u/Aurondarklord

Did framerates get worse lately?

I'm a PC player, relatively high end machine, AMD 7900XTX graphics card. TFD used to run smooth as butter for me. But in like the last week it's suddenly sucked. Can't maintain 60fps in Albion, game turns into a slideshow when a ton of Vulgus and effects are on screen.

I don't THINK it's my hardware. Other games that should be more demanding run fine. I'm not hearing my fans roaring and my temperatures aren't unusual so it's not thermal throttling. I dusted my case just to be sure and nothing changed.

Is anybody else having the same problem suddenly or should I go back to trying to figure out if something is wrong on my end?

reddit.com
u/Aurondarklord — 5 days ago

First of all I'm really glad that this kind of armor is making a comeback. The genre's called FANTASY for God's sake.

But while these sets are a good start I think there's some room for improvement. If the goal is to be sexy, here's some ideas for making them sexier:

First of all, remember that you see your character from behind 90% of the time. I'm a boob man. I love cleavage armor as much as the next boob man. But I'll spend most of my 200 hours with the camera following my character's butt, not her boobs. There's no way to change that without changing the entire game genre. So we need some of the fanservice in the BACK of the armors. If they've all got skirts and capes then from behind there's functionally no difference between the fanservice armor and the regular armor. Adding some details like platemail thongs and high heels to the outfits would be a major improvement in terms of the fanservice being something we get to enjoy during normal gameplay rather than just in the hub rotating the camera around our characters.

Second, if this game is going to have more of a focus on the player getting to decide what kind of aesthetic we want, be it being a more realistic armored knight or a Frazetta barbarian or whatever, then the player's choice of art style, as it were, needs to be separate from gameplay mechanics. And that means we need transmog, so that we can have both the stats that we want and the look that we want. It will be deeply unsatisfying if choosing to go for sexy armor relegates you to only a couple playstyles, which may not be the type of builds you enjoy. I've tended to play LOTF games as very tanky builds and I can only imagine that these sets will have all the mitigation of tissue paper. I don't want to be restricted to glass cannon builds to get fanservice. Sure, that's realistic but if I want to run around in a chainmail bikini I'm obviously not looking for realism.

Which brings me to my next point: we need some actual chainmail BIKINIS. Ideally dark, gothic ones like Lady Death and Purgatori, those metal, 90s bad girl comics are the aesthetic I'm hoping to get out of this. In fact, if I can go with chalk white skin and literally make Lady Death as a scythe build, that's gonna be my first run. Two-piece bikinimail outfits are the classic look for both Frazetta barbarian girls and gothic superheroines. Go crazy and add one that's got spike pasties only this is Lords of the Fallen so make it freakier by having severed hands impaled on the spikes so they look like they're grabbing the boobs. Or they actually MOVE and twitch and really do grab them sometimes. ...But okay I'm veering off into horror more than sexy here...

But in a game of this genre, mixing sex appeal and horror is not necessarily a bad thing, like BDSM-type outfits in the vein of the Cenobites from Hellraiser.

On which note: allow actual nudity, both in terms of having armor sets that innately involve things like open busts and in allowing the player to remove their outfit entirely (or transmog to look that way) without keeping on the rags/bandages underwear pretty much all soulslikes have. This is, ultimately, a hard M rated game and the sex appeal should not be restricted to PG while the violence is NC-17. Baldur's Gate 3 did it.

Also, allow physics as a customizable slider like character proportions so players can choose how much they want specific assets to move around. And if going in that direction, model the jiggles to interact with the kind of armor being worn. For example, a chainmail bikini might be flexible enough for the whole thing to bounce, but a plate corset...no matter how much the breasts themselves might move around, the armor itself will not start jiggling. I've seen games where it weirdly does and there's a line between unrealistic and internally contradictory.

And finally, in summation, to quote Kylo Ren: MORE!!!! I love this stuff, keep it coming!

u/Aurondarklord — 17 days ago

Maxxine was a perennial midcard champion and occasional main event player. Mostly remembered as a beloved underdog face, she also had a heel run that is highly regarded in hindsight but was very controversial at the time.

