Hey guys, guess what I'm playing?



If you want to play it early, just fire up a VPN and connect to Australia, then restart Steam.  It will start unpacking the preload immediately (took about 8 minutes here due to latency).


-b0b
(...squeeeee!)

NeoGAF is reporting the PS4 version is pretty buggy.  Long load times into and out of buildings, and severe frame rate dips.

PC just has the usual large number of game crashing bugs from a Bethesda game.

I've put about ten hours into the game so far and haven't seen any major bugs.  I got stuck in the terrain once, which is easy to fix on the PC.  Just hit ~ to bring up the console and enter tcl to turn off clipping, walk out of the terrain, then use the same command to turn clipping on again).  I also encountered a weird texture bug in one area that swapped a terrain texture for a super low-res gray texture, but leaving the area and returning fixed it.

So far, I'd say my experience has been way better than Fallout: New Vegas.  The game has bugs like any Fallout/Elder Scrolls title, but I've seen nowhere near the level of bugginess that F:NV had at launch.

The fortification building is really neat, although the controls for placing buildings/items leave a lot to be desired.  I'm anal retentive about symmetry, and you just don't have enough granularity in the controls to get things perfectly aligned.  I imagine there will be a mod fairly quickly to address that.

In all, I'd give the game two thumbs up based on my playtime thus far.  I've got the next three days off just for Fallout, so I'll be able to provide a more thorough review by the end of the week.  I know you loved the previous Fallout titles, so this is a no-brainer!


-b0b
(...and the gun/armor modding system is the bees knees!)

Holy shit bob.  You need to send this to Kotaku or some other video game site, because that's impressive.

Just wondering what you guys thought of FO4 so far?  I've burned about 120 hours so far, and I'm finally starting to progress the main story.  I've really been enjoying it so far.

Just as a heads up, if you play through the Freedom Railroad quest, you eventually get the ability to upgrade normal clothing at an armor workshop.  The stats are insane.  You can get 110 physical and 110 energy damage resist on both a hat and a set of clothing (e.g. suit/fatigues/etc), giving you a base of 220 physical/energy resist before even taking armor into consideration.  Those two items make up 65% of my energy resist and 57% of my physical resist, utterly dwarfing my arm/leg/chest armor.   Honestly, it's kind of ridiculous that a fedora can provide 2-3x the protection of some of the best pieces of fully-upgraded armor in the game.



The hat in the screenshot above used to be a Battered Fedora.  As you can see, you still get to keep any bonuses from the item (e.g. resists, SPECIAL boosts, etc) when you add the damage resist. 

I don't want to spoil anything, but if you need more specific details about the Freedom Railroad quests necessary to get this ability, let me know!


-b0b
(...isn't invincible, but can definitely take a beating.)

How are you guys storing your power armor?


-b0b
(...needs to buy more frames.)

So, the Oculus Rift pre-orders just launched and came in at a whopping $599.  That's damn near double what everyone was expecting.

Previously, Oculus stated "We want to stay in the $200 to $400 price range" and "It'll be in the $350 ballpark".  Not sure how their predictions could have been so far off.

The thing that really blows my mind is how hard the Europeans are getting screwed.  They're being charged €742.00, which is ~$800.


-b0b
(...ordered one anyway.)

The Vive will almost undoubtedly outperform the Rift to a minor degree, and will likely have a price tag to prove it.

As Oculus has shown, guessing at prices is a risky game, but Sony has stated the PSVR will be priced roughly comparably to a new console, so I'm guessing that is in the $300 to $400 range.  It might cost more than that to manufacture since PSVR is the only headset that will have a guaranteed market lock-in (and thus a cut of sales from PSVR games and other "experiences"), but the Rift and the Vive also have their own marketplaces so I don't think the lock-in price cut for the PSVR will be all that substantial.

That's a long-winded way to say that I don't think the PSVR is going to be capable of outperforming either the Rift or the Vive.  The Rift is $600 and that's probably with a razor-thin profit margin, so there's just no way you're going to get superior hardware for $400.  Sony isn't going to take a $200-per-unit loss on a totally unproven technology.

Based on current (and very speculative) specifications, the PSVR is already the weakest in the pack in terms of hardware.  Both the Rift CV1 and the current Vive devkit have 2160x1200 resolution (1080x1200 per eye), while the PSVR is specced at 1920x1080 (960x1080 per eye).  That's 1.036 million pixels versus 1.296 million per eye, or 20% fewer pixels.  I imagine that will amp up the screen-door effect, but there's a lot more to a head-mounted display (HMD) than resolution.

Motion control is also a consideration.  Both the Rift and the Vive have developed VR-specfic motion controllers, while the PSVR is getting saddled with the legacy PlayStation Move controllers from their aborted Wii-wannabe days.  I've never used them, but they look pretty big and clunky and will almost certainly have less tracking capability than the Move controllers.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I'm really concerned about the PS4's ability to handle the demands of VR gaming.  The PSVR is specced for 1080p at 120Hz, which is fairly trivial for a decent gaming PC but virtually impossible for a console to pull off.  Very few games run at 1080p even at 30FPS on either the PS4 or the XBox, so pulling off 120FPS is just not going to happen.  The PSVR is supposed to come with an "external processing unit" that will boost its performance, but I'm really struggling to figure out how Sony is going to pull that off.  It'd effectively have to be a separate video card in a box, and there is no way that would be cost effective considering the already high price of the HDM.  Sony has said virtually nothing about this external processor, so I guess we'll have to wait and see what they can pull out of their sleeve.


-b0b
(...is excited about all three solutions.  Bring on the VR revolution!)