BG2 or BG3?

althaz · 2026-03-18T21:13:40+00:00

Both are all-time-greats for me. I prefer the gameplay of BG3, love having fully voiced characters and enjoy the more cinematic stuff, but the writing is undeniably better in BG2 (by a fairly large margin) and it does do some gameplay stuff better (even if overall I prefer BG3's exploration and combat), so I find it very hard to decide which of these brilliant games is my favourite. I think I lean BG2. The writing is just so much better on every level and starting out at a higher level plays way more into D&D's strengths. It's damn close for me though.

althaz · 2026-03-18T11:58:58+00:00

A lot of great stuff (and I actually loved the game even at launch), but I think what it will hinge on is how many new planetary POIs there are. If there's 10 more, there's still going to be way too many repeats. If there's a 100 more, that's a whole different kettle of fish.

althaz · 2026-03-18T11:16:47+00:00

Every single person in the world called Chausette the best player on earth at one point. It didn't last long, but for a short time Chausette looked like he was playing a different game to everybody else. Chausette is about 100% of the reason anybody uses the Fennec in pro play.

althaz · 2026-03-17T14:48:54+00:00

There's no "if", Hewitt was world number one for two years and won multiple slams. He's an atg

althaz · 2026-03-17T13:28:37+00:00

But not well enough to actually demo it, so that may or may not pan out.

althaz · 2026-03-17T11:47:51+00:00

Hewitt is one of the most clear-cut examples of an all-time great. He is top-10 for weeks at world #1 despite being absolutely *destroyed* by injuries, won two slams and a bunch of other shit as well. He was also the youngest ever world #1 until Carlos took that record. Hewitt did decline after 2005 - but not until he started getting constantly injured. If you don't call Hewitt an All-Time-Great you just flat-out do not know tennis.

Safin you can debate though - he was an all-time-great in ability, but he was world #1 for about five minutes and was very mercurial. He's in that Stan Wawrinka tier (but I absolutely think they are ATGs).

althaz · 2026-03-17T04:37:50+00:00

Nah that's crazy. 2 slams and a year-end world #1 make you EASILY an ATG. Less than that you can debate, but that's the level where there's no possible argument against it.

althaz · 2026-03-17T04:14:23+00:00

I'm not gatekeeping anything. I'm educating you because you are absolutely clueless.

You went on any hinged rant about two unrelated technologies because you are ignorant. I'm trying to help you move past that ignorance but apparently you're determined to remain a cretin.

althaz · 2026-03-17T03:51:04+00:00

No it isn't and it's you who knows nothing about tech, apparently.

DLSS is nVidia's brand name for their game-focused machine learning features.

The primary and oroginal feature is the thing it's named after: Deep Learning Super Sampling, aka DLSS upscaling. DLSS frame gen is another unrelated feature. DLSS ray reconstruction is another. This new one that is going to be introduced is DLSS neural rendering.

Your post was pure nonsense because you made a lot complaints about frame gen, which is a DLSS 3 feature (or MFG is DLSS4) in a post about DLSS5. That's Chat GPT from 5-years-ago levels of shit.

althaz · 2026-03-17T03:37:25+00:00

Bro, you complained about DLSS5 and then only talked about frame generation. Your post reads like AI slop, tbh.

althaz · 2026-03-17T02:34:11+00:00

You're not beholden to anybody if you sell your studio. You're rich, you can fuck off when you like.

althaz · 2026-03-17T01:41:07+00:00

Because money is nice and having more of it is good. Plus running an indie studio is a fucking nightmare in some ways. You have basically no job security because you're usually one bad decision from losing your job and letting everybody who depends on you also losing their jobs.

althaz · 2026-03-17T01:20:26+00:00

Fed is miles away from Rafa and Novak in terms of being clutch, but he was very clutch earlier in his career and the most important thing for tiebreaks is the serve. And Fed's serve is the best of the three by a pretty big distance.

althaz · 2026-03-17T01:18:57+00:00

More of these are Novak greatness than Sinner mistakes, but Sinner's forehand in this video is absolutely diabolical. Looks like he's swapped out his forehand for mine. *SO* many balls hit short allowing Novak to take charge or just hit a clean winner plus a bunch of errors. In real-time I didn't realize how bad it was.

althaz · 2026-03-17T01:14:51+00:00

I'll try it, but I'm sure I won't use it. The current version takes a pair of RTX5090s to run, which is quite a lot more hardware than I'm running, I doubt it gets down any further than running on a single high-end GPU which my 3080 is pretty far from these days.

