Video Games Thread

[harv]

More GPU rumours doing the rounds. AMD have been so surprised by the power of the Pascal cards that they're bringing forward the release of Vega 10 to October. Probably bollocks, I can't see HBM2 being ready to go until next year.

Benchmarks of the 1080 being released to the public on 17th, ten days before launch. That's a good sign, means that NVidia are confident that the 1080 can walk the walk and talk the talk. If they weren't confident in its benchmarking prowess then they would embargo this stuff until launch day.

[jman]

Have to say.. I got Doom on Friday and I'm really liking it.. its a mixture of modern and old school gameplay - it does feel a lot different to most FPS games which is good.. I'm not getting so much into the backstory  if truth be told.. but you can tell the game doesn't want to bog the player down with a ridiculous plot and it stays faithful to the older Doom games that way too.

I put it on the 3rd hardest level of 5 and I have to say I've died quite a number of times.. its certainly not that easy.. another tick in the box!

Don't know why they bothered with the review embargoes.. its great!

[Late]

I'll check it out when it drops in price a bit. Too much of a backlog at the moment.
Been on a bit of a retro trip lately. Replayed GTA San Andreas and GTA IV, and I'm now playing Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD (which is effectively the old game but with prettier backgrounds and arguably prettier character models - but I'm torn on whether I preferred the old graphics. Either way it wins no prizes for visuals, but you don't play FF for the eye candy...)

[harv]

Doom is definitely on my radar, it works pretty well in VR using VorpX apparently. Like late I'm going to wait until it drops in price a bit before I get it.

Had a bit of a break from Elite Dangerous Horizons and gaming in general for a while because I haven't been feeling too good but started playing it again the other day. This game is going to be amazing in VR.

My first choices for VR gaming when I get my Rift in November are the following, in order:

1) Dreamdeck
2) Farlands
3) Dreadhalls (making sure I have plenty of clean underwear handy!)
4) Lucky's Tale
5) Elite Dangerous
6) Elite Dangerous
7) Elite Dangerous
Elite Dangerous
9) Elite Dangerous
10 Project CARS

lol

I'm also quite hopeful that the guy developing the wrapper that allows the CV1 to run games with older runtimes is going to have runtime 0.5 sorted by the time I get my Rift, and if so that means that I'll be able to play Alien Isolation and Half Life 2 with native VR support. He's managed to sort out 0.8, 0.7 and 0.6 so far but older runtimes are more tricky to do I think.

Alien Isolation and Dreadhalls are probably the two favourites for causing the first VR-related death I reckon, and there's no hyperbole there at all either. Can't wait to try them both out!

[jman]

Yep Doom is definitely worth checking out fellas.. even just for the SP campaign.  I picked up the super shotgun last night and currently ripping the shit out of every demon's ass I come across! 

[harv]

Reviews of the 1080 are in now. It's looking like a bit of a beast

Haven't seen any reviews of its VR performance yet though but it should absolutely slaughter everything else thanks to NVidia's new methods of handling VR stuff.

[jman]

Ah man.. I must of ploughed at least 12 hours into Doom so far (haven't finished it) and I'm still absolutely loving the old school style of it.. it's such a great game... if their spec was to recreate the old Doom for the modern time with a few new features which appeals to Doom veterans and new players.. they have absolutely nailed it!   This game has gone straight up to the top of my list of favourite games of recent times, it really has..  I'm having such a blast playing through it.   Graphics are awesome, soundtrack is fucking cool, the glory kills are a great addition and increase the gore levels and the gameplay is so good - I really cant recommend it highly enough - especially if you loved the old Doom like me.

If I had to level some criticism at the campaign.. at times, it does feel like you are just being herded through areas to kill one set after another set of demons.. especially in the later levels, but to be fair - its still great fun.. and the variety of weaponry and enemies you encounter are second to none.. I'm still mostly using the Super Shotty.. but I found the BFG last night (you can't miss it).. and having a lot of fun with that.  Each level has its own set of challenges and secrets too.. I've got plenty to go back and finish off - and even when I finally finish all of that.. I'm looking forward to trying out Ultra-Nightmare mode.. going on the difficulty now.. I reckon that's gonna be an absolute bastard!

I played one game of multiplayer the other night.. its not too different from the beta.. it does lack a little bit of quality and finish of the single player.. but still feels like it could be fun in bursts - it really is just a side attraction to the meaty SP campaign.  I haven't tried SnapMap out yet... probably will, just to get the achievements mind.. but apparently its quite good if you're into creating maps and shit.. that's never been my bag to be honest though.


