punxsutawneyphil's discussions

You can do substantial body piles without too many crashes on PS4, so there’s definitely some voodoo optimisation going on!

You’re probably right, but it’s hard to overstate how much the game starts subtly breaking long before you reach the point of executing your elaborate, time-consuming plan for mass destruction.

I once subdued every guard but one in Hokkaido, dragged them all into the restaurant area, and then let the one live guard go and wake everyone up. I then entered the bar and sat down. This was the result:

Good lord, what a surprise. I’d like to thank the decaying spirit of 2020, my friends and family on Zoom, and the small dog that barks at cats all day and all night. But most of all, I’d like to thank Zack for taking on the rampant voter fraud in this year’s poll and for taking my phonecall about the 11,780 votes we… Read more

One other factor in the extent to which CDPR bears some responsibility is that there are also procedures, like the Harding Test, that game producers can perform on their games to flag things likely to trigger seizures. Read more

The original screenplay was written by the Paul Schrader and his brother Leonard, who had dreamed up the core idea after living for a number of years in Japan, where he spent a lot of time in Yakuza bars and watching Yakuza movies. Leonard Schrader would even go on to write a number of Japanese movies (in Japanese,… Read more

I’m curious to see the sorts of exclusives we’ll see on both consoles, all of which should be able to push the envelope of what the machines are capable of. The storage advances of both consoles should lead to changes in the ways that games are designed. Sure, some of that is going to be under-the-hood stuff that just… Read more

What might prove to be the more interesting PS5 edge is that its SSD speed increases aren’t limited by bottlenecks at other points in the console, which could be put to work in novel ways in PS5 exclusives. Epic’s CEO, Tim Sweeney, noted that in practical terms it’s going to beat PCs in terms of putting its SSD speed… Read more

The great enemy of design is that people like what they’re familiar with, resent having to adapt to a new thing and underrate the idea that the new thing will grow on them. See: every new logo launch ever. Read more

Dear Wraithfighter, let us stare deeper into the abyss: player pets dog times ten because the achievement pops and somewhere in the folds of player’s brain dopamine is released and player feels rewarded for this behaviour, reinforcing it. That is video games at their fundamental essence. Why do we play them at all? We… Read more

I don’t begrudge you your realism in the slightest, but in these dark days I like to cradle a little idealism even if it might make me a rube. Read more

Hey Kotaku, not sure how much control you have over these things, and if this is a hello games embed or a new iteration of the gawker-wide video player, but the in-line video player is doing that thing where it pipes in a lo-res stream until it can switch over to hi-res. In the case of game trailers and clips, that… Read more

Whether they do or not, the fact that the narrative is being shaped by Evan Narcisse, formerly of these pastures, gives me a huge amount of hope that the game is going to say something or, perhaps, let our experience speak to us, which has always been the communicative power unique to games.

After experiencing the jet engine shortly after hooking up my PS4 for the first time years ago, I discovered a solution that has mostly worked since. Don’t put it anywhere with restricted airflow (ie in some sort of tv cabinet/stand), as it makes it harder for the heat to escape, raising the ambient temp, causing the… Read more

Don’t be too sad. Tim is now raking it in on Patreon, and recently put out his most baroque video about Final Fantasy VII yet on Youtube, so there is some justice in the world. And the other writers have new perches elsewhere as well (and while we’re on the subject of writers once of this pasture, Evan Narcisse is… Read more

The glamorising effect of smoking in movies and tv has been the subject of a lot of research at this point, all of which point to strong effects on people resuming, continuing and — worst — starting to smoke. Some of which could previously have been inferred from the tobacco industry’s historical practise of under-the-… Read more

There are more people working from home because of COVID-19, which likely means the security policies they would normally employ with builds have been loosened, whether that’s for QA, third party services, etc in order to meet the new shipping date. Read more

That was my slightly mangled point — I think the thing AC took from TW3 was its broad RPG framework, well-written & cutscened side quests with actual choices (vs the increasingly dreadful fetch-quest while someone talks at you model of Unity) and an overall narrative that branched depending on choices you made (plus a… Read more

I really hope they nail the settlement building. Even in something as small as the Witcher 3's arduous statue-building quest, there’s a deep reward in seeing the landscape permanently altered by your decisions. Mostly because (in the Witcher 3, at least) it reflects an overall design decision that your choices should… Read more

It sounds like it’s going to be woven into the narrative and the choices, which can be really nice in an RPG, as it might create a more profound sense that your actions are shaping the world.