What the hell. Have you gone politically insane in an attempt to be correct. What about games that force you to play as a male. Every game forces you to play as somebody relating to the story. What about movies that force you to watch preset story with a lead male or lead female, without you having any choice.
I suggest you stop playing games, because you're just tying yourself up in knots over nothing while attempting to take the moral high ground, but you haven't got the brains to think it through.
Go into a darkened room and have a lie down. You might come out normal again.
What do you call Tomb Raider without Lara, or Uncharted without Nate, or Horizon Zero Dawn without Aloy, or The Last Of Us without Joel and Ellie …you call it Beyond Good & Evil 2 without Jade. Go away and come back when it's sorted.
I like Dan Hay and love his motivations, but I'm trying to put the trailers and gameplay videos out of my head because they just look boring and contrived.
I'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt because Far Cry 4 was great with all the random systems creating chaos. This was most evident when you use the awesome map editor to create your own mini games to play coop with a friend.
Without doubt, the Far Cry 4 map editor was the defining feature of this console gen, but nobody knew what the thing could actually do. All people knew about the map editor was silly land sharks being blown up with a grenade launcher on Youtube. Meanwhile I was creating huge detailed landscapes with multiple battle locations, navigational puzzles and complex waves of AI.
If you have Far Cry 4 and want to see what you can really do with the tools Ubisoft give you, search 'DeeKayEm' and play some of the high quality maps I have created. They were not created in 10 minutes. Each map takes about 3 weeks to create. Make sure you download the latest versions because some include major changes and extra content.
Beware the maps are very hard. No hud, full immersion and fully alert AI. Run 'n' gun and you're dead. Play coop if you can so you can revive each other. Locations are often hidden via puzzles, so it's not a error, you have to search for a hidden route. Always remember if you get stuck, you can simply download my map and open it in the editor to see what you missed, plus you can learn some of the complex techniques I use to create the maps and see how the maps are designed. It's all there free of charge if you want it.
Example, in SubmarineAssault5, you cannot get inside the huge walled mountain top village battle until you find a cave that leads to a submarine dock. There are buzzers on the deck of the submarine. Capture those and you can fly up to the mountain village.
Some puzzles involve shooting explosive bootles to break walls, slashing a wooden walls with your knife, rock climbing and swimming through underwater caves that often lead to an underground temple full of crazy cultists.
Another good map is DesertResearchLab4. It starts with a underground lab explosion and the lab animals escape. You have to escape the lab and that's only the start of your adventure. Each map I create has at least 5 huge unique locations plus lots of smaller events.
What I want to see was a game called Far Cry Worlds which is just a very powerful stand alone map editor with a huge array of assets and event generators, where users simply create their own mini games and publish them for everyone else to play. It should be marketed as an open world game creator. With more modes such as 'assassination mode', where you have to take out 5 marked targets to complete the map, even if you leave all the others alive. Each one could be buried deep inside 5 locations across the map with different ways to enter them.
Creative gamers will have a blast and non creatives get unlimited free content. Everyone wins. But you need a better rating system to find the good ones. All mine went under the radar with inferior maps getting 5 stars. That's life …lol
I hear this a lot from xbox fanboys, but it just doesn't carry any weight.
The lower the resolution, the more noticeable the difference. The XB1 was not fit for purpose. It was doing crude 900p in a 1080p TV gen without any smart tech to smooth out the rough image and flickering details. It wasn't that the PS4 was better. It was that the XB1 was not good enough for most gamers to buy it.
We are still in a 1080p TV gen and the PS4 Pro is fit for purpose. It offers gorgeous anti aliased 1080p with a very stable image and partially supports 4K for the early adopters. The visual difference between two high resolution images is not as noticeable because you cross a threshold. Most gamers are still on 1080p TV's anyway, so 1800p downsampled to 1080p gives the same gorgeous anti aliasing a 1440p downsampled to 1080p, which makes the XB1X look like an overkill.
I know you want to shout it from the roof tops after 4 years defending a lame multimedia machine, but the difference between the XB1X and the PS4 Pro is not that great. Don't expect a Shadow Of War difference as the norm. There was something fishy going on there. The point of interest was not that the XB1X looked far sharper than the PS4 Pro, the point of interest was why does this game have far worse textures than any other game released on the PS4 Pro when it's doing nothing special. It looked like a set up.
Yes if you walk up to a 4K screen and compare them side by side with a magnifying glass, you will see the XB1X is sharper. It should be. It arrives a year later using todays tech and is a much higher price.
The trouble I have with the XB1X is that it's too expensive for a mid gen upgrade that only offers a 40% jump and only has a 3 year lifespan. PS5 will arrive in 2 years time at a similar price and be offering a proper 500% next gen jump with a 6 year lifespan. Yes there will be a mid gen PS5 Pro because it makes sense for those who think 6 years is too long as hardware improves. MS will follow a year after PS5 with the XB2, once the XB1X has had it's minimum 3 year lifespan that gamers expect. All the XB1X is achieving is giving the xbox fanboys bragging rights for 2 years.
You mention exclusives have to be recent in order to be of any value. A person buying a PS4 for the first time has never played any of the exclusives, so they have importance dating back to day one. A classic game will always be a classic game. Quality does not go out of fashion. Graphics don't age well, so that is why we have remasters. Forget all that back compat rubbish, play old games at old quality.
New customers will gain access to some of the best games ever made that are not available anywhere else, such as The Last Of Us remastered, Uncharted 4 and Horizon Zero Dawn. Plus if you're totally new to Playstation, you have access to the Uncharted trilogy remaster in high quality.
