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Welcome back to the Hard Run Box podcast for episode 53. Today we're going to be talking mostly about the latest games that we have been testing and exploring. In particular, Stalker 2, Heart of Chernobyl, which has just come out and Steve's been benchmarking like crazy.
And I've been checking out a little bit as well. So there's lots of interesting things there discussing the performance, CPU limitations, VRAM limitations, VRAM discussion. Again, everyone likes that sort of thing. And then a little bit on Flight Simulator 2024 as well. more loading screen simulator that we've experienced up until this point. So if you're interested in PC games and love a chat about games, this is the episode for you. So let's get into it.
Steve, have you been benchmarking? Lots of benchmarking. Yeah, for something different. Obviously, I've still been testing Z890 motherboards and a couple of X870 boards to add to... hopefully what will be a buying guide i don't know when i'm going to fit all this content in but uh yeah i think i've got about 35 z890 boards tested at this point uh with a grand total of yeah i think 54 in total
I'm not doing audio testing. I started doing audio testing and then I found like the right mark audio analyzer had a lot of compatibility issues with the boards and certain configurations that was just becoming an absolute.
nightmare really to try and diagnose and get it working for every single board so i was like nah this is just too many this software is too old too outdated so i don't know if anyone has any better software that's relatively easy to configure i really don't want to be spending you know hours setting it up for every single board because that would just be insane but i've done uh gear 2 ddr5 8800
uh validation uh amongst like three other configurations for the boards so that's been interesting because a lot of boards haven't been able to do that um okay they can do it in gear four but gear two is challenging especially for the four dim boards most of the two dim boards can do it uh but anyway so been doing that and then obviously what you're referring to is the stalker 2 testing yes and yes i got up very early this morning
downloaded the game, got it all installed and ready, then played it for a bit. Thankfully, I found a suitable section for testing relatively early games. I didn't have to sync. I think it was only about 40 minutes or so of gameplay to get to somewhere where I was... I decided... Yep, I'll go back 10 minutes. That was good enough. And I've been testing GeForce GPUs all morning.
Yes, which is interesting. I wanted to give a quick update on Blue Sky before we get into talking about Stalker because I've also been testing Stalker in a very limited capacity and flight simulator as well. So I'll talk about those. The interesting thing about Blue Sky is how many people have signed up and have started to chat to us on Blue Sky since I mentioned on the podcast last week. I was expecting just to mention it and then nothing to really happen.
But yeah, the engagement over there has been really good so far. And in what is a great surprise for a social media network where we're involved, not too much trolling. In fact, I think there's been zero trolling. I guess people maybe need to step up their game and start trolling us on Blue Sky or something. Disappointment. Well, I have to admit I haven't even bothered looking at Blue Sky yet. Yeah.
Yeah, it's been good. So, yeah, the Blue Sky account's been going well. Shout out to everyone that's said hi to us on there and sent us a message. yeah, a bit of a breath of fresh air, which has been good. So yeah, Blue Sky's been going well. That's just a very brief update on that situation over there. As you say, you haven't really been involved too much in that, but...
Yeah, I've been keeping the account at least a little bit alive for the time being. And there's a growing, I guess I should, not that there's that many people on there from the tech community at the moment, but for games, it's been going really well. So if you're interested in games.
yeah blue skies is certainly improving a fair bit so hopefully we can get some more more of our hardware unbox listeners involved on our blue sky account anyway let's get back into talking about stalker 2 because i think we've both done
well, not tons of testing into this game because it did literally just come out today as we're filming this podcast. But, yeah, what are your sort of early thoughts about what you've seen in the game so far? Well, yeah, I've probably got... more to talk about in terms of performance than i do the game itself the game looks like a quintessential stalker type game i mean it looks yeah
It's like that situation where it looks like Stalker. It looks exactly the same as the game I remember, but I'm sure if you go back and play the last Stalker game, there's... huge overhaul in terms of visuals and graphics but what i load into like this is exactly how i remember stalker looking yeah yeah i agree exactly the same like the interface and stuff yeah reminded me a lot of those original games
And yeah, it's got very much like, I wouldn't say it's like the best visual experience you can get on PC. No. But it's, the old games used to push a lot of like draw distance type stuff. The new game seems very heavily into. Objects on screen, draw distance, foliage, that sort of thing. Very detailed. Yeah, so it's a good-looking game. It probably doesn't have the same lighting quality that you'd see from like Cyberpunk or Alan Wake 2, but the environment is certainly very impressive.
It's a trade-off, isn't it? Compared to a game like Cyberpunk, I think stuff like texture quality seems to be much better. I haven't looked too closely at it, but... Whenever I play Cyberpunk, it just jumps out at me straight away how bad the texture quality is for a lot of the game. Even when you're like walking on one side of the street, you look to the other side of the street and it's just flat sort of muddy textures.
Whereas I didn't notice that in Stalker so much. And as you said, the draw distances are quite impressive. It's a very detailed environment, pretty much as far as the eye can see. It didn't seem like you were in a video game. You know when you play a game, you're like, oh, this looks good, and then you go down a hill or something and there's a lot of poppy, you know, or the texture and tree detail. Yeah, level of detail, not great for a long distance.
I didn't really notice that sort of stuff in the game. So I guess in that sense, really good looking game and sense of like character models, especially like facial features and stuff like that. It's very... basic looking dare i say yeah yep yeah agreed but it's just one of those things like some areas of the game look good others not and depending on what people
prioritize there or prefer than their opinions on which games look better, I guess, will differ a bit. But yeah, it's certainly not a bad looking game. I think they've done pretty well with the resources that they've had. I mean, they're not...
They're not a major AAA studio. I think they're probably sort of in that double A category, you'd say, from the amount of people that have worked on the game. So to get the game looking as good as it has... i think has been a pretty good effort um certainly if you like you stop and you look closely at certain things you're like okay yeah you can sort of see some of the rough edges and this is without talking about some of the uh technical issues that i've at least encountered during
the times that I've played at least a little bit. Maybe Flight Simulator's worse, actually. But yeah, Stalker 2, it's crashed on me a few times, which has been frustrating. Yeah, I've had a few crashes too. there's been some visual glitches and bugs which have and i haven't played that much of the game like i've played from this morning up until now in the afternoon so
Not much at all. And, yeah, you wouldn't want to see too many more crashes that I've been getting because I've been getting a lot. Really? Okay. I've probably only had about three and I've tested. well over over a dozen certainly configurations now three quality presets three resolutions and i've had like i think three crashes just crash the desktop you know the unreal type era yeah yeah
Yeah, so it hasn't been terrible, but yeah, not flawless. But then I didn't really have any weird glitches or bugs experienced while playing the game either. So maybe I just got lucky. I mean, admittedly, you've probably played more than I have. I don't think I've played heaps. I've done a lot of, you know, moving around in a very small area and sort of going, oh, what does that look like? And changing settings and things like that. But yeah, just some like...
