Age of Wonders 4, easily Triumph’s best 4X, received a meaty free update alongside its premium expansion this week. The expansion itself is pretty tantalising, introducing a new form with the Avians, the Reaver culture, new tomes and a whole lot more, but the free update feels almost as significant.
The Golem update, which is available now, throws some new features into the mix while also overhauling a bunch of existing ones, cramming in enough stuff to make it DLC-scoped.
Golem’s highlight is the Item Forge, a new city structure that, once unlocked, lets you disenchant items and use their essence to forge new ones. Per the patch notes: “You can change damage channels of primary weapons. You can add passive properties on almost all items. You can add active abilities on staffs, melee weapons and wands.”
Other new features include war coordination, introducing a new panel to the Free City interface that lets you boss your vassals around, ordering them to attack infestations or enemy cities, or defend your own territory. Expect to see a bunch of new events, too, with the addition of 18 war-focused events, as well as six warlike quests. The Pantheon has also been updated with a bunch of new unlocks, including new banners, hero origins, society traits and Item Forge visuals.
Triumph has also used this update to overhaul a couple of existing systems. There are significant changes to “water gameplay” and how coastal regions work, with new unique ship models, tweaks to water vision range, new water combat maps and the ability to build land improvements on coastal provinces when you annex them, like farms and quarries.
Form traits have similarly been overhauled, with a new point buy system in place, where traits cost between 1 and 3 points (you get 5 to spend). Existing traits have been tweaked, and new ones have been introduced, letting you give your fantasy races a hideous stench, reducing enemy resistance; make them light footed, so friendly units don’t block movement; or bless them with sharp eyes, giving them increased vision and sensing range on the world map.
Check out the full patch notes to see the rest of the changes. They’re pretty damn extensive. This is very much in keeping with the model publisher Paradox uses for the likes of Crusader Kings 3, where each expansion comes with a free update that’s just as wide-ranging as the premium stuff.
There’s enough in here to dig through that it should keep you plenty occupied even if you don’t shell out for the DLC, though the Empires & Ashes expansion absolutely does seem worth checking out. I’m very keen to build an empire of colourful birds who ride bear mounts—one of the other additions that comes with the DLC.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/1699463934_One-of-2023s-best-strategy-games-Age-of-Wonders-4.jpg6651200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-11-08 17:08:102023-11-08 17:08:10One of 2023’s best strategy games, Age of Wonders 4, just received a massive free update full of overhauls and new features
Grand Theft Auto 6 will be officially announced by the end of this week and a trailer will follow in December, according to a new Bloomberg report. The report cites “people familiar with [Rockstar’s] plans”.
If it proves to be true—and the source is far from dubious—that means we’ll be getting the “official” GTA 6 announcement almost exactly 12 years after the GTA 5 announcement happened on November 3, 2011. That’s a long time, but Rockstar parent company Take-Two has high hopes for it. “It needs to be something you’ve never seen before on the one hand, and it needs to reflect the feeling we have about Grand Theft Auto,” Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said in May. “That’s a big challenge for the team”.
Of course, it’s far from a secret that Rockstar is working on GTA 6: the project was subject to one of the biggest videogame leaks ever last year, revealing a bunch of footage and details that may or may not make it into the final product. The alleged hackers faced court over the affair in August and await further sentencing.
It’s probably no coincidence that Take-Two will present the financial results for its second quarter fiscal year 2024 tomorrow (November 8).
What do we know about GTA 6 so far? This page of GTA 6 details is exhaustive, but in a nutshell: the leaks suggest two playable characters that are “Bonnie and Clyde inspired”, and the setting will take in Vice City, at least. Our release estimate is some time in 2024.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/1699427896_GTA-6-will-reportedly-be-announced-this-week-ahead-of.jpg7501200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-11-08 06:00:032023-11-08 06:00:03GTA 6 will reportedly be announced this week ahead of December trailer
The game industry has suffered yet another round of layoffs, as Ubisoft confirms that it has cut 124 employees worldwide as part of an ongoing restructuring effort. The bulk of that number, 98 in total, were let go from Ubisoft’s Hybride VFX studio in Montreal.
