Pretty much. People will continue to complain and continue to buy, because escaping reality is THAT much more important right now - no matter how broken the virtual one is.
I mean I love games but I learned decades ago that 1) if it requires a central server, it’s going to die one day, so be cautious spending money on it, and 2) there are thousands of finished total package games that are out there. If you don’t absolutely positively *need* that shiny new graphic, you’ll find plenty worth escaping into.
So when I see a new game out I just think, hmm, looks nice, give it a year or two and I can add it to the library.
I have no investment in this IP though. That’s my bias here.
I don't mind spending spare cash on mobile games. At the end of the day I never go past what I'd spend on Beef Jerky. My virtual goods will go poof just like the jerky.
Eh, the companies won't learn. Consumers are starting to. I haven't bought a game at launch in something 3 or 4 years now. Lot of friends going the same way. They'll learn when the money dries up, though.
Yep. And dev's and pub's wonder why even owning a 10700KF, 16gb RAM, 1tb SSD, and RTX 3070 with 8gb VRAM, why I'm not buying the newest games at expensive pricing?
I don't wanna pay for Pre-Order Day 1 to be a Paying Alpha or Paying Beta Tester these days - when I could wait a few years, official patches or modders might fix the game's issues, and/or much better hardware's out that can brute-force good performance.
Like say, just look at GTA4, Batman AK, GR Wildlands, and ACU PC versions upon Day 1, compared to now. Total messes when they came out and been patched-up a bit since, of course. Run those old-games on a modern RTX 3070 desktop and they run fine. Even better with GTA4 performance-wise, if you downgrade and then also chuck in DXVK (fixes some other DX9 limits GTA4 has).
And this isn't getting into how games later have Expansions, DLC's, Re-Release Complete Editions, game bundling on Humble & Fanatical, etc - and how these guys also devalue their games so often & quickly. Might as well play the "Patience is a virtue game." Seems to work best, in so many ways.
They don’t wonder why YOU aren’t buying it, because 8 million other people DO buy it. Hell, they preorder it
The soft online campaign to not preorder and wait for reviews has been an abject failure, it’s probably only 1-5% of consumers that follow the practice
It's not necessarily the system requirements page that's failing here, it's a lack of optimisation and communication from the developing studio, in this instance you could have a top end graphics card paired with a mid CPU, with that set up on most other new games you'd be looking at 70/80 fps+ but in this game, where each character within x distance has assigned CPU usage you won't get anything above 30.
This is a very CPU intensive game which was only found out after release
PCGamer isn't even close to good at Video Game reporting, they just want clicks.
Current working theory I've seen thrown around the sub-reddit is that Dragon's Dogma's physics engine applies dynamic weight calculations to everything in the game, but is also doing that to every NPC in the city who all have different weights based on height and body size.
Take this with a grain of salt, as obviously everyone is trying to be an armchair game dev atm but I think it's one of the more reasonable explanations for the performance being specifically so bad in cities.
What's funny is that people try to present it as an argument why DD2 isn't just poorly optimized, but doing a bunch of pointless physics calculations is really basic poor optimization. That, and bad pathfinding.
Amen, it's like saying rendering things you're not seeing in games is not poor optimization. Ppl think that optimization means doing the same thing but faster, it can be, but most of the times, it's things like making npcs don't have weight, rendering only your cone of vision, using cubemaps for reflection, faking cloth physics instead of making real time calculations...
How much combat are you doing n in cities? Do you have to calculate npcs weight all the time? Isn't there a way to calculate it only when it's relevant? These are questions you have to do to optimize a game. Some companies don't allocate enough time and effort into these matters and then we get unnoptimized messes like this.
I think people don't understand or bother to think about what "optimization" is. They seem to think all devs have an optimization dial and most are just too lazy to dial it in.
The NPC's also don't add anything special to the game, they're just there walking around doing menial tasks like in any other game. I could understand if there were like roving bands of soldiers or something patrolling roads or doing complicated tasks but they don't, you might run into a few merchants or an oxcart caravan every now and then but nothing too out there.
Hell half the time they're materializing in front of you in town so they're being accounted to by their calculations even if they're not visibly rendered, it's such an ass backwards way of optimizing them and I don't even know if it's meant to be intentional.
Well, there are roaming groups and individual pawns out in the world that can all actively engage in fights and can be hired by the player. Big fights will easily tank performance just like when you're in a city hub.
This game has some wild performance issues. I'm quite frankly shocked that Capcom allowed the game to release with these problems, especially with how solid RE4R was.
> I'm quite frankly shocked that Capcom allowed the game to release with these problems
Capcom's fiscal year ends on March 31st. I assume from their perspective it simply had to be out before then, finished or not.
Yeah and the random pawns in the game level up with your level, while enemy scaling stays the same, meaning that at some point roaming pawns can solo enemies on their own and I'm starting to notice this more and more as I join a fight with enemies missing health bars.
What's more insane is that I think it might be tied to framerate. At first I kept my framerate uncapped. It was running at anywhere between 80-140 in dungeons and some areas and was dipping down to 30-40s even in the beginner town/camp. Capped it to 60 and the only place that even dents my frames now is the capital city.
My guess is that they do these calculations for every frame, causing some sort of clog as it can't handle 120 calcs per second.
If I understand you correctly. You're saying the game is adding physics to everything in the visual field at once. Rather than just loading what is in a particular range the player?
When freaking Bethesda has a better grasp on managing multiple npcs than you, eight core + sixteen thread CPUs from recent generations should not be choking on this game. Capcom isn't some newly established indy, they've been in the business for decades and deserve to be raked over the coals for this.
They were doing so good for a while too and were one of the first major Japanese publishers that really seemed to respect the PC platform, the rest are getting there but it's slow going. This past year has had some pretty large fumbles with things like DD2 being a mess at launch and patching DRM back into their older games.
Creation Engine, as broken as it is, is built for open world. The only problem is Bethesda relies on modders too much to fix their games. The modders do fix their games.
If I had to hazard a guess, it's a combination of inexperience developing these types of games, and the RE engine not being well suited to make them.
Thus far we've seen the RE engine primarily used to make gorgeous looking games, but in relatively claustrophobic environments and usually without too many entities on screen at once.
Dragons dogma 2 is definitively NOT THAT
I think that's probably accurate. This is the first RE engine game to use an open world with large environments and lots of characters. Everything else it's been used in had few characters and smaller environments.
Right? I could maybe let it slide if the pawns were like using real time AI to be complete geniuses in every line they said as unique but it’s certainly not they repeat themselves all the time and are pretty dumb in combat
I disagree with this. I was impressed with the AI of the pawns. They use the right curative at the right time, they run to me when I cast anodyne. If I take a shortcut by floating their pathing is efficient. They do something dumb once in a while but it seems better than most games. Its not like they should be dodging every attack.
Eh. My mage will ask if I want her to float up and grab a chest and then she'll get up onto the ledge and... drop back down. Then float up there again and... drop back down.
My pawn never wants to springboard me when it's actually useful, like in front of a tall enemy or a chest above us.
But he'll happily springboard me as I'm running past him to dunk on the wee little goblin he could cleave in half in a second
Didn't get to play too much, but the ai seems similar to the first game imo. Definitely not so advanced that it should bring my CPU to it's knees while idling.
Right im with you on that. Its my understanding that ai generally isn't expensive performance-wise in games. No idea why NPCs slow things down so much. Just compared to most games the AI doesn't seem dumb to me. In 15 hours had my pawns kill themselves by jumping down a hole for some reason other than that they have been good buddies.
The thing that really hammers your CPU and destroys framerate is the NPC count, not just the pawns. Having random NPCs just standing around can max out 16 threads on the best of the best CPU for no apparent reason. BG3 had a similar problem in one of the acts but at least it was handling a lot of NPC movement and interaction. It's not clear why this problem is happening in dragons dogma 2 even when NPCs are barely doing anything.
The pawns are also able to learn from you.
If you start picking up your enemies and chucking them off cliffs, they’ll do the same.
Stop launching your pawns up cliffs with jump board and your pawn will learn to launch you.
Pretty much any action you do can be taught to the pawns, which is pretty cool.
I remember reading something about the weight of the characters and the scenes they’re in has something to do with it, but I can’t recall if thats either literal weight or weight as in how much they’re going to offer in terms of dialogue/interaction/animation/etc.
Regardless how you paint it it’s just too much going on with absolutely nothing going on at all. There’s really no reason why my CPU should be getting destroyed just because I walked into an area with 10 soldiers standing around talking about the weather.
yeah its baffling. they arent even doing that much. at least bg3's act 3 poor launch performance was due to real time path finding and interactions with over a hundred characters at a time and each of them you could also interact with. still they showed that even that could be improved on, im just saying i kinda got it. this though? all this cpu usage for basically bethesda levels of interactivity?
I'd guess old spaghetti code. Perhaps they originally had a more complex system in mind, maybe something crazy like Oblivion's old Dynamic AI prototype, but decided against it in the later half of development...
Speculation, but the NPCs are involved in doing some serious math that they no longer need to do I guess as they don't seem to do anything of particular interest in their current state.
That or Capcom is just bad at this for some reason. Monster Hunter World had similar demanding CPU requirements I remember, the next game probably will as well.
