The Talos Principle 1 & 2

[Epoch]

Double post but I don't care. Got to the island, and Jesus Christ do I hate Nanite

We went from dense forests full of grass and tress without any aliasing back in OBLIVION, to now where if you turn off the vaseline AA you get a vomit of pixels


What idiot decided we should start modeling every single individual leaf or blade of grass? There is no point, you aren't going directly next to them, all it does is justify the shitty TAA smears existence. I don't know if I can play this game, TSR was driving me crazy with its fade in, TAA sucks ass, DLAA is just a slightly better TAA. I played Cyberpunk with no AA and that was bad, worse than this, UNTIL I got to the forest, but at least my tweaks made it stable?

Here is another clip. The game still uses SSR for some god forsaken reason even with Lumen enabled with its SDF reflections, and it doesn't even work properly as a fall back so you get garbage like this.


There are like no mip maps I swear to god. If they do exist then they are so blown out because of the temporal blurs that with those disabled they are essentially non existant. Things are shimmering that haven't shimmered since the ps1 days, like completely flat surfaces with just a texture.

I've turned on TSR again and there is still shimmering on the trees and grass, even with max settings, that's how bad it is. It also acts like a motion blur in this environment because of how dense it is, managed to get a clip of it but its a bit subtle on video.

 

[IDanceonTrannyGraves]

I'm waiting for the physical of Talos Principle 2

 

[Enig]

I knew the Linux dev leaving was the sign of Croteam slipping, seeing this game's performance is fucking depressing considering the first one was acclaimed for running butter smooth and looking grand.

 

[Epoch]

Game is still blurry and doesn't look very good unless you stand still for a few seconds, even then I think the art direction of the first game was stronger. There are some cool locations but its all very repetitive. They refuse to stack gameplay mechanics very much if at all and in the 3rd chapter its all the same, do 3 worlds where each world has a new gimmick, then go to the megastructure and do super easy puzzles, repeat. Some of the new mechanics are pretty cool, but you never see them outside their world other than like once or twice in the final puzzle of a world.

I actually softlocked myself very easily a few times in world 7 because of how either unplaytested or poorly designed some of the puzzles are with it's mechanic. They don't tell you that you softlocked so you have to restart from checkpoint manually and lose all progress.

The story isn't very interesting, they are trying to make the mystery of the megastructure the driving force, but its just not very interesting. There is very little philosophical depth compared to the first game. First game felt like a passion project, this feels like a sequel to make money, probably because Serious Sam 4 didn't do very well. From what I've seen on the forums it feels like the devs don't even know Unreal that well and are using 'engine hard' as their excuse for dropping their in house engine. This game doesn't do anything that their engine couldn't already do, probably better with its baked lighting.

What Unreal does let them do is get very lazy with asset creation and optimization, since they can just throw Nanite and Lumen at it and it will look 'good' without having to actually do any work.

Inside the megastructure the entire environment is kitbashed from surfaces like this. This is a displacement map applied to a subdivided plane that they slightly decimated and then just dropped straight in and let Nanite do the rest. This is extremely lazy and would never fly in any other engine, but Nanite lets them get away with this because all it costs is the game being heavier on the user. The entire game is made from basically untouched Megascans assets, you could open Bridge and pinpoint every single thing. Those megastructure models are still Megascans stuff, kitbashed together in Mixer, there were even models of rubble that were just that material applied over a Megascans coal pile model.


on the non megascans stuff when you get close you can see it start to fall apart. This is probably a biased example since this is pretty small detailing, but the UV mapping is just straight up awful. But its probably the reason the game has such brutalist architecture for everything. UV mapping can be automated using auto unwrapping or just triplanar mapping (which again costs more for the user) and then they just layer some mesh decals along the edges for damages. I dread seeing the topology of this stuff, its probably a mess because they let Nanite do everything.


Actual texture work is pretty basic when they cant rely on megascans, its just basic Substance Painter filters, thats the default smart rust and smart dust mask layers, they hand painted some dust around the grip which is another megascans texture.

Environments are pretty basic, what they did was just paint a landscape and then use the foliage brush to scatter random Megascans Nanite assemblies all over the place in an attempt to make it look detailed.

You can see this in every world, they completely just vomited it all over, in some cases not even checking for overlaps

and they didn't apply any of Quixel's 'recommended blending techniques' so you have harsh intersections along all of the ground scatter.


