Ruining It For Everyone Else Since 2004
If anyone wants some Rand talk and Obduction eye candy, here it is:
I find it funny how at the end of the PC Gamer interview Rand had to say that The Stanley Parable was one of his favorite games. If only the rest of the Myst/Uru Community knew that him (and others) had a sense of humor… and learned how to develop one.
One can dream. đ
Ever since the specs for Obduction have been declared things have been rather interesting at both the MOUL and Cyan forums.
Seems there are more people in the community than I expected that will actually be able to run Obduction. It is funny though watching people on ridiculously ancient hardware have sads about not being able to have a system that can run the game.
Well, I’m guessing it was enough for someone at Cyan to step forward and say something. I recommend reading the whole post in the link. Here are some of the bits I found interesting:
Between in-house testing, and a 3rd party hardware lab taking a look at the title, we really tried to find that minimum spot where the game was perfectly playable without the performance taking enough of a dive to be an issue. In reality, the game will start on anything that supports DirectX 11, but on the early DX11 cards theyâre just too old to be able to push what weâre doing. The one gig of video memory limitation is honestly aiming a bit low as well. The game at itâs lowest settings can stay within this, but youâre looking at a pretty poor visual quality. Turning the graphics up past the lowest point, youâre going to start seeing a large amount of stuttering and hitching as the game has to swap between video memory and system memory. A 2 or 3 gig card helps, but the 4 gig of the recommended specs is highly recommended. If youâre picking up a new card for the game, try to aim for at least 4 gig of video ram.
Funny, even they admit that 1GB is kind of a stretch when it comes to minimal requirements.
I am afraid that there is a can of worms to open however: the AMD vs Nvidia battle. To be upfront and honest, the game runs about 15% faster on nvidia cards than the equivalent AMD card. The nvidia cards also seem to deliver a bit smoother experience as well. Thereâs nothing wrong at all on the AMD side however and both companies really do offer the same visual quality. You wonât lose or gain any pretty effects with either manufacturers card. But if youâre picking out a new card for the title, be aware youâre going to need a slightly faster Radeon than you will a GeForce if youâre looking for that super-fluid 60 fps experience.
I am going to reserve my judgement until I play the game on my hardware, but I’m not exactly happy to see another game that may possibly fall to GameWorks.
Hard drives and storage:
The one area that makes a huge difference with the game, and isnât necessarily reflected in the system specs is hard drive/ system storage speed. We do a *lot* of streaming from the drive during gameplay, and slower drives have a terrible time keeping up. A generic traditional mechanical hard drive is going to see a lot of hitching and pausing during the game while it loads in. Outside of a video card, upgrading your drive to a solid-state drive if you havenât yet will make a huge impact in how smooth of an experience youâll have with the game, along with being a very nice and very noticeable upgrade for your machine in general.
This has me a bit concerned. If you need to run your game on an SSD to stop hitching and stuttering then something is really really wrong. I didn’t get this with any UE4 game I’ve played so far, and that’s on a 2TB 7200 RPM Hitachi Ultrastar with 32mb cache.
I know I’ll be able to play this… But between the NVidia favoritism and info regarding drive performance I’m not sure what to think. Guess I’ll figure that out on release.
Oh, and psssst, Cyan! Stop Uncategorizing your posts! Only n00bs have the excuse to use Uncategorized as a category. That’s a big no no with for a blog/website as it’s hard to find uncatagorized posts. Search engines have a better time finding your posts when they’re tagged and categorized properly! Unless… Finding your blog is supposed to be a difficult puzzle in of itself. Never mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1INKH_iBak8
Well, the graphics look real nice which is to be expected by Unreal Engine 4. The release date is June later on this year. I will definitely have this in my library upon release as a prize for having to mentally torture myself through the whole Kickstarter drama that unfolded by doing tons of exploring (not that I haven’t been doing that with Skyrim already lol).
However I will point out one thing that I’ve thought since the announcement of the Obduction Kickstarter, and I’m only pointing this out because someone over at RPS pointed out what I’ve been thinking since the beginning.
I didnât play Myst back in the day and have heard wildly differing opinions about it. Obduction sounded interesting but talk of Myst ended up overshadowing talk about Obduction so I ended up drifting away. With this trailer Iâm still not sure. I think itâs hard to communicate gradual unravelling of mystery in a trailer â I didnât really get a sense of that side of The Witness til I was playing it â so Iâm not really getting a feel for that side of things and itâs ended up at more of an environmental showcase kind of level for me.
This.
It seemed like whenever Cyan went to talk about Obduction they just couldn’t stop talking about Myst. We get it, Myst was an excellent game for it’s time and extremely unique. You can’t deny that. But it doesn’t quite look right to other people when you keep talking about one of your two successes constantly. This would be like if Bethesda talked about the first Elder Scrolls game ever made when introducing Skyrim, or the makers of Tomb Raider harping about how great the first one from 96 was amazing. Or if Valve kept talking about the first Half Life when trying to introduce a new product. It’s ok to talk about and remember those classics, but we’re not here to talk about your past products when you’re trying to tell us about your newest one. We want to know what you’re making NOW.
Cyan’s Obduction survived the kickstarter. They have met their goal and can now get to work. Here is a video celebrating their success.
Their latest post discusses some interesting features. For example, a roadtrip mode:
The Roadtrip Mode needs a bit more explaining. As weâve mentioned before, weâve found that our previous games – in spite of the fact that they were single player – were usually played by more than one person. Many times it was a big advantage for two people to explore together in front of the computer, or share clues over the phone. We thought it would be fun to support that idea! Roadtrip Mode allows two people to share the exploration via the internet. One player would be the âdriverâ – moving and interacting, while the other player would be a âpassengerâ – following where the âdriverâ goes, but able to freely look around on their own computer. They will be able to talk with each other, offering advice or pointing out highlights. And the players can switch the âdriverâ and âpassengerâ whenever they want. It seems like a great way to facilitate something that happens naturally – and let players share the journey.