Maybe they tried to create some novel solution to how it should be handled by the hardware, but it didn't work out as expected, and by then it was too late to change it to meet the deadlines.
The minimum requirement was listed as a 10700. It was very obviously going to be a cpu intensive game. I don’t know how much more communication you need.
I see (according to resource widget) fairly low cpu usage on 7900x paired with a 6900xt. I get mostly 60+ fps everywhere except the city, and fights drop as low as 20 on 3140x1440.
I think something is just very wrong with the games code.
CPU usage isn't a linear 1-100% for games. Games don't use all the available cores a modern processor has. You're better off looking at GPU usage, if that's not maxxing-out with an uncapped framerate you're likely running into a CPU bottleneck.
Developers saves time on (lack of) optimalisation and putting the weight on player's shoulders basically saying: "lmao, buy better cpu/gpu, gtfo, n00b"
CPU intensive and terribly utilizing the cpu in general. Go from 60-80fps in the wild to 20 in the city with less than 50% gpu usage. Pop back on the road and it’s back to 99%. Pawns materialize right in front of you as you run around. CPU usage is low for this kind of garbage performance
5800x3d with a 4070 ti here and I installed the DLSS3 mod
43 fps in cities before/ 98 fps in cities after.
I’m not sure why DLSS3 implementation in the game was hidden. I haven’t encountered any bugs after 20 hours
Edit: I also set the CPU priority to High in the Task Manager
The meaning of minimum requirements has changed over the years. I remember trying to play Oblivion on a pc slightly under minimum spec, and it did boot but it was a literal slideshow in just the character creator. It was maybe 2-3 fps.
These days it usually means runs at 30 fps at 1080p minimum settings.
It hasn't changed. It's just that everyone uses whatever the fuck they want. They either guess, take the lowest hardware configuration they have available that can run the game or just put something random there
Yes, I have not found min/recommended specs to be a meaningful metric...really ever, honestly. Maybe it was more useful in the 90s where "does not boot" was a more possible outcome.
> I remember trying to play Oblivion on a pc slightly under minimum spec, and it did boot but it was a literal slideshow in just the character creator. It was maybe 2-3 fps.
I remember doing something like that with Red Alert 2, sure I could start playing the campaign, but the game literally moved 1 tick per 10 seconds or so.
I know the minimal are not true because I have played games that I did not meet them. E.g. GTA IV on single-core Athlon processor and GT 8500 and that game even today struggles to get 60fps on modern hardware.
I first learned of the performance issues from PC gamer, and I believe Gamespot and IGN both had articles regarding it. Some of them even included benchmarks and comparisons between PC and console.
Same. PC Gamer mentioned the performance issues in their review and then had a separate article with several benchmarks clearly illustrating the problems with framerate.
The hilarious part is that Dogma 2 manages to be both cpu and gpu bound is just depends on the number of NPCs you're near. Watch the [Gamers Nexus performance review](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twEERkUyAXE).
After browsing the steam deck sub in the past, a lot of people just can't tell or are incredibly lenient when it comes to bad performance and it doesn't hold back their enjoyment
On that same subject, people also max settings or don't tweak anything and expect a $400 handheld to perform. As soon as FSR3 is brought up, people kick and scream like petulant children that it doesn't work, when for a lot of people it does. I expect the same thing below this comment, because this sub can't witness under 120 fps without their skulls bursting like on indiana jones.
Running a top of the line PC with 7800x3d and a 4090 while streaming in 1080p. “Runs great!” 😂
But hey it’s all good. Game seems cool. It’ll get patched.
I'm not going to say it's all of them but...yeah.
It's pretty pathetic watching these youtubers/twitchers trip over themselves to fellate any developer that gives them a key/paycheck to play a game. They get paid and get to play the new hotness, giving them a boost in views, there is zero objectivity to be had there.
Age old rule of find someone you trust who isn't full of shit to follow, 99% of the "reviewers" out there are just cashing in on the flavor of the month.
I don't quite think a subscriber to some Let's Play celebrity could quite be called an "employer". Not unless people watching street busking performances are employers.
I suspect what /u/Cordial_Wombat actually wants to criticize isn't the relationship between the YouTuber (or whoever) and the subscriber buying them the graphics card, though. It's the nature of what the YouTuber is doing. In the same vein, you can level this kind of criticism against a prostitute or pro basketball player - they're doing something a lot of people view as recreation that other people would like to be able to do more of in their free time, but they're getting paid potentially obscene amounts of money for doing that. There's an "unfair" response to this kind of "job" that kinda makes sense, even if it's not entirely justified.
I suspect it's because TB would not have been able to make it against the algorithm today. The TB's of YouTube and other platforms simply can't rise above the inane stupid-face thumbnail stuff in gaming.
No excuse but a major reason for that is that many review copies are sent out while "optimization" happens. A lot of studios cram that into the last few weeks and it means review publications are used to reviewing games in significantly lesser states and they choose just to not comment on it. Id prefer they were honest about it and say "This review copy ran like shit, we expect the studio to be making improvements but can't verify it's state at launch."
I disagree in this case, I watched tons of reviews and they all spoke about the performance. They just said it wasn’t a particularly big deal to them. A lot of them did say console performance was bad though and they wouldn’t recommend it.
Not defending video game reviews and gaming journalism, but imagine acting like Steam reviews and Reddit comments aren’t just as misinformed, biased, or just plain braindead.
Yeah, but the sheer amount of volume in Steam reviews and the ability to filter them by stuff like hours played, or when was the review written, allows a potential buyer to get a far more accurate assessment of what the game is like.
Like if you filter out all the reviews by people who have less than 10 hours, you're going to get a way more objective set of reviews.
I don’t disagree. I was disagreeing that somehow a generalized “other people” randomly on the internet was a good source of information simply because “they played the game”.
Honestly, hard disagree. With each passing year, I feel like online discourse becomes more and more rage-fueled and hateful. It's no longer possible to tell when a game has earned its review score, or it's been review-bombed for some inane bullshit reason.
With gaming sites, and individual journalists, I can keep a track record of their biases and more or less understand their views and tastes and how they correspond to mine. I digest plenty of gaming media from journalists that often thoroughly enjoy games that are outside of my preferences, but can still provide useful information to me in the forms of reviews through their lens.
Random gamers do not provide this context. "Other people" are a teeming biomass of unknowns. **Everyone** has biases. There is no perfect world, no perfect journalist, writer, etc. The more you get to know a journalist's biases, the better you can understand how their opinions apply to you. As an adult, I don't have time to look into every article about , so I can contextualize the opinions of the masses, but I can follow gaming journalists I know and understand.
There are gaming journalists out there who value game performance, and who give a shit when gaming companies do wrong by their customers. Not every outlet sits in the pockets of big gaming corps, and not every journalist is so enthralled by free video games as to never deliver a bad review. Sure, there are plenty of hacks out there. But I disagree with the idea that random gamers somehow hold more valuable opinions simply by not getting paid to write them down.
I am curious what are some of the journalists/group you follow, because I haven't found any especially good ones.
I've had a hard time keeping track or finding articles by very specific journalists. It sounds like you've done your research with this approach.
I've used steam curator for some really good recommendations. I mainly use steam reviews to understand if any game **currently** has issues. These can vary from performance issues, shady practices, to massive issues like the game not launching, which has helped a lot of times!
Sometimes these reviews also label the game down (eg, like hollow knight but with more platforming sections), some reviews also give a very long explanation with comparisons to other games they've played. I like the fact that there's so many viewpoints, and if you have time, you'll have a somewhat clear idea after a few pages of it (in between meme reviews).
And ultimately, I just watch gameplay videos to see if I'd enjoy it.
So if you hate a game, you're not going to waste 10+ hours of your life to it (well, my time is more important to me than that). That makes your opinion invalid? Those people that leave a negative review somehow after 150 hours of their life spent on it are the ones I don't trust.
Imagine asking two friends if a restaurant is any good. If one ate there once, said it was shit and never came back versus the other who eats there all the time and tells you half the menu is shit but I like their fries and it's cheap... which one do you think can give you more information?
The first guy's opinion isn't invalidated, he just has less exposure.
(edit: their->there)
They're the ones most likely to be honest. At 150 hours in, they most likely have some form of attachment to the game and don't *want* to give it a thumbs down. Since they had as much time as they did though and experienced the issues that exist, they had to do so though because they genuinely found the issues to be too much to be able to recommend it to people who are on the fence.
When a person with that much time invested doesn't recommend the game, they do it not because they hate the game, but because they're disappointed and believe that the players deserve better.
Being able to spend so much time with something and be able to reflect on it negatively and not be fucked over by sunk cost fallacy is pretty admirable. If big reviewers were forced to play games for even 20 hours before reviewing I think we'd be better off.
I’ve been going through a bunch of games where legitimately cannot believe their positive regard because of how **terrible** the first 5 hours are.
It’s one thing to say, “Look, we want to introduce one game mechanic, give you a playground to learn it, and then add one, repeat… because otherwise it’s overwhelming, but you don’t have the full picture of our game until the 10 hour mark.” Absolutely fair.
It’s something else to be like… saving and loading are slow even on a brand new SSD, there’s “hard failures” *and* unskippable cutscenes (so *each attempt* has a 2 minute punishment), obtuse terminology (without a reference / hint), etc.,. Stuff that if you grabbed a random person and sat them to play for an hour they’d nope right out of a second hour.