I think I got like a black screen at one point that was a bit weird and a few other things. So yeah, I think I was reading some reviews this morning and it seems like that's just generally the way the game is at the moment. Stalker experience, right? I remember the Stalker games back in the day. You'd fire them up and not the most polished experience, but...
Hopefully in a couple of months, those sort of things will be alleviated. But the thing that I noticed, at least the most on my system with the 7800X3D, was how CPU limited the game is in the... not really a hub, but like the town areas, which I wouldn't say are very built up. you know, hugely. There's a few NPCs walking around a small sort of village area. But at least on my setup, playing at like 1440p with a 4090, very clearly CPU limited and not getting too much over.
like 70 or 80 FPS, I know that I could turn down the settings from like epic to low and gain about 10% to the performance in that area, which is not great, but obviously... with cpu performance and when games are cp limited there's not a lot of scaling on offer generally speaking
So at least on my setup with that CPU, those areas, which I think are going to be the limiting factor for a lot of people in terms of performance, they don't run that great, I would say. And I haven't really been able to find any settings that...
you know, like draw distance, for example, doesn't have that much impact. It has an impact visually, of course, but it doesn't seem to really reduce the CPU load all that much. Same as some of the other level of detail settings, which are usually the settings you'd expect to... if they can improve CPU performance, have some sort of impact. But at least with this game, it just seems like what the CPU can do is what you'll see in those areas. Yeah, that's definitely true.
I was going to mention that as well. So I'm testing with a 9800X 3D, so I'm seeing probably slightly higher performance than what you're seeing. But it's not difficult to run into those CPU-limited scenarios where you just... Can't push a 4090 any harder even with a 9800X3D. And I saw multiple instances where even enabling upscaling just did not improve performance because of the overhead or even lost a couple of frames in some situations.
yeah it's another one of those modern games where it's just cpu limited right so it makes those 1440p 4k arguments about where cpus don't matter um irrelevant i mean it's the wrong argument to be making anyway so we don't really need to address those arguments but well we do because they come up a lot but yeah look if you've got a a slower cpu a 5800x or something like that
I imagine even 60 FPS in those town sections will be a bit of a struggle because it is just so heavily CPU limited. And also on that note, despite being very heavily CPU limited with a 9800X 3D, although I haven't looked at... individual core utilization the overall cpu utilization generally hovers around 50 to up to 60 i haven't really seen it go above 60 despite the fact that i am hitting a brick wall in terms of cpu performance
So that's why we've said in the past looking at CPU utilization to work out whether you're CPU limited or not is just not the way to do it. Just look at the GPU utilization. Yeah, seeing very similar things here. I think... that when I was noticing a small performance change when changing around the settings, I think that's largely due to just, you know, obviously some part of the frame time has to be allocated for the GPU to render the game. And so...
you know settings like shadows can make a small difference in performance turning them down um but yeah it's I would imagine that most people's setups, especially if you've got more of a mid-range setup where you've got maybe like an AM4 CPU, like a 5800X3D and a mid-range-ish sort of GPU.
that you won't be getting much more than 60 FPS in this game. I think 60 FPS is probably going to be the upper sort of limit for those sorts of configurations. You will see better performance in that outside of these. town areas, so the opening section of the game is much lighter, so it runs noticeably better. There is frame generation in the game with both DLSS and FSRs, which is good to see.
If you do want to have that smoother sort of experience at 60 FPS, then that's obviously you can do that. But yeah, I think some of the settings as well, you know, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think there's going to be a lot of... people on the edge of being either cpu or gpu limited depending on the settings that you've chosen so if you go for those sort of epic settings it's not like
In a perfect world, that would just run flawlessly on like an RTX 4060 and you'd be getting heaps of performance and you wouldn't need to worry too much about the CPU limit. The Epic settings are still very taxing. So even on the 4090...
in sort of outside the CPU limited areas, I was getting like maybe 80 or 90 FPS at a fairly high GPU utilization, like 95% plus. So it is still a very taxing game, but you're just going to... I guess, unfortunately, just have to accept that in those areas where performance isn't great, there's no magical solution to this, like, just turn this down or enable.
DLSS or something to get more performance and I think that's going to catch out a lot of people and probably lead to people saying you know leaving negative reviews and that sort of thing which I don't know whether that's fair, but it certainly doesn't run super well on the CPU, I wouldn't have said, at least based on what I've seen from the amount of stuff being shown and that sort of thing. Yeah.
And what you were talking about there really does come back to the whole 1080p CPU benchmarking thing. So if you only want around 60 FPS or you're happy with around 60 FPS, then even in this game, yeah, you'll probably... end up being gpu limited with your configuration because you better push the quality settings up your cpu should be able to sustain around 60 fps so it was jack up and max out your gpu at around 60 fps but if you want
100 fps which is probably going to be a big ask in a lot of situations but if you want 100 or more uh yeah it's going to really be the cpu that's doing all the heavy lifting to achieve that uh or at least the limitation to achieve that Another limitation that you reminded me of when you mentioned the RTX 4060 is VRAM. Yeah. Game loves VRAM. We're seeing more and more of this. Probably not too distant future. I will...
Do another 8GB versus 16GB 4060 Ti update, which I know some people love. Some people don't love because I don't know. They don't like seeing that 8GB cards aren't aging well.
as we predicted or pretty much it wasn't even a prediction right we showed they weren't aging well a long time ago over a year ago now and we've just seen more and more and more examples just they keep popping up and yeah i mean look if you've got a Like I always have to give the disclaimer here, if you've got yourself an RX 6600 or some sort of affordable 8GB card, then yeah, wipe the settings down to medium, you're good to go.
But if you're wanting to play at 1440p, even high can be a challenge. High upscaling, you'll possibly get away with it. I don't want to say you will because it might be one of those situations where you play for 20, 30 minutes and then VRAM. yeah uh allocation runs out and the game turns to a stuttering mess but boy oh boy yeah um 4060 ti 8 gigabyte bad real bad in this one uh it's it's not hard to and it's it's not one of those games where
Well, it is to a degree. So you get close to running out or you start to run out of VRAM, the performance falls away. But the window for that to happen... And then it turned to an actual slideshow at two FPS is very small. Yeah. So it doesn't handle it like other games where you'd see textures drop out or maybe if you have enough system memory, you could get away with it. You're saying this game.
no chance you go from no performance loss to quite a significant performance loss in like i said a very small like we're talking probably realistically hundreds of megabytes of over allocation and then just bang hits a wall So you don't get stuttering or anything like that. It just turns down at two FPS and the game's unplayable, unusable. So yeah, the Epic preset pretty well.
uh written off for eight gigabyte uh owners and then high hit and miss depending on resolution the degree of upscaling you're willing to use and all that sort of stuff um but yeah heavily compromised experience for sure the 16 gigabyte 4060 ti works uh with any settings i mean frame rate not great at 4k epic you're looking at around i think a 30 fps experience something like that
But there are situations at 1080p where the game is very playable on a 16-gigabyte model using the highest quality settings. not at all playable by anyone's definition on the 8 gigabyte card. So yeah, 8 gigabytes of VRAM, not sure if that's going to see much optimization or improvement for Stalker 2, but it's dicey. Yeah, and there's many different factors for why that is the case, as we've seen more games leaving the older generation consoles behind, like PlayStation 4, then...
The new VRAM requirements of the consoles, this game is on obviously PC, but also the Xbox Series X with 16 gigabytes of VRAM and the Series S, which is a little... I think it's like a little more than eight gigabytes, but they probably like just dumped the resolution on that thing because it's not a powerful console to begin with. But yeah, like as we see games ditching those older generation consoles.
VRAM requirements tend to go up on PC. That's something that we've seen every time a new console has come out with more VRAM requirements. And yeah, we really don't want to be seeing next-gen GPUs, which is very relevant because they're going to be launching in a couple of months. that have even more performance than what we're currently seeing, but only 8 gigabytes of VRAM, because then you'll start to see these GPUs where...
They could be running these games at like maximum settings, epic type settings, ultra or whatever in games at 1080p, 1440p, but the texture quality settings are just limiting them or the draw distance or detail settings are just limiting them.
So again, you sort of suggested that with Stalker 2, you're probably not getting a great performance experience on Epic settings, but it's playable on the 16 gig GPU. So that's what we need to see more of with that tier of performance. But if we were seeing like... 4070 levels of performance with just 8 gigabytes of GPS.
eight gigabytes of vram that's going to be a really bad experience because you're going to see all these situations where you could it's like looking at what you could have you'd be like oh i could be running this on it Everything maxed out, no problems at a reasonable resolution, but I just don't quite have enough VRAM for that scenario. So fingers crossed that doesn't happen.
But, yeah, quite a taxing game in that sense. Yeah. I mean, we're already seeing that situation with the 4060 Ti, to be honest. It was a $400 GPU. That's not cheap, right? It was $500 if you wanted 16 gigabytes. Well, the 16 gigabyte version works, though. Right. It's $450 now. I mean, that's still an absurd price to pay for that level of performance.
but at least that product works, whereas you're paying $400 for a product that doesn't work in a lot of these games, at least to the degree that you would like. Again, you can certainly argue that, well, you just turned down a medium and it works. What's the big deal? On one hand, it's like, sure, okay. But if you're buying an RTX GPU because you want the best experience, you want a no compromise type experience, even at 1080p. So I think it's fair to say.
If you're buying a 4090, you kind of want a no compromised experience at 4K. Yeah. But I think if you're spending $400, you go into that thinking you're going to get a no compromised solution for 1080p gaming. Okay. At the very least 1080p. It even sounds dumb saying that to me. Like we're talking about a $400 current generation GPU for 1080p. I cringed a little when you said it. Yeah, yeah. It sounded ridiculous when I said it, but I've got both.
sides of the argument in my head where people are like but you just turn down the resolution or you turn down the quality settings you're making a mountain out of a molehill and i get that argument but also you paid four hundred dollars for this thing And it's an RTX. It's got ray tracing and all these features. And if you use DLSS at 1080p with the epic quality settings, you're going to run into problems. The performance is going to be much worse than the 16 gigabyte card.
That shouldn't be happening solely. due to the fact that it does not have enough VRAM. That's such a bad situation. Yeah, I would say a $400 GPU is 1440p 60fps Ultra. Definitely. That's what people should be expecting. That's what they should be demanding. That's what it should be. But, yeah, this is, you know, we heard it.
A long time ago with The Last of Us Part 1, we were just using an outlier to make our case, to make Radeon GPUs look better, which was obviously never the intention. But first of all, The Last of Us Part 1 wasn't even the first example of this. There was examples, you know, predating that.
Oh, but it was just poorly optimized, Steve. It was no precursor for things to come. They did fix it, but you will still run into problems with the ultra-quality settings at 1440p on an 8GB card, whereas you weren't with a 16. I don't really like that argument.
There's two separate issues, right? One of them is games being released in a poor state, an unpolished, unoptimized state. So I get that. I get that we shouldn't be happy with that and we shouldn't stand for that. That's fine, okay? But we're... hardware reviewers so guys that tackle the software tackle the games can really push that side of things we're pushing for you guys when you part with your money
with the GPU manufacturers, that they give you a better product. So there's also the gaming side of things as well, but we want to ensure that you get a better quality GPU. And I think everyone can agree, if NVIDIA just had a lead... with the 16 gigabyte 4060 for 400 this wouldn't really be an issue we wouldn't be talking about it um a 300 4060 it's not not great but i i we wouldn't be happy with it we wouldn't be recommending it
But, you know, $300, $400, pretty big jump up in price there to still have 8 gigabytes of VRAM. But the point is, you know, with all these examples that we've seen, we knew this was coming, right? Yeah.
these games were going to well we knew it was going to play out the way it has and it has we've also seen the 4k texture pack for space marine 2 which massively improves the visual presentation of that game significantly like you're talking about ray tracing being a game changing you know dramatically changing the appearance of a game this was huge for that game uh
I don't know where people, the general sentiment is on how much that's transformed the game compared to what we've seen with ray tracing and other games, but... I mean, for me, it's a night and day difference between the original presentation of the game and then the high resolution textures. The game world is just so much nicer. The characters are so much nicer. The overall presentation is just sharper, more detailed.
It's like a remastered game, really. It's that substantial, the difference with that 4K texture pack. And don't work good with 8GB cards, let me tell you that. Yeah, it's like a chicken and egg situation, isn't it? Like people say, oh, you know, the games have to get better, but then the game developers say, well, you need better GPUs to run our games. Then it's just like an endless cycle of things. But I think what we've seen is that...
giving a better quality GPU is probably easier than game developers fixing games and making them more optimized. As much as I'd like to say... Game developers should put in more effort, blah, blah, blah. They should do a better job and Stalker is probably a great example of this because the game was launched with a lot of technical issues. How much time did they spend, though, optimising the game?
with some sort of preset to work with eight gigabyte cards i don't know the answer to that but was there any time allocated to that because if there was could that time have been better allocated to just bug fixing and Again, I'm not defending unpolished games, games that should be launched in a better state. But we have heard from game developers themselves, and they've said they're sick of trying to optimize.
their games at a high level to work on 8 gigabyte cards like too many compromises have to be made it's a difficult timely process so having twice as much vram than we currently have would help you know address that i i they still have to optimize for 8 gigabyte cards because they're not going away anytime soon and they're still going to be the entry-level option
but fewer and fewer people would use them and again if you're buying an entry-level card an rx6600 you're not playing with the higher ultra preset in the latest and greatest games medium to low
You kind of resign to the fact that, yeah, I bought an entry-level card, so this is me. This is where I'm gaining. So, yeah, as you say, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation and we're not... defending unpolished games that should be released in a better state but i guess i'm just a bit more forgiving of the whole vram problems like that sort of optimization um i'd rather go after them for like
players falling through the floor or black screens or crashing and those actual game breaking bugs other than you know or rather than you know optimizing for 8 gigabyte mainstream cards with high quality, ultra quality presets. Yeah, exactly. I'm sure people will point to various different examples. Everyone always brings up, oh, Cyberpunk looks so great. It's like, well.