Edit : Slightly disappointing - I just found out that Ultra-Nightmare is one-life permadeath difficulty - too hard for me I'm afraid!  Although I still want to do Nightmare after the first playthrough.

[jman]

Finished Doom now.. was playing it quite a bit over the weekend.. still haven't finished with the secrets and what-not.. so there's a good couple of hours left in the campaign before I start a harder difficulty level.  I played a few more multiplayer games as well - and actually I don't think its as bad as people make out.. yeah its not a patch on the campaign but I was still having fun.  Then I tried SnapMap out (mainly for the 'chievos) - actually its bloody good.. wasn't expecting it to be so customizable.. there's an achievement for making your own map.. so I'm gonna have a good go at making a pretty sweet one.

Best game of 2016 hands down..

[Late]

Good games, but I already have at least three of them (I'm not sure if I have The Crew, but I'm pretty sure I have Goat Sim on Steam and on one of the xbox consoles, I have X-Com on both steam and 360, and I have SMB on both steam and 360.)

[jman]

The Crew looked really good in its trailers and stuff - I think its a bit crap though... Goat Sim does nothing for me.. but I'm looking forward to X-Com which I never got round to playing.  SMB is superb, but I 100%'ed it ages ago.

[harv]

I keep on meaning to get Goat Simulator, might check to see if it's VorpX compatible, it would be insane in VR lololol

[Late]

Rumours abound that Microsoft are bringing two new versions of the xbox One to market.  :|
A slim version (probably with a 2tb HDD) later this year; and a model with more powerful processors next year. Codenamed Scorpio, it apparently would be capable of supporting 4k and Occulus Rift.

Peak performance figures (not confirmed):
1.32 teraflops - Xbox One
1.84 teraflops - Playstation 4
4.14 teraflops - Playstation 4 Neo
6.00 teraflops - Xbox One Scorpio

Sources:
kotaku
mcv
videogamer


I have no problem with them releasing a slim - it's to be expected with recent consoles.
But a revised console that's 4 or 5 times as powerful as the current version? Fuck that.
I paid a significant amount of money for my xb1, and I'll be majorly pissed off if they're bringing out a new console this soon. Of course they'd still support the vanilla xb1 for a long while after Scorpio, but it wouldn't be getting the full attention it should be, developers would be focussing on the more powerful version and giving xb1 owners a cut down and unoptimised version.

I can totally understand the move (again, assuming it's true), as Sony's pretty much forced them to do it with their ps4.5, but this effectively kills consoles for me. I'd rather just bin them off and join the pc master-race. There's more disparity in pc gaming, but at least there's no pretence about it.

[harv]

Don't know why they don't just call them the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Two tbh, and market them both as backwards compatible, this generation of consoles is ending. I said a while back that we'd be returning to a 5 year cycle again.

And the 1080 is available now. 8.9 Tera Flops, and if you overclock it to 2.1GHz you're talking about 10.8, 2.4 and you're talking 12.7 if I'm remembering correctly lol

Not worth buying the Founders Edition though, better to wait for the custom cooled AIB cards. Should overclock to 2.2 or 2.3 on air

Will be getting mine in August all going well.

[harv]

Whoops! I've been a bit lax with my PC security.

I'd allowed my ESET Smart Security to go out of date. Gawd knows how long my PC has been unprotected, it was blocking stuff fine yesterday when I was watching streams but when I was messing about with the Unreal Engine the other day I was dropping frames so ran a virus check last night. Said I had 12 issues but wouldn't allow me to fix them or even tell me what they were...that's when I checked my subscription.

Am running a full check now.

Glad I got my SSD a while back, has really sped things up. Can do an in-depth scan of 5.1TB in about 50 minutes. The sooner the price of these things comes down and the size of them I'm up the better. My machine would be INSANE with 5.1TB of SSDs

[harv]

Well everything came up clean, everything that showed up as problems were false positives so no worries.

Doesn't explain why my Unreal VR game is having framerate issues though. Might be because I'm using a Preview version instead of a Release Candidate, perhaps..? Had heard that the Preview versions were better for VR though. Not sure if my Preview built game will work on 4.11 though. Might download 4.11 and see tomorrow

Could also be down to me using the iGPU in my Skylake perhaps..? Can't remember if I built much of note when I was messing around with Unreal before. It can handle Elite Dangerous in 720p with high quality textures and shadows at 30fps on planet surfaces though and the experiment I've done is hardly heavy duty.

Will a look at things tomorrow, I reckon it's the preview version that's causing me problems. If it was the iGPU then I reckon that the game would work okay but just at a low framerate.