Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
3rd International Volunteer Brigade (Hexbear gaming discord)
Rules
That's two games today that I was hyped for that ended up being trash. Just gonna get hyped for indie games from now on
Anyone else feel like this is just every game now? Every single game I've been following for months now has run like doo doo on all systems. I already only play mostly indie games but it's getting hard to be excited about anything. Especially because the actual quality of the games this year has been overwhelmingly great.
I think a lot of companies forcibly targeted new hardware and had unrealistic expectations about adoption rate, on top of pushing deadlines that do not allow time for optimization.
Developers are under many unrealistic constraints that make it difficult or even impossible to deliver solid products.
AAA studios are relying on huge memory and even frame generation as a crutch for not optimizing their games. Meanwhile NVIDIA/AMD are scamming people with new generation hardware that is hardly better than the previous one but relies on shit frame gen.
The end result is shit unoptimized games requiring more powerful hardware which we don't have because the duopoly figured out they can keep the high margins making obscene priced shit hardware if they just start cheating benchmarks.
The usual tech channels are talking about it a lot now, GN/Hardware unboxed.
Yeah. It just makes me sad to see all these devs forced to push for "the next big tech" instead of letting the workers do their thing. Every exec and shareholder just wants to shill the "industry-leading" garbage at their presentations and meetings.
I'm still going just fine on a 1080 Ti graphics card, and even that's overkill for the games I play. I have never been interested in raytracing or anything like that. I don't even want my games to look all that pretty, honestly. Just load fast and play well. That's it.
Just logging in to tell you all that if you ever plan on playing paradox games, only buy the base game. Pirate the dlcs and load them with cream.api.
This allows you to still play online, get all the updates with no hassle and use the workshop, without wasting 1000's
Thank you comrade 
Your the fuckin MVP. No more stellaris dlcs for me, after $150 on one game, I'm a bit over it.
What's wrong with the game?
Runs like dogwater apparently. Recommended specs are higher than 80% of Steam gamer PCs. Also, it's missing a ton of features from CS1's DLCs, which people were hoping for (this is all just what I read, haven't played it).
Also, it's missing a ton of features from CS1's DLCs
A sequel missing features from DLC? In a Paradox game? And it sucks shit at launch? I'm going to need some time to process this... Please give me space to heal while I come to terms with it
Absolutely beyond wild. But like, they put a 2 on this one. You're telling me this is exactly like EU4 and CK3 and HoI4 and Vicky 3? Insane.
At least Stellaris 2 won't let me down.
Stellaris in particular was a absolutely wild release even by Paradox standards. They were reworking core features up until fairly recently, after it had been out for years. It's essentially a completely different game than it was at launch lol. It also had completely dogshit performance for years and years.
They were reworking core features up until fairly recently, after it had been out for years. It's essentially a completely different game than it was at launch lol.
this has actually kept me coming back lol. every time I fire it up it feels new
Runs like dogwater apparently. Recommended specs are higher than 80% of Steam gamer PCs.
This is like 95% of all new release games on computer.
Also, it's missing a ton of features from SC1's DLCs, which people were hoping for
This is like 95% of Paradox Interactive's business model.
I don't know what the 
s expect.
the performance is egregious, I've read
like you can't hit 30 fps on medium settings with a 4060 @ 1080p
Eh thats not "really" true. I "think" most pc games these days are indie games or small scale productions and most of the time they have rather low requirements. Now if you move into the AAA space or even just AA games your statement is closer to truth.
Basically the same thing that happened with Kerbal Space Program 2 - outrageous system requirements with only minor graphical improvements, stripped down gameplay vs the original game (Obviously this is Paradox so the intent is DLC).
I haven't checked on KS2 since release so don't @ me if they fixed it.
i skimmed the reviews: it's poorly optimized
Just play Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic instead. If that game was slightly more approachable it would improve over CS in every possible way.
The snapping is weird, it's like it doesn't snap. There are no bikes. There are pedestrian roads though, so that's good. It works like it did in CS1 except without the special zoning or services.
It does look better, graphically. I do experience stuttering. I'm not sure if I like the architecture. It looks like something a very liberal city would create to be modern while also being cheap for building associations. Houses look like boldly colored, giant chicken coops. I'd much rather they let you set that stuff up with the themes, which probably will come eventually.
Selling resources seems like ez mode for money management. You can have a poorly designed economy but still make money just by selling your water and power. I expect a balance patch.
There are no bikes?!
No but there is prison labor.
Slavery & Cars: American Republic
Workers & Resources: Appreciates this Comment 
🤣. Fr tho, I do need to figure that game out at some point. The learning curve is rough.
Travel back to 1976 and get a degree in urban planning from People's Friendship University of Russia lol
This is normal for paradox, unfortunately. After 70 DLCs and $1000, it’ll be critically acclaimed. Of course, I will spend $0 and still get access to the entire game.
More capitalist innovation; less features and runs worse.
Imagine if Apple could start the clock over with an iphone that didn't have a web browser
This is 9/11 for urbanist nerds
It's more like 15 9/11s at once for me. I enjoy watching my imaginary city suffer from my planning
The success of the cities skylines series has shown me that I really had the completely wrong idea what people want in a city builder.
PC games are always better when you get them 2-5 years after they come out, and you can play them on the hardware they were developed on.
That's two games today
What's the other one?
Can someone explain what the promise of CS2 was? I only caught glimpses of it, but it seemed mostly the same except some parking simulation, streamlining stuff like power/water, and a dlc reset.
What was the killer feature?
CS1 never fully integrated expansion packs, so there were three different ways to zone the industry, and a long disorganized list of ad-hoc zoning policies. CS2 had a chance to start with more of this more coherently designed.
Plus CS2 made road editing much more precise and flexible. You can add and remove lanes instead of having separate road types for 150 different lane configurations.
More control over economy, better zoning, basically a lot of stuff mods did was baked into the game but it also looked like a lot of unnecessary stuff was added