They did have to kind of fix that game and they spent, I think, something like $100 million fixing the game. I think that might have included the development cost for the expansion pack as well. But they spent a lot of money and time getting that game working on. on the older consoles the game was meant to come out on and run well on, like the PlayStation 4, which then, remember at the time, Sony was like...
guys, this game runs so badly on the PS4 that we're not even going to allow you to sell the game on the console. So fix it, kind of force them to do it, and then PC gamers... could benefit from those optimizations over time because they had to put in the work to get it to run on this eight gigabyte console they promised the game would work on. And now that isn't happening anymore. Game developers are not...
forced into making their games run on the PlayStation 4 and those sorts of consoles. As good as, like I'd love for every game to look like Cyberpunk 2077 and run great on mid-range hardware. But I think we've seen enough examples with games coming out today.
where gamers would just benefit from faster hardware, faster, better hardware. I was about to say on a final note, I'd just like to add that the reason why we advocate for this is that it's a better experience for you. You're getting more for your money. and time and time again we've seen it where and last of us part one was a perfect example i played that game on an rx 6800 when it was launched um yeah i think you and i played through it pretty much the same time as soon as it came out
And I had a great experience. I played at reasonable frame rates on a previous generation GPU. There was no weird stuttering. In fact, the frame time graph was buttery smooth. It was just a straight line.
uh wasn't playing at screaming high frame rates or anything but it was very playable and then i heard about all these people having problems and how unoptimized the medium quality textures were and the high quality textures how bad they looked and i'm like well i'm playing on ultra looks great the game it's a good looking game it's unrealistic let's use that word to expect that games are just going to change and we've actually talked about this before right i've been gaming for over 20 years
And this is not new, guys. If you've hopped into gaming in the last couple of years, five years, ten years, this isn't a new thing. Games have been released in unoptimized, unpolished condition. as far back as I can remember. It's always, and again, we've talked about this in Q&As a lot, so I don't want to repeat myself, but I remember the, it wasn't even early days. It was like 15 years ago, which I suppose for some people might be early days, but testing games and you couldn't get.
you couldn't turn v-sync off like basic features you know or you couldn't get the game to work in a full screen or just various silly little things the game's released you can buy it it's been out for two weeks and it's locked at some ridiculously low frame rate or something like that because there's a a frame rate that was maybe meant for console that was never removed for pc and they have to patch the game just to remove the 30 fps frame rate or something dumb like that
And yeah, like I said, vSync bugs were a constant problem. So this has been going on forever. Therefore, I don't think it's going to be fixed next year or the year after the year after that. It's going to be an ongoing thing. And one of the key problems we've seen as of recent is 8 gigabytes of VRAM. So if you have more VRAM, there's been a lot of these games, like The Last of Us Part 1, where if you had 12 gigabytes or more and you bought that game, you can just play it.
It just worked. Like, sure, there might have been some bugs in the game and whatnot, especially that you found quite a few later on. I think I fell through the floor. It's one less thing you have to contend with with these unpolished games. Yes, they should be more polished upon release, but they're not going to be. So just face that reality. That's someone else's fight.
The other reality that we're trying to change is actually getting enough VRAM on cards that don't cost $1,000 plus to enjoy these games. And it is really annoying. Like PC gaming, everyone's noticed this. It's getting to the point where... if you're just not extremely well off or willing to throw first car money at your next pc it's like yeah i'm sorry that ray tracing that that's gonna suck for you um new game release is probably gonna be a crap time for you
And, I don't know, is that what PC gaming is meant to be like? Unless you buy the best of the best hardware, your experience is probably going to suck. Yeah, and I feel like... Asking for more VRAM is a very reasonable request. We're not asking for GPUs to be significantly larger and more costly to manufacture while keeping prices the same. We're asking for something that, and I think gamers would actually...
be willing to pay a reasonable price for it too. Like if you offered a double VRAM model for the amount of cost to give you more VRAM plus a little bit extra, like maybe it's a $40 or $50 premium, I think most people would pay.
a reasonable amount like that for their car obviously that becomes less viable when you're talking about 200 gpus because 200 to 250 is a much larger jump but i think people are willing to pay for it i mean at the end of the day what are we talking about here you just need enough vram like you just need enough vram for the gpu and eight gigabytes of m is not enough for a 40 60 ti at the point in time at which it was released
We're not talking about a cart that was released four years ago. So you just need enough VRAM and eight gigabytes wasn't enough for that. And then they made the 16 gigabyte model and remember NVIDIA argued with us black and blue in the face that... It cost $100. There was no, could not be done any cheaper than that. There was no way they, it was an expensive process to clamshell that particular GPU. It was going to cost $100 US and that was the best they could offer at. I was like, okay.
and then yeah small amount of pressure from amd not that i'm saying amd did us any uh terrible favors there but anyway you get what i'm saying though right like don't bother releasing a variation of a GPU that doesn't have enough VRAM. And I guess you could say the 8GB model is like the eSports version. It's for people who play like Warzone and Apex Legends and Fortnite and that sort of stuff, which...
I'd be willing to accept if it was substantially cheaper. Like you're buying a card that, yeah, it's a competitive multiplayer graphics card. Like the resale, that's not going to be great. And you're limited to what you can play because of the VRAM. And you're not buying an RTX. It's a GTX graphics card at that point, right? Like you don't want DLSS even.
Yeah, so, well, we'll see what happens with the next generation of GPUs, but hopefully we don't get any more of these scenarios, or at the very least, you know. give gamers the option to pay for what things that they actually want. And I think the 4060 Ti 16GB has sold better than the 8GB model. I'm not 100% sure about that, but I believe it has. Yeah, it definitely has, yeah. Significantly so. Well, I've seen a lot of chatter. Even I was looking at Reddit threads about Stalker 2, for example.
And just seeing a lot more comments about VRAM situations at the moment, people talking about how their 3070s in particular have aged because that was a very popular GPU and obviously had 8 gigabytes of VRAM as well.
