Wouldn’t have been that bad if the push for ray-tracing didn’t come together with a higher price. Isn’t the point of ray-tracing to make things easier for the developers to work on lightning and shadows and such? Apart from the obvious graphical fidelity.

There’s absolutely nothing good about it. I’ve been reluctant to get into RT because it just doesn’t offer that much to me and seems to have launched us into the upscaling and frame generation era of gaming because the oh-so-wonderful ray-tracing capable GPUs actually need some crutches to deliver their killer features. And mandatory ray-tracing now, alongside the mandatory DLSS to see any benefit from a 5000 series card from Nvidia are absolutely going to contribute to me doing my best not to buy into ray-tracing for even longer.

I know it’s lost battle because of how many have either happily or silently jumped ship, but it’s now a matter of a principle. It’s not even that kind of situation when one is not enough until there’s one too many to ignore - it’s just me not feeling right about it; even less right than before.

I’m the old man yelling at the clouds.

Not happy about these Indiana Jones type of system requirements. I was coping that DOOM: The Dark Ages won’t have mandatory ray-tracing, even though I knew they’ll be using either identical engine or some “minor” variation of it, because. well, id software, idetch engine, etc. Fitting name!

DOOM (2016) and DOOM: Eternal ran extremely well on my GTX 1080 paired with Intel i5 3470. Now I won’t be able to run the new title with same GPU paired with Ryzen 5 5600x. There’s a lot of people in the comments in various places saying it’s totally fine or just arguing with people that are not in favor of such demands.

And there won’t be any multiplayer.

The mighty have fallen.

There’s enough people in what I assume to be big gaming communities, like active and paying and stuff, that are defending this, citing that other stuff got more expensive, too… and somehow not many agree that incomes have not risen proportionally. Them temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Somehow I think that most people defending this kind of crap are too young to actually have a first-hand feeling of how much prices for everything have risen.

Opinions on that one time Microsoft closed Arkane and the studio behind HiFi Rush, despite the latter’s success and the fact the former made Redfall a slop because of total mismanagement? I’m curious in how nervous that makes you as a developer and how common this bullshit is as seem from within; from outside, it’s basically all I remember about AAA because I don’t often interact wit the scene apart from reading.

This and what Putin’s presidency turned out to become in the long run is what I now happen to imagine largely felt like to witness the Nazis rise to power.

You just don’t know what’s coming before it’s actually there. The historical evidence even shows that the Nazis weren’t that out-of-touch with reality at first, at least in terms of what was largely acceptable back in their day - like rights to land, borders, with many countries and nations being in a very turbulent state after the first World War. It’s only after they got the power and set up the frameworks, like gradually oppressive laws and manipulating opinions and values through propaganda, that they went to do what we ultimately associate them with.

Putin spoke very high of “the west” and democracy and such at first, but quickly showed his true self when the Kursk sank, then with Beslan (the Nord Ost), then many more times, but back in the day, without today’s hindsight, it seemed so… plausibly deniable? Like people could just vote him out the next time or excuse some things with the same traumas and biases that still brewed in the generations born in or shorty after the USSR. Now a full-blown tyrant, modernized to dictate through deceit, looking wild compared to his first days - a proper example of boiling the proverbial frog; turning the dial little by little, either compounding into some greater evil or simply revealing its true self, both equally inconsequential in the end.

Trump and Musk, similarly, have for the most part been interesting characters, so bizarre that excepting anything more felt naive, beyond the realm of possible. And yet again, unless there is enough backlash early on, people like this will keep pushing, until they lead us to the edge.

I never wanted to see for myself how something so terrible can rise to power, seemingly past everyone’s attention. It’s dreadful to think that the lessons of history are bets learned on one’s own mistakes, that the Germany’s experience is not enough to generate the unrest that keeps such people out of power.

I’m not even on the same continent as these two, but I know they’ll be influencing a whole lot of change around the world, change that will never benefit any way.

The more things change…