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Time to talk about Blades of Exile! Spiderweb Software are one of the success stories of indie game development. Jeff Vogel's quietly been making a living since the mid-nineties out of making RPGs on an absolute shoestring budget, because decent storytelling and worldbuilding remain the cheapest resource you can buy. The Exile series was his first release, a trilogy of Ultima-like RPGs charting the fate of an underground penal colony where the Empire were disposing of any malcontents to be eaten by awful subterranean monsters. Unlike Ultima, which peppered its dialogue with hacky thees and thous, Exile's characters spoke in the vernacular and the game's dialogue itself was charmingly terse. One of my favourite descriptions from the original goes something like: "Once upon a time, someone defaced the fading writing on this sign with graffiti. Then the graffiti itself faded." By the end of the third game, players had found a way to the surface, assassinated the Emperor, defeated the Empire when it tried to make war with the underworld, and finally won concessions from a new Empress to take unoccupied land on the surface. It wasn't clear where Spiderweb could go with a fourth game. So for the fourth installment, Blades of Exile, Jeff Vogel sanded the edges off his devtools and handed them over to the community. Blades of Exile came with three scenarios written by Spiderweb and a toolkit to allow you to write your own, complete with a rudimentary programming language simple enough that pretty much anybody could make something playable. In a time before modding had really taken off, this was mindblowing to any teenager with big ideas for an RPG and no mates to play it with. The Blades of Exile community made literally hundreds of scenarios. Some were good, many were atrocious, but opening a new one would always be a unique experience because you could guarantee that somebody, somewhere, cared enough about this story to spend time hacking it into a scenario. Blades of Exile and it's predecessors have now been released as free software. You can get instructions for how to run them on a modern pc at http://www.bladesofexile.com/, and the scenarios have narrowly avoided being lost; they're archived at http://truesite.openboe.com/Home/mylittleboepage.html. LPer Berryjon also did an absolute masterpiece of a narrative LP of the trilogy, which starts here.
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Jan 6, 2022 10:02
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Let's discuss one of the best romhacks ever: ALTTP Randomizer. This game is insanely good on several levels, and I haven't found anything quite like it. The basic premise is that it takes the SNES classic Zelda 3 and shuffles around all the items. This adds an almost unlimited amount of replayability to a game that is extremely well designed and holds up great after 30 years. Every run is different, one run you may get several sword upgrades early on and crush everything, only to have to scour the world for That One Item that you need to beat the last required boss. On another run you may have to face a difficult endgame dungeon with only a few hearts and no sword, utilizing other items to kill the enemies. What really makes the game unique, however, is the community. People like to race each other, either live on stream or by comparing posted times for a specific seed. When you add time pressure to this game, it turns into a massive travelling salesman problem that you have to solve in real time while also playing Zelda. You have to remember exactly where everything is, determine the best places to go to minimize backtracking and check as many chests as possible, take calculated gambles, and even utilize glitches to sequence break the game at some points. Speaking of glitches, the romhack is based on the Japanese 1.0 version of this game, which means there are a lot of them. Most are banned under standard racing rules, but there are some allowed glitches that are relatively easy to pull off and don't break the game too much. There are also "glitched modes" where you have to completely break the game in order to win, but relatively few people play them due to the difficulty of pulling off the glitches consistently. I encourage everyone to try this game out at alttpr.com, there's also a link to a very helpful Discord that will answer all your questions, except for where to find the required ROM, but anyone who uses Google should be able to figure it out. A good goal to start out with is to beat most seeds generated using default race settings in under 2 hours. Your first couple seeds will probably be much longer as you familiarize yourself with the game, but your times will drop quickly and anyone can meet that goal with enough practice. Konstantin fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Jan 6, 2022 |
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Jan 6, 2022 14:49
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for like 6 months when LTTPR was popping off It’s all i watched. It rocked.
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Jan 6, 2022 15:01
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This is perhaps weirdly specific, but I can't help but gush about the truck in Death Stranding. (I do love the game as a whole, but something about the truck just sticks in my brain). This is a love letter. The first several hours of Death Stranding have you (as Norman Reedus (as Sam Porter Bridges)) delivering dozens if not hundreds of kilos of packages on foot through a ghost-infested wasteland. Your shoes are wearing out, you’re forcing Sam to jack-hammer six bottles of Monster Energy to stay awake, you’re tumbling off a cliff and watching all your precious packages scatter to the winds. It is rough. It is so rough that once you finally unlock the privilege of constructing your own trucks you will feel like the god of this Icelandic nightmare. From the high perch of the driver’s seat you WILL ensure people get their pizzas on time. The distinct beauty of this truck is that it behaves very much like a truck. It is not the horse from Skyrim, capable of standing perpendicular to ninety-degree cliffs. It does not have the impossible-road-hugging-silkiness of Forza Horizon 4’s Toyota #1 T100 Baja Truck. In Death Stranding, your truck is a Real truck. It is powerful, but it has limits that you must respect (or rather, you will respect them after cratering into a ravine that you naively tried to shortcut over). From beginning to end, Death Stranding is a game about overcoming struggle, not removing it entirely. The Death Stranding truck (henceforth DST) allows massive, speedy deliveries, but you forgo nimbleness and manoeuvrability until you obtain intimate knowledge of its behaviour. In appearance, it’s a bit like a lifted UPS truck. It has a large cab, covered bed, and bulbous curves. With the press of the X button, it can do a little hop. It does a cool stilt-leg thing when driving through deep water that keeps the chassis from getting wet. Press in the left stick and its electric-engine offers up a hefty speed boost. While you can (and I did) construct highways across the leftovers of the United States, the real beauty is found in taking your DST off-road. The DST was custom built for the end of the world. It can go up nearly any incline, but it will tumble if you make one wrong move. With enough persistence, it has the power to let you get yourself into deep, deep trouble when you lose traction and start sideways-sliding downhill towards a terrorist outpost. You will get yourself high-centred on some basalt pillar or outcropping. Any other truck, and that’d be it. With the DST, you can wiggle and writhe, using the hop function to bop the vehicle up and over the obstacle. Passes that seem far too narrow can be overcome by preemptively jumping into them such that half your wheels are riding on the rocky incline while the others spin through mud. Under the hood (the metaphorical game hood anyway), I could almost swear that hopping briefly modifies the DST’s hit box. Sometimes I’d jump over rocks I know that I had no chance of clearing. The DST rewards speed. On flat ground it simply will not tip over no matter how hard you try. Taking sharp turns with five-hundred kilos of painkillers at max speed will make you feel like you are in a crossover training course for USPS and stunt drivers. Going downhill, it turns into a bobsled capable of great speed but with a razor thin margin for error. With a combination of hops, spins, slides, stops, and starts you can mount any hill. I took it as a challenge. Paths that were clearly designed for hiking — narrow, plenty of switchbacks, unreasonably steep — became courses that, with practice, I could drive up with my eyes closed. Punch it to the boulder, take a sharp right, flip a U-turn around the rock, drop down into the stream bed, climb slow and straight to the pass, hop to get the front wheels in and gun it to the drop-off point. Coming back down: reverse hard the second your tires clear the rocks, jerk the wheel to the left, use the boulder to stop, follow the foot path, hop down several berms and recharge by the creek. The DST has the necessary complexity to give the thrill of mastery without being a full on simulation. I’ve seen people say that the vehicles in Death Stranding “feel bad” or “suck”. These people are wrong. I will, in full knowledge of how absurd this sounds, invoke my authority on the topic of off-road vehicle feel. Every vehicle I have ever driven I have taken off-road: 1995 Isuzu Trooper, 1998 Ford Ranger, 1995 Jeep Wrangler, Mid 2000s Subaru Outback and Forester, a rented BMW M3, Hydunai Sonata, a Specialized Triathlon bicycle, a Quintana Roo triathlon bicycle, my boss’s Specialized downhill bicycle, a (now totalled) vintage Urago bicycle. Most importantly, I have worked on a ranch and driven a Husqvarna HUV4414 Utility Vehicle. I know how vehicles feel off-road. I know which ones feel “good”. Understand that when I say I would pay good money for a DST I mean it. I would drive it to Idaho, tool around in Craters of the Moon National Monument, drive it into — and then out of — Bruneau Canyon, and finally use it to clear the old logging trail behind my not-grandmother’s ranch. The DST is at times clunky and janky, but only ever in ways that lend it personality and demand your attention. Master it, and you will summit the world.
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Jan 12, 2022 23:41
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I bought Death Stranding on the strength of its ideas. I was willing to give it a go. I gave up before I could see them to fair fruition. You’ve reinvigorated my interest. Thank you.
