What games are you playing now?

Also started playing Mirrors Edge and am switching between it and Spec Ops: The Line.

Once I got the performance issues sorted out in Mirrors Edge (turning off PhysX) and messed with the settings ini file for more graphics options I find I am enjoying it as its different. I am starting to get used to moving around the rooftops but am getting tired of constantly being hurried by being chased by the cops. So far theres been almost no time to actually slow down and enjoy the setting. The story seems like it will be good but I am still not far into it yet.

Toff said:

Also started playing Mirrors Edge and am switching between it and Spec Ops: The Line.

Once I got the performance issues sorted out in Mirrors Edge (turning off PhysX) and messed with the settings ini file for more graphics options I find I am enjoying it as its different. I am starting to get used to moving around the rooftops but am getting tired of constantly being hurried by being chased by the cops. So far theres been almost no time to actually slow down and enjoy the setting. The story seems like it will be good but I am still not far into it yet.

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I remeber finishing Mirror's Edge, back in the day, and I remember liking it quite a bit. I liked the puzzle element of trying to run across the environment, and having that fluency of movement. I also remember dealing with an encounter where the enemies were armed with firearms, but somehow I managed to run/dodge/duck and lure them one by one and disabled them. It kinda made you feel empowered.

I loaded up Skyrim, and downloaded as many graphics mods as I possibly could, but somehow it just doesn't look as good as it looks in people's youtube videos. Some of them are mindblowingly good-looking. But I can't seem to reach that. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I downloaded the 2K texture (unofficial ones from nexusmods), but I have a feeling that they're not active. I'm not really impressed with them in-game, and I can't see them listed in Skyrim's Data Files explorer. (someone said that's normal, since they're just texture replacements, but then how do I know if they're active?)

Anyways, it looks pretty good, but nothing mindblow-ing. But it's nice to max out everything and just run at 60+ fps. My 980 gtx doesn't even break a sweat. It stalls at about 50-60 degrees Celsius.

EDIT: For example, this video. It looks incredible, but no matter what I install I can't get it to look like that. I'll have to do some more research, and maybe install the mods manually. Maybe the Nexus Mod Manager has some issues. Anyone else tried this and had similar issues?

danutz_plusplus said:

EDIT: For example, this video. It looks incredible, but no matter what I install I can't get it to look like that. I'll have to do some more research, and maybe install the mods manually. Maybe the Nexus Mod Manager has some issues. Anyone else tried this and had similar issues?

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That video seems to be using Realvision ENB, and also some water, grass and foliage mods. Shouldn't be too hard to achieve. Have you set up an ENB? That is going to make the biggest single difference.

Ripper said:

That video seems to be using Realvision ENB, and also some water, grass and foliage mods. Shouldn't be too hard to achieve. Have you set up an ENB? That is going to make the biggest single difference.

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I think I did. I installed it using NMM, then ran the Realvision configuration tool, installed it, and I hope that was it. But I'm getting nowhere-near as good visuals as that video. I might have to try to manually install it.

It's my understanding the ENBs need to tweaked a lot. Wolfgrimdark is one of our resident experts on this.

Warmark said:

JDR13 are you planning to play Pillars anytime soon? I'd like to hear your take on it.

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Probably not in the immediate future. I'm enjoying too many other games at the moment, and I want to replay The Witcher 1&2 prior to the release of TW3. I'll play PoE sometime after TW3.

Toff said:

Once I got the performance issues sorted out in Mirrors Edge (turning off PhysX) and messed with the settings ini file for more graphics options I find I am enjoying it as its different. I am starting to get used to moving around the rooftops but am getting tired of constantly being hurried by being chased by the cops. So far theres been almost no time to actually slow down and enjoy the setting. The story seems like it will be good but I am still not far into it yet.

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If you're enjoying Mirror's Edge then you should also check out Dying Light. It uses that same type of movement system but is a much better overall game imo.

Thrasher said:

It's my understanding the ENBs need to tweaked a lot. Wolfgrimdark is one of our resident experts on this.

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I managed to get it working. Seems I was missing the actual ENB files. I was just using the Realvision ENB files. But you weren't kidding that it needs tweaking. By default everything is bright and contrasting as hell. There's a strong DoF effect for anything you're not pointing at. It was quite tiring on eyes. I'm not sure I have the energy to tweak those settings, so I might just default back to how it looks with standard HD textures, and just leave it at that. It might look beautiful in a video, but I felt it very tiring, and I'm not sure how playable those effects are.

danutz_plusplus said:

I managed to get it working. Seems I was missing the actual ENB files. I was just using the Realvision ENB files. But you weren't kidding that it needs tweaking. By default everything is bright and contrasting as hell. There's a strong DoF effect for anything you're not pointing at. It was quite tiring on eyes. I'm not sure I have the energy to tweak those settings, so I might just default back to how it looks with standard HD textures, and just leave it at that. It might look beautiful in a video, but I felt it very tiring, and I'm not sure how playable those effects are.

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I thought that might be the case. I know that realvision is designed to work with a very specific collection of lighting and weather mods, and might look weird without them.

Maybe try Vividian enb, or Taz visual overhaul instead. I think both are very good.

Still playing Dying Light, and I've got to say it has a serious amount of content for this type of game.

I've played all night the last 2 days and it shows that I'm still only 15% through the main storyline.

