sorted to actually plant feet on the ground so ended up with very obvious skating feet. By no means is this just a tick-box "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_kinematics" target="_blank">IK</a> enabled" fix but it's a lot closer to a solved problem, slightly weird to see not working correctly, than it was a decade plus ago (when I was doing some light animation work for video games). Reflections on the black gloss floor of Imperial bases constantly showed that they were not well aligned with cubes for the static positions from where the player would be observing them (it seems like they could have generated enough static cubes as you teleport between very few view locations and with no free movement or room-scale VR due to the screen fading to black if you moved around).<br /><br />
<h4>SuperHot VR</h4>
Now here is where I wish I knew how to really prod a game (maybe one of the Unity tweaker/console tools could provide some aid). This style would be perfect for some MSAA anti-aliasing that did more than mild super-sampling around the edges (which wastes shader perf on repeatedly sampling inside basically flat-shaded triangles while undersampling at the edges where the sharp contrast demands the best). The game as shipped doesn't even seem to be able to offer the post-AA (FXAA) that the non-VR games from this team have integrated. And you can't inject FXAA at the driver layer because the inverse warp for the lenses will remove the clean aliased lines that the morphological pass is looking for (assuming the nVidia driver doesn't detect VR titles and disable such tweaking entirely). While moving the Index scaling option clearly affected framerates, the aliasing never cleaned up significantly.<br /><br />
The game itself is still just as fun as it was when first released but, even with tweakable internal res on PC, it's still a long way short of where I would hope it could get to visually (and will likely not be getting any more updates that could add better anti-aliasing as the teem are almost finished with the 3rd game in the series, which is not in VR, then probably moving on to new things). Even a lot of brute-force super-sampling will possibly only go so far to fixing those incredibly sharp aliased edges accentuated by the game's style - something where you're wondering if something in the pipeline explodes if you push beyond 8K rendering so it'll never be viable to do so even with GPUs several generations out. You can definitely get immersed in the experience and have it bother you slightly less over time (especially if you push up refresh rate so you're getting more temporal data rather than letting aliased frames linger, something faster GPUs certainly help with) but quite a few games I've sampled seem to have decided that AA, even a cheap post-AA pass before distortion, isn't in their performance budget and I really think it's not paying off vs targeting a lower internal res but with an AA method enabled. Of course, on PS VR you often had the combination of a low internal res and no AA so at least on PC things are always less bad.<br /><br />
<h4>Tetris Effect</h4>
All the games I'm talking about this month provide a contrast of different techniques and rendering challenges. I <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2018/12/games-of-year-2018.html#tetriseffect">talked about this</a> on PS VR several years ago. It was one of the best games of the year in 2018 and the multiplayer mode is a nice addition in 2021 (but not really why I come to Lumines-style games) so it's still great today. The fidelity here is clearly better than on PS VR, although I found that super-sampling can push down the framerate below where it might be (even with only a 90Hz target rather than pushing towards 144Hz) without ever really making it feel like every sharp edge is anti-aliased (in combination with the FXAA the game uses). Much of the amazing particle work doesn't need AA (despite the High setting defaulting to 150% super-sampling the entire scene) and those semi-transparent particles probably causes major issues with trying to enable a turn-key AA solution so it's a shame someone hasn't built a more bespoke solution that merges the various different techniques each element of the scene needs while maximising performance (to hit the high framerates and native resolution needed for this generation of VR headset).<br /><br />
As with Rez (which I have not yet tried on PC, waiting for a sale to buy a second copy for a second system), there is something I find deeply pleasing about the audio-visual combination here and the soundtrack brings out the in-built speakers on the Index when cranked all the way up. There is certainly not the same deep bass you'd get from a subwoofer (it would be interesting, if not ideal for those living in apartment complexes, to be able to feed the LFE channel to a separate audio device in a game that bothers to enable a second rumble device for additional haptic feedback) but it's not bad. This isn't tinny (which is always the fear when doing something like off-ear small speakers) and is at least as good as a quality set of in-ear canalphones, but with the potential here for better positional audio because it doesn't ever feel like the audio is originating from inside your head.<br /><br />
I couldn't get the Index controls working exactly how I wanted them (anything linked to the right analogue stick is locked out despite the VR mode not using the right stick for anything so I couldn't rebind it; for some reason the individual buttons & pressable surfaces on the Index controllers did not all seem to turn up in the menus, which seemed designed assuming Vive or Oculus layouts and even recommending you not use those but rather plug in an Xbox controller) and this is a bit of a recurring theme in games that I have poked at. The Index controllers are a bit of a variation on the Vive designs, which changes the angle it thinks "forward" is from them but also shuffles the inputs around so that you're sometimes wondering exactly what the game is expecting when an icon from the Vive pops up. It's something that likely won't get ported back into older VR games and hopefully Valve will provide free engineering time to assist VR developers integrating prompts and defaults into their current or upcoming releases. This game is totally fine with a very old 360 controller (as long as you map things off the d-pad, because you can't drop and move Tetris pieces with <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/24/21078922/xbox-360-transforming-d-pad-button-improvement-evolution-change-microsoft" target="_blank">a d-pad that poor at reading precise inputs</a>) but I'd really like it to be pick-up-and-play with the Index controllers.<br /><br />
<h4>Half-Life: Alyx</h4>
And here we reach the culmination of a lot of VR work. Valve created an updated version of their engine and built the next entry in the Half-Life series around the development of a new headset and controller update from their earlier cooperation on the Vive ecosystem. That is the Index headset and controllers I'm currently using. This is exactly the game you expect it to be from the developer who have infinite money and time (but seemingly far fewer developers than studios that scaled out when AAA asset creation demanded it) to iterate on their previous design ethos: constant innovation during play. When <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2014/11/pile-of-shame-killzone-shadow-fall.html">I discussed Killzone: Shadow Fall in 2014</a>, Half-Life 2 was the obvious title to compare it to when talking about combining a narrative progression with first-person gameplay variety. And that's exactly what we get here in VR, a slow development of new tools and ways of interacting with the world that also slowly eases between several genres from action to horror. Very early on, when you're introduced to the power of 'gravity gloves' to point at an object and pull it towards you, it becomes obvious, "surely everyone should be doing this!" That's the Valve magic: making something that feels like it's the only answer and something everyone else must adopt because it so cleanly solves a problem (you don't want to have to physically slowly move over to pick up every little thing while keeping the action pace up moving through a gaming environment).<br /><br />
On a technical side, this engine is doing exactly what all the early best practices notes (which came from engineers pushing VR like the team at Valve) said you should. Get back to forward rendering (use forward+ or similar clustered options if you want many real-time light sources that your deferred renderer was enabling at high framerates), go back to classic MSAA, and try to get a lot of pixels rendered while maintaining modern geometry and texture detail. Step back to less dynamic lighting if you have to, which is already something HL2 was excellent at mixing to hide just how much wasn't part of some unified real-time lighting solution. The end result: a very sharp result and something that I fully expect to really sing on future hardware (both higher res headsets than the Index and the future GPUs that can drive them at high resolution while hitting 144Hz native). The only thing that actually feels extremely outdated is the level loads between sections, something a level streaming solution could surely have completely alleviated.<br /><br />
As to how it looks on my older GPU driving the Index? At points it's a touch too sharp for me. The textures can crawl and alias a bit in spots and the edge anti-aliasing is good but not perfect. I'd prefer a softer output that manages to deal with shader aliasing, even if it might have more issues around transparencies and thin edges (here using super-sampling on texture transparency, the old classic that we don't see so much of in 2021 but <a href="https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/1298-nvidia-geforce-7800-gtx-preview/?page=12" target="_blank">really made the chainlink fences pop in 2005 in games like Half-Life 2</a>). But beyond some mild criticisms, it holds together really well. That's why I think it'll work very well in the future (selling an entirely new generation of headsets on PC <a href="https://blog.playstation.com/2021/03/18/next-gen-vr-on-ps5-the-new-controller/" target="_blank">and presumably even console</a>). Unlike some of the other games, I think you could pump up the internal res and maybe integrate some VRS or even DLSS to boost output resolution without linearly increasing GPU load (spending your fidelity more smartly with VRS Tier 2 or simply letting AI magic clean aliasing defects while chasing a fixed frame time with DLSS 2.1) and so remove those small criticisms without demanding a radically more powerful GPU.Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-22248492593813951562021-03-04T10:45:00.004+00:002021-03-04T10:45:47.708+00:00My Present/Presence in Virtual RealityI did not get to experience the CRT-based early consumer VR hype, because that stuff basically failed to make it to market in any real sense and was at trade shows before my time covering the industry (let alone working somewhere that got sent dev kits). But I did enjoy the early success of consumer stereoscopic 3D gaming. I jumped into both the 1999- (<a href="http://www.stereo3d.com/revelator.htm" target="_blank">Elsa Revelator</a>) and 2008- nVidia 3D Vision ecosystems (first on a CRT and then on a high refresh rate LCD) and while the second push also came with some 3D movies (as cinema chains tried to find a new reason to spend too much to go to the movies), the main draw for me was always interactive 3D experiences. As long as you kept your head still & tweaked with the 3D settings, you could get an impressively convincing window into a miniature 3D world. Things just feel different when you can use your vergence to focus on different elements in the scene (because things close to you & distant cannot both be in focus at the same time so you have to pick which is double - although this tech does not simulate the soft-focus that reality provides to the out of focus depth) and have successfully trained yourself to disable your <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accommodation_reflex" target="_blank">accommodation-convergence reflex</a> (current VR has the same limitation but we're <a href="https://vr.tobii.com/integrations/hp-reverb-g2-omnicept-edition/" target="_blank">on the edge of consumer eye-tracking</a> that could allow renderers to apply depth-of-field based on gaze tracking).<br /><br />When consumer VR was back in the "maybe this could work at consumer prices" stage of Kickstarting in 2013, I started paying attention. Take a high resolution consumer phone screen, add some lenses, and read from the ok quality gyroscope/accelerometer package that phones also now include, and you're just some better motion tracking away from a real VR setup. Without that tracking, there isn't quite enough precision for rotation and you've got a major issue with drift (which you can see with your phone, if you've ever tried to do something fancy with that sensor package) plus the accelerometers are far short of what you need for sub-mm position tracking (as you'd expect from having to do a double integration from acceleration to velocity to position with no external validation).<div><br /></div><div>In 2014 I got the Oculus Rift DK2 to try out a few projects for myself. This <a href="https://developer.oculus.com/blog/sensor-fusion-keeping-it-simple/" target="_blank">fuses</a> the sensor package readings with an external IR camera looking for IR LEDs on the headset. The low persistence displays (you can't leave the image up until the next frame because the headset will be in motion and this smear can cause huge issues - I believe <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200512095714/http://blogs.valvesoftware.com:80/abrash/" target="_blank">the good series of blogs on this by Michael Abrash</a> all got purged from the Valve servers at some point last year but Archive.org remembers) offer up to 960x1080 PenTile per eye (half a 1080p screen, assuming the lenses go right up to overlapping views with your eye position in the headset) at a maximum of 75Hz. It's dev hardware, but it was only $350 and kinda works. The real issue for me was the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenTile_matrix_family#PenTile_RGBG" target="_blank">PenTile pixel layout</a> because that was a major thing for OLED phone panels at the time and means for each input pixel you only got two colour elements rather than the three of RGB. To me, while we're often talking about the bandwidth limits of higher refresh rates and 4K displays or the GPU load of calculating each sub-pixel's value, effectively throwing away a full third of the information when it hits the display (because the red and blue channels are half resolution on the actual screen) seems like a waste. It also means that the number of individual dots of light in the headset you're looking at is only twice the pixel count (skewing comparisons with RGB layout panels in other devices). Some early consumer games played on the DK2, although I seriously doubt everything released in the last couple of years would work (even if you can accept the quality limitation) as I don't think the current SDK still supports the very early dev hardware.</div><div><br /></div><div>In 2016, I got a real consumer VR headset with PlayStation VR. $300 got you Sony's spin on their existing line of <a href="https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/support/televisions-projectors-personal-3d-viewer" target="_blank">personal 3D viewers</a> (which I'd always seen advertised as a way of looking at a movie on a plane in a virtual cinema) and the big upgrade from my DK2 was an RGB OLED layout at the same resolution (so that's 50% more individual points of light from the sub-pixel count increase) and up to 120Hz. The camera used visible not IR light to track things and reused the PS3 motion controllers if you wanted to play something not designed to work with the motion-enabled DualShock 4 (default PS4) controller. The big setback: it was released around the time of the PS4 to PS4 Pro transition and most software was mainly made assuming the rather paltry GPU inside the 2013 PS4 (which, even at release, was not even a particularly high-end customised AMD). An external box added support for virtual 3D audio and 2D pass-through to a TV (some games even made social experiences where the players on TV saw something completely different to the person in PSVR). A lot of games seemed to rely heavily on reprojection to double the effective framerate and the tracking was not great (especially for controllers which were either actual PS3 motion controllers repurposed & never intended for exact tracking or a standard controller that likewise was not originally designed for sub-mm tracking because it was just bringing forward the legacy support from the Sixaxis <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixaxis" target="_blank">"we were fighting a haptics patent so couldn't include rumble in the PS3 controller so I guess have some motion sensors"</a> controller).</div><div><br /></div><div>In the before-pandemic times, I also had access to (but never had at home) the commercial first revision of the Rift and HTC Vive. Both 2016 headsets, both 1080x1200 per eye PenTile OLEDs (two actual panels, not one screen with lenses aiming to almost overlap) at 90Hz. At two and half million sub-pixel elements that's actually a lower dot density than the PSVR (about three million) but the advantage is everything expects a higher resolution and modern PCs can really drive those rendered pixel counts up (even using anti-aliasing) as the GeForce 10 Series was out by 2016. The Vive is interesting because it doesn't use a traditional camera for drift correction or sensor fusion; <a href="https://youtu.be/xrsUMEbLtOs" target="_blank">rotating lasers in base stations</a> provide a moving slice of light for objects to orient & position themselves within (synchronising with a wide IR pulse to know the timing of when in the rotation the laser hit them). For the last year of lockdown, I've had no access to this kit and I'd not really used it for a year before that. So I've basically been PSVR-only and while the exclusives have been good, stuff like <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2017/12/games-of-year-2017.html#re7">Resident Evil 7</a> sure does seem like it'd be better if it wasn't tied to that console GPU. Both the PC headsets have been superseded by higher spec updates but I've not seen anything of them up to this point.</div><div><br /></div><div>That is, until a week ago. Thanks to the incredible generosity of <a href="https://thetrakynia.itch.io/" target="_blank">someone</a> reaching out and offering to ship me their Valve Index VR kit, I now have a modern PC VR headset at home. The Vive was codeveloped by Valve so they decided to take the lead in 2019 and release their own branded kit. The same base station tracking tech but here paired with a headset that offers 1440x1600 per eye RGB from 80Hz to 144Hz (and a somewhat higher field of view than any of the other kit I've used). The audio uses portable "ultra near-field" speakers, which sounds surprisingly good (considering I normally use in-ear or closed headphones which provide good conduction) and doesn't block out sound from the outside world (otherwise it can feel a bit like you're extremely vulnerable when immersed in the presence of VR). I'm glad I can stand in a quiet room so get all the benefit of off-ear sound (you don't need to simulate the distortion of your ear shape because that process still happens - preventing the sound from feeling like it comes "from inside your head") and it continues to be immersive.</div><div><br /></div><div>The other huge update is the controllers. My limited time with the Vive was using their motion controllers (lot of time with the Rift & PSVR was using traditional wireless gamepads) and the Index controllers are certainly a refinement of that basic idea but rather than holding onto two sub-mm tracked devices, these you tie to your palms and so can entirely let go. The importance of precise tracking can be seen in how you put on the VR kit: with PSVR you need to know where the controller is before you put on the headset; with an Index the controllers need to be switched on but once you put on the headset you can easily walk over to the controllers and put them on using their 3D rendered virtual versions. I'm almost ready for the future where we go into VR by putting gloves on. Yes, you'll never beat the haptics of a real button press or trigger pull but, for a lot of VR experiences, actually having some virtual hands is all you need. This has opened my eyes to where VR gaming isn't just traditional gaming but with fully-immersive environments and extra input from head tracking. With the next generation of devices, gaze tracking should provide even more efficient rendering (only render the highest resolution where you're looking) but also entire new interfaces that are controlled with a look and a hand gesture.</div><div><br /></div><div>Up next (after maybe a couple more weeks of dipping into all the PC VR experiences I've been missing out on): what are my actual impressions of playing various things?</div>Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-56814570228591980482020-12-31T23:30:00.832+00:002023-12-31T17:01:33.807+00:00Games of the Year 2020Well
<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/12/games-of-year-2019.html">last year</a>
I tweaked the criteria for my lists and listed a number of games I'd get to that
*checks notes* I did not manage to get round to this year (although I did at
least
<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2020/05/catch-up-1-not-gotys.html"
>get through</a
>
quite a few
<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2020/11/catch-up-2-more-not-gotys.html"
>games that had built up</a
>
from lists in previous year - <b>Divinity: Original Sin 2</b> is currently in
progress). Everything outside games has been, for reasons you can guess, a lot
to handle so I'm actually thinking of
<a
href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/105168065919394660"
target="_blank"
>making another slight career change in 2021</a
>. Got that plan to eventually
<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/05/co-ops-sharing-spoils.html"
>build up a co-op</a
>
still rattling around somewhere. The slow
<a
href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/105045783586117685"
target="_blank"
>ending</a
>
of the
<a
href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/105236875310570745"
target="_blank"
>30% digital store rip-off</a
>
may actually meaningfully improve the viability of making small games for a
small market. But on to the new games other people have made that I've played
and found notable this year.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h2>
Best of the Best 2020:
</h2>
<br />
<h3>
Final Fantasy VII Remake (part 1)
</h3>
The most well remembered classic JRPG, completely remade with modern AAA
production values, and cut into pieces because making games as big as the
original with 2020 costs would be prohibitive. It's a large ask, larger than was
required of
<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/02/shooting-into-february-2019.html"
>the total remake of <b>Resident Evil 2</b> last year</a
>, but they seem to have worked out what <b>Final Fantasy VII</b> would look
like if you made it today. Which things needed to be retained, which things had
to change, and what stuff you could rework and expand because you're free to
experiment a bit as slavish devotion to the original would necessarily import
the most outdated issues into the reworking. At the start of the year, this was
not the remake I expected to be at the top of my list by year end.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAcbslmASW1pU9NnGxbqUgjSy1LwxjBvJZ-E3ufdtV-8QA8REs4KTwXtzahjhGImywiUY7KOM84wwKqv8B1_8SDt44JkcUZKPA6vBxbuP7XpnkBlN2L3RwYOgRL7KR_5S6aPzXER-YRo7V/s3840/FINAL+FANTASY+VII+REMAKE+DEMO_20200324130500.png"
style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"
><img
border="0"
data-original-height="2160"
data-original-width="3840"
height="360"
src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAcbslmASW1pU9NnGxbqUgjSy1LwxjBvJZ-E3ufdtV-8QA8REs4KTwXtzahjhGImywiUY7KOM84wwKqv8B1_8SDt44JkcUZKPA6vBxbuP7XpnkBlN2L3RwYOgRL7KR_5S6aPzXER-YRo7V/w640-h360/FINAL+FANTASY+VII+REMAKE+DEMO_20200324130500.png"
width="640"
/></a>
</div>
<br />Baring a few asset streaming issues that hopefully the eventual PS5 or PC
ports will completely fix, this is an incredibly lavish RPG that manages to walk
through the initial sections of the 1997 game while showing that some of the
offline rendered background from that era are now more than attainable by
real-time rendering. But also that the current designers are willing to throw
out entire systems (like the old combat mechanics) to build something that feels
fresh inside the shell of the classic game. It really gets onto my list by doing
the same thing I praised RE2 for: knowing how to merge the best of the original
game with enough new to be novel without losing the identity of the game.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Ori and the Will of the Wisps
</h3>
I didn't get into <b>Ori and the Blind Forest</b> until a while after release
(after the Definitive Edition had been out for a bit). The many escape
sequences without checkpoints managed to sour me slightly on the whole thing,
while acknowledging that it otherwise worked quite well (even the divisive
system of laying your own checkpoints using an energy currency rather than
hitting standard console auto-checkpoint areas - almost felt like when PC games
have played with limiting quicksave for higher difficulty levels). But after
they had fixed some launch performance issues with this sequel, I was ready to jump into this
somewhat classic Metroidvania platforming experience and find out what was
new.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWB9DwbmAeyY-Nzb52jRGCSBYHOypw5aspM4ErrC83joOOABSZ3zGZn_YK2yAQSC9j0d2TQrQcNbW6gIBi-pnQpTl_tBOtb92RQcJze03TXTlq5PnWO_hCArqaE9vMmgqonGewKFHMfdu5/s3840/Ori+and+the+Will+of+the+Wisps+Screenshot+2020.09.30+-+13.19.01.17.png"
style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"
><img
border="0"
data-original-height="2160"
data-original-width="3840"
height="360"
src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWB9DwbmAeyY-Nzb52jRGCSBYHOypw5aspM4ErrC83joOOABSZ3zGZn_YK2yAQSC9j0d2TQrQcNbW6gIBi-pnQpTl_tBOtb92RQcJze03TXTlq5PnWO_hCArqaE9vMmgqonGewKFHMfdu5/w640-h360/Ori+and+the+Will+of+the+Wisps+Screenshot+2020.09.30+-+13.19.01.17.png"
width="640"
/></a>
</div>
<br />
Luckily this contains lots more of same and far less annoying escape sequences.
