Hmmm, I was doing that cparison from memory, so I might very well be wrong. The old GTX670 was unusually powerful for its time, but couldn't quite keep up with a 970, let alone a 980! I must have misremembered! Still, my 1080 should eat Hitman up. I'll give it another go.

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Quoting: GuestJust tested Hitman 2016.
This time Feral wins; fps at start of the very first mission are 56 for native version, and only 38..39 for wine/DXVK

What card are you using? You profile only lists "Nvidia", but not the model. I got so-so performance on (native) Hitman on my old GTX 670 (roughly equivalent to a GTX1060), to the point that I gave up playing it.

I have a 1080 now and really should try getting into this again.

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I hope like hell you can zoom out. That's way too close for a top-down ship-builder, particularly if you build up a bit of speed!

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: Purple Library GuyUhhh . . . are you trying to say that it's not possible, or somehow incredibly difficult, to type without your eyes on the keyboard if your keyboard is qwerty?

It's hard to unlearn 20 years of habit.

Indeed it is. Many at work still type by looking at the keyboard, and using only two fingers. And they're software engineers. Makes me glad that the one thing my high school education insisted upon was touch typing on qwerty (which also helped with qwertz).

@scaine: does the game look and _feel_ like Berlin (if you have any point of reference for that)? Taking into account a futuristic setting of course. Just trying to get my expectations right.

Sadly, Berlin is one of the major German cities that I've never visited! I'm going to say no, though, based on the fact that the play area is almost absurdly small in most cases - often a single street in most cases which are depicted with unrecognisable, futuristic neon-glowing facades. It's fairly generic cyberpunk depiction really.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: calliciferThere are nine cyberpunk and/or posthumanist tropes mentioned there so I think it's pretty clear what he means.

Well, fair enough then.
Mind you, some of those are dupes--like, two "Skynet AIs" coming to consciousness isn't really two separate themes. And, a robot uprising seems unlikely to happen without robots coming to consciousness, so those aren't really separate themes. For that matter, a robot consciousness is just an AI in a physical body, so all four of those are really just "AIs coming into existence and doing things". The colonization of Mars isn't a theme of posthumanism at all, and I'm not sure Luddites are either. So what we're left with is, stuff about AIs coming into existence and having their own agendas, plus maybe Luddites, copy-pasting consciousness, memory fragments, and "some kind of Matrix thingy", which makes three to five themes of posthumanism depending what "some kind of matrix thingy" means.
But that's "events that are happening at the start of the game". Are all of those events part of the actual plot, or are some of them just setting? It's nice to have a rich background.
But I'd have to agree that whether or not that criticism is actually right (and for that matter, whether or not you agree with a taste for sparseness in themes), it does actually mean something and they did indicate what it was they meant, so I think Scaine's wrong there.

Whaaaaa? Outrageous! :)

The "Matrix thingy" is core to the idea of humanism and related (again) back to the emergence of AI (which comes clear in the last choice you'll make in the game). Basically, do you consider a virtual version of yourself, running inside an AI generated "City 5" to be... you. You can ignore the Mars thing - as I alluded to in my earlier comment, it's a red herring here and makes me think Darragh didn't finish the game before publishing his review. As for the China thing - I honestly can't remember that bit. Anyone remind me what this is going on about?

So for me, everything boiled down to two themes - humanity and AI emergence.

And this circles back to pretentious. Darragh could have focused on the core themes and criticised their handling. Instead, he inflated his own importance by "noticing" several different things which, to my mind, are the same thing. But it fits his "clever me" narrative.

Quoting: callcifer

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI dunno. You make it sound like there's no such thing as actual pretentiousness, or at least that it's very rare. I don't think that's true. There's an awful lot of people out there, whether in business or academia or the media, trying to dress up little or nonexistent ideas to sound big and significant.

While I agree that using big words to cover up for weak arguments exist in the wild, I don't classify that as pretentiousness. Grandstanding might be a better fit. So yes, I do believe pretentiousness pretty much doesn't exist.

No idea what you mean here. Pretentiousness doesn't exist? Really? People inflate their own importance and merit all the time, don't they? In my opinion, this guy does it throughout his review. I try to use five words instead of fifty and I try to use small words instead of big ones, but Darragh's writing in this review screams "I'm so clever". I'm not a fan of that.

Quoting: callciferDon't get defensive because a person felt differently about a game than you did.