Another thing I wanted to talk about relating to Stalker 2, though, is, and I don't know whether you had this experience, but the game is quite floaty for an FPS. I think that's probably the best way of describing how you... move your character like just mouse movements and stuff it didn't feel to me like an overly tight experience it felt very much like i guess the best way of putting this is they made an fps in unreal engine 5 that's kind of what it felt like and so
Yeah, just first of all, is that sort of what you experienced as well? Just obviously you're doing a lot of benchmark passes and moving around the world. I actually thought they made... it feel like that to make it feel a bit more realistic yeah i noticed a few times when i was pulling away when i was getting shot and it was almost like a slow sort of
Like a full animation rather than a... Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like, oh, I don't like that. That's sort of slow. But then I was like, okay, it kind of feels like, yeah. I don't know if that's what they were going for or not. That's what it seemed like to me. Obviously, I like fast twitch shooters, so the actual aiming and shooting in the game, I was like, I don't love this. This is very single player.
you know probably not the right person to ask about that but i did notice yeah when you were ducking in and out of cover it was a bit floaty but i wasn't sure if that was by design or not I think now that you mentioned it, it probably is more the game design side of things. I think the latency, which I did have a look at just using the quick NVIDIA overlay, wasn't too crazy compared to other titles running Unreal Engine 5. Not as good as a...
you know like a highly optimized shooter and an engine built for shooters but certainly not like we were running with 80 milliseconds 100 milliseconds of input lag it seems fine but yeah like i think it's more like an animation sort of thing where You're aiming, but then even just moving your gun around or whatever, it almost felt like the gun was pivoting on that sort of point, which gives this sort of like floaty feel rather than just...
moving and snapping really quickly it's almost like you know you're moving the point where your character needs to be in like a second from now and then it takes that extra little bit to move to make the movements you're even like
And this is a very stalker feeling sort of thing. But when you open like the inventory and those sort of things, you know, it's all about bringing up your bag to get out the tablet, to look at the map and putting that away or opening inventory, you get out your bag again. It's all that sort of, I guess, survival type of experience. Yeah, I think it's by design. The good news, though...
related to that is that it makes the game much more pleasant to use with frame generation. One of the things that I've noticed a lot over the gaming this year, playing plenty of games with frame gen, plenty of games without frame generation. is that I've tended to prefer to play without frame gen for any games that require shooting or I'd prefer to play them with a mouse and keyboard. So games like Star Wars Outlaws, I definitely prefer to play that without frame gen.
But games that tend to be third person or quite optimized for controller experiences like Black Myth Wukong, they're much better experiences with frame gen because you're getting the smoothness advantage, but the latency side of things is...
hidden a bit by the input methods and those sorts of things so i've been playing dragon age the valve guard another good example of frame generation where you can get the smoothness benefits but it's not it doesn't require fast movements or you know the mouse movement side of things isn't
too tied to gameplay. It's not a big factor. I think this game could be one of the first examples I've seen of a first person game of this nature where frame generation will actually feel reasonable to play with especially because we're talking about relatively low frame rates 60 80 fps that's usually what i would describe as being a little too like for a high refresh rate experience a little too low
to use with frame generation you'd want your base frame rate to be more 100 120 fps to give you that really nice experience then smoothed out with frame gen I think with this game, with that latency experience, and I've played a little bit of it with frame generation on, it doesn't have too much of an impact. So it's just a really interesting thing that I've found with frame generation technology over these. I'm very...
over the years it's actually been a couple years now hasn't it a bit of weird thing to say i was just anyway sidetracked um i've become very clear in the games i do and don't like using frame gen with and it's not a blanket case thing it's very much the style of game how it works mouse and keyboard
less likely to enjoy frame gen. First-person shooters, that sort of thing, less likely to enjoy frame gen. But with this game, I'll play more to sort of figure out whether that is truly the case or not, looks to be reasonable for the technology, which is. Something, I guess. The other title that I played, well, played is questionable, is Flight Simulator 2024, which also came out, well.
just slightly before, Stalker 2, which has been more of a loading screen simulator for most people. I think you tried to play it yesterday and ran into a few issues. Yeah, I spent... more than half of the day trying to get to the actual game menu so i could yeah so i eventually got there uh
I was able to set up a few things and then I wanted to have a look at some flight activities, work out what I might use to benchmark the game moving forward if it turns out that it's not too much of a headache for testing. And I think I tried about... eight times let's say to get into something and yeah i just sat at the loading screen never got there so that was i gave up late last night and now i've moved on the stalker so i haven't actually played the game
The simulation, sorry. Well, this morning I was able to get into the game. It still actually takes quite a while to load, which I guess is similar to Flight Simulator, the earlier version from 2020, where there's just lots of...
loading screens things just take a little bit of time it seems a little bit more polished than the original version of the game which is disappointing for people who wanted to play the game when it came out because i think if the launch was good and people could get in and play it they probably would have had a
Better experience than what I experienced at the launch of the previous flight simulator, where it was very janky. Performance really wasn't very polished. Lots of stuff was missing. It was kind of a bare bones experience. The new version of the game has a career mode, which seems to be a lot more like a racing game. You'd see from a racing game where there's all sorts of planes in the game. I haven't dived into this career mode all that much at all.
Don't take me as an expert on what the game is like, but it feels more like a racing game in that sense where you set up your little pilot and you choose your base to... do your flights out of and then that's on top of all the activities and things which a lot of which just weren't in the original flight simulator you got the game and
There was not a lot there. You could just do flights and then you'd fly to like New York or something and performance would get crippled. This game seems to run okay for a flight simulator title. It doesn't seem to be... ridiculously more punishing than the 2020 version while still having more detailed cities and that sort of thing it looks great like flight simulator the previous version looked great the new version looks great but it's very much like
40 to 60 fps sort of experience in a lot of those heavier areas with lots of cities and dense elements but the interesting thing with this game is that a lot of the game is streamed over the internet so the installation size is only 10 gigabytes or thereabouts and you're just relying on your internet connection to stream in all the other assets and there's certainly been times where
I've loaded like an activity or something. I think I loaded Sydney earlier today. Okay. And it was like for a couple of seconds, just the muddiest, grossest looking textures imaginable all across the city. And then within a couple of minutes, not a couple of minutes, a couple of seconds, suddenly the high-quality textures and assets started to load in, which is interesting. I have quite a fast internet connection.
usually those things wouldn't be too bad. But over your way with Starlink, it's probably not quite as, at least in latency and responsiveness, not quite as interesting. What do you think about games being streamed over the internet? Would that affect like your testing? For games where you're not guaranteed to have everything locally? Yeah, I'm not sure how many games will actually do it. Again, this is a simulator, Tim. It's not a game. Simulator, sorry. This is a serious simulator.