The innovative checkpointing is out (so no forgetting to checkpoint and losing
progress) but the various combat and upgrade systems have been extended in every
way imaginable. It's now a lot more of a combat platformer than the first game
(which relied upon auto-target shooting rather than a range of weapon styles)
with your face buttons remappable to whatever skills you feel are best suited
for where you're currently traversing. And the traversal still feels as good as
the last game (I would not have persevered through the partial memorisation
& cheap kills of those original escape sequences if the movement hadn't felt
this good) while the story sorta retreads the same emotional notes the last game
did - it mainly still worked for me but whatever they try next needs to change
it up narratively or it'll just feel cheap a third time. It's still doing very
nice things with making a world mixing 3D elements with lots of deformable 2D
layers.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Remastered
</h3>
I'm not sure I've played the original game this remakes since shortly after it
released in 2009. I have maybe replayed the original Modern Warfare since then
but I'm not certain of it. Either way, Sony's co-marketing deal for recent Call
of Duty titles have also ended up with remakes of the first two Modern Warfare
titles coming to PS4 slightly before other devices and in the last two years
also included them for any PlayStation Plus users (so anyone with a PS4 who
wants to play online with others). After this arrived on PS+ only a few months
after first being released, I decided to do a back to back (re)play of the two
Modern Warfare games that are the definitive Call of Duty campaigns in my
recollection.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYO_OHKsegUwqMdC72ebFaBQ-B98682RkqZtR1Ja2sht6eo4xhOCygdxTSHoC1CpqZLHKeU2pD0Ct9bIPIYk46JpSLCqG4lO8XmmilysZ6w8mjqYmC6grm6wcdw1uvU11-2xdQwb5YCGlQ/s3840/Modern+Warfare+2+Campaign+Remastered_20200806205923.png"
style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"
><img
border="0"
data-original-height="2160"
data-original-width="3840"
height="360"
src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYO_OHKsegUwqMdC72ebFaBQ-B98682RkqZtR1Ja2sht6eo4xhOCygdxTSHoC1CpqZLHKeU2pD0Ct9bIPIYk46JpSLCqG4lO8XmmilysZ6w8mjqYmC6grm6wcdw1uvU11-2xdQwb5YCGlQ/w640-h360/Modern+Warfare+2+Campaign+Remastered_20200806205923.png"
width="640"
/></a>
</div>
<br />
While this isn't the sort of total reimagining that I've praised above, there's
definitely some production values behind these and it's certainly not just
offering up a PC port (higher resolution than consoles at the time could offer)
with reworked textures and some higher detail models. This is all new work but
based upon the level progression of the original campaigns (the credits seem to
list "archive sound" so the original VO is retained but they've done new motion
capture so it feels all-new). This is basically a "how you remember it" remake
where you go back to look at the original and realise that actually the dynamic
modern in-engine cut-scenes you've just played through actually were far more
basic in the original game. It feels like the original given 2020 production
values.<br /><br />I did notice that
the ground-up rework has (in the same way the <b>Black Mesa</b> remake of HL1 in
the HL2 engine fails to capture identical enemy AI) somewhat changed the actual
play experience and difficulty. This is a campaign that I did not beat on the
highest difficulty in 2009 and I've not become radically better with a
controller in the last 11 years of ageing. I still found a few spots of
repeatedly reloading a checkpoint until I'd worked out a reliable way to get
through a difficulty spike but it wasn't as punishing as the original game - I
generally expect the very hardest difficulty in a game to be beyond me, leaving
room for those with good reaction times and knowledge of a scenario to still
have something to offer some resistance. There is a famous achievement for the
very end of the original Modern Warfare on the hardest difficulty (which also
slashes how much time you've got to complete that level) and it wasn't easy but
this year I managed to get that perfect run in
<b>Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered</b>. It feels like that same
difficulty change continues into this 2020 game, which some may find
disappointing.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Gears Tactics
</h3>
That lovely <b>Gears 5</b> engine, tweaked even higher with a PC-first release,
and a turn-based tactical combat game between the lavish cut-scenes? Sign me
up!<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglql92WzxtGCsqQ4gp0qJ0skT-LBAznyug0nz_jZfsINBNhbkIpk9wUza-wipCO3DK7bAlL7h3Y0Ah4Zztu9_xTFVvH-NN8BcE_mhC-_aa9-75U710hqx9ZHBURng5vJ1nf6xZBxDLP-P2/s3840/Gears+Tactics+2020.09.14+-+18.56.37.75.png"
style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"
><img
border="0"
data-original-height="2160"
data-original-width="3840"
height="360"
src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglql92WzxtGCsqQ4gp0qJ0skT-LBAznyug0nz_jZfsINBNhbkIpk9wUza-wipCO3DK7bAlL7h3Y0Ah4Zztu9_xTFVvH-NN8BcE_mhC-_aa9-75U710hqx9ZHBURng5vJ1nf6xZBxDLP-P2/w640-h360/Gears+Tactics+2020.09.14+-+18.56.37.75.png"
width="640"
/></a>
</div>
<br />Somehow we're having
<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/12/games-of-year-2019.html"
>another year</a
>
where my personal list contains quite a bit of stuff that looks a lot like a
modern Xcom and yet I'm still going to be adamant that I do not like either of
those games and the expansions did not fix that for me, despite going back to
the mid-'90s <i>X-Com</i> games they are based on and getting a lot out of
spending my action points to slowly work through a procedurally generated map of
alien terror. The way this game gets over the two-phase move + shoot turns I
dislike in <b>XCOM 1 & 2</b> is making it so you quickly multiply your total
moves while also being able to recharge them during a turn. It's basically
getting us towards proper action points while pretending to adhere to the modern
choice to do away with them.<br /><br />I'm also unsure how much the actual
combat drove me through this game vs enjoying those lavish production values for
every cut-scene. It's maybe not exactly as much obvious money on the screen
(rendered in real-time) as a numbered Gears of War game but it comes close
enough to remind you how little budget Firaxis Games are given to make anything
outside mainly functional graphics by 2K (despite a consistent record of making
multi-million selling titles).<br />
<br />
<h3>
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2
</h3>
Lotta remastered games getting to the top of the list this year. Almost feels
like a theme: the last push for this generation with very mature technology
being deployed to work over games that are old enough you'd maybe not really
want to dive into the limited visuals today but, at the same time, they still
often play really well. In this case, Activision have tried remaking and
bringing forward various THPS projects in recent years without enough funding or
care and completely failed. But after Toys for Bob remade <b>Spyro</b> and <b>Crash
Bandicoot</b> into extremely profitable titles, the classic levels from the first
THPS games and enough cash to relicense the vast majority of the classic
soundtracks have made it into a game that feels like how you remember those old
games did, only today we actually get the sort of framerate consistency you
really didn't around the turn of the millennium.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMeelhfo2UigHawA4UxHhc868rAoDQ8IYI6t8Hvt8DE0LlJYeCuj4LNVQh_e-q8bWoV0NbkWgCsbMpT9tDHEuy6Zi1JOEcNQE5I9YZxOcJJTo8b66kDMo-_Fp8NGKBsakprvu68dE11kl5/s1920/egs-tonyhawksproskater12.jpg"
style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"
><img
border="0"
data-original-height="2160"
data-original-width="3840"
height="360"
src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMeelhfo2UigHawA4UxHhc868rAoDQ8IYI6t8Hvt8DE0LlJYeCuj4LNVQh_e-q8bWoV0NbkWgCsbMpT9tDHEuy6Zi1JOEcNQE5I9YZxOcJJTo8b66kDMo-_Fp8NGKBsakprvu68dE11kl5/w640-h360/egs-tonyhawksproskater12.jpg"
width="640"
/></a>
</div>
<br />I think I played a ridiculous amount of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 on PC
with nothing more than a keyboard (this was far enough back that console games
were being designed for digital not analogue inputs so actually you could just
get a keyboard out and pray the port had been given more time and money than
most to get it working well under Windows 9x). We Europeans then missed out on
the Xbox merging of levels from the first two games in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2x
because by the time the console was out here, it was time for the 3rd full
sequel to release.<br /><br />So here is the first European chance at getting
all these iconic levels together in one package, now remastered with a lot of
extra content and tweaks (the combo system is completed with the revert from
THPS3, although you can disable it to get a pure experience on the original
levels) while feeling a lot like those classic games, only without the classic
framerate (it's a guaranteed 60 fps here). Now I'm just waiting to see if they add
level packs from the 3rd and 4th game to this package or if that's going to be
left for a full sequel bundle.<br />
<br />
<h3>
F1 2020
</h3>
At a certain point I had to stop just thinking that
<a
href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2020/01/a-new-generation-of-semi-sim-driving.html"
>this annual franchise had never been better</a
>
and start actually considering it for the end of year lists.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilo_OCQdGqzphwLxORRLd_sd97v_A6TzI8lBaTx-YmTcQFNOpGNIr3Wh0Y3bJJZGx6-Be4xjdc7Dc0dB-VNmMTLcbrgOSQKrj1VL9r4tOp20um-Aj7uBDgN6J4hI7d4tpfM8mJvyUcj9nv/s3840/F1+2020+Screenshot.png"
style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"
><img
border="0"
data-original-height="2160"
data-original-width="3840"
height="360"
src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilo_OCQdGqzphwLxORRLd_sd97v_A6TzI8lBaTx-YmTcQFNOpGNIr3Wh0Y3bJJZGx6-Be4xjdc7Dc0dB-VNmMTLcbrgOSQKrj1VL9r4tOp20um-Aj7uBDgN6J4hI7d4tpfM8mJvyUcj9nv/w640-h360/F1+2020+Screenshot.png"
width="640"
/></a>
</div>
<br />
It's not quite what I wanted as this is very much another incremental tweak to
the 2019 release that's coming out at the end of a console generation so
probably has most of the major rendering tweaks waiting to be shown off in the
2021 release for the new consoles. But this is still an extremely good semi-sim
game that this year adds the ability to create your own team and really take
charge of making waves in F1. Like the addition of an F2 season to last year's
game, it's an incremental change from what they've been doing recently so if you
don't upgrade to the latest game you're not missing out on a radically new
experience but it does help round out the package and build on top of the great
driving engine they've had for a few years that can range from assist-heavy to a
very light-touch semi-sim approach where you always need to be on top of the
tyres and mix moment to moment precision with race-long strategic choices.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h2>
Also Notable 2020:
</h2>
<br />
<h3>
Hades
</h3>
This won the hearts of just about everyone else this year and is from a
developer whose previous work I've enjoyed. I played a bit of the early access
version when it first became available then gave it another go after the final
release but, not helped by it always feeling really laggy on my Intel (iGPU)
machine, I never really loved the combat loop (latency wasn't an issue on my nVidia
desktop but when I was playing it was mainly on the go). As a roguelike-like,
it's always going to be tuned for maximum difficulty but I also just didn't feel
like how I lost health was often something I could significantly improve around
without major elements of luck (often keyed to random rolls for upgrades
etc) or grinding (as there are permanent unlocks you slowly earn currencies
towards). Again, none of this is totally unexpected for what they set out to
make but I'm not the biggest fan of 2D action games and definitely won't grind
much to progress, even if there is a lot of recorded VO to put around shuffled
tiles of levels. Maybe one to give another go in 2021.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Genshin Impact
</h3>
First off, this is a free to play game with primarily gambling mechanics around
the collection of additional RPG characters that make up your party of four.
It's an always online open world narrative RPG with matchmade online dungeons
you can also tackle solo. You own nothing but that does mean you can
<a href="https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1324016551570382852" target="_blank"
>completely seamlessly jump between a session on PC or on mobile</a
>. But if you feel compelled to collect everything in a game, this is a bad
option because the dozens of characters have several tiers of power to unlock
and each unlock comes from a rare random roll primarily using the paid currency.
So it can't go on the top list, even if I've been having a lot of fun with this
without having to pay money.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieYdHn8DHCcUUiTs6kQx7AmevmQoww9oCyj17pIyBFdYIW3u0SFnQxV3h_Rb1BsQtasmSMZs4G7vVD6OvRsvoUrUjCBdrhcuF6hgU3Hgk9EIwLn1BFqD62-hsQdPoI3H_jC1LyBCCxabVa/s3840/Genshin+Impact+2020.11.04+-+13.30.39.png"
style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"
><img
border="0"
data-original-height="2160"
data-original-width="3840"
height="360"
src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieYdHn8DHCcUUiTs6kQx7AmevmQoww9oCyj17pIyBFdYIW3u0SFnQxV3h_Rb1BsQtasmSMZs4G7vVD6OvRsvoUrUjCBdrhcuF6hgU3Hgk9EIwLn1BFqD62-hsQdPoI3H_jC1LyBCCxabVa/w640-h360/Genshin+Impact+2020.11.04+-+13.30.39.png"
width="640"
/></a>
</div>
<br />The core of the game is anime characters (with English or Japanese VO
joining the original Chinese) exploring a large vibrant open world full of both
repeatable event quests and a solid narrative mainline quest series. Your party
of four elementally-aligned characters can be switched between on the fly and
this provides some depth to the combat which otherwise restricts inputs to a
jump, dodge, attack (fast & charged variant), with special on a timer and
super that recharges with attacks (fitting into the limited options for phone
controls). The elemental combos really make the combat sing here, along with
plenty of abilities that operate even when the party member is swapped out
(which is something you'll be doing potentially every few seconds when in
intense combat) - it's an intriguing way of giving players most of the
versatility of a four character full party & associated health pool without
the pure offensive output of a group party with all characters active at once
(which is how you do online play). You've also got plenty of modern niceties
like zero punishment death, climb-anywhere traversal, gliders, plentiful
fast-travel unlocks, and rebuilding a new party composition whenever out of
combat. Actually one of the primary things to note about the lavish F2P RPG here
is that it's rarely punishing in a way that feels like they're pushing the paid
currency. You don't buy around death punishments because there is none.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoniaVjDkmHJx7QazvatCEBWlVnaRMyAeQVk9dPdo0wK05GzOK53c2Py4I7tNRUbxRYj-BTZ1EiZdLV1zS0CF4bT94K8ApaJQkTBdr3OGCygqx5h5a1yqdbsqNFN6ENO8onpcYUPCA8z88/s3840/Genshin+Impact+2020.11.11+-+14.26.05.71.png"
style="margin-right: 1em;"
><img
border="0"
height="112"
src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoniaVjDkmHJx7QazvatCEBWlVnaRMyAeQVk9dPdo0wK05GzOK53c2Py4I7tNRUbxRYj-BTZ1EiZdLV1zS0CF4bT94K8ApaJQkTBdr3OGCygqx5h5a1yqdbsqNFN6ENO8onpcYUPCA8z88/s200/Genshin+Impact+2020.11.11+-+14.26.05.71.png"
width="200"
/></a>
<a
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJcjjCfYbePnfy-VDoZ_s-nD6mFWfvG66K9IAR2AkBPwnt0wNGmYR4afU-P9a2H2_qm7hKsgLkPmlbHm6ZGmPC0Emf5u0OUZEmM5N-HlDGMleTnJI9N0EIA-5lW7XDPNTWZok3iu0WFX6W/s3840/Genshin+Impact+2020.11.29+-+22.31.49.64.png"
><img
border="0"
height="112"
src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJcjjCfYbePnfy-VDoZ_s-nD6mFWfvG66K9IAR2AkBPwnt0wNGmYR4afU-P9a2H2_qm7hKsgLkPmlbHm6ZGmPC0Emf5u0OUZEmM5N-HlDGMleTnJI9N0EIA-5lW7XDPNTWZok3iu0WFX6W/s200/Genshin+Impact+2020.11.29+-+22.31.49.64.png"
width="200"
/></a>
<a
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJOJ-CuOIASvr3ZtLKFqFx-1gSiImVdIWdHW3aHDEoe6oj8DmWcw8jDSM9XEBSet3-WD0ODu7dI0B7vHw56ZWrzwKplwucnfK-nWkJlTcgRRSai2GltpQ55Z4ZLeJnTyZOjlSv5_TDCWiv/s3840/Genshin+Impact+2020.11.14+-+06.06.53.45.png"
style="margin-left: 1em;"
><img
border="0"
height="112"
src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJOJ-CuOIASvr3ZtLKFqFx-1gSiImVdIWdHW3aHDEoe6oj8DmWcw8jDSM9XEBSet3-WD0ODu7dI0B7vHw56ZWrzwKplwucnfK-nWkJlTcgRRSai2GltpQ55Z4ZLeJnTyZOjlSv5_TDCWiv/s200/Genshin+Impact+2020.11.14+-+06.06.53.45.png"
width="200"
/></a>
</div>
<br />
There's zero friction to entry with the download kept reasonably small to fit
mobile storage and lots of quite generous freebies on offer during limited time
event and a drip feed of premium currencies that get you most of the way to the
end-game without much grind (I got a full double party - only required for
the most strenuous activity of a combat arena dungeon - up near level 80 when
the cap is 90 and got to an Adventure Rank in the 40s, which is the
non-level-based gating to progression). The PlayStation servers use different
accounts but play on mobile and PC and it's seamless as they're the same servers and
account system (you can also get a native 4K on PC, which the PS4 Pro doesn't quite
hit and also has issues holding a stable 30fps there).<br />
<br />
<h3>
XCOM: Chimera Squad
</h3>
This is one of the close-but-no-cigar games for this year. I grabbed it at
launch and had a good time... and then almost completely forgot about having
played it during the rest of the year. Which rather says how the "friendly cops"
narrative didn't stick with me given the geopolitical events this year that
could have reminded me of their attempts at making the Xcom universe more
light-hearted than previous games.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd_M8hWJo6qMqjyupET0E8i8If48F2rG1vRTH-ETXVC71lI7Mw7TbPpYyRU_gTjtqHBiQUUfFcRprUHqCLNBSIBV5_mUVd0NRTYaOYJjrQLqi43Xc2cZ22Y31EiQz9EtrgWwcmO26XBxa7/s3840/Chimera+Squad_20200502202143.png"
style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"
><img
border="0"
data-original-height="2160"
data-original-width="3840"
height="360"
src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd_M8hWJo6qMqjyupET0E8i8If48F2rG1vRTH-ETXVC71lI7Mw7TbPpYyRU_gTjtqHBiQUUfFcRprUHqCLNBSIBV5_mUVd0NRTYaOYJjrQLqi43Xc2cZ22Y31EiQz9EtrgWwcmO26XBxa7/w640-h360/Chimera+Squad_20200502202143.png"
width="640"
/></a>
</div>
<br />
On the plus side, this was launched at a very attractive discount so early
adopters got to take the risk for the sort of price that matches the more
limited ambitions on display here. As an Xcom game, one of the best things it
does is to remove the terrible sequences of cautious play while you work forward
to reveal the map and activate enemy groups. Here each area is far more
constrained and you start off with a breaching mechanic that can remove plenty
of enemies from the room and also primes you for the mixed turn-based
(initiative) rounds that mix up the previous gameplay formula.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Tell Me Why
</h3>
As I mentioned when discussing
<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2020/11/catch-up-2-more-not-gotys.html"
><b>Vampyr</b></a
>, I do hope Dontnod don't end up trapped in a rut as they seem to make
interesting games and I'd like to see them making many more. Surely there are
some Quantic Dream developers who worked on the (world class) motion capture and
animation systems who want to stay in Paris but would like a different boss.
Interesting that another team at the studio completed <b>Twin Mirror</b> about
the same time (I'm yet to play it but the reviews have not been very positive).
This game, heavily advertised by Microsoft, definitely has the legacy of
<a
href="https://blog.shivoa.net/search?q=life+is+strange&max-results=20&by-date=true"
><b>Life is Strange</b></a
>
hanging heavily over it.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh387HbCPvH-MmLAvbtvl0d41a-DCaPJzMqNGXYzZ_thWjWCXu9D6snmukTg8xO5r4WapZlsABTHD_c0HMUTuA2uxfsla9N7OjZf2I3dm0PJnKpIZBS3V5FoHmtjSS5BaP-2s7nCjro2lmB/s3840/Tell+Me+Why+28_09_2020+00_19_31.png"
style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"
><img
border="0"
data-original-height="2160"
data-original-width="3840"
height="360"
src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh387HbCPvH-MmLAvbtvl0d41a-DCaPJzMqNGXYzZ_thWjWCXu9D6snmukTg8xO5r4WapZlsABTHD_c0HMUTuA2uxfsla9N7OjZf2I3dm0PJnKpIZBS3V5FoHmtjSS5BaP-2s7nCjro2lmB/w640-h360/Tell+Me+Why+28_09_2020+00_19_31.png"
width="640"
/></a>
</div>
<br />A trans coming-of-age (into young adult) story with magical realism elements, this is definitely an
evolution of the house style and some narrative themes. Unlike the first Life is
Strange, this embraces queer text with the assistance of some outside
sensitivity readers and provided all of the episodes in rapid succession, having
been developed entirely before release. I liked it despite some
<a href="https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1319236862448369667" target="_blank"
>polarising choices</a
>
made about how certain elements offered player choice.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Resident Evil 3
</h3>
Well, given <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/12/games-of-year-2019.html">my praise of <b>Resident Evil 2</b></a> and other remakes, this would
seem to be a slam dunk. While I don't have much of a history (I have watched it
replayed quite recently) with the original, the idea of taking what worked about
RE2 or even infusing some of the innovation of <b>Resident Evil 7</b> into a
more open city scenario sounds like it would be a great game.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG6KsQXoKz5BQtAYUAKl2zM1JNiViakxkxNaGvQpAVQbdfzT03TbpaWS05KK16GSMIpyowwInWr0E2Gi9HxgBMGRAKhKxujiHd-sMJo9am36HBuWlzZJp_9Ln1LQN_YTQBBDfiRNx4Ihq8/s3840/RE3_20200324153605.png"
style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"
><img
border="0"
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height="360"
src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG6KsQXoKz5BQtAYUAKl2zM1JNiViakxkxNaGvQpAVQbdfzT03TbpaWS05KK16GSMIpyowwInWr0E2Gi9HxgBMGRAKhKxujiHd-sMJo9am36HBuWlzZJp_9Ln1LQN_YTQBBDfiRNx4Ihq8/w640-h360/RE3_20200324153605.png"
width="640"
/></a>
</div>
<br />
Unfortunately this fails to fully utilise the excellent engine they've been
building to update the 3rd game with the same scale of smart choices that made
the last remake work so well. Some sections feel needlessly faithful to the
rather limited original that was creaking at the limits of PS1 while others
don't seem to know what new direction they're trying to build in.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Dreams
</h3>
The ways this sculpting tool and console game development platform manages to
empower users to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=made+in+dreams" target="_blank">rapidly create so many different things</a> is pretty impressive.
Some smart rendering choices have ended up creating a very different look for
consoles and I really hope the Media Molecule team are being given plenty of
support from Sony to port this and everything created with it to PS5 to give it
a long life (and maybe PS5 exclusive increased complexity or features). More
people deserve to give this a proper shot and it's a real shame the 2019 public
early access into 2020 official release and VR patch have seemed to see media
interest wane rather than explode. Creators need curators with big audiences to
find and promote their best creations to a wide audience to ensure the ecosystem
stays enthused.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Kentucky Route Zero
</h3>
Long in development, this finally released the final episode in 2020 along with
a console port. I think that's notable but also have remarkably little to say
about this indie darling. Something about the intentionally aliased style eats
at me, especially with how it scales to different resolutions. There are some
interesting choices made in the emerging narrative but this has been picked
apart over the years as each episode has been released.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h2>
Failed to Play 2020:
</h2>
<br />
<b>Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales</b> - I
<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2020/11/catch-up-2-more-not-gotys.html"
>mentioned this</a
>
when talking about playing the previous game again but ended up deciding I'd
rather wait for PS5 hardware to enjoy the best version of it (especially given
how expensive this is compared to a <b>Lost Legacy</b> release, before exchange
rate and other price increases made games a lot more expensive domestically).<br />
<br />
<b>Control</b> - Sorry Remedy but the last gen version
<a href="https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1277992897762263041" target="_blank"
>just looks bad to me when I tried to get into it</a
>. I'm still waiting on an upgrade to my home PC hardware. As soon as I've got a
current GPU with hardware ray tracing acceleration, I've got the Ultimate
Edition ready to go.<br />
<br />
<b>Noita</b> - This did hit 1.0 this year but I've not really dived into it
properly unfortunately.<br />
<br />
<b>Teardown</b> - This is still in early access and is quite an interesting
rendering choice with a completely destroyable world. Unlike <b>Noita</b>, it's
all in 3D. Worth keeping an eye on as it develops.<br />
<br />
<b>MS Flight Simulator 2020</b> - My PC can barely run it, so I will wait until
it runs a bit better on modern CPUs (has to be optimisation coming with that VR
patch only just out by end of the year) and I've got a beefier GPU to throw at
the ridiculous scale of what's being attempted.<br />
<br />
<b>Half Life: Alyx</b> - My home VR equipment is getting old (DK2 & PS VR)
so not being able to visit friends or offices with something fancy meant I
didn't get nearly as much VR in 2020 so this will have to wait.<br />
<br />
<b>Yakuza: Like a Dragon</b> - As is quite a theme in these, I never quite get
round to Ryu Ga Gotoku games at launch so end up putting them on the end of my
annual lists.<br />
<br />
<b>Cyberpunk 2077</b> - Sure sounds like waiting for the long patch and
expansion cycle towards a GotY/Enhanced Edition (this team is known for) will
pay dividends here vs playing the launch version. I'm up for some open world
<b>Deus Ex</b> style gameplay but it seems like there's too much focus on
shooting (a lot like how <b>Watch Dogs: Legion</b> sounds like it's not actually
the sequel to WD2 that I wanted despite the ludic space being so ready for
making guns even less relevant and a push towards Immersive Sim stealth/ghost
play) that maybe fan mods will fix. Another game with too much to do and
releasing too late in the year for me to have a chance of completing it.<br />
<br />
<b>Ghost of Tsushima</b> - This runs at both high resolution quality mode and 60
fps on a PS5 (PS4 Pro makes you pick 1800p sub-30 [but actually mainly 30 fps] or 1080p30 locked) so I'll wait to play this on new hardware,
once it becomes easy to get that at home and there is a critical mass of
exclusive games to play on it. "1800p and if you're really pushing the visuals maybe accept 30 fps" is something I've associated with my [coming up to 5 years old] GTX 1070 OC and I'm ready to ask for 60 fps again from hardware upgrades.<br />
<br />
<b>The Last of Us Part II</b> - I bet this will look even nicer if they do a big
PS5 patch or rerelease rather than just a back-compat update. Maybe explore the
options for ray traced global illumination and unified lighting/shadow model
that their PS4 baked solution attempts to approximate but with a few obvious
spots where it breaks when dynamic lights and objects fail to cast the shadows
you'd expect.<br />
<br />
<b>Watch Dogs: Legion</b> - I'm absolutely waiting for a new PC GPU for this.
