Fixing Mass Effect black blobs on modern AMD CPUs

Re:Fixing Mass Effect black blobs on modern AMD CPUs by paulmd on Sunday July 19, 2020 @05:54PM (#23892763)

ME1 was groundbreaking for the time but really has not stood the test of time all that well. The gameplay mechanics are significantly rougher than ME2, ME2 feels like a shooter with strong RPG elements and ME1 feels like KOTOR where you get to aim the guns, it is very much an old-school bioware RPG title. The mako planet exploration is excruciatingly bad. Droid scavenger hunt on the citadel is excruciatingly bad. Endless elevator rides are excruciatingly bad.

There are some sequences that felt tedious but the story is definitely the best part overall.

ME2 is definitely the apex of the series by modern standards.

Also you forgot to mention ME:A. Maybe your face was tired? ;)

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Re:Fixing Mass Effect black blobs on modern AMD CPUs by account42 on Monday July 20, 2020 @09:03AM (#23897360)

> ME2 feels like a shooter with strong RPG elements and ME1 feels like KOTOR where you get to aim the guns, it is very much an old-school bioware RPG title.

Funny, that difference is exactly what I most disliked about ME2.

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Re:Fixing Mass Effect black blobs on modern AMD CPUs by moomin on Sunday July 19, 2020 @06:01PM (#23892809)

I haven’t bothered playing it. Hardly even seems canonical and the reviews described it as worse than DA:I, which... did not impress me.

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Re:Fixing Mass Effect black blobs on modern AMD CPUs by paulmd on Sunday July 19, 2020 @06:33PM (#23893003)

Frostbite engine is such an unwieldy monster that it has killed the last 3 games that tried to use it, all of them top-tier AAA franchises no less (BFV, Anthem, ME:A).

It is optimized for two things, Battlefield and FIFA, and it is even cumbersome for that (see: BFV's lifecycle and the numerous long-standing bugs that plagued it). It was never designed for an RPG and things like inventory systems and facial animation did not exist and had to be invented (badly). But EA is all-in on the "everything has to run frostbite company-wide".

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Re:Fixing Mass Effect black blobs on modern AMD CPUs by SeanBoocock on Sunday July 19, 2020 @09:29PM (#23893888)

This characterization is inaccurate and misleading. A game engine is a basic framework with which to build a game - responsible for things like platform abstraction, memory management, and the basic rendering pipeline - but much of what is identifiably part of any specific game lives on top of that. Unreal Engine and Unity don’t ship with “inventory systems” and neither are “designed for an RPG”.

Having worked on multiple Frostbite and multiple Unreal games, both engines are capable of building a wide variety of games. The discrepancies in my experience aren’t technical but organizational. It is hard to compete with the scale of Epic’s developer support organization and the wider industry inertia around their technology.

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