This game is what I'd call a true and complete letdown thus far. Not even talking about the technical problems of the game (of which there are numerous).
The writing is simply a shame. Choice an illusion.
It is utterly heavy-handed. When it comes to politics, then children's books are more complex and balanced compared to this.
Not only is the writing very agenda-driven (I think you know, what I mean), there is no subtlety to it at all.
And the way Zoe is written ... it's just so bad. Her dialogues are so bad - preteen novels bad.
Not a whole lot of adventuring, in ye olde sense, in the first two books. But at least you had awkward conversations with a bot, that had absolutely no relevance, but took 20 minutes.
I was kinda bored and broke my vow to wait until the game is completed, grabbed the first two Books and it turns out I was actually quite enjoying this so far... and then I hit Europolis. What the actual fuck with that framerate and performance? Seriously? With shadows on full and overall quality set to "High" (not "Awesome") it chugs down to the low 30s, sometimes struggling up to around 44. It doesn't look even close to "that" good and, worse, it's not even a system issue either as it's using 50% GPU and 50% CPU at best. If I turn shadows down to 3m then the framerate stays in the 40s, though supposedly there are areas further into Europolis and Marcuria with even WORSE performance.
I'm rapidly growing to hate Unity. What a ridiculously pointless engine.
Well I won't go out of my way to ignore Unity games, but I've certainly changed my stance from when Unity first started taking off. Back then I used to be pro-Unity and was very happy it was becoming a regular engine for indie devs, but it seems it's just too goddamned limited and rapes machines needlessly. Unity 5 supposedly fixes so much of the bottleneck and improves performance dramatically, but according to several devs it's not QUITE as easy as loading their Unity 4 project in Unity 5 and hitting "export" - some even said a lot needs to be done from scratch.
It's a shame about the performance because, so far, DC is looking to be quite the game indeed. I'm certainly liking the grittiness of everything and that Ragnar's newfound social justice warrior push isn't creating a fake game based around stupid ideals, the story seems taut and he isn't wrapping cotton around tough issues, hell, they're even throwing in some "offensive!! sexist!!!" conversations and swears too.
RealMyst: Masterpiece Edition for me runs <20-30 fps with max settings and <30-40 with medium ones on my GTX 970. And that is an iPad game with the same geometry/complexity of its original 2000 PC version
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
I'd probably go as far as to say that for any game engine it can be difficult to move to major revisions let alone something like UE3 -> UE4 or Unity 4 - > Unity 5 though Unity is probably among the easier though it still requires a lot of work.
(Gearbox still using a very old UE3 build for Borderlands 2 and Pre-Sequel for example although heavily customized.)
If it was easy I'm also pretty sure we'd see more game engine upgrades and improvements via post-release patches instead of in sequels, consoles aren't as limited as before either so larger updates are actually possible now even on those platforms.
(Whereas I believe Microsoft and Sony had restrictions on patch sizes for the X360 and PS3 and of course the week long certification process.)
I would love to see more of the recent Unity 4 games and especially those still in active development switch over to Unity 5 but even for smaller games that's months of additional work which translates into further costs and time required.
(I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have seen say Wasteland 2 upgrade to Unity 5 if it wasn't also heading to console.)
I'm note sure unity 5 is much better than unity 4 performance wise. I'd rather all those indie studios started developing games on UE4.. or even UE3..
Supposedly the difference is staggering, there have been a few blog posts from developers talking about the benefits of U5 vs 4.. and then there's this;
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
That's..impressive I just hope we'll see this performance boost in real games and not only in creepy gangbang demo scenes lol Anyways, I still liked UE4 presentations more than Unity 5, I mean graphics wise.
Medium settings. 3m shadows. Medium AA. High SSAO. DoF enabled. Looks like poo, uses more more rendering power than Crysis 3.
Unity
They have updated from 4.5.x to 4.6.x but a full overhaul to 5.x might not happen as it would be a lot of work (And the ever present budget issue.), doesn't guarantee improved performance either but the engine improvements are sure to use the hardware better at least though it's still up to the actual developers to implement stuff like culling objects that are currently not visible or creating a optimized streaming system to name a few things, LOD levels too for models, textures and shaders and stuff like shadows.