Ray tracing looks variable (not a big fan of how close the max distance is for
rays, either dynamic objects or static, compared to how Spider-Man is dealing
with the same problem) but it definitely looks better than without it.<br />
<br />
<b>Assassin's Creed Valhalla</b> - Lotta big games coming out at the end of this
year, right? Ubisoft Plus is going to get a lot of use in 2021.<br />
<br />
<b>Wasteland 3</b> - Conceptually I really want more Wasteland (I backed 2 when
it came to KickStarter) having come to the series via the original '90s Fallout
games but once again this seemed like it needed a few patches before being ready
and with Game Pass I know it'll be waiting for me next time I subscribe with any
enhancements they patch in.<br />
<br />
Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-86821229605465786492020-11-13T09:26:00.014+00:002020-11-15T04:06:43.645+00:00Catch-Up 2: More Not-GotYs<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2020/05/catch-up-1-not-gotys.html">After saying</a> this blog wasn't going anywhere during the unfolding global pandemic, things both accelerated & slowed down to the point where <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa" target="_blank">Mastodon posts</a> were about all I had to contribute (about gaming related topics) for a while. Before the year concludes with some 2020 hits (although don't expect anything for new consoles - I'm not getting hardware and, due to movement restrictions, I'm not playing games elsewhere at all right now), it's time to look back at a few more games from the recent past that I've now consumed completely.<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOzBJIyHxwAaCeNczLFrvq29CEObV_J3v_0cfFgTvi4U9xwMgs-7pL0pZA75JrzlI0hu05kgjczoM3WeU5RrHvu7owQjRFKU31wcHsCx5YLqu9-YYfI7KW2YGq8D4dfKWtlBXaPyWsJS2H/s3840/Marvel%2527s+Spider-Man_20200626195531.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2160" data-original-width="3840" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOzBJIyHxwAaCeNczLFrvq29CEObV_J3v_0cfFgTvi4U9xwMgs-7pL0pZA75JrzlI0hu05kgjczoM3WeU5RrHvu7owQjRFKU31wcHsCx5YLqu9-YYfI7KW2YGq8D4dfKWtlBXaPyWsJS2H/w640-h360/Marvel%2527s+Spider-Man_20200626195531.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<h3>Marvel's Spider-Man</h3>
So this is now available (with a different face on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/NyuaIasOGrO9xLohQ9cg3Fxs0ehblSDri4lk0Z1sQEC/VlwQIZYWQkuMbibxmjoO7g" target="_blank">the post-grad protagonist</a>, which I am not going to find easy to get used to in the almost assured direct narrative sequel in 2-3 years) on PS5 as a remaster (along with the 2020 spin-off Miles Morales game). Which made for the ideal time to go back to the PS4 & also play through all the DLC.<br /><br />What's there is still absolutely some of the most impressive visuals on the PS4, even without ray-tracing (making some of the buildings into rather unfortunately outdated <a href="https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/t4oYI0nRMBgJBwvJMLksp78CJD8uqjchbTcj6lWVRZr/tPuSaQFgTyKavu_Dh75QtQ" target="_blank">low res city skyline cubemaps</a>), and a romp of a cape story that keeps the game moving along as you explore the open world activities on offer. It sure has <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2015/01/games-of-year-2014.html">been a while</a> since <b>inFamous First Light</b> gave us something similar (although without the Disney IP to lean on) and the traversal here is just exactly how you want swinging from building to building to feel without trivialising movement (which allows various challenges around racing timers, drones, & other things).<br />
<br />
<h3>A Plague Tale: Innocence</h3>
This just skipped out of contention for <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/12/games-of-year-2019.html">being mentioned in my GotY post last year</a> (as I didn't get round to it until the start of 2020). Since then, Asobo Studio have continued to rise in reputation after leading the <b>MS Flight Simulator</b> 2020 project but this 2019 game was a strong announcement of both the state of their internal tech and art teams. Definitely the tier above the indies I mentioned when talking about Observation last year, this verges on AAA without the major publisher (or budget) and is likely to indicate what we'll see outside the big publisher ecosystem in years to come (<a href="https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1226523378233880578" target="_blank">in genres you may consider to be dormant</a>).<br />
<br />
The horror-edged historic setting shows off lush French scenery and mixes the adventuring with a focus on stealth which only occasionally frustrates (something most games find hard to get perfect, especially without resorting to the modern stealth genre option of allowing combat as an entire alternative play style). As you go through the ten hour story campaign, the art never lets off as you move from setting to setting and there's just enough going on in the plot (and between characters) to give it all momentum.<br />
<br />
<h3>Vampyr</h3>
I wanted to put this down somewhere as I'd not said anything about this yet, despite playing bits of it on several platforms since it was released. I really want to like it more than I actually do and it comes down to two issues: I don't think the action holds up very well (something I could look past in <b>Remember Me</b> due to that interesting world and novelty of the memory editing sections) and the character animation tech just isn't where it really needs to be to sell the emotions. The latter being something that Dontnod have been on the edge of for a while now but I'm starting to worry about if they're going to be left behind in this generation change if they're not investing in upgrading their facial animation system, subtle character animation blending, and so on. It's not <b>Mass Effect Andromeda</b> bad but it's not going to hold up well against the expectations driven by the last generation of AAA really refining what's possible. The house art style can only hide so much and here was where I started to find it impossible to ignore (unlike <b>Life is Strange</b>, which managed to <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2015/12/games-of-year-2015.html">totally sell me</a>, despite the rather limited link between character animation & the VO). While Dontnod may be spreading themselves a bit thin and ending up with a bit of a "formulaic subversion" problem (we might talk about more at the end of the year), one thing you can say is none of their games are exactly like most other video games, even when doing a vampire action game.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwKmhaqWWuj9A1gBbT7NN-ZKGXIi6Pvkm34MP1c5eBJB8c9ciyG8lYi6_TxIn4Aipq523_IJh1c59_aJfbtW_b3fpEttX6KDbQLzBuLIBmHM4BCxMLQdGjVNLm_J2oqd_mevbMz2BJD2Xg/s3840/Uncharted%25E2%2584%25A2_+The+Lost+Legacy_20200527232612.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2160" data-original-width="3840" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwKmhaqWWuj9A1gBbT7NN-ZKGXIi6Pvkm34MP1c5eBJB8c9ciyG8lYi6_TxIn4Aipq523_IJh1c59_aJfbtW_b3fpEttX6KDbQLzBuLIBmHM4BCxMLQdGjVNLm_J2oqd_mevbMz2BJD2Xg/w640-h360/Uncharted%25E2%2584%25A2_+The+Lost+Legacy_20200527232612.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<h3>Uncharted: The Lost Legacy</h3>
I've mentioned this in passing on here but haven't actually given it the proper dues of getting a paragraph or two of actual discussion. <b>Spider-Man: Miles Morales</b> has put this back into the conversation because Sony are back with something that seems like it might have started as a significant DLC but turned into a shorter spin-off game. The thing I noticed playing the Lost Legacy recently is its reputation for brevity is more about <b>Uncharted 4</b> being lengthy. Which means a shorter spin-off is still basically the same length as any of the games in the original trilogy. The difference here being more of a focus on <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2018/12/games-of-year-2018.html#godofwar">"wide linear"</a> open areas that allow some choice of how things are approached (and environment reuse), while also providing plenty of narrative progression through corridors (showing off the visual splendor of modern AAA assets).<br /><br />While the Tomb Raider series has slowly been losing me since a high point of the 2013 reboot, the most recent Uncharted is the best the series has ever been for me. I wonder if the switch of protagonists is enough to give the series new life away from the conclusion of the numbered series or if Naughty Dog are going to head in this ludic direction with an entirely new cast and maybe even universe for whatever they're working on right now (beyond <b>Last of Us 2</b> updates & multiplayer spin-off).<br />
<br />
<h3>Into the Breach</h3>
Since this was so beloved and I'd given it <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2018/06/mini-review-slay-spire.html">a bit of a go a while back</a>, I thought I'd go back and complete it. Until I realised that the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_problem" target="_blank">chess puzzle</a> aspect of it (which seems to be influential in a new wave of games in development that use similar deterministic rulesets) is actually something I really need to be in a very specific mindset for. A mood that 2020 has not made forthcoming and without which I just find each mission either infuriating or trivial with nothing in between. Bit of a strange place to be, considering for the last decade my day job has revolved around some of the fiddlier aspects of programming languages. Maybe I need to make more of a division between hobbies and work when dealing with the heightened stress of broader world events.<br /><br /><br />
On my list of things to polish off right now: <b>Divinity: Original Sin II</b> & <b>The Evil Within 2</b>. The latter should be something I just need to put a few evenings into while the former is probably going to be quite a time investment. Not <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/04/dragon-aged-inquisition.html">playing the entire Dragon Age saga</a> long but also maybe something that'll end up taking me into 2021. Or maybe the combat will feel too much like a puzzle and I'll drop off it. I feel like there's something to be teased out of how much I didn't enjoy going back to Into the Breach this year but that'll have to wait for another time, once I've collected my thoughts & played through a few more games.<br />Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-71990049098741734282020-05-23T17:57:00.001+01:002020-05-23T17:59:46.998+01:00Catch-Up 1: the Not-GotYsSince
<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2020/03/next-gen-feeding-beast.html">last we spoke</a>
I've been in somewhat of a holding pattern, expecting to find another meaty
topic about next gen to dig into but instead being satiated by
<a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa" target="_blank">micro-blogging about game dev stuff</a>
and
<a href="https://twitter.com/Shivoa" target="_blank">the state of politics</a>.
I suspect that during the not-E3 events next month I'll find something that
won't fit into a few 500 char posts on Mastodon. But until then, I was reminded
of
<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2018/12/games-of-year-2018.html">the tail</a>
on my recent
<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/12/games-of-year-2019.html">GotY</a> posts
of the games that get left off those lists (because I didn't manage to play them
in their launch year). As many of those games are things I've played by now, I
wanted to just quickly give some thoughts on a few I never got back to talking
about, however briefly (and which didn't get included in
<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/12/games-of-year-2019.html">the recent rule changes</a>
made to allow ongoing games to be properly given their dues).
<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">Dishonored: Death of the Outsider</h3>
A good capstone on the series, this expandalone contains strong levels
(something Dishonored has continually refined with iteration) but the
environment reuse does make it somewhat limited (but then you'd maybe expect
that from a DLC that this clearly was before sales of Dishonored 2 left Bethesda
unwilling to require people own that to buy this).
<br />
<br />
I find it hard to believe that this story alone would be satisfying (selling it
separately did allow me to buy it on a different platform to the base game so I
can't fault them for that but after replaying Dishonored 2 & immediately
jumping into this, it felt like bundling the two is a smart move). Taken as the
final piece in a series, there's a lot to enjoy from how they conclude the
threads & flesh out bits of lore. Mechanically, I'm not sure the selection
of new abilities is my favourite but that's been a long-standing issue I've
felt: the need to keep things somewhat novel & not just replicate the
original formula creates a weird space which demands evolving strategies that
worked in previous games (which is good) but also makes you pine for the flow
you'd achieved by the end of a full game exploring your abilities (which can
feel bad but maybe ensures the systems never feel stale).
<br />
<br />
As an Unseen stealth player, I've never felt like this series compromises those
roots for action (although giving plenty of extra space for non-lethal surprise
moves). That remains true here but the Contracts (optional mission objectives)
do suggest that those wanting to be a ghost can't also engage with that new
system completely (as contracts demand murder, something previous games have
worked to ensure there is always an alternative to). The removal of an
achievement for never killing (it exists only for not killing during any one
level) while retaining the one for never being seen indicates developer intent
for players to be somewhat more bloody during this campaign. I respect avoiding
becoming formulaic even if it's not what I go to in a Thief-like.
<br />
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">What Remains of Edith Finch</h3>
I don't think this is as emotive as it thinks it is and that can really hold it
back unless you choose to go with it. When it worked for me, it worked extremely
well and the section everyone talks about as tying mechanics & narrative
perfectly was so anxiety-inducing for me (as someone irrationally paranoid about
settings where losing concentration can quickly lead to losing body parts).
<br />
<br />
It's also a pretty visually lush in the way that several of these Sony-incubated
(Santa Monica Studio) developers have been able to achieve (see also Everybody’s
Gone to the Rapture). The pushing of well-funded indie into adopting very AAA
aesthetics. The Unfinished Swan may have been a visually more interesting
experiment but this game works incredibly well. The density & detail of the
assets fleshing out the different scenes here provide a lavish presentation that
puts you inside the place. When you're playing a game to find the details &
understand the story, having that crafted density rather than a rough
approximation that is only meant to invoke it matters - I know plenty of indies
who dislike that but I don't think it's untrue even if it does somewhat tie
budget to what you can do with virtual spaces. Finding affordable ways of doing
this stuff (ie doing it fast but well, possibly leveraging a huge database of
material info & mesh detailing or assembly tools) is something that'll
continue to push the industry forward.
<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">Inside</h3>
Did I never mention Inside on here after noting I failed to play it in 2016?
Well that's an oversight.
<br />
<br />
The continuation of the ideas covered in Limbo manages to expand on every facet
of the '2.5D platforming with mood and some mechanics' design. It's also a very
solid evolution of the visuals and
<a href="https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1183493352605519882" target="_blank">the best dithering you've seen in a game</a>. Seriously, the final result is very appealing and I suspect it'll convert at
least some who have previously accepted banding as a limitation into
<a href="https://github.com/playdeadgames/publications/tree/master/INSIDE" target="_blank">reading up</a>
on how to stop it.
<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">Titanfall 2</h3>
Just an incredibly solid campaign that provides something new in each level to
play with while driving forward a basic story with just enough to hook you into
finding out what happens. You and your big robot friend try to save the world.
It's a real shame this
<a href="https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1192565603325947905" target="_blank">never got the space to really breathe</a>
and so is now stuck in the cult-mainstream area where a lot of people have
played it but not quite enough to make a sequel obvious for a hit-driven
publisher like EA. Also it feels real good to pop AI heads off using the mouse,
all contained within more narrative trappings than the multiplayer-first
original game - for those of us who have really moved away from competitive
online shooters, the campaign makes for a value that churning through Apex
Legends simply doesn't (even at the entry price of free).
<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">Watch Dogs 2</h3>
Another game that I found the energy to complete on PC rather than console.
Considering the (narrative) slog that the first game was, the radical changes to
the tone and subject here refreshed what could have been just another attempted
GTA-lite by someone other than Rockstar.<br /><br />
The result is something that feels like it has an identity. Something Saints Row
took three games to really nail down and then almost as quickly imploded into
itself. Hopefully Watch Dogs: Legion avoids that and I can have some more fun
<a href="https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1159174433241751554" target="_blank">taking selfies</a>
& completely avoiding the combat that feels so out of place for an average
hacker in over their head. Oh dear, I feel that's not what they're going for
with Legion and no fancy procedural story system will save a mediocre shooter
that could have been a stealth hacker game with charm.
Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-41160580875696633262020-03-24T10:52:00.002+00:002020-03-24T10:52:57.945+00:00Next Gen: Feeding the BeastNo one attended GDC due to the global pandemic (I was considering pausing this blog for some months during the crisis but decided having more things to read during world events wasn't a bad thing at the current time) but we still started to get the technical deep dives on the architecture of the new 4K consoles from both <a href="https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/03/16/xbox-series-x-tech/" target="_blank">Microsoft</a> and <a href="https://youtu.be/ph8LyNIT9sg" target="_blank">Sony</a>. (I will try to avoid just repeating what is said by both architects.)<br />
<br />
I will not, sight unseen, be telling you which numbers are slightly bigger and so which console is definitely going to dominate the next five to seven years (plenty of people with much larger readerships seem to have already covered that). I've not been read in on any next gen hardware so nothing I'm about to say is hinting at information not already make public. But the way these specs are being sold is already somewhat interesting, especially as we think about the divergence between a totally open (assuming you've got the billions to buy into patent lockouts on various standards) PC system and the closed box of a console, after a generation where the custom silicon inside each high end console were ultimately less distinctive than in previous generations (even the one where MS asked for a Pentium III on an nForce chipset & a GeForce GPU).<br />
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<h3>
Getting from There to Here</h3>
Moving from AMD's tablet CPU cores to a modern Zen2 desktop architecture and a GPU upgrade to stay contemporary with current PC GPUs targeting 4K screens was widely expected and confirmed early on during this generation transition. But you have to <a href="https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-2950x" target="_blank">feed the beast</a> and for games that often means juggling a huge array of large assets with only a semi-predictable pattern of demand (based on player action). The dual issues are having the time to load the data you need to render in the near future and the processing power to run the logic that decides which assets to prioritise & actually push the commands that move data around (the latter becomes far more pressing as bandwidth increases).<br />
<br />
A major theme from both console architects is load times and the potential for radically faster storage now that NVMe SSDs are the expectation (and luckily PCIe is just ticking over to doubled bandwidth, which removes that bottleneck from controllers with a wide pool of flash chips to parallelise over). MS are branding their upgrades the Xbox Velocity Architecture with a new DirectX API (which will also be available on PC) called DirectStorage. Sony have gone into detail about their custom silicon and decisions to enable SSD throughput beyond even the most premium PC tech.<br />
<br />
It's not just about having a fast connection, you need to be able to drive data to where it needs to go and keep everything catalogued. Sony in particular are definitely focusing on taking the fastest PCIe 4.0 drive they can and pumping it with a silicon implementation of <a href="http://www.radgametools.com/oodlecompressors.htm" target="_blank">RAD Game Tools' current compression</a> (use less drive space, get even more data into RAM for the SSD bandwidth by expanding it the other end of the connection) and classic <a href="https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_amiga500/index.html" target="_blank">DMA silicon</a> (don't waste CPU cycles getting your main processor to direct data around, use dedicated silicon to do it - a trick as old as time) with a few tweaks to the formula (looking forward to hearing more about the GPU cache scrubbers from practical talks after games get released).<br />
<br />
PC game designers are going to <a href="https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1240335103630413824" target="_blank">have to get very clever</a> to match the game experience of these new consoles without having access to all these tricks - expect significant increases in RAM requirements for some AAA ports that will have to use the system RAM as a large cache for data they can stream into the (more limited) unified memory as needed on consoles. Will we see high settings with 4K textures on PC ask for at least 32GB RAM & even 16GB VRAM? I wouldn't say it's not going to happen within 2 years. Those 100-200GB installs are not going away (although Sony did make the salient point that SSDs remove the need to duplicate data to help remove seek times - we can claw <i>some</i> excess back to redirect into even more detailed textures).<br />
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What new game experiences? Elevators and slow-opening doors everywhere are not an unconstrained design choice; the length of the walk through the between dimension to fast travel in the recent God of War wasn't required by the no-cuts design decision. It's all about being unable to load enough data for clean fast transitions and even with the much lower quality (smaller) textures of the PS360 generation, you saw a lot of slowly fading in the most detailed textures available (initially associated with the Unreal engine but an issue for many engines that wanted to push RAM limits or just spend less time sitting on a load screen). The plan going forward is to load extremely detailed assets just-in-time via a massive sustained read bandwidth from the SSD, so players never see anything less than the most detailed option close enough to the camera to differentiate. <a href="https://youtu.be/rLEbO0Vrzz4" target="_blank">Mesh<wbr></wbr>/<wbr></wbr>Primitive Shaders</a> are also going to help here in making the triangles that make up a scene more dynamic in games that step away from the old static pipeline (think the advertising blurb for <a href="https://youtu.be/sQQpCd_vvGU" target="_blank">Tessellation</a>, only it really works this time for far more scenarios).<br />
<br />
This also opens up new possibilities beyond just avoiding load screens or design choices aimed at masking invisible loads in more open level designs (rather than very constrained levels or low<wbr></wbr>/<wbr></wbr>repeating texture scenarios) etc. Things can move faster without causing the dreaded texture quality drop<wbr></wbr>/<wbr></wbr>pop-in. That's not just allowing high speed open world driving games to up the detail of each street or letting Spider-Man swing faster. Each camera cut is a very rapid movement to the new position.<br />
<br />
You'll be familiar with inserting pre-rendered video that uses the in-engine assets into otherwise real-time rendered game cut-scenes. It's often very obvious when <a href="https://youtu.be/4493q-6PQH8" target="_blank">the PC technology moves forward but the assets are still from an old console release</a> (GTX 760 vs video captured on a 360). There are many reasons for it, like being able to do some offline post-processing (less relevant now real-time shaders are so powerful) or show scenes or animations that you don't need to ship as assets (or hand-tweaked animations that don't fit into the shipped animation rig). A big reason: jump cuts to a different area, ie places for which you don't have assets already loaded into memory unless you've got lots of extra RAM sitting idle, are a right pain - once you start looking for it, it's clear how often directors avoid such cuts, especially multiple of them. Well now you don't have to worry about that issue so expect real-time cut-scenes to start to be a lot more dynamic in cutting between different locations (or different areas within a large scene) in a way far more similar to other media.<br />
<br />
Going back to more technical details: to put the PCIe 4.0 four lane SSD connection in context, that's half the massive bandwidth that most PC GPUs have used for the last decade and which textures stream down to the local VRAM - many many times faster than the fastest rotating platter HDDs. For Sony to go beyond that via cutting-edge compression (spending silicon on something better than the current compression typical for GPUs either as texture compression or delta compression) is very exciting and MS are no slouch, they're just not betting everything on it needing to be as bleeding edge.<br />
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<h3>
Doing Something New when You're Here</h3>
So we have 16GB of unified fast RAM (with a bit of differentiation from MS with a 10GB very fast block + 6GB slow block mainly eaten by the OS, while Sony have made all of the RAM mid-fast). We're feeding it via extremely nice storage and custom silicon that avoid spending all our CPU cycles on memory transfers or decompression algorithms. What about the actual rendering features?
