The Gaming Chat Café

[Saul Goodman]

So Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga on Android was a failure since a lot of maps have missing textures on its walls and floors, but they updated the game this year and fixed it! Finally, I can play this masterpiece again

[Agent Edward]

Man, I just learned about this bug, has this happened to any of you old timers back in the PS1 days? (I wasn't even born back then).

 

 

This is some next level creepy sh*t.

[Jason]

Some new nVidia leaks, albeit they were leaked by a Seasonic PSU leak not long ago, but pointing towards increased power consumption for the higher end 5000 series cards, with the 5080 going up to 400w. Should still be good on my 750W PSU given my CPU caps at 125w, especially with a lil undervolt on the GPU, which will have the added benefit of running it cooler ofc.

 

Same new reports saying the 5080 is looking like it might be a slightly faster 4090, which sounds amazing, but also terrifying when it comes to price and availability lol. I can see a lot of people jumping on the 5080 if it's a cheap 4090, cause I think the 4090 is a GPU that could do another 3-4 years @ max or near max settings in games w/o breaking a sweat especially with DLSS and frame gen, so a 5080 is gonna be a good long term buy for many I think.

 

Praying they still drop this year, but there's still no murmurs of an nVidia event to announce them just yet.

[Mister Pink]

Yeah, so I couldn't resist and bought Star Wars. Bit pricey - went through the Microsoft Store. It was David Jaffe's, and Emil Pagliarulo's tweets that swayed me lol.

 

 

 

I actually love Emil's response to the game. 

 

I'm only about 6hrs in myself and it's not perfect but there's a lot of fun to be had in the game. 

[Jason]

It's rough around the edges, has some weird decisions, some meh execution and some instances of the never popular mandatory stealth, but despite all that Outlaws is a fun game.

 

And despite those groups who are terminally on-Twitter wanting every game to fail, a game being fun is always the most important thing.

[lndex]

I'm quite enjoying my time w/ the game, hovering between this, Core Keeper and Star Trucker, so plenty to play at the moment. I even found a cameo of a certain knowable SW character when I was on a Tatooine mission, which was pretty cool to see.

 

I will say the save system is really naff too. There's been moments where it's said I'm in combat when I wasn't, so not allowing me to save at all and I'd need to blow my self up or something lol. Hopefully they address situations like that in a patch or the lack of being able to save in general, especially during missions, weird design choice.

[Jason]

The save system is one of the big QoL issues they need to fix. It's just stupid, honestly.

 

Not to mention enemies respawn on a load lol.

[Margot Robbed Me]

I just started playing Cities Skylines 2 again, and this game is screwed.

 

I built a city to about 150k pop, and the simulation speed is now moving at a snails pace. The game itself continues to run smoothly, but now everything is starting to move in slow motion. For those familiar with city builders like CS1, you had the Speed Select option where you could Pause or Play the simulation, with 1x, 2x, 3x speed.

 

Once you hit a certain population, those speeds are irrelevant. With a 150k population, 3x now moves slower than 1x in a New Game with no existing population. Eventually, it will take an hour for a car to cross an intersection because of the limitation.

 

The population at which this slow down gets noticeable and how quickly it degrades, varies depending on your CPU. I'm on a 12700k and it happened at around 150k. The reason this is an issue is because my map is about 15% built. I have PLENTY of area left that I was planning to develop, but now all of that is pointless. 

 

Game runs smoothly frame-rate wise, but the CPU just gets f*cked before you can get any decently sized city built. On top of that, some key things just don't work. Editing the Seasons in Map editor for example, doesn't save your changes. So if you make a tropical map, change all the values for the seasons to eliminate snowing, save it, and load it as a new game. You're going to get snow. If you go back into map editor and open your map, you'll see that your changes reverted to default. This has apparently been broken for months, is an acknowledged issue, and STILL has not been fixed.

 

What an absolute shame. I was enjoying building the city, until I noticed that everything started to move slowly. Now I don't even want to continue anymore knowing what lies ahead.

[Jason]

I might be barking up the wrong tree, but I do look forward to the day Unity is dropped by AAA studios.

 

The next Football Manager game is moving to Unity after like 20 years or whatever on the same engine, and so far it all sounds terrifying as a long time FM fan. Delays to the game, major long standing features cut and be readded in later versions... I know moving engine is hard and all, to any engine, but at this point it just feels like Unity is being used for stuff it was never ever intended for.

 

It's a shame too cause CS2 could be great, but if it sh*ts the bed at 150k pop then what's the point.

[Margot Robbed Me]

Some people are saying the slow down gets noticeable as early as 75k population, which is completely unacceptable, especially relative to the map sizes.

 

To make a city of decent size playable, the system requirements would require one of those $5000+ Threadripper CPUs or something. How's that for system reqs. 

