Days Gone (Sony Bend) [PS4, PC]

Btw, here's another thing that really bugs me about the game: loading times everywhere.

Probably an Unreal tech limitation ?
Ubisoft and Rockstar are unparalleled when it comes to open world tech. I've been playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey lately and I just thought how child me mind would of been blown by it. A RPG where your character can climb almost anything and you can sail somewhere in your own ship with no load screens.
 
Probably an Unreal tech limitation ?
Ubisoft and Rockstar are unparalleled when it comes to open world tech. I've been playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey lately and I just thought how child me mind would of been blown by it. A RPG where your character can climb almost anything and you can sail somewhere in your own ship with no load screens.
Funny you mention AC Odyssey, which I've been playing the last couple of weeks too. Loading times are awful.

I think we can all start the conspiracy theories over loading times - it's all Sony's masterplan to get us to buy a PS5!!!111!!11 Artificially inflating loading times on PS4 so we all jump ship quicker !!!11 !1 1!!!! !
 
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Funny you mention AC Odyssey, which I've been playing the last couple of weeks too. Loading times are awful.

I think we can all start the conspiracy theories over loading times - it's all Sony's masterplan to get us to buy a PS5!!!111!!11 Artificially inflating loading times on PS4 so we all jump ship quicker !!!11 !1 1!!!! !
Credit to Sony on this, they've watched what the console experience is like and have targeted a real bug-bear even if that isn't a major league stat. Or, maybe it will be. Out with the teraflops, in with the load times! :runaway:
 
Funny you mention AC Odyssey, which I've been playing the last couple of weeks too. Loading times are awful.

Odyssey only has a lengthy initial load, does it not? Maybe when you die as well. I haven't played it much. I cannot remember much in terms of loading from AC Origins, though. Days Gone on the other hand bookends every cut-scene with lengthy loading breaks. Cut-scenes spanning multiple locations even have multiple loading breaks iirc. And the game has quite a lot of cut-scenes too.
The open world is entirely seemless at least.

Still impressive what they did with UE4. Almost miraculous that this is the very same engine that powered some middling looking fighting games, Kingdom Hearts and some stuttery indies.
 
That line is a throw back to a hugely popular and successful TV series Sons of Anarchy, that is about a biker gang, it was used exactly as quoted in a wedding in the TV series.

And even if it wasn't. Nothing about your wife telling you to **** her brains out in whatever way she chooses is anappropriate or sexist or heck, even anti-feminist. It's just normal. Some people are just kill joys.
And I think it's not naff either. Guy's a biker after all.
 
If it were me, I'd separate combat gameplay difficulty from survival difficulty. You may have lousy shooter skills and want that easy, but enjoy the challenges of difficult survival.
The separation of difficulties according to gameplay type was much appreciated for the last two Tomb Raider titles. I guess in some respects they can be developed as such with different sub-teams handling those aspects (tombs/puzzles are effectively separate levels that are stitched into the game world, tweaking A.I. bullet sponges is trivial etc.). Not sure if that can be easily translated to DG's setup, but I guess that's up to the dev to figure out (different sponges).

I think there are a couple other games that tackle it similarly between resource gathering and combat, but it's just beyond me at the moment.

The line "promise to ride me as much as you ride your bike" is a bit naff. But it's taken completely out of context, so who knows?
Oh c'mon. It's cheesy. How can you not love it. :p

Even if I'm not mainstream enough to know what brit is on about.
 
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Good idea. So you can have the survivor aspect like less resources but snap on aiming if you not good at aiming. Choice is never a bad thing.

Being a small team though probably limits how much gameplay testing they can do.

I had no idea there was no auto-aim, I thought that was normal for any game!?

Btw, here's another thing that really bugs me about the game: loading times everywhere.

Yeah, it breaks the immersion which is a shame.
 
Btw, here's another thing that really bugs me about the game: loading times everywhere.

Expect things to get much worse next generation if consoles come with 24+ GB of memory and developers try to use all or most of the memory available to them. Even with NVME SSDs much less SATA SSDs or even worse SSD/HDD hybrid solutions. Not to mention anything a GPU would do dynamically to fill that amount of memory.

Streaming will help, but anytime there is fast travel, those lengthy load times will kick in again.

But who knows, if systems come by default with NVME SSDs, maybe there will be ways for games to optimize for that which couldn't be done with mechanical HDDs.

