Far Cry 6

[Grogan]

Well, I can start a Far Cry 6 thread now

I've only just gotten through the linear, cut-sceney parts but it's been pretty nice. I can play it on Ultra, with 165 Hz Vsync (though I'm certainly not getting 165 FPS at those settings lol) and it's pretty smooth. I'm at the Libertad camp and have a FAL rifle now (which was always one of my favourites in these games).

The bad guy, Castillo, is a good villain. He reminds me a little of Gustavo Fring (from the Breaking Bad series')

P.S. I soon realized that's because it IS the same actor that played Gustavo Fring. Older, more wizened, nastier man in this, but it's him, Giancarlo Esposito

[Zema Bus]

I still have to get back to this one, I've been distracted by Assassin's Creed Odyssey

[Grogan]

I found the sweet settings for this game.

Refresh Rate 165 Hz, with Vsync (and frame rate limiting) OFF

All settings Ultra, except Texture Filtering set to High. It was probably using some aggressive anisotropic filtering or something at Ultra. It was just one last piece of the puzzle, it was pretty good but this made it smooth. I was surprised because usually texture filtering isn't expensive but that made a difference. Of course, stupid shit like motion blur turned off, always.

There are some funny mock Spanish names for things in this game.

First of all, the "Supremo" from Juan. A crazy launcher doohickey thing that I haven't quite figured out how to work yet. (I could never hit anything with the dynamite attachment). I just upgraded it though and I have different doohickeys on it.

Then, there's this harpoon gun called "La Clavadora" (literally the nailer)

Not to be confused with this 400 rpm, silent nail gun El Susurro I also got (but haven't had a chance to try yet)

Also, I seem to be getting these "Exploradora" points now lol

[Grogan]

So I'm fairly surprised at what I can enable here in this game. Not only Ultra everything (except no motion blur) and no scaling rubbish, DirectX raytraced shadows and reflections, adaptive sharpening (cleans up after antialiasing lol) and variable rate shading (VRS). That's actually just a performance shortcut, variable rate shading. The AMD version uses luminance, it cuts the resolution in dark areas where you can't see shit anyway.

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The game looks gorgeous, with lighting and shadows and all now. I won't say it didn't harm performance (even more noticeable while driving) but it's definitely playable like this. I'm using 165 Hz and no vsync, and it's not choppy, it's more like a smooth slow down because it's not a limitation of anything else but those shader cores or whatever, allocated to it. I went right out and restarted the game to make sure I wasn't dreaming, too.

The previous 6700 XT card (RDNA2) was capable of enabling ray tracing settings, but in practice not really usable. (I tried just enabling ray traced lighting in Cyberpunk with that card and it was too hurty. I can't test that now though, I've removed it in disgust)

This is because AMD open sourced this shit. Everyone can use it, game devs, us, everybody. I do have the latest everything though (kernel, mesa, vkd3d-proton, wine etc. from like yesterday) but I didn't expect all those gimmicks to actually work

[Grogan]

Now, the real question is, did going through all that conversion process to UEFI so I could enable "ReSize Bar" (direct quote, including case, from my bios lol) actually help?

I think it did, and I thought this might be a prime candidate to show it. After some long load screens (shader compiles, new Mesa) and some initial pipeline work (fairly brief) this game settled down to being hardly able to notice I had that DXR ray tracing shit enabled. I was driving a big truck and crashing into shit too lol

While I was driving this truck too, I was driving on a wet mountain road (paved) after rain. Not flooded, but a layer of running water because the road was dipping into valleys and stuff. It looked so good... swoon. Lighting and shadows while walking in the forest is delicious too. Also, very realistic "haze" in the jungle after a rain. I almost felt hot and sticky, it was so realistic. Not exaggerated, but the way the air refracts etc.

Also tried Borderlands 3, which isn't anything advanced, but has ridiculously large datasets and bloated textures. It worked well, but I don't have a frame of reference to feel, like the recency of Far Cry 6 DXR the night before.

By then it was 8 o'clock in the morning though and it had to stop.