Hybride’s website describes it as “part of the techno-creative family of Ubisoft,” but its work is focused primarily on film and television rather than videogames. The studios numerous projects include Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Watchmen, The House With a Clock in its Walls, and Kong: Skull Island, along with pretty much every recent Star Wars films and series: Ahsoka, The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, The Rise of Skywalker, and many others. Ubisoft clarified that Hybride is not part of its major Ubisoft Montreal studio, but is a separate studio based in the same city. According to Mobygames, Hybride’s only videogame credit is on Far Cry: Primal.
“Over the past few months, every team within Ubisoft has been exploring ways to streamline our operations and enhance our collective efficiency so that we are better positioned for success in the long term,” Ubisoft said in a statement sent to PC Gamer. “In this context, today we announced that we are reorganizing our Canadian studios’ general and administrative functions and reducing headcount in Hybride (our VFX studio based in Montreal) and in our global IT team, which impacts 124 positions overall. These are not decisions taken lightly and we are providing comprehensive support for our colleagues who will be leaving Ubisoft during this transition. We also want to share our utmost gratitude and respect for their many contributions to the company. This restructuring does not affect our production teams.
“As part of this transformation, 98 people, representing less than 2% of our Canadian workforce, from our business administrative services and IT team will be leaving Ubisoft. All affected Canadian employees will be supported through this change, including severance packages, extended benefits where applicable, and career assistance to help them navigate their transition.”
2023 hasn’t been an overly smooth year for Ubisoft. It began with employees at Ubisoft Paris going on strike to protest “catastrophic” comments by CEO Yves Guillemot, who was accused by the Solidaires Informatique union of trying to pin the blame for Ubisoft’s financial struggles on employees rather than management. Following that came reports of unrest at multiple Ubisoft studios in Paris, Montpellier, and (via IGN) Montreal, multiple game delays, and an embrace of AI and NFTs that frankly nobody likes.
But it’s also been a rough year for the game industry across the board, with layoffs seemingly industry wide. Star Trek Online developer Cryptic Studios cut its workforce just last week as part of Embracer’s ongoing financial struggles, Bungie made cuts in October amidst reports of declining Destiny 2 player numbers, and Epic laid off more than 800 people in September just because it was burning too much cash. Other big game companies including Electronic Arts, Activision, Take-Two, and CD Projekt, along with numerous smaller developers, have followed suit.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/ASSASSINS-CREED-MIRAGE-13-NING-A-TESOUREIRA.jpg7201280DecayeD20https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngDecayeD202023-11-07 18:00:332023-11-07 18:00:33ASSASSIN’S CREED MIRAGE #13 | NING A TESOUREIRA
A technical analysis of the graphics rendering in Cities: Skylines 2 has identified the reason why the performance is just so poor. Put simply, the game is trying to draw the cityscapes using a shocking number of polygons, with few systems in place to reduce the amount when it’s not needed. It’s not something that should be happening in a modern game but the recent breakdown also suggests changes within Unity are partly to blame, too.
And when the city management sequel finally appeared, it turned out the dev wasn’t kidding and the only way to get any semblance of a decent frame rate was to whack most of the graphics settings down to low or completely off. The first patch for the game helped matters a bit but the fact remains that, as a simulation-management game, it really shouldn’t be as GPU-dependent as it is.
I learned the full answer to that puzzle over the weekend, via a short Reddit post. It contains two things: A link to a technical analysis of the game, involving a spot of decompiling and rendering software tools, and an excellent discussion of the findings. The breakdown was carried out by software developer Paavo Huhtala, who explored the game’s inner workings with a fine toothcomb.
It’s a long and dense read, especially if you don’t know much about rendering, but the primary issue is that the cityscapes are being drawn using way too many polygons. And I mean by multiple orders of magnitude too many. How do 25,000 vertices (corners of a triangle) sound for a simple clothesline model?
If you need a point of reference, take the clothing models used in Cyberpunk 2077. Some of them use an enormous number of polygons and I’ve seen one with as many as 29,500. But that’s triangles and these will share corners, as they’re ‘stitched’ together. The actual number of vertices for that jacket could be as low as 8,000.
This log pile in Cities: Skylines 2 comprises 100,000 vertices (Image credit: Paavo Huhtala | Colossal Order)
There’s so much going on in the Cities: Skylines 2 engine is making nearly 7,000 draw calls and over 50,000 API calls (requests made by the game, via DirectX) in a single frame. Now those figures by themselves, and set in no context don’t mean very much, but they’re both enormous in general and indicative of the game asking far too much of the GPU.