They've got like two petabytes of data in the cloud or something, which is why it's streamed. You can't really do that offline. Obviously, your internet speed is going to play a big role. Having not experienced it yet, I don't know. It's difficult to judge it right now because it barely works. Yeah, that's true. So once they get the server load and that sort of stuff worked out and you can actually play the game.
as it's meant to be played then i guess you can judge it right now it's just a a hot mess i mean like i said i couldn't even load into it yesterday and i doubt today they've made any substantial adjustments to server support and stuff like that so we're probably have to give that a few weeks for them to either the demand drop off or them or iron out the bugs yeah i think so um
It's probably not great if you're launching a major title and people can't play it for like a couple of days. I wouldn't want to see more of these sort of games that rely on heavily internet connections, heavy asset streaming where...
Suddenly there's more demand than expected. Then, oh, you can't play it because there's not enough server capacity. That is very bad. I think people paying, especially because Flight Simulator has like a $300 Australian version. If you want to get like the... ultra mega super deluxe edition or whatever it is i feel like for those sort of people paying that amount of money for a game you should be expecting to play it day one no problems so
They've kind of fell on their face a little bit with that one. But it's interesting that we've got two quite intense, quite PC demanding games launching at around the same time. Lots of interesting things for people with their high-end hardware to enjoy. And yeah, Flight Simulator looked, at least in the couple of flights that I did, like...
Again, one of the best looking games you can get on PC. Simulators. Well, simulator. To be fair, the game is more of a game now than it was the 2020 version. There's going to be some...
Very upset people in the comments, Tim. They've got fighter jets in there and stuff now. You can do like low-flying activities and stuff. That's serious military equipment. How dare you suggest they're just toys. Tim, when I... last evaluated this game and i said game i said this game yeah now look i was i was letting know that it's a serious simulator and to call it a game is disgusting conduct and
Yeah, very disrespectful of the community and whatnot. So I wish you good luck, Tim. Well, we'll see what the comments are like on this video. Maybe I've upset everyone by calling it a simulator. Yeah, just to be fair though, I guess back at the launch of 2020, there was a lot of simulator elements that were also missing. Like there were a lot of dials and stuff in the cockpits that didn't do anything.
was reading from like the hardcore simulator community about how disappointed they were and all these missing features and things so maybe it was neither a game nor a simulator when it launched which is probably fair considering They probably spent the next three years adding in all the stuff that should have been there at launch. I think an unsatisfactory simulator is as close as you'll get them.
Yeah, that's probably true. Well, anyway, Flight Simulator 2024, this excellent simulator, is a game I, well, a simulator that I will play at some point. I can't help myself. It's so hard not to call it a game. I know, I know. So I think that pretty much wraps us up for our testing of, well, our experiences testing these latest couple of games and you'll see Steve's...
of Stalker 2 up on the channel probably tomorrow. Hopefully tomorrow, yeah. I'll do my best. Soon after this video goes live. Yeah, I promise not to sleep until it's done. Yeah, good job, good job. Keen to see how that one goes out. And yeah, for now, we'll move into our, take a break and then we'll talk about Borrowing Lives.
Hi, I'm Lowry, the voice of Celia from The Magnus Protocol and The Magnus Archives, the award-winning horror anthology with an epic 200-episode metaplot. This episode is brought to you by the EE Game Store. The EE Game Store is open to everyone on any network and has game-changing kit for every type of gamer. Whether you're a racer, slayer, baller or sidequester, the EE Game Store knows your game. For more information, search EE Game Store.
Hi everyone, it's May Letizio. I'm Oli Bromfield. And I'm Moses Duckrow. And this is Green Flags, a Forever Better podcast by Puma. He will be setting us challenges each week to help turn us into eco-legends. And along the way, we'll be finding out with Puma how making even the smallest changes to our daily habits can change the world for forever better.
Find out which one of us comes out on top waving the green flag. You can watch and listen to green flags wherever you're hearing this or follow our journey on Puma's YouTube. All right, we're back. Steve, impress me with all of your things that have been happening. Did that car arrive, by the way? Yes, got my wife's new car. Very pleased with it, very happy. She loves it. Nice.
Yeah, it's actually probably too good for her. She might be listening to this, but yeah, it's a bit of a weapon. So yeah, slightly jealous, Lila, to have that one. But anyway, no, very good. Took delivery of it.
very good condition very good car so all happy there um and yeah not too much more to say on that one so yep that's good uh outside of um that i did a little bit of work on the upcoming harbour unbox gym so we're one step closer i'll probably get some photos for the bts section in the near future um but that that was good so we've got
Foundation's pretty well done. We'll be installing bearers. I'm hoping I can take a day off next week. We'll see how we go. Get the bearers installed, then weld on some cleats and then put on the purlins. 150 mil sea purlins and then there'll be the flooring that goes over that and all the other stuff but yeah we're one step closer so uh yeah all the all the hard work on the foundation is pretty much done now so that's good now i've got
I bought a new welder. I think I mentioned it a while ago. So I'll be using that to weld the cleats on. So I'm excited to give that a real good workout. Nice. And yeah, do you get hay fever at all? No, not really. It's never been something that I've been affected with too much. No, you're super lucky. My wife never used to get it either.
but she started to get it this year for the first time. And apparently the doctor was like, oh, that can sort of happen with old age. So she's rapped about that. I haven't got it that bad this year. Okay. So that's weird. uh i don't have any real explanation for why that is balen suffers from it quite badly
But I bring it up because today's the first I've actually had some hay fever symptoms. So I've had a hay fever tablet. I've had one of the non-drowsy ones, but I swear it still makes you a bit drowsy. And I've got a bit of an itchy eye. That's why I've touched a few times. I try not to touch it, but itchy eye, what can you do? So anyway, for all my fellow hay fever sufferers out there.
good times well southern hemisphere hay fever sufferers right because everyone in the northern hemisphere would be well past the season well you know hay fever allergies they sort of you know you can there are people that suffer from you know that sort of stuff all year round
My cousin is one of those people. So, you know, if he opens up an old suitcase and it's got some dust in it, he's done for the day, just wrecks him. So that sucks. There are some things you can do about it, but yeah. So anyway.
um my boring life is being slightly inconvenienced by a bit of hay fever at the moment but poor balen's been coming in for the last six to eight weeks just nose running and yeah he's been really struggling with it and the tablets help to varying degrees and of course he's tried a whole heap of different ones so um yeah
We'll probably get a heap of suggestions on which ones to try, which is fine. But yeah, I imagine he's probably tried them all at this point in time. Do you have to like look at the pollen count? Does that affect you like high pollen count? High hay fever symptoms sort of thing? Generally, if they say it's like extreme polo and cat, you're going to suffer from it. But for some reason, I would normally...
Because I remember each year you get to probably October, definitely by November, December. It's at least two months, two to three months of the year. I'm generally pretty bad.
