Video game journalism has become such a joke.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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Video game journalism has always just been third party PR, but journalists almost all absolutely love Fromsoft games. It's user reviews that complain about them being too hard.
Video game journalism has always just been third party PR
Nah. Back in the days of print, there actually was some fucking integrity with most outlets. Such as with Computer Gaming World.
Nah. There were a few print magazines with some integrity, but there are still some websites with integrity. The really popular stuff has always been PR though. You just had lower standards as a kid.
My standards have not changed in the least. The quality of journalistic integrity sure the fuck has, though. And not just with video games or entertainment media, but across the board.
Mainstream news was already starting to turn into ragebait in the 80s, and by the mid 90s there was no integrity left. Video games never had any standards. If you think that things were good back then that is just the proof that you had lower standards. It's okay. We all had lower standards as kids. That's perfectly normal. It's important to acknowledge it though.
What where people complaining about?
People bought a game that is well known for being hard, and then complained it was too hard.
To be fair, this happens with the release of every soulslike
I've heard from people who liked it that this has been exceptionally hard (but also exceptionally fair and gratifying).
Performance and skill issues.
Well it is a souls game. I got platinum on Elden Ring, but I just followed a tutorial on YouTube. I'm probably going to get the dlc when it goes on sale.
From what I saw the negative reviews were split between complaints about difficulty, and performance complaints. On the performance front it looked to me to mostly be shader compilation studders, which is relatively common with most new games.
Difficulty wise, yeah, it's hard. That's a big part of the appeal of Fromsoft games. They have made some adjustments since launch to bring the difficulty down a bit, but it's probably better that they launched a game that is "too hard" and patching the difficulty down, than releasing something that everyone can steamroll through in a day and getting complaints that it was too easy. The game also rewards exploration, and if you just try to rush the bosses without exploring you'll make things much harder on yourself.
Shader compilation stuttering only happens if a game was coded incorrectly to begin with.
Shaders should never ever be compiled during gameplay, and if it has to be done, done so asynchronously.
Either way it should never be dismissed as a problem that is "common in new games". It's amateurish and completely avoidable.
The fromsoft cult doesn't like that kind of talk, you're supposed to ignore performance issues, dictate to people how to play the game or else "they did it wrong", and tell people to GIT GUD.
I adore Fires of Rubicon. They know how to design games, and how to pull off an aesthetic. That side of the studio has serious world-class talent.
But fromsoft has some big issues on the graphics tech expertise side of things.
I don't think I've seen any subsurface scattering in their games, or proper multi-texture materials. I don't think they are on a PBR workflow (physically based rendering) though they couldn't achieve their "style" if they were. And the way they still rely on shell texturing in places they really, really shouldn't, actually hurts.
My problem isn't with their style. It's that they don't seem to know all the industry standard solutions and techniques that exist and have been developed, and shoot themselves in the foot both in terms of performance and fidelity, by achieving things in ways that an expert could immediately tell is a bad idea.
Why exactly do they need to be targeting photorealism with shit like PBR?
PBR isn't shit, and it doesn't necessarily mean targeting photorealism.
It's just a benchmark for material rendering that means once all your assets come out the other end of production, they work consistently with each other.
You could shift that benchmark towards cartoony or painterly or whatever you like, and even with assets produced using PBR, it's easier to "style" your game later because all your different assets are at the same starting point, and will therefore react to rendering changes consistently across the board.
Basically if your entire team is making metal materials by eyeballing it, and you then put it all together in a scene, you won't be able to get all the different metal objects to look like metal at the same time as you make changes to the lighting in the scene, because the asset team made all of them using slightly different material parameters.
If you make your entire asset production pipeline PBR, all metal assets will behave the same, all glass materials will behave the same, flesh, fabric, fur...
You get the idea.
Compiled shaders are unique to every GPU model and often driver revision. The console versions don't studder because they all have identical hardware, so compiled shaders can be shipped with the game.
Steam will eventually download a shader cache specific to your hardware, otherwise if you jump straight into a new game on PC, the game is going to have to compile them during gameplay, or make you wait 30 minutes to play while they compile (similar to how a lot of emulators for modern consoles like the Switch make you wait). And since nobody wants to launch a newly downloaded game just to sit at a boring 30 minute loading screen, they do their best on the fly.
This isn't about defending Fromsoft, they're just another company trying to get your money. I'm just saying that's how PCs work, and new games with complex shaders are probably pick being accused of having performance issues at launch than hitting players who are expecting to launch a game and play right away with a long loading screen (that a patent prevents them from putting a mini game on while you wait).
I know.
But only games running dx12/Vulkan must compile shaders.
The "normalcy" of sutters on linux is because dx7-11 games are running through vulkan, and those games were never coded to account for the way Vulkan works. Hence the shaders are compiled (by VKD3D/DXVK, not the game) during gameplay when first needed.
Like I said, if games must compile shaders during gameplay, they should do so asynchronously in order to not impact frametimes. This only applies to titles actually coded with the intention of being run under dx12/vulkan. Elden Ring in particular straight up violates the dx12 spec.
Compiling the shaders in advance also doesn't take 30 minutes, and doesn't require doing so for the entire game. Many games will only compile the shaders for the immediate area that a player is in. (Apex Legends in dx12 mode for example processes only the current map in rotation and lets you play when it's done)
Games that precompile shaders when running using Vulkan/dx12 have never made me wait longer than a few minutes at most, and only at first launch.
There is no excuse.
Most of what I've seen was "waaaaaah! It's too hard! 😭"
Though there are some legitimate complaints about performance. The areas with tons of waterfalls and the final fight have hella slowdown.
So after all the people actually playing it came up for air lol?
I miss XPlay on G4. Those were the days.
scythed
Nice to see a new verb used in a headline.