R&C Rift Apart basically exists to flex the insta-loading power of the SSD. I for one welcome our seamless loading overlords! 

Unless Bethesda is employing monkeys to write code, the game isn’t keeping track of non-rendered physics objects in memory. Their positions would be stored elsewhere, and be loaded when the player position or camera frustum was close enough to trigger rendering.

Any game can be optimized if it’s a priority; that’s not…

Unless traversal is tedious I generally avoid fast travel.

Seriously!!  I can’t believe there was no mention of that, it looks incredible!

Insomniac’s games are always really, really well optimized so this isn’t too surprising, even Spidey MM and Remastered loaded insanely fast for open-world games. Designing from the ground up for PS5 clearly did this sequel wonders, they seem to have taken advantage of every bit of power on PS5, and that speedy SSD…

The raw speed is obviously very impressive, but the slickness of that transition is the real wow factor here, IMO. Open map, select fast travel, fade out/in in the exact same timeframe would be significantly less impressive than this map level geometry blending wizardry.

Looks like the existing PS5 Digital is 92mm x 260mm x 390mm, and the new one is 80mm x 216mm x 358mm. For a reduction of between about 9% to 17% in each dimension, or an overall reduction of 33% of space consumed.

Funny you should say that with the massive layoffs at Epic happening nearly simultaneously. Nobody is safe.

Company takes a talented studio that makes popular games and says “make us a Games-as-a-Service” cash cow revenue generator.”

I believe that companies should be penalized, rather than rewarded, for canceling creative work at the last second. This stinks of a tax-write-off to me.

I have a hard time getting invested in this genre. I mean, they always find the treasure, and then they always leave the treasure behind because the world is not ready. They might as well just stay home.

I’ll be interested to see if the show counts the comic series as canon (the games never directly referenced them, but also went out of their way not to contradict them, and some wild stuff happened there).

Modding has a long tradition of being free. Mainly because it’s typically derivative work that can be legally distributed only with the permission of the owners of the actual game. Because of this, modders who try to charge for their work tend to get huge blowback (and, in some cases get themselves a nice cease and…

While I’m not sure that what you’ve concluded about MS ingratiating themselves to the gaming public with gamepass, or setting themselves up as the hero for gamers is merited, it is a reasoned analysis of what MS is up to with its subscription model.

Kotick has been winning while losing for twenty years. He’s too big to fail and shareholders choose CEOs based on how much they get away with ripping off workers and consumers. That’s the whole business model.

This is a net-negative for the industry. Microsoft isn’t historically a good steward of the things they buy. They are the console manufacturer with the least goodwill toward gamers as a whole.

That’s not even considering the shit they got slapped for in the 2000s re: antitrust.  Fuck Microsoft.

Yeah, ship's gonna get righted into the same cliff the Rare ship dropped.

No one is happier about this than that queasy asshole and I hate it.

this sucks

Everyone who wished for Bobby Kotick to get ousted from Activision just saw a finger curl on their monkey’s paw.