I remember waiting like 10 minutes with a loading window for Monster Hunter Rise to compile shaders at one point a while back and I had no idea what that meant then… (but yeah obviously most games do it more elegantly)

I only know this because I recently started doing some game development (as opposed to just being a gamer for 30 years); Shaders are little programs that run directly on your graphics card. They’re all over the place in games, doing stuff like making objects glow, morphing/transforming objects, and in 3D games, they’re also doing a lot of the work of lighting effects and details that you would want to see in order to actually see the game’s final product. When you start a game it will (either in the foreground or background) compile (build for your computer) all of the shaders designed in the game, but I guess this needs to happen on each computer. If they re-coded some of the shaders in the game to be more efficient/use fewer resources and ultimately make the game run faster, the ones in the previous release would need to be completely recompiled.

(I’m sure someone will be along to correct any inaccuracies in that.)

What I think is odd though is that game companies are throwing that around like anyone has any idea what they’re talking about though.

Sigh. There are just too many things to play, do, worry or think about to fuck around with people who have already shown you who they are. I liked the original game, like 20 years ago, and I’ve liked hundreds or thousands of other things in between. What I’m trying to say is these people can go fuck themselves. I don’t care if it’s the publisher, it’s the whole crew they came in here with. Fuck off.