At the risk of sounding snippy, you should perhaps take your own advice. I don't like this RPS review, and you did. Let's leave it at that, I think.

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Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: callciferPlayed this about a month ago and I largely agree with the RPS review [External Link]

RockPaperShotgun is a good source for reviews. Also the metascore pretty much confirms that they are onto something.

I wasn't going to comment on that review, but feel I have to now, if only to provide another perspective (beyond my review itself).

RPS can be extremely arsey (is that a word?) with their reviews. Pretentious - that's a better word. They're trying to be intellectual critics, and often over-analyse. I don't mind that per se, but sometimes it's kind of like a film critic having a go at an action film for not having a political message. They're missing the point - play the game, enjoy it, have fun, first and foremost. They sometimes forget that.

And for me, that review is a massive example of this. Some of the writing... jesus.

I mean, from the review: "Though the whole game is angular, the character models are in a particularly low-res, polygonal style that stands out against the crisp backgrounds. The intention here is to make you consider the uncanny valley that emerges when people become digitalised and the digital becomes humanised."

Frankly, what a load of arse. Also, his plot synopsis suggests that he either hasn't finished the game (their review came out on the day of release, but perhaps they got early access), or he's ignoring key elements of it to shoe-horn in his narrative that the game is trying to do too much with the plot. Apparently State of Mind juggles "six or seven themes of posthumanism" and the reviewer suggests that it should simplify to just one or two?!? What does that even mean??

No, State of Mind isn't a masterpiece, but it's extremely enjoyable. RPS failed to see that apparently, too busy as they were, lamenting instead the lack of "great cyberpunk".

Even more infuriating is the suggestion that humanism in AI isn't addressed - when in fact it's addressed on multiple separate occasions: Richard's relationship with his android Simon, Simon's backstory, City 5's inhabitants, and even (if you chose the same way I did), one of what is surely multiple endings.

So, yeah. Not a fan of that review...

Even less of a fan of Metacritic. Let's just reduce every creative thing ever made to a single number between 0 and 100? Yeah, no thanks!

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The Doom bug affected me as well - an 800x600 full screen "window" on the wrong monitor. However, if you can navigate into Campaign, then Settings, Video, you can change the monitor and then hit escape to apply the change. Game works fine for me now, and it remembers the change thereafter too.

I hope this doesn't happen every time a new version of Proton comes out though!

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Honestly, people. I didn't expect this review to spark a "rolling-credit-war". Lets all agree that we can have differing opinions on the subject and move the hell on! :)

(Rolling credits for the win!)

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Quoting: EhvisThe game has a few bugs though. Binding the comma key messes up the input configuration. Not nice for those on dvorak keyboards. And I have had several instances where the game soft locked during dialogues. Several weeks after reporting that (including save games and log files) I received a reply with the suggestion of deleting everything (including save games) and try again. Yeah, how about no.

Otherwise I'm enjoying it thought. But then I like these interactive story games when they're done well.

I didn't experience either bug, so maybe they're both regional. There are some awkward pauses in conversations occasionally, maybe two or three instances where I thought "uh, what's going on?", before it continued, but nothing game breaking, or even really noteworthy.

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Quoting: Dunc

when I finish a game, I like to watch the credits rolling

I don't. It's 2018. Scrollbars have been a thing since at least the mid-'80s. Why do we have to sit through twenty minutes of advertising executives and lawyers before we get to see who voiced the main character? And then blink and miss it?

Games aren't movies. Is it really beyond the wit of developers to put the credits into the main menu structure, and split up the various departments so we can go straight to the part we're interested in?

As I noted, this game has both - rolling credits at the end, which I enjoy, and the option of viewing them at any time, complete with scrollbar. And the rolling credits can be skipped at any time too, so everyone wins.

I suspect that enjoying the rolling credits is an old man trait. I grew up with a distinct lack of scrollbars in my life. I didn't really encounter them until Linux and X Windows in the early 90's, then later on Mac Classics. You got used to sitting through the credits and acknowledging who was behind what you just watched. It actually pisses me off no end that Netflix consigns them to a thumbnail while forcing the next episode in your face. I know I'm overreacting, but it feels hella disrespectful to me.

And as for "games aren't movies", we can agree on those three words I suppose, but I think you're oversimplifying. Games (well, some games) have every much a right to proudly rolling credits as a good film. If you'd poured several years of your life into making something you're proud of, maybe you'd feel differently about rolling credits. They're the theatre equivalent of taking a bow at the end of the performance.

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