You're not a wizard Harry!

AccidentalDenz

AccidentalDenz

Lord of Steam
Scott said:
So....... what's the game like?
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I'm enjoying it. It's a relatively straightforward open world light RPG. It doesn't really do anything special or new in the genre - you've got story quests, side quests, activities (mostly puzzles) and collectables. I'm a dozen or so hours in and starting to expand the number of spells I have available so I can start playing round with different combos that is adding a bit of depth to combat - the combat feels pretty good. It's simple enough to pick up but will take a bit of work to fully master, as certain enemies react to different spells and you'll sometimes have groups of enemies that take different damage attacking you. Switching between spell types rather than just spamming the same attacks is needed when that happens. I keep running past objects that I know are puzzles, but some of them I don't yet have the required spell or item, or story progression, etc in order to solve them. There's a lot of incidental stuff going on around you, groups of students will talk about what you've done as you pass them (similar to people commenting on you being the Dragonborn or hearing a whispered "Hail Sithis" in Skyrim for example), some suits of armour will start fighting each other and other things like that. This makes the world feel lived in, and since some of the incidental stuff has different chances of happening depending on rarity or location, there's bound to be stuff I've seen that other players won't have, and vice versa.

There's no doubt that it's the best Wizarding World of Harry Potter-themed video game, but that's been such a low bar that there's no surprise in that.
 
T

TonyCarter

VALUED CONTRIBUTOR
I'm also quite enjoying it, but as has been said it could have been done by simply reskinning Skyrim or one of the Jedi Knight games and got the same effects/gameplay with much less resource usage. I'm surprised how taxing it is on the computer for a game that doesn't really bring any new mechanics, gameplay, graphics, effects to the world...just the HP IP.

Don't like the fast travel with Hogwarts though...can't tell where a travel point is in relation to a quest location...it looks right next to it, but there may be a wall in the way and so you have a 5 minute walk around a convoluted route to get to where you actually wanted...but I suppose that all adds to the game's overall length of play ;)

I'd definitely take this ANY day over Fallout 76...even if you paid me to play Fallout 76.

I've ignored all the online hysteria about trans rights vs women's rights and you can configure your character to be:
  • male looking with male voice
  • female looking with a female voice
  • male looking with a female voice
  • female looking with a male voice
But I'm peeved that there's no way to make an ugly, fat, one-armed scouser in a wheelchair in it...so it's aesthetes, ableist, sizist, and racist!!! 😤

Since I created my character, I don't think I could actually tell you off the top of my head what I created (other than having a teenage male voice).
 
SpyderTracks

SpyderTracks

We love you Ukraine
CountingDown said:
I have no interest in the game but, having seen the stupid hardware requirements for it at 4k, I was curious so I watched the stream of someone I know for a couple of minutes and I am beyond confused.....that game must be the most poorly optimised game in the history of video gaming as it does not look anywhere near a game that would require the sort of hardware they suggested prior. :unsure:
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This is so on point.

When you look at games like Doom where they can still output hundreds of FPS even with full ray tracing, it really is down to good development.

Games like Modern Warfare, Spiderman, Halo Infinite, they're just not well coded for current graphics cards. There's absolutely no need for them to require so much power.
 
MrWilson

MrWilson

Godlike
I’m getting Cyberpunk flashbacks with the performance of this game, especially with how it performs on console. As such a popular title, you would hope that with driver updates and software patches we will have a much more sensible and realistic product down the line, but hopefully it won’t take 6 months to get to that stage.
 
HomerJ

HomerJ

Author Level
SpyderTracks said:
This is so on point.

When you look at games like Doom where they can still output hundreds of FPS even with full ray tracing, it really is down to good development.

Games like Modern Warfare, Spiderman, Halo Infinite, they're just not well coded for current graphics cards. There's absolutely no need for them to require so much power.
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whys is that though? is it because devs either are not skilled enough, or have enough time or just lazy or a mixture of all three. seems many games are not well optimized for pc.
 
C

CMP01

Enthusiast
ActuallyDenz said:
When I first loaded up the game, it recommended 4k Ultra with the DLSS Quality setting. I was aware of some micro stuttering going into and out of cutscenes and the first area of the game was occasionally stuttering. The first area is fairly empty with not a lot going on as you're being fed information about the setting, so I was aware that the game would only get worse in that respect. I lowered the setting to High and kept DLSS where it was, and only really notice a tiny bit of stutter when opening doors that move between busy areas, and the rest of the game feels fairly smooth. I'm happy enough with that kind of performance, but I'm not overly surprised to see the following.


