conciselyverbose

Slartibartfast?

Just don't try to take pictures. That's a money pit.

There are performance traits you have to have to be even in the vicinity of functional for gaming, and they're the opposite of what you need for a server. Yes, I'm saying that if you put a gaming GPU into any of those chips, the performance would be fucking terrible. You need fast clocks and IPC with low latency, not lots of cores and high bandwidth. High "Performance per core" in terms of server parts does not mean that it can do anywhere close to the same work per core a consumer, gaming focused chip can do. The design parameters are completely different.

The processor in the Switch chip is the reason the Switch has such a limited AAA library. It's not mediocre. It's not serviceable. It's fucking terrible.

It absolutely a masterpiece and I'll be playing it for a long time.

I'll just also be playing Starfield for a long time because it's a different game that scratches a different itch.

That's probably the one I've seen before. It definitely does look like it has potential.

My biggest issue is actually finding the time to really dive into it among all the other stuff I want to play. I could see absolutely getting into a black hole with it some time I start though.

Thanks for helping me find that to at least put on my wishlist. For now between BG3 and Starfield I don't need another giant time sink, but I'll definitely keep it in mind when I'm looking for something different.

That's like 75% of the work for BG3. There's absolutely some work implementing DnD mechanics into code and designing encounters, and obviously the assets for the world have to be created as well, but the vast majority of their time was spent on dialogue choices and designing the story in general.

It's a great game for it, but we're a good ways away from being able to do the same in an FPS/TPS with real time combat that isn't absolutely brutal. BG3 could be what it was in terms of interactions because it was a CRPG. But it had to be a CRPG to do it. ARPG isn't the term for what Starfield is, but games with reasonably rewarding action take too much work on that element to invest the time into every encounter that BG3 does. Balancing probabilities and maps for encounters for a CRPG isn't trivial, but it costs way less to do than building out all those mechanics and skill trees into real time physics.

They're different games with different goals.

That is not a gaming capable chip. It is a server chip where the entire value proposition is the core count and connectivity.

Nvidia doesn't make anything and hasn't shown any capability to make anything that isn't a massive liability for gaming.

It doesn't even matter a lot if it does have really good graphics capability. Nvidia is good at that (though whether they'd price that where Nintendo wants is questionable). The question is what Nvidia can give in a CPU, because the only ARM CPU out there that's actually interesting in terms of efficient per core performance is Apple.

IMO 40 with some drops is your best bet. My experience is that the drops are mostly during exploration and not in combat. I don't think I've been killed because of drops.

Forcing 30 adds noticeable input lag.

Visually, it's technically not impressive once you get the performance where it should be, but I think the design looks really good. There are spots, especially in some of the castle/dungeon like areas, where you can look over a ledge and recognize all the stuff you just climbed and battled through that really give the whole thing a beautiful sense of scale.

I think there's something like it someone suggested to me once, but something like an RTS where you code up your units with different behaviors seems to me like something that could be fun for novices and more experienced coders alike if done correctly. You probably wouldn't want to support a full coding language, but taking something like Python or another scripting language that supports objects and providing a small set of legal commands to include in your unit code would be interesting to me. If the base was a campaign that encouraged creative problem solving to use your hand coded unit behavior, and you added a simple way for players to share code with each other, pit their unassisted bots against each other, and maybe even added the ability to write/pin commands to change behavior patterns for an actual real time head to head, I might play the hell out of it.

I also might play for 5 minutes and never touch it again though.

I sincerely don't care either way.

I'd consider it a slight positive on a broader cultural level, though. The fact that big market games don't have to be heavily censored to exist any more feels like a positive even if I don't find the sex particularly gratifying. (And no, I don't care which of 3 identical looking dicks my character has, BG3 or cyberpunk). I do think, that given how many people find the romance part of the roleplaying enjoyable (and have way before the modern trend of adding explicit elements to them), that having sex is kind of an inevitable part of that, though.

Also, I don’t know the difference between game journalists and game critics,

Neither exist in any meaningful format? There's clickbait game stories and people who halfass review games, but it's well under 1% who meet the bare minimum standard to qualify as anything resembling a journalist or critic. Games coverage is way worse than the people reacting to it.