(Physics calculations, collision pathing and of course the full shader work and particle effects.)
EDIT: Unity 5 might also help setting up a more optimized threaded CPU usage or how to say, taking better advantage of multiple cores and spreading the load over less busy cores and all that stuff I don't really know how they fully work but it's plain to see how poorly optimized some games can actually be. (And then you have that article by a Nvidia driver developer completing the picture of just how damn poor the PC code can be in some games when they have to hack things in the driver to get basic stuff working correctly.)
Supposedly Unity 5 upgrade *is* coming, but only in Book 3 onwards and I can't seem to find a confirmation as to whether it's a retroactive upgrade for Books 1 and 2. All in all, this really is a massive embarrassment and I don't know how they could feel good about themselves putting it out the way it is. The most recent Unity 4>5 game I tested was Satellite Reign and that was night and day, it really was, went from a ghastly mid-20s/30s to 55-60... all whilst looking BETTER too.
~edit~
Never mind, it seems they will be doing a full Unity 5 overhaul since they're porting the game to PS4, which Unity 4 doesn't support, and then bringing that upgrade to PC too. Good.
Porting it to PS4 means having to utilize Unity 5, and when we do that and release the game for PS4, I can't see any reason why we wouldn't want to utilize Unity 5 for the PC versions too. It might not be at the exact same time, since there may be different requirements and limitations, but creating a PS4 version with Unity 5 and then not moving to Unity 5 for PC at all is not something I can see happening.
Last edited by sabin1981 on Sat, 13th Jun 2015 22:57; edited 1 time in total
So correct me if i'm wrong. This game got a kickstarter that was for a PC game. The continuation of the classic Longest Journey and Dreamfall. They got their money. For a PC game. From PC gamers. Then shortly after, we got hit with a "there's gonna be a peasant version too, cuz sony just had to stick its filthy hands in this project as well". And now we have a split team that instead of working the game for its backers, is doing the peasantry at the same time, delaying all versions. Is this accurate ?
So correct me if i'm wrong. This game got a kickstarter that was for a PC game. The continuation of the classic Longest Journey and Dreamfall. They got their money. For a PC game. From PC gamers. Then shortly after, we got hit with a "there's gonna be a peasant version too, cuz sony just had to stick its filthy hands in this project as well". And now we have a split team that instead of working the game for its backers, is doing the peasantry at the same time, delaying all versions. Is this accurate ?
Uh... dunno? I have no idea how you can extrapolate that from "we're going to release a Unity 5 PS4 version" Right now, according to Ragnar, there are only TWO main programmers - the rest are artists/etc - and they're still working on the PC version. Beyond that, I have absolutely no idea what they're doing or planning. Much like Wasteland 2 getting a "current gen" port which necessitates upgrading to Unity 5, as long as we PC gamers get it too -- immediately, for free -- then I don't care how many other versions they put out on how many other platforms. I absolutely agree with you that PC should take full preference though, seeing as how "Sony" or "Microsoft" didn't fund development of the game; PC gamers did. Any upgrades or additions or changes that benefit XB/PS4 SKUs borne from PC gamer money, should absolutely be given to PC owners free of charge and at the same time they're given to console too.
Given how long this game has been in development and how long between each episode is released, I'm worried they're simply going to run out of money at some point and just give up
Also updated the engine from I think it was 4.6.3 to 4.6.6, don't remember what the previous chapter updated it from but possibly 4.6 or 4.6.1
Eventually I do hope they transition to Unity 5 though it might not be until all the chapters are out.
(EDIT: Oh right Sabin already mentioned that earlier in this thread.)
Fixed the story flag bug that prevented some choices from Book Two to carry over to Book Three. Please note that you will need to load your final save game from Book Two and play through to the end of that episode to properly record your choices.
Fixed two Steam achievements that did not trigger properly.
Fixed gameplay-specific lighting in House of All Worlds.
Added some character animations to Interlude II.
(As this is using Unity the majority of the game files were changed with this update.)
Since it's all one game (Unlike say Telltale episodes where each is a self-contained game.) and since you said book two the one thing that comes to mind is that you might have a old version or a incomplete version of the game with missing files.
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