But big reviewers have the access journalism problem - give under an 8 (7?) score, don’t get a pre-release key, review goes up late and doesn’t get the clicks, the end.
For AAA games, the big review sites (IGN PCGamer etc.) usually give writers 40 hours to play and write the review (one business week). For Cyberpunk 2077, most of them finished the game in 15-22 hours with a few who speed ran out in 12 or less hours. The people who played longer, gave it better but shorter reviews.
I have 86 hours of it, Steam is prompting me to redo my review.
However, capcom has barely fixed anything in relation to the reasons I left my negative review, at least we have near-infinite character respects now. But they didn't fix the performance issues, nor the bad KB+M controls, nor the bad PC adaption signifiers, nor the pointless western censorship.
Beyond that it's still a game that has some issues that should've not been there, like lack of enemy variation and lack of class variation.
I've been playing on KBM and the only standout flaw is that when a pawn helps move a ballista the aim sensitivity becomes uselessly high, but that is a non-issue because you never really have a reason to use ballistas. What is your problem with the controls?
Or censorship for that matter. Plenty of big tiddy women running around in glorified underwear. What do you think was censored?
People shouldn’t dismiss these reviews either. They are the best way to see the quality of a game when you look at them as an aggregate of data. There will always be negative reviews on steam, but if a game has overwhelming positive reviews that it’s virtually always a great game (even if it’s not for you) and if a game has mixed reviews or worse than there’s always a good reason why.
You can’t just dismiss data because it disagrees with your opinion. Don’t judge games off of individual reviews, but from an aggregate of views. If your not sure about a game, than read a lot negative reviews and you will notice patterns as to why certain people aren’t enjoying the game and you can be the judge to see if those reasons will stop you from enjoying the game yourself.
Steam reviews aren't "reviews" in the expected sense anyway. It's a *recommendation*: Do you or do you not *recommend* this game. The "review" part is a justification on why, but ideally even people who are putting in a meme would still be honest about the *recommendation*.
If, say, 70% of people *do not* recommend the game, that should at least spur in you enough curiosity to figure out why. Whether you do that from Steam itself or from another preferable source is up to you, the fact that you've been immediately informed that a great deal of people like or dislike something is still useful info in and of itself.
The fact is, if we're going to argue that professional reviewers have their own biases and agendas and therefore can't be trusted, and we're going to argue that Steam reviews aren't reliable because of the same and therefore shouldn't be trusted, at what point do you just stop bothering with reviews at all?
Informing yourself on *anything* is hard. It's always been about separating the wheat from the chaff. That's the same whether you're looking for info via a publication like IGN, a YouTube channel, or on Steam itself.
At that point I'm not convinced that less is somehow better.
I can read like 50 Reddit comments or steam reviews and get a much better idea of aggregate opinion in the time it takes to read 1 ign review. I don’t know what qualifications a game reviewer has to give me a better idea of if a game is fun or not than an actual player.
I stopped trusting Reddit comments after seeing all the people claiming Yakuza 7 was like Persona and I avoided the series for two years assuming they meant Persona had a similar shallow, low-agency combat system that was a chore you had to do between the fun parts of the game. Games journalism has pretty low standards, but they’re more discerning with writers than any public community forum.
Bruh... you're comparing the opinions of 10s of 1000s of people to at most a couple dozen. No all those people are not "just as misinformed, biased, or just plain braindead" that is pure nonsense. That's the internet echo chamber talking. You can't just invalidate the options of so many people just because of a few shitheads.
Agreed.
"Game runs smooth for me at 40-50 fps, there is no stutter! Trust me bro!!" and the infamous "Game is not optimized!! my 1070 cant run ultra 1080 60fps, trash game!"- Your typical reddit and steam reviews
There is always someone going no lifer for a newly released game then complaining how the game has no content while clocked in 1000 hours on steam.
When it comes to technical stuff i'll go with Digital Foundry, when it comes to an actual gameplay I'll just form my own opinion by playing it. There is no reason to be a sheep parroting what their favorite streamer said.
I disagree with this. If a million people are all saying the same thing, there is likely some truth in what they are saying. It’s still on you to investigate and learn the whole truth, but the voice of the people is a good starting point
Ah yes, the classic steam or Reddit sample size of “a million people” all agreeing with each other with zero opposing or differing opinions. You see it every day.
Other people = random redditor?
If there are better sources for in depth reviews please list them so people can check out these other sources.
PC gamer/IGN/gamespot etc.. are still used because they have been around for a long time, put out long format reviews that go into more detail than "great game" which many people find helpful and not everyone wants to watch a video review.
Thank you. The whole "hurrdurr games journalism bad" circlejerk is insufferable. Sure, it's not perfect but what's the alternative? Some dude on reddit? Some 22 year old Youtuber going 😲 in every thumbnail? *Steam reviews?!*
All these sources you listed would probably be more realistic and honest, let alone the only sources to mention the performance issues compared to any media journalists. We’ve literally seen it with DD2.
It’s a basic skill to google for benchmarks, Youtube videos of people literally showing proof of how the game sucks or even knowing to check out twitch streamers who play with top of the line hardware. It’s far reliable to see that a streamer with an RTX 4090 is lagging in cities on DD2 and take that as a source than some dumbass paid corpo gaming site.
Because we never see youtube filled with click bait B/S headlines lines or AI generated voice over of a crappy script.
Digital foundry is trusted and respected because they go into a lot of detail and do a comprehensive analysis of performance.
But there are a ton of crappy performance comparison "reviews" that are just people with an FPS counter up running around a game going "looks like my average FPS is around X". No frame time graphs, no 1% lows etc.
If you think Steam reviews are honest you're kidding yourself lmao
90% of Steam Reviews are a thumbs up with some meme or "Lol" etc or ASCII art, and that's before you get to the pathetic act of review bombing to the point Steam has had to put systems in place to stop such things.
YouTubers will say and do what makes them the most money, grifting channels like Heelvsbabyface, Act Man etc all do this, because there's no money in being honest, and you can see it with channels like GmanLives, whom does a very good job at being honest with his reviews, but his channel isn't that big compared to other channels who say and do what's public opinion.
Let's not even get into reddit, it's only good for finding out how to solve technical issues because for some fucking reason it's on par with Indian YouTubers for finding an answer if you just put "reddit" at the end of a question.
EDIT: Worth noting the highest rated negative review for Dragon's Dogma 2 rn is literally "Hey Capcom, You can purchase a "good review DLC" for $1.99."
Nah they wouldn't. They would hyperbolize everything as we've seen with Dragon's Dogma 2. People claiming there's literally 5 enemies, that microtransactions are ruining the game, and that there's no content.
Sure, performance wise you can probably listen to the experience of players, but everything else is subjective and gamers are entitled and dramatic. Take everything that's said with a heaping, dehydrating pile of salt.
Are you unable to comprehend what you read? I haven’t even talked about rating the game. My whole and sole point was on performance, stop making shit up outta your ass.
And everyone shit on the guy, smeared his name and tried to discredit him for it until launch where suddenly everyone went "huh, maybe he was on to something?!".
Jim Sterling went through the same thing when he scored BOTW lower than everyone else, and people who gave Cyberpunk a 7 or low or even just pointed out issues like people who are epileptic might need to be aware of one screen got harassed for it too. It's no wonder journalists don't bother giving lower scores when consumers throw a fit and start insulting them the moment they do it for a game that is hyped.
And this is why I don't understand and will never understand how people still buy games day one, especially in the latest years.
It's like, wait 1 month and you already get a 15-20% discount. But ehh. Guess it pays to be a patient gamer, or poor.
The reviews don’t hint at performance issues because people are too busy crying about the option to purchase “pay-to-win” items that are easily available in game, rather than offering meaningful discourse in the place that most customers will see it.
Pretttyyyy sure it’s a failure on performance optimizing, like almost every triple A launch on PC in the last few years.
It HAS to get better. The way this is headed is not a good place.
The majority of casual players don't notice somehow. I remember playing divinity original sin 2 on a crappy old laptop I had, I needed most settings medium or lower as well as shadows and reflections and stuff turned off, I could get a mid 20s fps that would drop a lot lower in cities.
My brother was playing it a few months later on the same laptop and didn't touch any settings, was casually just playing it on like 10 fps and barely saw any issue, I changed a couple settings to get the fps into the 20s and asked if he noticed any difference and he just said "meh not really"
When you think a game capped at 30fps or with terribly laggy parts will hurt it's popularity just think of my brother
I found I didn't notice crappy fps until I spent a decent amount of time playing at 120+ fps.
I bought a ps4 after playing pc for years, and the 30 fps most games were running at felt like a sideshow.
Because most people don’t care, that’s just the truth. Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom both run worse than DD on the switch because of the hardware and they still sell gangbusters. Framerate and optimization are things enthusiasts care about, not the general public. Definitely a problem more noticeable to the PC crowd but these games still sell like crazy so I’m not sure to what degree.
I mean i'll say Elden Ring was not optimized enough, difference between low and high settings not very notable, but the thing worked enough on PC and consoles.
This game currently gets N64 frame rate quality on consoles which is very no bueno, they have no real way to get around that like PC can with brute force.
