Similarly, to 3440x1440, except now I find myself ordering information on screen more, like using a half of it. Resolution really has a major impact in the whole experience.
And like lex, I can still play at 720p, but I do get the 'why is everything so effin huge' / low information density smartphone feeling. Not something I'm a huge fan of. Just give me well ordered, clean UI and high info density, instead of having to scroll half a mile to finish a sentence. Still, moving 'back down' in resolution is easier than going up and feeling comfy with it, to me. Immersion plays a big part here, once immersed in a game, it really doesn't matter what it is or how it looks. Your mind is entangled in it, that's all you need.
Yeah, I can understand this. I'm like that with scaling for interfaces, too. If the display has the resolution to make it smaller, but still legible to me, I'd like to free up that space for more info. I can't stand mobile interfaces because of how much space they waste. It takes a bit to acquire all of the information you see going the way of high density, but once you do adjust to it, it's far less tedious.
Going down in resolution feels weird to me initially... just this stuffy feeling. But I can't pretend like I didn't play tons of Skyrim on a 720p TV at one point. I'll still play older games with my filthy emulators blown up on a 1080p display, maybe a light scanline overlay at most, as god intended. I was playing a little Star Fox 64 that way the other day. As long as it's not something like, classic portable resolution, anyway. As soon as I'm into the game, I almost can't see it any other way.
Upscaling really isn't different at the end of the day, in terms of information on the screen. It's just redundant, fudged-in information, representative of what might've been there across the extra values. If anything, the response I get is just kinda craving a little more on the screen. It doesn't affect how I actually interact.
Going up is like "How can anyone live at this speed?!" for like a day or two... it's kind of disorienting. I don't know if that's an ADHD thing, but it's like my mind wants to micromanage everything I am seeing. And then once I'm used to it, I find it superior.
All that aside, smoothness of motion is still king for me. Nothing takes me out of a game like rough animations, poor performance, or bad feedback. That's why I'll usually take a tradeoff on resolution for FPS if I have to... within reasonable FPS ranges. Ideally, you always have both resolution and frames to spare, but when I don't, I scale down and it really is just immediately better for me. Consistency of information seems to be the mitigating factor. It needs to pass a certain bar of consistency, before adding more detail is worth it... which makes sense to me in that the flow of the information over time may affect one's ability to process it. That's my attempt at understanding part of that overloaded feeling, in games, anyway.
Anyway, 1.5 brings a rebalance, eh? I just reinstalled it. Supposed to be better AI, more apartments, some bigger QoL things... it seems extensive. I'm mostly interested in the total rebalance, and the general shift away from loot. The looting was the achilles heel for me... it just felt so hollow and tedious. Here's to hopefully getting more what they hoped for with this whole build system overhaul. Honestly, it was fun to fuck with when it was all broken and full of exploits. I THOROUGHLY and sincerely enjoyed the shit out of that, it was a real Skyrim experience. As an expert alchemist and master enchanter, I had a lot of fun picking at the broken mechanics, all of the integer overflows and straight up oversights in percentage bounds... item exploits, the broken ability to break down beverages for exponential profits. Once they patched that kind of stuff up, there wasn't anything all that fun about it anymore. It became nothing more than a mediocre, half-working character building system.
It seems like a good bit of things got nerfed. I'm actually kind of optimistic about that. It kind of suggests to me that they've really gone deep in the rework. Giving back the perk points lets you know it's serious. They're just like "Fuck it, all pieces off the board, lets rearrange all of this shit..." I'm really curious what kinds of builds will be possible, and what dominant playstyles will emerge. Looking back, it seems silly that so many people (myself included) attempted to piece-together classes and playstyles out of them. That may be more of a 'me' thing though... in that the only builds I personally found fun required some degree of cheezing. The system wasn't set up with anything like it in mind, there was just A way to do it. It really was kind of a joy to meta, if you enjoy testing the limits of games like that. There was just a lot to uncover, countless hours of exploration! lmao... we were basically improvising classes out of an incomplete, maybe not even fully conceptualized system.
Maybe now, I can try again for real.
