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I figured I might as well give this game a try, since I still have that EA subscription until the end of the month (I may even renew it if I decide to keep playing this game... it pays for itself if I'm actually going to play their games)

What I didn't like about previous Dragon Age titles was that everything was kind of out of perspective, not immersive. For example tall castles looked small and it didn't feel like I was walking through a game world etc. This one seems more in perspective.

Very nice graphics and I have it on Ultra with full ray tracing and "hair strand" (things that people on proton-db were saying you have to disable,m and/or use an amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xfffd3fff (for disabling some power/clock features... I'm not about to do that without even knowing what those bits represent). I must be doing something right with my wine-tkg and translation tools (vkd3d-proton for this one) because it works nicely out of the box, with everything in game enabled.

So far, on the easiest setting, the combat is do-able. Similar key mappings to Assassin's Creed Odyssey (and other games). Left click for "light" fast attack, hold shift for Strong attack. Space to dodge, right click to bring up shield etc. I was chopping up baddies like a pro from the start

I'll have to see about a photo mode to make screenshots, that's one thing I miss by not using Steam.

Pretty meager screenshots on Steam here (I don't like videos), but there are some
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1845 ... Veilguard/

I got one... this "Photo Mode" is weird. It seems a bit blurry, not what I see in game. That's because it does processing, and I didn't adjust any of the sliders.

The blue, horned, female character is me

http://www.mikeserv.org/coppermine/disp ... 23&pid=528

P.S. This one is a little better. It was upscaling (AMD FSR 2 in Performance mode) in game causing the screenshots to be excessively blurry, even with the the "Blur" slider in the Photo Mode editor set to 0. I don't like that downsampling/upscaling bullshit, I didn't realize it was enabled.

http://www.mikeserv.org/coppermine/disp ... 23&pid=529

P.S. I decided to go with AMD FSR in Quality mode, as it takes care of antialiasing anyway. Quality mode is much better, I can't tell the difference. I'd have to enable one of the Temporal AA variants anyway without it.

Say what you want about EA, but they do have good quality game engines.

As for the game, I actually like it and think I'm going to play it. On the easiest setting, "Storyteller", it has some nice settings available. For example I get a waypoint diamond indicator at every turn, and there's a setting to "Prevent Death". So all I have to do is enjoy the story and visuals, with easy combat and non-confusing traversal (which is a welcome change from the games I've been playing)

Looks good, nice and dark. Do those horns house cranial cooling rods like the ones Scorpius has?

I don't think so, she's just horny

What a wonderful game this has turned out to be. Impressive Elven ruins and magical devices, likeable characters and with that "Prevent Death" setting, I can explore and fight bosses I shouldn't be attempting yet. I still lose health, but when the health bar goes down I don't die. I get some health back for finishing strikes (when the enemy is "staggered") and health restored from smashing potion urns and I still try not to take damage, but there have been some big enemies I was underleveled for where I would have croaked, if not for that

I'm sure Dragon Age fans hate this game (because it's completely different from the original style) but they have made it great for me. It has kept my interest for 11 hours now, which is rare for anything I get from EA Play. Because the controls are so much like Assassin's Creed Odyssey, it's a no brainer for me to play.

Game forums have gotten really pointless to read anymore. It's all whining that drowns out everything else. Someone says they like the game, they are attacked and belittled even.

I thought I'd take a peek in EA's forums to see what people are saying about Veilguard, since the Steam forums are so bigoted and toxic and if you say anything against it, even when it's a direct, quoted reply to you, it will be YOU deleted and getting a warning infraction for some jumped up, trumped up offense.

The EA forums are a whinefest too. What really took the cake, and caused me to just close the browser tab was people complaining that the game puts loot chests for us "in the middle of nowhere". It's to reward you for exploration, dumb asses. Also complaints that the game lets you smash things to find hidden loot pickups. It's "inappropriate". The game puts that stuff there for you, it doesn't offend any characters.

I'm on the final stretches now, but I've gotten 67 hours of enjoyment out of this game (including side quests, character loyalty quests and exploring) so far. I would sure hate to be a game developer in this day and age when all they get is shit and abuse just for trying to make everybody happy.

They also complain that "it's too easy!" on those forums. Maybe that's why so many modern games have had an easy mode that doesn't seem like easy mode.

They'd have a point if "nightmare" mode or whatever equivalent isn't that much different than normal, but those assholes don't want ME to be able to play a game if I'm not as elite as they are.

This game's "Storyteller" mode made it enjoyable for me. The only time I really benefited from the "Prevent Death" setting was during side quest boss fights that I was underleveled for. I don't like having to come back or being unable to traverse an area. Even that was before I even knew that I could carry 4 health potions and use them by pressing R (I thought I could only smash the urns when low on health lol). In fact most of the time I was trying to keep my health low because I have an amulet that grants increased damage on low health, with the penalty of only being allowed 70% max health. Finishing kills were giving me health back anyway (skill point perk). They did a good job of making it playable for people who just want a nice interesting, relaxing game. I really don't like game difficulty... I never finish games where I die often.

P.S. That developer attitude is why I didn't buy Elden Ring. They made it difficult on purpose and too bad if you can't play it. So they don't get my money.