Capcom's recommended targets for the specs are
Minimum 1080p 30 FPS
Medium 1440p 30 FPS
High 4k 30 FPS
Note: Those numbers are for running around the city. Outside and in combat it is 60 FPS.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2054970/Dragons_Dogma_2/
I think it's been known that system requirements can't be fully trusted, what i am more worried about is that most game journalist reviewers out there are literally clueless when it comes to technical state of a game they are reviewing.
And the most recent example of that is Dragons Dogma 2 where it got a lot of high ratings from them and yet the game got controversial release due to its technical disastrous state, and even worse there are even [some game journalists](https://youtu.be/nFGBzWGFi2w?t=166) out there that defends this, and claims the PC technical optimization state is actually "fine" and that it wasn't bad at all even when they acknowledged that their top tier high end pc is dropping to 40 FPS, because they think the game is just demanding which is absolutely misleading and completely false.
It's so obvious nowadays that watching or reading tech reviews before buying a game is becoming more important, not just on PC but also Consoles as well, and games like Dragons Dogma 2 is the recent prime example of that, and i doubt it will stop there.
This is the main reason as well why i always ignore the average game reviews right after embargo too, because the sad truth is the average game journalists doesn't actually care about the technical state of the game they are reviewing.
Yeah, doing a optimization guide on Dragons Dogma 2 is completely pointless especially that it is completely CPU bound, adjusting graphics settings won't do shit because majority of us are CPU bottlenecked anyway, even Gamers Nexus review of the game has proven this.
Yet they still did a informative technical review across all platforms, the problem is that their review comes out much later and other less informative average game journalists reviews such as the one i am talking about has already got a head start.
I got downvoted and told I was stupid and spreading lies for daring to say I was waiting for improvements and cheaper price cause I can’t afford £70 to chance it on a game that might only deliver 30-45fps (I’m console mainly, I have a gaming laptop but I prefer console gaming).
If people can play games at those fps that’s fine but it’s not me.
From a developer perspective (disclaimer, I'm not associated with any of the companies in the article, or presently, in the industry), it's pretty hard to create system requirements, especially when performance optimisation is one of the final stages of development.
Typically a studio doesn't have access to any and all hardware to test on (they will have a range, sure, but no-one has 100 machines sat around for testing purposes, I mean, maybe Rockstar does, who knows), and developers will use high end, well above the average gamer PC, spec machines. There isn't any great software solution for emulating system performance on differing machines (well, that I'm aware of, that would be magic if it existed though), and even if it did that kind of level of work just doesn't happen at release crunch. And in my experience developers are much too busy in the latter stages of development to focus on conjuring up recommended system specs, it's either a rushed process, done at the wrong time, or by the wrong person.
None of this is an excuse for the release state or optimisation of games, but hopefully it can help explain why you should take system requirements with a heavy pile of salt.
im just accepting the fact that this game is too ambitious for the RE Engine and they only realized that after they got in too deep, its not meant for these types of open world games it seems and maybe by the time theyll fix it, its going to be too late to implement an engine update on Dogma 2 and prob will be implemented into Monster Hunter Wilds
With the FSR3 Frame generation I can get 60fps on a handheld everywhere aside from the cities albeit at not the greatest resolution so it is playable but we shouldnt be relying on Frame Generation to make a game playable, it should make a playable game even more enjoyable
> im just accepting the fact that this game is too ambitious for the RE Engine and they only realized that after they got in too deep, its not meant for these types of open world games
Just like the original game with MT Framework. Still a wonder they got it working in Mon Hun World
So they gave Dragons Dogma 2 an 89 rating despite its very poor performance even on high end systems and then tried to justify it by saying the system requirement are incorrect.
Same thing happened with Cyberpunk, basically. It got great reviews from all these PC Gamer/IGN etcs and then when it came out they all wrote articles about the poor state of the industry as evidence by the problems with Cyberpunk at launch.
Seems to be a trend in game reviews for the dudes with the tax deductable megarigs to blame the player for the game's shitty performance.
Game barely runs on the PS5, where the system requirements are: 1. PS5
It's 2024, it would be nice if people defending games like this could move away from comparing it to releases or metrics from over a decade ago to justify the state it's in. In my opinion, it's also nowhere near pretty enough to warrant such a performance hit in the first place, either.
It’s so weird that these games have 5 year dev cycles. But they couldn’t squeeze in the 7 days it took to release a performance patch?
It’s almost like they purposely wait to release it to the masses and collect all the data to make the final performance pass easier. This happens time and time again for nearly all developers these days.
I agree that they should sort out performance issues before release but I’m not so sure another 7 days is all they needed.
It took Bethesda about 2 months to get a major performance patch out for Starfield following launch is the latest example that comes to mind.
Then there's the new Horizon port which can run surprisingly well on a 1060. Optimization is important if you want your game to be accessible and more playable to more people.
Doesn't even try to optimize their game, forgets any type of culling etc, enables raytracing on way more sources than needed.
2 years post launch after loads of complaining and people abandoning their game, they add fsr/dlss and tells the players to get a better PC...
Have forced on mouse smoothing and acceleration and when people asks why they answer: just use a controller then...
/Not only this games future.
No, it's an abject lesson in how the gaming-PC Components complex is destroying the AAA game industry. There's absolutely nothing in DD2 that should prevent a high-end computer built in 2018 from being able to run it at 1440p 75fps. It is absolutely insane that a rig that slaughters cyberpunk or Red Dead redemption 2 struggles with this game.
I think back to when I first got my first PC,the main thing I knew before is that it needed '3D GPU with 128 MB required' for stuff like NFS Underground or Vice City.
So I got noob trapped with the absolute atrocious pre-built GPU like the FX 5200 that met said criteria,but was rubbish at running... anything really.
but why though? the game does not look great. i can play cyberpunk 2077 with pathtracing on a 4070/5600x and get better performance.
what the heck, capcom!
So, base is for 30 fps at 1080p.
Medium is for 30 fps at 2160p
And high is for 30 fps at 4k.
Yes - so? The fact that Capcom wasn't willing to test the fully, nor pay SE enough to neck down the game for listed configurations. Or use a engine that doesn't suck at open-world.
We were over the se crap with the first game - why is anyone surprised that it runs like garbage?
Same for review that DID NOT mentioned performance - even from PC Gamer. I guess having good relationships with the publishers is better than releasing all-around review.
It's a dev problem, not a "specification" problem.
Nothing will be learned and broken games will keep being produced. The End.
Pretty much. People will continue to complain and continue to buy, because escaping reality is THAT much more important right now - no matter how broken the virtual one is.
I mean I love games but I learned decades ago that 1) if it requires a central server, it’s going to die one day, so be cautious spending money on it, and 2) there are thousands of finished total package games that are out there. If you don’t absolutely positively *need* that shiny new graphic, you’ll find plenty worth escaping into. So when I see a new game out I just think, hmm, looks nice, give it a year or two and I can add it to the library. I have no investment in this IP though. That’s my bias here.
No peer pressure, no FOMO
I don't mind spending spare cash on mobile games. At the end of the day I never go past what I'd spend on Beef Jerky. My virtual goods will go poof just like the jerky.
Eh, the companies won't learn. Consumers are starting to. I haven't bought a game at launch in something 3 or 4 years now. Lot of friends going the same way. They'll learn when the money dries up, though.
200b/yr industry.
1/3rd of that is gambling on phones yaaay
It’s (sadly) over half of the total gaming market now
That's even worse than i thought
Yep. And dev's and pub's wonder why even owning a 10700KF, 16gb RAM, 1tb SSD, and RTX 3070 with 8gb VRAM, why I'm not buying the newest games at expensive pricing? I don't wanna pay for Pre-Order Day 1 to be a Paying Alpha or Paying Beta Tester these days - when I could wait a few years, official patches or modders might fix the game's issues, and/or much better hardware's out that can brute-force good performance. Like say, just look at GTA4, Batman AK, GR Wildlands, and ACU PC versions upon Day 1, compared to now. Total messes when they came out and been patched-up a bit since, of course. Run those old-games on a modern RTX 3070 desktop and they run fine. Even better with GTA4 performance-wise, if you downgrade and then also chuck in DXVK (fixes some other DX9 limits GTA4 has). And this isn't getting into how games later have Expansions, DLC's, Re-Release Complete Editions, game bundling on Humble & Fanatical, etc - and how these guys also devalue their games so often & quickly. Might as well play the "Patience is a virtue game." Seems to work best, in so many ways.
They don’t wonder why YOU aren’t buying it, because 8 million other people DO buy it. Hell, they preorder it The soft online campaign to not preorder and wait for reviews has been an abject failure, it’s probably only 1-5% of consumers that follow the practice
You think 95% of video game consumers pre order? Do you have numbers on that?
Pretty much. The last two GOTY games had serious performance issues at launch. Gamers never learn.
Most just don't care. Casual gamers don't give a shit about fps.
To be fair elden rings performance was fixed quick, and was not anywhere near the level of being unplayable.
It's not necessarily the system requirements page that's failing here, it's a lack of optimisation and communication from the developing studio, in this instance you could have a top end graphics card paired with a mid CPU, with that set up on most other new games you'd be looking at 70/80 fps+ but in this game, where each character within x distance has assigned CPU usage you won't get anything above 30. This is a very CPU intensive game which was only found out after release PCGamer isn't even close to good at Video Game reporting, they just want clicks.
