Every time I see this I get totally triggered and then I realize I can't deal with too much Asian weirdness. Strange. Is it grindy?
LMAO I can say as someone who has seen a lot of anime that I go from completely dumbstruck and mystified to "I get it, and it's still weird." And then I kinda gotta pull back. It really never stops being weird. But I think a lot of that weirdness comes from the simple fact that we are not the target audience at all... it's really appealing to a completely different class of mindsets. What people in the west get out of it and what the original audience gets out of it aren't the same.
Oh man, you convey this so perfectly well... I totally recognize this. I'm not an avid fan of anything in specific though... and when I am, I really do want to just do the actual 'thing' I'm a fan of. But that is totally the perspective of a real fan, yes. The one that joins the fanclub-type fan, that is.
The void... had it so many times and luckily its just a temporary thing. To me it really helps a lot to just 'not game' for a while after having finished a truly awesome game or story. Metal Gear Solids have done this to me, numbers 2, 3 and 4 in almost equal measure. Those games really leave you with so much to think about. Its really nice to just let that be there and give it attention. Diving straight into another game is a sure way to destroy that unique moment.
I never really have been either... I don't really own any memorabilia now that I think about it. I do have some LPs, but at least actually do spin those lol.
But no, that is the answer for me, too. Just walk away for a little bit and kinda let other things enter your mind as you process everything you took in. And then there comes a point when you can either have another go and have it be fresh, or go in for a completely new experience and roll the dice on restarting the cycle.
There is also another type of void I'm familiar with... ....Pretty unique, that.
Ahahaha... I totally get that. That's how I always feel when I get the super-endgame weapons/armor in a FF game. That is basically the cap. Like you can keep going leveling up and all of this stuff, but you pretty much can't do more than murder everything. Level caps are tricky in general. I think it's best when everything is so tight that you basically hit the cap right as you run out of stuff, but that is so hard to execute without watering things down to primordial levels. So most seem to keep things more open to the point where you can progress at different rates, and then try to incorporate extra credit stuff in the game for people who class into 'slower' builds. I know with those, sometimes I can get so honed-in on the open-ended process that I have sort of a workflow that is central to everything else happening... to the point where the 'everything else' is almost arbitrary. But that can be a tightrope walk... if it's not done right I find myself getting lost and then I step back and clearly see everything I know is going to happen... and sort of run through every point in the progression... which brings this really jarring sense of meaningless, but in a bad way. It's almost too real of an emotion for a video game, you know? It's not supposed to feel like that!
Fixed class systems have that limitation, I think. But like your example with Grim Dawn, there are ways of staging out the meta to continue keeping it fresh, where there are sort of reward tiers that can redefine a build just when you think it is finished. There are also plenty of ways to constrain progression reasonably without how far you can grow being obvious... sort of guide it to a range of points the player should be at by then and set up the parameters so it's very likely they will be in that range. It can completely negate the need for grinding to convey progress... the player still controls their progress, just not always so much the overall state of it. The problem is that this kind of balancing really takes time in order to iron out things like exploits, or boxing the player in too much... or even just leaving things too open. Honestly, I think that might actually be one of the toughest things to balance in those sorts of games. Any game with a level system is prone to some problems with it. The proof of concept is there, but it's pretty meticulous stuff, and yet sometimes it's hard to gauge.
Anywho, I found a Skyrim mod that adds distant particle mists.
Volumetric Mists is the one. That's one thing I always missed from FO4. They had all of those thick mists and real volumetric fog. A lot of Skyrims volumetric fogs are simple meshes with basically static textures, just plopped around. The weather system has it's own fog system, too, but it's simple, old-style 'haze' layers. Performance hit is nil on the former because the meshes are simple... they basically need to call a texture and define boundaries, and then serve as a physical point for determining how the volumetric light works. The latter is similarly simple to generate... simply define the depth boundaries and layer it at varying strengths and opacities. These particle fogs need a lot more polygons to work because the shape and density of the fog isn't just limited to a single texture or some global attribute affecting the whole image equally... the whole cloud has to be able to shift, move, break-up, have variable density throughout, etc. What you see isn't a texture at all, but particle emittance. It deffo ups your drawcall count, haha.
