Would you believe, I actually finished the main story line just yesterday! It feels fairly short compared to San Andreas (which took me nearly 10 years to finish, playing on and off. Finished it just 3 weeks ago!), though I think the checkpoint system in missions is the main time saver here. And no mandatory stunt flying lessons either! The ending did feel a bit rushed though, and still left too much of the plot unresolved IMO. The credits came scrolling up quite unexpectedly, after a seemingly normal and not particularly difficult mission.
Equally unexpected, about 30 minutes (!) into the credits, I noticed Guybrush Threepwood's name scroll by! 🤣
badmojo wrote:So how does it look at 1024x768? It looks nice and plays fine at 1080p over here but I can't seem to help myself, I'm still messing around with the outrageous number of graphics options.
I played about half the game at 1024x768, but the shimmering textures and fuzzy antialiasing started to annoy me so I cranked it up a bit. It looks freaking amazing at 2048x1536 and 1600x1200, but I can't turn all settings up to max on these resolutions without running out of VRAM (the in-game indication is pretty accurate, I found). I settled for 1280x960 at 130Hz now with all options on Very High, which offers a good compromise between graphics quality and frame rate. Maybe I'll just turn it up to 1440x1080, see how that works out.
The advanced options don't really change anything except the framerate, so I left these on minimum and only enabled "High detail streaming when flying". On very busy highways the framerate does still drop a bit, nothing bad but it's definitely noticable. I found that motion blur set to 20-30% helps a bit to mask this.
badmojo wrote:This excellent guide from nvidia takes a lot of the painful trial and error out of it: http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/grand … rformance-guide
Thanks for the link! Haven't seen this guide yet. Man, these Nvidia PCSS shadows are almost an unfair advantage compared to the other options.
badmojo wrote:I tend to get side tracked so haven't actually seen much of the main story line yet, but I've enjoyed what I have seen. It's such an amazingly realistic world that it strikes me as a shame that they've injected a nasty GTA plot into it - those seemed more appropriate in the cartoon-ish worlds of Vice City and San Andreas. I find myself wanting to play a good guy in this one! Oh well!
My thoughts exactly! It's kinda hard to relate to any of characters if you have no direct influence on the plot. They're pretty much all complete assholes in general, and make some cringeworthy decisions occasionally. The only likable characters in the game (like Floyd and the Azerbaijani guy) have their life made pretty miserable by the player characters (indirectly, you!). I think it's more or less a limitation of the "interactive movie" genre, and all things considered, that doesn't make it a bad game by any means. But I do think the game would've been more enjoyable if there was more left for the player to decide.