Personal Computer Game News

[king3pj]

AC: Syndicate PC specs revealed

http://blog.ubi.com/assassins-creed-syndicate-pc-specs/

Not that I'm saying this is a bad thing but I think it's interesting that the minimum specs are lower than AC Unity.

The CPU and GPU hardware required for Syndicate are both lower than Unity by a decent margin.

Edit: That is actually true for both the minimum and recommended specs.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Likely due to better optimization. I hope Ubisoft learned a LOT from the Unity disaster.

 

[yourbeliefs]

In case anyone wasn't aware, Call of Duty 12 came out today. And in what is sadly becoming all too common in this day and age, the PC version is an absolute mess. Some have called it "The Next Arkham Knight" but it should be noted that the PC version was developed in house, as opposed to AK which was outsourced to what was apparently a group of monkeys in front of computers.

Video Demonstration. NSFW due to language, but should be noted that the guy has a very high powered PC.

http://www.polygon.com/2015/11/6/9681392/call-of-duty-black-ops-3-pc-issues-broken

Update: Wow, this is REALLY a mess. There's no real memory management going on. People with 16 GB of RAM are getting out of memory warnings, and people with Titan cards (which have 16 GB of video RAM in them) are ALSO getting all their memory used up. I mean, nowadays having 4 GB of VRAM is considered fine. Having FOUR TIMES THAT filled is just insane. And also for some reason, various i5 processors are having problems as well.



I mean, I realize that CoD is bigger on consoles than it is PCs and it's not unexpected that they'd focus more on consoles than the PC version, but that's no excuse for putting out such an incredibly unoptimized product.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Fallout 4 has set a new record for most concurrent players on Steam (For a non-Valve Game.)

http://www.polygon.com/2015/11/10/9...t=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

I find this rather surprising. I mean, I get that this was a highly anticipated game, but when you have an open world game from Bethesda, a bug laden, unoptimized launch is about as predictable as the tides. You'd think that people would wise up to this and wait like a month before picking this game up. And I understand that some people just can't wait and will deal with the bugs, but you can get real game-breakers, and sometimes in trying to patch problems, you end up losing your progress, which has happened a few times. Of course, this is coming from the same guy who had Arkham Knight and Halo MCC on Day 1, so maybe I'm not one to talk, but like I said, a Bethesda game is basically destined to be a mess at launch.

 

[king3pj]

Fallout 4 has set a new record for most concurrent players on Steam (For a non-Valve Game.)

http://www.polygon.com/2015/11/10/9...t=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

I find this rather surprising. I mean, I get that this was a highly anticipated game, but when you have an open world game from Bethesda, a bug laden, unoptimized launch is about as predictable as the tides. You'd think that people would wise up to this and wait like a month before picking this game up. And I understand that some people just can't wait and will deal with the bugs, but you can get real game-breakers, and sometimes in trying to patch problems, you end up losing your progress, which has happened a few times. Of course, this is coming from the same guy who had Arkham Knight and Halo MCC on Day 1, so maybe I'm not one to talk, but like I said, a Bethesda game is basically destined to be a mess at launch.

Actually it sounds like it's pretty well optimized. People are reporting that the game scales pretty well on both high end and weaker hardware. Hell the minimum GPU is a 550Ti from 4.5 years ago. Not bad for a huge open world game considering the hardware that was required to run many other recent releases.

There are some bugs inherent to Bethesda games but I think a big part of that is the kind of games they are making. These games allow you to equip thousands of combinations of items in a huge open world.

There is no way for them to test every combination of items with every combination of character leveling in every location of the game. Sometimes they find out that if you have "helmet A" and you are carrying "weapon B" and you walk into a specific room everything goes to hell. Some things just aren't going to be discovered until the game is in the hands of the masses in this type of game.

Some of it is actually funny enough that I don't mind seeing it from time to time. Obviously I don't want to put up with game crashes, corrupted saves, or bugs that prevent me from finishing a mission but I can kind of forgive most things short of that.

Master Chief Collection was a different situation to me because the main reason I bought the game, multiplayer, didn't work. Arkham Knight was also a different situation because the performance and PC options were terrible. Since Fallout 4 appears to work and not have major performance issues on PC I wouldn't have an issue jumping in early on this one. I guess I'm just more willing to give a pass when we are talking about Bethesda's open world jank than the other problems we talked about.

The only reason I haven't already bought it is because I want to make sure I finally finish Arkham Knight before I get wrapped up in another massive game.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Fallout 4 sold (approximately) 1.2 million copies on Steam in 24 hours.

 

[king3pj]

Fallout 4 sold (approximately) 1.2 million copies on Steam in 24 hours.

