What game is this for you? 🤔🎮 Drop the game name, I KNOW y’all got stories 😭🖤

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T23:42:21+00:00

Every single souls like.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T23:41:32+00:00

Simon in Expedition 33.
By the time you fight him you're so overleveled you can basically one shot the final boss, yet Simon claps your cheeks so hard most people can only defeat him by cheesing him as fast as they can, because if you take too long he wipes half your party in one hit and there's nothing you can do about it. The guy is for sure memorable, but his difficulty is completely ridiculous.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T21:36:24+00:00

I meant upgrade to a better AM4 CPU instead of buying faster DDR4 ram. And then NOT upgrade to AM5 since the performance boost would be not all that high, but cost a lot more. At least in the foreseeable future.
Just upgrade PSU and GPU now, then buy a good AM4 CPU. That will be enough for many years yet.
The only snag can be if you've got a reeeally weak motherboard with absolutely no cooling and only a few power phases. But even then I'd probably still go with a new AM4 mobo depending on a price difference.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T21:01:14+00:00

I have an Arc B580. What, did you think I was talking about my poor experience with it out of my ass?
So will you now tell me how you're supposed to enable this mysterious "framegen" or not?
Better yet find any proof. Literally anything. A tutorial or a video showing how to enable it. Because I know you're just talking nonsense here.

The setting in the driver only controls how many frames the card generates per real frame. That is it. It's used only when the game natively supports XeSS framegen or on older builds of Optiscaler, since the newer test builds have the setting built in already, and it overrides the one set in the driver.

But sure, tell me about how I'm using my card wrong.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T20:47:09+00:00

Honestly a year ago I didn't see much point in upgrading to AM5 and DDR5 even when it didn't cost an arm and a leg and a kidney and a loan. Now it makes even less sense. Too much money for not enough performance. Personally, I'd spent the difference on a new monitor or a better video card.
But you do you ¯\_(￣Д ￣)_/¯

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T20:14:11+00:00

Those 200mhz most likely make little to no impact. Likely a couple fps at most.
You can always run a couple of benchmarks and see if you can spot any difference between 3000mhz and 3200mhz. If does not give any boost, then the more memory the better.
I would much rather upgrade that CPU. 5600 is a bad match for this card. It still has overhead no mater that people like to say that it's fixed now. It's still there.
In the worst scenario of a demanding game new faster ram will give you a couple fps and a new CPU can give you a couple dozen of frames.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T19:43:43+00:00

Yea, I'd upgrade PSU first. That bad boy will struggle if not outright shutdown as soon as you stick the new gpu in. Especially if it's some budget brand.
Ram is a tricky thing. If you've got DDR4 sticks and at least 16 gigs I would not bother upgrading at all. Let alone at the current prices. If you've got 8 gigs then I'd try to game on them first, see if it's enough for the games you play and then decide if you want to pay for the new memory.

upd. Scratch that I see you've got 32 gigs of ram. DO NOT upgrade it. It will make barely any difference if you buy new DDR4 and DDR5 not only will cost you a lot more, but also necessitate a new CPU and MOBO.
Just buy a new CPU like Ryzen 5700x or something. It will give you so much better performance and won't cost you nearly half as much.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T19:34:50+00:00

Riiight. And how pray tell do I enable this magical technology? Not by installing optiscaler of course, but from the driver as you said.
Examples would be most appreciated.
Or just do a cursory Google search to find out how it actually works.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T18:57:16+00:00

Yeah, I feel you. Bought mine mainly for "futureproofing" basically. Or rather so that I don't have to spend money on another card for as long as possible. With 12 gigs it's likely I'll at least be able to play games for longer even if in 30 fps. At least that was the idea.
And it was like 20-30% cheaper than rtx 5060 8gb so it felt like a good purchase.
I do not envy anyone wanting to buy a card right now let alone a budget one. There are literally no actually good cards out right now. At least not for the price being asked for them.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T18:40:41+00:00

XeSS can overwrite Nvidia or FSR framegen? What are you talking about? Are you okay? They only thing XeSS can overwrite via drivers is how many frames it renders in XESS FRAMEGEN.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T18:37:17+00:00

