Time for a lil personal rant of my own:

Over the past 3-4 years, I've seen review bombs on Steam come and go, and while they do not work much at all these days (not like they did all that much in the past either, but I digress), I at least found them to being a sure fire way of finding out that something bad is going on with any game.

Fast forward to today and well we have Deathloop, a game with objectively mediocre and barebones AI, PC issues and the game not allowing you to do all that much outside the box (shooting out lights and the like, you know, stuff that's existed in far older games years ago, that modern AAA devs seem to have utterly forgotten). I look at the Steam reviews and it's gone up to "mostly positive", so I'm left with two thoughts; "Are people so happy with barebones AI and just mediocre games" / "Have all the problems been magically resolved in the span of a week, AI and new mechanics (like shooting out the godamn lights)?".

Basically I'm losing major trust in Steam reviews, because it occurred to me that the former thought can and does ring true for a lot of other markets out there (like mobile gaming and whales being dumb to MT tactics and being coddled to thinking it's fine and to accept the bad practice). Deathloop's user reviews in the positive range basically paint the game as "well worth the price", and yes, while I know that's their opinion, a lot of that personal opinion likes to push it a lot further, to get you to buy the game, because if they think it's worth it, it should be worth it to anyone else (hence why anyone in any walk of life would suggest you buy something in the first place, that's just what we do).

The other part of where I lose this trust, is that for the negative reviews (the ones that actually list the faults and don't sweep them side like positive reviews can and do) end up being met with negative commentary of their own, jester badges being awarded or being listed as "funny" reviews, mostly from fanboys or those that bought into the game, or just pointless shitheads that are bored.

I'm not saying Steam user reviews should go away, because I absolutely still end up using them half the time (besides youtube reviews by non journos, because journos are a waste of space at this point), but I believe they need to be filtered in the way review bombs are, because I don't find mindless reviews helpful, let alone the fanboyish ones or the ones that will gladly excuse every bad mistake or bad practice under the sun.

Another part of me is thinking that Steam in general is being filled with a new generation of gamers that grew up with lower standards and being easier to fool with barebones crap and bad bugs. Like I don't want to be any type of "old guard", but at the same time I have very, very low tolerance for mobile style gamers or fornite kids excusing shit, or wannabe 2B2T griefers who excuse their own shitty actions.

Basically I don't think deathloop deserves the "mostly positive", primarily because it's priced high, but has some of the worst AI and not all that great game design, and it's left me thinking that I'm one of the sane few who isn't buying into something so mediocre. I don't want to be Rick, but I look around me and everyone I see is ending up like a Morty.

Meh, I think Mostly Positive is where I more or less expected. You look at something like Watch Dogs 2, that has "Very Positive" reviews and while Deathloop may have issues... It's much more interesting than Watch Dogs and it's generic gameplay. I am sure you can find more examples if you care enough. DF also did their optimized settings which fixes a lot of the issues with Deathloop in terms of performance and Steam Forums does help with issues like this. And I am sure the negative reviews would be much worse if the refund system didn't exist.

For me, I have come to the conclusion that the masses have a different taste than I do a long time ago so I don't really pay that much attention anymore. I am still searching for the glory days of RTS but that sure ain't happening anytime soon. I have a cousin that loves his asscreed and ubisoft games. Every time I talk to him, he's all about that asscreed. He always puts them in his GOTY. I am almost disgusted that anyone in my gene pool has such yawn worthy tastes... Then again, if they saw my hentai games collection... They may be disgusted on my pervertedness... So to each their own as the saying goes. *Unfriends cousin*

I honeatly find most of what Ubisoft makes as being generic, even with half the woke stuff they've been dabbling in. OG Watchdogs had something, but that something ended up not being there and being half arsed, then by WD2 they decided to change it up to being GTA with millennial hackers. 

I do find some youtube reviews being more honest than what user reviews I find on Steam, which is why I wish for Steam user reviews to be a bit more critical instead of overly positive and just ignoring overly visible flaws. 

Tbh, I've always found the masses to being exactly what corps see them as, whales, not that smart, not the types to be critical about something until it's too late or if it absolutely bites their arse real hard. I also find them as being one of the many problems as to why bad practices continue, because they feed and allow them to spread (again, only doing something about it when it bites them real hard in the ass, like the lootbox fiasco with the parents that slept on MT's for nearly a decade). 

