8mo ago

Alex Battaglia: "Fortnite still sucks as a PC game. I wonder why Epic finds it acceptable that the first play experience on PC is an absolute disaster due to shader compilation"

bsky.app

Alex Battaglia (@dachsjaeger.bsky.social)

7 comments

Some of us are jaded and won't accept microstuttering or poor performance, but considering Fortnite's success I believe that a large number of players surely must not mind, especially if it goes away after a while.
- We aren’t respected as pc gamers. Seems like Epic boss doesn’t like our money.
The critical path for a lot of game adaptation is joining friends in a game. So that means your first game is time critical, your friends are already playing, you just downloaded it, the most important thing is to join your social group and have a good time. Immediately.
Anything that gets in the way of the critical path, causes people to switch games, or to refund the game (i.e. they were not able to join their friends)
So even if the first game is a stuttery potato, it's better to have it work immediately, then delay until it's beautiful
- I mean, they could solve both problems by adding a button to compile shaders in the menu, that way the people are anal enough about shader stuttering have a way to fix it without lengthening the time it takes to get into a game for the masses
They still don’t have proper shader precompilation? That’s insane to me
Blah blah blah I'm going to ignore the opinion of half the gamers out there and bitch anyway.
I appreciate DFs technical dives but they don't understand that micro stutters on the first few loads aren't what people care about outside of gamer "forums". See every fromsoft game every made except sekiro.
- It's not even really that bad: a new patch will force recompiling of the shaders in Fortnite, and by the time you hit the ground from the battle bus it's usually... fine?
  Like, yes, it's a stuttery mess in the lobby and while landing, but who cares? That's not gameplay where it matters in the least what the pixel-peeping frametime stats say.
  This kind of thing is why I've just stopped caring about product reviews. It's either pixel-peeping nonsense that nobody but the reviewer thinks is important, or it's nonsense like 'The new Gaming Blaster X 2000 Mega Pro! For $1499 it's the best thing since the last thing, you should buy it, recommended!' and you look at the benchmarks, and you see that last gen was 148 fps, and this thing is 158 fps on the minimums and like, who gives a shit.
  You won't notice this if you're playing the game and not playing watch-a-stats-graph, and this has kinda become the norm for a few generations of reviews on everything.

7 comments