<br />
<br />
We know a bit more about the MS side for the GPU, because they also <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/announcing-directx-12-ultimate/" target="_blank">did a point update to DirectX 12</a> and unified the console and PC APIs for the XSX. The new DX12_2 (Ultimate) will update the feature level (things a GPU has to support) to basically be "almost <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/13282/nvidia-turing-architecture-deep-dive" target="_blank">all the shiny things</a> nVidia have been shouting about from 2018's Turing RTX cards". This is actually <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/103865610363900746" target="_blank">a real trick for nVidia</a>, who get to claim leadership of the GPU space while not winning either designs for the new 4K consoles (MS & Sony both seemed happy with AMD plus really wanted to update from x86 to x86 CPUs, something nVidia <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/4122/intel-settles-with-nvidia-more-money-fewer-problems-no-x86" target="_blank">took piles of money from Intel</a> to agree they cannot offer to customers wanting a custom SoC design).<br />
<br />
AMD are making their custom RDNA2-derived GPU for MS to basically boost their feature set up close to where Turing has been for a while. Mesh Shaders (not even calling them <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/11002/the-amd-vega-gpu-architecture-teaser/2" target="_blank">Primitive Shaders</a> - the ill-fated Vega tech AMD wanted to fix the old shader pipeline structure) as mentioned above; ray tracing via hardware BVH traversal acceleration (<a href="https://youtu.be/u8tDgvvGWSE" target="_blank">Turing's RT Cores</a>); <a href="https://developer.nvidia.com/vrworks/graphics/variablerateshading" target="_blank">variable rate shading</a> (shading at rates other than the native pixel count in areas of a scene); and sampler feedback (<a href="https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/news/graphics-reinvented-new-technologies-in-rtx-graphics-cards/#texture-space-shading" target="_blank">clever tools</a> for making sure you only need the texture data in RAM that the scene actually needs and no more) - it's all here and what we know of Sony's custom RDNA2 GPU is very similar (they called them Primitive Shaders but who knows as AMD are definitely using something compatible with the common Mesh Shaders plan for both MS and their future PC cards & I don't see why Sony wouldn't have signed up for that considering the first shot at AMD's own Primitive Shaders never got enabled - ultimately they're branding quite similar ideas but I think AMD are sanding away any differences to make it more like Turing rather than nVidia having to pivot at all).<br />
<br />
Something I want to focus on here is what neither architects have said is being matched vs Turing & isn't in the DX12_2 feature level: <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/12673/titan-v-deep-learning-deep-dive/3" target="_blank">Tensor cores</a>. The (usually low precision) AI inference maths that enables a lot of interesting ideas like computation photography (<a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/13474/the-google-pixel-3-review/6" target="_blank">Google Night Sight</a>), nVidia <a href="https://youtu.be/0X1RtXCvPFQ" target="_blank">DLSS</a> (AI upscaling), and much more (often in an offline context); especially relevant for games now we're talking ray tracing: high quality <a href="https://developer.nvidia.com/optix-denoiser" target="_blank">denoising</a>. MS gave the PR talk about their XSX having 97 TOPS of DirectML Int4 performance but <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/103871389640370046" target="_blank">if you look into the rapid packed maths blurb</a> then that's almost certainly just saying their normal shader cores can do eight Int4 ops as a SIMD-y alternative to a single FP32 op (same 32-bits of data). This explains why that figure is so much lower than the RTX GPUs, which <a href="https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/design-visualization/technologies/turing-architecture/NVIDIA-Turing-Architecture-Whitepaper.pdf" target="_blank">max out at 455 TOPS</a> (using dedicated silicon).<br />
<br />
Sony have also not talked about any AI cores and it sounds a bit like their extra SIMD<wbr></wbr>/<wbr></wbr>vector units (saying their old Cell SPEs were basically ideal for complex audio processing needed for things like transfer function processing) for virtual 3D audio are going to be how they offer non-shader core acceleration of other computational demands. I spent a decent amount of last year doing work on a project around virtual 3D audio. I'll say this much: what I got working before the company folded made me a believer (using nice stereo headphones) and I used to be adamant that you needed all 5 speakers since way back in the nForce<wbr></wbr>/<wbr></wbr>original Xbox days (when real-time Dolby encoding finally made it easy to pipe 5.1 audio out of games with one TOSlink wire per device + some real-time spacial game audio was getting ok). I'm very glad Sony are leaning heavily on this and also that their foray into VR isn't being completely forgotten. Ray tracing for sound propagation through a level and good virtual 3D with hundreds of localised spacial sources will make for something unlike what we're used to hearing. When this tech works, it really work (and Sony aren't hiding that it doesn't yet always work so we've got to figure it out).<br />
<br />
I'm eager to get more details of these system (how much are they holding back for later reveals?) and then to see what people are starting to do with this power. I wish we'd heard about tensor cores, because I think <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/103659452459526852" target="_blank">there's something rather interesting about the potential there</a> that we'll possibly not see if only nVidia push them (and slowly cut down the die area they use for a feature if Intel & AMD don't match them). Just because neither consoles have announced it, doesn't mean AMD aren't going to offer that for their (non-custom) RDNA2 PC cards, but inclusion in a console would definitely push adoption & experimentation.<br />
<br />
These new systems seem like very smart steps forward, mainly matching new feature for new feature (with a slight difference in focus on just how fast each feature runs) and not being "a PC but fixed platform". Interesting times for cross-platform games and how we do things right without underutilising silicon when it is available.Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-76704204116513664282020-02-29T19:17:00.000+00:002020-02-29T20:05:12.833+00:00Sets a Decade in the MakingI've been playing through more RPGs recently (<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/07/aaa-rental.html">digital game rentals</a>: looking to get people subscribing for a long time so going after quite large games) and having not played a Final Fantasy game in a long time, FF XV sure was something. A game announced in 2006, rebooted with new leadership sometime 2012-2014, and released in 2016 (for consoles; 2018 for Windows where I played it; 2019 Stadia).<br />
<br />
However the exact preproduction<wbr />/<wbr />production split worked out, you can see from a lot of earlier trailers that the world they released was, in some form, being assembled for quite some time. The gameplay systems you see in trailers exist in the final game but not in the places they are shown & some of <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/103721171703181838" target="_blank">the CG footage apparently ended up in a movie rather than the game</a> (which makes where it is cut into the game all the more disjointed). It's not actually the longest of RPG, assuming you don't try and eke out every inch of side-quest content & after-credits end-game. But it's an example of AAA games that seemed to be built first before being rebooted (under a new producer) into the actual final game, taking which pieces they could because after spending $100m on building assets, <a href="https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1232371019429687296" target="_blank">you can't just throw them away</a> even if you end up making a very different game with them.<br />
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This is far from the only time we've seen that pattern. As the sets on which games are placed have become more and more extravagant (chasing the potential returns from matching the over 125 million sales of GTA V, a massive world for both a long campaign & countless multiplayer experiences) then the total you can sink into building them is only going to have grown. At the same time <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/03/good-enough-meets-extremely-fast.html">the speed of technical progress</a> has allowed <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2018/03/the-asset-fidelity-arms-race.html">assets created to be viable</a> for a AAA game for longer - something made for a game four years ago is not automatically now useless, even if you've not kept pace with the latest ideas (not even every major release today uses physically based rendering, an asset creation transition <a href="https://www.guerrilla-games.com/read/killzone-shadow-fall-creating-art-tools-for-a-new-generation" target="_blank">already well underway 7 years ago</a>). You can go against the norm and play up a style you're going for rather than keeping pace with expectations because even HL2 (16 years old) has <a href="https://youtu.be/4ddJ1OKV63Q" target="_blank">the basics of making something competent</a> - you can even <a href="https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012220/Borderlands-and-the-11th-Hour" target="_blank">deploy that style at the 11th hour</a>, as the original Borderlands did.<br />
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Quite a lot is known about the 2014-2016 era of FF XV's development, as some public progress reports exist to reassure people who originally started waiting for a game called Final Fantasy Versus XIII in 2006 that this new numbered entry was definitely coming soon. We also have <a href="https://kotaku.com/the-messy-true-story-behind-the-making-of-destiny-1737556731" target="_blank">reporting from people inside Bungie</a> on the way those Destiny games have been radically rebuilt for new stories. The way Destiny feels as you walk between info-dump dialogue and wait for timers to count down in levels that seem repurposed from possibly earlier designs is probably not reading too much into what actually happened. We know that Overwatch is a setting originally designed for an MMO that does not exist. Blizzard presumably made a lot of content for that MMO to feel out the design & throwing it all away was not the best option.<br />
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Some of how <a href="https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964" target="_blank">the BioWare process has been documented</a>, making a game that doesn't work until it all comes together in the final months, doesn't sound dissimilar to a process of making assets for a game and world you may not yet understand only to wait for someone to take final charge in the last moments & make a new game out of it. Not to say that this isn't on the edge of how a lot of games have been made over the years but the length of the "preproduction" (a term that seems to mean a million different things but generally just "not literally the entire team was working full-time on the project") and how much of the asset production is being done before the final decision is made on how to use those sets - it's something else (FF XV trailers show <a href="https://youtu.be/IcUSXub_ypU" target="_blank">significant divergence</a> as late as 2013 but the very different plot & action sections are clearly being done with assets that are there in the final game).<br />
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As the next generation comes along with a mainstream target of 4K60 & an upper realm of 120fps, real-time ray tracing for lighting and reflections (using dedicated hardware to accelerate), then we may see asset fidelity continue to slowly tick up but driven by the dynamic rendering options (see ray tracing shader hacks in older games for how the same old assets can look fresh & new with a bit of effort - if you're already making PBR assets then changing your rendering equations to relight your scenes can make a huge generational difference without rebuilding your assets).<br />
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It'll be interesting to see what happens for constructing the worlds in which we play vs making the games. It'll be a while before they're capable of being unlinked but we're going in that direction. The CG production world and the game development world are overlapping more and more so why wouldn't you rapidly assemble your world using Quixel etc assets, effectively offloading a lot of your asset pipeline to external libraries. Location scouting is something you can analogise to knowing where to go for the right assets well beyond things like SpeedTree, because larger and larger pools of assets are being assembled so that you may need someone who can know where to go for your virtual set. Sometimes your corporate overlords <a href="https://youtu.be/BZL5PCZO8cc" target="_blank">already also own two petabytes of data that is your starting point</a>. Ubisoft are specialists in creating massive worlds using a lot of teams around the world and their current struggles are more about ensuring each product has a clearer identity from the pasting of a game onto each of those underlying worlds - too few ideas being handed out by a central gameplay brain trust at the top.<br />
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We live in <a href="https://twitter.com/elegantandwrong/status/1232859318464024576" target="_blank">interesting times</a>, going forward and looking back at how recent game projects have managed to see the light of day after extremely long and turbulent production cycles.Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-65380741141486200692020-01-27T09:21:00.000+00:002020-03-05T09:28:00.487+00:00A New Generation of Semi-Sim Driving GamesI have been thinking about driving games again. The act of driving around virtual tracks in virtual cars - possibly not strictly simulational but taking inspiration from the laws of physics and how they apply to an engine working through a gearbox to apply force to up to four wheels in contact with (ideally) tarmac. Games that aren't about exploring open worlds or drifting on invisible rails but about refining your entry into corner 12 with the perfect braking point for your current setup, tyre wear, weather conditions, and fuel level to optimise your exit speed down the long final straight.<br />
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What I haven't been doing is playing much <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2017/09/forza-motorsport-7-demo.html" target="_blank">Forza Motorsport 7</a> or <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2017/12/games-of-year-2017.html#gtsport" target="_blank">Gran Turismo Sport</a>. Which isn't to say they're not still the ongoing titles in those series: Polyphony Digital have made good on <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2018/09/the-free-dlc-driving-customer-delight.html" target="">their plans</a> to <a href="https://www.gtplanet.net/gt-sport-update-v1-53-arrives-adds-laguna-seca-ford-gt-and-more/" target="_blank">keep releasing new content</a> for GT Sport to bring it up to a full game and Turn 10 finally missed their odd-year Motorsport cadence (they've hit from the 2005 release of the very first Forza Motorsport) so are having to support their e-sports ambitions on the old platform even after <a href="https://www.forzamotorsport.net/en-us/news/fm7_august2019_update" target="_blank">updates have run dry</a>.<br />
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Meanwhile, Codemasters have continued to release more driving games than any other publisher with their annual F1 licensed games and usually combined with at least one of a TOCA/Race Driver/GRID or Colin McRae Rally/Dirt titles. Now Slightly Mad Studios (of Project CARS fame) is part of that publisher, they'll have even more games to publish. Which is to say I've been playing through some older games and also trying out the reasonably new F1 2018 & 2019 releases to help me refine what I'm looking for in a driving game.<br />
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One of the nice things about different teams coalescing around an idea of a semi-sim, ie a game that's not the PC pure simulator racing setup, is that many of the quality of life features appear in several places. Since Flashbacks came to GRID & Dirt in 2008, they also came to Forza in 2009 (with unlimited rewinds in FM3). While playing the earlier 2011 F1 game, Flashbacks were limited with custom difficulty offering at most four rewinds, but by the time F1 2015 rolled around, you can rewind as much as you like (something that's still true in the most recent F1 games). To me this allows offline play to combine the process of learning tracks and control with experiencing a decent campaign made up of your best performances. It's training for time trials or online play and it gives players the confidence to turn off assists because learning how to tame a beast of a car won't ruin a 30 minute race against AIs that they'd otherwise have been crushing. We now expect regular checkpointing in games rather than a failure resulting in restarting the entire mission.<br />
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The idea of assists has also changed over time. The handling of F1 2011 and 2015 isn't identical but you can feel similarities (beyond how weightless both make the car-car impacts feel) with things like how ABS works which are unlike a modern Forza or the newer F1 games. Previously, when working with physically-based cornering (ie not "arcade" handling) then turning on virtual ABS provided limited help in corners because they felt like they consumed all the friction of the tyre slowing the car down so there was nothing left to turn with. If you brake before the corner then turn and accelerate, this isn't the end of the world. Unfortunately for those wanting this assist, trail braking is a thing and <a href="https://www.mercedesamgf1.com/en/news/2019/06/formula-one-brake-systems-explained/" target="_blank">F1 is known for it</a> - it's basically impossible with this old system for simulating ABS (which feels a lot like you've locked the brakes but without the loss of deceleration).<br />
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But assists are meant to limit your potential (they make your mistakes less ruinous but cap your performance so there is incentive to turn them off - that's the ideal anyway) so this wouldn't be the end of the world without another major assist everyone offers: dynamic (3D) racing lines that go from green to red to tell you where the braking point is. Only they're not quite as dynamic as you'd want from a teaching tool: they tell you where the best braking point is for a competitive lap, not where you need to brake if you can't use trail braking because of another assist you've got on. Marking the place where you need to have already been braking is like having a note marker in a rhythm game where you're not meant to press a button: that's the opposite of what I wanted. So jumping ahead from 2015 to 2018, I was glad to see that the new ABS system reserves friction for turning - it becomes a helper mode that makes your braking slightly less effective but means you don't need to know how far to hold in the left trigger and how to let it off slowly as you decelerate to get round the track competently.<br />
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With all these assists (ABS, traction control etc), they're completely illegal in actual F1 racing but also that is some of the most demanding driving you can do - I'm not trying to play an actual simulator; I don't drive race cars & my joypad is a bad approximation (which is why games have to smooth steering inputs with a joypad) for a complex wheel & two pedals - F1 cars don't need a clutch pedal. Doing this for real is something experts are paid a lot to do very well and consistently after years of practice. Which helps lift the question beyond "is it realistic" because no, none of these are options you can enable in an F1 car. I think it's easier to have conversations about what assists are designed to do when there's not the option of falling back to how it happens in real life (unlike a lot of the cars in these semi-sim games that do have actual clever gizmos doing this stuff, sometimes with an option to disable them for track day).<br />
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When I'm learning how to handle the car losing balance at a tricky corner or how to manually tweak my various boosts (if you didn't know, F1 cars charge an onboard battery under braking which they can deploy as extra power (beyond tweaking fuel mix); they also have a system for increasing speed on the straights by opening the rear spoiler as long as they're under a second behind the car in front to help encourage overtaking) then sometimes I don't want to worry about locking. Also there are a lot of people who haven't had to think about any of these things and introducing one concern at a time is a great way to build the ladder to enjoying the full range of systems in these semi-sim games (along with unlocking the best lap times that mastering all the systems and knowing a track well can provide).<br />
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There's something here that might not hold me for an entire 305 km on a single track but luckily you can tweak distances and it'll kick up wear to compensate (as all these games should), turning a race into a more reasonable 20-30 minute play session. The weather forecast is always there to keep things interesting - pit for wet tyres or should you risk it not getting worse and put on intermediates? The pit strategy is a core part of every F1 race because you've got to change tyre compounds at least once and, in previous years, refuel (1994-2010) - it's all about handling the dynamic conditions and betting where you'll need the best lap times (making races less of a procession defined by raw pace during qualifying turning into race pace). The conditions for an exciting race have been developed by actual racing so video games can handily borrow all that know how - drivers considering when to burn tyres on pace and when to sacrifice a tenth of a second but be better placed to overtake in two laps when the opportunity arrives (bonus points for games that have the radio operator advise you about such possibilities). One of the things that has turned me off Forza games as a long term project to master was a lack of interest in dynamic conditions being as dynamic as they really are (even the poorly received DriveClub <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2015/01/games-of-year-2014.html" target="_blank">provided examples</a> of dynamic conditions and real-time lighting: changing a dozen or more laps into never the same loop twice - something Forza Motorsport took too long to adopt). Having wet tyres teleport onto your car as the rain starts is really not doing it for me in 2020 (especially in FM7, where you keep driving past a pit lane there's no reason to use).<br />
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F1 games had always challenged me because they're so fast that mastering them without assists needs a great memory or amazing reaction times. With a granular AI difficulty (1-115) you can really tune the AI to your pace (also the breadth of teams means that you know approximately where you should finish based on how good your car is vs the rest) and slowly ease off the assists. There's also the pageantry of the race weekend (all of this stuff tweakable to however much you want to engage with) which allows you to (in the most recent games) run various programmes during qualifying to get familiar with the track and show your team how you can maintain an ok pace while focusing on minimising fuel use (doing things like coasting at the end of straights) or being kind to your tyres. There's a lot more than just doing the race itself and those programmes feed back into unlocking upgrades to push your car up the rankings. F1 2019 even introduces a brief Formula 2 option, finally offering cars with longer acceleration and braking times than the slowest F1 team (to help get up to speed - something the far wider selection of cars in other series make much easier).<br />
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We should see some new consoles showing off new driving games later this year but I might actually be the most interested in what new is coming to F1 2020. The actual motorsport is making a few changes that'll mean new tracks but it would be nice to see them bring back the classics (especially as they've already built versions of the tracks recently retired from the real season) to make more meaningful the smattering of classic cars already in the game and expand options beyond just running a career mode that pretends tracks never change in the future theoretical seasons. What if they got really into speculating on future rules changes so you could vote in new seasons which played quite differently? Something to give a 10 year career some real legs.Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-16580274884372408082019-12-31T20:34:00.000+00:002020-01-01T04:50:34.479+00:00Games of the Year 2019So <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2018/12/games-of-year-2018.html">last year</a> I refined the criteria for inclusion on my list of interesting games (which I'd actually managed to play through) released each year to include Early Access and other pre-release purchasable versions of games that were approaching feature-complete. Slay the Spire got that 1.0 release date <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/646570" target="_blank">early in 2019 on Steam</a> (press inquiries are told <a href="https://www.megacrit.com/press/" target="_blank">the game released in 2017</a>), which ties in well with how I expected the system to work. Of course, the beta of a brand new fourth character is currently ongoing because digital games often continue to be expanded upon after that 1.0 point. At the other end of the spectrum, that 0.17 "almost to 1.0" release expected in early 2019 for Factorio didn't actually arrive <a href="https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-314" target="_blank">until almost October</a> so maybe that wasn't as ready to call complete as I'd expected (I have not had time to even look at the game this year so I still think 2018 was a better list for it). Will 0.18 arrive soon? The devs have decided that it doesn't matter, they're just going to <a href="https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-321" target="_blank">arbitrarily name the branch that's ready at the end of September 2020 as 1.0</a> and then work on patching a "released" game after that.<br />
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So all of this is to say that this year I'm going to be playing with the rules even more, because games today are rarely "done" and it's getting real hard to guess when they are "feature complete" (whatever that means in an era of plenty of games doing free DLC for a while beyond stability patches or even mechanics updates via "live game" changes). To be eligible for my totally subjective list of great or notable games for a given year, a game has to have released content I consider notable and I have to have extensively played the game that year. This means that if you release a game in December and I didn't get round to playing it but you release a large DLC expansion the next year, I can put the entire game on my list rather than weighing up if the DLC alone is good enough to make the list (DLC can still get onto the list, <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2015/01/games-of-year-2014.html">as it has done for years past</a>, by being exceptional stand-alone content). Hey look, <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2015/01/games-of-year-2014.html">back in 2014</a>, I was already bending the rules (expect similar in 2021 as I'm not going to be rushing for release day consoles in late 2020 along with every notable new game).<br />
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This year has been a bit weird for my play time. A console generation is coming to an end and that often means jumping through some of the highlights or games purchased but barely played (due to time constraints or just not being in the right mood for genres or design choices in otherwise interesting games). This year was really something in terms of diving into complete series (played end to end, usually including expansions or DLC) as part of that: Baldur's Gates & <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/03/dragon-aged-10-years-later.html">Dragon Ages</a>, <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/03/good-enough-meets-extremely-fast.html">Dead Spaces & Mirror's Edges</a>, Assassin's Creeds & Batman: Arkhams - some of these have not been short dalliances. But on to the 2019 list and what has caught my eye this year.<br />
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Best of the Best 2019:</h2>
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Outer Wilds</h3>
Another of those indie ideas that bubbles out of student projects (a 2013 master's thesis that had a public alpha in 2015), this clockwork miniature planetary system on a 22 minute timer will hopefully prod a few designers to think again about how roguelike-likes can work. I know it got me thinking about spaces that are broad rather than long.<br />
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After completing a short tutorial to unlock your space vehicle, Outer Wilds reveals its core conceit: you are trapped in a time loop that resets upon your death, most commonly happening 22 minutes after the loop starts as the star in the centre of your system goes supernova. As an explorer archaeologist, you will find out what's going on and why you and two other people are the only ones aware of this. At the very start of the game you have every tool required to piece together everything and explore every inch of this virtual system. It's Metroidvania-like if rather than collecting new tools, it was gathering new understanding of how things work to unlock the various doors and puzzles that initially seem to gate your progress. The only things that change between loops are your computer logs that list what you've already found (which is invaluable at showing links between areas with a marker if you've got more to find) and a couple of frequencies you can use to find artefacts (which get added to your device once you stumble upon anything related but are purely for help locating things, not required to reach any point).<br />
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Nothing in this world can be more than about 20 minutes away, and basically none of it is more than a few minutes away. But it's not a precision platformer or a classic roguelike about mastering controls or riding an RNG engine. It's an incredibly detailed space where you can dive into whatever parts you find the most enticing and will slowly learn more about what this place is and was (with some haunting writing to uncover) as you unlock every part of it. This is absolutely in the lineage of the Immersive Sims, while also feeling incredibly fresh as a walking/flying simulator. I've spoiled the reveal in the first few minutes of the game but this game is all about discovery (in any order you choose) so I'm going to avoid talking in detail about anything else. A real treat of every interlocking piece (both in the sense of each area and things like dynamic music & visual design) making the whole function, let alone more than just a sum of those parts; you need to play this.<br />
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<h3>
Assassin's Creed Odyssey</h3>
Here's why the preamble made sure that releasing new content for an existing game pushes it into consideration for that year. I've been a bit behind keeping up with this series recently (turning up on a couple of those "I need to find time for these" lists at the bottom of these <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2018/12/games-of-year-2018.html">annual posts</a> recently) and never doing more than playing enough to understand the changing systems and renderer in a given year. But this year I made the time to do a deep dive into the entire series.<br />
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It's remarkable how new the most recent two games (Origins and Odyssey) are, completely flipping the established formula. A long time ago I wrote game previews and one of the things I started doing in a draft was writing down the controls, text that was cut but informed my final writing; essential for thinking through the new game. Why? Because in the '90s genres were moving fast enough that knowing what the designers thought was important for the interface and controls gave an insight into what the game was (and could be communicated to the audience without just referencing games they might not have played or even heard of). The entire control scheme for Origins was new. Core ideas like high and low profile (tying climbing, sprinting, etc to your AI stealth alertness system) were dropped; combat was completely reworked. The urban environments were replaced with an open world on land that showed a huge change in ethos since the previous attempt at anything similar (Assassin's Creed III, which was rolled back to more compact explorable areas with more focus on naval traversal in IV). These games are now very much the Skyrim end of the open world RPG, not the [melee-combat variant] GTA end.<br />
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I don't know if it was the patches and updates (adding <a href="https://www.polygon.com/2019/8/22/20823212/assassins-creed-odsseys-lost-tales-of-greece-dlc-review" target="_blank">some of the best narrative content</a> into the game and completely reworking the levelling curves to accommodate post-credits expansions and a larger perk system) but a lot of reviewers seemed a bit down on this entry (even the ones who liked the transformation of Origins) - I loved almost every moment of it. Did reviewers who found boring copy-paste quests end up doing the bulletin boards (which seem quite clearly to be generated quests you should ignore unless desperate for XP)? The game now <a href="https://assassinscreed.ubisoft.com/game/en-gb/news-updates/356631/This-Month-in-Assassins-Creed%E2%80%93October-2019-Update" target="_blank">there are no more updates planned</a> seems tuned that even if I'd only done half as many of the authored quests, I'd have been fine for the levelling curve (the game boosts the level of content to prevent you overlevelling and trivialising everything while retaining areas you can only go to later on without extreme caution - completionists are not punished but you can ignore a lot of content without even considering grinding off the main story path).