I noticed the first time that I ran Resident Evil Village wiht my 3080 that 4k Ultra settings was using up nearly 8Gb of VRAM, and mentioned on here that I didn't think it'd be too long before 10Gb was going to be insufficient for newer games at these kinds of settings. We're very much at the point where even High settings without DLSS is using up that much VRAM!
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Yeah... that was one of the reasons, looking at upgrading pros and cons in May 2021, that I opted for a 6800XT over a 3080 (10Gb) at the time. Even with the difference in type of VRAM, though the 3080 was faster the 6800XT had just a little more even when taking that into account. Up to then I'd had a 1070, first desktop, then laptop, which was just as good but by 2021 that 8Gb GDDR5 was having trouble ensuring 60 fps and high-ultra settings at 1080p in an increasing number of games. I figured going for high-ultra at 3440x1440 with an option for 4K (I have a very good TV for that) and a few years grace from upgrading I'd need as much VRAM as possible for the money. Then price and availability weighed in. The 6800XT was immediately available at the time, instead of weeks or, more likely months away, and also at least 33-50% cheaper than a 3080.

But, apart from the hope those conditions never happen again, that's all aside from the real issue rn. That games are increasingly getting either less optimisation and/or are ramping up in required specs faster imo than they have before. I haven't seen an increase quite like this before tbh but then apparently we are all also beta testers now too...
 
Robbie

Robbie

Gold Level Poster
I get the odd frame drop now and then on it, but if you tweak your settings it's very playable. I don't have the best PC but still run it locked to 60 fps, only high/ultra. Only thing I really played around with was changing the scaling from quality to balanced/performance, seemed to help a lot from dipping too low in frames. I'm really enjoying it at the moment, but I'm a bit of a Harry Potter fan so I guess that helps!
 
SimonPeters116

SimonPeters116

Well-known member
CountingDown said:
Porbably a combination of the massive leaps each GPU generation has now as well as the sheer amount of power they have means developers don't have to optimise things at all well...not like they used to have to. You could also add in to the mix the fact that gamers now expect badly optimised and half finished games at release and optimised through updates over time as a normal thing.
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I think it's this tbf. When the game had to play, from installing off a CD. Games had to be delivered fully ready to go. Dial-up internet was so slow you could watch the lines of pixels in a photo coming through. So waiting for patches to download would be unacceptable.
Now, a patch downloads in minutes.

Do you remember the wobbly London foot bridge? They had to 'patch' that, with dampers.
OK, it was leading edge design, at the time.
But The Romans knew about bridges. They had the order 'break step', (as does the British army these days). This is because soldiers marching in-step can break a bridge, or make it bounce and wobble. Lazy engineering. A computer doesn't know about the effects of 'marching in-step' unless you tell it, but an engineer should. And the wobble frequency of that bridge 'made' everyone walk in-step, making the wobble worse.
I think it's the same sort of thing with game developers. They expect their computers to do most of the software writing for them, and patches to sort any out 'minor' problems after release.
 
HomerJ

HomerJ

Author Level
SimonPeters116 said:
I think it's this tbf. When the game had to play, from installing off a CD. Games had to be delivered fully ready to go. Dial-up internet was so slow you could watch the lines of pixels in a photo coming through. So waiting for patches to download would be unacceptable.
Now, a patch downloads in minutes.

Do you remember the wobbly London foot bridge? They had to 'patch' that, with dampers.
OK, it was leading edge design, at the time.
But The Romans knew about bridges. They had the order 'break step', (as does the British army these days). This is because soldiers marching in-step can break a bridge, or make it bounce and wobble. Lazy engineering. A computer doesn't know about the effects of 'marching in-step' unless you tell it, but an engineer should. And the wobble frequency of that bridge 'made' everyone walk in-step, making the wobble worse.
I think it's the same sort of thing with game developers. They expect their computers to do most of the software writing for them, and patches to sort any out 'minor' problems after release.
Click to expand...

those were the days when games worked from the get go, (y)
 
SpyderTracks

SpyderTracks

We love you Ukraine
SimonPeters116 said:
I think it's this tbf. When the game had to play, from installing off a CD. Games had to be delivered fully ready to go. Dial-up internet was so slow you could watch the lines of pixels in a photo coming through. So waiting for patches to download would be unacceptable.
Now, a patch downloads in minutes.