For example, taking a random scene in Cyberpunk 2077’s cityscape shows fewer than 10,000 API calls are required to render the frame. Now, one can’t directly compare these two games as they are so very different, and city-sim games are likely to be making more calls than any shooter, as the world changes so much and fills up with lots of interacting models. But even so, 50,000 is…well, a lot!
Apparently, the decision to use high polygon count models will “become relevant in the future of the project,” whatever that means.
Normally that many calls would make a game highly CPU-bound, but not so with Cities: Skylines 2. That’s because there are yet more problems that just utterly grind down the GPU. Many of the high polygon models used have no so-called LOD (level of detail) versions.
These are simplified versions of the original objects, built from fewer triangles, and get used when the item is far from the camera. In other words, there’s no point in keeping all of the intricate details when you can’t see them.
Remember that 29,500 polygon jacket I mentioned earlier? It’s never really used in the actual game, as LOD versions of this scale that amount right down. When it’s being viewed from far away, the item of clothing just gets represented by a handful of triangles, and you can’t tell because it’s nothing more than a few pixels on the monitor.
The developers openly admitted this was causing performance issues and that it would be resolved in time. Apparently, the decision to use high polygon count models will “become relevant in the future of the project,” whatever that means.
For the frame analysis, Huhtala noted that 36 million triangles had to be processed for multiple rendering passes. While a lot of these aren’t visible on screen, it’s still an excessively high number and would only get larger as the city expands during the gameplay.
Cities: Skylines 2 is processing millions of triangles for scenes like this (Image credit: Paradox Interactive)
It gets worse, though. It seems that Cities: Skylines 2 doesn’t appear to cull objects that aren’t visible particularly well and combined with the method used for creating shadows (four separate rendering passes just for shadows), a huge amount of time is wasted on processing data that’s completely unnecessary. Nearly three quarters of all the draw calls and half the frame time in the analysis were for just doing the shadows!
This is why the game performs so much better when you set the detail levels to low, disable shadows, and anything else that relies on geometry. So it would appear that the developers just made a real mess of things and that they should be held entirely responsible for it all, shouldn’t they? Well, perhaps not.
Huhtala’s analysis goes further than just examining a frame of rendering. Using a decompiling tool to peek inside how the game was utilising Unity (the engine package used to create the game) highlights a number of problems that were somewhat outside of the developers’ hands.
Cities: Skylines 2 appears to make heavy use of two major features of Unity: DOTS and HDRP. The former is a complex but powerful collection of software packages that, in theory, enable games to be hugely intricate and rich in object interaction; the latter is the engine’s high definition rendering pipeline and is required if you want to employ all of the latest graphics wizardry in your game.
You don’t really need to understand what they do, though, as that’s not really the issue. Colossal Order began work on Skylines 2 way back in 2018, quite a while before DOTS reached a public release. Even HDRP wasn’t fully ready then or certainly nothing like its current status. Huhtala suggests the devs had to write out a lot of code themselves, simply because Unity either didn’t have what was needed or the status of the new software features required significant handcrafted solutions at that time.
My own take is it looks like the developer was very unfortunate with the timing of how things were changing under the hood of Unity but still made the decision to go down that route, despite knowing that it would have to do a fair amount of coding work to navigate through the system changes.
Perhaps Colossal Order had hoped Unity would have pushed through all the changes quickly, giving it sufficient time to get to grips with it all properly. However, it would seem it just had to ‘make do’ with what it had and ended up making some poor choices for the rendering techniques.
But regardless of this, the end result is the game runs really badly, having been made by a team that chose a development path that involved using software that wasn’t fully ready. Or at the very least, the developers wouldn’t have much experience with it, because it was so new.
When it comes to creating games across multiple platforms and genres, Unity is typically the engine of choice for hundreds of thousands of projects. But that doesn’t mean it’s simple to use and, if anything, it’s a pretty complex system as it currently stands. The maker of Unity highlights that if you’ve been developing games for a long time, switching to DOTS is a big change.