I'm thinking they must've had it ready, but chose not to use it much because it was considered too expensive at the time, only placing it in later for FO4, when machines could reasonably handle it. I mean, it's basically extra fog, manually put into parts of the worldspaces, as opposed to being baked into the image space - being a layer in a gobstopper that's technically static and tied directly to the weather system. They stay put as the world moves. The particle fog is locational - it's literally a part of the world. It hangs out where it is, regardless of where the camera moves. Though visibility is still distance dependent, so it can still appear to run from you - the difference is you can only see it when you back away. You can't chase the fog line. So it's a little higher in plausibility. Back in the day, it wouldn't have been worth the cost. Consoles would definitely struggle with all of the extra polygon action.
But it's a total yes. It's one of those things that's so simple that it's silly to get excited about, but it really is just the perfect compliment to the volumetric light from the sun. When you have that gradient moving further back in the frame, it really feels like the rays are really cutting through to you and actually moving over distance instead of just popping up in front of things.
All of the fogs are hand-placed... really adds a certain something, along with the more static
Obsidian Mountain Fogs. I feel like with this and dyndolod, my LODs are probably about as agreeable as they can be - the textures are higher-res and many more objects show up - they even have shadows for the trees. The only thing I could do is try to get full 3D LODs going. By default most of Skyrim's non-ground LOD objects are literally just a flat texture duplicated and rotated 90 degrees on itself, looks like a '+' sign when looking from the top down. Same awful trick they do with chains in the vanilla game. LODs with lots more polygons obviously hurt performance but I bet they look much better with even simple 3D polygons than standing cardboard cutouts. The best you can do elsewise is to try and obscure them like this. Which fortunately serves the atmosphere very well.
Unfortunately I think it's not even about hardware grunt when it comes to LODs. The engine starts to struggle immediately when you so much as up the resolution too high. Your game will just crash. It just can't handle all of it. So when people claim that certain 3D LODs have borked their saves, I kind of believe it. It has enough trouble with textures, and you do have to hook into saves to change them to begin with. It's the only way to get more trees, rocks, and even large locations (say a huge nordic ruin jutting out of another mountain halfway across the world,) showing up in your distant LODs. Once you have trees, buildings, water, and everything all the way back to the furthest mountain, you really realize how bare they were before. I would love to have the 3D trees... and actual grass on the surrounding cells lol. But at least there are ways to make due. Skyrim's weather system was kind of ahead of it's time... it is staggeringly nuanced and advanced. Lots of creative ways to tweak the illusion and make up for it. Sometimes I think the power of a good weather mod is in its ability to hide the right things.
As I learn more about making them and realize how many different things go into hiding this and accentuating that, I kind of shake my head more at Bethesda for having an amazingly useful weather system and barely making half the use of it that their own players were able to. It looks dead and stark for no reason other than not using what the engine had to put much more art and color into the renditions of the images. It's all there, but it's like a movie with no post-processing or grading on any of the footage. It's really bad to me now, what they did there, because I'm starting to think their weather system is one of the best-developed parts of the engine. It's really got a lot going for it. So it's like one of the best things they had to really make the game look impressive and immersive, they didn't even use fully! There is so much built-in that you can use that really just works and you can use it in many ways, that never sees use or proper care put in. Just base game with weather mods, which are basically just different settings for the already finished weather system, can be almost disappointingly better.
I found a few more to throw on top. It'll be interesting to see what the other fog mods do... I think I have 5 of them now
There's one that puts interior fogs over water ONLY on cloudy mornings. Another one adds more defined, mid-field fog. Should be interesting, because at the same time I've found these, I've really started to figure out to how to make the cloudy/foggy weathers really work on the ENB weather module. It's kind of dizzying... there are literally hundreds of parameters for different point in the TOD cycle. I just tackle one point at a time. The interactions with the fog in place make it so I have to dial it back in for the more extreme points in the cycle, but it works great when you do! Would've made this one a lot cooler if I had those fogs and had the sun/volumetric fog/volumetric light all working together:
I swear, any time I am near Azura's statue, there is at a minimum light shining specifically on her, even if it's cloudy all around. I'd say it was planned, but I struggle to remember a time when you could actually see the sun in vanilla Skyrim. There's a light source up there for the TOD system, obviously, but there is no sun casting rays in the engine, so it strange to me that they would go through the trouble to line it up intentionally for people to later add one in and see it coincide... but with where it ends up lining up I think they actually might've!
