Daweii

You can team kill in this game. It's often done by mistake, but it can also be done on purpose by someone that just wants to watch the world burn.

So far the game has been quite a bit of fun with a fair bit of stuff to do. The game is a bit of an everything game. It has survival elements, crafting elements, adventure elements, and even subtle horror elements, that are all packaged in this story rich adventure where you go out into the exclusion zone to get more resources. I'm enjoying it so far. I'm not sure how I'll feel after 10-15 hours because it does seem to be leaning on the survival and crafting to give it length, but I'm invested enough to see where it takes me.

Currently have Pacific Drive, Balatro, and Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor on my rotation. I usually only play one game at a time, but Balatro and Deep Rock Survivor are so bite sized in their design that I find them relaxing to play for 20-30 minutes before bed.

Not really. I mean, yes if you take both games as being Bethesda style RPGs, but Outer Worlds deliberately limited its scope to maintain a more traditional flow. You land on a planet and then you play that planet like its Oblivion. Starfield lets its grand scope get in the way of that more traditional flow. The reason for this is because everything is a loading screen. Land on a planet is a loading screen. Leave a planet is a loading screen. Entering a section of space around a planet is a loading screen. Warping is a loading screen. Now, some of these loading screens give a nice little cutscene, but the game essentially boils down to clicking on the map, selecting a destination, and then fast travelling to it. There is no real space travel in this game. You load into a section of space around a planet and if there is something there to do then you can fly towards it, but on many occasions you'll load into a section of space and the only thing there is the planet and nothing else to do. Starfield would be 100x better if it was like Outer Worlds which is why I don't see them as comparable. Starfield wanted 1000 planets, space combat, ship building, outpost building, crew recruitment, and whatever else they managed to get into that game. It's the scope of Starfield that hurts the game. Also, the pace of the game hurts it quite a bit. This is a game where it takes 15-20 hours to get going, and some even say it doesn't truly get going until completing the main story and starting new game plus. There is definitely fun to be had in Starfield for sure, but you have to play it to know if you'll find it. I'm a huge Bethesda fan and I thought Starfield was shit, but there are 6+ million people that love it, so it seems to be a game you have to play to know if you'll like it as while this is "Fallout in space", "Skyrim in space", "Oblivion in space", it's also it's own thing with its own pace and flow.

3% sounds too low, so there might be a bottleneck elsewhere. I just pulled up a benchmark from someone with a 3700X and a 6700XT and their CPU usage was 67% at 1080p medium settings in the main city. That said, their GPU usage was around 75-80% which does indicate that they're being bottlenecked by the CPU slightly even if it's not using 100% CPU. Upgrading to a 5800X3D and 7900 XTX will certainly help a lot though.

The game is massively CPU dependent. Starfield is doing things with physics, world detail and world persistence that no game has ever attempted. This means that the target frame rate for every platform is 30FPS, even on PC. There are people getting higher than 30FPS on PC. Those with a cutting edge Ryzen 7800X3D or a i9 13900K. Those CPUs eat Starfield for breakfast, but most CPUs especially in the major cities are not good enough for Starfield. Now, those with better GPU's like the 7000 series AMD GPUs or the 40-series Nvidia GPUs can raise their graphics or resolution enough to make the game slightly more GPU bound and free up some CPU, but when Todd Howard, the games director stated in a Bloomberg interview that, "the game isn't unoptimised, you might just need to upgrade your PC", he was mostly telling the truth. There are CPU benchmarks from reputable tech outlets that show over 90% of CPUs from the last 5-6 years all struggling to run the deep simulations in Starfield. We're entering into a time where current-gen games are now hitting PC. We're long gone from PC games that are ports of games made for a terrible AMD Jaguar netbook CPU in the PS4/Xbox One. We have been eating good for so long on PC because the consoles were terrible from a raw performance standpoint. Now, of course it didn't stop developers making truly gorgeous experiences with that terrible hardware, but it meant that the recommended CPU was a i5 2500K and the GPU was a GTX 970 for what felt like almost a decade. That said, we're entering into a time where games are now targeting consoles with an AMD 6700XT GPU and a 3700X (8 core 16 thread) CPU. It sucks when games like Immortals of Aveum come out that are Unreal Engine 5, and require a Ryzen 7 3700X and a RTX 2080 Super for 1080p low settings. The 2080 Super is a card that is 33% better than the 5700XT, that's a card that is 6% better than my aging 1080Ti. Everyone is getting caught out by the hardware that current-gen games are requiring, and Starfield is just yet another current-gen only game that is hitting peoples hardware hard.