Do you remember the wobbly London foot bridge? They had to 'patch' that, with dampers.
OK, it was leading edge design, at the time.
But The Romans knew about bridges. They had the order 'break step', (as does the British army these days). This is because soldiers marching in-step can break a bridge, or make it bounce and wobble. Lazy engineering. A computer doesn't know about the effects of 'marching in-step' unless you tell it, but an engineer should. And the wobble frequency of that bridge 'made' everyone walk in-step, making the wobble worse.
I think it's the same sort of thing with game developers. They expect their computers to do most of the software writing for them, and patches to sort any out 'minor' problems after release.
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I absolutely agree this is a big factor.

I do also think there's a scale issue. Back in the day, gaming was quite niche, most gamers were bullied as "nerds", and the gaming community were looked down on. Royalties if you like from game releases were quite paltry.

With what's happen in the last 20 years, with gaming now being on par with some cinema releases with regards to financial return and insane numbers of copies sold on opening weekend, devs are pushed to release ever more "open world" or huge maps to try to make it a "special" release. And communication between teams even in the best conglomerates in the world sucks, lets face it.

When you factor in the number of devs working on any one project, it's insane, as you can see for the latest Modern Warfare game, they had 3000 devs working on it! That's just mental, but when you're accounting for returns of multiple Billions of dollars for a single IP, you can understand it.

gamerficial.com

Activision Have Over 3000 People Working On MW2 2022

Call of Duty is Activision’s most popular franchise by a mile, so it makes sense that the team have revealed that there are over 3000 people working on the series. Activision-Blizzard’s…
gamerficial.com gamerficial.com

When you think that a game like No Man's Sky had about 6 - 10 people working on the initial release from a literal cupboard in Guildford in some "hick" town - now I know that didn't go too smooth on the initial release, but even so, what they'd achieved with such a small team was a million times more impressive than what the MW2 team have put to market.
 
C

CMP01

Enthusiast
SpyderTracks said:
When you think that a game like No Man's Sky had about 6 - 10 people working on the initial release from a literal cupboard in Guildford in some "hick" town - now I know that didn't go too smooth on the initial release, but even so, what they'd achieved with such a small team was a million times more impressive than what the MW2 team have put to market.
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Just shows what can be done with either more time, greater resources/teamwork/communications etc etc.

Sure, No Man's Sky was underwhelming at launch... a bit buggy (but not like some more recent bigger team/budget games I could mention) and failed it's promise. But I went back to try it after a couple of years and it was great and better still since. Now look at CP2077, among others, two years on and I'm still not touching it no matter how much I loved CDPR's previous work.

Imagine how some games we might grumble over here could do with 6 months extra time and a bit more care taken, nm many of late that were delayed and still launched badly and in beta state (cough Warhammer 3 cough)

Buuut the less said about CA's ability to excel in the niche and genre they pretty much own...
Look out CA, you got Game Labs and Black Sea Games in the rear view.
 
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TonyCarter

VALUED CONTRIBUTOR
Might have to start recommending 32GB RAM as the new minimum if the next tranche of AAA games are as poorly-optimised as Hogwart's Legacy.

It's a sample of one, but this YouTuber sees FPS lows using 16GB of 2-4 FPS vs the 12-16FPS lows using 32GB...on a 12900 and RTX3080 at 4K Ultra and full RT.

Last time I tried it with those settings, I got a call from our electricity supplier asking if I could stop gaming for a few hours, as it was going dark and they had a town to light up :LOL:


2023-02-19_11-03-56.jpg
 
AccidentalDenz

AccidentalDenz

Lord of Steam
There's been a few small patches which seem to be fixing the memory leaks, as performance seems to be a little more consistent for me. Then again, I've totally abandoned RT in this game, so that's probably helping too to be fair.
 
T

TonyCarter

VALUED CONTRIBUTOR
ActuallyDenz said:
There's been a few small patches which seem to be fixing the memory leaks, as performance seems to be a little more consistent for me. Then again, I've totally abandoned RT in this game, so that's probably helping too to be fair.
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I tried RT for the first 4 hours, then with it off for the next 4...and to be honest, my 53 year old eyes and dirty glasses couldn't tell the difference. Playing on high, no-RT and happy with the smoother/faster 80FPS I'm getting @ UWQHD.
 
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TonyCarter

VALUED CONTRIBUTOR
I've nearly finished the game anyway, and other than relatively poor performance I've not had any game-breaking issues (well other than getting stuck behind a barrel once which disabled all my keys/controls so I had to shut-off the power).

But was surprised that what was labelled as a 'small patch' was so comprehensive...would hate to see what a 'large patch' looked like.
 
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