Then again this is from the POV of MacOS/Windows OS where gamer/consumer workloads don't see the large benefit that data center workloads get from moving from SATA to PCIE NVME.

Regards,
SB
 
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Was there a difficult option at start? For a survival game, I think that's quite imperative to set resources to the challenge level the player wants. It's the kind of thing that can be way too easy or way too hard which should be fairly easily parameterisable in response to a "how do you like your survival games?" response.

I left the difficult on normal, there is also easy and hard. The danger with scavenging mechanics is that can become a massive chore. I'm enjoying myself of scavenging for items when I'm conscious I need them so every so often, but not everything I see.

As it turns out that was a rubbish plan as I'm now miles from anywhere, I've just run out of the fuel and it's about 9pm so freakers will be out in massive numbers any minute now. On the plus side, crossbows rule and they're easy to make so I guess tonight is the night where I collect hundreds of freaker ears and become rich!

Or dead. Probably dead.

A shoutout to the environmental sound team - it's fantastic.

Btw, here's another thing that really bugs me about the game: loading times everywhere.

Where are you hitting loading times? I've only noticed this a couple of times in maybe eight hours of gameplay.
 
Where are you hitting loading times? I've only noticed this a couple of times in maybe eight hours of gameplay.

You're likely just far more tolerant of it. Watching someone play on a PS4-P, and there are lengthy load times almost constantly. Basically anytime a mission loads, a cutscene loads, fast travel is activated, and other instances.

Was watching Bikeman and Cohh play and both of them constantly mentioned the lengthy and frequent load times. A friend of mine that's into zombie games mentioned it as well the last time I was over there.

That said, I think it's tolerable for the level of detail that you get in this game.

Regards,
SB
 
But who knows, if systems come by default with NVME SSDs, maybe there will be ways for games to optimize for that which couldn't be done with mechanical HDDs.
Cerny's remarks about as much in the Wired article show he's wanting to reduce these dramatically, and pointed to his solution being way more effective than what you get replacing an HDD with an SSD. He described that as a 'game changer' and I agree with him.
 
You're likely just far more tolerant of it. Watching someone play on a PS4-P, and there are lengthy load times almost constantly. Basically anytime a mission loads, a cutscene loads, fast travel is activated, and other instances.

That'd be it then because I don't fast travel and I'm spending most of my time exploring stuff as it appears on the map. Just soaking up the world. :yes:
 
And even if it wasn't. Nothing about your wife telling you to **** her brains out in whatever way she chooses is inappropriate or sexist or heck, even anti-feminist. It's just normal. Some people are just kill joys.

It reminds me of the editorial some guy wrote for Polygon back when Shadow of Mordor first came out absolutely scandalized that the player character sneaks up on his wife to surprise her with flowers. He seemed to think it was highly inappropriate to tease a partner by startling them. It read like a critique of an intimate relationship from someone who has never been in one, same as the people getting the vapors about the stuff in Days Gone.
 
Funny you mention AC Odyssey, which I've been playing the last couple of weeks too. Loading times are awful.

I think we can all start the conspiracy theories over loading times - it's all Sony's masterplan to get us to buy a PS5!!!111!!11 Artificially inflating loading times on PS4 so we all jump ship quicker !!!11 !1 1!!!! !
FF15 is also killing me with it's loading times!!!
 
That'd be it then because I don't fast travel and I'm spending most of my time exploring stuff as it appears on the map. Just soaking up the world. :yes:

It only happens when you do missions due to the abundance of cut-scenes. If you're just roaming around it's fine. At least they aren't that lengthy. It's just momentum/immersion breaking when every piece of story is bookended by a tacky biker ring swirling in the lower right corner.
 
Completely absorbed in Days Gone now. It feels very like a more story-driven State of Decay, replicating that same risk/reward dilemma that kicks in when your resources are low and one half of your brain is telling you to go back and resupply while the other part is telling to you to press because a big scavenge find is just around the corner.

The interactions of freakers (some of whom don't get on) wildlife (prey and predators), infected animals, marauders, rippers and other factions give the world that GTA-like unpredictability. I was riding to a new area and come across my first NERO camp with rippers who were fighting off marauders. The marauders were better armed and winning until some wolves decided to get involved. The whole commotion drew some freakers. Later I was chasing a deer which ran into the mouth of a nearby cave, followed by screeching, following by a high-speed deer and about 50 freakers.

The game's systems are great at creating moments like this.
 
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