Recent content by hughJ

It's not really a matter of physics and materials, it's just the problem of having a unified set of animations regardless of what's being worn. A full suit of plate armor restricts your range of motion in certain ways, and the animations are created as a one-size-fits-all. If you have the...

The way the character armor is skinned looks extra sloppy in 2025. Seeing the steel chest plate stretching and flexing with the character's breathing on the inventory screen is probably even more apparent with the game's upgraded textures. Given that it's mainly just the inventory screen where...

I don't think the factor is monopolizing money spent, but rather attention and time. And this isn't a new phenomenon. There's a very long list of titles between 1996-2003 that I didn't play because I was busy putting thousands of hours into Quake and HalfLife. Not only did I not buy other...

Has the completion rate for games actually ever been high? What percentage of 8bit and 16bit games did anyone finish? For me it's got to be comfortably less than 5%. I also don't think choice paralysis trends have actually changed all that much either. I distinctly remember going to the...

Tech outlets are more concerned with having a convenient and consistent test environment than they are with generating test results that map to real world usage. IMO, basically all benchmark results these days have to be treated as a synthetic test with an ample amount of YMMV. Presumably it's...

Win98 was the most popular OS when Steam came out, so it's kind of silly to pretend like Steam + Win98 is some kind of anachronism.

If MS have a studio that has a great idea for a military stealth-action game then they should just make it. Throwing money at an IP then handing it over to a studio and saying, "here. make game." sounds like a recipe for more mediocre gamepass content.

Even if CoD did the same thing over and over, the fact that it's a competitive multiplayer game gives it legs. Go, chess, poker, bridge, etc don't change and yet people continue to play. Counter-Strike hasn't appreciably changed since ~2000 (where the 5v5 bomb defusal mode became the...

Different strokes for different folks I guess. I'll happily accept physics jank, visually clunky NPCs, and erratic CPU performance if it means I get to feel a sense of agency and reactivity in the world, or emergent things facilitated by dynamic NPCs with a wide range behavior/verbs. Static...

Civ4 is still the peak of the series for me. I bounced off Civ5 pretty hard at launch with the 1 unit per tile and how simplified the city management became and how the combat felt like a tactical board game. I probably won't return to the franchise unless it moves back towards what I got from...

So far I'm pretty luke warm on the game as a whole. The UI and menus are an improvement. The graphics are good and consistent (lacking noticeable LOD pop-in from KCD1). The systems feel more complex and more thought-through. But the story, dialogue, and VO are a noticeable a step down from...

If I were in the market for a 5090 I'd very much lean towards one of the chunky traditional design AIB variants. These cards are going to be viable for a very long time (>10 years), and sooner or later you might want to disassemble that thing to clean, repaste, repad it. Nickel plating or not...

Presumably "PC games" is including any games that happen to get a PC release, not games that were designed from the ground up to exclusively target the PC. My expectation would be that as the console generation ages you see a growing minimum viable PC spec install base, making the business case...

125fps was the magic number.

Yeah. In that GDC talk they're using 512kbit as the baseline for "broadband". Their sales pitch for Steam was the promise of it being cheaper, faster, and simpler than physical media. The only way a digital download over a 512k connection was going to be anywhere close to a CD installation is...