When the xbox fanboys were defending the XB1, they claimed it's not about graphics, it's about games, but Playstation has always had great games. Nothing has changed for Playstation gamers.
They did, but they had no other choice in the previous gen. They just accepted it as the norm. The PS4 Pro has opened up a clarity that has educated the eye to expect more. This will happen with the PS5. PC will always be 5 years ahead of consoles because if you have the money you can always brute force the code with more grunt.
Yes love it for what it is if you can afford it. The XB1X is a great game console if you lower your expectations. The best out there right now. A bit expensive, but way better than the lame 900p XB1 multimedia machine you suffered for 4 years in a 1080p TV gen.
The truth should never hurt. Just be proud of what you have got.
Good luck trying to tell xbox fanboys that the XB1X is similar to a PS4 Pro. That's not the message MS have been brain washing them with. The PS4 Pro does what it says on the tin at a low price, while the XB1X promises to be the most powerful native 4K console on earth that is future proof. Yet in 2 years time we will have the PS5 with a 500% jump in power at a similar price to an XB1X which only offers 40% more grunt.
30fps on a console is not the same as 30fps on PC. 30fps on a PC is just that. It's brute force 30 frames per second as set in the options to make something else use a higher setting. It's just a crude 30fps, so you see judder when panning and in movement, plus a loss of detail during that movement.
When you make a crude cartoon animation from perfectly distinct frames, you see the same judder at 30fps. Yet when you watch a professional animated movie running at 24fps you don't see the judder. Did you ever ask yourself why?
With 30fps on console, the best devs use specific techniques not available to a PC gamer that include motion blur and temporal antialiasing. These make 30fps appear smooth to the human eye and retain detail during a pan. It's not as fluid as native 60fps but it's 100% better than 30fps on a PC. PC gamers like yourself are not aware of this and are just drawing on personal experience without any knowledge of the tech at use in the console space.
Again you mention brute force process's that PC's struggle with such as shadows and grass. The PS4 Pro has worlds full of shadows and dense grass, handling them perfectly fine because the programming is optimised to make good use of the hardware available.
Even Digital Foundry keep falling into the PC trap when they call out alpha transparency effects as a cause of frame rate stutter on PS4 Pro. It has long been a problem with brute force PC gaming and every PC gamer went through that nightmare, yet Digital Foundry cannot explain why in other cases, PS4 Pro games are full of alpha transparency effects and volumetric clouds in the middle of the action, and don't have the frame rate issue. Uncharted 4 and Horizon Zero Dawn are perfect examples.
The infamous Crookbag Bog in The Witcher 3 blamed alpha transparency effects as the cause of frame rate stutter on PS4 Pro. The problem is due to the physics and AI of the actual enemy used in that area which overloads the CPU, stopping it from doing draw call duties. Hence the stutter of frames not ready for display. It's actually quite smooth now on the PS4 Pro after the Pro update because the console has more brute force and a slightly overclocked CPU.
The PC is not a perfect gaming platform. The devs just use crude brute force code that gamers have to push through with raw computing power. The devs keep using more power to make their new games look better and the PC gamer has to stump up the cost with expensive upgrades. And if you don't upgrade, you face not having enough brute force to push it through and that leads to performance worse than the console version, because you don't have any smart tech optimising the performance.
Ubisoft are up to their same old money grabbing tricks. Just when I thought they were going to make good after the AC Unity disaster, now they are milking the AC Origins with a big con trick.
You cannot pre-order the PS4 standard edition from Amazon UK because it's unavailable with no option to pre-order. But they still have all the expensive money making premium editions. Clearly they have used up all the game disc stock in the premium editions to force customers to pay the high price in order to get the pre-order bonus's.
10 days to go before release and Amazon UK are not taking standard edition pre-order's claiming it's unavailable and they don't know when or if it will be back in stock. Bullshit. If I cannot pre-order the standard edition at Amazon UK before release I'm going to kick it into the long grass.
I'm replaying the game on PS4 Pro with the new 1.51 patch on a 1080p TV and the game is glorious. The frame rate is silky smooth with no visible frame drops and we have supersampled anti aliasing going on so the game looks really polished. The frame pacing is excellent. Zero flickering details, zero jaggies, zero screen tear, and the game still looks extremely lush with lots of detail. In fact textures and edges look sharper even on a 1080p TV.
It's an impressive transformation that shoots this already impressive game to the top tier. Movement feels very close to Horizon Zero Dawn's level of smoothness. I expect the performance to drop slightly in more demanding scenes later on but the game is now starting from such a solid base that the negative impact won't be that great.
I'm sure Digital Foundry will rush to an area that hammers the game and point out the flaws, but that sort of stress test trick does not give a realistic impression of the full experience.
Thanks to the dev for this, because it's what I was waiting for. The XB1X is the reason why this has happened because it has created a larger mass of potential customers to justify the extra work.
The game is a real pleasure to play now. Who needs an XB1X. PS5 will be out by the time I upgrade to a 4K TV anyway and will be doing the native 4K thing properly, just like the PS4 did in the 1080p TV gen.
Oh and by the way, turn off the lame auto centre camera option because that just fights with your joysticks and constantly jerks the camera like a frame drop or frame pacing issue. It's perfectly smooth with that disabled and far more cinematic anyway, giving you full control to admire the views without fighting the joysticks.
And no, the game did not run better in boost mode because I was testing it last week. This is an epic upgrade on PS4 Pro for 1080p gamers.
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