Least popular? Who the hell *didn’t* pick to merge with the godlike AI and become even more godlike? The other options were all about surrendering control to the very same humans who had been screwing things up spectacularly the whole way through the story.

Caleb makes that particular reference in Blood 2.

I quietly lust for an alternate reality in which NMS followed the Dark Souls design direction - a version of the game in which your survival meant something, because you would spawn somewhere else in the galaxy as a different person, and players could find others’ corpses/abandoned ships more readily, and every…

This is how games journalism tends to work these days. Reminds me of when everyone was going absolutely apeshit over Dear Esther and “what it says” about gaming and how it “redefined bla bla bla”.

And none of them appeared to have played the vastly superior (and genuinely funny) Stanley Parable in its old mod state,…

Er, I think you need to think a little harder about that. And what does PVP have to do with anything?

It isn’t just about whether or not certain things are *possible* in a peer to peer multiplayer game, it’s about their entire design direction.

No NPCs have any persistence in Elite. They spawn, randomly, in a bubble…

Elite suffers too much from its obsession with being a semi-almost-not-quite-kinda MMO. The limitations of the peer to peer system are glaring; visiting high population areas means you’ll see... maybe a small portion of the players actually in that area, depending on your connectivity, and you’ll pay for it in latency.

…

Nope, they really aren’t. I lowered my resolution to 1280x720, and it still struggled to hit 20FPS on a system that runs GTA V just fine at 1600x900. I would have been fine running NMS at 30FPS, so long as it was a *stable* 30FPS. But it can’t even manage that.

I would have thought the more pressing issue is the galaxy-sized Tyranid swarm actively being drawn towards this galaxy by that very same light.

Another sunny day in the grim darkness of the far future.

Oh man, that NEEDS to be in there somewhere. You ever see the Discworld reference in the anime “Psycho Pass”? They literally just throw the Discworld in there as someone’s VR chatroom environment.

Discworld deserves way more recognition - bloody Harry Potter totally distracted everyone from something truly incredible.

This is usually a common theme with badly optimized games - people with theoretically less powerful rigs just happen to have a configuration that works well within the quirky confines of a specific game.

Anyway, it seems like Hello Games has confirmed - the stuttering is a shader cache issue. Just have to wait for them…

I swear there’s an unholy cult of SSD. Someone always pops up to suggest that I buy an SSD to mitigate bad optimization. Had a massive conversation in Planetside 2 where someone was telling me to get an SSD to fix a glitch introduced by a patch.

Anyway, I left NMS running for 43 minutes (according to steam) while I…

Why would the game be trying to communicate with the server every time the player moves their head though? Given that the game is all about dynamic streaming of world content, I think it’s more likely to be tied to that.

This kind of stutter/momentary freeze is usually the result of insufficient RAM - it happened back…

I especially like the part where he actually, genuinely suggests that a problem people are having with his game is that they’re trying to run it WITH NO GRAPHICS DRIVERS.

Yes, Sean. That is totally a thing that happens. Let me guess what the next big issue is - people trying to run the game without turning their PC on?

That shouldn’t matter - the FOV issue is that they’re measuring it by a different value. I can’t remember exactly what the standard is for PC releases, but there’s horizontal and vertical FOV. It’s like the difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit - 100 in one is not 100 in another. For most PC first person games,…

I tried running the game at 1280x720 - what should be considered a last, LAST gen resolution.

The stutter remains. It’s clearly something to do with the game streaming its content - it just isn’t making adequate use of the hardware.

The FOV issue is going to be a big one for some people (myself included) - while the game claims you’re increasing it from 75 to 100, I think it’s measuring vertical instead of horizontal... or horizontal instead of vertical (I forget which is which). But whatever - the point is, 100 is not 100. Like, in standard PC…

Well yeah, I could imagine he is. And personally, I’m not that bothered - just killing time while I wait out the next 3 hours until the PC version unlocks and I can play it myself.

That being said, I think Sony probably should have given those guys some sort of PR person to coach or something. Sean’s ambiguity has been…

I’d prefer a subtler reference. I want to see it named “Sting’s Scifi Underpants”

Except the giant sandworm will be the product of the procedural generation, so while you might not see a giant *sand*worm, you should be able to see a variety of other worms and giant serpents of various sizes. IF. If such creatures are in the game at all.

I’m waiting for the PC release to unlock later today, so I’ll…

Except to be fair, it appeared in a trailer. People aren’t asking him “Which planet was this on?” or “when will we see it?” they’re asking him, out of increasing suspicion “Did this trailer lie?”

All he had to do was confirm whether or not the stuff in that trailer made it to release. And given the nature of a game…