That's very impressive for a AAA game on PC. The console numbers should be several times higher than that.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Actually it sounds like it's pretty well optimized. People are reporting that the game scales pretty well on both high end and weaker hardware. Hell the minimum GPU is a 550Ti from 4.5 years ago. Not bad for a huge open world game considering the hardware that was required to run many other recent releases.

There are some bugs inherent to Bethesda games but I think a big part of that is the kind of games they are making. These games allow you to equip thousands of combinations of items in a huge open world.

There is no way for them to test every combination of items with every combination of character leveling in every location of the game. Sometimes they find out that if you have "helmet A" and you are carrying "weapon B" and you walk into a specific room everything goes to hell. Some things just aren't going to be discovered until the game is in the hands of the masses in this type of game.

Some of it is actually funny enough that I don't mind seeing it from time to time. Obviously I don't want to put up with game crashes, corrupted saves, or bugs that prevent me from finishing a mission but I can kind of forgive most things short of that.

Master Chief Collection was a different situation to me because the main reason I bought the game, multiplayer, didn't work. Arkham Knight was also a different situation because the performance and PC options were terrible. Since Fallout 4 appears to work and not have major performance issues on PC I wouldn't have an issue jumping in early on this one. I guess I'm just more willing to give a pass when we are talking about Bethesda's open world jank than the other problems we talked about.

The only reason I haven't already bought it is because I want to make sure I finally finish Arkham Knight before I get wrapped up in another massive game.

Actually, things are not all happy for the PCGMR..

First off, the game is being metabombed..http://www.thejimquisition.com/2015/11/metabombed-fallout-4-is-vomit-trash/

Then there's the fact that Bethesda lied about frame rate capping. https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterra...hesda_should_not_be_allowed_to_get_away_with/

And finally, game speed is tied to frame rate. So if you have a higher frame rate, the game will run faster. Proof here. It may be hard to tell, but there's a FPS counter on the top left hand corner.



The first one I can tie to sour grapes (a lot of complaints have to do with gameplay as opposed to just people complaining about performance) but the other two really are just dumb. Gamers REALLY don't like being lied to, and tying speed to frame rate is just flat out dumb. A lot of people are pointing to the fact that they're using the same engine that was used for Skyrim, which was the same engine used for Morrowind (or at least just a modified version of it.) Hopefully these issues will be ironed out soon, especially that FPS/game speed.

 

[king3pj]

Actually, things are not all happy for the PCGMR..

First off, the game is being metabombed..http://www.thejimquisition.com/2015/11/metabombed-fallout-4-is-vomit-trash/

The whole "metabombed" thing is a non-issue for me. Metacritic is a useful website for quickly seeing an aggregate review score. The user reviews there have always been useless in my opinion though.

Then there's the fact that Bethesda lied about frame rate capping. https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterra...hesda_should_not_be_allowed_to_get_away_with/

This is technically true but I think the context of the tweet they are ripping apart is important for bringing some perspective into this conversation.

Basically Todd Howard was asked about differences in the PS4 and Xbox One version in an interview. His answer was that the game runs at 1080p and 30 frames per second on everything. Immediately after that story went live the internet went crazy thinking we had the same situation as Arkham Knight where the game was locked to 30 fps on PC for no reason.

The Bethesda twitter account put up this tweet to let people know that this didn't apply to PC which can obviously support a higher resolution and framerate than consoles.



The bottom line is that this isn't anything like Arkham Knight. The game isn't capped at 30 FPS and I don't think this was a malicious lie.

It sounds like VSYNC cannot be turned off without editing ini files. This means that the framerate won't go higher than the maximum framerate your monitor can display. If you have a 60Hz monitor like the vast majority of people you get a maximum of 60fps in game. If you have a more expensive, 144Hz monitor your maximum framerate goes up to 144fps.

This is something that they should fix and I'm sure they will. Some people don't like playing their games with VSYNC on and PC gamers should have the option not to.

I play most of my games with VSYNC enabled. VSYNC is a feature on PC that eliminates screen tearing by making your GPU put out 1 frame every time your monitor refreshes. I'm particularly sensitive to screen tearing to the point where I get motion sick in games where it is a problem. I also don't see the point of running my hardware at 100% use drawing more power and kicking out more heat to put out 300fps when my display can only output 60 fps.

This is one of those things that doesn't affect me but I hope it's fixed for those who prefer to play without VSYNC.

And finally, game speed is tied to frame rate. So if you have a higher frame rate, the game will run faster. Proof here. It may be hard to tell, but there's a FPS counter on the top left hand corner.

This one is an inexcusable bug that has to be fixed. Sure, 144Hz monitors are much rarer than 60Hz monitors but plenty of people with high end PC setups have them. Designing the physics engine to run at 60 fps even when they made the game capable of running at 144 fps doesn't make any sense. Fortunately this one is too obvious not to fix. Again, this doesn't affect those of us with 60Hz monitors but PC is supposed to be a highly customizable platform. You can't just cater to the most common setup on PC.

