The HotSpot - Episode 389

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oh yea, been waiting!

"Touch the shit out of me" - LOL

I still dont know about the Cyberpunk reqs, they seem too reasonable for a game that looks as good as it does. I have trouble believing them.

My model 1 genesis with 32x and model 2 Sega CD takes up an absurd amount of space in my retro setup and I love it.

I told my wife about the fake RBG ram Brad mentioned, she immediately said "Is that like the fake testicles people get for their fixed dogs??"

Yes. It is exactly that.

my ps5 was (still is) absolutely fine. then i decided to hook up my old external. tons of problems. unplugged the external and back to normal. my downloads seem to be fast enough that i'm just gonna keep the external unhooked until sony does whatever they have to do.

Worms Rumble is a PS5 game on PS+. Not sure why Brad said it wasn't a PS5 game.

Still wondering why these guys are acting like ray tracing is some minor, ancillary feature. Yeah, it's taxing, but it massively improves lighting, shadows, and especially reflections, the latter of which we basically haven't had in games at all in years. Only recently did we start getting the utterly horrible screen-space reflections, which only look acceptable at certain angles and with certain materials (they're okay in large bodies of water I guess, since the water is supposed to be distorted so you don't notice their low resolution) and which are often at a drastically lower resolution and sometimes frame rate, on top of having awful artifacting such as reflecting objects close to the screen on distant surfaces, and an entire portion of the left and right side of the screen being entirely absent of reflections, creating an obvious and janky looking cutoff point.

Is it the most important thing right at this moment? Of course not, but it's also several hundred tiers above stuff like PhysX or TressFX, which Brad did acknowledge. It is definitely the Holy Grail in the long-term, but in the short-term it's a great way to massively improve the visual quality, realism and simple beauty of a lot of games.

Some games will benefit less than others, if you can get really good pre-baked stuff in static environments, you really won't notice much, but Control in particular had its entire atmosphere changed for me from my first playthrough on my 1080 Ti (no RTX support) vs when I finally got my hands on a 3080. Areas like the telephone room where you've got a separate reflection in each plane of glass, all showing the room, lighting and character accurately. That's kind of a big deal in a room entirely comprised of glass. But it also had more subtle effects, like seeing the light from a vending machine reflected as you walk by glass in a dark hall. Hell, the office windows basically go from being essentially invisible in the base game to actually impeding your vision, which I thought was fucking cool, because breaking the glass so I could see actually became sort of important, even though that's not an explicit "feature" of it.

And then in something like Watch Dogs Legion, despite being a very meh game, all the warped and twisted reflections from all the surfaces was really fun to toy with. The cars in the game are very shiny, so taking a spider-bot and running around seeing the reflection of it and the entirety of the environment in both the bumper (where it's squished and warped because of the fact that it's a small rounded piece of plastic) and on the doors and hood and such, all make it just fun to look at and mess with. Not a big deal on its own, but where it gets interesting in terms of actual gameplay is seeing enemies in reflections before you round corners, or noticing how light is projecting on a surface in a certain way, potentially warning you of some danger ahead.

While years from now we'll have a much broader use of raytracing rather than it being an optional feature to turn on, I think it already massively benefits the atmosphere of games and has so much potential for actual gameplay ramifications as well. Am I saying every single game needs to have you looking in mirrors or something to spot baddies? Of course not. But it effortlessly opens that up as a possibility without any work beyond "put a reflective surface here." And I think that's awesome.

I'm a little bummed the consoles can't do it very well, but I'm just as excited that they have it at all. That means it won't just be a niche, and surely a mid-gen refresh would open up some ray tracing power that'll be just as noticeable as the performance or other visual upgrades.

I feel like that quote that Brad mentioned about RPG games being gravy now was actually Gabe Newell saying RPG games are now a sauce. I can't find a source though. Does anyone else remember that interview he mentioned?

I will be that person who will admit that they kinda like the tempered glass and RPG LED trend of PC builds today. It's fun looking inside, seeing the fans spin, and have some lights flashing about on all the components. Though, maybe that's the cause of me hanging around too long in a computer store where they have to sell all these things from Corsair and Razer.

The biggest events for me in gaming were Mario on the NES. Then Doom on an ancient PC.. Then the advent of 3d accelerators and the whole immensely exciting time that followed. This came at the same times as internet multiplayer became a thing, extremely awesome time in the 90s.

After that there wasn't really any enormous leap for a good long while. The first big change to how gaming works were MMOs. As mentioned, everquest and WoW did things for gaming that made it a thing for everyone. WoW was a life changer for me. Online gaming in general really. The internet was probably the biggest thing to ever happen for games.

After WoW nothing really happened for a decade, then VR came along, and for some of us, that was always our goal. I've wanted VR since I was 5 and tried a light gun for the first time on a philips pong machine. I wanted VR but I never thought I'd actually get it. VR is truly ready for people to adopt right now, but it's just gotten too tarnished by people at large. We still hear idiocy like "it's mostly tech demos" like what said by the media in 2016 still applies.. And I hear this from the media a lot too, especially people who haven't really played VR.. Like Bakalar who got nauseous cause an idiot friend decided that he would make VR suck even more and told him to play Boneworks.... Just so much bad info and negative press, not sure it's actually ever going to be accepted by gamers at large.

