'For how it looks' is the biggie for me. I totally get the performance hit when I can see a reason for it. The lightning in Assassin's Creed Shadows is an obvious one, I can totally see why there's a trade-off there. It looks stunning in the 40fps mode.
But some of the stuff being churned out on UE5 looks worse than older, more performative games. I'm playing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided at the moment, which is a lovely ten-year-old game with lots of reassuring boomer graphic terms like baked lighting and MSAA. It runs at 200fps on my computer, without any DLSS magic. And it genuinely looks better than these new UE5 titles that are struggling to hit 60fps at an internal resolution of 720p.
I have zero understanding of how these engines work, so I might be way off, but to me it feels like another case of reducing man hours and ending up with something objectively worse, but cheaper to make. (Not cheaper to buy, of course.) Because presumably, someone used to spend months 'baking' the lighting on these games, and now it's all done in real time. If that's not the reason people keep shipping games in this state, then I'm at a loss.
I'm not getting one, just because I have a PC that's pretty much on par with this box. But if it does well, I'll almost certainly get Gabecube 2 as this PC's replacement.
The 4K60 stuff must be bollocks, based on my experiences over the last year. My 8GB GPU wouldn't even dream of a stable 4K60 with ray tracing, even with fancy image reconstruction wotsits. But if they've somehow managed to crack that (they haven't), and it costs under 500 quid (it won't), then this will be a must-buy for a lot of people I reckon.
It's good news for PC gaming in general. If this thing sells bucketloads, everyone with moderately powered PCs (which is most of us) will suddenly become the target benchmark for developers. Maybe they'll finally stop forcing UE5 on everyone.
I remember it being easily the best combat. The combat is the only thing about Andromeda I can actually remember, couldn't tell you a thing about the story. I don't even recall if it happened in the same time period, or millennia later.
Play
The Outer Worlds 2 is a bit TOO janky for my liking. I don't know if it's Unreal Engine 5 (which really is a plague, isn't it?) or just a general lack of care, but it all just feels a bit naff. I love Obsidian, so it's a shame, but bleh.
Just finished the first good fantasy book I've read in years, and it's by the same author as the posts above!
City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's set in the occupied city of Ilmar, a place that has more than a whiff of Ankh Morpork. And the reason I loved it, aside from his great writing, is that it's not the neat story most people would have written. The occupiers are a bunch of shits, so you sort of expect the narrative to be 'downtrodden populace fights back'.
Which it is, sort of, but there's so much history in the city that it's not that straightforward. So many warring factions, so many agendas, and a real appreciation that the original Ilmari rulers were almost as shitty as the new imperial occupiers.
Throw in a dash of really inventive fantasy, spooky forest portals, and university professors that fight back by chucking chairs out of top-floor windows (there's Ankh Morpork again), and I hoovered this up in a couple of days.
There are 4 books (groan), but they're all standalone. They just exist in the same universe.
Mr Party Hat