Expensive ugly PCs that don't play that many games doesn't sell well
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@lucas1 said in Expensive ugly PCs that don't play that many games doesn't sell well:
Anything product that has the words "Intel" and "GPU" is automatically shite.
I have a i5 laptop with "intel HD graphics" that can't play Medieval Total War 2 on low settings the game is 9-10 years old.I can play Skyrim on acceptable settings on my Surface 3 Pro, which contains an i5. So it probably depends on the game you're trying to play.
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@asdf Skyrim was released in 2011. And ran on the Xbox 360. A recent I5 is hot shit compared to what they were working with.
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@blakeyrat I still find it pretty impressive that a AAA game runs reasonably well on an IGP. And the Surface Pro is already 2 years old as well (CBA to look up whether that particular CPU is even older).
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@asdf It's honestly a miracle that Gamebryo games run at all, if you spend any time with Creation Kit looking into how the engine is "designed".
Imagine you took Morrowind's game engine, but then just kept glomming more and more stuff onto it-- interactive in-engine cutscenes, a real GPU-driven physics engine, a dynamic shader generator (yes, seriously), tons and tons and tons of AI code nobody's ever built before, console support-- based on a Mac Classic resource fork-esque database and never, ever refactored or removed anything. That's Gamebryo. (Of course even that description is too simple, because half the game engine's features, including much of the physics stuff, are implemented in the .nif file format for the game's meshes.)
What's great too is they re-use features without renaming them. Fallout 3 had VATS. Skyrim has a killcam. Guess what? The Skyrim killcam is implemented using code originally for VATS and all its data structures have "VATS" in the name. Seriously.
The feature in Oblivion where PC gamers can use the Z key to pick-up and move objects around is literally called "zkey" in the settings. I am not making this up. There's still features in it that were only ever relevant to Morrowind. (They don't generally work after all the code churn, but the database still has 'em.)
The engine has absolutely no facility for unit testing, or any kind of logical testing of quest objectives (like an automated "if the user is doing both quest X and Y will the item removed by quest Y make quest X impossible to complete?" Gamebryo games have that bug ALL THE TIME. Brand-new Fallout 4 had one exactly like that I ran into.)
It's kind of incredible.
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@blakeyrat said in Expensive ugly PCs that don't play that many games doesn't sell well:
dynamic shader generator
Holy shit, why???
half the game engine's features, including much of the physics stuff, are implemented in the .nif file format for the game's meshes
I think I'm having an aneurysm just trying to imagine that.
@blakeyrat said in Expensive ugly PCs that don't play that many games doesn't sell well:
The engine has absolutely no facility for unit testing, or any kind of logical testing
That explains why the games are unplayable at release (as in, quests may be horribly broken) and you have to wait a few months until the first "quest fix" patches arrive.
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@asdf said in Expensive ugly PCs that don't play that many games doesn't sell well:
Holy shit, why???
Presumably because artists wanted to make cool spell effects without learning shader language. IIRC, it's also integrated with a particle system, so your effects can shoot out sparkles and such. If I get time later, I'll post the huge-ass dialog in the CK that configures it.
@asdf said in Expensive ugly PCs that don't play that many games doesn't sell well:
That explains why the games are unplayable at release
Meh.
My Fallout 4 quest was broken because I went "off script" and killed-off the Brotherhood of Steel before anybody told me too. It wasn't that big a deal.
The games are only unplayable if you're stupid enough to keep a single running save file so you can't backtrack to before you broke stuff.
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@asdf I doubt my i5 could load skyrim.
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@blakeyrat said in Expensive ugly PCs that don't play that many games doesn't sell well:
The games are only unplayable if you're stupid enough to keep a single running save file so you can't backtrack to before you broke stuff.
My problem is that I get sidetracked so easily that by the time I noticed the main quest is broken, I might have to go back 20 hours or more, which would really piss me off. Yeah, I know, I'm .
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@asdf said in Expensive ugly PCs that don't play that many games doesn't sell well:
@blakeyrat said in Expensive ugly PCs that don't play that many games doesn't sell well:
The games are only unplayable if you're stupid enough to keep a single running save file so you can't backtrack to before you broke stuff.
My problem is that I get sidetracked so easily that by the time I noticed the main quest is broken, I might have to go back 20 hours or more, which would really piss me off. Yeah, I know, I'm .
If you're playing on PC you can just use the console to skip quest stages. It is a little bit of work finding out the quest ID but whenever I encountered bugged quests I would do as much as I could and then skip to the next stage.
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@Lathun True, but at the point when you find out there's a bug, you're already pissed off because you've usually already spent hours trying lots of different stuff to advance the quest at least 30 minutes wondering whether you did something wrong.
I prefer waiting for the unofficial patches and not dealing with that shit, which might destroy the experience.