Bethesda’s Starfield launching November 11, 2022 exclusively on Xbox Series X/S and PC
Spaceship interiors in Starfield, as well as interiors of space stations, look very believable, made with attention to details. With high quality graphics and textures almost look like a render of real spaceship. Too bad spaceship is just fast travel location with extra loot storage. It's not even good hub location. There's seems to be fuel mentioned somewhere, but you never have to refuel. Fuel capacity just limits distance of single gravjump, then fully replenishes. No wonder people spending thousands on Star Citizen, players craving detailed space travel simulators. Starfield is too casual. The only realistic thing there is that you need to undock before making gravjump. But eventually this just becomes annoying.
Would have been weird not to have space flight in a game built around space exploration, so naturally Starfield had to have that. Unfortunately, space flights in the game are superficial. You can't really travel anywhere in space. When you travel to a planet, it's just a fast travel to a tiny location with 360 degree skybox and invisible walls. You can't fly to another planet, can't even fly a bit closer to the planet you are currently orbiting. Of course all the key aspects of space flights are technically there: docking to a space stations, shooting at other space ships, fast travel using something called gravjump. Also it's possible to survey the planets for resources, to mine them when you land. Never mined any resources in 2 playthroughs. That sounds even more boring than all side missions in the game. One of the most disappointing things in a game about space is dead sky. Skybox in space is just a picture, stars are drawn, no shimmering at all.
Visually Starfield is exceptionally good: hi-res textures, models, lipsync and facial animation in general. Very admirable achievement for a game engine as old as gamedev industry itself. Extra credit for level design - those underground compounds, space bases and spaceships - are believable and fun to explore. The rest unfortunately is inherited from previous Bethesda games: animations, visual effects, NPC AI and cut-scenes came directly from early 2000s.
Starfield is looking surprisingly good, next level of visuals for Bethesda.
CD Projekt has confirmed that a new Witcher game is in development, "kicking off a new saga for the franchise."The new game will be built using Unreal Engine 5 rather than CD Projekt's REDengine, which the studio said will begin "a multi-year strategic partnership with Epic Games.""It covers not only licensing, but technical development of Unreal Engine 5, as well as potential future versions of Unreal Engine, where relevant," CD Projekt said. "We'll closely collaborate with Epic Games’ developers with the primary goal being to help tailor the engine for open-world experiences."CD Projekt said that the change to the new engine was made to help streamline the development process.  "From the outset, we did not consider a typical licensing arrangement; both we and Epic see this as a long-term, fulfilling tech partnership," CD Projekt Red CTO Paweł Zawodny said. "It is vital for CD Projekt Red to have the technical direction of our next game decided from the earliest possible phase as in the past, we spent a lot of resources and energy to evolve and adapt REDengine with every subsequent game release. "This cooperation is so exciting, because it will elevate development predictability and efficiency, while simultaneously granting us access to cutting-edge game development tools. I can’t wait for the great games we’re going to create using Unreal Engine 5!"  The studio also confirmed that despite the shift to a new engine, the new Witcher game is not planned as an Epic Games Store exclusive.
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League of Legends looking at long lockouts for AFK laggards
Developers over at Riot Games are broadening their strategies when it comes to countering behavior they don't like, and are going to trial new penalties for players who leave or engage in AFK behavior during matches. According to Riot, about 9% of players worldwide engage in consistent AFK behavior.Riot defines AFK as two behaviors that waste time for others: people who idle during matches and people who just up sticks and leave the match entirely. Right now, the worst those players can get is a queue delay: "Queue Delays are a speed bump on an offending player’s way to their next few games: Upon clicking the play button, the queue blocks them behind a short timer. The purpose of this is to change behavior," says Riot.Now, however, players can get escalating penalties of between 1 day and 14 days of a queue lockout. That means no playing at all: They're removed from the player population entirely. "We're removing the player from the population for a while so they can't continue to AFK in games," says Riot.For now, the new punishments are being trialed in specific regions, as Riot is concerned about certain region-specific connectivity problems. (The SEA region, at least in other MOBAs, is infamous for connectivity issues that players can't control.) Players who would be immediately subject to the new punishments have been reset to a lower tier, so they have a change to change their ways before the new punishments are levied.You can read the whole developer log, with stats, on the League of Legends site.Nice spot, Eurogamer.
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