[Zema Bus]

That's good to hear

[Grogan]

I started some DLC called The Vanishing, by following up on this telepathic communication I got from this Russian lady telling me about this creature, La Devadora (the devourer). I went to a bunker when the game informed me I wouldn't be able to leave. It took away all my guns and gear and I had to find the portal to this other dimension, and blast through some bio matter with a giant laser to open it and enter to rescue Chorizo (the dog on wheels... how did he even get in the bunker?) before I close this portal for good. In this dark dimension, there's this entity that has turned everyone into... zombies that attack. I have a pistol and a shotgun and ammo is scarce, I have to melee with my "big knife".

The atmosphere is creepy, and it demos the ray tracing nicely, but I hate shit like that. I wish I hadn't have started it now.

[Zema Bus]

I was glad when that DLC was finally over lol! It gets more frantic near the end but you get access to much better weapons.

[Grogan]

Hah! I can thank this game's shitty (and evidently buggy) save system for getting me out of that DLC. There's only one running save (multiple slots for new games), and I could see no way out of it. So I resigned myself tonight to just playing it, and I was spawned outside the compound with the bunker, I'm not in that other universe anymore. The quest is still on "go to the blah blah and see what's up", I still have the two quest weapons, the shitty silenced pistol and shotgun, BUT my slot 1 and 3 weapons are equipped, and I have my Supremo and stuff. I'm out of the DLC, so I can just go play the rest of my game and change out those weapons when I get to a bench (I hope it lets me, because I don't think I can get back there now to finish the quest unless I can get back in and that portal is still open. I can't seem to get in that compound (though I didn't try hard, I just wanted to get out of there).

P.S. I'll bet that if I fast travel back to the village/base, Chorizo is there. That's usually how silly shit like this works. NPCs are back where they normally are if you leave a DLC.

[Grogan]

Am I ever glad to be back in my game! What happened was that I simply have those DLC mission weapons in my inventory now as Unique weapons. It let me change them out. I'm not sure if I can get back to that alternate dimension (that's pretty wonky save behaviour, I was a ways into that), but I don't care because I'm not going to play that. Also, Chorizo was back at the Montero base as expected. So... neener to that stupid quest lol

I just did a fun quest (with a sad ending... the whole thing was a setup) where I had to go with the Monteros to rescue some of their people that were to be executed. It ended with an exhilarating escape in the back of a truck. I just happened to have my incendiary assault rifle and with infinite ammo in the back of a vehicle, I was lighting up pursuing vehicles. I had to repeat it several times, because I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. The truck kept getting blown up, and I'd either die or the mission would fail (If I'd gotten off). As far as I knew I had blown up all the enemies, but it kept happening.

It was so horribly scripted that even though I'd already destroyed the helicopter, I didn't destroy it at the right time. I figured out that I have to destroy the helicopter before the truck stops... to wait for me to destroy the helicopter (I presume?). If it gets to the part where the truck stops, it blows up for no reason after an elapsed time, even though there's nothing to blow it up. I was waiting for it to get closer to me and saw no reason why I couldn't (it wasn't even shooting at us yet). I was even trying repairing the truck but it wasn't down much, it only took a couple of seconds.

I'd be mad if I didn't love the sequence I was repeating

[Zema Bus]

Since you're not going back to that DLC, here's what the last 5 mins of it looks like, including Chorizo vomiting up an alternate reality slug creature

[Grogan]

Heheh... then he chomped it for good

That is a silly DLC.

[Grogan]

Heheh... some crazy shit happened tonight in this game.

A treasure hunt, with a supply drop on the top of mountain, because this fool radioed in the wrong coordinates. Fearing retribution for his screw up, he tried to climb. I found his body, with a note that he broke his arms and legs trying. He concluded by saying "I'm glad I found this orange box to put my note in. This way it can be an inspiration to others". Anyway, it was a tough climb, grappling, going through caves and traversing ledges, climbing vines, grappling and swinging. Then, I'm almost at the place where the supply crate is, but I can't figure out how to climb. I've got rocks, and some support webbing anchored into the rock (the kind that prevents rock slides). I can't climb it, I can't destroy it, I can't see any other way to traverse. I accidentally fired my Supremo rockets and was all "oh no!". I was almost dead, with just a sliver of health. It was lucky I didn't fall off the ledge I was on... where was I now? It boosted me up right where I wanted to be... no way! lol

So then I'm heading to my next objective on foot. I like that, because I come across enemy soldiers and skirmishes with the resistance to help with. During one shootout, vehicles were frantically swerving to avoid it on the road. A dump truck comes along and creams this soldier on a horse. Plowed it right into a pole and then into this shelter. It looked so funny all rag doll dead and stuff.