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Jan 12, 2022 23:50
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OoTR is also quite good and has a pretty different feel because there's a lot more items inside the dungeons, and the default setting of only shuffling the songs amongst themselves means you'll end up getting something if you just go to song locations. Recommend it for any zelda randomizer fans
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Jan 13, 2022 00:02
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BurningBeard posted:I bought Death Stranding on the strength of its ideas. I was willing to give it a go. I gave up before I could see them to fair fruition. If you are struggling to push through low points I think that's understandable, but it does pick up in terms of gameplay and story as you progress. You are free to just blaze through the main story. As far as I know there are only minor benefits towards grinding out deliveries and roads (although I did take the time to construct every single road segment). Maybe the best advice is just to get wacky with it. I sort of made a commitment to myself that I would never leave my vehicle unless absolutely necessary, which made for some great adventures.
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Jan 13, 2022 00:08
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Death Stranding posits a world where everyone is isolated, only communicate online, and get everything delivered by courier sounds entirely unrealistic to me, just like MGS which suggested a world where misinformation spread online could influence real behavior ....... what I'm saying is I think I don't want Kojima to make any more games
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Jan 13, 2022 01:49
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victrix posted:Death Stranding posits a world where everyone is isolated, only communicate online, and get everything delivered by courier I want to say that Kojima getting "artsy" is nothing more than dumb nerdy anime crap. But at the end of the day his core premise is extremely relevant in the near future, far before most others caught it themselves.
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Jan 13, 2022 01:53
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He's one of those guys that loves scifi in all its forms so he's always on the lookout for the next 'near future' thing and excited to translate it to the medium he's allowed to create things in. Based on his twitter feed I wouldn't be surprised if his next project is around private space mining or similar. In a way it reminds me of Neal Stephenson and how a lot of his work will just dump a disguised essay in the fiction based on whatever fact he learned that day. (REAMDE was a big misstep, both in terms of writing quality and plotting, because its conception of what MMOs are like basically assumes WoW was a popular aberration and popular games henceforth would be more like an even more realistic Ultima Online)
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Jan 13, 2022 03:10
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My favorite part of REAMDE was how none of that mattered.
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Jan 13, 2022 03:18
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Should I read that? It's the only one I haven't read. Part way through TS now. Still good, but so far the dullest of his books. (Not necessarily a bad thing)
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Jan 13, 2022 03:32
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Dominoes posted:Should I read that? It's the only one I haven't read. Part way through TS now. Still good, but so far the dullest of his books. (Not necessarily a bad thing) Nah REAMDE just kinda sucks overall, it's like it's trying to ape Dan Brown and Tom Clancy and just doing it poorly and not even in an ironic way. The big 'lore drops' that NS loves are seemingly about terrorism and counterterrorism but that's well-trodden ground for that kind of fiction. Also I just remembered that the ransomware phishing virus spreads because people schedule their MMO raids in Outlook and it's an Outlook exploit which sounds absolutely absurd to me, but I have no idea how hardcore raiders actually scheduled. Come to think of it I haven't read any of his stuff since that. All I know is that I liked Snow Crash, thought Cryptonomicon was alright, the whole Baroque Cycle was pretty cool even if a lot of the last book was padding, and Anathem was cool. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Jan 13, 2022 |
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Jan 13, 2022 03:42
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Thx; will skip. FYSA, Diamond Age is probably my fav. Seveneves is another to look at, albeit feels different from his other books. I loved Dodge, but many people don't.
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Jan 13, 2022 04:19
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victrix posted:Death Stranding posits a world where everyone is isolated, only communicate online, and get everything delivered by courier Playing death stranding during the depths of the winter lockdown last year was a gaming exeprience I will never forget. The plot was a bit kojima daft as you'd expect, the action sequences were fairly forgettable but needed in a way to break up the walking. The walking and driving though was just so atmospheric, particularly in the bleak moonscapes and snowy mountains, I can't think of another game that captures quite that mood.
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Jan 13, 2022 09:04
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Whybird posted:Time to talk about Blades of Exile! I loved these games. They were sorta difficult and inscrutable when I played them and never ended up getting very far, but rolling a new party and seeing how far I could get was always a good time. In a similar vein to these games was Realmz, which I also spent in inordinate amount of time playing and figuring out what was game and what was jank. They certainly dont make games like these anymore
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Jan 13, 2022 21:26
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I’m not eloquent enough to write up Earthbound, someone more eloquent than me, please write up Earthbound.
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Jan 15, 2022 09:22
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FiveSixKilo posted:This is perhaps weirdly specific, but I can't help but gush about the truck in Death Stranding. (I do love the game as a whole, but something about the truck just sticks in my brain). Have you ever tried Mudrunner or Snowrunner?
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Jan 15, 2022 09:37
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Stelio Kontos posted:I’m not eloquent enough to write up Earthbound, someone more eloquent than me, please write up Earthbound. Earthbound was special. I never solved the eraser puzzles. 
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Jan 15, 2022 16:48
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Harold Fjord posted:I freaked the gently caress out when I beat this game no cheats on our family's 486 in my stepdad's office. I think I was 10. That might have been the first time I ever properly beat a game, looking back. One funny thing looking back is that, as a child, I not only never beat games, but never even progressed beyond the beginning. Pretty much every NES game or PC (my family's Macintosh Performa 550) game I had I would never progress beyond the first 2 levels. I can't think of a single exception to this.
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Jan 15, 2022 22:04
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Stelio Kontos posted:I’m not eloquent enough to write up Earthbound, someone more eloquent than me, please write up Earthbound. I would love to, but EarthBound is so drat difficult to adequately describe in words or even words plus pictures. It either resonates with you or it doesn't, there is no in between. Maybe just link to a PDF of the players' guide and say "if you're not in love with this game after browsing through this then there is no helping you."  Plus I insufferably insist on capitalizing the B.
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Jan 15, 2022 22:35
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Game content: Stephenson is like Civilization games - the loving best premise and first half of a work ever, and the ending always sucks.
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Jan 16, 2022 00:51
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The official EarthBound strategy guide included scratch n' sniff fart stickers. The opening music and graphics while naming your characters were totally bizarre and unconventional compared to anything before it.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hBF1WZeT_M&t=50s I remember my friends and I renting it, firing it up for the first time, laughing at its incredibly lovely presentation, and turning it off to go outside and play. I eventually got bored later that evening and powered through the intro to find an absolutely bizarre game about some seemingly every-day children who need to periodically call home to talk to their parents. I remember killing a bunch of bees to get stronger, while sometimes fending off weird space enemies called "StarMen".  At some point I was hooked and spent the next seven days playing the poo poo out of it, until eventually getting stuck at a spiky monster dog boss.  I didn't rent it again, but 5 or 6 years later, the grocery store that I rented the game from (they had a little video section), was clearing out their inventory, and I saw EarthBound still sitting on their shelves, and greedily purchased it, thinking maybe one day I'll be able to get back to that same point I got stuck on originally. After getting home and turning it on, the first save file had my name on it, with many more hours added to it. Someone had gotten past that hellfiend, and gotten to near the last level. I don't know what stretch of the game that I missed, but I did get to finally beat the game, it just took me half a decade. This doesn't count as an adequate write-up for such a unique game, but I wanted to share my experience discovering and playing through this mid 90s cult classic.
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Jan 16, 2022 00:58
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I played Earthbound when it was released for the Wii U, and while I dig the style I found the pacing to be bad. Mother 3 on the other hand is fantastic and one of the best game's I've played.
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Jan 16, 2022 01:10
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Ytlaya posted:One funny thing looking back is that, as a child, I not only never beat games, but never even progressed beyond the beginning. Pretty much every NES game or PC (my family's Macintosh Performa 550) game I had I would never progress beyond the first 2 levels. I can't think of a single exception to this. One of my earliest memories as a kid is playing Link to the Past, except it was a foggy, misremembered nightmare where I would wake up as Link and walk into the soldiers to die over and over. So yeah, I never got beyond the first path outside Link's house
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Jan 17, 2022 21:04
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Konstantin posted:Let's discuss one of the best romhacks ever: ALTTP Randomizer. Something else that has been enduring for ALTTPR are the shear number of different ways you can randomize the game nowadays. Think you have basic randomization of the item pool figured out? Add in dungeon keys to make your routing that much harder! Sick of the standard open world start at Links house? Why not start in the Dark World instead! Randomize underworld entrances so an out of the way cave on the overworld will lead to Ganon's Tower, and then if that gets too dull randomize underworld exits so leaving Ganon's Tower leaves you in the middle of the Dark World swamp. The hack is an absolute labor of love where you can customize and randomize nearly everything about your experience and they still come up with new and interesting ways to mess around with the formula. And then if you get sick of that, you can combine with with another stone cold Super Nintendo classic...  I'm not the best guy to do a writeup on this hack but due to a quirk of ancient SNES programming (I believe each game only uses half the memory available to it, and notably the half that the other game doesn't use) it turns out you can combine both games into one single rom! Now your items are scattered across both games, and entering certain preset entrances in both worlds will take you to the other! A great time if you are good at speedrunning both games, and if you want to see it yourself has been run at GDQ a couple times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWNGWrZ8wec
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Jan 28, 2022 21:41
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This is fascinating! Thanks for sharing 
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Jan 29, 2022 23:38
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LeafyGreens posted:One of my earliest memories as a kid is playing Link to the Past, except it was a foggy, misremembered nightmare where I would wake up as Link and walk into the soldiers to die over and over. So yeah, I never got beyond the first path outside Link's house I remember everything past the first couple levels/areas of games having this certain allure and feeling of mystery. Like once in every 20-30 times of playing I'd get a small peek into The Game Beyond. Like in this Star Wars rails shooter PC game where I'd almost never make it past the Star Destroyer, so the content after that felt special.
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Feb 5, 2022 08:47
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Ytlaya posted:I remember everything past the first couple levels/areas of games having this certain allure and feeling of mystery. Like once in every 20-30 times of playing I'd get a small peek into The Game Beyond. Like in this Star Wars rails shooter PC game where I'd almost never make it past the Star Destroyer, so the content after that felt special. Rebel Assault? I remember the feeling of getting past the dam in TMNT for the NES. Once. Immediately dying. Neither of those belong in this thread. Rygar though had a bit of a difficult point early on that once I got past it it really opened up and I'd assert it's a good game. Not best but good.
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Feb 5, 2022 09:03
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Rygar was one of the best games for the NES but we've moved on since then.
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Feb 5, 2022 15:43
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BaldDwarfOnPCP posted:Rebel Assault? I never understood the consensus the dam was near impossible, I could get past it ok and I had no mad skills. That battletoads hover bike level though… didn’t turn off the NES for a while after finally clearing it. Still impressed speed runners treat it as nothing. ultrafilter posted:Rygar was one of the best games for the NES but we've moved on since then. As a kid who spent my fair amount of time in the Rygar trenches gonna politely disagree it belongs on any best of lists. Way too much grinding and instant deaths. I still liked it ok but never got very far.
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Feb 9, 2022 22:30
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Ytlaya posted:I remember everything past the first couple levels/areas of games having this certain allure and feeling of mystery. Like once in every 20-30 times of playing I'd get a small peek into The Game Beyond. Like in this Star Wars rails shooter PC game where I'd almost never make it past the Star Destroyer, so the content after that felt special. I remember Super Mario 3 being my favorite game of all time when I was like 8. One night I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning with my grandpa and we did it. We finally beat the game. Except we just beat world 1 and when we saw world 2 my brain exploded. I never did make it back to World 2 until years later but I still remember my jaw dropping when there was more.
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Feb 21, 2022 05:14
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Final Fantasy XIV is a fantastic game. It looks great, the combat is rewarding, and the story is some of the best in the franchise. Maybe THE best. It's good solo and with friends. You can do all kinds of poo poo. You can play it really well with a controller or mouse & keyboard. You could even rig up drum controllers or flight sticks to play it, but you're feeling more couch, TV, and controller with this one. Sadly the TV is starting to go to crap. The LG 32LC42 is a gift from a good friend who suddenly had to move years ago. It downscales movies nicely but anything PC or game has to be run at 720p or its weird native 1360x768 at 50 Hz. Your CPU has never seen an overclock despite being capable. The MSI Nvidia 1070 Gaming X has served well since launch and has only seen Afterburner’s stupid white jet plane a handful of times for a tiny nudge. The only things that struggle on this hardware are Dwarf Fortress and modded Minecraft. Other games published by Square Enix like Final Fantasy XV and the HITMAN™ series look and run great with minimal tweaking. Looking great has been getting harder over the last couple years though. What began as a few small strips of discoloration grew to large streaks of the LCD's backlight not working. It's usually easy to ignore but the worse it gets the harder it is to focus on the bald guy stabbing dudes. Also everything you've watched and played from the couch for the entire pandemic has been 720p-ish. Maybe it's time to let the thing go. You've been busting your butt going into the office every day since the third wave started. You blow people's minds with your ability to turn machines off and on again, and you are rightly loved and respected by those people who do things that blow your mind but to them are probably the equivalent of turning something off and on again. You just got a big Christmas bonus and look, there's a sale on LG OLED 55C1 TVs. Smart TVs are generally the absolute worst, but this one has very low input latency so you can blame one less thing in Smash Bros Ultimate. It also has a lot of abbreviations of things you've never experienced like OLED, 4K, HDR, and even G Sync. TVs can do 120 Hz these days? And it's so cheap compared to the others. After reading up on mitigating OLED burn-in the word "Free" is penciled onto a sheet of paper and taped to the 32LC42 on a street corner. The new TV has different settings for each HDMI port and all of them can do the abbreviations. Blu-rays are actually HD now which is pretty wild, but it takes a good day of messing with settings to get movies to not look like poo poo. It first seems doubtful that the now generations-old PC hardware is up for the challenge of anything newer than Hexen in 4k HDR 120Hz but you really hope to get 30-60 fps in 5-10 years old games. The actual results are better than expected. Many games hit an easy 60 FPS with low-mid settings at 4k. HDR basically adds a brightness knob to the pixels that really wows when anything fades to black. This requires the operating system, the GPU, and cable to push 2 or 4 more bits of color information per pixel over each original 8. Some older games like Sonic Generations and Doom have mods that allow it to output that color information but overall less than 200 games support it. HDR looks baller when it works. The 1070 is crushing this setup without even overclocking. HWinfo shows a hard working but happy computer. There are the usual PC configuration test formalities like benchmarks, Crysis and pushing Mario Sunshine to its absolute limit. Hitting men in HITMAN™ 3 has never looked so good, and the tunnels in METRO are all dark and scary. After a while, it's time to try another game where the old TV's age distracted from the visual awe. Final Fantasy XIV can look so good. With that much screen real estate, the first thing to do after gaping at some scenery is redo the HUD. This is actually a really cool and fun mini game. You have to be careful with burn-in for these OLED screens, so it'll have to be three different HUD layouts with the UI elements in different locations. Then just switch them out over the play session, and otherwise use a fourth one that has every UI element hidden. The gameplay loop of teleporting between cities, watching the idle camera at 4k in 60fps, and tweaking the HUD is interrupted after an hour or so by the lights in-game all dimming once or twice. About a minute later the floorboards in the Grand Company hall begin to flicker. Exiting the building shows some black squares on the ground, and then also on some trees, then also on the screen, and then  FINAL FANTASY XIV A fatal DirectX error has occurred.(11000002) It's the first game to have obvious graphical trouble with this resolution and the second to outright crash after HITMAN™ 3 which sometimes crashed when completing a level before anyway. On the surface it seems that your hardware has little trouble keeping up right until the crash. It's a surprise that one of the older games is the troublesome one, but it's so popular that others must have solved this long before, and there is still the overclocking ace-in-the-hole. This is PC gaming after all so it's expected to deal with errors sometimes. With time set aside for some tests you tuck in for some good old-fashioned troubleshooting. Two ones, five zeroes, one two - an easily typable error number. With a replicable and easily searchable error you're in your element. Simply trying the game again crashed the same way in Gridania city after about 30 minutes. Lowering the graphics settings seems to help at first, but is a bust. Event Viewer doesn’t show anything interesting around the time of the crash. The GPU temperatures and % usage are not particularly high nor low, especially compared to other games and benchmarking software. MSI afterburner, here we go. You try a tiny overclock of +5 Hz, and the game oddly crashes much sooner. Google says that a lot of the people have had this issue going back years, and getting more popular with each expansion. A recent upvoted reddit post shows a person who tried strangely varied things before reporting that underclocking solved their issues. They recommended -100 or -200 Hz. The logic is that their GPU was factory overclocked and FFXIV has issues with that. Of course! The MSI Nvidia 1070 Gaming X is hella factory overclocked. The GPU underclock improved things right away. At first it seems like a balancing act staying above 60 FPS at 4k. Soon that turns out not to be an issue as the sweet spot for stability is more clock speed than the 60fps tipping point but fewer than the first -10 Hz test. This begins a long phase of not really playing FFXIV, but testing it. The bug occurs at random so it's a matter of making the change and then seeing if the crash comes sooner or later. It should really be done 2 or 3 times as perceived positive/negative results could be down to luck. Multiplayer is a no-go, since it's a real dick move to join when you know crashing is on the table. All single player content is fair game, but some is less enjoyable with that threat, and eventually you will want to do a dungeon or get matched into duty roulette. It's hard to pick visually demanding areas. City plazas are full of people and effects but have their fps capped lower in-game. There are giant house parties on twitch with live DJs, but those are kind of weird. Certain environments seem pretty demanding. Tweaking the clock speed further makes the crashes less frequent and occur with more or less buildup. Rarely the error message is different, citing ffxiv_dx11.exe. This turns out to be another take on the same DirectX 11 error, and the addresses aren't helpful.  A few days become dedicated to adjusting a number before playing 2-3 hours of crafting and item selling punctuated by a crash. You mix it up with some squadron stuff, golden saucer or FATEs if you’re feeling particularly hands-on. Some days seem better than others. After a bit you can idle indefinitely in a populated area without a crash. You think it's time to play the game and queue up for something needed to progress. Multiplayer action is unfortunately still problematic. You crash a couple minutes in and the group does the entire Stormblood climactic boss fight in the time it takes you to reconnect. Surveying Google reveals that people report the issue being solved by a variety of strange settings being disabled. Some people compile their stories into posts with a list like this guy’s 30+ attempts. It's not always graphics related, although that seems obviously at play in your case. It could be a combination with another problem though. Bothered players make up weird tales about the game’s construction to cope. FFXIV isn't just a PS3 game rendering in DirectX 11, it's a fragile beast that may startle at unfamiliar headphones and simply refuse to output another frame. Some say that its graphics pipeline is so wound into ancient spaghetti code that any minor hardware change or unsavory Windows background activity can make it divorce from DirectX entirely. A specific mouse could be a death sentence. You've shot bigger trouble before. People say they have tried everything for this error but in your experience they rarely mean everything. Time to look at every proposed solution ever written online about this one. How many could there even be for a hyper-specific DirectX error unique to one game? A new tab opens in Notepad++ and the only line "underclock GPU" gets a ✔ checkmark next to it. Research and Planning It's nice not being a lone trailblazer in IT problem solving. For popular software you are nearly guaranteed to find a clear path stomped to the exit. But 11000002's path is more a series of foot trails that keep meeting up at the same clearings. The first person to write long-form about this error is probably Kelly Heffner Willerson in this blog post. Kelly's description of the issue is perfect and matches yours better than any you will ever read. When the error message changes for her, it also cites an audio dll where yours doesn't. She jokes about the missing space in "occurred.(11000002)” which didn’t annoy you that much until now. Like many posters before her, Kelly makes a change that seems to fix the issue entirely, but turns out to have only made the problem less frequent. This is repeated over a period of months with attempted fixes relating to mouse software, audio devices, and even Windows updates. Commenters on her post share their own woes and success stories. You add each suggested and reported fix to your text file. Worse examples are the countless posts on Reddit, the official "Lodestone" forum, and sprawled across the internet on hardware message boards. People that post on Lodestone are greeted by a moderator who asks the player to post a log, after which point the mod ghosts the thread until they can close it due to inactivity. Many lucky players will get a copy-pasted message in between asking them to disable fast startup in Windows. These messages tend to have spelling or grammatical errors, and if you google that exact phrase in quotation marks you can see how long that canned response has been used. Glitches, bugs, and errors have something of a personality. The more you get to know them and their quirks the better you can help them and their relatives. You are starting to get a feel for the personality of 11000002. It can manifest in different ways. For some the crash comes instantly, and for some like you there is a buildup. Some players can reliably duplicate the crash by loading in a certain area or cutscene. For some people it happens instantly or within minutes of logging in. For some it may not happen for entire play sessions before returning. Some people get it in populated areas, cutscenes or only in dungeons. Unfortunately you are one of those without that kind of replicability. Players tend to enter a series of attempted fixes. A poster will often follow up their success story with an edit or second post, where a few hours of playtime proved the issue not to be fixed, only improved. A common theme is the computer being able to run all other games perfectly. People enter a sort of catch 22 by talking about their solutions online. As a professional computer toucher you respect people who come back and reply or edit in their solutions. It’s an obligation so that the next person googling can benefit from the experience. But those who post what seems to fix 11000002 are statistically likely to see it again. Computers are not magic or maliciously sentient though. They’re just a bunch of math and logic gates. With patience and resources it’s just a matter of methodically shooting the trouble like any other. Issue: After 20 to 400 minutes, generally during intense scenes, FFXIV crashes with the message “FINAL FANTASY XIV A fatal DirectX error has occurred.(11000002)”. This is usually preceded by a few seconds of graphical artifacts. Steps to reproduce: Play the game but not really play the game for a few hours. Don’t just idle but also don’t do any multiplayer. For each change or attempted fix, you must play the game for a few hours to test it. Due to the random nature of the crash, it is important to repeat the test to rule out false positive/negative results and placebos. Due to the nature of testing like this, it is practical to attempt multiple fixes simultaneously. You sort your list of others’ attempted and suggested fixes into categories. It’s most likely display-related, but it could be any combination of issues so it makes sense to try absolutely everything that has worked for someone or was suggested in good faith. You continue searching and adding to the checklist until you realize: this is a new one. You have never seen a game crash that one person solves by underclocking, another solves by uninstalling mouse software, and another solves by disabling both audio enhancements and RGB lighting. It is bizarrely specific, only appearing in FFXIV. It is bizarrely general, caused by seemingly any part of the machine. This sorted checklist of real troubleshooting steps would eventually form the basis of a huge loving post on Something Awful. For now you commit to keeping up the list of bullet points and posting your eventual solution in the aftermath. The list is already more comprehensive than any related writing outside of Kelly’s blog post. You go through your troubleshooting list mostly top-to-bottom. You ✔ check off each as you go and add a note for any that seem to make a difference. You originally use 🗹 but that unicode character doesn't always display well on mobile browsers so you swap them for the goofier ✔. You ☒ reject and ☐ skip a few but you try to be diligent. Basic Troubleshooting As always you start with the easiest things to try that seemed to help the most people. ✔ Update everything possible. Hit up Windows Update and go check for your motherboard’s website for BIOS. Your GPU probably doesn't just have drivers but its own BIOS too. That could give you a couple frames or enable some new bells and whistles, so you should be doing that anyway. Why not update your storage device’s firmware that’s distributed as a bootable Linux ISO? Don't forget chipset drivers. If your computer has a support page with the manufacturer like Dell, install the latest everything there. If available use an OEM driver updater like HP Support Assistant or Lenovo Vantage. You could even use something like DriverEasy if you want to get dirty. ✔ Disable Fast Boot, fast startup, or hybrid boot in Windows power management. It's essentially Turn It Off and On Again (Hard). If the option is grayed out there, it must be set in the registry. This one ends up helping a lot of people. ☒ Try launching the game launcher from its .exe directly. Avoid Steam Big Picture mode too. This is not applicable (N/A) here - you have the Square Enix version with standard launcher. ✔ Check your RAM using Windows Memory Diagnostics or MemTest. If you have multiple sticks of RAM, try running the game with just one of them, and then again with another until you have tried it with all of your sticks. ✔ Use an air compressor or canned air to clean out the dust. You did this along with the cabling when hooking up the TV. ✔ Check PC date and time settings. One user’s time was off by 8 minutes, but after fixing it they had no more crashes. ✔ Don’t alt+tab ever. ✔ Disable all startup applications. ✔ Set program compatibility mode to Windows 7 or 8. ✔ Run FFXIV as administrator. This suggestion and the next two are actual official suggestions from Square Enix support forum moderators. ✔ Close all other running programs. ✔ Create exceptions for FFXIV in your antivirus and firewall. ✔ Rename the folder C:\Users\[username]\Documents\My Games\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn\ to something else. FFXIV will reset all character and system settings. Don’t start changing your settings back right away, see if the game is stable first. ✔ System Restore. You’re a big believer in Windows system restore points. ☐ Use the Windows “start over” feature. You are just going to reinstall Windows later if it comes to that. You skip this step. ☒ Reconfigure or remove game plugins such as ACT. N/A ✔ Use the ‘'restore game data' option in the launcher. ✔ Power cycle network hardware like modem and router. ✔ Reinstall DirectX 11 ☐ Try playing FFXIV as another character. This suggestion comes from Square Enix support. You skip this and forget to come back to it later. ☒ Do not overclock CPU or RAM. N/A Graphics Troubleshooting You are pretty sure that the issue is graphics-related. ✔ Underclock the GPU. Generally just by a little bit, somewhere between -1 and -100 MHz. Some suggest as low as -200 MHz. It has also been suggested to underclock/cap to exactly the stock clock speed. On certain configurations, FFXIV does not play nicely with some GPUs that include a factory overclock. Experiment with MSI Afterburner, Nvidia Inspector or AMD’s equivalent and see if it helps. If you have no experience overclocking don’t worry; making numbers lower is pretty safe and you’re not going to blow the thing up. If you underclock too much or too little, you can still have the problem, but it may manifest slightly differently. The error manifesting differently is HUGE for troubleshooting. Any change in crash behavior here is a good indication it is graphics or display stuff. With enough experimentation you might find the perfect underclock value that fixes everything. ✔ Undervolt the GPU. Strange how this could help vs underclocking but it's worth trying. The lowest suggested is 75%. ✔ Try using a different video cable. If you have access to tools like HDMI cable testers and signal generators, use them. If possible, confirm that the cable is up to 2.1 spec. If you don't have the tools just try with every cable you have, favoring shorter, thicker, more expensive cables. It's really a crapshoot with cables - more expensive isn't always better. If the cable isn't quite up to spec, it may work for a while and fail at a random point later. ✔ Reduce color to 8-bit if using 10-bit or 12-bit color. HDR isn’t quite as nice but you probably won’t notice unless you’re looking for it. ✔ Disable HDR. Deep blacks will be missed but you can just turn it back on for other games. Not too many things even properly support it. ✔ Disable full screen optimizations in the properties for every game .exe in the FFXIV directories. ☒ Try onboard graphics instead of the GPU to see if it doesn’t crash. You refuse. ☒ If you are using multiple monitors, try just using one at a time. N/A ☒ If you are using a single monitor, try using a different one. Haha, no. ✔ Match Windows refresh rate to in-game FPS. Both to 60 Hz in this case. Previously there was a mismatch between Windows 120 Hz and FFXIV 60 Hz. This one really helps. It’s the first thing since the underclock to make a significant impact and unfortunately inspires hope that the problem is almost solved. ✔ Lower graphics settings in-game. This seems to help at first, but then seems to be a placebo with more testing. Low vs Mid-High graphics settings tend to affect framerate more than crash-free runtime. ✔ Try running the game in Full Screen, Windowed, and borderless windowed modes. ☐ Lower the in-game resolution and framerate. 4k 60 fps looks way too good. You skip this step. ✔ Remove the graphics driver cleanly with Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) inside Windows safe mode. ✔ Install the latest GPU driver. If optional or experimental drivers are available, try those as well but use DDU between switching. Avoid Nvidia Experience. ☒ Use Game Optimizer in Nvidia Experience to configure the game for your machine. This reported solution is stupid, to be honest. All it does is configure in-game settings. Nvidia experience is bad and makes Nvidia container start scanning your hard drives loudly all the time. You don’t need Shadowplay either. You refuse to try. ☒ Downgrade to an older “known working” GPU driver. People online may suggest a specific driver version, and that’s worth trying too unless the post you’re looking at is several years old. N/A here as a driver or software change did not cause the crashes to start and there is no “known working” driver for this new configuration. ✔ Run the game in DirectX 9. The game runs and looks much worse in DirectX9. You’re not into this. Some say there is an equivalent error message for DirectX 9. The game requires it to be installed separately. You have been playing old Windows games so you have a lot of those installed. ✔ Experiment with VSYNC settings both in-game and in your GPU software. If you are able to specify or enable something like Fast Sync, Free Sync, or G Sync in your GPU software, consider those third or fourth options. That gives you 6 or 8 different configurations to try. ✔ Experiment with framerate cap settings in-game, in your GPU software, and in Windows. ✔ If your GPU has multiple power modes, try any for performance. For Nvidia this can be found in the Nvidia control panel under 3D Settings > Global > Power Management. ✔ Change Texture Filtering to Performance in Nvidia Control Panel. ☒ Don't use SLI or multiple GPUs. N/A ✔ Enable debug mode in the Nvidia Control Panel under the help menu. Apparently debug mode disables GPU overclocking. This may have helped a little, but you forget about this setting after the next attempted fix. ((continued next post)) Heran Bago fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Apr 1, 2022 |
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Windows Troubleshooting Windows does a lot of graphics stuff too. Plenty of computer stuff is Windows' fault. ✔ Perform a clean installation of Windows 10. No problem, you keep your data backed up and the thing hasn’t been wiped in a while anyways. ✔ Make sure Windows update KB5004296 is installed for its game-related fixes. ✔ Disable Game Mode in Windows. ☒ Perform a clean installation of Windows 7. Windows 10 and 11 are pretty good, so this would actually be a deal breaker. If the decision is between FFXIV or OS-level HDR support, FFXIV isn’t going to win. Dual-booting or triple-booting various Windows versions is considered and abandoned. ✔ Perform a clean installation of Windows 11. It also has Auto-HDR which is a very nice feature. FFXIV looks better than ever. This really seems to help the game crash far less. Intermission - Posting on the Internet The game runs smoothly and looks great! Well, it always has, but now it doesn’t crash no matter how much you idle in the big city. You do some light dungeons and go a whole session or two without a crash. It might be fixed, but you kind of doubt it. You want to do a multiplayer boss fight to progress the story but you’re still a bit too nervous. You have no more patience for testing that day and you log out. It's time for a ‘smoke break’. The smoke break or breath of fresh air is important in this kind of problem solving. By getting away from it you might think of different approaches or remember something you wouldn't when focusing. You reach out to some other players and share your experiences. In-game "Free Company" or guild members have been supportive. It would be nice to post your potential fix too for some poor googling soul that might be spared the same suffering. Not very interested in posting on Lodestone or Reddit, you put in a poorly written rant in Something Awful’s FFXIV thread. Heran Bago posted:11000002 meltdown: With that line in the water you switch gears and absorb as many 11000002 reports as you can. You collect as many suggested and reported solutions as possible. Most large closed threads on the Loadstone are salt mines full of angry well-intentioned gamers trying and failing to help each other. You’re ready to get back on that horse and test the game under Windows 11. It feels like you have been honing in on the problem. The latest test of connecting/disconnecting Bluetooth headphones to the computer while FFXIV is running seemed to make the game crash a bit sooner in places where that might happen, and disabling Bluetooth brings stability back to acceptable overworld gameplay. Some goons read your post and chime in with their experiences. It’s nice not being alone in these things. Badger of Basra posted:I had this problem after getting a new graphics card. The underclocking and FPS locking seemed to help a little bit and I thought it was an FFXIV only problem but I noticed weird graphics crashes on another game so I finally realized it was the card. I got a new one (same model/manufacturer, just a different card) and that solved the problem. Swapping the graphics card is kind of an extreme troubleshooting step. It makes sense with more signs of a bad card like Badger of Basra's. For fun, this step goes on the bottom of the troubleshooting list. You try a dungeon roulette as an expendable DPS class and it doesn't crash. Neither does the second one. The next session is crash-free as well. It's really remarkable what a difference Windows 11 makes. Eager to tell the world what might be the magic bullet you post more optimistically in the FFXIV newbies thread. You are still a “sprout” after all. Heran Bago posted:I switched to a bigger TV about a month ago and the game randomly crashes with DirectX 11 error 11000002. This is called PC gaming. You completely misread the room and get no replies there, but a few more responses in the main thread. iPodschun posted:Between this post and the one in the newbie thread, you seem to have it under control now but thought I'd contribute my experience: After getting a new computer in December 2020, XIV was crashing very often. Sometimes DirectX stuff, sometimes the generic program crash message. I checked Event Viewer and a lot of the crashes were at the same time as Windows doing some other random thing, so I was going through and fixing permissions on files and folders or turning off various processes that would run at the same time as a XIV crash. The Event Viewer! It’s easy to overlook and underestimate this tool. You haven’t touched it since some of the first tests. It wasn't too promising but worth revisiting if anything crops up. It’s textbook troubleshooting so it goes on the list. Theophany posted:The solution is always nuking your C: drive with a clean winstall. If only the solution were always nuking C:. “Reimage it” is one of the best ways to solve IT problems. It's essentially Turn It Off and On Again (Savage). Steam Deck videos are popping up with FFXIV going strong. Putting the game down until your Steam Deck arrives later in the year is literally a solution so this goes on the bottom of the list near replacing the GPU. You never did post the full list anywhere. It doesn’t fit the Something Awful thread’s tone. You try to move on and actually play the game. Unfortunately, you made the same mistake as many who came before you. Posting online that the game works nicely after a few sessions makes it statistically more likely to begin crashing again than to remain stable. It’s tempting fate. You make a new line at the bottom of your list to remind yourself not to repeat this mistake. You edit an update into your previous posts and correct yourself with a haphazard reply in a thread where people would rather discuss best-in-slot armor. Heran Bago posted:11000002 returns Theophany posted:Honestly I'd be tempted to flip your 1070 for a reasonably priced replacement of equal or greater power as that seems to be the root problem. Obviously GPU prices and availability continue to be screwy for consumers, but in my experience when a piece of hardware continues to cause errors after a drive nuke then it's likely only going to get worse over time as the hardware degrades and you slowly descend into madness. You will keep the idea in mind. You only have the one GPU, and unfortunately you have seen recent prices and availability. You could ask a friend with a 1070 to swap cards to test, but he has it in some absurdly small build. You go to add “Swap GPU” to your list and remember it's already there. GiantRockFromSpace posted:If I got the new PC I'm planning to buy and I started getting that kind of errors on games I would start throwing poo poo out the window so you already have more patience than me. strange feelings re Daisy posted:Have you tried updating BIOS to the latest version? It's a desperation move, but if a full system reinstall didn't work it's worth a try. Occasionally it will fix game issues. Windows Troubleshooting continued Back to it. ✔ Reinstall the game from scratch again but directly to the C: drive. This one is a Square Enix support favorite. Your OS is on an NVMe SSD, so maybe the game should not have been on a different SATA SSD. This helps some people out there and really should have been tried sooner. ✔ Watch Event Viewer. Maybe you’ll notice the crashes occur when something random like Windows Update does a thing. You keep an eye on Event Viewer for many of your tests from this point on. Unfortunately you can't find any patterns. You feel like you're getting into the weeds overanalyzing nothing after a point. ✔ Watch Performance Monitor and Reliability Monitor. In the Run dialog enter “perfmon /rel”. If you see a LiveKernelEvent around your crash, then there is a good chance your issue has something to do with your hardware, the program, or other peripherals such as audio or USB devices. ✔ Reinstall Microsoft redistributable C++ 2017. ✔ Do not connect or remove any devices when the game is running. If you use wireless controllers that enter sleep or disconnect automatically, disable that feature or switch to a wired controller. ✔ Remove as many USB devices as possible before starting the game. If you must use some experiment with putting them all on the front panel USB ports vs rear IO panel. If possible, try the PS2 connections for mouse and keyboard. ✔ Disable in-game overlays or anything that could create them. Discord, Steam, Game Bar, Shadowplay, Fraps, ReShade, anything that could draw over the screen. Exit any chat programs as well such as Discord, Skype, Teams. AIM, etc. This should have been much higher on the list as it helps a lot of people. ✔ Raise the priority or affinity of the running FFXIV exe in Task Manager. It always feels weird doing this for some reason. ✔ Delay, defer, or explicitly schedule Windows updates. Kill as many windows update services and processes as possible. You don’t really try too many of these. If the choice is between FFXIV and a bare minimum for IT security, FFXIV doesn’t win. ✔ Run the game in Vulkan using DXVK. The game runs a little better. The error equivalent to 1100002 is “VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST”. ✔ Change Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR) in Windows registry. In "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers" create or edit DWORD (32-bit) named "TdrDelay". Try a value of 10, and if that doesn’t work try 60. ✔ Run sfc /scannow to scan the drive for errors. ✔ Close as many programs as possible before starting the game. Go wild and kill every process you can in task manager before starting the game. Audio Troubleshooting You generally play without sound and listen to something else, but you do have headphones. Maybe there are multiple sources for this crash and you've just been overlooking something. ✔ Disable all audio and audio devices, both in Windows and in-game. If this seems to help it is worth proceeding with the rest of the Audio troubleshooting. ✔ Avoid using Bluetooth headphones. ✔ Disable Audio Enhancements for the device. ✔ Set the output device in-game to your desired device rather than Windows default device. ✔ Disable and/or uninstall any audio devices or hardware that you are not using. ☐ Use the "game" option for your headphones or audio output device. You can't find this option for yours. ✔ Lower the Sound Default Format on the display to 16 bit 44100 Hz. ✔ Disable Spacial audio in-game and in Windows. ✔ Disable or remove anything related to "Windows Sonic” or “Dolby Atmos.” ✔ Avoid multi channel headphones and surround sound setups, just use stereo audio. ✔ Disable the option in-game to output sound effects via the controller. This is a neat feature for a Dual Shock 4 or Wiimote but you can live without it. ☒ If a controller is present under Sound in device manager, remove it. N/A ✔ Use a different audio device or different audio hardware. ✔ Uninstall all audio devices in device manager, making sure the check box to uninstall the driver as well is marked. Other Hardware Troubleshooting FFXIV is extremely sensitive to hardware changes for some users. ☒ Disable RGB lighting and RGB control in the motherboard BIOS. Disable RGB or other lighting for as many devices as possible. Uninstall all software that controls RGB, unless it is still needed to disable RGB. You have already disabled lighting on your Motherboard and GPU in the past because it's tacky. N/A ✔ Manually raise the fan speed. You can do this for your GPU but nothing else the way your chassis and fan controller are set up right now. ✔ Disable Bluetooth and wifi. Avoid using Bluetooth mice. If a previously paired device gets close it may automatically connect and crash the game. You can't believe this is a real suggestion to fix a game but you can believe that you're actually trying it. ☒ Uninstall any mouse software These are needed for mice with configurable RGB lighting or extra buttons. Razer and Logitech commonly have something like this. Removing iQue in particular helps some people. You had an app for your Logitech G403 but it hasn't been plugged in since the SSD wipes. N/A ✔ Try a different mouse, preferably wired. It's rare that the wired mouse sees any action these days. ☒ Change AMD PBO settings in Bios. N/A ✔ Disable XMP Profiles for RAM in Bios and/or reduce RAM clock speed. ☐ Try a different power supply unit. You don’t have a spare that will power this hardware configuration. You know someone who does at least. ✔ Disable Smart Access Memory in BIOS and Radeon software. You scour the BIOS menus for it and for anything that sounds similar. After the next failed test you change the settings back. ✔ Remove extra peripherals. If you have multiple mice, keyboards, controllers etc plugged in that you are not going to use in-game, disconnect them before starting the game. Extreme Troubleshooting You have now gone out beyond the weeds and outside the box where there is nothing left to test. The reported and suggested fixes up to this point have been reasonable, and you consider the steps in this section unreasonable. ✔ Post on an internet forum or community about it. The success rate isn't great for this one but it was worth a shot. ☒ Stop playing FFXIV or take a break. Maybe MMOs on the PC just aren't for you. You still want to play FFXIV though. N/A ☒ Wait for Square Enix, Nvidia, Microsoft, or whoever is responsible to address the issue and create a fix. You’re patient enough to get through this list, but not that patient. ☒ Get a PS5 and PS5 copy of the game. You don't want a PS5 and there isn't enough shelf space for one. N/A ☐ Put the game down until the Steam Deck arrives. Word is the game runs well on the thing. That's the best solution candidate so far. You still want to play FFXIV in 4k after all this, but if that’s not going to happen it's good to have a backup in mind. ☐ Actually send a report to Square Enix or post the mod-requested one on the Lodestone forums. This is the 'lawful' troubleshooting step. Many have tried this but you don't think you've seen it directly solve anyone's problem. Either they find their specific fix elsewhere in their own searches, or one of the myriad suggestions posted by others happens to be the one for them. Most likely their issue is not fixed. You skip this step. ☒ Use a different machine. If there's a second gaming machine where it works, just use that. You do not have another machine available that can run FFXIV at 4k. N/A ☐ Reassemble PC and reapply thermal paste. At this point you do not feel up to the task. It’s good practice but a bit much for this specific game error. Your temps are fine already. ☐ Run the game under Linux. Your Linux-friend thinks your story is hilarious and suggests installing Linux. You have heard that the game performs well under Linux. Ubuntu is solid and you've been learning Arch / Manjaro lately for the Steam Deck. You’re not eager to learn Wine Bottles or whatever it is these days to get non-Steam Windows games going under Linux. You’re nervous it wouldn’t run all of your niche applications and old games like Star Trigon. This step is skipped. ☐ Replace the entire computer with a brand new one. Build a better gaming PC and don’t use any parts from the previous computer because you can't trust them anymore. It would have benefits outside of FFXIV and seems extremely likely to work from the people who have tried it. You think this is a bit much but not a complete deal breaker like Windows 7. It's cost prohibitive of course. The Steam Deck is still the more attractive option. You skip this step for now. ☒ Replace the entire computer with an exact copy of itself. This is the funniest reported solution you have seen. One person claimed that FFXIV was the only game giving them trouble, and of course it was 11000002. They RMA’d their entire machine, got a new one with identical hardware, and no longer got the error. Your machine is self-built, so the price per performance on sourcing the parts is a deal breaker unlike building a new rig. ☐ Replace the GPU Theophany posted:Honestly I'd be tempted to flip your 1070 for a reasonably priced replacement of equal or greater power You check online what GPU stocks are like at computer stores and big box retailers. GPU costs are a bit prohibitive after spending that Christmas bonus money on the TV. Stocks are alright though and It's not hard to find some models of most current AMD and Nvidia cards. You look up the naming/numbering scheme for AMD because you’re somehow incapable of memorizing it. You check a graph of GPU price per performance. You remark that 3070 Ti just barely pulls ahead of 3070 for the best valued NVIDIA card. You pause for a moment. There's a 3070 Ti? You know about the Ti cards. Of course there's a 3070 Ti. But it feels like you've never heard of it in your life. You start to brush it off as some mandela effect poo poo. You've read hundreds of people crashing out of FFXIV with the widest variety of hardware configurations. You just saw dozens using 3060 Ti or 2070 Ti cards. There's no way that no one using this card has ever seen 11000002, right? Almost. That honor goes to the Nvidia 3080 Ti. Googling "3080 Ti" + "11000002" comes up empty. 