Hello everyone,
I think I might be playing the wrong games at the moment …
But before I dive in to that, a little about the announcement yesterday … Cor blimey what was that ? I’m not going to go into it at all here, you’ll be seeing plenty about that around the internet at the moment and if you’re lucky, you’ll be missing the more rabid stuff that’ll be going on the internet at the moment about Stuff. My opinion ? It’ll be in the tags at the bottom of the post.
Anyway, with that out the way, I hope you are all well. I’ve been a bit up and down lately, although I don’t think there’s anything sinister behind that. Let’s see :
Headaches – I’ll come back to those.
The usual wrist soreness – managing that at the moment. I think reading is helping, more of that later as I’m only 130 pages from the end of Redemption Ark and it’s been properly kicking off in there.
Eye strangeness – I’m well overdue having new glasses. One eye is giving sharp images, one has shifted into a bit of blurriness and I think that might be contributing to headaches.
Friday was a bit too toasty and I think I overheated.
And the usual hayfeverish type things.
I don’t there’s anything sinister in there but I do need to change the glasses and I think I need to ditch at least one of the games I’m about to talk about …
2 games today – Rebel Galaxy and Deus Ex Mankind Divided (DXMD). I think I’m going to be dropping both of those … Rebel Galaxy because the visual effects are causing headaches and DXMD because while it looks gorgeous, it’s also rather buggy. I might go back to both later though.
That’s Rebel Galaxy and the starter ship called Rasputin. I’ve since upgraded past Iceangel :
That picture is showing one of the problems actually … massive over done lens flare. Oh and as always, click for bigger on these.
That one is my current ship, a Tennhausen ship named Runner of Blades for the quote at the end of Bladerunner. There’s another bit of that lens flare creeping in there.
That’s the real problem. You travel around the various nodes in a warp system with lots of that lens flare plus added camera shake too. Oh and there’s motion blur as well. I think the combination of all that was triggering headaches … And they don’t seem to have gone away with turning those particular effects off. A shame because this one’s a nice game to play with genuine scope for winning through tactics.
And it can be rather pretty too.
Still, if a game is bad for you either mentally or physically – walk away. Find other games. They’re supposed to be things that you enjoy, not things that make you ill. Warcraft is another of those, the posture and play style I was adopting was doing horrid things to my shoulder.
The other game I’ve been looking at is Deus Ex Mankind Divided which I talked a bit about last time. This might get the walk away from treatment as well. Whereas its predecessor, Human Revolution, was tightly produced, bug free (I noticed one that brought chuckles) and worked extremely well as a game, Mankind Divided feels like it was rushed out in a much less than perfect state. It’s also infected with the fad of that time : power boosting microtransactions. I’ve been ok with the cosmetic microtransactions in Elite, mostly because they contribute to great looking screenshots … but day 0 content DLC and power boosts are a bit naughty. Human Revolution had some of that as well.
It has bugs, some of them game breaking. Some of them just annoying in terms of having to reload from a save if they hit. But …
That’s one from tonight’s session. I’ve tweaked the shadows a bit and a couple of other settings. I didn’t push it too far, because the graphics card I have isn’t really capable of driving this game at its highest settings. Going for the max will cause frame rate disruptions which ultimately mean headaches again.
I was remembering to observe my social distancing on the in game underground system … This is a curious element of the game actually. There are two sides to this particular corridor, a normal human side and an Augmented human side. This game very definitely plays to the digital apartheid card, with your character being one of those augmented humans who is on the bad side of that discrimination. Augs go to the back of the train, need special papers, are disqualified from a lot of work and while it isn’t nearly as bad as apartheid was and is in real life, it’s noticeable.
I’m going to leave that subject alone though here. I’m not subject to racism in real life, so I have no inkling as to the real horrors that I know people are subjected to. I can get away from the digital apartheid in DXMD by closing the game, that’s an immense difference to real life.
The thing I think I need to take away from it is to keep a part of myself watching out for anything similar coming from me and stamp it out. We’re all humans who deserve and should expect equal treatment.
Back to the graphics ! This is from walking around a bit more and I was noticing the shadows and reflections. (You may want to click for bigger again !) The quality in this game is getting particularly stunning and I think if I were to stick with it, I might be persuaded to invest in a stronger graphics card.
And that’s one from an internal location ! It looks stunning doesn’t it.
Just a couple of problems … if you can see “Shooting range” to the left, tonight’s session ended when I tried to enter that (side mission) and the game crashed to desktop. Apparently that’s a well known issue caused by inventory swapping.
I had another known issue with storage compartments associated with the microtransaction equipment boosts. The game interface can cease responding as soon as you try interacting with these storage boxes. I had this 4 years ago, had it again last week.
There is the critical level crash to desktop bug with the lighting which stopped me playing this game when it came out. I haven’t had this recently (it was a game vs AMD problem and I now have an nVidia card) but that bug is still likely to be in the game.
The game is 4 years old, the bugs are known, no fixes have come out for them. That’s negligent. And even without those bugs, the game just isn’t as good as its predecessors, Deus Ex and DXHR.
But it does look stunningly gorgeous doesn’t it.
Next games ? I’m thinking XCom 2 as the more relaxed playstyle game and quite possibly Alien Isolation as the first person run and hide and if you shoot you’re already dead type game :-D.
Stay safe everyone ! If you can avoid going out, please do, keep that distancing up if you do, hopefully this current situation will be behind us sooner rather than later.