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Thanks to the metanarrative, whatever science fiction the series rolled into the historic settings has now fully flipped over to fantasy meaning that this Ancient Greece can be filled with mythological creatures and stories on top of a very dramatised Peloponnesian War. The stunning visuals (making great use of that Origins engine update) keep uncovering new areas worth exploring while the strong cast and humorous asides pull you through a Skyrim-long RPG. I never felt exhausted by the length of the game (even coming straight off the also quite huge Origins) and actually found the swift conclusion of the A plot disappointing; getting the "best" outcome did not make it any more satisfying how quickly the sprawling story collapses into a couple of quick fights and some rather sparse areas with little in the way of B plot questlines before you see the initial story's concluding cutscenes (and dive back into the world to finish off B plots, optional challenges, and work towards the real story finale in the metanarrative timeline and dive into the meaty DLC post-credits stories - those expansions able to easily consume 30 more hours, most of which are worth your time).<br />
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I played the game as Kassandra (the canonical protagonist) and from what little dialogue I heard from the Alexios alternative, I feel sorry for anyone who decided they wanted to play a bloke. The romance options are not Bioware-style party members but feel about as well developed narratively (in the chapters you have the option to pick them up) with plenty of opportunity to play a disaster bisexual protagonist (love interests are all written as playersexual). Unfortunately there is <a href="https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1178090075470602240" target="_blank">some bury your gays</a> that seems like they could have written more interesting ways of trying to hit emotional notes with raised stakes. I'm also still torn on writing a single plotline vs making choices change outcomes (in a game so long as to make it so choices can't majorly change things with major repercussions later). The dialogue is really nice "we have a set character but you can express a range of views within that envelope and try different strategies to engage with NPCs" and I was surprised later on in the game while restarting various quest chains and trying different options leading to quite different conclusions (even if isolated to that area, as the main plot only has a few branching options that are very Walking Dead "diverge then rejoin"). A few plotlines (including that A plot) could have been tightened up and expanded rather than writing several similar alternatives that ultimately didn't really make earlier choices feel more real (and could even undercut some of the themes of the narrative). Even the old binary narrative designs of the Mass Effect or inFamous series are a step ahead of how Odyssey handled this one system so I hope any future iteration can step up (maybe by poaching some ex-Bioware writers to help give an extra pass to the scripts).<br />
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<h3>
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden</h3>
Released at the very tail end of last year (too late for me to have played it) but with an expansion coming out in the middle of this year, this is a 3D real-time isometric RPG that seamlessly turns into a modern Xcom-style move&shoot two phase turn based tactics game for combat. The real trick here: making that crunchy tactical combat engine really sing while removing all the stalking phase of initiating encounters (that's all handled entirely in the real-time part of play with vision cones and noise bubbles determining who gets the first turn when combat starts) and also adding silencers to weapons to break a large area full of enemies into several short sharp stealth assaults before anyone can raise an alarm (once again, removing the long turn-based movement phases between packs of enemies that slowed down Firaxis' titles).<br />
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The licensed setting here was a world I'd not previously encountered so I can't speak to the accuracy of it but the writing here slowly reveals a history you probably saw coming but it didn't overly detract from experiencing it unwind and getting a feel for the setting that takes the post-apocalypse standard and inserts a slight slant. Characters are colourfully written, encounters don't have time to get stale, and the visuals have a great lived-in feel.<br />
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I used to love UFO/Xcom (the 1994 onward series), completing playthroughs well into this decade, but could never be happy with the Firaxis reboot. I had thought that removing action points and moving to a two phase turn was what turned me off. This game made me realise it was actually everything else that had changed that broke it for me. I'm very happy with the Xcom-like combat resolution here (especially how they've tweaked it to move faster and allow stealth to matter more).<br />
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<h3>
Phoenix Point</h3>
Wait, didn't I just say I don't like modern Xcoms because I'd rather load up an extremely old original game (that is surprisingly playable despite technical shortcomings of running a 1994 game in DOSbox that only barely works with modern screens and mice)? Well, here's the just-released other side of that year-long realisation. This is a hybrid of Firaxis' modernisation with some original flair from the series originator, Julian Gollop. An indie take on the formula trying to compete with 2K's now-established series while reaching back for ideas about campaign structure and independent forces which can be allies or enemies as your campaign develops.<br />
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Starting with the turn-based combat, while it's not a complete return to action points, you do start out with 4 points each turn and can spend them on movement or combat in any order and combination (and with a second reserve of willpower for specials that also push a soldier closer to panic as you deplete them). I have long mourned the end of action points - a dozen plus fractions of time you can spend on anything within your turn allocation to play out - letting choices like a slow aim & shoot be tuned against blindfire with precision rather than using cooldowns to differentiate the different potential actions each turn. Games like Frozen Synapse 2 (simultaneous turn-based) last year and John Wick Hex this year have been doing some interesting stuff with modernising that idea but if we're moving away from that, I prefer the way Phoenix Point simplifies it.<br />
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The geoscape strategic layer here is somewhat primitive but functional, cutting back some of the options taken forward from the classic series into the Firaxis games but also moving back from the narrative "mission select screen with a ship-shaped cursor" map into a proper open map full of places to explore, defend, and worry about losing to emergent future events. This isn't a treadmill of progress that you have to walk down and can find out that a decision you made 6 hours ago (or even a single lost soldier) actually was game over because you fell off the required power curve the game doesn't tell you about. I've not actually finished a campaign yet but everything I've played makes me feel like this is inspired by the campaign design of the original series but with a bit more narrative flair for this new-but-similar setting you take control of as the last best hope of survival for humanity (here with global warming unlocking a frozen alien mutation menace). I hope anyone chasing the sales of Firaxis' series give the decisions made here due attention (it sounds like John Wick Hex will not be remembered by many but I do think that action queue is also worth others iterating on, even if I can't recommend that game as a whole).<br />
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<h3>
Disco Elysium</h3>
So talking of throwbacks combined with potential paths for future games, this is a very retro RPG in some respects with probably quite a bit of direct lineage to Planescape: Torment. It's a game of talking, or getting to know a place and some people, and working out what it is you know and believe in having woken up knowing almost nothing. It's also a pretty interesting modern setting around collapsed democracies, irony-poisoned Leftism, and what it means to be a detective in the era of police violence that feels totally disconnected from classic film noir portrayals.<br />
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The work turning an introspective character into the progression and character building system is smart (build out who you are, what you can do, and what knowledge you have access to as you explore the world), the way it feeds into the dialogue systems gives a cohesive interface and even feels a bit like a Failbetter Sunless game (so looping back to Torment influences). I really hope more games that want you to define a character rather than playing a fixed one iterate on systems like this. Scoping the world to be a single city block made it possible for an indie project to make a world this reactive and, I suspect but haven't confirmed, offers quite a bit of replayability for those of us who want to poke at exactly how broadly the character and progression can be directed.<br />
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<h3>
Resident Evil 2</h3>
As I said <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/02/shooting-into-february-2019.html">earlier in the year</a>, this was a project that could have fallen apart extremely easily. Remaking a 21 year old title in a genre whose popularity has been up and down, bringing back most of the story beats and even design decisions while completely remaking the visuals and how the game controls (goodbye fixed cameras). And yet, what has arrived is both a great recollection of what has always worked for horror games along with enough new to feel modern and accessible. This should end up in classrooms as an example of how to refresh old games while retaining their identity.<br />
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<h2>
Worth Talking About 2019:</h2>
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<h3>
Gears 5 & Metro Exodus</h3>
I'm going to take these together as neither of them are going to make my top list this year and they share an interesting choice I hope we see refined in sequels. Gears 5 sensibly moves away from the boring Nathan Drake impression of a protagonist in 4 while retaining the "this advertises the engine" chain of interesting settings for set-piece missions that we're now used to. The flip is that those mainly linear experiences are accessed via several open world areas that also contain optional combat encounters that reward upgrade tokens for an AI buddy (can also be played co-op, so now offering two main players and a 3rd helper bot player if you've got someone who is less on top of shooter controls).<br />
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Metro Exodus also mixes more linear sections with large open areas where you can complete objectives in any order and engage in optional quests, crafting guns, and wondering why they got rid of the bullet economy of previous games. They're not doing it identically (Metro mixes open sections with some narrative missions and set pieces, offering very linear corridor sections as purely filler between those open zones; Gears makes the open areas combat free and always on a vehicle so the line you walk over for encounters or missions is very obvious rather than organic) and I'd say some of those linear sections in Metro really drained my enjoyment of the game while Gears kept the best stuff for the linear sections that could have been taken from any of the earlier games. But there's a common push for trying to do something more that I think offers something very interesting: replaying Gears 4 earlier in the year took me less time than my first playthrough but it was exactly the same progression; these open areas mean you can tailor how long your game is by choosing how much optional content you play (not just how many nooks you look in for collectable trinkets).<br />
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I think it's something we don't do enough of. Because it's hard to make a satisfying narrative that's as satisfying after a full dive as with a much shorter highlighted path through it. Books are as long as they are and you're not expecting a book to offer a shorter path through it where you only need to read half the chapters but it still makes exactly as much sense. Luckily we can modify experiences on the fly and so ensure we add context where it might be missed from skipping chapters, something authors of a single book can't do (even if they wanted to).<br />
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These games are not the interesting explorations of customising your typical eight to twenty hour action experience so you can play it as a long/double-movie 3-4 hours highlight or a roaming exploration of every nook and cranny with every side-story maximally expanded for 20+ hours (or several routes in between, all signposted so the player doesn't feel lost for what they should be doing next given their desire to reach a conclusion without wading through what they consider too much filler content). But they could be a step on the path there. I also can't stop thinking about how Outer Wilds is a 22 minute long game that you play for about sixteen hours and walk away feeling satisfied, but could also play for less time if you didn't want to engage with certain sections (as long as they weren't on the path to the critical knowledge for reaching the end and seeing credits). With RPGs we've explored main vs side quest chains etc but it's always been the difference between a long story and a very very long story.<br />
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<h3>
Tom Clancy's The Division 2</h3>
I liked the first game in this series enough to put it <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2016/12/games-of-year-2016.html">on my top list</a> but three years later and I didn't find nearly as much to get excited about here. Despite the fact that in every single area I can think of this game builds upon the previous game and really refines systems in a way I can only think of as making for a better experience. There have been a few missteps that got corrected via patches but the first game launched with a lot more systems almost broken and only the core encounter loop & setting to pull you through it. Unfortunately I think it's the setting here that lets the game down. The well rendered scenarios with great enemy AI and still engaging RPG shooter combat don't matter nearly as much if you're not drawn into the setting. They picked a city and time of year that I don't find nearly as interesting as snowy Midtown Manhattan and pushed the clock forward so all the initial mystery of working out what had happened has been resolved. I can't even blame the narrative for being a lot less satisfying as the original wasn't that tight (especially with missions you're always thinking about repeating for the loot and co-op fun) and, baring a bit of a gap where I expected a more extensive cut-scene or even mission (once the levelling progression ends, a new enemy arrives and resets the map with new harder encounters, but this is all revealed in what feels weirdly rushed exposition), everything flows reasonably well here.<br />
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When we talk about the maturation process for games, we've often focused on visuals (this engine is doing a lot right even down to some really tricky edge cases) or more broadly on technical competence. The cinema equivalent of filming something well and not breaking the projector - once you get a certain level of maturity it's a baseline expectation of competence (even if cinematographers and editors can clearly show excellence far beyond basic competence to elevate a project). Less talked about is that reaching that point will push a much heavier focus on the other parts of a game. Some players will find that "it feels good to play" or "I like working out the optimal solutions" is enough to drag them through a game, as we are an interactive medium. But also there's going to be stuff like this where I can say that this game is a step up from the last game (which I played a lot of and even jumped into the PvP setting for the adrenaline rush) and I have no interest in going back and playing more than my basic tour of the initial campaign and prodding what the post-levelling game looks like.<br />
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<h3>
Observation</h3>
Some of the indies who worked on this also worked on Alien: Isolation and you can see some of that at work. It's also worth looking at for the visuals and polish possible for modern indies working with an established engine. It's not Hellblade-tier of aiming directly for AAA aesthetics and technical rendering but it's certainly got a very specific look from the cameras to the interfaces combined with good-enough humans (the classic "only do this if you absolutely have to" difficulty spike for realistic real-time rendering and animation on a budget).<br />
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I did not enjoy the structure of some of the puzzles in this "you are the machine" exploration game and suspect that without a FAQ, I'd have only played an hour or two (of what is only a six hour game). But in a year where I must have missed more notable indies than I usually do (or just didn't find that much to remark upon - there are a lot of games near this in my personal rankings this year like Baba is You where I don't actually have anything notable to say), there's something here to pay attention to and based upon Stories Untold & this, I expect their next project could be really special.<br />
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<h3>
Ape Out</h3>
A very short note, as this is a very short game and I'm not as enamoured with the bold colours as many critics are. As you play this (and so far I've seen it offered free on Epic and included as part of Amazon Prime & Xbox Game Pass subscriptions), listen to the music. It's not an audio stream, it's dynamic composition. It's cool and I've been playing with something kinda similar in a very different genre for years without ever getting results that sound this good.<br />
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<h2>
Notable for Consideration in 2020 (as they evolve):</h2>
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<b>Noita</b> - I loved those '90s sand simulation games & the homebrew stuff (we all made from copying code from magazines). That with procgen levels you explore while constructing your own wands as a Magicka-style action roguelike-like? Looking forward to when it's nearing done.<br />
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<b>Control</b> - Sorry Remedy, going to wait for the GotY edition in 2020 once the season of content is all done and included (also the chance of having a GPU that's less than 3 years old, with some flavour of ray-tracing acceleration). Sounds like my sort of game but I didn't get round to it in 2019.<br />
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<b>Death Stranding</b> - The asynchronous collaborative online experience is intriguing and makes me slightly wonder about if I'm missing out by punting this into 2020 but also I'm extremely interested to see what that engine looks like on a PC or maybe will look like on a PS5 by the end of that year (if that's a cross-gen early example Sony invest in). I'm also slightly curious if <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/10/cheat-engine-dev-basics.html">memory value editing on PC</a> could do some interesting things to the mid-early hours of the game that some reviewers have not reacted well to (or even what a modding scene could do, depending how locked down the game is).<br />
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<b>Ghost Recon: Breakpoint</b> - Beyond a few critics who <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne8qwq/ghost-recon-breakpoint-review" target="_blank">really found something interesting here</a>, this got panned and resulted in Ubisoft delaying their entire 2020 stack while also talking about how they needed to let live games have more space to breathe between iterations. I want to see what this looks like after some additional iteration because it looked really rough pre-release (of the "quietly warn friends to maybe wait for some patches before buying" type of coming in hot) but the sniping / clearing locations (picked up as the highlight by some reviewers) already felt like a step forward from Wildlands.<br />
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<b>Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order</b> - Sounds like this came in pretty hot too, so I'm going to wait for the version that's got less bugs in 2020. It was not a great year for EA releases feeling "fully baked" with NfS: Heat a week earlier feeling cheap & buggy for me while Anthem will likely live in infamy (even if that speculated retooling launches in 2020 and actually makes it worth spending more than an hour enjoying the suit flight stuff). Even Madden looks to be in decline (while NBA got cancelled shortly before release, again).<br />
<br />Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-17844658359028044982019-10-14T13:26:00.002+01:002019-12-06T22:30:55.412+00:00Cheat Engine: Dev BasicsThis year I've been playing through a lot of premium computer games that came out around the time Facebook was a platform where a lot of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker" target="_blank">social-idle games</a> were making a lot of money and getting a lot of attention from game designers. To the point that some of those mechanics for positive feedback loop economic models was being dumped into $60 games or linked via external social games on another platform. Even in the current era, where that stuff is less in fashion, a lot of the changes are still being applied to in-game economies (when not tied to micro-transactions and the quest for "AAA whales") compared to the process of balancing a game economy from the era previous. Some games have been patched to provide all the bonuses from engaging in external social games when those social games were taken down, others simply expect players to do more grinding in the game as that was always one of the play styles they considered viable at launch.<br />
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Personally, I've been approaching it from a different angle: one of someone who always wanted to know what the cheat codes were for games, even if I ended up not using them that much during a first playthrough. As a developer who has <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2013/07/how-to-make-sell-software-without-going.html">always believed that my code is usually a guest on someone else's hardware</a>, the cheats available to me are rather broad. I don't feel the need to limit myself to the dev/debug commands that ship in a solo game (where I have not signed up to an agreed set of rules for play in a multiplayer environment). In my consideration, the means by which games are protected from players editing memory values to play content they do not own is called copyright law (as pasting in any parts of the game you have not sold them into memory would be an obvious violation of copyright) - knowing this makes the technical means by which you should operate clear. (And the ESA or anyone trying to shill DRM are not your friends.)<br />
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<blockquote align="center" class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" lang="en">
Old joke: Engineer asked to itemise $1k bill for marking a cross where mfr needed to drill a hole to fix machine. $1 piece of chalk; $999 knowing where to put the cross.<br />
Feels like Ubisoft "Time Savers" are charging for a memory address.<br />
*Opens Cheat Engine* I've got this boss!<br />
— Jess Birch (@Shivoa) <a href="https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1175415612568473600">September 21, 2019</a></blockquote>
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I occasionally have lively discussions with other devs on this topic but I'm against anti-consumer snooping or memory obfuscation having any place in solo experiences that have been sold to consumers (who should then expect to be able to tweak their play experience as long as it doesn't involve grafting on copyrighted content that was not included in the sale of data). <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2013/07/how-to-make-sell-software-without-going.html">Including source code</a> is a method of assuring players that you have not hidden any anti-consumer systems in the thing they purchased (and given some expertise, they can explore and modify their experience however they like); some modding tools even approach this level of access.<br />
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Which brings us to today's topic: <a href="https://cheatengine.org/" target="_blank">Cheat Engine</a>. This is quite an advanced tool with a long history of updates so I'm only going to talk about a few of the simpler things that a lot of people use it for. If you make games but have never played with CE then this may be a good primer for what people are talking about when they discuss Cheat Tables for your game.<br />
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The simplest function of Cheat Engine is to scan the memory of a running application to find any instances of a certain value (a bit pattern that could be read as a certain value, optionally including fuzzy scans that find anything that might be a interpreted as a value or within a delta of it for floats) and save the list of those addresses. The Next Scan function allows this value to be edited & another scan run on only the addresses already found. A player can use in-game systems to tweak a number and then find all fixed memory locations that are mirroring that change by repeatedly scanning for addresses doing what the in-game value does. A canny player can even deduce that certain values in the UI are not immediately saved back to a permanent location (and the save process may not involve copying the same location as the UI is using) so to only rescan the memory at certain points (like after backing out of a buy screen into the main game UI, completing a virtual transaction).<br />
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Knowing where in memory the values are being updated, the player can track those locations and even lock their value to prevent them changing. This is very useful if the game is updating a handful of locations with the same value and the player wants to know which value is used for future calculations as the master value and which is just mirroring (or if they missed something in a previous scan and so don't have the core location they want in their current pool of memory locations - as developers then we have an advantage in how we think about memory & knowing what processes are going on that can cause data to be moved and plenty of players doing this stuff also have that knowledge). Often applying a lock and then trying to change the value in-game will show which location is key & which can be ignored. This is where the player can now basically save-file hack in the live game and change any value they can isolate. The scans are very fast so it's quite easy to do this at any point, especially if you're looking for an unusual bit pattern (eg not 0, 1, 2, 16, etc) that's easy to repeatedly change via in-game actions on demand.<br />
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<i>November Edit:</i> one nuance of this is that scanning for the bit pattern is only one of the various modes. Within a range, has not changed since last scan, has decreased (optionally by a specific value)... there's a lot of ways of doing a refinement. With a bit more time (we're talking only a few seconds to index it on a modern system with a typical binary) you can even start from "I don't know the initial value", which makes it surprisingly fast to find where player health etc are being stored in memory in a lot of games. And then locking that memory area (have Cheat Engine repeatedly writing that value to the location to erase any changes by the game). The versatility of the system was something I'd not considered before giving it a poke - average users really can find ammo, health, etc extremely quickly as they control when the value changes or stays fixed then refine memory locations mirroring their expectations.<br />
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But it's not common for these offsets to be fixed, so players would have to do this whenever they want to change something and maybe that's enough friction to consider it annoying. Which is where a slower but fancier trick Cheat Engine has comes it: once a player has an address they can look for any memory in the running application that looks like an offset or pointer to that address. Then they can do the same iteration & look for that value not changing. A player will note that after a while (or load, or game restart) the location of some in-game value moves and then check to see if any of those suspected pointers have moved to the new location they've found for that in-game value. Advanced use could even follow a chain of pointers. These saved pointer locations are often stable between level loads, game loads, and even some minor patch revisions (although the last one is uncommon, which is why Cheat Tables usually have the associated patch version tied to them). There is more complex stuff with code injection and advanced tweaks that can be done for fancy tables and reactive cheats (halving damage taken, boosting XP) but the bog standard DIY stuff is usually more limited. But this is still clearly powerful enough to have worked out where your CharacterInfo struct is and know how to follow the pointers and edit various values.<br />
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If a player wants a million credits to break your in-game economy, it's probably reasonable easy for them to hack it without that much expertise (most anyone could follow a tutorial on this stuff, even if it's sometimes faster to do with some expertise to understand the underlying systems going on moving data around in memory). Once upon a time, it was standard for computer games to include cheats and some development or debug tools that would make those extra credits something that didn't require an external tool. In recent years it has become a lot less common (maybe in part due to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_mod" target="_blank">GTA Hot Coffee</a> and similar "scandals" related to leaving assets and tools that the player was never meant to encounter in the release version; maybe the console push for Achievements/Trophies as "verified played good" permanent records for player profiles).<br />
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I think this stuff is good for games. Especially a few years after release, when players are going to want to really poke at all the systems in a game and find out the limits of how things work. Obfuscation work to frustrate players trying to do this is wasted resources that could be spent making a better final product and, often, isn't even entirely successful as it just takes one smart hacker to figure out what's going on and work out how to get round it by writing memory at a certain point or injecting a bit of extra code at just the right location. It's the user's memory so it's not like you can guarantee that they won't lift it from under you. Embrace the chaos, and kindly ask players to not submit bug reports if they've been editing their memory addresses while playing a game, because this is far far outside of developer supported play.Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-67171987794237808792019-08-30T09:32:00.003+01:002019-09-01T23:14:35.019+01:00The Sharpening CurseI should start this off by saying that there are times when sharpening filters are absolutely standard. Playing with local contrast using an unsharpen mask or clarity tool is a stock part of most digital photo development (baring skin, where the clarity tool is used in the opposite direction to reduce contrast and provide wrinkle suppression) and something like Adobe Lightroom even does an automatic (mild) sharpen on export for printing (in the default configuration).<br />