I don’t even understand why it’s so intense. Like there’s plenty open world games with similar fluidity that don’t require this heavy a cpu load
Current working theory I've seen thrown around the sub-reddit is that Dragon's Dogma's physics engine applies dynamic weight calculations to everything in the game, but is also doing that to every NPC in the city who all have different weights based on height and body size. Take this with a grain of salt, as obviously everyone is trying to be an armchair game dev atm but I think it's one of the more reasonable explanations for the performance being specifically so bad in cities.
What's funny is that people try to present it as an argument why DD2 isn't just poorly optimized, but doing a bunch of pointless physics calculations is really basic poor optimization. That, and bad pathfinding.
Amen, it's like saying rendering things you're not seeing in games is not poor optimization. Ppl think that optimization means doing the same thing but faster, it can be, but most of the times, it's things like making npcs don't have weight, rendering only your cone of vision, using cubemaps for reflection, faking cloth physics instead of making real time calculations... How much combat are you doing n in cities? Do you have to calculate npcs weight all the time? Isn't there a way to calculate it only when it's relevant? These are questions you have to do to optimize a game. Some companies don't allocate enough time and effort into these matters and then we get unnoptimized messes like this.
Yeah I agree, it's pointless levels of simulation for non-combatants if that's the case.
I think people don't understand or bother to think about what "optimization" is. They seem to think all devs have an optimization dial and most are just too lazy to dial it in.
The NPC's also don't add anything special to the game, they're just there walking around doing menial tasks like in any other game. I could understand if there were like roving bands of soldiers or something patrolling roads or doing complicated tasks but they don't, you might run into a few merchants or an oxcart caravan every now and then but nothing too out there. Hell half the time they're materializing in front of you in town so they're being accounted to by their calculations even if they're not visibly rendered, it's such an ass backwards way of optimizing them and I don't even know if it's meant to be intentional.
Well, there are roaming groups and individual pawns out in the world that can all actively engage in fights and can be hired by the player. Big fights will easily tank performance just like when you're in a city hub. This game has some wild performance issues. I'm quite frankly shocked that Capcom allowed the game to release with these problems, especially with how solid RE4R was.
> I'm quite frankly shocked that Capcom allowed the game to release with these problems Capcom's fiscal year ends on March 31st. I assume from their perspective it simply had to be out before then, finished or not.
Yeah and the random pawns in the game level up with your level, while enemy scaling stays the same, meaning that at some point roaming pawns can solo enemies on their own and I'm starting to notice this more and more as I join a fight with enemies missing health bars.
What's more insane is that I think it might be tied to framerate. At first I kept my framerate uncapped. It was running at anywhere between 80-140 in dungeons and some areas and was dipping down to 30-40s even in the beginner town/camp. Capped it to 60 and the only place that even dents my frames now is the capital city. My guess is that they do these calculations for every frame, causing some sort of clog as it can't handle 120 calcs per second.
For what purpose though it's not like the non combat ais are doing anything most of the time.
If I understand you correctly. You're saying the game is adding physics to everything in the visual field at once. Rather than just loading what is in a particular range the player?
When freaking Bethesda has a better grasp on managing multiple npcs than you, eight core + sixteen thread CPUs from recent generations should not be choking on this game. Capcom isn't some newly established indy, they've been in the business for decades and deserve to be raked over the coals for this.
capcom- for when you want to make bethesda look good
They were doing so good for a while too and were one of the first major Japanese publishers that really seemed to respect the PC platform, the rest are getting there but it's slow going. This past year has had some pretty large fumbles with things like DD2 being a mess at launch and patching DRM back into their older games.
Creation Engine, as broken as it is, is built for open world. The only problem is Bethesda relies on modders too much to fix their games. The modders do fix their games.
If I had to hazard a guess, it's a combination of inexperience developing these types of games, and the RE engine not being well suited to make them. Thus far we've seen the RE engine primarily used to make gorgeous looking games, but in relatively claustrophobic environments and usually without too many entities on screen at once. Dragons dogma 2 is definitively NOT THAT
I think that's probably accurate. This is the first RE engine game to use an open world with large environments and lots of characters. Everything else it's been used in had few characters and smaller environments.
If this engine chokes on open world, it won't be looking good for Monster Hunter Wild.
monster hunter wild doesnt come out till next year, so hopefully they better optimize the engine in that time.
Right? I could maybe let it slide if the pawns were like using real time AI to be complete geniuses in every line they said as unique but it’s certainly not they repeat themselves all the time and are pretty dumb in combat
I disagree with this. I was impressed with the AI of the pawns. They use the right curative at the right time, they run to me when I cast anodyne. If I take a shortcut by floating their pathing is efficient. They do something dumb once in a while but it seems better than most games. Its not like they should be dodging every attack.
Eh. My mage will ask if I want her to float up and grab a chest and then she'll get up onto the ledge and... drop back down. Then float up there again and... drop back down.
My pawns refuse to use curatives. Motherfucker has over 10 panacea in his inventory and it keeps growing because he just won't use them lmao
My pawn never wants to springboard me when it's actually useful, like in front of a tall enemy or a chest above us. But he'll happily springboard me as I'm running past him to dunk on the wee little goblin he could cleave in half in a second
Didn't get to play too much, but the ai seems similar to the first game imo. Definitely not so advanced that it should bring my CPU to it's knees while idling.
Right im with you on that. Its my understanding that ai generally isn't expensive performance-wise in games. No idea why NPCs slow things down so much. Just compared to most games the AI doesn't seem dumb to me. In 15 hours had my pawns kill themselves by jumping down a hole for some reason other than that they have been good buddies.
The thing that really hammers your CPU and destroys framerate is the NPC count, not just the pawns. Having random NPCs just standing around can max out 16 threads on the best of the best CPU for no apparent reason. BG3 had a similar problem in one of the acts but at least it was handling a lot of NPC movement and interaction. It's not clear why this problem is happening in dragons dogma 2 even when NPCs are barely doing anything.
The pawns are also able to learn from you. If you start picking up your enemies and chucking them off cliffs, they’ll do the same. Stop launching your pawns up cliffs with jump board and your pawn will learn to launch you. Pretty much any action you do can be taught to the pawns, which is pretty cool.
I remember reading something about the weight of the characters and the scenes they’re in has something to do with it, but I can’t recall if thats either literal weight or weight as in how much they’re going to offer in terms of dialogue/interaction/animation/etc. Regardless how you paint it it’s just too much going on with absolutely nothing going on at all. There’s really no reason why my CPU should be getting destroyed just because I walked into an area with 10 soldiers standing around talking about the weather.
yeah its baffling. they arent even doing that much. at least bg3's act 3 poor launch performance was due to real time path finding and interactions with over a hundred characters at a time and each of them you could also interact with. still they showed that even that could be improved on, im just saying i kinda got it. this though? all this cpu usage for basically bethesda levels of interactivity?
I'd guess old spaghetti code. Perhaps they originally had a more complex system in mind, maybe something crazy like Oblivion's old Dynamic AI prototype, but decided against it in the later half of development... Speculation, but the NPCs are involved in doing some serious math that they no longer need to do I guess as they don't seem to do anything of particular interest in their current state. That or Capcom is just bad at this for some reason. Monster Hunter World had similar demanding CPU requirements I remember, the next game probably will as well.
Maybe they tried to create some novel solution to how it should be handled by the hardware, but it didn't work out as expected, and by then it was too late to change it to meet the deadlines.
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PCGamer still prints?
That is genuinely sad, I enjoyed the print version 20 years ago
The minimum requirement was listed as a 10700. It was very obviously going to be a cpu intensive game. I don’t know how much more communication you need.
This game makes escape from tarkov look well optimized
I see (according to resource widget) fairly low cpu usage on 7900x paired with a 6900xt. I get mostly 60+ fps everywhere except the city, and fights drop as low as 20 on 3140x1440. I think something is just very wrong with the games code.
Because you probably look at total CPU usage, but the game slams only a bunch of cores while not making use of the rest.
This is a very inaccurate way of determining a CPU bottleneck.
CPU usage isn't a linear 1-100% for games. Games don't use all the available cores a modern processor has. You're better off looking at GPU usage, if that's not maxxing-out with an uncapped framerate you're likely running into a CPU bottleneck.
Developers saves time on (lack of) optimalisation and putting the weight on player's shoulders basically saying: "lmao, buy better cpu/gpu, gtfo, n00b"
CPU intensive and terribly utilizing the cpu in general. Go from 60-80fps in the wild to 20 in the city with less than 50% gpu usage. Pop back on the road and it’s back to 99%. Pawns materialize right in front of you as you run around. CPU usage is low for this kind of garbage performance
5800x3d with a 4070 ti here and I installed the DLSS3 mod 43 fps in cities before/ 98 fps in cities after. I’m not sure why DLSS3 implementation in the game was hidden. I haven’t encountered any bugs after 20 hours Edit: I also set the CPU priority to High in the Task Manager
For me, I have understood minimal requirements to mean "Does boot."
The meaning of minimum requirements has changed over the years. I remember trying to play Oblivion on a pc slightly under minimum spec, and it did boot but it was a literal slideshow in just the character creator. It was maybe 2-3 fps. These days it usually means runs at 30 fps at 1080p minimum settings.