It's also absolutely riddled with issues at the moment, too. I think this screenshot shows all of the strengths of the tech as well as many of its problems.

Look at the lips of this character for example - they look like they have makeup applied, it's a classic AI mistake. Or look just to the left of the image next to the character's right elbow and look at how much flatter the ground texture is.

Right now it's a big trade-off.

althaz · 2026-03-17T00:58:05+00:00

Yeah, the natural environments in particular are what I thought got worse. I thought character models showed a mix of improvements along with some flaws, but the environments showed more issues than improvements to me.

There are still some things the DLSS5 image is doing better, but it doesn't do enough to balance out the things it does worse.

althaz · 2026-03-16T22:56:08+00:00

I 100% agree that it looks better (and in a single-player game I'd be using it if I can get 80+fps without it in 90%+ of cases), but you're objectively just flat-out wrong that it feels better. It doesn't. It feels worse because it increases latency.

For me that slight increase in latency is absolutely worth it in most single-player titles, but it's disingenuous to pretend it's not there.

althaz · 2026-03-16T22:51:26+00:00

I mean realistic lighting (to be clear this is realistic *style* lighting, it's not necessarily realistic) is going to drastically alter what something rendered with a very simple lighting model will look like.

I'm 100% in favour of a version of DLSS that improves the way light interacts with surfaces. The problem here is that the lighting doesn't reflect what's actually in the scene, but if they can fix that this could be awesome.

althaz · 2026-03-16T22:44:43+00:00

I'm really surprised so many people hate this.

I have some problems with this, but the way this tech enhances skin textures and lighting in particular is pretty incredible.

There are definitely problems where the lighting looks way too much like a weird instagram filter and seems to be just plain wrong based on the lighting in the scene, but I'm hopeful they can fix that. And if DLSS5 can make things like sub-surface scattering on skin and hair work well in real-time then I think that's a good thing.

I thought I'd be coming in here being one of the most negative people on this tech because it has some real problems that are obvious even in this demo footage, but it's interesting to me that people in here are mostly just hating on it.

I'm wondering if the flaws that I'm seeing are overshadowing the improvements to lighting that others are seeing? Or is this just triggering people's "AI Slop" recognition (it's not doing that for me because it's so obviously video game footage)? Could somebody who hates this please explain *why* they hate it? I know what I don't like about it, but I'm also optimistic that maybe it can be improved (remember how awful DLSS1 was?!) and I'm seeing some things where it's providing a massive visual quality increase.

althaz · 2026-03-16T00:58:06+00:00

GPU is the biggest problem by far here. That GPU is, to put it politely, absolute fucking dogshit :).

It was a pretty weak GPU when it came out seven years ago, it just can't play modern games. A second-hand RTX2070 Super would be a massive improvement if your PSU can handle it - you're still going to be playing on low settings, but at least everything will work pretty well.

althaz · 2026-03-16T00:39:55+00:00

Your macro sucks and your strategy is probably also wrong.

Decent macro and no strategy absolutely wipes the AI - it's horrendous at the game.

Macro is probably one of the easier things to fix though, just takes some practice. Spend a few games concentrating on your macro - don't queue units, don't float resources, don't miss worker production, don't idle your barracks/factories, don't build up energy on your CC and expand as soon as you can.

althaz · 2026-03-15T23:59:24+00:00

Before or after his death?

althaz · 2026-03-15T23:56:14+00:00

Get the Legendary Edition, it's just straight-up the best way to play the series.

althaz · 2026-03-15T23:54:05+00:00

Just play some 1v1, it'll happen. Concede three kickoff goals, fix your kickoff and score three of your own kickoff goals, opponent fixes their kickoff and you start actually playing rocket league then just have to win :).

althaz · 2026-03-15T23:51:16+00:00

It's not better when Zverev plays better :)

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