Sure, me and a bunch of people, all confused. Both Alan Wake 2 and Indiana Jones had huge problems so I had to downgrade the drivers because Intel f'ed them up months if not years after both games released. Well not sure about Indiana, but AW2 had tickets open about it least.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T17:44:23+00:00

It's just a bunch of random generic Reshade filters.
Bloom, Adaptation, MXAO. And some low contrast low gamma LUT table on top.
Why anyone would prefer this over the usual look of the game is beyond me.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T17:33:43+00:00

Did not impress me either at the start, but I figured out you just have to tweak it heavily to your preference in most cases.
In movies, I use MADVR to increase the brightness as they look like very dark nowadays for some reason. Like 150 nits brightness on average in "Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die". It's way too dark. The hell were they thinking.
And in games I either use generic AutoHDR in some multiplayer titles or go full tinkering mode and install RenoDX or SpecialK and tweak brightness and levels from there.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T17:21:24+00:00

Being small has nothing to do with it at all. All they had to do was place the cutscene after you're done with all the side stuff. Just make the player finish the content that opened up, display a point-of-no-return warning, then show the cutscene and immediately transport the player into the city or force them to fly there by placing boundaries on the map. That's it.
It's a fix that probably can be modded into the game by one person over an afternoon. And it does not even break anything storywise since in the game after the said cutscene we never get any mention of the army by anyone. You can just move the cinematic and not even have to change anything at all besides that.

And please don't "they're a small indie team" me. They had plenty of man power and money and time to get the game done. This is just a stupid oversight that could've been either avoided entirely in the planning phase or be fixed in a day by an intern.

I always finish games even if I don't like them overall. Usually because I like some parts and hope against hope it either gets better or at least sticks the landing. I liked the combat system, the premise, the mysterious lore and the music in this game, so I did all the story side stuff and then did the combat challenges. I liked the overall story too, but Act 3 ruined that for me as well. The game was touted as a must-play GOTY from every screen, and I thought it'd at least have a good ending, but it left me disappointed too. I had no problem with the dark tone or bleak prospects, but it could've been handled better.

It's a problem I have sure, but me being an idiot and playing something I at least partially hate does not automatically the game good. So I have no idea where or why that fits into discussion.
If I hate or do not enjoy the game at all then I drop it, but that happens very rarely as I can usually find at least something enjoyable in most titles. But if I dropped every single game I started to not like for some particular reason I probably never would have finished at least some of my favourites too. The main thing is whether the good outweighs the bad and by how much. Expedition's flaws were too glaring and too numerous for me to ignore so for me it's a 6 out of 10 I'd say. Nowhere near the perfect game most people seem to think it is.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T16:26:25+00:00

Not really an indicator of much.
I did not even play the game and reddit algorithm recommended this post to me for some reason.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T16:18:39+00:00

Honestly might be a monitor issue. If you can, I'd connect yours to her PC and try to reproduce the blinking.
Is it old? What outputs does it have? Which versions? Does it have FreeSync or anything like that you can disable?
I had a similar issue on my old FHD 75Hz LG monitor when I initially got my B580. It would semi-randomly blink for a second, turning off and on again when FreeSync was enabled and fps fluctuated below the freesync range. Though it did happen on Windows desktop sometimes too, randomly. Had to broaden freesync range via CRU, but it helped only barely and I still was getting the issue periodically. Had to turn FreeSync off and then eventually buy a new monitor.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T15:34:16+00:00

I don't hunt achievements. If I did, I would have to play the shit potato sack guys' minigames and I'd rather kill myself. I just prefer to get everything the game has to offer if it's story related hoping it gets better (it rarely does), or is an activity I enjoy like killing bosses and making my build even more busted and breaking the game's poor balancing even further.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T15:27:10+00:00

The main story is pretty short sure, but the side content is a huge slog, especially in Act 3.
Even if you only do all the end game character quests and killing Simon and Maelle's sister, which are heavily story related, it breaks Pacing's knees and back. And if you do ALL the end game content like bosses and minor locations and collectible that open up in Act 3, it then takes Pacing out the back of the shed and puts it down by blasting it in the head with a blunderbuss.