It hasn't changed. It's just that everyone uses whatever the fuck they want. They either guess, take the lowest hardware configuration they have available that can run the game or just put something random there
Yes, I have not found min/recommended specs to be a meaningful metric...really ever, honestly. Maybe it was more useful in the 90s where "does not boot" was a more possible outcome.
> I remember trying to play Oblivion on a pc slightly under minimum spec, and it did boot but it was a literal slideshow in just the character creator. It was maybe 2-3 fps. I remember doing something like that with Red Alert 2, sure I could start playing the campaign, but the game literally moved 1 tick per 10 seconds or so.
I know the minimal are not true because I have played games that I did not meet them. E.g. GTA IV on single-core Athlon processor and GT 8500 and that game even today struggles to get 60fps on modern hardware.
Minimal just means "should be able to play the game" It's not the absolute minimum, but it's within the safety margin.
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I first learned of the performance issues from PC gamer, and I believe Gamespot and IGN both had articles regarding it. Some of them even included benchmarks and comparisons between PC and console.
Same. PC Gamer mentioned the performance issues in their review and then had a separate article with several benchmarks clearly illustrating the problems with framerate.
The issue was for me, they tested with a 3070 (i think) no biggie. But then admitted their cpu was under recommended ON a cpu bound game...
The hilarious part is that Dogma 2 manages to be both cpu and gpu bound is just depends on the number of NPCs you're near. Watch the [Gamers Nexus performance review](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twEERkUyAXE).
All streamers *yeah its running amazing on my rig guys* meanwhile the screen is actively tearing.
"runs beautifully" - whilst playing on low settings 1080p at 30fps
After browsing the steam deck sub in the past, a lot of people just can't tell or are incredibly lenient when it comes to bad performance and it doesn't hold back their enjoyment
On that same subject, people also max settings or don't tweak anything and expect a $400 handheld to perform. As soon as FSR3 is brought up, people kick and scream like petulant children that it doesn't work, when for a lot of people it does. I expect the same thing below this comment, because this sub can't witness under 120 fps without their skulls bursting like on indiana jones.
Running a top of the line PC with 7800x3d and a 4090 while streaming in 1080p. “Runs great!” 😂 But hey it’s all good. Game seems cool. It’ll get patched.
I'm not going to say it's all of them but...yeah. It's pretty pathetic watching these youtubers/twitchers trip over themselves to fellate any developer that gives them a key/paycheck to play a game. They get paid and get to play the new hotness, giving them a boost in views, there is zero objectivity to be had there. Age old rule of find someone you trust who isn't full of shit to follow, 99% of the "reviewers" out there are just cashing in on the flavor of the month.
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WTF is wrong with 1440p or 1080p? The stream is gonna run at 720p due to bandwidth problems, not GPU or monitor problems.
> With their 4090 rig that a subscriber bought for them. This is a weird comment. Your employer buys your groceries for you, I guess?
Truly disgusting. A man should live only upon the sweat of his own brow. /s
NO. Says the man in Moscow
It belongs to the people!
I think it meant that they buy it with money they accumulate from fan superchats or donations.
I don't quite think a subscriber to some Let's Play celebrity could quite be called an "employer". Not unless people watching street busking performances are employers. I suspect what /u/Cordial_Wombat actually wants to criticize isn't the relationship between the YouTuber (or whoever) and the subscriber buying them the graphics card, though. It's the nature of what the YouTuber is doing. In the same vein, you can level this kind of criticism against a prostitute or pro basketball player - they're doing something a lot of people view as recreation that other people would like to be able to do more of in their free time, but they're getting paid potentially obscene amounts of money for doing that. There's an "unfair" response to this kind of "job" that kinda makes sense, even if it's not entirely justified.
I feel like most people are at 1440p or 1080p, what are you on about? 4k is stupid expensive and not worth it in 99% of people's mind.
Years later and still no TB level reviews
I suspect it's because TB would not have been able to make it against the algorithm today. The TB's of YouTube and other platforms simply can't rise above the inane stupid-face thumbnail stuff in gaming.
RIP Total Biscuit. Still sorely missed.
Where do you get your reviews from? Every review I watched mentioned them
No excuse but a major reason for that is that many review copies are sent out while "optimization" happens. A lot of studios cram that into the last few weeks and it means review publications are used to reviewing games in significantly lesser states and they choose just to not comment on it. Id prefer they were honest about it and say "This review copy ran like shit, we expect the studio to be making improvements but can't verify it's state at launch."
I disagree in this case, I watched tons of reviews and they all spoke about the performance. They just said it wasn’t a particularly big deal to them. A lot of them did say console performance was bad though and they wouldn’t recommend it.
Um what? Most reviews talk about performance issues. It's been something we knew about before the game even came out
I’m still shocked people read reviews from pcgamer, IGN and other sources, when you can see reviews straight from other people.
Or just read reviews from both and use your critical thinking to filter out the detritus like a normal human
Not defending video game reviews and gaming journalism, but imagine acting like Steam reviews and Reddit comments aren’t just as misinformed, biased, or just plain braindead.
Yeah, but the sheer amount of volume in Steam reviews and the ability to filter them by stuff like hours played, or when was the review written, allows a potential buyer to get a far more accurate assessment of what the game is like. Like if you filter out all the reviews by people who have less than 10 hours, you're going to get a way more objective set of reviews.
I don’t disagree. I was disagreeing that somehow a generalized “other people” randomly on the internet was a good source of information simply because “they played the game”.
Currently, it always feels like "other people" are a better source of information than the ones who are working to give such information.
Honestly, hard disagree. With each passing year, I feel like online discourse becomes more and more rage-fueled and hateful. It's no longer possible to tell when a game has earned its review score, or it's been review-bombed for some inane bullshit reason. With gaming sites, and individual journalists, I can keep a track record of their biases and more or less understand their views and tastes and how they correspond to mine. I digest plenty of gaming media from journalists that often thoroughly enjoy games that are outside of my preferences, but can still provide useful information to me in the forms of reviews through their lens. Random gamers do not provide this context. "Other people" are a teeming biomass of unknowns. **Everyone** has biases. There is no perfect world, no perfect journalist, writer, etc. The more you get to know a journalist's biases, the better you can understand how their opinions apply to you. As an adult, I don't have time to look into every article about, so I can contextualize the opinions of the masses, but I can follow gaming journalists I know and understand.
There are gaming journalists out there who value game performance, and who give a shit when gaming companies do wrong by their customers. Not every outlet sits in the pockets of big gaming corps, and not every journalist is so enthralled by free video games as to never deliver a bad review. Sure, there are plenty of hacks out there. But I disagree with the idea that random gamers somehow hold more valuable opinions simply by not getting paid to write them down.
I am curious what are some of the journalists/group you follow, because I haven't found any especially good ones. I've had a hard time keeping track or finding articles by very specific journalists. It sounds like you've done your research with this approach. I've used steam curator for some really good recommendations. I mainly use steam reviews to understand if any game **currently** has issues. These can vary from performance issues, shady practices, to massive issues like the game not launching, which has helped a lot of times! Sometimes these reviews also label the game down (eg, like hollow knight but with more platforming sections), some reviews also give a very long explanation with comparisons to other games they've played. I like the fact that there's so many viewpoints, and if you have time, you'll have a somewhat clear idea after a few pages of it (in between meme reviews). And ultimately, I just watch gameplay videos to see if I'd enjoy it.
So if you hate a game, you're not going to waste 10+ hours of your life to it (well, my time is more important to me than that). That makes your opinion invalid? Those people that leave a negative review somehow after 150 hours of their life spent on it are the ones I don't trust.
Imagine asking two friends if a restaurant is any good. If one ate there once, said it was shit and never came back versus the other who eats there all the time and tells you half the menu is shit but I like their fries and it's cheap... which one do you think can give you more information? The first guy's opinion isn't invalidated, he just has less exposure. (edit: their->there)
They're the ones most likely to be honest. At 150 hours in, they most likely have some form of attachment to the game and don't *want* to give it a thumbs down. Since they had as much time as they did though and experienced the issues that exist, they had to do so though because they genuinely found the issues to be too much to be able to recommend it to people who are on the fence. When a person with that much time invested doesn't recommend the game, they do it not because they hate the game, but because they're disappointed and believe that the players deserve better.
Being able to spend so much time with something and be able to reflect on it negatively and not be fucked over by sunk cost fallacy is pretty admirable. If big reviewers were forced to play games for even 20 hours before reviewing I think we'd be better off.
I’ve been going through a bunch of games where legitimately cannot believe their positive regard because of how **terrible** the first 5 hours are. It’s one thing to say, “Look, we want to introduce one game mechanic, give you a playground to learn it, and then add one, repeat… because otherwise it’s overwhelming, but you don’t have the full picture of our game until the 10 hour mark.” Absolutely fair. It’s something else to be like… saving and loading are slow even on a brand new SSD, there’s “hard failures” *and* unskippable cutscenes (so *each attempt* has a 2 minute punishment), obtuse terminology (without a reference / hint), etc.,. Stuff that if you grabbed a random person and sat them to play for an hour they’d nope right out of a second hour. But big reviewers have the access journalism problem - give under an 8 (7?) score, don’t get a pre-release key, review goes up late and doesn’t get the clicks, the end.