In her career, she won the Intercontinental Championship four times, the United States championship seven times, the Tag Team championship six times (once with Natalya, once with Nikki Blackheart, once with Blake Monroe, and three times with Tatum Paxley as Nevermore (yes, it was a very, VERY obvious Wednesday joke but people loved it), and the Chyna Memorial Battle Royal once. She also had two world title reigns, once with the Women's World Championship and once with the WWE Women's Championship. She's also a three time divas champion (bear with me, that's where this story gets weird), one time Royal Rumble winner and one time Money In The Bank winner.

Maxxine spent the rest of the 2020s floating around between Raw and Smackdown periodically winning midcard championships. In 2029, she won Money In The Bank and became the first person ever to cash in during a War Games match, scaling the cage and ending Saya Kamitani's 587 day reign of terror to win the Women's World Championship.

Her heel turn the next year led into the most controversial storyline of her career. Chelsea Green, who was at this point an established main event star, had turned heel by cutting an internet-breaking pipebomb on the Women's Revolution itself and formed a stable called the Diva Mafia initially consisting of herself, Tiffany Stratton, and Blake Monroe, dedicated to bringing back the Divas era. Maxxine initially fought against them, but ultimately joined the faction, turning on Tatum Paxley.

The storyline was highly divisive, online opinion largely split between the belief that even doing this was antifeminist and a cynical effort to roll back the clock on progress for ratings, others rolling their eyes and essentially going "they're the heels you dummies", and a large number of people who unironically agreed with them and supported bringing back divas era shenanigans, particularly boosted by nostalgia due to the recent retirements of AJ Lee and the Bella Twins. Charlotte Flair got herself in trouble when she went off script (in hindsight it's generally believed this was a work) in a promo battle with Tiffany Stratton in which she accepted Tiffany's challenge to a bra and panties match only to insist she had won by default as that was what Tiffany's gear amounted to anyway. The Divas defeated the Horsewomen (with Alexa Bliss taking the fourth spot) in a traditional survivor series match at Evolution 3 with Maxxine as the sole survivor, winning a wager on the match that allowed Chelsea Green to rebrand the WWE Women's Championship back to the Divas Championship and resurrect all Diva-specific match types. The Diva Mafia ultimately fell however when Charlotte dethroned Chelsea and restored the WWE Women's Championship, her 18th world title and the final of her illustrious career, bringing the record back to the Flair family (in an absurd moment, Ric revealed he had only been pretending to be on his deathbed to motivate her, in actuality he lived another five years after seeing his daughter recapture the record).

Blake Monroe betraying Maxxine to steal her US title shortly after this caused the Diva Mafia to implode and Maxxine to turn face again, however a compromise was reached in which the Divas Championship was reactivated permanently but kept a separate title, competed for in Diva-specific match types that were generally more fanservicey in nature, for those women on the roster who were willing to do that.

However, the biggest moment of Maxxine's career came later, when she returned from a serious shoulder injury at the 2034 Royal Rumble and won. In the main event of WrestleMania 50, she won the WWE Women's Championship on the grandest stage of them all when 10 time world champion Becky Lynch tapped out in Maxxine's sharpshooter, leaving her boots in the ring and ending her hall of fame career. Seth Rollins would follow her into retirement the next night after losing his own main event to Avery Styles.

Maxxine's second world title reign lasted a full year, culminating in a feud with Sol Ruca, who had revived the Shang Tsung-inspired "Soul Snatcher" heel gimmick she hadn't used since the late 2020s and made her Wrestlemania entrance in full Shang Tsung gear as part of a promotion with Mortal Kombat 15, that is remembered as possibly the best feud of both of their careers and saw Maxxine take a Super Sol Snatcher off the titantron and through the entrance ramp.

Maxxine's career came full circle at Madison Square Garden, where she lost her last intercontinental championship in the place where she won her first, leaving her boots, and her straps, in the ring after being pinned by The American Icon, Liberty Rhodes. A few years after retiring, she was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.

reddit.com
u/Aurondarklord — 24 days ago