What games are you playing now?

I been playing Sunless sea.Game can get repetitive and too slow at times but it's writing, events and setting make it more than worth it.

I went old school, and started playing Veil of Darkness. It's a pseudo-horror adventure from the early 1990's, using the same engine as The Summoning. While there is combat, much of it can be avoided from memory, and it's as much about solving puzzles as anything else. While the engine was used for an RPG, I wouldn't classifiy this as such, the only character choice you make is the name.

Castle in the darkness (platformer) and Runestone Keeper (puzzle-roguelike) both are pretty hardcore

Dungeons 2 - loving it!
( see avatar ='.'= )

the art style of the game is great, and I like the humor and overall theme.
Tho be warned - this is STILL no Dungeon Keeper III….

This is no cozy Dungeon Home Away from Home, where you shower gold and chickens on your malevolent little pets. This is an underground, fortified base from where you get your Saruman-on: training your troops and scheming to take the lands above. That said - I do still get that giddy feeling that of watching my little demonic ant farm grow into a monster. It is a fun game. To it's credit, unlike Dungeon Keeper there is something to actually do with your minions once youve invested hours of your life into creating theirs.

Dived right into Wolfenstein: The Old Blood after being pleasantly entertained by the excellent The New Order last year.

Not very far into the game, maybe 30 to 45 minutes, but the opening is very impressive. It is oozing Wolfenstein atmosphere as you -once more- return to the namesake Castle Wolfenstein in the opening scene. Plain awesome. The graphical fidelity is amazing with very detailed and well animated (and voiced!) characters. The great German dialogues are also quite funny at times.

The gameplay hasn't changed all that much from TNO so far but I'm guessing that is to be expected from a standalone expansion pack. There is some new stuff, if my memory does not fail me, like the ability to climb walls with some pipes that can also be used as a melee weapon but that's about it so far. I'm sure more new things are yet to come as you progress through the levels but so far you feel right at home.

A word of advice on the hardware requirements: Cranking up everything to the max resulted in a slide show on my i7-4790K, 16GB RAM and GTX 980.
The 'ultra' preset (which is not the all out maximum) was slightly better but still did not go consistently above 30fps. So I dialed down the AA from 8x to 2x and I'm getting about 50fps now. The game looks great but I can see in MSI Afterburner that system RAM is going above 8GB sometimes and VRAM is hovering around the 3.5GB mark (with the ultra preset it got very close to 4GB even).
Also, to the best of my knowledge, SLI does not work with this engine so as of now this is definitely one for the TitanX folks if you want to play on ultra. A 980 doesn't quite cut it.

Replaying Shining Force because after all these year, it is still amazing.

Moriendor said:

Dived right into Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (..)
Not very far into the game, maybe 30 to 45 minutes

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30 to 45 minutes actually sounds like a lot in this type of games.

Moriendor said:

A word of advice on the hardware requirements: Cranking up everything to the max resulted in a slide show on my i7-4790K, 16GB RAM and GTX 980.
The 'ultra' preset (which is not the all out maximum) was slightly better but still did not go consistently above 30fps. So I dialed down the AA from 8x to 2x and I'm getting about 50fps now. The game looks great but I can see in MSI Afterburner that system RAM is going above 8GB sometimes and VRAM is hovering around the 3.5GB mark (with the ultra preset it got very close to 4GB even).
Also, to the best of my knowledge, SLI does not work with this engine so as of now this is definitely one for the TitanX folks if you want to play on ultra. A 980 doesn't quite cut it.

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Weird. Did you have the same experience with the base game? I remember crancking everything to max on my system, and worked flawlessly. Maybe it's my memory.

Moriendor said:

Dived right into Wolfenstein: The Old Blood after being pleasantly entertained by the excellent The New Order last year.

Not very far into the game, maybe 30 to 45 minutes, but the opening is very impressive. It is oozing Wolfenstein atmosphere as you -once more- return to the namesake Castle Wolfenstein in the opening scene. Plain awesome. The graphical fidelity is amazing with very detailed and well animated (and voiced!) characters. The great German dialogues are also quite funny at times.

The gameplay hasn't changed all that much from TNO so far but I'm guessing that is to be expected from a standalone expansion pack. There is some new stuff, if my memory does not fail me, like the ability to climb walls with some pipes that can also be used as a melee weapon but that's about it so far. I'm sure more new things are yet to come as you progress through the levels but so far you feel right at home.