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That said, I welcome anyone to look at freeze frames from any 4K film print and tell me what you see. Watch it in motion and pay attention to any sub-pixel scale elements as they move through the scene. Watch it on a neutrally (professionally) configured screen that's accurately presenting the source input, not a TV that's doing its own mess of sharpening because it's configured for a showroom with everything dialled up to 11. Even if aggressively sharpened (and most films are not), then there is a lack of aliasing thanks in part to the ubiquitous use of <a href="https://youtu.be/jXJjhGhd8vM" target="_blank">an optical low-pass filter in front of the camera sensor</a> during light capture and because an optical sensor is capturing a temporal and spacial integral (light hitting anywhere on the 2D area of each sub-pixel sensor & at any time during the shutter being open is recorded as contributing to the pixel value). Cinematic (offline) rendering simulates these features, even when not aiming for a photo-realistic or mixed (CG with live action) final scene.<br />
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When we move to real-time rendering, we're still not that far away from the early rasterisers - constructing a scene where the final result effectively takes a single sample at the centre of each pixel and at a fixed point in time and calculates the colour value. We're missing a low-pass filter (aka a blur or soften filter) and the anti-aliasing effect of temporal and spacial averaging (even when we employ limited tricks to try and simulate them extremely cheaply).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Assassin's Creed III using early TXAA</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Assassin's Creed IV with TXAA</td></tr>
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Even when using the current temporal solutions to average out and remove some aliasing (and the more expensive techniques like MSAA for added spacial samples, which doesn't work well with deferred rendering so has fallen out of fashion), the end result is still a scene with far fewer samples into the underlying ground truth (or the output you would expect if filming an actual scene with a real camera) than we would like and a tendency for aliasing to occur. When TXAA (an early nVidia temporal solution) was introduced then it sparked a mild backlash from some who wanted a sharper final result, but mainly because they are so used to the over-sharp mess that is the traditional output of real-time rendering. The result has been various engines that use temporal solutions now also <a href="https://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/tom-clancys-the-division-graphics-and-performance-guide#tom-clancys-the-division-sharpening" target="_blank">offer a sharpening filter</a> as post-process and <a href="https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-software-fidelityfx" target="_blank">AMD</a> (& <a href="https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/gamescom-2019-game-ready-driver/" target="_blank">nVidia</a>) are starting to advertise driver-level sharpening filters (as an enhancement to be applied to games for "greater fidelity").<br />
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While AMD are talking about their FidelityFX as an answer to <a href="https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/graphics-reinvented-new-technologies-in-rtx-graphics-cards/#dlss" target="_blank">nVidia's DLSS AI upscaling</a> (using those Tensor Cores to upscale and smooth based on training on 64xSSAA "ground truth" images for each game - an effect I sometimes like in theory more than I love the final result), DLSS actually removes more high frequency aliasing than adding additional local contrast (it is primarily adding anti-aliasing to a low res aliased frame while also picking up some additional details that the AI infers from the training set). Technically AMD's FidelityFX contains two different branded techniques, one for Upscaling and another for Sharpening, but these two tasks operate in opposite directions (so combining is something to be attempted with extreme care and possibly not without something as complex at AI training to guide it) and the marketing seems to treat them under a single umbrella. Shader upscaling can certainly be better than just the cheapest resize filter you care to run but really, in the current era, I think temporal reconstruction is showing itself to be the MVP now that issues of ghosting and other incorrect contributions are basically fixed (outside of points of very high motion, where we are very forgiving of slight issues - just look at a static screenshot in the middle of what motion blur effects looks like in ~2014 games, but because we only see it as a fleeting streak then we don't notice how bad it can be). Unless DLSS steps up (while AMD and Intel also start shipping GPUs with dedicated hardware acceleration for this computation type), I think we should expect advancing temporal solutions to offer the ideal mix of performance and fidelity.<br />
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<i>Edit: As I was writing this, <a href="https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/dlss-control-and-beyond/" target="_blank">nVidia Research posted this discussion of DLSS research</a>, including: "One of the core challenges of super resolution is preserving details in the image while also maintaining temporal stability from frame to frame. <b>The sharper an image, the more likely you’ll see noise, shimmering, or temporal artifacts in motion.</b>" - that's a good statement of intent (hopefully Intel plan to launch their discrete GPUs with acceleration of "AI" - something even <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/12195/hisilicon-kirin-970-power-performance-overview/5" target="_blank">a modern phone SoC offers more dedicated PR (and silicon area?) to</a> than current AMD or Intel efforts).</i><br />
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So far we are seeing a lot of optional sharpening effects (optional on PC - I think stuff like The Division actually retained the user-selectable sharpening strength on consoles but not every console release includes complexity beyond a single "brightness" slider) but I'm worrying about the day that you load up a game and <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sharpening+halo&iax=images&ia=images" target="_blank">start seeing sharpening halos</a> (oh no, not the halos!) and notice additional aliasing that cannot be removed.<br />
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A very mild level of sharpening absolutely can have a place (doing so via variable strength that adapts to the scene? ideal!) and is probably integrated into several game post-processing kernels we don't even notice, but a sharpening arms race seems like the opposite of what real-time rendering needs. We are still producing final frames that contain too much aliasing and should continue to lean on the side of generating a softer final image when weighing detail vs aliasing.Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-14432725728025154012019-07-31T11:47:00.003+01:002019-07-31T12:54:55.526+01:00AAA RentalWhen I was young, we used to go to the local video rental store in the nearest town and rent games. Initially this was computer games, including manuals etc in a plastic sleeve that allowed you to enter the correct code to start the game (back when code wheels or typing in a word on a page of the manual confirmed you weren't a pirate). A few years later it was mainly consoles, renting both hardware and a video game for the weekend. The store purchased games and then more than made the money back renting them out - all thanks to the concept of the first sale doctrine (which lobbying from software developers means isn't actually part of the legal framework in many places when it comes to games (?) but still guides what many think of as legal interactions with copyrighted material). Years later, when economic realities made collecting a proper library of games impossible for some years, I used to rent AAA console games via post (many of which I finally got into my library via used sales on last-gen titles no longer sold new).<br />
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One of the things that the recent transition to digital has done is really slow down those rental markets. Along with <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/101863670516574162" target="_blank">eroding used sales</a>, the game rental services have also found it hard to operate in a world where publishers looked to things like Project $10 (EA making it so a one-time key unlocked content in a new game) and now look to digital as the primary platform to sell games (where there is no physical token to rent out which enables play). But never fear, publishers are stepping into the gap with their own rental offerings.<br />
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The biggest player right now is probably Microsoft with GamePass. Some might consider this "the Netflix model", with a mix of their own brand new content and content they're buying in from 3rd party publishers. Others have pointed to Spotify. I've <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2013/06/first-sale-doctrine-drives-bad-game.html">previously said</a> that Spotify (+ Apple Music + Google Music) could actually pay for the music industry as it is (artists are being ripped off by bad contracts, not a lack of consumer cash pumping into the system) but <a href="https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1110353827474096128" target="_blank">I'm somewhat concerned</a> that gaming (an industry roughly an order of magnitude bigger) may not actually be able to be sustained by subscriptions in the short to medium term.<br />
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What <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/101704815466909006" target="_blank">makes me doubly concerned</a> on that front is that some publishers have extremely deep pockets right now and so could lose money for a long time on subscriptions before pumping up the price to consumers once many other avenues for playing games had become eroded by artificially cheap subscriptions. That is the model of "disruption" used by plenty in tech with VC backing. As of right now, it's hard to ague with the value on offer (especially as something you subscribe to for a specific game & then dive into the archives and then unsubscribe - not really analogous to TV or music you like to have playing in the background so always want to be subscribed to at least one service with all the classics you enjoy).<br />
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As a player of games right now, it seems great to be able to jump through a large archive of games for about $10 per month. With that including the latest releases from the publisher offering the subscription, I don't see why I'd pay $60-100 for a AAA release on launch. With EA even offering a cheaper option if you're not interested in their latest releases and Ubisoft saying their upcoming service will also include all DLC and premium editions - it's starting to look like quite a poor option to give $60 for a brand new game and miss out on DLC when you could rent it once at launch and again when the DLC has all come out while still having more than enough cash in your pocket left to buy it on sale eventually if you want a permanent copy for your library.<br />
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This year I've been playing <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/03/good-enough-meets-extremely-fast.html">a lot of older games</a> in between trying out subscription services. Sometimes I'm even doing so based on wanting to see credits roll in a game I've owned for a while but never completed before jumping into a sequel I never got round to buying (but is now available on these rental platforms). I've also noticed that once a game appears on a subscription list, I'm probably taking it off a store wishlist - I'll get round to it next time I subscribe rather than watching for an attractive sale price to buy it now. Another thing I've watched myself doing is treating everything like it's on a clock when you're subscribed and that ends up <a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/102390572794853387" target="_blank">helping to keep me going</a> (rather than getting distracted by reading or something else and not playing anything for a few weeks) - very Battle Pass energy but for games that aren't so multiplayer focussed or reliant on F2P hooks.<br />
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It's probably too early to predict how everything shakes out but I certainly think we're in for some turbulent times as everyone figures out how gaming adapts to publisher-driven rentals vs ownership. Ubisoft seem to be doing extremely well with maintaining extended support for their online games and providing several seasons (Year 4 Pass for Siege? Sounds a lot like a slow-mode Battle Pass) of updates for premium games - that likely maps well to pushing a subscription service, although I'm not sure their price point is ideal (lacking the cheap tier that EA has for people who only want older content). Will EA finally resurrect <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2012/03/non-linear-games-and-dlc-world-of-ea.html" target="">their proposed TV model of narrative</a>? Games as a Service (as they currently do it) has maybe not been working out ideally at EA (without the huge revenue from gambling-like experiences in FIFA etc, disappointments like Anthem would probably be a lot harder for EA to work through) so it might be time for another strategy (as their subscription service finally arrives on the biggest console after Sony have agreed to let it onto their platform).Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-89571793745054833632019-06-20T11:52:00.001+01:002019-06-20T11:52:11.878+01:00Moving to FirefoxI was a big fan of Firefox from approximately <a href="https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_releasenotes/en-US/firefox/releases/0.10.html" target="_blank">the introduction of Live Bookmarks</a> (before Google Reader or even my own use of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloglines" target="_blank">Bloglines</a> - literally all three of these RSS tools <a href="https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks" target="_blank">are now dead</a> so RIP RSS in general: push notifications for new website content seems like <a href="https://feedly.com/" target="_blank">the obvious right way to do things</a> and yet support is slipping away) up until some decisions I considered strange (eg removing the ability to restrict which websites ran Javascript unless you installed a plugin to manage what I consider a core task of a browser interested in basic security). When Firefox still hadn't added back those basic security tools but decided to lock down running unsigned plugins (like the ones I'd written myself & didn't need external security audits) with the stable release branch, I had already mainly moved to Chrome as my daily browser (which retains the ability to decide which plugin code need to be signed & offers granular whitelist support for managing locally executed website code). Android has been the one place where I've continued to keep FF around as an option (although recently I had also basically moved to exclusively using Chrome because of how it syncs history, bookmarks, tabs, and settings between versions).<br />
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But recently my use of Chrome for daily browsing and Edge for occasional tasks with access to a different rendering engine (to avoid bugs) has been defeated by <a href="https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/microsoft-edge-making-the-web-better-through-more-open-source-collaboration/" target="_blank">MS giving up on their own rendering engine and deciding that Chrome is <i>the </i>standard</a>. Everything close to mainstream is a child of KHTML now (WebKit & Blink are not identical but they're both derived from a common ancestor and just steered in slightly different directions by Apple and Google). It's starting to feel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish" target="_blank">Microsoft EEE plan</a> crushing to stick with the Blink renderer in 2019; and I also have an ecosystem interest in Servo (built as one of the tentpole projects for Rust). But moving to Firefox wasn't entirely painless so it's time for a quick rundown for anyone else making the move - I'm starting from <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/developer/" target="_blank">the Firefox Developer Edition</a> (because they still force you to get your plugin code signed for the main stable branch) as Waterfox's Servo-derived version sounds like it is still early so I'm not yet thinking about projects that have forked from the main Firefox path.<br />
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<h3>
Save often</h3>
An early crash seemed to wipe out FF's settings database, which includes most plugin configuration data, so make good use of the Export to File options that most plugins seem to offer. I'd personally prefer if all settings were stored in flat files which were easy to back up and sync between devices but it seems like FF prefers a central database which also stores most of the settings for the browser itself.<br />
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Outside of that one disaster of a crash (which ate customisation data & forced me to configure things twice, this time saving backups once I was done), everything seems stable. I was also leaving Chrome due to some rare stability issues that seemed to be triggered while several video streams were running at once and so far none of those issues have happened in FF. A tab has crashes once or twice but with about the same frequency as Chrome and the isolation (so it doesn't take out any other tabs) seems to be just a solid. Discord introduced a bug (that I only saw in FF) for about two days that caused its internal engine to detect a failure state and require refreshing, which indicates the major concern with moving away from the market leader: sites will not be as well tested in FF. On the other hand, a long-standing bug in TweetDeck (making scrolling a column jump around) is simply not an issue on FF so it's good to keep an open mind about which gripes you're just accustomed to.<br />
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<h3>
Customise everything</h3>
One of the nice visual updates to Chrome some time ago was to drop the OS stock scrollbars and give us something a bit cleaner and often narrower (using a style extension to manage it). Unfortunately FF does not pick up on that extension but rather <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/CSS/scrollbar-width" target="_blank">has its own extension</a> with which you can request a skinny scrollbar (or the complete removal of one). I had to tweak some of my old CSS injections to customise the pages I often visit (eg TweetDeck) to look more like they do by default under Chrome. I'll write my own CSS injector for FF (as I did in Chrome - it's an ideal "my first plugin" learning experience) but right now I'm using <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/styl-us/" target="_blank">Stylus</a>.<br />
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Because I have a 4K desktop and so run my Windows UI above 100% zoom (in the mess that is the various HiDPI APIs in current Windows 10) there have been a few times I've needed to prod the page zoom settings to get everything feeling the same as before. The standout glitch was Discord, where the visible scrollbars are fake (elements drawn by the website, not the browser itself) but the code to hide the real scrollbars doesn't work perfectly outsize of 100% zoom in FF. But as they're not the actual scrollbars you're looking at or interacting with, the above extension can also be used to completely hide them and clean up the visuals (making it look just like in Chrome). Basically it's a lot easier to adapt when you're used to poking CSS to your satisfaction for certain web-apps anyway. I even caught up to modern CSS and the more recently added wildcards to catch all the Discord elements in a single line: <span style="font-family: "consolas" , "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">div[class^="scroller-"] {scrollbar-width: none;}</span><br />
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Basically all of the actual browser experience customisation maps directly from Chrome to Firefox, from font preferences to interface layout and customisation. You can even tweak the "density" of the main UI to tweak whitespace, something I don't think Chrome offers, which leaves you with a narrower tab bar and more vertical space on a 16:9 screen for the actual website. A really nice stock feature is the Reader View, which toggles a clean article view when detecting a main text block (far from unique, but it's a clean stock implementation unlike Dom Distiller or a plugin). I think we're at a point where the stock features are pretty comparable, even if you do have to do the occasional search to translate it over (as I did for the scrollbars) or find a plugin on one platform to reach parity.<br />
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<h3>
Plugin list</h3>
Most of the plugins I had in Chrome also exist for Firefox. Here is a list I'm currently running until I've moved most of my internal stuff to the new ecosystem. I'm not saying I've audited code, but I did at least do basic checks to avoid obvious snooper extensions (eg Stylus is designed to be the non-telemetry alternative to Stylish). There is currently no way to restrict which pages each plugin can read and modify, something I'm shocked hasn't been <a href="https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/answer/2664769" target="_blank">copied from Chrome</a> on a browser that advertises it's security (FF <a href="https://support.mozilla.org/kb/extensions-private-browsing" target="_blank">only just added restricting plugins to not work on Private/Container tabs</a>).<br />
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<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/facebook-container/" target="_blank">Facebook Container</a> - Keep your logged in FB session in a special container so it's slightly harder for FB to track you elsewhere on the web.<br />
<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/privacy-badger17/" target="_blank">Privacy Badger</a> - EFF tracker blocker & url click-tracker remover for Google search etc links.<br />
<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/https-everywhere/" target="_blank">HTTPS Everywhere</a> - Another EFF classic: make https the default for websites which haven't made the switch yet.<br />
<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/noscript/" target="_blank">NoScript</a> - IMO this should be a core feature in Firefox. In previous versions this was a stock feature. For now I'll use this to whitelist the few sites that do need client-side code execution rights.<br />
<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/" target="_blank">uBlock Origin</a> - I'm mainly using this as an easy way to suppress certain page elements as I read until I port over my plugin that does that job (I typically do not go for "Adblock" plugins but it's easy to configure & you can turn most of it off). It's a good extra line of security until I get comfortable with NoScript & my own plugins properly protecting me from JavaScript nasties.<br />
<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/styl-us/" target="_blank">Stylus</a> - As mentioned above, this makes CSS injection really quick and easy until I port my own plugin over to customise how regular websites look.<br />
<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/" target="_blank">Awesome RSS</a> - Firefox took the classic RSS icon out of the address bar (so did Chrome: Google made an official plugin to add it back). Weep for RSS, an idea that made the web so much nicer to use that they tried to kill it!<br />
<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/snaplinksplus/" target="_blank">Snap Links</a> - This is the equivalent of the most esoteric plugin I love in Chrome: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/linkclump/lfpjkncokllnfokkgpkobnkbkmelfefj" target="_blank">Linkclump</a>. My index of RSS feeds in Feedly: sometimes I want my browser to open lots of links in several tabs ("I've got half an hour, give me 5 articles I've put a pin in as worth reading fully"; "Open all webcomics that have updated since last I checked") and this makes that as easy as dragging a box over all the nicely lined up links.Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-91746911974086948472019-05-31T11:30:00.000+01:002019-05-31T12:06:15.559+01:00Co-ops: Sharing the SpoilsFor quite some time this blog has been a dumping site for thoughts about how to operate as independent software creators while being <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2013/07/how-to-make-sell-software-without-going.html">fair to the users and developers we work with</a>. Recently those thoughts have turned to the co-operative model, including the focus on giving back to a wider community (not exactly an uncommon consideration for an industry with so much FOSS foundation) while still aiming to operate as a commercially viable entity inside the capitalist hellscape we currently operate (until the seas boil).<br />
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Even with the new funding models around donations (eg Patreon and KickStarter), there has been little movement around changing the deal for users (from offering source code & unbaked assets as standard to taking investment as ownership - creating consumer co-operatives) or developers (eg moving to a worker co-operative to democratise the office that is now funded by thousands of small individual donations rather than an investor who takes ownership of the company and chooses the boss). Meanwhile, every week there is a story about workplace conditions and we all kinda know the only reason no indie teams are getting the negative press is because stories do the numbers when tied to well known corporate brands. The <i>EA Spouse</i> blog post is almost 15 years old and things only change at the slowest speed those in power think they can get away with (once again, see boiling oceans); and that's mirrored in how we push ourselves into early burnout (and to keep up with a competitive marketplace filled with so many products).<br />
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The big play with a worker co-operative is that <a href="https://zines.gwumtl.com/coops/" target="_blank">they're democratically owned</a>. Every worker buys into the institution and so become a co-owner. Big decisions usually require consensus votes, smaller things can be majority or even left to individuals. As a large company, you still have the same management tiers but ultimately they answer to all the workers rather than shareholders or a small group of private owners. The details are somewhat fluid so maybe in one place you can increase your share through time worked (while most places do it so that after a trial period everyone buys in with an equal vote/share) but fundamentally <a href="https://www.ica.coop/en/cooperatives/cooperative-identity" target="_blank">all workers can buy in and democratically control the institution while also receiving the full returns from their combined labour</a>.<br />
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Some places are particularly precious about one vote/share per person. I think we're all aware of how soft power works and that every person having one vote does not mean everyone has equal power. As long as you're being rewarded (eg for time dedicated to the co-op, which increases institutional cohesion) and it has a low share ceiling then I feel those rules make enough sense. I'm actually somewhat more concerned by the other running decisions and initial investment, which is great if you're building a co-op by and for devs who all have $50k cash (and a lot of time to invest that we could value at market rate $10k/month) to create a viable business but becomes less great when you look at who that excludes and how the final system works (often with the aim to move to a salary system to even out income but at the cost of decoupling project profit from remuneration).<br />
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It's not helped by software as a product. Work several years on a video game with zero revenue and then you've got a source of cash, an IP bundle that can be duplicated for basically free as buyers are found for additional copies, that may or may not pay for the next development cycle. It's all a bit luck-based because the wider games industry is a hit-driven market. If you've got personal reserves to self-fund then <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw" target="_blank">you're buying those lottery tickets</a>. Tying remuneration entirely to a project rather than salary system also seems inadvisable. I have been part of that process of a decade of obscurity and I'm not convinced that the co-op model automatically does anything to ensure those who built the foundations are fairly rewarded.<br />
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<h3>
Buying a company</h3>
There are many ways of organising this (or less many, depending on your local legal landscape) but in general you buy your slice of the company when you join and everyone else has to collectively buy back that slice when you leave. I imagine it would be advisable to minimise the value of the company if you're doing direct ownership, because otherwise buying a slice could become prohibitive for new hires and difficult when someone leaves, although with so much being IP rights then minimising value isn't trivial.<br />
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My preference would be to put the co-operative's ownership into a trust to be run for the benefit of all employees. That means you can have the buy in be a dollar or similar symbolic value while a contract requires trustees to operate the co-operative for all workers, under rule by the decisions of those workers, while not requiring workers have the net worth of where they work inexorably linked to their own finances. The company as a focus of value to be exploited is an unhealthy model that pushes market cap maximisation and other unsustainable growth models which the co-op model already rejects (along with the potential to raise investment in that way).<br />
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<h3>
Dividing up the IP</h3>
What we've started to build up here is a company that splits revenue between paying sustainable salaries to all workers with a bonus based on project contributions. Ultimately that's based on the agreement of all the workers, as they are co-owners, but an initial split would be for everyone who contributes to a project to vote on how the bonus is split. That's how the model works: we have suggested structures for how this works and recruit based on that but also, if all workers agree a different system, then even the core bylaws change with a unanimous vote to change them. The co-op can adapt and change over time.<br />