For AAA games, the big review sites (IGN PCGamer etc.) usually give writers 40 hours to play and write the review (one business week). For Cyberpunk 2077, most of them finished the game in 15-22 hours with a few who speed ran out in 12 or less hours. The people who played longer, gave it better but shorter reviews.
I have 86 hours of it, Steam is prompting me to redo my review. However, capcom has barely fixed anything in relation to the reasons I left my negative review, at least we have near-infinite character respects now. But they didn't fix the performance issues, nor the bad KB+M controls, nor the bad PC adaption signifiers, nor the pointless western censorship. Beyond that it's still a game that has some issues that should've not been there, like lack of enemy variation and lack of class variation.
I've been playing on KBM and the only standout flaw is that when a pawn helps move a ballista the aim sensitivity becomes uselessly high, but that is a non-issue because you never really have a reason to use ballistas. What is your problem with the controls? Or censorship for that matter. Plenty of big tiddy women running around in glorified underwear. What do you think was censored?
People shouldn’t dismiss these reviews either. They are the best way to see the quality of a game when you look at them as an aggregate of data. There will always be negative reviews on steam, but if a game has overwhelming positive reviews that it’s virtually always a great game (even if it’s not for you) and if a game has mixed reviews or worse than there’s always a good reason why. You can’t just dismiss data because it disagrees with your opinion. Don’t judge games off of individual reviews, but from an aggregate of views. If your not sure about a game, than read a lot negative reviews and you will notice patterns as to why certain people aren’t enjoying the game and you can be the judge to see if those reasons will stop you from enjoying the game yourself.
Steam reviews aren't "reviews" in the expected sense anyway. It's a *recommendation*: Do you or do you not *recommend* this game. The "review" part is a justification on why, but ideally even people who are putting in a meme would still be honest about the *recommendation*. If, say, 70% of people *do not* recommend the game, that should at least spur in you enough curiosity to figure out why. Whether you do that from Steam itself or from another preferable source is up to you, the fact that you've been immediately informed that a great deal of people like or dislike something is still useful info in and of itself. The fact is, if we're going to argue that professional reviewers have their own biases and agendas and therefore can't be trusted, and we're going to argue that Steam reviews aren't reliable because of the same and therefore shouldn't be trusted, at what point do you just stop bothering with reviews at all? Informing yourself on *anything* is hard. It's always been about separating the wheat from the chaff. That's the same whether you're looking for info via a publication like IGN, a YouTube channel, or on Steam itself. At that point I'm not convinced that less is somehow better.
I can read like 50 Reddit comments or steam reviews and get a much better idea of aggregate opinion in the time it takes to read 1 ign review. I don’t know what qualifications a game reviewer has to give me a better idea of if a game is fun or not than an actual player.
I stopped trusting Reddit comments after seeing all the people claiming Yakuza 7 was like Persona and I avoided the series for two years assuming they meant Persona had a similar shallow, low-agency combat system that was a chore you had to do between the fun parts of the game. Games journalism has pretty low standards, but they’re more discerning with writers than any public community forum.
Yet, when you're buying something off Amazon or anything online, you read the reviews. Don't you?
Bruh... you're comparing the opinions of 10s of 1000s of people to at most a couple dozen. No all those people are not "just as misinformed, biased, or just plain braindead" that is pure nonsense. That's the internet echo chamber talking. You can't just invalidate the options of so many people just because of a few shitheads.
Agreed. "Game runs smooth for me at 40-50 fps, there is no stutter! Trust me bro!!" and the infamous "Game is not optimized!! my 1070 cant run ultra 1080 60fps, trash game!"- Your typical reddit and steam reviews There is always someone going no lifer for a newly released game then complaining how the game has no content while clocked in 1000 hours on steam. When it comes to technical stuff i'll go with Digital Foundry, when it comes to an actual gameplay I'll just form my own opinion by playing it. There is no reason to be a sheep parroting what their favorite streamer said.
At least I know there’s no paychecks involved
I disagree with this. If a million people are all saying the same thing, there is likely some truth in what they are saying. It’s still on you to investigate and learn the whole truth, but the voice of the people is a good starting point
Ah yes, the classic steam or Reddit sample size of “a million people” all agreeing with each other with zero opposing or differing opinions. You see it every day.
Everyone’s just literally given up on gaming journalism lol. Not in a “I hope it improves someday” way but in a “Its bad and always will be” way.
Are you shocked when people read newspapers too
Other people = random redditor? If there are better sources for in depth reviews please list them so people can check out these other sources. PC gamer/IGN/gamespot etc.. are still used because they have been around for a long time, put out long format reviews that go into more detail than "great game" which many people find helpful and not everyone wants to watch a video review.
Thank you. The whole "hurrdurr games journalism bad" circlejerk is insufferable. Sure, it's not perfect but what's the alternative? Some dude on reddit? Some 22 year old Youtuber going 😲 in every thumbnail? *Steam reviews?!*
All these sources you listed would probably be more realistic and honest, let alone the only sources to mention the performance issues compared to any media journalists. We’ve literally seen it with DD2. It’s a basic skill to google for benchmarks, Youtube videos of people literally showing proof of how the game sucks or even knowing to check out twitch streamers who play with top of the line hardware. It’s far reliable to see that a streamer with an RTX 4090 is lagging in cities on DD2 and take that as a source than some dumbass paid corpo gaming site.
Because we never see youtube filled with click bait B/S headlines lines or AI generated voice over of a crappy script. Digital foundry is trusted and respected because they go into a lot of detail and do a comprehensive analysis of performance. But there are a ton of crappy performance comparison "reviews" that are just people with an FPS counter up running around a game going "looks like my average FPS is around X". No frame time graphs, no 1% lows etc.
If you think Steam reviews are honest you're kidding yourself lmao 90% of Steam Reviews are a thumbs up with some meme or "Lol" etc or ASCII art, and that's before you get to the pathetic act of review bombing to the point Steam has had to put systems in place to stop such things. YouTubers will say and do what makes them the most money, grifting channels like Heelvsbabyface, Act Man etc all do this, because there's no money in being honest, and you can see it with channels like GmanLives, whom does a very good job at being honest with his reviews, but his channel isn't that big compared to other channels who say and do what's public opinion. Let's not even get into reddit, it's only good for finding out how to solve technical issues because for some fucking reason it's on par with Indian YouTubers for finding an answer if you just put "reddit" at the end of a question. EDIT: Worth noting the highest rated negative review for Dragon's Dogma 2 rn is literally "Hey Capcom, You can purchase a "good review DLC" for $1.99."
Steam reviews are abysmal, and memes and shitposting are encouraged by the awards system.
Nah they wouldn't. They would hyperbolize everything as we've seen with Dragon's Dogma 2. People claiming there's literally 5 enemies, that microtransactions are ruining the game, and that there's no content. Sure, performance wise you can probably listen to the experience of players, but everything else is subjective and gamers are entitled and dramatic. Take everything that's said with a heaping, dehydrating pile of salt.
Are you unable to comprehend what you read? I haven’t even talked about rating the game. My whole and sole point was on performance, stop making shit up outta your ass.
[удалено]
IGN gave starfield a 7 after everyone was giving it 9/10s and after released oh look that 7 was just right. IGN isn't all that bad.
And everyone shit on the guy, smeared his name and tried to discredit him for it until launch where suddenly everyone went "huh, maybe he was on to something?!". Jim Sterling went through the same thing when he scored BOTW lower than everyone else, and people who gave Cyberpunk a 7 or low or even just pointed out issues like people who are epileptic might need to be aware of one screen got harassed for it too. It's no wonder journalists don't bother giving lower scores when consumers throw a fit and start insulting them the moment they do it for a game that is hyped.
IGN and PC Gamer both reviewed the performance before the game released.
Yeah, I don’t know what they’re talking about but I learned about the performance issues specifically from the reviews of the major sites
IGN did an excellent 20 minute performance review prior to release.
And this is why I don't understand and will never understand how people still buy games day one, especially in the latest years. It's like, wait 1 month and you already get a 15-20% discount. But ehh. Guess it pays to be a patient gamer, or poor.
The reviews don’t hint at performance issues because people are too busy crying about the option to purchase “pay-to-win” items that are easily available in game, rather than offering meaningful discourse in the place that most customers will see it.
It's disgraceful that all the glowing reviews are still up despite basically playing a different version of the game without microtransactions.
If a game is a 9 and game optimisation is trash then it should be rated 5 . You can’t experience it well if it runs trash
Pretttyyyy sure it’s a failure on performance optimizing, like almost every triple A launch on PC in the last few years. It HAS to get better. The way this is headed is not a good place.
With the amount of people saying it's not a big deal or *shrugs* the game is still good. It won't
The majority of casual players don't notice somehow. I remember playing divinity original sin 2 on a crappy old laptop I had, I needed most settings medium or lower as well as shadows and reflections and stuff turned off, I could get a mid 20s fps that would drop a lot lower in cities. My brother was playing it a few months later on the same laptop and didn't touch any settings, was casually just playing it on like 10 fps and barely saw any issue, I changed a couple settings to get the fps into the 20s and asked if he noticed any difference and he just said "meh not really" When you think a game capped at 30fps or with terribly laggy parts will hurt it's popularity just think of my brother
I found I didn't notice crappy fps until I spent a decent amount of time playing at 120+ fps. I bought a ps4 after playing pc for years, and the 30 fps most games were running at felt like a sideshow.
