Tag: Gameplay

How The Last of Us – will win the silicon lottery!

Paul
Last Of Us Pt 1
My Screen of the Game

Understanding the Silicon Lottery

Whether you like it or not, that CPU or GPU you bought might not last the entire time you have it.   After all, You could have a slighly below average CPU from what others who have the same CPU are experiences.   There is a great Youtube Video on this that you should go check out.   Let me be clear that I think most of the people who are having issues with games such as this are those who have faulty CPU’s or GPU’s.   So a break down of what I have found out, most users who are using a K series Intel isn’t have much issues with the game.   Why’s that well the video tells you what I have always suspected those cpu’s are higher end and probably aren’t likely to fail as much due to the high demand of quality they are wanting out of the series.  Even in th discussions there are several post about who can run this game without issues.   I will admit I had to turn on V-Sync, DSS, and make a limit of 9 FPS to get my GPU not to be used at 100%.  This is something you should do too.   I also did notice some cutsceens (Cineramics) For the game did drop me back into Windows 10.   So I do not like that idea but it did   Even though people will probably blame the game for their GPU’s dying, but in truthfullness you should already be limiting just how much the system uses your GPU.

Gameplay for my Systems

I found this to be very rough to start up with since there was at least an hour that the system was using 100% both CPU and GPU.   It doesn’t help that you have to build the shaders and I honestly would like to know how much space those are taking up in bouth my Steam Deck and PC but I couldn’t find any information, I have found people asking the same question but I have yet to find a way to see just how much shaders are being stored on my systems.  That would be something I would like to know at a glance on my Steam deck.   I have 42gb on my 256gb NVME drive on my steam deck that just say other.  So why can’t Steam fix this for us.

System Specs:

  • I9-10859k on a Asus Prime Z590-P Motherboard  (240 Watercooled Rad)
  • 3050 Geoforce RTX GPU
  • 32 gb DDR4 4,300 ghz ram
  • NVME Hard drive

As you can see this isn’t beginner PC, I built this for my enoyment and thus I know a thing a two about keeping the system cool.   It was constantly getting hot while building the Shaders which took an Hour at the least and I don’t know why they would need to build the shaders in the first place.

The Game

Other than the problems I had, I really didn’t have to much else problems on my computer so far.  I’ve been playing the game on and off for the past few days and I’ve not seen anything else to cause me trouble.   Is that because I won the silicon lottery, that would be a good guess and I’ll probably say yes.  I’m not sure why others are having more issues, but I would be willing to bet it is because they are letting the game take over their Frame rates and cause more issues than they need to.

SteamDeck Play

I even tried it on my SteamDeck and it only could do 20 or 30 FPS on it and it was very intuitive playing it because there was always those times you just couldn’t keep up with the game play due to it stuttering and don’t remind me of the hour long shaders building for it.  Again that needs to be fixed, we shouldn’t have to wait an hour just to play the game, which I did just to not have any stuttering in the beginning game.   I still don’t get the idea of why this is necessary, I thought our systems could build shaders as we go or maybe build the shaders for the next part of the game and so on.   I am hopeful that they at least make the game a little more playable on the Steam Deck because it was something I would like to do more often.   I play Spiderman on it without much issue but The Last of Us just seams to be a little more harder for me to play on the Steam Deck.

My Review of Subnautica : Below Zero and the Story Line

Paul
SubNautica: Below Zero

It’s not for the faint of heart

Subnautica even the original isn’t what you would want to give someone who hasn’t ever played the game because there are scare sequences that might not make for the best impression to people who has never played the game.  I’ve played both Subnautica and Below Zero through the whole game and come to realize that that there is something off on the game.   I wanted to talk about it and tell you my thoughts on the whole idea.

The story line

Now Let’s face it if you haven’t played subnautica original or this one and don’t want spoilers, please be warned this is going to have spoilers in it about the story line.

You’ve Been Warned!

The original subnautica, You crash land on the planet in an escape pod.  Then you have to gather resources and get yourself up and about to survive the environment.   Of course you need food and water and even a nice bed to sleep to make it look real and feel like you are actually living it.  The storyline in the game on the original was just really well done and you had to explore and find out how to save yourself from getting even more sick and that didn’t come all at once, you found out over time that you were sick.

Finally once you figured out how to get yourself well you had to help a giant leviathan who was trapped and dying due to be locked up and all she wanted you to do is let her babies go free who will help stop the virus in every plant and fish.   They seem to leak the antidote and it helps to cure  plants and fish.     Finally you do that and the next thing you have to do is create a rocket to launch yourself up and away to go home.     This was the storyline for the original subnautica and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I loved the exploration of it all and being able to go really down deep and to find the resources that I might need to survive.   The Base building was always the fun part, you could make big or small bases when you needed it and also make them however you liked and customized them your way.

Subnautica Below Zero

We find Robin getting off the ship with a drop pod and she wants to find out what happened to her sister(Sam).   The opening sequence was well done but the voice actors were changed, I am not sure why they changed but I was playing this game in beta and I don’t know why they wanted to change the actors but it was really well done.   So we find Robin trying to gather resources first like usual and building a base is something that needs to be done.   You’ll come to a point in the game where you will find a distress call(in morse code)   and find out there is an living entity in a cave who takes over your brain because it needed help to survive.   We’ll come back to him in a second.   You do the things you need to find out what happens to Sam and why she dead.   You explore and find out that Sam has an antidote for the big frozen leviathan and you are to find it and administer it to prevent Alterra from using the Kharaa Bacterium for research or who knows even a weapon.  Along the way you find out what happens to your sister and even some pictures and stuff that helps bond the player to want to know more and more.  Anyway once that storyline is done you have another storyline to complete.

The Talking Entity

So Now you have Alan(or Allen) in your head and there are occasional times where you two are talking to each other.   Either way you develop a need to get him out of your head and put him into a body or container.  He tells you what you might and even shows you where there might be some at.  You’ll definitely need to go deep like the last one.   I figured that I’d need to go deep again, it seems to be a constant with the architects.   They really do love to go deep don’t they.

You’ll get him a body but first you need to build the resources to build be able to build his body.   You’ll want to bring those resources that you gathered with you to the places far down below when you’re ready to make his container or body.   You make his body and he tells you the story of how he got into this predicament.  He tells you he’ll go back to his home world and ask for forgiveness and try to make right what he did wrong.   He offers you to join him and you do since you have no other way off the planet.   I really liked the ending sequence to this because you saw the space outside and it looked really nicely made.

Ending it

I really didn’t like the fact that there were two storylines in the game and the game just felt a little bit off but it might just of been me.   I do hope what we see in the ending sequence is a precursor to another part of Robin’s journey we will get to play.  After all, I am really curious as to what happened to the architects.  Does Robin get to help them or are they dead?  I really think Unknown Worlds is going to continue this game in the coming months.  We’ll probably see another game about the architects and it will hopefully be the one where we are still playing Robin and she has to help this being out to figure out what happened to his people.

Do you think they will create another game to continue off where they left or is this just the end of the game series?  Let me know what you think?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Affiliate links: