Love how the courts are framing this. “ROMs are illegal software.” “Emulators are for playing pirated software.”
Ngl I kinda want them to use this logic and see what happens when they try to apply it to Nintendo’s own Virtual Console, which are emulators playing ROMs basically.
Hell, the games you can play in Animal Crossing are literal emulators with ROMs since they found iNES data in the headers.
Vermintide 2 and Tekken 8.
Both games have high skill ceilings, so I could probably spend years (and have) playing both and still finding ways to improve or optimize gameplay.
Last time I’ll respond to you since it seems you’re a Bethesda fanboy - or at least a very ardent defender.
I think you overestimate how many people actually install or care about mods. Many people just seems to like what Bethesda does.
Then why did Beth go out of their way to include mod support for consoles for Skyrim and Fallout 4, as well as announce mod support for console versions of Starfield? Plus people were clamoring for mods on console versions of their games even going back as far as Morrowind - but their games back then were more complete, so you are correct in that more people were okay with not having mods because at least the games were decent enough.
Oblivion was a smash hit on Xbox without mods. Since that the main sellers seems to be the console versions.
During 2006? Yeah, you’re correct - but interesting you’re bringing up Oblivion instead of Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and even Starfield. Y’know, the games that have been pretty devoid of any worthwhile vanilla content.
Two things: 1) You’re making it sound like swapping engines is incredibly easy (it’s not, and you have to train staff on how to utilize it from the ground up and that can take a while), and 2) you’re probably right on why they keep using CE, and the sad reality is that Bethesda absolutely intentionally designs uncooked barebones games because they realized they can just have the fandom make actual interesting content, or QoL changes. They also know that Creation Gamebryo Engine does limit them a lot to what they can do, but rather than going through the cost and time of changing over engines, they just let the fandom create the script extenders that are available for literally every single game of theirs since Morrowind so modders can literally do things the base game can’t let them do.
So this is more of a case where the craftsman has shoddy tools, but they don’t care because they’ll churn out a piece-of-crap and have their audience improve it for them for free. And then the craftsman will have the gall to try and get a cut of the audience’s work somehow.
Funnily enough, what you said is pretty close to what happened in canon. The Emperor at the time (I forget who it was, probably Tiber Spetim) had a legitimate methaphysically-powered Gundam/EVA unit and used it to basically terraform the jungles of Cyrodill into what we see in Oblivion
So he basically modded Cyrodill with the power of Numidium.
Actually, you can argue that they are still limited by what the engine can do - which, in turn, means it affects game design due to the fact they might want to implement an idea, but either they would need a hacky way to do it (like trains in Fallout 3 being a fucking equippable hat with an NPC running underneath the map, which is probably why their Fallout games don’t have drivable vehicles) or simply cannot due to technical limitations of the engine.
This is like saying a good wood carver can still be good if they have shoddy tools, when the reality is that a good craftsman is only limited by the quality of tools they have. If I can’t fully realize my wood carving because my knife is too blunt and do the best I could with what I have for an inferior design, is that my fault or the tool’s fault?
Bruh, TES games are button mashers if anything. Dark Souls and any other related games has got TES games beat by lightyears in that department.
TES lore, on the other hand, is just as interesting as Dark Souls lore for different reasons - mainly how wacky and weird the stuff Kirkbride wrote for Morrowind and Oblivion, like the fact gameplay mechanics like saving and loading, console commands, and even mods are legitimately canon thanks to CHIM, or the factoid that Pelinal Whitestrake might have been a time-travelling gay cyborg depending on how you interpret his descriptions. And who can forget that Vivec, a living god, has a spear that is implied to be the penis of Molag Bal after Vivec gave him a blowjob and bit his dick off. Then you got shit with Lorkhan, the Dreamsleeve, and of course Talos being 3 different people at the same time.
I wouldn’t say “clearly still early access”, but it does lack the polish on a lot of small things.
BG3 Act 3 Spoilers below because Iunno how to do spoilers on Kbin
Like the fact on release, if you use Speak To Dead on Gortash, you get a completely unvoiced dialogue with Bane himself.
Wow, I didn’t realize making more commits and changes means something is better.
I mean, if something is working and it’s working decently well… does it need a nightly change or frequent updates? It not being updated as often as it normally does is not a bad sign imo.
I’m honestly quite fine with not owning any Ubisoft games, so me and this exec are on the same page of being happy not owning Ubisoft games it seems like
You say that as if any of those games or series are truly original:
Fortnite
Fortnite just copied other survival games like Rust and Ark. Epic put their own spin on it by combining it with a battle royale - sorry, with a PUBG game mode.
Zelda
If you’re talking BoTW and ToTK, you can argue they just copied other open-world games like The Elder Scrolls and Far Cry and added a Zelda flair. Weapon degradation was even present in the older TES games.
Pokemon
Pokemon is just a kid-friendly version of the Shin Megami Tensei games without the fusion mechanic. Some of the Gen 1 Pokemon designs were also more or less lifted straight from Dragon Quest.
Minecraft
It was more or less virtual Legos when it first came out, and the survival mechanics gave it a unique spin.
So if you really wanted to, you can reduce all of the games you mentioned into their influences and what they straight-up copied. Funny thing is, these are all very well-received games because their core gameplay mechanics and designs were very good, and they added their own spin on things. Copying others isn’t a bad thing so long as you’re either iterating on it to improve it or to do something different to it somehow.
It also helps if the game is genuinely fun or interesting to play. I can tell you I’m having a hell of a lot more fun watching people play this than recent Pokemon games, and it’s making me consider dropping some money to buy the game.
Oh, you should totally check out XCOM: Enemy Within and XCOM 2 if you found these games interesting.
The main gameplay for the tactical level is the same as Mario + Rabbids; it’s turn-based (you take your turn with your entire squad, then the enemy takes their turn) and you control up to a squad of 6 panic-prone rookies soldiers who have to complete an objective of some sort, usually killing all the aliens on the map. Each soldier can get a different class and choose different abilities as they level up within those classes, so you can sort-of tailor each soldier’s stats with the abilities they’d work best with. The major difference with XCOM is there’s also a strategic layer to it; non-fighting stuff, like managing each country’s panic level, building your base, and researching technology to get more upgrades for your weapons, armor, and fighter jets. Super fun strategy game if you’re into the genre.
It’s supposed to be like XCOM, right? Is there a strategic element to it, or is the game only just the fights?
The only hardware upgrade I will see myself making in the foreseeable future is changing out my 3600 for a 5700x3d solely so I can keep my current AM4 mobo for as long as I can.
With parts being hella expensive and my 3060ti still going strong, I don’t see why I shouldn’t just keep what I have until they either die or break.
I mean, you can argue that Google actually has a monopoly on web browsers right now. iirc Firefox takes a ton of money from Google, so if the choices are “Google’s proprietary browser” or “a non-Chromium browser backed by Google” (EDIT: unless you’re on Apple hardware and use Safari), then Google comes out on top either way.
Wish we could get another good browser engine that isn’t Chromium, WebKit, or Quantum.
Great! So what is it?
Y’know, it’s possible people buy a game to play offline where you don’t get achievements. The numbers Larian put out could also include EA purchases from like, 5 years ago.
But gamers don’t actually need to understand game design or why a certain choice was made.
I said this in another thread: if it’s a shit design, it’s a shit design. Knowing why the shit design was made does not suddenly make it not shit. In fact, I do not care to know why you made that decision in the first place - if it’s bad, then just own up to it and either try to fix the issue or actually resolve to do better next time.
Nah, DDG is arguably worse than Google now with their search results - I just ended up going back to Google after a couple of years of using DDG.