Like I love RTS games too, but I loved what Arkane used to make, but now they just seem to be a one trick pony show, only it's less stellar and more mediocre, but the masses seem to be more than happy with their output, and I wanted them to do better than this. I just want the masses to want companies to do better, instead of shrugging and eating from the trough without a word (it's kinda why I just look down on them most of the time, because they just don't care enough).

Opinion Piece #2 as it's slow news weekend...

AMD needs to be competitive in features if they want to charge Nvidia prices

AMD going from being xx70 competitor to being able to trade blows against Nvidia's xx90 is certainly quite the achievement. But when AMD is asking similar prices to Nvidia for only being good at one thing and not even good at that all the time... Well... It becomes very hard to recommend.

And here is what I mean. Lets look at for example, techpowerups review of the 6600XT as that will have the latest data in their reviews:

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/sapphire-radeon-rx-6600-xt-pulse-oc/28.html

So what is the pattern? Well in Raster...

So RDNA 2's claim to fame is supposed to be in Raster... Yet... Most of their GPUs loose even in Raster... Unless you are one of those types that pay $1000 for a GPU to play at 1080p. To be fair though, least at the top end, the % are so close that it doesn't matter too much. But then you add in the features where Nvidia is vastly superior like in Ray Tracing, like in DLSS, like in Production workloads, and with added features such as RTX voice and etc... And of course, Nvidia GPUs also have support for FSR and Re-sizable Bar (but granted SAM works a bit better on AMD). And you really get to see why it's hard to recommend RDNA 2 over Nvidia... Especially at todays prices...

And of course, Raster is becoming the new "Medium" settings as time goes on where as Ray Tracing is becoming the new "Ultra" settings. As games continues to implement Ray Tracing, AMD really needs to catch up next gen, especially in features.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. RDNA 3 is supposed to have MCM design that's supposed to be really revolutionary. And they patented technology similar to Tensor Cores and DLSS. We will see how that fairs against Nvidia's node parity as both RDNA 3 and Lovelace are supposed to be using the same node but suffices to say, Jensen has his work cut out for him. I believe AMD can become dominant in the GPU market. They just need to pull a Zen 3 which they just might do next time. Lets just hope that if they do pull a zen 3 in the GPU space, they don't forget about their budget buyers...

It's funny how that table of yours shows what we all know: as resolution increases, the impact of the lower memory bandwidth of Navi 2x becomes more visible. And that's not something they'll change with RDNA3, as far as rumors go, as they'll only put more cache on it to compensate (ok, and maybe go for GRRD6X).

Other than that, we'll see how the MCM approach works, first times can be troublesome, but yeah, let's hope that RT performance improves noticeably and puts AMD roughly on par with Nvidia. The DLSS alternative will depend on how open it is, how easy to use it is and the adoption rate by both studios and engine providers.

As for the low end... well, if AMD has ample experience in something in the GPU space is in rebadging cards from one gen to another. I have no doubt that they'll have 7xxx series cards for the low end, but I wouldn't be surprised if they use Navi 2x chips in them. That said, the rumors said that the high end GPUs would go with two different MCM configurations while keeping a more traditional monolithic design for the rest, so at least it looks like they have something planned for that segment as well.

Yea increasing the cache is certainly going to be interesting at higher resolutions with RDNA3. AMD themselves recognizes that once you go above a certain amount of cache, the diminishing return kicks in as well as higher the resolution, the lower the hit rate on the cache itself.

And of course, once you start lowering the cache in an architecture that relies heavily on cache to perform... Then the performance starts to fall off along with it and relies more and more on external memory bandwidth.

Next gen is certainly going to be interesting.

There's one extra thing that could be important for next gen cards: supply. And don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about crypto miners getting all the cards, I'm talking about working chips.

Both AMD and Nvidia will use TSMC's 5nm process so they'll be at the same level when it comes to yield problems, but the MCM design from AMD means smaller parts and more functional chips per waffer, something that should benefit them compared to Nvidia's traditional monolithic design.

Gonna need to bring back the Colosseum and gladiator fights to see who is truly worthy to get a next gen card...

Decided I wanted to watch the LOTR films again this weekend, since it's been years from last watching them.

Then I realised I still own War in the North, but cannot play it due to the shitty ass issues it has with Windows 10. God I miss that game.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who's been feeling this for some time now with PC ports and PC versions

I know this is a thing that tends to occur at the start of every gen, but it's honestly getting me fed up to seeing devs doing this again and again with PC versions, because one would think they would learn from past mistakes and take the platform far more seriously, to not repeat the same mistakes and us having to wait a year or two for said games to be in actual working order (this is Era's Deathloop PC perf thread btw).