VR has taken the same path as all the other platforms. 4-5 years of garbage, then it turns a corner. 2020 was VR turning the corner in a huge way with the Quest 2 being cheap and awesome, and the games being fucking baller now. Anyone could have said exactly the same about video games in 1980 as people say about VR now, and they did say that. then 5 years passed and Mario came along, and that was that. We don't have the "Mario of VR" yet, but neither does _any other platform_ so that's OK.

I see no other development in the future that is even remotely as engaging as VR. Raytracing is just more graphics, which means games will be prettier and not much else changes. That's what's happened with flat games over the past 2 generations.. All added performance is shovelled directly into better graphics, the games themselves remain exactly the same as they were. Far Cry has played the same since FC3, and that was 2 gens ago. Same with Asscreed and all the other 3rd person shit.. It just gets prettier... Raytracing is just a continuation of that non-innovation we see in the AAA space. It's emblematic of the problem I have with gaming as large right now: If you want to PLAY something fresh, that means you play ugly indie games. If you want to take advantage of your new console, you'll be playing 3rd person action games with role playing elements that are kinda the only reason you come back. Gotta unlock that [insert object name].

I have no idea what future development might make screen-games better aside from graphics. No sign of destructible environments or anything for this gen. There's like never anything new on screens anymore.. Depressing as hell. I would be fine with the ps4 and xbone generations never happening. It was by far the most boring gen I have experienced, and I've experienced them all. Some good games, mostly just rehash at 30fps.

Jeff, when you get the [You have experienced a software problem] message, have you tried shouting “No motherfu**ker, YOU did!” at it?

I'm right there with you. In my case I think it's because I was introduced to RGB stuff through Techtubers/influencers who exercised some restraint--coming up with a design or theme and using the lighting to accentuate that, rather than just throwing in RGB everything and creating a rainbow bukkake inside their case.

home pc means something for players down stream finally.

Fun fact. 10900k overclocked to 5.3 all cores and the watch dogs legions benchmark still says my cpu is a letdown...

You can tell that Vinny is the producer of the 4 here. His video quality is brilliant compared to the others.

So glad the crew and me are on the same page in regards to RGB lighting. It's the most utterly confounding thing to me. I can't believe that people like that stuff, but.. evidently an overwhelming amount of people do. Really shows the amazing aesthetic sensibilities of gamers.

I hate to say it but Jeff is correct, Sony changed the gaming industry is dozens of meaningful ways that remain around today. It was not just the console, controller, and system outputs and inputs that changed. The changes the industry underwent are outlined in "Revolutionaries at Sony: The Making of the Sony Playstation and the Visionaries Who Conquered the World of Video Games" by Reiji Asakura.

Sony literally changed the way games...
- were produced, Sony created the process of how games went from going into production to how many were pressed, and how games were re-ordered to be restocked.
- were sold into stores. They literally changed the B2B transaction of game sales in Japan, North America, and Europe.
- were planned to be sold worldwide more often.

Sony literally took the industry prior to 1994, steamrolled it, shoveled the old debris out, and remade the entire process. If you ever wondered howSony really took over with a brand new system, it is carefully explained, in a business sense, in the book above.

Turns out it's pretty easy to run your own bot. I've had one running for the purposes of obtaining a single rtx 3080 and/or PS4 for myself for a few weeks now. I've had one hit that someone else obtained almost immediately. It's rough out there.

It seems like Xbox put what I could only call a masterwork of a plan in place for their grand rebirth with the Series X | S... and then Covid happened and it all went to shit again on the games front.

However, with the reported attach rate of approx 70% onto GamePass from Series X | S owners, I have a feeling they are still feeling pretty damn good about how they've aligned themselves for this gen.

@iggnight: Looking for the Sauce Source with my Source engine game avatar. (sorry, I couldn't resist)

The quest 2 is 100% put on and go VR. I do Beatsaber every morning using Virtual Desktop on the Quest 2, it takes me about 1 min 30s to get into VR if that. Put the headset on, launch Virtual Desktop and choose a game. Done. I'm very lazy when it comes to what game I'll play next, I tend to play switch more than anything because its so easy and I stopped play HTC Vive because of the 15 minute setup every time. The Quest 2 feels like next gen hardware to me

I just signed up for premium...anyway to make this available on a Podcast app?

I don't specifically aim for it, and whether or not a product has it doesn't have any bearing on whether or not I will buy said product, but I like the RGB stuff. I recognize it's not always practical, though. My current headset has lights on it, but I turned them off. One, it's on my head so I'd only ever see it when I'm taking it off, which is kind of pointless. And two, it's a wireless headset, so the lights would cause the battery to drain considerably faster. Like, I get 5-6 hours more battery out of it with the lights off. Crazy.

The only reason I'm not into the glass window case thing is that I'm far too lazy for proper cable management, so it would look like crap.

Interesting talk about PC aesthetics! I don't know if this is weird but I actually like the tempered glass look without RGB in it. Am I alone? I dunno, maybe I'm really simple minded but I like the idea of looking at the inner workings of stuff lol. But the lights look tacky to me, so I kinda want it to look like a plain box that you can see inside, if that makes sense. It's a shame like Vinny said that a ton of stuff just comes lit up automatically nowadays.

How come hot spot vids never indicate if I've seen them already or not?

I like these podcasts!