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The system I'm currently thinking through, and the impetus for this blog post, is to tie the IP and projects to the workers rather than the co-op as a whole. Clearly the co-op needs central funding to continue to operate and pay out salaries on unfinished projects. Without that, it all falls apart. Traditionally you'd assign IP ownership to the co-op and then it, as an entity, would divide out the bonus to workers on a project; keeping the rest as core funding and slowly increasing the accumulated IP the co-op owns.<br />
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But if we go back to our basic copyright law, there is already a suggested construction for IP which is worked on by several people and is indivisible. Shared copyright ownership where all contributors own the IP but either must agree any license or must equally compensate every owner for any individual deal done (how this works by default changes depending on local legislation). There is the framework for assigning the IP created on a project to the workers of that project and licensing it to the co-op as entity for commercial exploitation and future development. This goes beyond the original model of splitting the company between all workers and also splits the IP between the workers not just as via direct ownership but also applying via indirect ownership & on a per-project basis. If we're working on this, we could also attempt to spread our values even if the workers on a project leave the co-op with their IP, something that copyleft licenses are an example of.<br />
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<h3>
A viral license</h3>
So what do we need this system to do and prevent? (Consider this working <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2013/07/how-to-make-sell-software-without-going.html">on top of our previously stated general rules for creating software</a>, so the license will already include terms that automatically transfer the IP to the public domain after a certain number of years of commercial exploitation or after a high return on investment is achieved.)<br />
<ul>
<li>The co-op must be given a reasonable ability to commercialise the project, which repays it for day-to-day costs, salary payments made during development, ongoing platform services, and ensures the future operation of the co-op. This may require it have the exclusive rights for some years to prevent competition from project members operating outside of the co-op. It should probably also have rights to develop new IP on top of the existing IP (sequels, use of the codebase in new projects etc).</li>
<li>The individuals on a project should be fairly compensated for commercialisation of their work, around an agreed bonus split. Future work to maintain ongoing development (patches etc) may need to be accounted for in this agreement or allow renegotiation of the original split.</li>
<li>To prevent IP becoming inaccessible due to disagreement between shared owners (something several commercial games currently are stuck with), the contract should err on the side of providing every individual with the ability to further commercialise the IP after any initial exclusivity, as long as the returns are split back to all individuals in a way considered fair (a new unanimous agreement) or along the lines of the bonus split (the original agreement).</li>
<li>To ensure the IP does not calcify, only able to be duplicated and sold as a fixed product, a viral license should allow new IP to be constructed on top of the existing IP by those who own a share of it. The value of the viral component is to ensure that any project member who takes the shared IP with them will also be constructing new projects that value shared ownership. This will require some sort of agreed structure for how various derivatives built on top of the IP are required to return some cut of their revenue to the original bonus split or find unanimous agreement in drafting a new split and cut amount.</li>
</ul>
As you can maybe sense, this is very much still a rough outline. I'd love to find projects already working along similar lines that manage to take the idea of worker ownership and split the difference between treating that as a project and co-op office being primarily owned by all workers. Also a way of sharing IP with a framework for future exploitation by the shared owners which has been designed with the expectation that everyone working on the project would be a shared owner (the existing things I've read around this are closer to classic music contracts where various things are not considered indivisible and they are never expected to scale out to a full team working on a project all getting shared ownership).<br />
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Worker co-ops are already heavily marketed as part of a wider social movement promoting more co-operatives, which would seem to be a great match for nailing down a form of shared IP ownership that also brings with it various restrictions that mean anyone exploiting it outside of the original co-op would still be bound to the principles of democratic shared ownership between every contributor and fair remuneration.<br />
<br />Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-92164801088151489642019-04-14T17:05:00.001+01:002019-04-14T17:25:02.727+01:00Dragon Age(d): the InquisitionSo after finishing Dragon Age 2 in <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/03/dragon-aged-10-years-later.html">the last post</a>, we're now up to 2014. In fact, the last DLC for Inquisition came out only three and a half years ago - not old enough for us to be diving back to recontextualise the game but also not new enough for this to be a stock review. And yet, if we're evaluating the Dragon Age series in 2019, this is the biggest entry and probably the foundations on which <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw3lrXlti-8" target="_blank">the teased Dragon Age 4</a> builds (quite clearly narratively but also probably mechanically - whatever that ultimately means for a game rebooted under new directors at <a href="https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964" target="_blank">a studio imploding under mismanagement & crunch</a> and <a href="https://kotaku.com/the-past-and-present-of-dragon-age-4-1833913351" target="_blank">possibly pivoting to connected "live" experiences built directly on the Anthem code base</a>).<br />
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Dragon Age <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/03/dragon-aged-10-years-later.html">initially went</a> from an attempt to recapture the old BioWare WRPG spark (before crowdfunded revivals offered players a lot of choice there) to a more console-focused character-driven affair on a limited budget. But for the fourth campaign in the setting (and third standalone game), EA couldn't keep ignoring the siren call of Skyrim.<br />
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When this series was first in development, Oblivion was already showing where console-friendly RPGs could land commercially. The previous Dragon Age games each did well enough (into the several millions sold) but they didn't manage to compete with Oblivion's incredible long tail and certainly couldn't stand in the same pantheon as a break-out hit like Skyrim (now well beyond 30 million sales thanks to another huge tail and many ports to new platforms). Open worlds were not just for big budget action games that took a few elements of RPGs, and so BioWare chose to take a stab at the big money.<br />
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<h3>
Technically speaking</h3>
Moving to a modern engine, it's immediately clear that a GTX1070 can't run close to 4K native or max-settings with MSAA (or higher than native with downsampling) and expect locked v-sync (<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/03/good-enough-meets-extremely-fast.html">unlike earlier games</a>). What's worse, the mild shader aliasing that supersampling fixed in previous games becomes terrible shimmer here with more advanced material shaders, an HDR pipeline, and bokeh-simulating depth of field (enlarging any shimmering overbright pixel into a fat blob that would almost look like glimmer if it wasn't so clearly strobing at the frequency of an aliasing artefact). MSAA is still an option but it's not going to do anything about shader aliasing (also you probably don't have the GPU headroom to turn it on at high resolutions anyway - especially as on PC you can and should <a href="https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Dragon_Age:_Inquisition" target="_blank">force a 60Hz mode everywhere</a>) and the post-AA is typically somewhat inconsistent. A modern temporal AA solution is sorely missed here, even if it's no worse than many contemporary titles from this dark era for temporal stability.<br />
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The game's technical issues were never fully patched and I had more than a few DXGI_ERROR_<wbr></wbr>DEVICE_<wbr></wbr>HUNG crashes early on (which seemed to get nailed down to some resource management issues that became less prevalent with patches after release but clearly never got completely defeated). Early on I also encountered animation stuttering (especially in cutscenes where they should be playing back at a perfect 30Hz but clearly don't, with some scene elements updating correctly while other stalled for several frames) before deciding that <a href="https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Dragon_Age:_Inquisition#High_frame_rate">60Hz SimRate</a> couldn't be worse. Despite being officially unsupported, it seemed much better than the default and provided pretty consistent frame pacing.<br />
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7HXtP5K2nd1naYzt3kl1Gt-_6J5OGF-44eZ7t52MRjGEj_2yZKLugmWga_nIIqpv2dGoVefWry5T8ZBsK7VxGHpSgNgmPF0DkMbRS7y2pZXMLxCjsquMJu_7C0EZAjYShHhhwcxxMgvSN/s3840/dark.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7HXtP5K2nd1naYzt3kl1Gt-_6J5OGF-44eZ7t52MRjGEj_2yZKLugmWga_nIIqpv2dGoVefWry5T8ZBsK7VxGHpSgNgmPF0DkMbRS7y2pZXMLxCjsquMJu_7C0EZAjYShHhhwcxxMgvSN/s200/dark.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dark (default) indoor</td></tr>
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhewGqcvXjDLBLptnGF-UWCnA3syyJf8yTqKxeTXZ3qrwPnZ3jOU0ZKGj6RoszG0avcovClwDFv9RFn_8BmDQEiotS5evewc4R3I4k-GN3If4tzCpeVPEYELYABp69Nu1g_RMVqjOYqKNT_/s3840/ScreenshotWin32_0031_Final.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhewGqcvXjDLBLptnGF-UWCnA3syyJf8yTqKxeTXZ3qrwPnZ3jOU0ZKGj6RoszG0avcovClwDFv9RFn_8BmDQEiotS5evewc4R3I4k-GN3If4tzCpeVPEYELYABp69Nu1g_RMVqjOYqKNT_/s200/ScreenshotWin32_0031_Final.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Metals in shadow</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Imagine the DoF glints strobing</td></tr>
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<br />
Also holy clipped brightness values! How was the monitor configured on which this tone-mapping was agreed upon? A few blown highlights outdoors and, far more significantly, severely crushed shadows inside; you're often entirely reliant on the phantom light your protagonist often emits onto the nearby dungeon walls. I ended up pushing the brightness up a few notches, although there is no proper gamma setting in-game so any slight improvement in the blacks also makes blown highlights more common - I could find no satisfactory setting and literally the only screenshot with the default brightness is the one immediately above from the very first dungeon.<br />
<br />
There are other areas of taking a visual step forward only for it to lead to inconsistent results. The rather mechanical facial animation of the earlier games are gone and we enter the era of modern BioWare. Not as bad as Andromeda's "automated animation while management failed to schedule any time to hand-tweak the output" but the higher fidelity certainly pushes towards uncanny in a way the previous games didn't. There may also be an element of so many returning characters, with their previous visual representation so fresh in my mind. Playing the games back to back, it's striking - initially I almost wanted to look away to enjoy the vocal performances without the distraction (before getting mostly used to it and then missing seeing face close-ups at all in the many dialogue scenes where the camera doesn't even zoom in).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">DAI "default" Hawke</td></tr>
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBJFcJe5bOJ9BjSCojwnM5OvzYJ9tqAWUOiS9yjzP1UMrG79LNsFYs8HcWktG92l01cqivUsXwWOGZe5JM7YbunZvzRgFh3N2JE9y58s51uo38TnqubsjXVi7jAa7TtMjPRzuOqZhRG0Tb/s3840/ScreenshotWin32_0009_Final.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBJFcJe5bOJ9BjSCojwnM5OvzYJ9tqAWUOiS9yjzP1UMrG79LNsFYs8HcWktG92l01cqivUsXwWOGZe5JM7YbunZvzRgFh3N2JE9y58s51uo38TnqubsjXVi7jAa7TtMjPRzuOqZhRG0Tb/s200/ScreenshotWin32_0009_Final.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My attempt at a custom job</td></tr>
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8Wq21NAFlueRjqSCJjuYrdb0JKh7H9jocM2oQIO_f5KVZIUV8joHofC-Ke09hmVOpLuqGIpSK2I6gQkTydIc2LMKDXDnjxKosTXxco6PXQXz7gL5LFA62ZQE1KyXwONLMdsf666uDzhLL/s3200/Screenshot20190227194110798.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8Wq21NAFlueRjqSCJjuYrdb0JKh7H9jocM2oQIO_f5KVZIUV8joHofC-Ke09hmVOpLuqGIpSK2I6gQkTydIc2LMKDXDnjxKosTXxco6PXQXz7gL5LFA62ZQE1KyXwONLMdsf666uDzhLL/s200/Screenshot20190227194110798.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My near-default Hawke in DA2</td></tr>
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<br />
The technical chops of the new engine are clear (at the cost of GPU requirements per pixel rendered) and despite the tone-mapping issues, the lighting and material system does a great job of bringing the scenery up to where other Forstbite Engine games can reach. But the move to more realistic skin shaders is possibly going away from where I think BioWare have traditionally done so well - the painted portraits in Baldur's Gate right up to Dragon Age 2's very stylish designs (going as far as to lock the party visuals and heavily push the default look for Hawke, same as had been done for Shepard in Mass Effect). This series playthrough, I'd gone with a basically stock Hawke (modding in the option to tweak a few things but generally sticking to that iconic face you got from selecting the default) and then seeing what BioWare put in Inquisition as the default Hawke: that's really not an aged version of the previous protagonist's facial features. Thinking more closely about how I couldn't really make a custom character that looked like Hawke, it's not just the lacking options - you simply can't create a more cartoonish face from Dragon Age 2 in Inquisition's more realistic rendering palette.<br />
<br />
It's worth remembering that this title spanned the console generations (also releasing on PS360) so was always going to straddle the visual expectations of both and Frostbite is a lot fancier today - yet more reasons for a full trilogy remaster for the upcoming consoles. The stories here are worth another stab at; the voice performances may need to be augmented (especially if Dragon Age 2 is to be expanded to a full-length middle chapter in the saga) but are still extremely good; and there's the kernel of some extremely good visual flair here (especially if slightly reworked towards a cohesive, less realistic, style that spanned the series).<br />
<br />
<h3>
When 'all things to all players' fails</h3>
Dragon Age 2 felt like it streamlined the RPG mechanics and removed busy-work; Inquisition adds extra busy-work like the "ping" button to reveal resources/<wbr></wbr>loot while removing strategic choices like manually assigning character base attributes to customise a build. Ability trees have been simplified to fit the limit of only being able to hotkey eight active abilities for any character (including an 'ultimate' ability), similar to how some MMOs have streamlined their abilities in recent years and removing the need for large hotbars to play some of the most interesting classes.<br />
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A cavalcade of secondary systems have been added (expanded crafting, exploration goals, a million different progress bars, etc) so a desire to cut back on old systems makes sense. Players only have so much mental bandwidth to consider each system and their potential interactions. You can see where every decision comes from, but when put together it often feels like it doesn't lead to a great final experience and certainly doesn't flow from the previous games.<br />
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The tactical view returns, the PC UI does not. But it's not the Origins tactical view that allows playing the game as if it was an Infinity Engine game and it barely feels like it fits the more action-oriented combat modelled on Dragon Age 2. As a continued progression into only adding the merest facade of PC niceties, the ability tooltips now fail to actually provide details of what anything does (hover over the toolbar to get the name of an ability and literally nothing more). On such a large project, creating a PC UI seems like it would have been a reasonable task.<br />
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When you're using a mouse, so many of the menus require you to drill down into a new layer to edit something rather than having edit buttons to switch stuff at the level of a list of items. I spent quite a while getting comfortable with both keyboard and controller support. Unfortunately you have to exit to the main menu to change between them so hotswapping is out of the question - I feel like a lot of us who played Battlefield from the early PC days got good at quickly migrating from on-foot keyboard to a stick or pad for vehicles and, despite the technical challenges to providing the correct UI, more games should expect people to dynamically move between them.<br />
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Inquisition is clearly built primarily for controllers (even with the 8 "face button" actions not being as nice a fit as most action games manage). The movement with WASD feels clunky (once you rebind the comically outdated keyboard turning default); the auto-attack from Dragon Age 2 feels severely scaled back and no longer automatically deals with facing/<wbr></wbr>collision/<wbr></wbr>movement as elegantly; the menus are actually slower without keyboard shortcut keys that are bound on a pad to a quick press while a menu is open; and on and on. But what eventually got me to stick to keyboard was the (patched in after release) Unsheathe button - if you're exploiting unlimited fast stealth* then you need your weapons out. Normally you'd ping or jump quite often to ensure the cooldown never detects you're out of combat, otherwise you're stuck having to hunt a new mob to initiate infinite stealth off. Not so on keyboard, where you can return to a combat stance without swinging an attack (which breaks stealth and so ends you unlimited stealth). Without this, I might say gamepad is the better option on PC but, as with so many things in this game, it feels like you're always being denied the best solution.<br />
<br />
<h3>
An open world filled with stuff</h3>
I was almost 25 hours into my playthrough of Inquisition when I gave up on the slow mount speed (with inability to pick up crafting materials or ping for points of interest) and exploited being able to get unlimited stealth* with a speed-boost dagger to make running faster than mounted travel. It's a symptom of the world being too large and the traversal options feeling too limited. The only real downside is the mount system despawns your party while sprinting means they regularly teleport in front of you as you sprint around.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
* A rogue's Skirmisher upgraded Flank Attack, when it connects, puts you into a stealth mode that's not got a duration timer as long as you don't attack afterwards; Lost in the Shadows upgrade means even running through enemies doesn't reveal you. Mages can beeline for the Ring of Doubt to get stealth. Stealth means creeping to get the mats for the crafting of a 1.75x speed-boosting Masterwork weapon. Warriors on PC may want to replicate this combat speed (that is possible with the unmodded game for two classes so is bordering on not even a cheat) via <a href="https://www.nexusmods.com/dragonageinquisition/mods/1461" target="_blank">mods</a> or just switch to a party member of a different class for traversal.</blockquote>
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This is an impressively huge world (even cut into many zones), especially coming directly from the very restrained Dragon Age 2. But sometimes impressing and being readable are at odds with each other. It's impressive to not know where the edge of a player-explorable area is - a potentially infinite world - but that lack of readability makes it hard to efficiently explore. Earlier games showed you on the map that you'd reached the edge of the traversable area; Inquisition puts cliffs (looking just like the ones you can climb) or some rare invisible walls in the way rather than letting you understand the space as a floorplan. The corridor linearity of those zones and dungeons in previous games gave the feeling of a space without the navigational hurdle of actually working out how to get between any two locations on what looks to be a huge open expanse.<br />
<br />
When you're constructing an RPG out of a more open world design, you start to hit those pain points that the previous Dragon Age campaigns had rarely encountered. <i>"Here's a big huge Dwarven door that I've previously found another of unlocked on this map by collecting the draw-the-star puzzles. I'm level 4ish as this is one of the areas you can unlock very early on. Nothing in the game indicates why this doorway (marked as if it is a cave and currently showing there are things for a quest I'm currently on inside) is something I should ignore and come back to later."</i> The quest markers are accurate, the quest objectives are absolutely inside but you need to be level 16, far later in the game, to unlock a different quest that unlocks this particular doorway. You need to look that up on a wiki or forum, thankfully now filled with hints from players who've already done everything.<br />
<br />
We can go back to some of the early impressions of the game, where completionists (used to the previous campaigns and doing all the quests in a zone) just burned out on the very first large zone unlocked and the endless minor quests with little to not flavour. One of the things a chatty party offers designers is the option to add barks to suggest heading back to base (and trigger some more plot development). Huge open worlds require a lot more careful planning of how they introduce and guide the player to everything. There are a lot of points where the previous games had offered a clear map of the dungeon with which to navigate while the open spaces in Inquisition lead to a completely different way to parse traversal and it's hard to not pine for the old ways when you're trying to work out how to jump up a cliff to get to the collectable thing that's <i>probably</i> in reach.<br />
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The rewards at the end of the new collectathons also leave a sour taste. <i>"I can't wait for Solas to have a big speech back at base about all those shards we collected and the Pride demon we took down once the final door unlocked in the zone that's basically just there to give you doors to feed the collected items into that gets introduced as important at the very start of the game."</i> There is no follow-up dialogue or quest; no narrative reward for finding all the shards. An achievement pings when you cross the final door. The same total lack of fanfare occurred when I helped Solas with 10 stabilising widgets and got given a location of a standard (high level) rift closure that was "special" & "worth investigating" in the mission text but not in any real dialogue or narrative conclusion; not even an achievement dinged for that companion quest. I'm left wondering if this is still a BioWare RPG with so much less signature BioWare narrative tied to progression. Worse, I wonder if there is actually less good stuff or I just feel like that because it's watered down by so much more filler? Looking at hours played, Inquisition would need at least as many character moments and narrative developments as all three of the previous campaigns I'd played through to compare, simply due to just how many hours it takes to complete all the quests here.<br />
<br />
Developers can say <a href="https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-03-13-shards-side-quests-and-dlc-a-mini-inquisition-with-the-boss-of-dragon-age" target="_blank">"just don't engage with it"</a> about the less strongly-narrative content but the game design doesn't flag that there will be no payoff to the narrative setup they wrote to start the quest lines so how do you know what to ignore? Also how often have BioWare killed off a character if players failed to engage with their optional quests in the last decade so it's not exactly unreasonable that players have been trained to exhaust the quests and even dialogue trees (even asking borderline transphobic questions just in case it's vital to some progression that Krem gets asked something that shows you've got no clue) to try and avoid missing some critical but optional path. Dragon Age is a series where the fan parlance discusses "hardened" and "softened" characters over the arc of the entire narrative to track potential changes to character attitudes and what that means for where the story can go. In 2019, we know a new Dragon Age is coming and will almost certainly import the world state from the Dragon Age Keep (the online world state checker/editor).<br />
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The real killer I felt on this playthrough, during which I used a mod to turn the real-time waitathon mechanics off (instantly finishing quests on the "war table"), was how the large open spaces and walking round to chat were broken up by so many trips to trigger a text-dump "mission" on a glorified map you can only access by running to an area (with no fast-travel point just outside) in your base area. Timers making sure you don't play through the main missions or unlock new areas too quickly (even though there is already a currency that gates unlocking missions behind doing the less narrative content). And when you remove those blocks then the true absurdity becomes apparent: running from a companion spot to trigger a cut-scene and back to the map to start a "mission" you don't actually play that does what they suggested then immediately back to their location to trigger the continuation of the cut-scene.<br />
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<h3>
Going forward</h3>
We're approaching the end of this series on a bit of a downer there. To be clear, I very much enjoy Dragon Age as a series and Inquisition as a bit-too-Skyrim-y big-budget entry in that series. If I didn't care about the characters (new and old) then I wouldn't be so invested in wanting more character moments. The technical issues (some of which we might generously call "era appropriate real-time rendering limitations") and stylistic choices along with the zone readability and collectathon issues stand to hinder some truly lovely spaces that could be filled with excellent gameplay and stories. It's the gap to greatness that makes me feel like Dragon Age should get another chance - just like Mass Effect 1 just needs the combat and inventory stuff reworked or Mass Effect 2 deserved a better ending. All of this modern BioWare era feels like it's so close to something not just extremely special but timeless. Nothing is perfect but some things stand out, even ten years later.<br />
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The first two big Inquisition DLCs - a dungeon and new zone - are very similar to the base game and if there's something this game wasn't desperate for it's even more content (providing more lore that BioWare will have to assume many players don't know about in the next game). The capstone Trespasser DLC however: a lot of my concerns with Inquisition actually felt like they were improved significantly, so the team were already moving in a good direction. We now know <a href="https://kotaku.com/the-past-and-present-of-dragon-age-4-1833913351" target="_blank">the next project from that team got cancelled or rebooted with the loss of the project lead</a> so the future is less certain. One thing the teaser (which was for the new project) did make clear is that the narrative hooks at the end of Inquisition are definitely the jumping off point for the next game.<br />
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It seems likely that next game will arrive at some point on a new generation of consoles. So we still have some time to wait. Luckily there are four campaigns here that are very worth playing through.<br />
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Plug: why not help me justify spending over 200 hours replaying old games recently and writing up my thoughts by *jangling tip jar* <a href="https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=18687189">becoming a patron</a>.Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-72587985269248676392019-03-29T15:19:00.000+00:002019-03-29T15:19:08.051+00:00Dragon Age(d): 10 Years LaterA decade after the first Mass Effect was released, <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2017/01/playing-mass-effect-2-today.html">I went back to the series</a> to see how it held up. In the same vein, it's been almost 10 years since we first got to step into <u>the</u> <u>D</u>ragon <u>A</u>ge <u>s</u>etting (yes, <i>Thedas</i>) and I've just completed a full (all available quests in a single run) end-<wbr></wbr>to-<wbr></wbr>end replay of each major campaign in the series (Origins, Awakening, 2, Inquisition). Two months well spent.<br />
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Extremely broadly, Origins [~45 hours] and the full expansion Awakening [~20 hours] brought BioWare back towards their Infinity Engine early prime, right down to the interface on PC (which allows for an overhead camera for tactical decisions) and real-time with pause combat, all while retaining the more modern cinematic presentation and focus on character relationships (the prototypes for which started in Baldur's Gate and have become increasingly prominent in the more recent BioWare oeuvre).<br />
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The rushed full sequel, Dragon Age 2 [~35 hours], completely drops the tactical perspective (and PC-only interface) while retaining most of the mechanics and narrative focus. It doesn't feel great to click through 720p console UIs on a 4K PC and the budget constraints are everywhere, but it's a reasonably tight RPG due to the limited scope (not as compact as Awakening but also not feeling like an expansion) - the updated engine may be the same tech under the hood but the new UI does give it a clean feel, as does the forced closer camera and renderer tweaks. DA2 introduced many quality of life tweaks (a button to run to & auto-<wbr></wbr>collect loot is huge) that make going back to Origins and Awakening a bit of an ask, much like going back to Mass Effect 1, but also it's hard to not applaud how much the first game got extremely right.<br />