The first one I can tie to sour grapes (a lot of complaints have to do with gameplay as opposed to just people complaining about performance) but the other two really are just dumb. Gamers REALLY don't like being lied to, and tying speed to frame rate is just flat out dumb. A lot of people are pointing to the fact that they're using the same engine that was used for Skyrim, which was the same engine used for Morrowind (or at least just a modified version of it.) Hopefully these issues will be ironed out soon, especially that FPS/game speed.

 

[yourbeliefs]

In case anyone wasn't aware, Call of Duty 12 came out today. And in what is sadly becoming all too common in this day and age, the PC version is an absolute mess. Some have called it "The Next Arkham Knight" but it should be noted that the PC version was developed in house, as opposed to AK which was outsourced to what was apparently a group of monkeys in front of computers.

Video Demonstration. NSFW due to language, but should be noted that the guy has a very high powered PC.

http://www.polygon.com/2015/11/6/9681392/call-of-duty-black-ops-3-pc-issues-broken

Update: Wow, this is REALLY a mess. There's no real memory management going on. People with 16 GB of RAM are getting out of memory warnings, and people with Titan cards (which have 16 GB of video RAM in them) are ALSO getting all their memory used up. I mean, nowadays having 4 GB of VRAM is considered fine. Having FOUR TIMES THAT filled is just insane. And also for some reason, various i5 processors are having problems as well.



I mean, I realize that CoD is bigger on consoles than it is PCs and it's not unexpected that they'd focus more on consoles than the PC version, but that's no excuse for putting out such an incredibly unoptimized product.

Looks like Treyarch fixed the performance issues.

http://kotaku.com/black-ops-3s-pc-version-fixes-crippling-slowdown-issue-1742672260

 

[yourbeliefs]

Well this is a rather disturbing/sad bit of news..

Ever wonder how GMG gets all those great deals so close to release date, or why CdProjekt had issues with them selling the Witcher 3 for so cheap and declared that they weren't getting any $ from those sales? Well it looks like GMG may be like CD-Keys and resorts to grey market sources, which don't always have the best track record. 3 BIG publishers have declared that GMG is NOT an authorized retailer of their games, and most recently they pulled a MAJOR faux paus when various consumers were told that GMG would NOT be delivering them their Origin Keys for Battlefront in a timely manner. While GMG has had a decent reputation over time in that there's been very few instances of games being revoked via invalid/stolen keys, this definitely makes me feel rather wary of purchasing through them again, knowing that at any time my game may be pulled from my library.

More info here: https://www.reddit.com/r/GameDealsMeta/comments/3t0p9m/rgamedeals_and_greenmangaming/

 

[yourbeliefs]

Some more not so nice news..

Looks like Overkill (developers of PayDay 2) have embraced their whole evil microtransaction system and decided to make them even WORSE by adding Extra XP and Cash perks to those who purchase various skins. It's gotten so bad and crazy that the mods of the game's Steam community have gone on strike until Overkill tells them what is going on.

http://www.destructoid.com/overkill...actions-worse-cash-and-xp-boosts-320649.phtml

Also, remember that Fallout Beer that was being released in England only and how much of a bummer that was (depending on how big of a fan you were anyways?) Well it looks like us Americans didn't miss out on much. Laura Kate Dale mentioned that the beer isn't anything special in terms of flavor. It's literally the same regular Carlsberg beer except with Fallout stuff on it. And according to the various reviews on Amazon, it's clear that this was a very simple and tasteless (no pun intended) cash grab by the 2 companies.

 

[king3pj]

Well this is a rather disturbing/sad bit of news..

Ever wonder how GMG gets all those great deals so close to release date, or why CdProjekt had issues with them selling the Witcher 3 for so cheap and declared that they weren't getting any $ from those sales? Well it looks like GMG may be like CD-Keys and resorts to grey market sources, which don't always have the best track record. 3 BIG publishers have declared that GMG is NOT an authorized retailer of their games, and most recently they pulled a MAJOR faux paus when various consumers were told that GMG would NOT be delivering them their Origin Keys for Battlefront in a timely manner. While GMG has had a decent reputation over time in that there's been very few instances of games being revoked via invalid/stolen keys, this definitely makes me feel rather wary of purchasing through them again, knowing that at any time my game may be pulled from my library.

More info here: https://www.reddit.com/r/GameDealsMeta/comments/3t0p9m/rgamedeals_and_greenmangaming/

I don't know whether to believe this or not. The Reddit post says that GMG is not an authorized retailer for CD Proket Red or WB but both of those companies are listed as official retailers on GMG's website.

It should be noted that Activision is not on GMG's official retailer list even though they have been advertising this $40 price point for Black Ops 3.

