The Video/PC Game Discussion Thread

And the performance of Shadow of the Tomb Raider just gets worse and worse. Sub-30FPS and crazy unplayable stutters now I've reached the Hidden City, especially in the higher area of the map. 

I think it's another case where it's just been terribly optimised on PC. I'm saying this because even turning down the settings to lowest doesn't even fully fix matters. And lowest looks really bad on this game. I can tolerate it when it's flitting down into the 50's and even the 40's but when it goes below 30 that's when it becomes hard to play. 

It did get discounted very quickly, for that kind of game. The real concern is, that's probably a sign the game's sales bombed hard, so the series might be over, at least in this form. Which would suck, because I never got into the series before, but I've loved these past three games.

Yeah, that does sound like it would be extremely annoying to deal with. Now that I have a laptop that can play reasonably high spec games, I've gone through some of that as well, where a game would be listed as having less demanding specs than games I can run flawlessly, but then I try it and get stuck with sub 30FPS, and have to play around with settings for sometimes up to an hour, to see if I can even get it to be salvageable or not. That's one reason I prefer console gaming: Less FPS overall, but at least it doesn't give you a headache trying to get games to work, sometimes. 

Edited by DippoMagoo - 22 Oct 2018 at 1:19pm

Just finished Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I have to say that in the end I have mixed feelings that lead me to conclude it the weakest game of this reboot series so far. Aside from technical issues I've already talked about, the combat was lacking. Not so much in amount but when it was there it felt really jarring to me. Almost half-arsed even. As the combat was good in the last two games I'm not sure what went wrong here, but it felt considerably more clunky to perform and I found that most encounters were a real pain in the arse, especially when the game tried to force stealth, such as one particular big encounter where the game decided it would be a good point to make you lose all your weapons just before except for your knife and climbing axe (rather useless as weapons go in the game, since by the time you kill anyone with it the rest of the enemies have located you and shot you while kill animated are playing). I despised that encounter as it absolutely forced you to complete it never breaking stealth which led to me dying maybe a dozen times before I managed to clear that area. Before you had weapons to fall back on, but there it was suddenly impossible. Given how few and far between encounters in the game are I have to conclude that as bad game design. If they'd been more enemies around and more chances to get used to stealth maybe it would have worked better, but it was really just a really annoying sequence. The boss fight at the end of the game was also really bad for the opposite reason, since the game put all this reliance on stealth which was of very, very limited use then, since even in the first phase of the fight before the boss even attacks it was very rare that you could get an enemy alone to take them out with alerting another. 

Edited by adg211288 - 26 Oct 2018 at 11:04am

I actually normally prefer stealth combat - I sneak everywhere I can in Skyrim and Fallout 4 for instance - I just don't think it was executed that well in Shadow. Like when you do a stealth kill Lara will sometimes drag the body into nearby cover, but not always and there being no option to manually do it. Puts enemies on alert to see a body lying around. Actually I also found that even when they were patrolling normally and I was fully in cover they had a habit of suddenly walking directly to where I was, even when it wasn't an obvious patrol path. And when they do that it's very hard to get away from them again without being seen. Those mind control arrows were something of a life saver actually. I should have remembered them in the final boss fight, but I was too boss trying to dodge everything and get a few shots in on the actual boss. 

adg211288 wrote: Trying to find a new game out of my Steam library to delve into next without falling back on one I've already completed like I usually do. Tried one called 2Dark yesterday but found it clunky right from the off, so that got uninstalled. Today I've been trying a horror one called Remothered: Tormented Fathers. It's Amnesia like although in 3rd person with some minimal defence options, but what started as promising has taken a downturn fast as soon as the first enemy appeared. Not only does he make no sense in terms of narrative (unless something gets revealed about him later), since he's presented as a sick old man yet he can continually catch you with no problem, being able to keep track of him is proving near impossible as he sounds so close all the time even when he is nowhere near your position. He also seems to be able to hear everything whether he is close or not as well. I can understand that behaviour in the alien in Alien Isolation, but even that had weaker hearing then this guy: if you run a single step he immediately runs straight to your position and if you hide (in the usual kind of options for these games), he always goes straight to that hiding place before any other. Whether he finds you there depends on a mini-game of sorts, which is pretty easy, but even after he walks away he locates you again so fast I'm finding it impossible to even find where my next objective is, let alone get there safely.  I may give it another go yet, but seeing as this is the first enemy encounter I have a feeling this game may get more annoying than it is fun.

Psydye wrote: Gonna try out the DLC for Outlast for Halloween. It's been awhile since I played a good survival horror!

^ It actually has 75% off on Steam right now.

So, the maker of Undertale ( A really unique, funny RPG from a few years ago) made a mysterious new project, called Deltarune, which currently isn't on Steam (but I think it will be when it's officially unveiled.) It's only one chapter and about 3 hours so far, but it basically plays the same as Undertale, and has familiar faces, but in a whole different world, from what I can tell. Based on the first chapter, it looks amazing!