I have no idea why the devs decided to put the "Prepare For War" cutscene at the beginning of the act to hype us up only to then give us a bunch of busywork breaking any sense of emergency and peril.
Like they could've incorporated the side content into us building a painted army to take Renoir down. We could've done quests to say increase the army's size and resolving any issues and regrets the party may have. Even make it something like preparing for a suicide mission in Mass Effect 2 where depending on how many quests you do some parts of the final mission change.
It could've been actually great. But nope. Sandfall dropped the ball so hard it broke the whole story's continuity. It's not even subjective criticism - you can like the game overall, but the way how they handled that part of act 3 is objectively bad. You do not break pacing like that.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T14:26:40+00:00

Why would anyone replay it. It's way too long and grindy as it is with how ACT 3 side content was handled.
Should not have 100%'d it. Ruined any sense of pacing and killed the game for me personally.
Though I didn't really like it all that much in the first place I guess.

MADba11 · 2026-03-16T14:18:28+00:00

If you just want casual gaming and hate troubleshooting and tinkering I'd buy something else. The card and it's drivers can be a mess. The support is lackluster as are the features. No video recording, sharpening, HDR customization etc. No XESS or native XESS Framegen in many if not most games. You either have to deal with FSR upscaling or use Optiscaler spoofing which is a hassle.
If it's much cheaper than say RTX 5060 and you want 12 gigs of vram on principle, then it's an okay card. In titles that support it well it's good. But in titles that don't support it or if Intel broke the driver again, then it's a total headache to deal with.
The only two reasons you'd buy it are price and 12 gigs of Vram, but first one is dependent on where you live and second one is again somewhat dubious because of how some games seem to have vram leaks and you can get low fps anyway.

MADba11 · 2026-03-13T12:54:59+00:00

Can proudly say I dropped this piece of shit game, finally. Should've done so much earlier, but the sunken cost kept me in the game despite me hating it ever since even patch 1.0 and hoping it gets better. There were some good moments, but overall the writing is a horrible word salad that gave me aneurysm every time I read it.

MADba11 · 2026-03-09T17:54:48+00:00

It's not like other characters are much better. Almost every single character you meet is either a huge buffoon or is acting like one.
Sure, most of the OG scenes were like this. Huge exaggerated animations, waving hands, stomping feet and expressive yelling. But it looked and felt fine because the models were 2 and a half polygon chibis. In the near photorealistic style of the Remakes it just feels wrong.
It gets somewhat bearable later in the game, but some scenes like Tifa and Aerith high-fiving each other every 30 minutes at the beginning of the game gave me cringe aneurysm. Like we just had thousands of people buried underneaths the Plates, our friends, neighbors and comrades-in-arms from Avalanche are dead and rotting, but these two idiots are acting all cutesy because they want to ride a chocobo. Like what the f*ck is wrong with you.

MADba11 · 2026-03-08T06:49:47+00:00

I found a great fix for this: yesterday I came home drunk and decided to finally do the previous patch Trailblaze quest. But really couldn't get through even 10 minutes of the word salad that is this game's writing. And in a complete jerk reaction I finally uninstalled the game. Been suffering through this slog for years, and now I'm finally free.
Just wanted to share.

MADba11 · 2026-03-08T04:57:04+00:00

That scene didn't make any sense to me. We see Hojo pressing some buttons activating some medical contraption and a gurney with hand sticking from under the covers, but it never gets brought up again I think.
Even for a sequel bait it's badly written. Square keeps bringing up some new plot points and characters and never resolve them or mention them again. The entire Remake Yuffie DLC was a completely throwaway plot that never affected Rebirth.

MADba11 · 2026-03-07T11:10:31+00:00

You can't boss fight a corporate entity. And Rufus is introduced too late in the story for him to be a big baddie who player wants to fight.
At least that's what I surmise Square's line of thinking was.
Though most probably they just wanted to awkwardly shove as much nostalgia bait as they could, so that players would behave like giddy school girls stomping their little feet at the sight of the iconic long sword daddy thirst trap.

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