What really annoyed me was seeing this happen. It happens all over the game with fences. What they did was just drop everything in and turn on Nanite, which auto generates LODs. For skinny geo like this there is little mesh detail for it to remove so when it does you get the silhouette being mangled like you can see on the right. What they should have done if they weren't lazy, and I'm calling the devs lazy here, I know thats a popular thing to say but in this case it actually is, is that they should have disabled Nanite for these and hand authored LODs where it switches over to a flat texture of a fence at a certain distance, this would stop it from losing shape, and would stop subpixel details that get freaky with upscalers because it would be a texture that could be mipped properly.

TLDR: Unreal 5 is going to lead to a generation of game developers that don't know how to make games, it will only enable more pajeet/yandev style garbage.

Edit: they just quoted Anakin not liking sand...

 

[ABE LINN COHN]

At least the puzzles are pretty good.

 

[Susie Sumner]

I got really pissed when I saw the "an ssd is recommended " warning, has this what game devs really strive for? Its not like I don't own one but most games do not have the right to take up space, ESPECIALLY this one, same with the graphics "requirements", Talos 1 looks amazing and runs very well compared to the mess this one is, slapping ray tracing on everything doesn't make it better.
I don't appreciate the dumbing down in some parts, like the stars being obvious clues, NPCs to tell the story because apparently the player is too retarded to do that on his own, puzzles are easier but I don't know how much of a "new" audience they expect with this game, probably 2-digit IQ for them to include those fires of Prometheus that allow you to skip them entirely.
The museum was nice for nostalgia and I like that they kept the Talos 1 model for Athena (on a seperate note I think all other robots look too uncanny, I prefered the 1 look).

 

[Epoch]

I got really pissed when I saw the "an ssd is recommended " warning, has this what game devs really strive for?

Unreal 5 requirement, due to how Nanite streams data. Another thing that would be under the devs control if they were using their own engine, but using Unreal 5 leaves that entirely to Epic Games. It's all these little things that add up that makes the death of custom engines awful.

 

[Brain Power]

Oh man that's a shame. Meanwhile the first game still looks gorgeous and runs perfectly fine with the highest settings on potato pcs. Good engine crafting and optimization are turning into a lost art nowadays, they just expect you to consoom the blooating while everything looks worse.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Holy shit that's multiple levels of retardation: 1. This isn't 2004, no one censors shit anymore and word censorship only appears when retarded gen X-ers want to make a joke about moral guardians that don't exist for nearly two decades.
2. This kind of censorship only exists for children, your only exposure to it will be if you consoom content that is low brow enough to warrant curse words and is for children.
3. The argument is pro censorship, of course if someone mentioned censoring grooming materials (that is objectively dangerous to children) then there will be crying on how unfair it is.

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

Oh man that's a shame. Meanwhile the first game still looks gorgeous and runs perfectly fine with the highest settings on potato pcs. Good engine crafting and optimization are turning into a lost art nowadays, they just expect you to consoom the blooating while everything looks worse.

By 2030, every AAA/AA game will be 1TB in size and require an SSD, while looking and performing worse than Xbox360 titles.

Okay, that's a bit hyperbolic, but it really feels that way sometimes.

 

[Susie Sumner]

By 2030, every AAA/AA game will be 1TB in size and require an SSD, while looking and performing worse than Xbox360 titles.

We will return to cartridge based physical games where each copy is an SSD around a cardboard casing and cost 200 dollars each

 

[IridiumDragon06]

I really enjoyed the first Talos Principle, and I'm feeling ambivalent about two so far. I've only gotten through the first world, and I like the puzzles well enough, but I'm just not invested in the plot or my fellow robots. It feels so fake and artificial, and the one thing I'm hoping for is a reveal that the robots really aren't sentient, and that what Prometheus is offering is a full upgrade to that status. But apparently it's been some unknown hundreds of years, and aside from the original twelve, not one of the robots in the city have left? Not feuded or fought? There have been no fatal accidents as people getting used to existing with physical bodies and the generous respawn mechanics of the Simulation ran off a high scaffold and died?

I hope that the game pulls out something deep and interesting in Act 2, because the hollowness of robot society makes me not at all engaged in the mystery of what's going on, and it feels like a bad sign when I find myself resenting the fancy visual presentation of things because it means having to listen to my exploration-buddies talk.