[Emmi]

Core Design's Tomb Raider games (all of them including the often criticised Angel of Darkness) are masterpieces and extremely enjoyable and 'different', unique experiences in my opinion which we haven't gotten before and since ... sadly. I really hope that Aspyr works on a remaster collection of IV, V and VI as well because it'd be sad not to see them get the same treatment as I, II and III.

 

The Tomb Raider games/franchise AFTER Core Design, so the games under Crystal Dynamics (Legend, Anniversary, Underworld and the 'Survivor' Trilogy) have nothing in common anymore with what made these games (the 'Classic' era) so unique and exciting except for Lara but even her character has been changed drastically for the worse in every aspect! It's just like any other adventure game (think Uncharted).

 

Thank you Core Design for the most unique, exciting, difficult and rewarding adventure games there have ever been!

[lndex]

There's a new patch out for Outlaws. It seems like they've addressed some issues during stealth (I think they've just adjusted the detection level), performance stuff to do with VRAM improvements, and tweaked the HDR brightness values, so hopefully it's not washed out anymore.

 

Nothing on the save situation, I don't think, which they really need to sort out...

[Jason]

I dunno if it's something that gets worse over a save or if something broke, idk, but I've been getting some pretty bad performance and texture degradation in Outlaws the past few days, both pre and post patch. On a fresh start it's fine but it gets juddery and the texture quality just plummets to nothing, the other day performance dropped to the low single digits and needed a reboot to fix it. There's a config fix to fix the texture issue, which seems to help, however the perf deg and judders remain.

 

Not sure what it is tbh. It's a bit of an on-going theme with me at the moment in games though lol, feels like a lot of it VRAM related and possibly related to VRAM memory leaks.

 

I'm at the point of no return for the main story (you can continue playing after, post-story) but I'm not in a mad rush to play through it while the game feels a bit juddery. Beyond this issue I've really enjoyed the game tbh, it's definitely worthy of it's review score, it's a 7-7.5/10, it's got some nice ideas, it's immersive as f*ck, the world and atmosphere is great, the story's a decent romp, some cool moments, it's just not executed at a high level across the board while also being a bit buggy and as said above technically troubled in places. I hope it's done well enough to let Massive have another go at the franchise, with more mature tech and a better understanding of the what people like and don't like I think they could cook up something really good with a second go. I'll be down for DLC in future if it's any good, which is not a given with Ubisoft DLC in my experience but we'll see.

[lndex]

I've not had anything of the sort, but when using DLSS, I get these weird short black flashes/flickering when looking at certain objects, which happens a lot on Tatooine. Not really sure what the cause is, but using FSR3, it's fine.

 

The only thing I'm not really digging with the game at the moment is how frequently the missions are happening around stealth when going into new areas. It all feels very samey and gets a little boring, and that paired with the save checkpoint system is ooooooof, but outside of that, I think going about the open world is really enjoyable. I guess that's just the Ubisoft formula for ya lol.

 

But yeah, it's a good 7/10 game to chill on.

[Jason]

Weirdly the stealth gets less restrictive as you get more options to help with stealth lol. Later in the game you get less "don't get spotted" type objectives, allowing you to go guns blazing. Outside of like 2-3 instances it's been okay for me, but yea if they do a future game I think that's one area they need to massively improve on, allowing us to go guns blazing in every mission if we want.

 

Not had any black flashes or anything like that my self, either on FSR or DLSS. I did find a mod to remove the "cinematic lensing" effect though, which fixed DLSS + the FSR3 frame gen mods ghosting issue and also just in general massively improved the IQ cause that lensing effect not only blurs the image it slightly distorts it. One of the more bizarre filters I've ever seen on a game, especially considering you can't disable it at the moment.

[Jason]

 

 

About 50 mins of footage. Can't help but be disappointed  that it doesn't have a custom character, feels like this type of RPG really benefits from them, especially given the studio had a great one with BDO. Not a deal breaker by any means, but would've been nice.

 

The game its self looks bonkers ambitious - there's a bit of a money shot just after 19 minutes in if you don't have time  to watch it that shows the scale of the world. There's the expected jank that comes with a project that's this ambitious, and some of the art looks a bit uninspired, but you can live with that if the ideas are good. I think my main concern would be the jank, stretching themselves too thin, and the studio struggling to make a single player world that feels dynamic and alive in a way a single player world should, as it's a bit of a different kettle of fish to an MMO where players running around helps make it feel alive. Also just a random thing, but the game looks a tad over sharpened to me, even in a compressed video, that being said the image quality was pretty clean.

 

But beyond that, the combat looks really fun and fresh, whatwith all the kicks, knockbacks, and for lack of a better way to describe them, wrestling type moves lmao, and while it's an acquired taste for some I do like the heavy use of particles too. Also is that a RDR2 style "hold L2" to interact with NPC's I spy? There seems to be a lot of RDR2 insprired stuff in the game in general, which is not a bad thing.

 

They seem to be showing this off a bunch now so they're clearly growing in confidence in it. I just hope it's not a game that buckles under it's own ambition come launch.