JDR13 said:

Still playing Dying Light, and I've got to say it has a serious amount of content for this type of game.

I've played all night the last 2 days and it shows that I'm still only 15% through the main storyline.

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I'm glad you stuck with it - and I had a feeling you might enjoy it more than your initial kinda harsh evaluation would suggest

Wanted to play something that's not as time-consuming, at least until GTA 5 releases on Tuesday, so I decided to fire up Wolfenstein - The New Order. Pretty cool. Gameplay/mechanics-wise it's very solid. Shooting feel good. And it certainly feels interesting having B.J. more involved and having more of a personal story. I also like the purely narrative moments, . It contributes a lot to world-building.

I've reached the London Nautica level in Wolfenstein. And the game started behaving weirdly. Up until this point there were a couple of time when the game temporarily (like 0.5-1 seconds max) froze and then recovered, but so far it was only in cinematics (not ingame, at least I don't think those were ingame). But on the Nautica level it did this 2-3 times in the actual game. Anyone else had this issue? It's not exactly stuttering, as the framerate didn't just drop to a rate that you notice, it actually went to 0 fps, as I said, for up to 1 second.

I'm breezing through it with everything on max @ 60+ fps, so I don't think it's my hardware.

I didn't expect Wolfenstein to hold me all that long, and I've already started up another one. Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor. I don't expect to invest very much into this one, it's just to see what they've done with it, until GTA5 is unlocked. But, I must say, I'm surprised it's more challenging than the Assassin's Creed combat system. It's not very complicated, but somehow it challenges. I've died twice now. And it's very pretty. I also like all the chatter you hear from the orcs and uruks.

danutz_plusplus said:

Assassin's Creed combat system.

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(Me after finishing AC2, Brotherhood, Revelations and Rogue with about 90% sync in all of them)

There is a combat system in Assassin's Creed? OMG
Where?!

joxer said:

(Me after finishing AC2, Brotherhood, Revelations and Rogue with about 90% sync in all of them)

There is a combat system in Assassin's Creed? OMG
Where?!

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Yeah, attack/parry/counter-attack/rinse&repeat.
Which is very much how Shadow of Mordor seems to be doing it, except that the enemies seem to gang-up on you, unlike in AC where they just line-up and come at your one after the other.

I still don't know what are you talking about.
In AC2, if aggroed, it's close your eyes, rightclick/leftclick, they dead.
In Br and Re it's, press a key and your OP brotherhood spawn and kills everything. In Rg it's kill everyone with puckle on ships, and on land just use rope/hook for instakills (doesn't work on bears though, but well, you can instakill those with a pistol). Yes Rogue has bears in it, probably the reason I didn't like it as much as others did.


But then again, AC games, at least these I mentioned, I played because of the story not the combat. And on that field, these AC games definetly shine. Without the story, they'd have been a garbage.

How the story feels in that "you can't have ultratextures on superexpensive 4Gb VRAM GPU" game?

joxer said:

How the story feels in that "you can't have ultratextures on superexpensive 4Gb VRAM GPU" game?

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I'm not sure how it evolves later on, but the beginning was quite strong. Plenty of motivation for Talion to seek revenge. And I quite liked the way the tutorial integrated into the storyline. We'll see how they take it further. From what I've read, it's nothing to write home about, but I'll see for myself.

Event without the HD textures, which are said to warrent a 6GB vram video card, it looks quite good. I'll have to load the HD textures and see how it runs on my gtx 980. Lords of the Fallen also had this sort of a mention that for ultra-high textures you'd need > 6GB vram. But I've enabled it anyway, and it ran smoothly. No issues on my 4 GBs of vram.

danutz_plusplus said:

Lords of the Fallen also had this sort of a mention that for ultra-high textures you'd need > 6GB vram. But I've enabled it anyway, and it ran smoothly. No issues on my 4 GBs of vram.

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I've never seen 6GB of vram mentioned for Lord of the Fallen. It says right in the video menu that 4GB is "recommended" for ultra textures.

Yep, AFAIK, Shadows of Mordor is the only game to have a setting with 6GB GPU memory "required".

That said, it "almost" ran smoothly at that setting with just 3GB - until it started raining and stuff, then it began stuttering.

So, I suspect SoM will run just fine at highest setting with 4GB.

However, I wouldn't recommend buying a top-of-the-line PC today with a 4GB GPU. I'd wait for 6+ GB cards to start showing up, which is supposed to be in the next few months.

Personally, I've decided to wait with my upgrade until the 980 ti is out.

JDR13 said:

I've never seen 6GB of vram mentioned for Lord of the Fallen. It says right in the video menu that 4GB is "recommended" for ultra textures.

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It doesn't say it requires 6GB explicitly, but if you turn it to the biggest texture quality setting, you get this warning message. So I assumed it recommended 6GB vram for it.
http://oi61.tinypic.com/sy12me.jpg

I'll have to download the HD textures for SoM and see how it runs on my 980. To see how much is it required.

DArtagnan said:

However, I wouldn't recommend buying a top-of-the-line PC today with a 4GB GPU. I'd wait for 6+ GB cards to start showing up, which is supposed to be in the next few months.

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That's all fine and good, but I need to be playing Witcher 3 on max settings on release day . If I didn't have that obsession, I'd have also waited some more instead of getting the 980. But I'm more than happy with it. I expect it should hold me for 4 years in the future. There's very few games so far that are that demanding.