 

[Quijibo69]

So far the graphics on the second one look like ass compared to the first one. Everything looks like a Rice Crispy Treat.

 

[Epoch]

I hope that the game pulls out something deep and interesting in Act 2, because the hollowness of robot society makes me not at all engaged in the mystery of what's going on, and it feels like a bad sign when I find myself resenting the fancy visual presentation of things because it means having to listen to my exploration-buddies talk.

I finished the game and I can say it's not worth it. The story goes nowhere and it felt directionless the entire time, only settling on its idea of a theme at the very end and its extremely weak. I have to wonder if there was even anyone from the first game still involved. The game is really just a safe sequel made to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The story was gutted and simplified and told to you by other characters. The puzzles are much simpler and never build upon themselves, each area introducing a new mechanic, spending 6 of the 8 main puzzles teaching you the mechanic in super easy puzzles, then the last two are sort of challenging but nothing like the first game, then the next area throws all that out and it starts over with a new mechanic, never layering them. There is no difficulty curve, and the puzzles that are inside the megastructure are barely even puzzles, where in the first game the trips to the tower were the culmination of what you learned in the prior areas.

The music is a downgrade as well. It went from contemplative and lonely with religious themes to loud bombastic and epic, which is a good description of the whole game really. It's bigger, louder, but without the depth or emotion of the first game. I've already said more than enough about the graphics, but I want to say that I really like the architecture, but its ruined by the aforementioned Unreal issues, but it also feels like they built it around the puzzles instead of building the puzzles with the world. The puzzles are tiny and are never actually built in to the environment or use it in any way. In the first game the whole map was a puzzle because of the stars requiring thinking outside the box, but in 2 they turned it into an open world checklist and the stars are now just copy paste riddles with obvious ways of solving them, they re-used the shoot a laser at a statue thing in most of the worlds.

The bridge 'puzzles' that replace the tetris door locks suck, they aren't a puzzle, they are trial and error, and they get overused for everything because the game is extremely formulaic. The first game had better structure, pacing and story telling. The story unfolding from the computer terminals and Milton alongside the QR codes from previous iterations and then hints of the outside world from audio logs, the tower and Elohim being a constant question that hooks back in to everything, and the world itself glitching and breaking at the seams giving you a sense of urgency. Talos 2 doesn't have any urgency, there is no story that unfolds and the structure attempts to follow the first game with the megastructure replacing the tower, but the first game was non-linear in how you approached it, where as in 2 you are railroaded along and have no choice in when to brave the tower.

Maybe someone else can do a better analysis of the plot, but to me at the end it felt like it was boiling down to change = good, stagnation = bad, perhaps someone can have a political spergout over it better than I could. It doesn't use the Greek mythology to any actual interesting extent, it exists as a setpiece only, with only the bare surface level references to the mythology told to you directly by the holograms, which I think the discussions with were meant to replicate the Milton stuff, but its forced and like everything else, means absolutely nothing and has zero affect on anything.

Conclusion: Glad I pirated it, I doubt there will be mod tools since its Unreal, just play Talos 1 which still looks and runs great, here it is at the highest settings with 8xMSAA and 4xSSAA at 1440p, 60fps with none of the awful smearing that 2 has.

 

[Crypto Six Gorillionaire]

"I have stripped as many parts from this vile skeleton as I can but it is not enough. I am still a machine."
"... I sought to blame our mayor and his associates for the decisions that made my life so miserable."
"But now I see that my problems aren't external at all. It's all me, and if I could change myself, if I could make myself truly human, I would be happy."

Based?

 

[Brain Power]

Look what was announced a couple days ago:

https://nichegamer.com/the-talos-principle-reawakened-announced/

Does it really need a remake, and in Unreal 5 of all engines? OG still looks and runs amazing (and it only takes 8 GB of space!). I remember getting the gold edition for like 2 dollars when it was released in GOG. God I fucking hate that foggy/smudgy look all modern games have.
(75 GB for some barely retouched graphics JFC)

 

[Backyard8405]

i loved the first game and its mix of puzzles and interesting philosophical discussions on the computers. im playing the road to gehenna dlc of the first one right now then i want to play number 2. the puzzles are quite hard.