kcin

I don't want it all. I want whatever the dev thinks is best. I don't want to decide. I also don't want hardware manufacturers to manufacture expectations that can't be met. I don't care if the hardware can't do it, it's not embarrassing if the hardware can't do it. It's embarrassing to say it can, but then expose that it can't with performance 'options'. I think 'run best' is always the best decision, so maybe that's why I think it was foolish to start doing this. Now they've made the conversation 'well why not both?? Must be the hardware!' That's on them.

We just feel differently about what it means to expose options to people on a console. I think it was a bad move, you seem to not mind or like it. That's fine.

I understand Jeff's opinion that it's 'embarrassing' that games are launching out of the gate with graphics options. 'Performance' or 'Graphics' options are, objectively, concessions, not a feature. They made sense last gen because those 8-year-old consoles were getting pushed to their limits. But now we're on brand-new, cutting-edge hardware that they are touting as capable of 4K at 120FPS with ray-tracing, and they're 'offering' graphics options on the launch titles?

Yeah, every game has compromises that the developer chose to make on the player's behalf for an optimized gameplay experience. That's intrinsic to development. Exposing a layer of that optimization to the player is novel, but it's still reflective of a compromise being made. If some people want to flip that switch themselves, that's okay. While I don't, either way it doesn't change the fact that the selection being made between graphics and performance is necessary because the hardware is the bottleneck through which both configurations can't pass simultaneously.

Since these hardware companies are so loud about the possibilities of their hardware that television forums are literally dominated by "does it do 4K at 120hz?" questions because people want to "be prepared for the next-gen consoles", I too think it's embarrassing that they're making players decide between Graphics and Performance in order to meet a technical benchmark at a rather high cost to the player's experience.

Lastly, I also think graphics options and 64MB expansion packs and shit in older games are neat because they expose how developers worked around limitations in hardware. That's also explicitly why I don't want to see it on new consoles on launch day.

I, like Jeff, just don't think that a graphics menu belongs in a console experience. I don't think Jeff is demanding 60fps at 4K with ray-tracing. I think he's saying "set realistic expectations and meet them". If the console can't do 60fps while also doing ray-tracing, or if it can't do 30fps while doing 4K, find something in the middle that it can do and just do that.

The only people making 4K, 60fps, and ray-tracing the hot-topic expectations that developers in the upcoming generation are meant to meet, are the developers and hardware manufacturers themselves. Perhaps they should stop hyping up this tech if it isn't usable without weird configurable concessions yet. I think that's the core of the critique against graphics settings.

The least compelling part of my PC experience is setting graphics options, and the most compelling part of the console experience is that it "just works". His (and my) frustration doesn't come from a desire to have it all. We just want it to be optimized to whatever is appropriate already. If they didn't talk about performance OR graphics, I wouldn't have thought about it, and these concessions they are admitting to making would therefore not be an issue.

The Giant Bomb forum has followed the trajectory of every ten-year-old forum on the internet in 2020. Its activity should not be assumed to be a good metric of the business' success or failure. This finger-pointing at overactive moderation by the self-identified 'power users', lamentations for the loss of the personalities that once populated the forum, and concerns about the waning interest by ownership in the forum itself is the same narrative I've experienced on every forum I've ever been on since 1998. This is not a marker of the community's cultural evolution or decline, it's just intrinsic to forums themselves.

There isn't a BB-style forum in existence that is more active now than it was ten years ago, and the rate of a forum's activity decay will only increase as socialization on the internet continues to evolve.

I fundamentally disagree with the notion that it is appropriate to take what little we know about the personal lives of the people who work here and guess at what their inner lives are like.

Jeff didn't reveal that his family was expanding until his child's birth. I don't blame him for maintaining that level of privacy when people are incessantly projecting their hopes and fears onto an imagined version of him that they've based on the details they were able to scrape from thousands of hours of videos and podcasts.

Everyone trying to game out how this is going to go down less than 12 hours after it was announced - especially the ones who are scared - should log off for awhile, for their own sake.

This post speculating about the secret motivations of Jeff and the personal details of his life is easily weirder by one thousand times than the guy talking about his personal experience working at Red Ventures.

How would using those names because the chat suggested them be any better than coming up with them themselves?? what??

golly, but if the DEMOCRATS are SUPPORTING the war...what do I do with my completely imaginary worldview/his strawman???

there's always one of these guys here. just popping in to a thread about a serious cultural dilemma to say some purposefully unspecified aspect of the thread is beneath them. thanks for the input dude

I have no idea what part of my post made you think I am sympathetic to the military.