And, you know, you get the people in the video saying, Steve, you need to get sleep, which may be true, but I just look like shit because my bloody eyes have been just about bleeding. They've been... running like a tap my nose has been running i've been sneezing um so i feel if you see someone who's been suffering from hay fever they generally look like shit uh so yeah that's that's that uh
But I don't know, because I talked about how I've started having to take the garlic to help supplement my immune system, and that's been working quite well. Yep. But my understanding is... and this is a generalization people who suffer from hay fever have or even allergies in general have an overactive immune system so
You know, like when you breathe in pollen, you're breathing in foreign crap into your lungs and your body and stuff, and your body's just like, love that shit. Put anything in here. I'm a dumping ground for foreign objects. I don't think I want to describe myself as a dumping ground for foreign objects. That's how I'm describing you. I'm seeing what you eat when we go over to Computex for breakfast. No, no.
I'll get back on track if I can. Yeah. So, I mean, I never, ever, ever pre-COVID never got sick. Like it just wasn't a thing I did for whatever reason. But I got horrific hay fever. The second it even looked like being hay fever season, I was a mess. Itchy, runny eyes, runny nose. It was just bad. whereas now that I seem to get sick more, I don't get hay fever anywhere to the degree that I used to. So is there a link there, Tim?
Well, I don't know. I'm not a doctor, so I'm not going to make any definitive calls on this podcast about that, but it certainly sounds like there is some sort of link there. It's something that I've noticed because it's really weird. This is the first year.
ever that i haven't really suffered from it um again if i go mow the lawns i'll get a bit of an itchy eye like i said today i had a some it's it's like an extreme day today for example so balen's had like three tablets he's trying to stay awake and he's just suffering and i'm like oh you're gonna be a bit of an itchy eye a bit dry but anyway i mean It's called Our Boring Lives for a Reason and this sort of stuff is dominating the headlines at the moment, hay fever season.
You're talking about foreign objects getting inserted into people's bodies. So, I mean, it doesn't get much more excited than that. I'm talking about what happens over on your end. No, I always give Tim crap, guys, because we go... You've probably gotten better and I haven't noticed, but I remember the first time we went over to Computex and I got some bacon and eggs. At the hotels we stay at, it's sort of a buffet breakfast or you can eat type deal.
You know, I get a Yakult, a coffee, some bacon, eggs, pretty stock standard stuff. Tim rocks up to the table. He's got like a waffle with a giant scoop of ice cream and he went to the chocolate fountain. Why have they even got a chocolate fountain for breakfast? I guess for people like Tim. Well, they used to have jelly beans there too. That was pretty good. Maybe you're not that...
got a chocolate fountain so if they've got it i guess it's not weird to use it um i don't know i don't know how to how else to read into that but yeah tim rocks up to the table so hang on first of all We get seated at our table because, you know, that's how it works. You get seated at your table. There's your table number, your cutlery and all the gear. And I'm sitting there and Tim's like, I don't really do breakfast.
Like you just never have breakfast, which is not that weird. I'm like, okay. I said, I don't usually have a big breakfast, but we're going to be on the showroom floor. We're going to be going all day. I'm not sure what lunch looks like today. We could be flat out. So I'm just going to have a...
a big breakfast, which I don't normally do. And Tim's like, yeah, no, I don't do breakfast. All right, cool. I'll go get my bacon eggs while I sit down. Where's Tim? I don't know. Somewhere. 30 seconds later, Tim sits down. As I said, plate. big old waffle covered in ice cream and chocolate and i'm like i thought you'd have breakfast and you were just like oh i don't even know what your explanation was
Well, yeah, I don't really want to have like bacon, eggs for breakfast because I don't usually eat breakfast. So you just thought, I don't usually have breakfast, so maybe I'll try dessert. What's the last thing I do at the end of the day? I'll try that first. I think you made a good case that like we were going to be busy. You probably should eat something because normally I would have like a...
Can we just timestamp this? Tim said I made a good case. Okay. The one and only time. Yeah, please timestamp that. I need to cherish this podcast now. Anyway, continue. Sorry, Tim. So, yeah, you said we're going to have a busy day. You should probably eat lunch or have something. I'm like, well, I don't really want to eat like bacon and eggs. It's not really my sort of thing.
So I just had a look around at what else I've got. I'm like, okay, they've got like waffles and stuff. Sure. Like give me some of that then. Why not? So yeah. But yeah, I don't really do the whole like. Oh, actually, I can't. It doesn't really work for me. Like eating a huge breakfast to skip lunch, I could have a huge breakfast then get to lunch and be like, yeah, I'm hungry at this point. You're like a camel.
I guess. I guess so. But in your defense, you did it every single day we were there and you functioned fine the whole time we were there. So I was like, all right. Yep. Yeah, that's true. Sometimes I would have more like of fruits or something, but if you have too much fruit for breakfast, it's also... problematic for other reasons um digestive system wise did you get into that um fruit smoothie they had
Yes, at last year's hotel, the fruit smoothie was very good. And you would pay a significant amount of money for that sort of smoothie in Australia just by itself. You would. It'd be at least, what? $15 a thing. Probably. Especially in a place like Sydney. Yeah. Minimum $10. Yeah, minimum $10. Minimum. And I think I had like six one morning.
It was so good though. It was kind of hidden away a little bit on the table of things. Not many people were going for it. I discovered it on the fourth day we were there. Yeah. yeah so that was nice i found on the fourth day and you you guys all looked at me like what are you doing what's that and i'm like i don't i think it's a fruit smoothie thing anyway i had it i was like guys you this is
insanely fresh, tastes great. You've got to try it. That and the banana bread was really good too. Yeah. I think one of you then went and tried it and then was also impressed. Then one by one, you guys caved. And then I remember they had to keep... going and making a lot more of it after that point because we just kept on smashing it but anyway um but yeah that's that's pretty much all of my stories um so i'll hand it over to you tim well minutes before this podcast went live i was
going outside to grab some parcels. The parcel delivery person had just arrived. Nothing too exciting there. Got my parcels. Went back and I noticed that a blue-tongued lizard had fallen into a drain nearby and was sort of flailing around. I went and saved that guy, so that was nice. That's just a random thing I thought, oh, I might as well mention that on the podcast because it literally just happened minutes ago. I guess the...
Blue Tongue was not very thankful, but he was a lizard. Do they have Blue Tongue lizards in the US and stuff? I don't imagine. I think it's a native Australian. It's definitely native Australian. Well, I'm pretty certain it is. Have Wikipedia got a little map where they say where they're from? Yeah. Have they infested anywhere else? No, I think it's Australia and New Guinea and maybe Indonesia. Okay. Yeah, they're pretty cool blue-tongued lizards.
Pretty cool, blue-tongued lizards. Go have a look at them on – this is a small one, which is why it fell into the drain. Normally we get fairly big ones out here. Big old fat ones. Yeah, a blue-tongue is probably – Maybe like a big one will be arm's length from like your elbow to your tip of your fingers sort of length for a really big one.
