Community MetaSteam | July 2020 - Blood on the Horizon

[Li Kao]

Uh !

'...initial work towards mariko support has been performed with full support for mariko consoles (Switch v2 + Lite) being planned for this summer'

Uh !

 

[fantomena]

Seems like Im gonna need that RTX 3080. Currently don't have an RTX card.

 

[Tomasety]

The surprising way that paid DLC works

So, paid DLC - new levels, modes, etc - specifically those made for PC games on Steam. It's way better for devs than you think, and here's why!

www.gamasutra.com

This is an interesting read from a consumer perspective point of view, probably just half of the article because its aimed towards developers.
Things I noticed that made the first section of the article interesting were:

“I think that most people make only one purchase and never return again, so if the DLC isn't available when they buy the game, that sale is lost… I think that DLC has more value as a long tail extension than as a singular launch event e.g. DLC sales in week one after a DLC’s release.”

There's some truth behind those words. Its not exactly 100% accurate but I believe it works for the majority of videogames consumers. I mean, for instance season passes that takes 1 year to release after initial game releases are somehow initially lost sales. I as a consumer have got plenty of those waiting years to see a decent sale or discount after I have finished the main game not only once but maybe twice or more.

In the current videogames industry trend, there are too many good games being released frequently which makes "waiting for a sale or even waiting for the season pass to release" a burden, frequently, at least from my personal experience, By the time I can or want to get DLCs I might have 0 interest on the extra content due to the above reasons among many others that may be up to personal circumstances.

And then, there's also this case:

It’s all about increasing $ yield smartly for the ‘long tail’ of sales, and for post-launch players finding the game for the first time.

I underlined the last part of the sentence which is what I immediately identified myself with. For example, I bought Darkest Dungeon in the Summer sale and I had to read quite a bit about whether it was worth or not to purchase the major DLCs. Due to the nature of the game it was not recommended for a beginner.
This behaviour is explained later in the article, in which the author gives his personal opinion on which games paid DLCs are worth to invest as a developer.
Hint: Strategy, Simulator (Say Hi to Firaxis, Paradox and many more) Well known franchises for their paid DLC business model.

 

[Li Kao]

Oh lord, you mean I can do 4K/60 in 'quality mode' with my rig.
There is a catch, there must be a catch. Maybe I should buy an extinguisher

 

[Tizoc]

Nope, I am very much not into that. Far Cry 4 it is. Also, it turns out that I will review Death Stranding. I don't know how to feel about that.

Be fair: Give props to stuff you like and point out stuff you don't like or hamper your enjoyment of the game.

 

[Alexandros]

For which publication?

A greek site that I write for.

 

[fantomena]

A greek site that I write for.

Link? I can give the site 1 more click.

 

[Tizoc]

Nope, I am very much not into that. Far Cry 4 it is. Also, it turns out that I will review Death Stranding. I don't know how to feel about that.

 

[Hektor]

Can't use eShop and online functionality I think.

Oof, guess i won't then

 

[ISee]

Oh lord, you mean I can do 4K/60 in 'quality mode' with my rig.
There is a catch, there must be a catch. Maybe I should buy an extinguisher

DF even flat out recommends DLSS over native resolution + TAA.
DLSS is some black voodoo magic.

The last time I remember getting better visuals and better performance was, the actuall 3dfx vodoo 1.

 

[Li Kao]

So, on the 4K TV set, should I play Death Stranding

• DLSS 4K/60
• DLSS 1080/120 (mode that is not officially supported by the TV, but compatible)

Emphasis on 4K set ! My question is if playing at 1080p on 4K TV could be bad.

 

[Cordelia]

So, on the 4K TV set, should I play Death Stranding

• DLSS 4K/60
• DLSS 1080/120 (mode that is not officially supported by the TV, but compatible)

Emphasis on 4K set ! My question is if playing at 1080p on 4K TV could be bad.

1080p on 4K TV will be blurry as fuck.

 

[fantomena]

Death Stranding is out.

 

[ISee]

Death Stranding is out.

and downloading

 

[MonthOLDpickle]

Random gift from wife's cousin.

It is

You need to react to this post in order to see this content.

How come I can't see the release time on store page anymore?

 

[madjoki]

Random gift from wife's cousin.