Cities: Skylines 2 may become the game it was intended to be and this will all be forgotten about in time. But right now, it stands as a reminder that making huge, complex games is hard and can go badly wrong if you make the wrong decisions early on.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/1699355784_A-tech-analysis-of-Cities-Skylines-2-proves-its-rendering.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-11-07 10:15:412023-11-07 10:15:41A tech analysis of Cities: Skylines 2 proves it’s rendering WAY too many polygons, making Cyberpunk 2077 look like Minecraft in comparison
Blizzard may have turned Diablo 4 around in the last month, but there’s still plenty of work to do before the release of its first expansion, Vessel of Hatred. BlizzCon’s Diablo 4 Campfire Chat stream had surprisingly little to say about the action RPG’s major remaining issues: dull itemization and a barren endgame.
The Diablo 4 team said it wants it to be easier to compare items and find things to do at level 100, but they weren’t ready to discuss specifics. The focus for BlizzCon was the new expansion and Season 3, which will introduce leaderboards, weekly challenge dungeons, and a new level 100 seasonal event. Itemization, build and gear presets, and easier target farming for unique items were only briefly mentioned as plans for the future.
Diablo 4 players seem split on the whole thing. Some people want the base experience to improve before anyone starts talking about a new class and continued storyline, while others are desperate to play something new. But with Vessel of Hatred due to launch late next year, Blizzard should have time to fix Diablo 4’s most critical issues, or at least start to build a solid foundation for what will be an annual expansion release cycle.
Season 2’s massive list of quality of life changes was a great start. Here’s what needs to be prioritized next:
A loot filter
(Image credit: Tyler C. / Blizzard)
Season 2 introduced a storm of loot in every part of the game, but sorting through it all is like doing homework. A full inventory isn’t an exciting opportunity to find upgrades anymore—it’s work.
There needs to be a better way to quickly pick out upgrades and ignore the rest. A loot filter seems like the only answer when loot drops so often. I want to be able to have the game only highlight items with maximum mana and attack speed for my Sorceress and save the five minutes of squinting at my inventory after a bountiful Helltide or Blood Harvest event.
Conditional stats
(Image credit: Sean M. / Blizzard)
Diablo 4’s item stats sometimes read like a math problem. Certain effects will only work if you do something else first, like activating a barrier or crowd controlling an enemy. It’s tough to build your class around a bunch of stats that have requirements before you get the bonus, and Blizzard seems to agree. Season 2 simplified conditional effects on Unique items and in the Paragon Board, but most items in the game still have ridiculously specific stats like doing more damage when injured.
I don’t think they should go away entirely—some of them can be fun to build around—but they should show up less and be more distinct. Or, as game director Joe Shely implied during BlizzCon, become the primary reason to alter your items with crafting.
More endgame
(Image credit: Blizzard)
Shely says Diablo 4’s endgame is a high priority, and we already know season 3 will help with that. Weekly challenge dungeons, leaderboards, and the Greater Rift-like Abattoir of Zir event should make reaching level 100 significantly less boring. But the issue isn’t just with the lack of activities, it’s what to do with the rewards.
Diablo 4’s loot isn’t very versatile. Unless a piece is an upgrade, it’s probably getting sold or broken down into materials to fix up your other gear. Item trading with other players is largely pointless and you can’t even craft your own stuff. Loot is a dead end and it reduces Diablo 4’s endgame into what is essentially a bunch of ways to farm for tiny percentage increases in your gear. For any new activity to feel worthwhile, Blizzard needs to find a way to make their rewards more broadly meaningful, whether it’s to your other characters or an economy of crafting and trading.
PvP
(Image credit: Tyler C. / Blizzard)
I forget Diablo 4 has PvP until I pass through the Fields of Hatred on my way to something else. It barely feels like a part of the game. PvP isn’t for everyone, but I think Blizzard could do a lot more to nudge people in that direction. World bosses and other world events should spawn in PvP zones and there should be a reason to at least engage with it even if you’re not looking to get a bounty on your head.
World of Warcraft regularly encourages PvE-focused players to dabble in PvP to earn currency for new gear or for cool transmogs. Open world PvP, especially with Diablo 4’s regularly broken builds, is inherently unfair. If Blizzard could find a way to embrace that in a way that isn’t intimidating for people who can’t go toe-to-toe with a decked out Barbarian, it might help with its endgame variety problems.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/1699319692_Diablo-4-still-has-4-crucial-issues-to-fix-before.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2023-11-06 23:08:482023-11-06 23:08:48Diablo 4 still has 4 crucial issues to fix before the expansion launches next year
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