I think I've stopped the kernel crashes. I didn't have it crash at all without Ray Tracing and Strand Hair enabled, but I wasn't enjoying it as much without those things. The ambience looks much better with the RT, and the hair looked like shit without Strand Hair. My character has a nice, dark gold, bouncy pony tail and it looked like a hunk of cheap plastic halloween costume hair without it.

It was vkd3d-proton's pipeline cache. I knew it had something to do with vkd3d-proton because of the drastic change in the behaviour (much, much more frequent) between those two versions. It's pretty clever with shaders by default, it caches the DXIL to SPIRV conversion primitives so shaders can be compiled offline (during load screens/at the same time as DirectX shaders) and linked into the pipeline at runtime.

From the README.md file in the build dir:

## Shader cache

By default, vkd3d-proton manages its own driver cache.
This cache is intended to cache DXBC/DXIL -> SPIR-V conversion.
This reduces stutter (when pipelines are created last minute and app relies on hot driver cache)
and load times (when applications do the right thing of loading PSOs up front).

Behavior is designed to be close to DXVK state cache.

#### Default behavior

`vkd3d-proton.cache` (and `vkd3d-proton.cache.write`) are placed in the current working directory.
Generally, this is the game install folder when running in Steam.

#### Custom directory

`VKD3D_SHADER_CACHE_PATH=/path/to/directory` overrides the directory where `vkd3d-proton.cache` is placed.

#### Disable cache

`VKD3D_SHADER_CACHE_PATH=0`disables the internal cache, and any caching would have to be explicitly managed
by application.

I used the variable at the bottom that I emboldened, to disable that tomfoolery. (I deleted the existing vkd3d-proton.cache files in the game directory first).

This isn't the mesa vulkan shaders, and what this would do is just revert back to the old behaviour of back end shaders compiling on the pipeline and being cached. It's kind of worded funny, it calls it a driver cache (that's not what it is, it's cached pipeline state and shader IR's) but by "explicitly managed by application" he's only talking about the pipeline cache. The game does manage a pipeline cache, but it's for the DirectX 12 shaders which would have to be translated for Vulkan.

It has not harmed performance, if anything it has improved. (It probably wasn't handling it very well in this case anyway). I wonder if there are other games that would benefit from disabling that mechanism.

I played all night like that last night, but finally had the game freeze/crash tonight after about an hour or so, when some magic spewing enemies spawned. It was only a game crash, not the kernel and it didn't harm my X session. I did CTRL-ALT-F2 and surprise surprise, got the login prompt. By the time I logged in as grogan and did ps aux, the game was already gone. So I logged out and flipped back and the EA App and Lutris were still there. I rebooted, but only to see that it would and it did so without any systemd fuckery.

So I can live with that, I don't care if the game crashes occasionally if it just crashes and aborts. It's very good with the autosaves.

P.S. More interesting observations. I went back to vkd3d-proton 2.14 again (this is the latest stable, there haven't been any commits since) and the game crashed in less than a minute, as soon as I got to the first fight. Also, interestingly, I still do get mesa shaders compiled at the same time, my mesa_shader_cache_db grew by about 125 Mb. So that's good. The game knows the pipeline has changed, and triggers a shader recompile (it says "verifying shaders" and it takes a few minutes) on the initial load screens.

It was still just a game application crash. A directx error dialog. I didn't read it, it was out of focus and I just killed the game with the stop button on Lutris. Disabling the vkd3d-proton pipeline cache mechanism does indeed stop the kernel crashes and hard boots.

So back to vkd3d-proton 2.13 (git master soon before it went to 2.14) for that game since it crashed right away with 2.14. I might even try going back one more build, I still have a 2.13-master_old archived.

P.P.S. I went back to my 2.13-master_old and it crashed pretty soon, so back to the build that was working for this game. The amdgpu driver reacted with a protection fault (page fault type error) and recovered seamlessly.

P.P.P.S. It seems I had a crashy spot in the game state, with this vkd3d configuration and no version would get past it. I temporarily turned off Ray Tracing and got through it. Then I saved and quit and changed the prefix to use vkd3d-proton 2.14 and it seems to be doing OK at this time. I'll play it like that and see how often it crashes, now that the crashes are just an inconvenience again.

I do actually intend to do a third playthrough. I'm playing as the same character in the second one, just a different faction. I could also play as a mage with a magic staff, or a dwarf with a bow for my ranged weapon (my character has a shield toss).

My new wallpaper. The Elven gods (not really gods, but ancient elven mages that we are fighting in this game) caused an eclipse to conduct a blood magic ritual. This is my home base, it's called "The Lighthouse", a hidden area of the Fade (kind of like a spirit realm) only accessible by portals, mirrors called "eluvians". That statue of the two skeletons embracing is changeable, it's a statue of a wolf by default. That spirit dude you see at the counter is the "Caretaker", it's where you upgrade and put enchantments on your gear.

Here's the original PNG image screenshot from the game
https://www.mikeserv.org/coppermine/dis ... 23&pid=563

I'm on my 4th playthrough of this game now. This time as a female Elf character, Rogue class (dual wield swords, and bows as ranged weapons... best character class in my opinion, I rarely take damage at all)

Looks good!