Just last Friday I bought Fallout 4 from GMG with a 20% off promo. After reading that Reddit post I immediately felt bad about it. However, Bethesda is also listed as an official retail partner on GMG's website.

I think going toward my policy will be to only take advantage of GMG sales when the publisher is listed as an official retail partner. I guess I'm just more inclined to believe the website's partner list than a poster on Reddit.

Edit: EA is also not an official retail partner. That may explain the Battlefront issue. It's really shady that they are selling keys for games they aren't getting directly from the publisher. Bottom line, if it's not coming from an official retail partner don't buy it.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Well just because GMG says they're a partner doesn't mean they are. GMG also says that Ubisoft is one of their retail partners, but GMG isn't listed on Ubisoft's list of approved vendors.

I'm a little worried because now I wonder what will come of my GMG refund of Arkham Knight. Before reading this I would welcome getting store credit in lieu of a monetary refund, but now I'm not so sure. I may try and push for a monetary refund more now.

Hopefully this will get resolved soon. A GMG spokesperson tried to respond in that same thread, but apparently the answers weren't to their satisfaction and the account was banned.

 

[king3pj]

Well just because GMG says they're a partner doesn't mean they are. GMG also says that Ubisoft is one of their retail partners, but GMG isn't listed on Ubisoft's list of approved vendors.

I'm a little worried because now I wonder what will come of my GMG refund of Arkham Knight. Before reading this I would welcome getting store credit in lieu of a monetary refund, but now I'm not so sure. I may try and push for a monetary refund more now.

Hopefully this will get resolved soon. A GMG spokesperson tried to respond in that same thread, but apparently the answers weren't to their satisfaction and the account was banned.

That's just stupid. if they are going to make allegations about GMG they should allow them to respond. Banning them from the Reddit thread just hurts the thread's credibility.

I'm not saying GMG is in the right here. It seems like they are definitely doing some shady things. I would at least like to hear their explanation though.

 

[yourbeliefs]

That's just stupid. if they are going to make allegations about GMG they should allow them to respond. Banning them from the Reddit thread just hurts the thread's credibility.

I'm not saying GMG is in the right here. It seems like they are definitely doing some shady things. I would at least like to hear their explanation though.

It wasn't like that. They let GMG come on and explain, and the MODs requested that GMG show some proof that they're authorized sellers via some sort of contracts (with properly redacted info.) GMG refused, so the MODs banned the user. I think part of the reasoning too was that quite a bit of what they were saying come off as advertisement, as opposed to actual explanation as to what their deal was. The GMG guy is also on other parts of the thread as /u/GMG-PlayfireCS. It should also be noted that in that link I posted that the guy said that GMG was pulling out of /r/Gamedeals.

I think some of the gaming press is going to pick up on this and then we may get some more answers. I mean hell, the fact that numerous people aren't going to get their Battlefront Keys in time is newsworthy in and of itself (I luckily don't have that issue and received confirmation that my Xbox One copy shipped out.)

 

[king3pj]

I agree that we will probably get an official press release on a bigger gaming site. Again I'm not saying GMG hasn't done some shady stuff. It looks like they are in the wrong here especially with regards to Black Ops and Battlefront.

I will say that there could be plenty of legitimate reasons to not post a private contract on a public Reddit post even with some redacted info. Contracts between large companies almost always have confidentiality clauses written into them. It's even common with the small businesses we deal with.

Edit: I just read the post and saw that they were just asked to share with the mods and not post it for the public. My point still stands that this could be against the rules in the contracts they signed though.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Hey Gang! Remember BUBSY? Do you miss him? Well if you do, good news, because now the first and second game are up on Steam Greenlight!...

http://www.polygon.com/2015/11/16/9745874/bubsy-two-fur-steam-greenlight

 

[king3pj]

Hey Gang! Remember BUBSY? Do you miss him? Well if you do, good news, because now the first and second game are up on Steam Greenlight!...

http://www.polygon.com/2015/11/16/9745874/bubsy-two-fur-steam-greenlight

I honestly don't remember those games ever existing. I just pulled up the wikipedia page to see what it was and I never actually owned any of the platforms they were available on so I guess that makes sense.

Edit: Turns out I was wrong. The franchise was on PS1, which I did have in addition to Super Nintendo, Genesis, Atari Jaguar, and PC. I never had any of the rest of those gaming systems though.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Yeah I remember Bubsy. As they said, it was back when basically EVERY publisher thought they had to have a mascot like Sonic or Mario. I don't remember the games that well. Bubsy would really have just been a completely forgotten memory, but unfortunately what most people know about Bubsy is that he was part of one of the worst video games of all time, which was Bubsy 3D.

JonTron did a decent retrospective on Bubsy



And a quick AVGN segment on 3D