But then this one was much smaller, sort of maybe half that sort of length. And yeah, we've had some like really fat ones around here. Maybe they've got like a good food supply around here. But yeah, we get lots of them. And so yeah, this one just fell into the...
Fell into the drain, so I saved that and did a little public service for it. Yeah, and just so people don't think you're some kind of Steve Irwin, they are harmless to humans. Yes, that's right. It's not a snake. No, well, there's snakes that are harmless as well, but it's not.
poisonous or venomous or anything like that. That's right. They will bite you, but they don't even have teeth, I don't believe. So it's more they just gum you. I think they got quite a good snap on them, but Tim was never in danger. I think they normally eat insects and like seeds and fruits maybe. I don't really know what they eat, but it's not. They will eat meat and stuff as well, but it's got to be, you know, stuff that is manageable for them to kill. They would be able to.
you know, do too much damage to you. And they don't have like a big head or anything. But, yeah, their distinctive feature is they've got this sort of dark blue tongue that comes out and sort of, you know, to eat insects or whatever. But yeah, like they're kind of this weird looking thing. Like they've got, you know, their bodies are kind of like fat, I guess, with like little legs coming off them.
Yeah, they sneak around our property quite a bit and have to avoid mowing over them or standing on them at times because they just bask in the sun. They usually try to run away. They're not that friendly. This one got stuck, so saved him. Anyway. Nice. That's not too exciting. What else has been happening around here? Our veggie and fruits are going really well at the moment, so should be getting a nice large crop of peaches this year, which has been going good.
um yeah just growing strawberries and stuff this year which has gone well and beetroots and carrots so it's all prime prime produce time around here and yeah it's been going off pretty nicely so Should have the Peaches ready in a couple of weeks, I think, and then Apples probably early next year and don't know what I'll do with those, but got a whole bunch of them this year as well. And then loss has been happening around here. Not all that much. I've been playing...
Dragon Age of the Veil Guard, which I know a game that you've added to your benchmark suite. And I think I added it into the RTX 2060 ray tracing thing as well. Divisive game from the reviews. Lots of people... not liking it, lots of Dragon Age fans really liking it. So I guess where I sit on it at the moment, I've played maybe 30 to 40 hours, so I've just finished.
well, I'm into Act 2 of the game. There's three acts or three main story, big story missions. So I'm into Act 2 of the game. I wouldn't call myself a big Dragon Age fan. Like, I've played the... older games all the way back to origins so i played origins 2 and inquisition
And I'm one of the people that didn't think Origins was that amazing. There's some hardcore Dragon Age fans that think Origins was like the best game of the series, and then they changed up the mechanics. Now the game worked quite a bit for 2 and Inquisition. I'm more of a fan of 2 and Inquisition than Origins, but it's not like, oh, I was desperate to play this new one when it came out. I was really hanging out for it. I just started to play it because why not?
I bought a copy, was going to use it for testing. I'll give it a go. And I think I probably sit somewhere in the middle of the reviews that I've seen. Some people going crazy for it, thinking it's an amazing game. I think those people are more the hardcore Dragon Age fans that are really into the lore and the story and that sort of thing. The people that dislike the game probably...
criticizing aspects like the combat, which I find the combat very easy. I had to turn the difficulty way up because the standard difficulty was just boring, very easy. You just...
Basically, you're a machine just clicking. Like there's no... difficulty or no strategy to the combat whatsoever on the standard difficulty once you put up to the high difficulty levels which i'd strongly recommend doing if you're playing the game then you start having to pay actual attention to when you should be using your abilities
the strengths and weaknesses of the things that you're fighting against. So they'll usually have a strength against fire attacks. You can't use a fire attack, but a weakness for lightning attacks. You'd use lightning attacks on that enemy.
That's irrelevant on the normal difficulty, but you have to do that quite a bit for the higher difficulties, which makes the combat much more enjoyable and much more challenging to get through. And that has improved my thoughts on the game just in general because there's a lot of combat. You want that to be an enjoyable part of the game. When it's too easy, it's not enjoyable. And sort of the, you know...
It's not really an open world game. There's not that much exploration to it. You're sort of just going through the fairly linear levels to a large degree. So that's not a particularly exciting aspect of the game.
But then lots of people have enjoyed the story, the characters, those sorts of things. And at least what I've played up to this point, the first act of the game isn't... anything special in those areas you're just sort of gathering your group of people to go on with as you're sort of playing you you start off with a couple of mates and then you grab another one and another one as you go along sort of standard rpg stuff and then
at least from what I've heard from people that have played much deeper into the game. A couple of friends and stuff have been playing it. the story gets much, much better because you've got all the characters, they can start developing the story, and by the end of Act 3, the final parts of the game apparently are supposed to be really good.
Yeah, Act 2 has certainly been better than Act 1 and I've been growing into it. I've been enjoying the story more and more as it goes along. But the first 10 hours of the game are not that amazing. And I would think that a lot of people have...
played that part of the game and just being like nah this isn't for me and that's fair enough because you should probably make your game a little bit more exciting and enjoyable from the start so at least based on what I've played so far this is sort of like a
seven out of ten, six out of ten for maybe the first ten hours, maybe even a five out of ten for the first ten hours sort of experience. So maybe we'll go into something better. I'm still playing it. I'm still enjoying it, but it's, you know.
People were criticizing it for not being in the game of the year considerations at the game awards or whatever. Not that I pay too much attention to the game awards because it's more of an advertising sort of event, but I think it's pretty fair that it hasn't. gotten nominated for that. A couple of the other games I've played that did get nominated I think were much better. So I don't have too much else to talk about. Cats, the new Cats are going well.
The AFL draft was last night and that was interesting to watch. And, yeah, that's pretty much it that's been happening. So unless you've got anything else to chat about, we'll end the podcast. No, I'm going to get back to benchmarking, Tim. Yeah, it's unfortunate because the weather today is really nice. I think it's like 30 degrees Celsius here. Yeah, I've noticed. I've noticed, yep.
Well, have fun benchmarking Stalker. I'll probably continue to check it out a little bit and check out Flight Simulator, see if there's interesting things in there. But, yeah, lots of monitor content coming out as well on Monitor Unboxed. You're interested in that sort of thing in the next couple of days. So yeah, that'll do it for the Hard Run Box podcast for whatever episode we're up to. As always, we've got our audio feed. You can sign up for that at Spotify or whatever.
And just get the standard audio version. Got the YouTube version as well. If you want to leave us a comment, that's usually where we read comments for this podcast, fresh at the YouTube page. And yeah, thanks for listening. We'll see you in the next one. Hi, I'm Lowry, the voice of Celia from The Magnus Protocol and The Magnus Archives, the award-winning horror anthology with an epic 200-episode metaplot. This episode is brought to you by the EE Game Store.
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