A word of advice on the hardware requirements: Cranking up everything to the max resulted in a slide show on my i7-4790K, 16GB RAM and GTX 980.
The 'ultra' preset (which is not the all out maximum) was slightly better but still did not go consistently above 30fps. So I dialed down the AA from 8x to 2x and I'm getting about 50fps now. The game looks great but I can see in MSI Afterburner that system RAM is going above 8GB sometimes and VRAM is hovering around the 3.5GB mark (with the ultra preset it got very close to 4GB even).
Also, to the best of my knowledge, SLI does not work with this engine so as of now this is definitely one for the TitanX folks if you want to play on ultra. A 980 doesn't quite cut it.

Click to expand...

Sounds odd, since the base game performed quite smoothly on highest settings (or very close to it) on my 780 ti.

Carnifex said:

Replaying Shining Force because after all these year, it is still amazing.

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Ah.. the Sega Genesis days. Shining Force was one of the best games back then.

Carnifex said:

Replaying Shining Force because after all these year, it is still amazing.

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Yes that game is really great Still which I would play the third game in the series I actually started it, but the only way to play it is with an emulator, and then I'd need to buy the game first to feel good about it…..

GothicGothicness said:

Yes that game is really great Still which I would play the third game in the series I actually started it, but the only way to play it is with an emulator, and then I'd need to buy the game first to feel good about it…..

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Iirc, Shining Force 3 was split into 3 games, but only the first part was released outside of Japan. I still have my Sega Saturn copy somewhere...

The original SF was the best though imo.

JDR13 said:

Iirc, Shining Force 3 was split into 3 games, but only the first part was released outside of Japan. I still have my Sega Saturn copy somewhere…

The original SF was the best though imo.

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That is a relief to know, some people wrote such a great things about the saturn shining force game that I was tempted to get it several times, but if 1 and 2 is better… in that case… all is fine I can let go.

DArtagnan said:

Sounds odd, since the base game performed quite smoothly on highest settings (or very close to it) on my 780 ti.

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Same here. I also had a GTX 780Ti when I played TNO but TOB is more demanding for sure. It also has quite a few more graphical options than TNO (or my memory is really bad).
IIRC, in TNO I only had to dial down the "screenspace reflections" from high to medium since that ate performance alive and I might have lowered AA by a level or so but in TOB there are a few more sliders that will outright slaughter performance.
Screenspace reflections on 'high' still kills the performance, of course, but then there is also a slider to increase the shadow maps from 4096 to 8092, then you can crank AA all the way up to 32x (!) which resulted in said slide show (IIRC in TNO the max AA was 8x?) and increasing "Virtualtexture Max PPF" from 32 to 64 also seems to have a very noticeable impact on performance.

So after tinkering a bit with the settings, I settled for the ultra preset (~30fps) and then just reduced AA from 8x to 2x to end up with 50fps (at 1440p). The game still looks spectacular and performance is reasonable at that level.
In spite of 1440p and 2x AA there are noticeable jaggies on pillars and other straight structures though. Oh well... generally speaking, OpenGL and id tech engine seem to not quite be at the level as a decent DirectX 11 engine like Unreal or Frostbite, unfortunately. It just feels a little "rougher" and less polished/optimized.

Finally, my MSI Afterburner is certainly not lying. This game does eat RAM and VRAM head first at ultra (or if you dare go even higher).
I prefer to look at the bright side though: Finally a game that is not a completely shitty console port that makes the CPU and GPU twiddle their thumbs and causes them to consider whether hanging themselves out of boredom might be a better option than rendering low poly crap graphics .

Hehe, well, it sounds like I'm going to take a pass on this game. I hate the engine already - and there's no way I'm buying a game that looks decent at best and performs like shit on near top-end hardware. Base game wasn't really a looker to me.

Maybe once it's optimised or whatever

Moriendor said:

Dived right into Wolfenstein: The Old Blood

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I'm not buying that thing, but still, for those who can't resist the temptation:

Moriendor said:

So after tinkering a bit with the settings, I settled for the ultra preset (~30fps) and then just reduced AA from 8x to 2x to end up with 50fps (at 1440p).

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That almost sounds like a bug, or maybe it's just very poorly optimized compared to TNO. I experienced almost no performance hit whatsoever from AA in TNO.

Depends on the AA technology. FXAA is very cheap, but MSAA (for instance) is EXTREMELY expensive.

DArtagnan said:

Depends on the AA technology. FXAA is very cheap, but MSAA (for instance) is EXTREMELY expensive.

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Sure, but it's unlikely that they enabled an entirely different form of AA for the expansion. From Moriendor's description, it sounds like the game is poorly optimized in general.

I wouldn't know, but I don't remember what kind of AA was available in the first game. Maybe there's more than one?

But it sounds like they changed a bunch of stuff in a technical sense - and if the game runs on modern consoles, it most definitely should be able to run smoothly on a high-end PC like that.