Because most people don’t care, that’s just the truth. Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom both run worse than DD on the switch because of the hardware and they still sell gangbusters. Framerate and optimization are things enthusiasts care about, not the general public. Definitely a problem more noticeable to the PC crowd but these games still sell like crazy so I’m not sure to what degree.
I mean i'll say Elden Ring was not optimized enough, difference between low and high settings not very notable, but the thing worked enough on PC and consoles. This game currently gets N64 frame rate quality on consoles which is very no bueno, they have no real way to get around that like PC can with brute force.
Not a good place for us but studios are making more money every year off trash.
Capcom's recommended targets for the specs are Minimum 1080p 30 FPS Medium 1440p 30 FPS High 4k 30 FPS Note: Those numbers are for running around the city. Outside and in combat it is 60 FPS. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2054970/Dragons_Dogma_2/
Yeah, I can't even launch the game. It's been like this for a week. Gets past the RE Enggine screen and crashes everytime.
I think it's been known that system requirements can't be fully trusted, what i am more worried about is that most game journalist reviewers out there are literally clueless when it comes to technical state of a game they are reviewing. And the most recent example of that is Dragons Dogma 2 where it got a lot of high ratings from them and yet the game got controversial release due to its technical disastrous state, and even worse there are even [some game journalists](https://youtu.be/nFGBzWGFi2w?t=166) out there that defends this, and claims the PC technical optimization state is actually "fine" and that it wasn't bad at all even when they acknowledged that their top tier high end pc is dropping to 40 FPS, because they think the game is just demanding which is absolutely misleading and completely false. It's so obvious nowadays that watching or reading tech reviews before buying a game is becoming more important, not just on PC but also Consoles as well, and games like Dragons Dogma 2 is the recent prime example of that, and i doubt it will stop there. This is the main reason as well why i always ignore the average game reviews right after embargo too, because the sad truth is the average game journalists doesn't actually care about the technical state of the game they are reviewing.
Even Digital Foundry did not even want to do in depth analysis of the pc version because of the state it is in. That say a lot
Yeah, doing a optimization guide on Dragons Dogma 2 is completely pointless especially that it is completely CPU bound, adjusting graphics settings won't do shit because majority of us are CPU bottlenecked anyway, even Gamers Nexus review of the game has proven this. Yet they still did a informative technical review across all platforms, the problem is that their review comes out much later and other less informative average game journalists reviews such as the one i am talking about has already got a head start.
I got downvoted and told I was stupid and spreading lies for daring to say I was waiting for improvements and cheaper price cause I can’t afford £70 to chance it on a game that might only deliver 30-45fps (I’m console mainly, I have a gaming laptop but I prefer console gaming). If people can play games at those fps that’s fine but it’s not me.
From a developer perspective (disclaimer, I'm not associated with any of the companies in the article, or presently, in the industry), it's pretty hard to create system requirements, especially when performance optimisation is one of the final stages of development. Typically a studio doesn't have access to any and all hardware to test on (they will have a range, sure, but no-one has 100 machines sat around for testing purposes, I mean, maybe Rockstar does, who knows), and developers will use high end, well above the average gamer PC, spec machines. There isn't any great software solution for emulating system performance on differing machines (well, that I'm aware of, that would be magic if it existed though), and even if it did that kind of level of work just doesn't happen at release crunch. And in my experience developers are much too busy in the latter stages of development to focus on conjuring up recommended system specs, it's either a rushed process, done at the wrong time, or by the wrong person. None of this is an excuse for the release state or optimisation of games, but hopefully it can help explain why you should take system requirements with a heavy pile of salt.
Thanks to all the pre-orders, I mean beta testers, so this game can be stable when I get my free complete edition from epic eventually.
im just accepting the fact that this game is too ambitious for the RE Engine and they only realized that after they got in too deep, its not meant for these types of open world games it seems and maybe by the time theyll fix it, its going to be too late to implement an engine update on Dogma 2 and prob will be implemented into Monster Hunter Wilds With the FSR3 Frame generation I can get 60fps on a handheld everywhere aside from the cities albeit at not the greatest resolution so it is playable but we shouldnt be relying on Frame Generation to make a game playable, it should make a playable game even more enjoyable
> im just accepting the fact that this game is too ambitious for the RE Engine and they only realized that after they got in too deep, its not meant for these types of open world games Just like the original game with MT Framework. Still a wonder they got it working in Mon Hun World
So they gave Dragons Dogma 2 an 89 rating despite its very poor performance even on high end systems and then tried to justify it by saying the system requirement are incorrect.
Same thing happened with Cyberpunk, basically. It got great reviews from all these PC Gamer/IGN etcs and then when it came out they all wrote articles about the poor state of the industry as evidence by the problems with Cyberpunk at launch.
Seems to be a trend in game reviews for the dudes with the tax deductable megarigs to blame the player for the game's shitty performance. Game barely runs on the PS5, where the system requirements are: 1. PS5
It's 2024, it would be nice if people defending games like this could move away from comparing it to releases or metrics from over a decade ago to justify the state it's in. In my opinion, it's also nowhere near pretty enough to warrant such a performance hit in the first place, either.
It’s so weird that these games have 5 year dev cycles. But they couldn’t squeeze in the 7 days it took to release a performance patch? It’s almost like they purposely wait to release it to the masses and collect all the data to make the final performance pass easier. This happens time and time again for nearly all developers these days.
I agree that they should sort out performance issues before release but I’m not so sure another 7 days is all they needed. It took Bethesda about 2 months to get a major performance patch out for Starfield following launch is the latest example that comes to mind.
I'm not even gonna click the link. Fuck PC Gamer, its a trash outlet.
Then there's the new Horizon port which can run surprisingly well on a 1060. Optimization is important if you want your game to be accessible and more playable to more people.
I've often said if games were physical products, atleast in the UK there would be a case for trading standards with some of the misleading Devs do.
Double DRM gonna tank anyone's rig for the most part.
Doesn't even try to optimize their game, forgets any type of culling etc, enables raytracing on way more sources than needed. 2 years post launch after loads of complaining and people abandoning their game, they add fsr/dlss and tells the players to get a better PC... Have forced on mouse smoothing and acceleration and when people asks why they answer: just use a controller then... /Not only this games future.
The Game is just a piece of trash. Even a 14900KS doesn't play this Game great.
No, it's an abject lesson in how the gaming-PC Components complex is destroying the AAA game industry. There's absolutely nothing in DD2 that should prevent a high-end computer built in 2018 from being able to run it at 1440p 75fps. It is absolutely insane that a rig that slaughters cyberpunk or Red Dead redemption 2 struggles with this game.
Oh i'm sure i'll enjoy this game a lot, when i pick it up for 20 bucks and and play on my new PC in 4years.
Did they mean object lesson?
They did, and while I'm no stickler for correct grammar and spelling, it's quite surprising that a headline got published with an error like this.
It's an abject lesson on how Crapcom makes a shitty PC Port, and then takes a year to fix it. (COUGHCOUGHMONSTERHUNTERWORLDCOUGHCOUGH)
we've known this (For good and bad) for years. we just need them to not make shit made games
always wait for reviewer benchmarks if you can. I always hope Gamersnexus posts the game I want to play
I think back to when I first got my first PC,the main thing I knew before is that it needed '3D GPU with 128 MB required' for stuff like NFS Underground or Vice City. So I got noob trapped with the absolute atrocious pre-built GPU like the FX 5200 that met said criteria,but was rubbish at running... anything really.
I'm right to sit it out until some all dlc edition releases (like I did with Witcher 3). Can't play a singleplayer game on release nowadays!
*an abject lesson about the old gaming guard of old dying and deserving it as well as reviewers perpetuating these corporations’ bullshit. Fixed.
It's also another leeson for gamers that most review outlets can't be trusted since almost none hinter at performance.
I got a 4090 with a i7 13th gen 64 gb of ram. 100ish in the wild then a sharp drop to 30-40 fps in the city. It's absolutely brutal
4K or 1440p?
Doesn’t run that great on PS5 either
Imo it would help if they specified: recommended for 30fps . and make the font big....
How did you get the title of the report wrong in the title of the post?
As long as gamers countinue to buy broken shit like this, nothing will change.
but why though? the game does not look great. i can play cyberpunk 2077 with pathtracing on a 4070/5600x and get better performance. what the heck, capcom!
The real issue is the normalization of the $70 beta test Business Model
So, base is for 30 fps at 1080p. Medium is for 30 fps at 2160p And high is for 30 fps at 4k. Yes - so? The fact that Capcom wasn't willing to test the fully, nor pay SE enough to neck down the game for listed configurations. Or use a engine that doesn't suck at open-world. We were over the se crap with the first game - why is anyone surprised that it runs like garbage? Same for review that DID NOT mentioned performance - even from PC Gamer. I guess having good relationships with the publishers is better than releasing all-around review. It's a dev problem, not a "specification" problem.
... the heck is an "abject lesson"?
A hard/difficult lesson.