It is [Hidden content]

How come I can't see the release time on store page anymore?

Death Stranding is released.

 

[ISee]

How come I can't see the release time on store page anymore?

Because it's out and available,

 

[ezodagrom]

So how bad is SAO Re Hollow Fragment ? Is it the first one to play chronologically ?

I haven't played it yet, but it seems to be something like a 6/10 game?

Seems like it's considered to be both the 1st and 2nd games in the series, it includes the content from the first game (PSP game, Sword Art Online Infinity Moment, an alternate story that starts at the end of the 1st part of the anime) and also a new story that wasn't part of the first game (Hollow Area).

After this, the release order is Lost Song -> Hollow Realization -> the spin-off Accel World vs SAO -> Fatal Bullet -> Alicization.

 

[fantomena]

95 min left with downloading.

 

[Li Kao]

Yeah, Death Stranding download on fiber should be nearly done !
I waited all day for this moment, I'm moderatly hyped (gimme me weird, gimme ), so I will immediately... take a nap.

I think I haz a depression issue, fam

 

[Mor]

Another great work from Dictator
Please, check it out, image quality is STUNNING and it's a very interesting review of this PC port, also, great first part of the video hehe

 

[fantomena]

Almost 10k in-game in DS and still 1h23min to go on me. Game has only been out for 30 min.

 

[ISee]

Let's try out Death Stranding with DLSS at 1440p:
Game: 170fps - 180fps

I think I should enable Vsync, lol.

 

[MonthOLDpickle]

so the download is still 63.9gb or am I downloading the preload still?

 

[Deku]

 

[ISee]

so the download is still 63.9gb or am I downloading the preload still?

Nah, the download is always 63.9GB.

 

[Cordelia]

I should really get an RTX.

Ampere can't come soon enough.

 

[PC-tan]

Sadly it does not seem like you can use the DS4 speaker for DS. Welp.

 

[Tizoc]

xinek

Check out this Cov. 25 run in Monster Run. A nice tactic used by the player. If you thought normal runs were hard, seeing him utilize the tools given to them is pretty encouraging XP


Note that the changes you see in this video go live this weekend for everyone.

 

[Durante]

Dictator nice work on the Death Stranding article.
I was asked if I wanted to write about it for IGN, but since there isn't much to cover that you didn't already touch upon I don't see a reason to replicate that effort.

One thing I do wonder about is if you saw any amplification of moire/similar patterned artifacts (especially ones induced by high-frequency specular detail) in motion with performance DLSS. That was the only real drawback of DLSS that I noticed in my playthrough of Wolfenstein.

 

[Tizoc]

Does any still use DSR with their NVidia card? Call me crazy but I could swear I hardly hear talk of its use nowadays ^^;

 

[Mor]

Absolutely nuts, game already at 27k ccu playing the game, my bet is that it's going to peak at 50-60k

 

[Dictator]

Dictator nice work on the Death Stranding article.
I was asked if I wanted to write about it for IGN, but since there isn't much to cover that you didn't already touch upon I don't see a reaso nto replicate that effort.

One thing I do wonder about is if you saw any amplification of moire/similar patterned artifacts (especailly ones induced by high-frequency specular detail) in motion with performance DLSS. That was the only real drawback of DLSS that I noticed in my playthrough of Wolfenstein.

Thanks I would have loved to have seen your thoughts on it for IGN.
In this game I noticed moire pattern happening at 1080p going up to 4K on tiling detail surfaces, 1080p to 4K has it, but 1440p to 4K does not have it (and ends up having less moire or flicker than native, interestingly enough). Here is a shot for the zoom comparison on the EG website.

1080p -> 4K has it here on the jacket with that crazy tiling detail texture, while 1440p -> 4K does not.

 

[Durante]

I would have loved to have seen your thoughts on it.
In this game I noticed moire pattern happening at 1080p going up to 4K on tiling detail surfaces, 1080p to 4K has it, but 1440p to 4K does not have it (and ends up having less moire or flicker than native, interestingly enough). Here is a shot for the zoom comparison on the EG website.

1080p -> 4K has it here on the jacket with that crazy tiling detail texture, while 1440p -> 4K does not.

Yeah, that's probably the type of artifact I was thinking of (it's hard to be certain without motion).