[Zema Bus]

Almost like you had planned it that way lol! I had something similar happen in 'High on Life' when I was endless getting killed by an enemy in a confined arena. At one point after many deaths and respawns one of his weapons blows me way up onto a ledge from where I was able to leisurely knock down his health without him being able to do anything more to me.

[Grogan]

I think I remember that spot, where there was that toxic goo on the floor and you had to grapple to those plates etc. during that fight. That game did have its aggravating moments of traversal. Maybe someday I'll try to get that game going again with some affinity settings (it will be trial and error), but right now I can't stomach crashes like that. Nothing will halt your system like a CPU fault. Well, in that case it's not a complete halt, but it disconnects enough OS subsystems that it's fatal, anyway.

Remember back in the 90's, the original Pentium processors all had that f00f bug? One line of assembly (hell, one word is the business end) compiled into binary, if executed would hard lock any system. I had one. (download test program, run it, then it's instantly time for AT power off for you)

I've got about 25 hours into Far Cry 6 and so far, it has not made me angry or frustrated me once. It's been a nice relaxing game. Even at the start, when the weapons were shit, the health bar wasn't. It's not my favourite game I've got, but it's definitely the best Far Cry campaign since they switched to that style of engine (Far Cry 3+)

[Grogan]

Heheh... I found this crazy contraption last night, a little fan hovercraft. It seems to go over any terrain (doesn't like trees and boulders lol) and goes at a pretty good clip. It's a bit hard to control on the road going fast, but OK. I was trying to get to water to see how it handled, but got attacked and stuck in the trees while I was heading for it. I was intending to actually bring this one back to a vehicle post to keep it, too. That annoyed me, so I killed them with FIRE

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[Zema Bus]

After all the hours I put into the game I haven't come across that one yet. I'm going to get back to it over the 3-day weekend.

[Grogan]

This is one reason why I like to go around on foot in games, because that's how you find nifty stuff, situations, vistas etc.

[Grogan]

Some of the billboards and murals in this game are funny. Look at this guy forcefully kissing a frowning baby... these faces crack me up

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[Grogan]

Well, I gave up on this game. Once I got over the nice graphics and realistic water effects etc. it's really not that much fun. I more enjoyed walking to my quests (the driving is irritating, winding roads that make it take longer to get there than on foot, with messed up waypoints that take the long way if you follow them) than the actual quests. Some of them are pretty stupid, I've seen enough now.

The straw that broke the camel's back, after I killed this evil female general, the next story quest was to have a party, with La Morale (the more terrorist-like faction). Put up with silly drunks and "drive to the beach house", then take jet skis to an island and then it's "get food for the party". OK, pick carrots (one of the leaders is righteously vegan), shoot crocodiles... there are only two on the whole island. That put me at 88% for obtaining the food, after scouring the whole island for any other alternative, which left... fishing. At first I didn't think I had a fishing rod, so I quit.

Here's the thing. It doesn't save the quest even though you've accomplished some of the objectives like drive, jet ski, talk etc. It spawns you back on the mainland at "drive to the beach house".

So a few nights later I thought I'd try again. I look up the fishing rod ("fishing tool") and I do indeed have it, it was an early game quest reward, I just didn't know how to equip it. It's in the equipment wheel, nowhere in Inventory. So I can't do it. I'm doing the quick time events but the line keeps breaking no matter how quick or careful I am.

I guess "parrot fish" are too strong for the basic fishing line, so I go to a "tackle box" to upgrade my fishing line and get this: It needs "Industrial Circuits" as a crafting component. For fishing line! Fuck, that's too stupid for me. Gunpowder and stuff too, but I have plenty of that, but not industrial circuits. So I quit again, which will spawn me back at the irritating "drive to the beach house".

That's a story quest I can't ignore, so that's it. I've pretty much had enough of this game and I'm not suffering that, so I took my hundred gigs of disk space back for something else. I've had it since March and still haven't finished it. I made the decision because the Ubisoft clients all need updating, and didn't want to do it three times (Now it's just Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Valhalla installed).

[Zema Bus]

This is the first Far Cry game I didn't finish since Far Cry 2.