Game Pass Console, Game Pass PC and Game Pass Ultimate get day ones from first party and third party studios which isn't changing. Game Pass Core is a new tier that is replacing Xbox Live Gold, and adding to it a smaller selection of Game Pass games that gets rotated out every 4 months or so. For those on Xbox Live Gold the change will likely be an upgrade overall, and for those already on Game Pass Console, Game Pass PC, or Game Pass Ultimate nothing has changed. Game Pass Core is basically a trojan horse to get the entire Xbox userbase used to having some kind of Game Pass library so that they all upgrade to Game Pass Ultimate.

Bend Studio are currently working on a new IP that includes multiplayer and will be building upon the open-world systems from Days Gone. I definitely hope the new IP is primarily single player with a multiplayer component, but it definitely gave me pause when Bend mentioned multiplayer as Sony are all in on live service multiplayer as their future. I think Sony have more live service games in the works right now than single player story driven games. The full statement from June 7th, 2022 on their new game; I hope it's good, but everything happening around it is making me feel weird about it. Sony planning to release 10 live service multiplayer games by 2025. Sony spending $2 billion on research and development into live service games. The multiplayer part of Bend Studio's statement might be pretty innocuous, but Sony's recent plans are definitely making me cautious.

The only real difference is PS+ Essential offers three games every month, while Game Pass Core offers a library of over 25 games that get rotated every 4 months or so. When Game Pass Core launches on September 14th it will launch with these games; Among Us Descenders Dishonored 2 Doom Eternal Fable Anniversary Fallout 4 Fallout 76 Forza Horizon 4 Gears 5 Grounded Halo 5: Guardians Halo Wars 2 Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice Human Fall Flat Inside Ori & The Will of the Wisps Psychonauts 2 State of Decay 2 The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited Only 19 games so far which means they will likely be adding to that list ahead of release, or once the service has released.

The reboot was so bad that the studio was shut down last week. Volition released Agents of Mayhem which bombed super hard, reviewed terribly, and sold poorly. They then followed it up with a reboot following some Gen Z "gangsters" that spend more time complaining about student loans than gang shit. Saints Row reboot also bombed super hard, reviewed even worse than Agents of Mayhem, and sold terribly. I never want to see anyone lose their jobs, especially at a studio that has been around for 30-years, but in the AAA space you can't be spending $200-300 million (not counting marketing) developing two games that fail to hit expectations. Deep Silver in a poorly worded eulogy post has said that Saints Row and Red Faction will live on at other studios, but Volition are gone and the Saints Row reboot played a huge role in that.

The game unlocks globally at 1am BST tonight.

Dave Meltzer (Wrestling Observer Magazine) stated yesterday that a non-wrestling eye witness backstage had said that CM Punk lunged at Tony Khan after choking out Jack Perry, and "lunged" is apparently underselling it. It sounds like CM Punk attacked the boss, or at least attempted to.

CASH!!!!

Get in!!! Duran!!!

The conversion has recently been changed from 1:1 to 3:2, so 90 days of Xbox Live Gold (soon to be Game Pass Core) will now convert to 60 days Game Pass Ultimate. So while the conversion is still possible, you will be spending quite a bit more now.

I don't think anything dramatic is going to happen. The simplest explanation is often the correct one and I think All Out is just a weak PPV because all the build was all for All In. Meanwhile, the few matches that were specifically built for All Out are either lame, or aren't happening anymore because a certain someone is suspended. The matches that have "build" on the card; Luchasaurus vs Darby Allin Miro vs Powerhouse Hobbs (weak build, but they at least tried for a couple weeks) Bullet Club Gold vs Young Bucks/FTR (Bullet Club Gold have been feuding with every tag team they can find to show they're the best, so this works) Kenny Omega vs Konosuke Takeshita So 4 out of the 9 matches on All Out have some kind of build, while the rest are pretty much Dynamite/Collision level matches. The main event of All Out was meant to be CM Punk vs Ricky Starks for the "Real" Worlds Championship. This would have been the 5th match with some kind of build as the two have been feuding for weeks, but CM Punk has been indefinitely suspended so the "biggest" match of the night likely isn't happening. As for the drama points? Mercedes Mone was still wearing a protective boot at All In, so I don't think she's doing anything with AEW for a while. If she was cleared, I think she would have debuted at All In. The MJF/Cole story is just getting started and if they wanted to do the betrayal I think they also would have done that at All In. I could be wrong, but I think we're just at he beginning of a potentially long storyline between the two. Of course Tony Khan could still be planning something to happen, but I can't imagine the advance buys for this PPV have been strong. Is Tony Khan going to have a big surprise planned for a PPV that 80% of the fanbase might not watch because they all just dropped money buying All In?

The day one patch was released yesterday. It was 15GB or something, but if you're downloading the game today then the day one patch will be included I imagine.

It now seems like almost every outlet in the UK didn't receive code, so it might simply be a case of Bethesda UK messing up in a big way. It would definitely make more sense for it to be a mistake given every US outlet got review code. What I don't understand is why UK outlets chose now to speak up when they've had 2-weeks since US based reviewers started mentioning they got review code.

They have sent out hundreds of review codes. They didn't send one to Eurogamer, but that's likely because their new rating system would tank the Metacritic if they gave it a 3/5, but not because a 3/5 is bad, but because Metacritic sees a 3/5 as a 60/100 on their backend. The Guardian and Metro also didn't get review codes, but they're also both platforms that use the 5 point system. I don't think there is anything particularly shady going on outside of Bethesda avoiding the review sites that have a system that is overly punishing due to Metacritic being broken.

That story is great. I love that his entire gimmick manifested into living a life of absolute luxury. It's a shame that such a gimmick wouldn't really work today as wrestling fans have long since separated the characters from the human playing the character, but I'm glad there was a time where kayfabe was allowed to thrive in such a way. We've lost a lot thanks to the Internet and social media.

On the one hand it's a shame that there wasn't a car there to pick him up, but on the other hand at least AEW tries as WWE don't provide cars to pick up wrestlers. If WWE did an event in the UK then every wrestler on the card is paying for their own flight, paying for their own transport once on the ground, and paying for their own hotel. The fact that there being no car was an annoyance for CM Punk tells us how different AEW and WWE are. If this was WWE then CM Punk wouldn't be annoyed because he wouldn't be expecting a car, but AEW do things differently and on this occasion something went wrong.

I am curious to see what WWE do about WrestleMania in the UK. I know they want to bring it to the UK, but there are a limited number of event slots at Wembley each year, and there is every chance that AEW are making All In a yearly event to keep WWE out of Wembley. We might also be waiting a while for WWE to make any plans for WrestleMania in the UK. I think the next three locations for WrestleMania are Philadelphia (2024), Minneapolis (2025), and Las Vegas (2026).

CM Punk and Jack Perry are reportedly suspended pending the results of an investigation, which will mean neither will be working All Out.

I likely won't be going to all All In 2024. I didn't go to this years All In. I was going to, but I remembered that I prefer the TV presentation over the atmosphere of being there live. Back in the day I went to WWF Insurrextion 2000 and 2001 at Earls Court in London which was fun, but each time I felt like I was missing something and the atmosphere wasn't making up for it. So, during Insurrextion 2001 I realised I'd probably be having more fun sat at home watching it on Sky Box Office with a large pepperoni pizza. Not sure I'll ever go to another wrestling event live even though All In did look fun.

The story is that Jack Perry had vacation time booked, so he planned to do a angle backstage involving a car to write himself off TV for a week. CM Punk told him no and stated that a broken glass spot would be too dangerous. This would have been fine if it just ended there, but CM Punk being CM Punk also insinuated that Jack Perry was trying to get serious cuts as a means to not come to work. It's the last part that seems to have rubbed Jack Perry the wrong way. That said, Jack Perry saying something during his match at All In shouldn't have lead to a physical altercation. Jack Perry was just doing CM Punks schtick. CM Punk has made a name for himself by outing insider topics publicly while belittling those around him, so it's pretty pathetic that when the shoe is on the other foot he can't take it. Any rational person would have taken what Jack said at All In as a joke even if Jack Perry was being serious, but instead CM Punk got Jack Perry in a headlock and threw some punches like any sane person would.