I really feel like issues with patterns like that are impossible to circumvent once you reach some level of subsampling relative to the frequency of the detail. IMHO, in motion, blurring more rather than trying to preserve "detail" (which just manifests as noise) would be preferable in such cases,

Doing a really good analysis of DLSS seems like a huge task. IMHO you'd need something like multiple perfectly reproducible scenes stressing different aspects of the reconstruction, scripted camera movements, and lossless capturing of matching frame sequences.
And then you'd need to find a way to make it clear to people that you are focusing on the failure cases since those are the interesting ones, and that overall DLSS 2.0 is really quite amazing compared to all traditional alternatives (i.e. TAAU, checkerboarding, filter+upsample, ...).
Oh, and while you are at it, you also have to try and make people aware that temporal stability is just as important as "sharpness", and that the really impressive (and, to me, surprising thing about DLSS2 is that it often manages to combine both. (As long as you're not subsampling a high frequency pattern heavily)

I was always really skeptical of DLSS (I'm biased against everything that promises "magic through ANNs" for other reasons ) but playing through 2 games now with the 2.0 version the quality/performance tradeoff might be the single most significant of any setting in basically a decade. But the failure modes still show that it's not quite magic. (But maybe future iterations will surprise me there as well)

 

[Cordelia]

970 really shows its age on Death Stranding

 

[Blu]

More City Connection shmups

Released yesterday.

Upcoming

 

[fantomena]

Every time I hear the sound of the police even though Im pretty sure I haven't done anything wrong:

 

[Durante]

Does any still use DSR with their NVidia card? Call me crazy but I could swear I hardly hear talk of its use nowadays ^^;

I use it quite frequently, I just don't talk about it much since there's nothing new to talk about. It "just works" (except for needing desktop resolution changes in badly implemented games/engines ).

 

[didamangi]

Does any still use DSR with their NVidia card? Call me crazy but I could swear I hardly hear talk of its use nowadays ^^;

Not that much to talk about other than using custom dsr tool to make your own multiplier. With DLSS features to keep frames up with the RTX cost. You can say it's the opposite direction than DSR.

 

[Ascheroth]

DF even flat out recommends DLSS over native resolution + TAA.
DLSS is some black voodoo magic.

The last time I remember getting better visuals and better performance was, the actuall 3dfx vodoo 1.

DLSS = Deep Learning Secret Sauce?

 

[NarohDethan]

Is DLSS worth using playing on 1080p?

 

[Cordelia]

Does any still use DSR with their NVidia card? Call me crazy but I could swear I hardly hear talk of its use nowadays ^^;

I use it all the time on lightweight games and MMOs.

 

[prudis]

Every time I hear the sound of the police even though Im pretty sure I haven't done anything wrong:

 

[Durante]

Is DLSS worth using playing on 1080p?

In Death Stranding it looks like "quality" DLSS looks better than their native TAA, so yes.
If you get more performance than you need that way something like 1440p DSR with quality DLSS would also be an option.

It's too bad for use cases like this that so far we never got to see the native resolution mode of DLSS (which they talked about back at its introduction).

 

[Dekunator]

Assuming I have the funds, I can't wait to upgrade from my 6600k and 1070 hopefully by the end of this year. DLSS looks insane!

 

[ISee]

Does any still use DSR with their NVidia card? Call me crazy but I could swear I hardly hear talk of its use nowadays ^^;

If there is enough performance left for it...

 

[AHA-Lambda]

Just got an email in Superhot Mind Control Delete final release is out early for backers of the original game

 

[FeedMeAStrayCat]

All that talk of gaming magazines has me feeling pretty nostalgic. I used to buy so many as a kid and teen.
EGM, EGM2, Game Players (and then Ultra Game Players, right? And maybe something else after), GamePro, GameFan, Next Generation, PC Accelerator (which I had completely forgotten about until I saw that post about it), Game Informer, Nintendo Power, PC Gamer, Tips and Tricks, etc. Then ones I would buy just a handful of throughout the years like Official Playstation Monthly, Official Xbox, etc. I'm positive there were a few more sprinkled in there, too.

 

[fantomena]

TAA or FXAA?

Durante

 

[Durante]

In any game with a modern PBR renderer screen-space AA is too unstable IMHO, so I'd always go with TAA.