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Finally, Inquisition [over 100 hours] went big (budget) and tried to please everyone: constructing the largest campaign by some margin (and unfortunately unlocking a lot of the MMO-y fetch quests early on, which turned off some completionist players); a tactical view returns while moving towards more of an action combat style (somewhat negating the value of the perspective, which also can no longer be used to play the rest of the game); generally more MMO-y sensibilities for side quests and map layout abound; gearing all party members came back (missing in DA2); but goodbye spending attribute points when levelling up. The new rendering engine (Frostbite) was also a radical departure and in 2019, I can't say I'm totally convinced the massively higher requirements (per pixel rendered) justifies the visual upgrade (clearly a more modern approach to materials and shaders, but plagued with aliasing issues you can't brute-force around yet at 4K & the new tech had teething issues with animations, which you can also see striking Andromeda several years later).<br />
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<h3>
Start at the beginning...</h3>
Jumping into Dragon Age Origins, <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/03/good-enough-meets-extremely-fast.html">it's not doing badly for a game from 2009</a> (that probably only had a mid-tier budget for EA at the time - especially as a game that started out development before the BioWare acquisition). No one was trying to make this within a crowd-funded budget, even if CRPGs aren't known for bleeding edge visuals. The one thing that you do have to live with is that the PC interface was never intended for 4K screens, certainly not for beyond-4K internal resolutions which clean up any light shader aliasing.<br />
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The classic Infinity Engine games it harkens back to have all had their re-releases in more recent years that have basically fixed up their interfaces to work at higher resolutions but Origins is new enough to not get that work and also didn't have the best modding options so it doesn't have the fan-made UI overhaul of a Bethesda game. There is a mod to change the font sizes, which also boosts some of the UI boxes to take up the full screen and basically makes it something you can live with but it's not the best experience. Like Mass Effect 1, it feels ripe for a remake (<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2019/02/shooting-into-february-2019.html">Resident Evil 2 style</a>) that retains the character and progression while rethinking some design decisions and updating the narrative details towards modern expectations.<br />
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It initially felt strange to play a "modernised" attempt at "Baldur's Gate, but without the D&D license", now we've had so many teams making explicitly retro RPGs (eg Pillars of Eternity) that are takes on those Infinity Engine games. There have always been other WRPG series, like (Divine) Divinity, that never totally left the classic mould, but Origins feels like it comes from a less certain time where BioWare knew they wanted to modernise a classic design but weren't quite sure what that meant. 2009 was before a consensus formed on what modern audiences wanted from their retro-compatible WRPG while in 2019 you can't throw a stone without hitting a crowdfunded RPG directly evoking those classic games.<br />
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Despite offering the classic perspective that removes the roof and offers great tactical control in battle, I quickly locked to the closer 3rd person view to enjoy the skyboxes and character details anywhere outside the most hectic of battles. It's not the up close shooter that Mass Effect always was, but there is the extra layer of immersion when the camera gets down towards character eye level. The basic programmable team AI, ranking abilities and setting preconditions to activate, actually did just enough to allow me to mainly play my character and let them get on with it (again, reducing reliance on the overhead view that I'd originally used to play the entire game). One of the more amusing defaults (which sticks throughout the series) is keyboard turning - WASD doesn't include strafe options unless you rebind it. For a series that increasingly aimed for fluidity with a controller, it feels extremely dated to default to the old MMO standard that was widely derided even back when WoW launched in 2004.<br />
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But outside of the perspective, everything feels just like the classic BioWare WRPGs from a previous era. Yes, cynically this can be viewed as trying to make a new D&D setting without the license (the same way Mass Effect builds a sci-fi setting without the Star Wars license) but the world is rich enough to support it. You travel an overworld map engaging in random battles between the detailed (fake magical middle ages) rural & urban quest hubs and the more combat heavy dungeons. As you play, you collect companions and, in the modern style, decide who to party with and eventually do affinity quests with. Banter is on tap no matter who you bring along and sometimes new dialogue options unlock due to who you bring along on a quest. The scale is epic and nations may rise or fall based on your decisions while most of the actual quests retain a very human scale (even surrounded by demons and the rest of the fantasy accoutrements).<br />
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I really appreciated how much was added with a whole new cast of companions within the shorter Awakening campaign - fleshing out concepts and themes from the main campaign while still being a meaty narrative itself. After Origins concludes with the definitive defeat of the Big Bad, there could have been a hole in the expansion but it's filled well; even if BioWare then completely drops the ball and have to plagiarise their own work during DA2's DLC to set up a new main antagonist for Inquisition (it's not like BioWare don't resurrect characters you can optionally kill elsewhere in the series). The other Origins DLC chapters are far more slight, adding [companion] backstory (some with heavy location reuse) and an ultimately disposable capping story in 1 to 2 hour micro-<wbr></wbr>campaign chunks. Even these least satisfying blocks were something I enjoyed though - at no point does the storytelling feel like it lands totally flat.<br />
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However, replaying it now, the Person of Mass Destruction trope feels so so tired; not helped by it being a core theme for the entire series. It was always tired, but it's not getting any better with age (mine or the game's). We can do better than a marginalised and brutalised subgroup who are actually as dangerous as the dominant group claims and so it's morally gray if they really do have to be exterminated (or lobotomised) the second they become "too dangerous". Considering the real world oppression of people considered sub-human with super-<wbr></wbr>human strength etc "justifying" violence then we should expect more from these stories - this was a brand new setting, it could have been about anything. And Dragon Age loves to play within this trope, often being pretty inconsistent on how it plays things like Blood Mages in what seems like an attempt to let the player character choose a morality but often it just leads to NPC dialogue and choices that paint a deeply inconsistent tone and characterisation (even when the player tries to pick a consistent stance).<br />
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I'm not expecting Dragon Age 4 to come out and completely deconstruct the trope but it would be nice to step a bit away from the Templars vs Mages focus that is never far from the core of the series. In spots Origins and Awakening are probably actually the best the series is on this front, often because of how self-contained many of the chapters feel and how you play part of an outsider cult. I started out as a mage for this playthrough (one of the several opening origin acts that give the subtitle) and was pleasantly surprised whenever it got referenced back through the main campaign. Clearly that's a lot of work, making many playable origin stories and then hooking them all into the main narrative, but it's possibly less work than is required in the sequels to hook in player choice events in the previous games. Throughout those origins and the wider game, there's some very smart reuse of locations; which brings us on to...<br />
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<h3>
Travelling to Kirkwall (not in Orkney)</h3>
Of all the Dragon Age campaigns, this feels like the one most in need of a critical reappraisal in 2019. Although by no means panned on release, DA2 did not get the same gushing praise that met the rest of the series and so is remembered as the weak middle chapter. There was a player backlash (to the production values? to the total focus on characters? to devs talking "diversity" in interviews?) and corresponding oscillation of DA2 super-fans pushing back but my recollection of 2011 was mainly of a muted reception and jokes about how the entire game took place in a single location with one (cave) dungeon because it was developed behind EA's back (in case it's unclear, part of the joke is how ridiculous that would be).<br />
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Coming directly from Origins and Awakening (we'll consider that long enough to be its own thing rather than "DLC" - much longer than the hour or so for each of the Origins DLC offerings and maybe half the length of Dragon Age 2) then it's extremely apparent that DA2 was pushed out the door not much more than a year after production started (that one isn't a joke). As I've commented on Mass Effect, BioWare can sometimes do a touch too much copy & paste with distinctive (and theoretically unique in the fiction of the game world) art assets but the constraints for making DA2 really push that into a whole new realm. As the devs have since said in interviews, asset reuse isn't the problem, it's the lack of smart reuse that quickly becomes apparent as you get deeper into DA2.<br />
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Reuse is meant to clone meshes or props, not lock a player into repeatedly walking the same 20m loop and telling them they're on an epic journey - if you don't look carefully then lots of trees do kinda look the same but near-<wbr></wbr>exact reuse at a floorplan scale is immediately uncanny to most players. It's an area where procgen or tileable block construction in the tools pipeline (eg Sucker Punch using hex tiles to rapidly assemble the inFamous map) can quickly help you bake variety into your floorplans (even without going full rogue-like procgen and randomising the elements for each user - just a tool for rapidly creating many similar but distinct floorplans); the absence of it is immediately obvious and disappointing. When you're going through cave after cave between narrative payloads then a varied skybox or surroundings helps offer something beyond the mechanics of combat to the player (<a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2017/10/guild-wars-1-halo-edition.html">just ask Bungie</a>).<br />
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The use of a single city with day/<wbr></wbr>night and several acts (progressing various things over several years, not unlike how some of the Origins areas are reused, especially showing partially destroyed variants) is great; I have always been a fan of attempting Warren Spector's idea of a One City Block RPG. But when the story calls for dozens of different caves and other areas, if you've only built two very distinctive cave layouts that have a few doorways that can be closed off to change the walking lines, it's too distinctive to work. Reuse happens everywhere else too, creating additional floors to areas that just copy floorplans which wouldn't layer on top of each other at all. There are probably fewer dungeon maps in the entire of DA2 than there are just random encounter maps in Origins, which is an easy thing to ding the game for and many reviewers did. Going back, I'm less annoyed by it (expectations are everything, I knew it was coming for a replay) but it's such an unforced and obvious error (of budget or planning).<br />
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The three acts tie DA2 together better than Origins, which generally lacked the feeling of structure that even Mass Effect achieved (around a similar broadly linear narrative structure with a meaty central chunk where several locations could be handled in any order + side-<wbr></wbr>quests for flavour which also created the feeling of non-linear choice). Once again, the production schedule unfortunately robs some of the feeling that this was a choice rather than just not being able to get any more done to make it feel sprawling. Things like the random side-quest drops that have no narrative hook and generic "thanks for returning this" barks when handed in feel like they could and should have been expanded to a proper dialogue or cut as busywork. I'm not convinced by the acquisition of invisible armour perks for the single item of clothing every companion wears (with a couple of new outfit unlocks for plot progression) in a game that's still very much about checking the loot that drops from combat and finding chests. Especially as this time through I knew I should just grab the armour sets for Hawke, so there was absolutely no dressing up or finding cute clothing combinations to be had.<br />
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The back-<wbr></wbr>to-<wbr></wbr>back nature of my playthrough meant I moved from not really liking Anders but enjoying Justice in Awakening to just straight up not really caring for new Anders. It's a shame that I still don't really appreciate the arc of such a core character to this story but there will always be a companion or two whose motives and arc isn't all you want of it. I think there are better ways of doing the righteous terrorist/<wbr></wbr>freedom fighter but I'm not sure I could do better while still weighed down with the Person of Mass Destruction trope. My joy at being propelled through the events of the story with most of the characters outweighed what reservations I had around certain plot devices or tropes, which isn't to say I never cringed at a scene or few.<br />
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Some of the writing around romances feels of an era we're trying to escape (especially setting up a binary of either completely naive or very promiscuous). Ultimately it gets immature-<wbr></wbr>attempting-<wbr></wbr>maturity in spots, much like when <a href="https://youtu.be/bmHoo7JZfiQ" target="_blank">the Mass Effect writing falls down</a>. A lack of outfit changes doesn't help when characters go into melee combat with little more armour than a Dead or Alive character. The entire "hardened" romance chains, gifts to buy affection, etc (which continue here barely changed from Origins) comes over as from an era before serious criticism had really pushed progressive teams to try to tighten up their attempts at what that messages to players. Some choices are still up in the air: should all romanceable characters be implicitly bisexual (DA2) or risk the Mass Effect 2 issue (where the Paramour romance options demanded a straight protagonist) by defining sexualities more concretely for party members (and having limited bandwidth to write full romance dialogue chains). I can't say I preferred where Inquisition went the other way, but I would like at least some range of queer representation and for all characters who are attracted to either Hawke to be more clearly bisexual during a single playthrough. There sure are a lot of bisexual men in this series who give little indication of that unless you play two complete playthrough with different genders.<br />
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I don't actually remember liking DA2 back in 2011 nearly as much as I did on this replay. Maybe that's playing Origins and Awakening with the closer camera so not being a shocking change or about better expectations for what DA2 was trying to do with a smaller scope than Origins. But it's real good. My issues with Mass Effect 2 around forgetting the impending universe-ending events and doing a smaller character piece are less of an issue here (that said, both ending are still kinda a mess in spots). Thanks to how Origins resolved, there's space for a new protagonist to have a more reactive story based around a cast of characters over time in a single city state (where the Mass Effect series didn't have that change with a single protagonist for the original trilogy despite being just as happy to actually kill off the protagonist!) and DA2 really pulls that off in 2019. It's not unparalleled storytelling but it's pretty good where I found it.<br />
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After 3000 words, we're going to take a break before wrapping this up. In part two of this blog series, it's time to dive into by far the longest Dragon Age campaign to date. The Inquisition, teased throughout the framing of DA2's story, takes centre stage...<br />
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Finally, if you've been enjoying this blog for a while, why not help me justify spending over 200 hours replaying old games recently and writing up my thoughts by *jangling tip jar* <a href="https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=18687189">becoming a patron</a>.Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-38439316325460270472019-03-15T13:21:00.000+00:002019-03-15T13:21:51.734+00:00Good Enough Meets Extremely FastI've been <a href="https://twitter.com/Shivoa/status/1104951644972814336" target="_blank">playing a lot of games in the last month</a> that are getting on for a decade old. Some of that is for a longer post (series of posts? my notes, not yet having finished the final Dragon Age game, are 3500 words) but I wanted to do something shorter about how these games (that exported their artist assets expecting most users to play them at 720p) stand up rather well on modern systems. There may be a touch of riffing on <a href="https://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2019/03/rendering-doesnt-matter-anymore.html" target="_blank">this recent blog post</a> too.<br />
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Almost exactly a year ago <a href="https://blog.shivoa.net/2018/03/the-asset-fidelity-arms-race.html">I was asking similar questions to that linked post, but about the asset fidelity arms race</a> and the last decade of progress measured in pure asset comparisons (that is, taking eg a 2011 game and comparing it to today by rendering both assets with roughly equivalent to today's real-time renderers). Playing through this series of games from 2008 to 2011 in quick succession was a great visualisation of how those old assets hold up in 2019 with 4K60 output.<br />
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None of the screenshots that I'm embedding here are doing anything fancy like injecting alternative shaders or swapping out the stock assets with higher poly community mods or more detailed textures. Dragon Age 2 has the "High Resolution Texture Pack" (advertised as for GPUs with a massive 1GB of VRAM) which is an optional official download on Origin but I'm pretty sure that was released on the same day at the base game (and is official anyway). Everything was captured looking for a ~60fps experience so it's not a DeadEndThrills approach of turning everything up to 11 even if it broke the framerate and then capturing and downsampling purely for the photography. These are faithful captures of the internal framebuffer for the game as played.<br />
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If you click through to the screenshots in this post, you'll notice some unusual resolutions involved because today DSR/VSR (super-sampling at the driver level - exposing fake higher resolutions to any game and then downsampling for output to the actual screen) is an absolutely stock technique. Something like a modern GTX1070 (my card will turn 3 years old next quarter - so not even that modern) has more than enough power to turn on any existing AA technique (MSAA hadn't totally died to deferred renderers in this era; FXAA etc had started to be imported from the consoles) and then also boost beyond 4K to help control some of the shader aliasing. The shaders aren't that complex so there is plenty of performance to play with and often no one is getting fancy with HDR to really explode everything (compared to games around 2015, which seem like they're going to be a dark period of high shader complexity but not great management of artefacts & defects in edge cases; not to mention not having good enough temporal anti-aliasing yet while most everyone had migrated to deferred where MSAA isn't viable).<br />
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Despite expecting most users to see these decade-old games on much lower resolution screens, the push around this era was for good enough textures for up-close inspection. What you get when the textures are good enough up close is that you've now got some decently detailed textures even for 4K output at medium-distance. I'm not going to say all of these games are perfect, as you do clearly get some muddy visuals even in the mid-ground in some places (especially stuff like a large flat repeating floor texture etc). But it holds up surprisingly well and even the primitive dynamic shadows are often so primitive as to be easy enough to ignore (if you can't brute force it via poking at config files and demanding the GPU just throws a GB at huge shadow maps). The several years of continued development from where Half-Life 2 (including Episode 2 refresh) had left us in terms of getting a reasonably coherent result while juggling multiple different systems (this is before a unified PBR push) is often impressive. You can nitpick the results, just as you can often point to comically low polygon density you'd not see today (outside of maybe indie games and even those often push their polygon budget quite well), but it's only a few spots rather than the entire scene looking out of place on a modern system.<br />
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While clearly miles from photo-realism, there is enough detail to know what everything is meant to be and for things like a poster or sign to get close to being the actual poster or sign without lashes of artefacts or having to use a special rendering technique to achieve it (here I'm thinking of how well Doom 3 did the in-world UI stuff back in 2004 being the exception even today). There is nowhere near the level of detritus you would see in a real world, but there is enough to make it look lived in. Those props look close enough to what they're meant to represent that we're not in the situation of years previous where it was a muddy texture and often a mess of polygons that you had to work at to understand once looking at them at a far higher resolution than was originally intended. There are enough assets that there is cruft on a desk rather than only the props required for the interactions and one fake bottle to avoid the artifice totally collapsing once interactable objects started to get glowing highlights or arrows above them.<br />
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Also the lack of PBR in this era for things like human(oid) characters means the artists seemed to be more free to push the more cartoon-y stylish approach (before you defaulted to starting out with a skin shader with sub-surface scattering and worked from there) which certainly helps avoiding the uncanny valley. Some of the animation systems from this era are clearly reaching towards a fluidity the tech did not make easy and the animators were not given the budget to hand-tweak them to perfection from whatever performance capture they may have started with. I'd say it does show an "emotive gap" from looking at the puppetry onscreen trying to convey subtle emotions via expressions but often not quite getting there - but even today this doesn't seem like a totally solved issue and I find the difference from studio to studio is far more significant than simply looking at the progression of technology. Around this era of games then we've got stand-out stuff from Naughty Dog showing you could do that stuff really well with the technology back then.<br />
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I am still energised by rendering questions. The introduction of real-time ray tracing is such an exciting time to be thinking about the next generation of engine designs (and even just what the new console generation will bring in terms of a baseline performance we can expect many many millions of users to have reasonably affordable access to). Even the more invisible things like a continuing focus on code quality and reliability engineering, with several studios talking about how they're looking at using Rust to really enforce higher coding standards (banning some patterns of design as too risky, which the Rust borrow checker enforces at compile time) in their work.<br />
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How do I feel going back a decade and enjoying all these games that still look good enough today (thanks to the extremely fast GPUs we've got)? Well it makes me think about what we're working on today and the hardware we'll be able to use to replay it in another decade. What slight visual deficiencies we'll be able to brute force around; just how detailed things might look on 8K TV panels with amazing contrast/brightness options (and maybe some of that Deep Learning algorithms tweaking the game output to enhance it without the horrible results from previous generations of "TV enhancements" to the input signal) or with VR headsets that sit us inside recreated 3D spaces and give us effectively even higher pixel counts (via head movements allowing us to be truly surrounded in a scene and 4K VR panels).<br />
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Games have longer shelf lives than ever before and can continue to grow even long after we've stopped actively working to develop them. We should probably think about making sure all our sliders can be unlocked to go up to 12 so that players in ten years can continue to poke the settings up as they get the hardware to run it.Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6551141715326137723.post-25942759239758451742019-02-14T12:29:00.000+00:002019-09-17T19:33:28.664+01:00Updating Rust NightlySo Rust has a pretty usable nightly build. Actually it has an extremely usable nightly build that also keeps a huge set of powerful features siloed off from the stable branch (<a href="https://doc.rust-lang.org/unstable-book/the-unstable-book.html" target="_blank">behind feature gates</a> so you can turn on just the stuff you want to play with rather than being dumped into a thousand things that have been deemed to not actually be ready for prime-time yet). That attracts a lot of users to keep on nightly rather than stable (or the beta that is one update ahead of stable but also lacks nightly's features and so is the mid-ground no one uses unless they really believe in helping test the next stable for the public good). However, nightly isn't perfect(ly stable) and right now is <a href="https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/rust-toolstate/" target="_blank">a great example</a> of where the update tools feel like they come up short vs the usability that is visible everywhere else for the Rust language ecosystem.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">>rustup update</span><br />
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<i>"error: some components unavailable for download: 'clippy', 'rls', 'rustfmt'".</i><br />
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As primarily a user of VSCode for Rust (also sometimes a JetBrains IDE, although the Community Edition plugin lacks any debugging feature so I'll revert to VSCode to debug) then the RLS isn't really optional. It is good that the updater tells me after finding that some of the components I have installed in the toolchain I asked to update are missing from last night's build. However, it does not then go on to give me any information about how I can get from however old my last installed version was to the last good nightly build.<br />
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<a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@shivoa/101590111102601917" target="_blank">As best I can work out</a>, I have to <a href="https://mexus.github.io/rustup-components-history/x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.html" target="_blank">browse to a site tracking the nightly builds by component</a> and then tell <span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">rustup</span> to update to the date last shown to have built correctly. But that's not actually the end of this story (which would be a bit of lack of useful info but not totally weird to not get that added info directly on the command line).<br />
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The behaviour of <span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">rustup update <dated nightly version></span> is not to update the nightly toolchain install already on your system but to install a second toolchain (the help does make it clear that you are effectively just running <span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">rustup toolchain install</span> when you provide a toolchain argument). So now I've got a second toolchain installed with the last dated good build I took from that tracking site, except it's a default install so those optional components that I needed and weren't available in last night's nightly? Those didn't automatically get added to my new toolchain install (and for my use, they are not optional - if I could live without them then I could just force the update and it would wipe over the old stuff with the partially working current nightly). So now I have to go through the process of requesting those components be added.<br />
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None of this is the end of the world. Many other toolchain ecosystems are no better (and some are worse) when it comes to updating. But there is clearly room for improvement here and this is one of those pain points where a new Rust dev who is not used to any of this may not even really understand what's going on (after someone told them nightly was totally fine and just install that). Either they can't update or, worse, they end up with a VSCode IDE that has no RLS (and no way to get a corresponding RLS as that part of the nightly build is broken right now) which means it's not behaving like they expect it to.<br />
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A typical dev who is asking to update their nightly build probably wants to get the latest nightly that has all the components working that they have installed. That seems like a safe default to assume, maybe with a Y/N prompt after the error message rather than silently updating (if we are to be cautious). Leaving them with a potentially weeks or months old nightly (where they're potentially behind stable - not that hard for sporadic Rust users with the 6 week cadence of new stable versions and reasons to prefer nightly) because last night's build didn't work (and no easy way to update without just starting to install a totally new toolchain from scratch) does not seem like a suitable behaviour.<br />
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<i>Edit, July 2019, to add: This has now been patched so the updater at least explains that you should search for the last good build with the components you want installed</i><i><i> (including a link to the site where you can do that)</i> and then add that dated build. It doesn't offer to do that work for you automatically but it does provide example commands to explain exactly how you'd do that. Thanks Rust, always improving.<br />
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September 2019: This has now been <a href="https://github.com/rust-lang/rustup.rs/pull/1997" target="_blank">completely resolved</a>.</i>Jess 'Shivoa' Birchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14418591292866802372noreply@blogger.com0