3070 Ti returns exactly one case that naturally goes unsolved. Players with 2070 Tis, 2070 Supers, 3060s, 3060 Tis, 3070s, 3080s, and even 3090s are getting the error in brand new rigs. Can you imagine building a new machine with a 3090 and it can’t play FFXIV no matter what you do? Of all the reports 0% of players had a 3080 Ti and far fewer than 1% had a 3070 Ti. You go to the computer store and spend a decent chunk of your remaining Christmas bonus on an ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. You uninstall the old display drivers with DDU and shutdown. After installing the new card and driver FFXIV runs flawlessly with the settings turned up. This seems to have solved the issue. You test it lightly and rigorously over the next weeks. Eventually you start trying risky stuff that you’re not supposed to do: you connect the controller after starting FFXIV and connect Bluetooth headphones while the game is running. You open and close multiple chrome tabs streaming video with FFXIV in the background. 11000002 has not appeared once since installing the new GPU. You put the 1070 up on craigslist and meet up with some nerd outside a cafe. You're slightly emotional seeing the 1070 go. It tried its best. You consider buying Theophany a forums cert or something for being annoyingly right, but decide that they may have already cost you enough money. And it wasn’t simply replacing the GPU. It was a more specific conclusion that you totally came up with on your own. There was practically data. You make one last new entry on the list. ✔ Buy an Nvidia 3070 Ti, 3080 Ti, or 3090 Ti specifically. *marked as solution From the current sample sets only the latter two have a 0% chance of 11000002, the 3090 Ti helped by the fact that it’s not yet released at the time of writing. Maybe there are also some AMD cards with a 0% incidence rate. The rate is < 1% for 3070 Ti cards. This solved the issue. There’s still the bottom line on the list that you added during your forums tantrum: ☐ Do not tell anyone when or how you fixed it. The proper response to someone else having this issue should be “it's working for me, must be a problem on your end". For every person that fixed the issue and posted their solution, there are several who realized partway through a dungeon that they hadn't solved things - just improved them - and returned to their triumphant post to edit in their disappointment. You have already been that person once when you wrote this entry. Temper your expectations. Don't get your hopes up if you try a fix and the game seems to be running without a crash for longer than usual. Definitely don't do a big blog or forum post about it. Turn up the settings and ride off into the sunset. You skip this step. Looking Back on Fatal DirectX error 11000002 Like some people, there are errors that you can never forget nor understand. It really has a personality full of likes and dislikes. Solving 11000002 is waking up from a sexy nightmare a minute before your alarm clock goes off and wondering what the gently caress just happened. It's the embodiment of the British expression "what's all this then?". Replacing the GPU fixed the problem, therefore the problem was the GPU, yeah? This doesn't sit right. The logic in narrowing down the problem flows the other way. This hardware configuration worked very well with power to spare on dozens of games. It was only this specific piece of software taking issue. There's your single point of failure. So many people have had this same experience in the last decade across hardware and OS configurations. Surely it is legitimate driver issues or outdated BIOS for some players, but the "tried everything" posts aren’t all hollow desperation and fury. These people can be methodical tech junkies like Kelly who know their way around a computer. The pleas of 'everything works great except FFXIV, I've tried everything!' fall on deaf ears of other players and Square Enix. In the professional world, you would contact the software manufacturer and/or create a support ticket. There are chains of responsibility so your request is not likely to go unanswered with an automatic response. In rare worst cases, it will get branded as "can't fix" or "won't fix" for a legitimate reason. If enough clients complain about the same thing then something will probably get retooled so it can be fixed. You will never hear 'it works on our machine, must be something on your end' unless software developers are also working support. Real support helps make it work on your end. Nothing about Square Enix’s silence on the issue is fishy at first. It's not reasonable to expect the publisher of Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime to be able to target every PC hardware configuration. We should be glad they can copy paste a few suggestions in mostly correct English. Video game and MMO customer support is famously awful. Contemporary MMO New World makes this level of support look almost competent. You also have to consider that FFXIV is a popular game with other issues. Ask players what the biggest problem is during a new expansion launch and there will be some very unanimous answers. Even in downtime the game's letters to the players highlight the biggest problems and how Square Enix is tackling them. Most recently they're trying to fix various issues related to server capacity by throwing money and hardware at the problem. You have to respect the hustle. 11000002 probably affects the tiniest minority of players. An interesting part of researching 11000002 is how long it has existed without a concrete fix nor specific patch. Any mention of this number that doesn't relate to FFXIV is completely unrelated like inventory numbers. Non-gaming websites containing this code are numerous, but google consistently puts FFXIV-related entries on top. It could just be search engine optimization or Google knowing what poo poo you like to look at. To be sure we're going to need some graphs.  This Google Trends graph compares the all-time peak volume at which this term was searched against everywhen else since 2010. On its own it isn't evidence of anything. Not shown are a couple spikes long before FFXIV’s launch. Googling “before:2009 11000002” reveals that those were most likely searches for a specific medical journal paper on pubmed.gov and nice bookmarks on Rakuten. Also noteworthy is the date 01/01/2016 halfway through when google greatly improved their data collection systems, coinciding with the real graph activity. We can mark when major expansions were released on the graph. It really looks like version 3.0 Heavensward introduced this bug, with cases peaking at the launches of Stormblood and the current expansion Endwalker. The data does not trend strongly upwards nor downwards. We can probably ignore the bumps before the 3.0 launch.  It would be nice to be sure we’re not looking at searches for IBAN numbers or silicon compound aerosol spray. Let's add the most relevant term and compare.  The old graph becomes a squished line on the bottom, telling us that WAY more people are searching for FFXIV than for 11000002. What's more interesting is the shape of the graph, easier to compare using Photopea to overlay the two.  This doesn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know but helps prove the connection. We can look at less related terms to show that nothing trends with 11000002 like FFXIV. It’s certainly not an overall trend in how people search for game-related things. We also learn that mankind will never be as interested in DirectX as before 2005.  The history of fatal DirectX error 11000002 is the history of FFXIV, hitting players since 2015 without a fix. A link to this specific game is proven and patches haven't been helping. It's reported most heavily around certain launches but also by players long after the peak hype cycle. Fans are hard to deter. Why it has never been officially addressed is unknown, and there are so many unknowables about the situation that it's impossible to conclude without a person on the inside of Square Enix. It could be an artifact of Japanese corporate culture and hierarchy. It could be a spaghetti code issue that is legitimately not fixable without remaking the game from the ground up. Hackers and data miners aren't particularly interested in this niche aspect of the game's code. IDA Pro won't just circle a line in red when you drop ffxiv_dx11.exe in it. The game's developers have legitimately more important things to add to the game. If QA is even able to log this issue, it's easy to imagine developers ignoring it entirely and focusing on ones that affect more players. Addressing it publicly without a fix could also be disastrous. Admitting fault and/or knowledge of a problem persisting for seven years could open small claims or class action lawsuits in countries with strong consumer protections. The facade of Lodestone mods pasting "try turning off fast startup" before closing the thread is enough legal proof that they are supporting their product. Gamers are also notoriously harsh and unforgiving so a policy of silence makes complete sense. You might do the same in that position. You have to share this info and your list of potential solutions. People willing to try everything need a more comprehensive list than existing blog posts and forum threads. You’d rather not post on Reddit or the Lodestone. Something Awful’s thread on the game probably wouldn’t appreciate the big list. You remember the “Effortpost your favorites” thread which might fit. FFXIV is a favorite, and any post with that list is going to be an effort post. Erwin the German already has a post about the game so this wouldn’t be its only entry. You start writing some paragraphs on the backstory and add bits of commentary to the list. You realize that telling the story in first person past-tense clashes with the second person present-tense imperative of the list. You decide to write the whole post in second-person present tense as a fun writing exercise. Surely it won’t be that long or annoying to read. Final Fantasy XIV isn't perfect. You really like it but you can’t actually recommend it to people. There’s that error of course but the game can be imposing if not impenetrable. There is a lot of fun in there, but it isn’t always straightforward for a new player to get the fun out. The first few dozen hours are a slog and you have to pay attention to get the most out of the story when it gets better. It's like when a show gets really good after the second season, but the "first two seasons" here are a combined 50 hours of content. It's presented as a single player RPG that controls like an MMO and you play the dungeons with other people. You pay for days of being allowed to play on top of buying the game and expansions. The official support channels are comically useless. The overworld quests are nearly all variations of ‘go to marker, grab/kill thing, return.’ The cutscenes and story interaction compare favorably to visual novels. You even have to be careful how and where you play the free trial: the confusing cross-platform model locks you into a digital store effectively punishing players for “jumping in” on Steam. The gripes go on, but Final Fantasy XIV is good, actually. It might sound bad after all this, but it takes a hell of a game to make someone willing to go through all that troubleshooting. Several Lodestone posters have personal backgrounds that compel them to play FFXIV. Many are spouses or members of longtime friend groups where being able to access their game is an integral part of something social. Some posters have found their Forever Game: a mythical subjective perfect game that one could play for the rest of their life. This comes out between the lines in bug reports. Affected players just want it to work and will try a battery of absurd "fixes" on the off-chance that one lets them return to Eorzea. What about you then? You don't have a years-long connection to this game. You don't need to play it to connect with your spouse. You don't really play video games with friends anymore. Your current gamer friends are exclusively into single player stuff. You don't really want to play FFXIV with others outside your in-game Free Company. The game clicks with you but it's not your "Forever Game" material. However you couldn't have tried all this troubleshooting and paid out all this money for no reason. Looking at the data, statistically you should have some kind of intrinsic motivation. You try to reassess what FFXIV means to you. Is it somehow special to you? It's not super important of a game on its own. The story and progression are dope, but you rarely see that stuff through in games and the cutscenes are all on YouTube. Maybe it’s because it's a new big complex game that you like. Maybe it's the last big complex game you will ever like. You had a brush with death in real life a year ago, and after two weeks of being pretty shaken up you got back to normal albeit with reduced restraint around expensive menu items. Maybe life is just too short. You are also getting ready to build a family in the not-too-distant future. Maybe you don't see too much of a future left where you can enjoy long and complex unpausable games. Maybe you want to enjoy this one video game while you still can. Maybe this will be the last one. You think about talking to a therapist regarding these feelings as a 10,000 word public essay is a pretty bad way to cope with anything. You settle for just playing the game and continuing the main story quest into the Shadowbringers expansion. It’s supposed to be pretty good. There are so many ways to realize that a game is personally meaningful or important, but you have never found that at the bottom of a list of troubleshooting steps before. Heran Bago fucked around with this message at 02:23 on Mar 12, 2022 |
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Mar 11, 2022 19:28
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This post is reserved just in case.
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Mar 11, 2022 22:06
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So games can be art
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Mar 11, 2022 23:54
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 Gonna show this to my friend who can't play the game on PC anymore cause it'll inevitably reboot her computer when certain visual effects play.
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Mar 13, 2022 05:47
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Masterpiece. except the part about usually playing without sound, that's a guillotining.
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Mar 15, 2022 13:22
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I used to be one of those people who play without sound. I still do sometimes depending on my mood, but I make sure to use sound at least on initial play through of any new content. It adds so much to the experience.
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Apr 6, 2022 16:43
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Warning: This post contains spoilers for the game Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Specifically, the identity and mechanics of the final boss of one of the ending routes. Personally I consider this information to be relatively unimportant, really easy to assume and figure out if you’re playing the game, and meaningless if you’re not, but to each their own. If you consider the name and some mechanics of the final boss a spoiler you will want to skip this post. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a 2019 game released by FromSoftware AKA The Dark Souls People AKA The People Who Have the Tenchu License but Chose Not to Use It. A one-armed shinobi called ‘Wolf’ (Also ‘Sekiro’ which can roughly be read as ‘one-armed wolf’) is the sworn protector of a child with immortal powers. Said child being held by the collapsing Ashina Clan because it turns out immortality might be a really good thing to have in your back pocket. Are you a bad enough shinobi to rescue him? If you know Souls games then you know the score here. You’re playing through areas, collecting items and currencies, finding checkpoints and shortcuts, and dying a lot. It’s really the differences where Sekiro blossoms into its own thing. There are loads of little changes that I think are great, like getting to come back to life right where you die so you can in essence never be ‘one-shot’ killed when you’re learning a fight (Sekiro might actually be one of the most forgiving Soulslikes), or if you fall off a cliff doing platforming it just puts you back where you were minus a little health instead of outright killing you. But the two biggest differences are that really form the game are: -Wolf is extremely fast – able to run, grapple, and jump around freely with no stamina bars. Everything plays much faster and more fluid than a traditional Souls game -Sekiro has no builds. There are no weapons, no armor, no stat points to assign. Everyone who plays the game will be playing as the same Wolf with the same sword. As a result everything is much more tightly designed than a traditional Souls game, because the designers will always know exactly what every player will have and be employing. I think there’s no better example of how these two changes play out than the final boss of what can be considered the ‘good’ ending(s) route. This is Isshin Ashina, Patriarch of Ashina Clan, Sword Saint. https://i.imgur.com/tZJr7ip.jpg Linked image so people concerned of spoilers can scroll past This guy’s great. He’s got a sword. And a spear. And a semi-automatic pistol. And he calls down lightning. And he can swing his weapons so hard they part the air around him sending shockwaves around the field. And I think he’s one of the best bosses in the FromSoft catalogue. First, the boss room is very well-designed. A big mostly empty field is a perfect final setting for your dumb anime martial arts fight. Thematically it’s the field from the very first tutorial boss of the game (the one who ‘kills’ you in typical Souls Tutorial fashion) and now you’ve come full circle to take back your win here. Functionally it’s a nice clear area so you’re never fighting geometry or the camera controls. The physical design of Sword Saint is also great. As a human enemy, you can assume he will be beholden to the same offensive and defensive strategies as the player and so it should be roughly a ‘fair’ final showdown, but his multitude of weapons, moves, and impressive height are still intimidating (dude’s like 9 feet tall). For actual gameplay reasons having him taller also does actually help with camera angles which is better explained in this video by Zullie. Mechanically is really where I think this boss really shines and exemplifies what I enjoy about the overall design of Sekiro. Sure he has a lot of moves. Sure the moves come out fast, and flashy, and cover huge areas of space. But by this point in the game you should be able to look at his moveset and realize something. Ashina Cross, Perilous Thrust, Lightning Reversal, Ichimonji Double, Perilous Sweep, Ranged Projectile, Chasing Slash. These are all moves you have seen before. In other Souls games, generally most bosses exist in their own sort of ‘bullshit bubble’. You go through the door, you fight Moonlit Butterfly, and then you never come back or use that knowledge again unless you choose to do a replay. Any strategy you may have devised there will not necessarily apply to O&S, or Dark Sun Gwyndolin, or Bed of Chaos, or Gwyn who may as well be a sign post 20 hours into the game that reads “btw I guess you should’ve learned to parry”. Sekiro is largely the opposite. The tightness of the gameplay and design means everything can be planned to build into the next. Normal enemy attacks, weapons, and martial arts styles get used by mini-bosses, into bosses, which give way into tougher bosses. Simple moves chain into flashier moves, longer move sets. You’re always learning and improving in ways that can keep getting utilized. Sure Isshin’s attacks are faster and flashier and bigger, but strip that away and they’re attacks you should already know how to deal with. Hell, some of them are attacks you yourself can use right back at him. He doesn’t just feel like a fitting final boss, he feels like a final exam. The game has taught you everything - just apply it. Anyways, Elden Ring sold a billion more copies on its first day than Sekiro sold in its lifetime, so we’ll likely never see anything like it again. Lol. Lmfao.
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Apr 6, 2022 17:02
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