 

 

[Saul Goodman]

After weeks of grinding, I have finally become infamous in Payday 2. I just need a couple million dollars to ace all the skills.

 

There's this heist that I was trying to stealth called Framing Frame. It was difficult since there are a total of 5 guards walking around the place and 1 guard in the camera room. I can only kill 4 guards since I can only answer 4 pagers. If I kill all four, take out the other one and answer the pager, the alarm will trigger. It's not like the bank where I can kill all guards and dominate the entire map.

 

There's also this guard that stands near a path that I need to walk and he never moves. I can't go around because it has lasers that will trigger the alarm if I cross it.

 

I'll play multiplayer as soon as I update my console

Edited September 13 by Saul Goodman

[universetwisters]

The Sims 2 is 20 years old today!!! Jesus Christ. I had SO much fun with that dumb game

 

[Emmi]

Ye, The Sims 2 was the GOAT Sims game for me followed by Sims 1.

[lndex]

R&C: Rift Apart is currently 22 quid on CDKeys, so f*ckin tempted, but Ragnarök comes out this week, lol.

[Jason]

Sony's PC ports hold their price for ages, it's a bit annoying lol, only Horizon ZD has ever really seen heavy discounts from what I've seen and that's their oldest port. Even stuff like Sackboy has held it's price for yonks, it's still over £20 on a sale despite being a relatively niche game that's been on PC for a few years now.

 

I've been tempted to pick up GoT but it's still about 30 quid on CDKeys and I've still got multiple day 1 games to buy this year still so I don't really want to throw that cash down on another game right now. Ragnarok is basically in the same boat, a game I absolutely will play but just not right now due to spending a lot on games in these last few months of the year.

 

Next year I'll use GoT, Ragnarok and revisiting some old saves I didn't finish (Cyberpunk, HFW) + new playthroughs (BG3, maybe GoTG, maybe DATV) for any quiet periods though, so I'll at least have a good backlog of stuff to play next year inbetween releases.

[LongHairedFreakyGuy]

3 hours ago, lndex said:

R&C: Rift Apart is currently 22 quid on CDKeys, so f*ckin tempted, but Ragnarök comes out this week, lol.

 

 

Said my piece on it plenty times now. Fantastic game. 

[lndex]

I suppose this is Minecraft 2, then:

 

 

[Jason]

Sounds like the nVidia app and driver update coming on the 1st of October will finally add RTX HDR support for multi monitor setups. Finally get to give that a whirl then.

 

At this point SDR gaming looks dark and dim for me lol, I try and use at least AutoHDR in every game now.

[lndex]

I've found RTX HDR to be a godsend on those non native HDR games or sh*tty implementation, and yeah, it's crazy how after all these years an SDR picture looks so f*ckin flat when you switch between the two.

 

Also, seeing that Max Payne now has the RTX Remix mod, I'll say I'm impressed, but...why the f*ck does it make everything look as if it's soaking wet lol.

 

[Jason]

RTX Remix is just a fancy visual mod for games, same sh*t you'd see on Nexus etc. People using it just make everything shiny and reflective, cause shiny and reflective = good graphics. It murders the art direction in every game I've seen it in thus far apart from MAYBE Portal, which had a simplistic art direction to begin with, plus actual artists as it was a showcase game for it.

 

And yea, have been waiting for RTX HDR multi mon support for a while. Special K is good but launching via Special K is a step I forget to do and also has caused crashing before for me. AutoHDR is solid, it makes the picture bright when you crank up the brightness slider but that's the only customisation you can do w/ it.

[LongHairedFreakyGuy]

4 hours ago, Jason said:

, cause shiny and reflective = good graphics.

 

Bit of a digress, but that sentence just instantly makes me think of the hundreds of '4K ultra HD Remake GTA' YouTube videos, wherein they genuinely thought the game looked decent. 

[Jason]

In today's episode of bizarre:

 

 

 

The min reqs are pretty damn low it has to be said, but it does say it's based on 1080p upscaled from 720p.

 

But the recommended? Those recommend a 2070S/4060 for 1080p/60, which honestly is nothing too alarming in 2025... except it says that's 1080p/60fps with frame generation. I would f*cking hope that's an error and it means upcaling cause otherwise that's madness for so many reasons. I know this engine hasn't got a great history with open worlds (Dragon's Dogma 2 says hello) but the f*ck?

[lndex]

@Jason I'm not sure if you've got a bit of an idea, but I ran into a problem with HDR in fullscreen. It seems to be almost inverted in color. I dunno why it's happened. I've switched DP cables to the one you get with the AW monitor. It still does it. The only thing that seems to work is using a different DP port on my GPU, which I suspect could be the problem, but It will happen again so...

 

For reference:

 

Spoiler

 

 

[Jason]

Never seen or heard of that before, that's really weird tbh.

 

If a port change fixed it then it could be the port on the GPU? Have to wait and see if it does it on the other port I guess.