Epic have come a long way from Epic MegaGames, and it isn’t always a fairytale story I suppose.

Someone here on Lemmy highlighted that quite nicely when Valve dropped their Half Life documentary. Valve embraces their past. They cherish it. They still maintain their old games to honor their success.

Epic on the other hand completely wiped old Unreal titles from the relevant stores and don’t give a fuck about supporting any of them. Which is a shame. Also I admire the tech behind of modern Unreal engines, so there are still geniuses at work who are likely passionate. Too bad they essentially only ride the Fortnite train outside their engine development.

I would consider Todd Howard to be part of development (since he directs the creative and narrative angle, from what I understand).

He defended bad performance with “get better hardware”. He defended criticism of the content with “you play the game wrong”.

Both are bullshit “excuses”. The first one was even debunked by modders who showed that there was potential for optimization. And modders are far more limited than engine devs. The game doesn’t look ugly, but there are far better looking games with more scene complexity out there that run better.

And “you play it wrong” is bullshit because if enough people play it wrong to have an effect on the rating of the game, then the game is badly designed. Part of game design is making sure the game explains itself or subtly pulls players in the right direction. Either they failed with that, or there simply is no clear direction. But that’s not the players fault.

Yeah but businesses typically don’t go out and rub that in their customers faces. That’s basically what most of the complaints are about: Bethesda should just shut the fuck up and swallow their pride. Is some/most of the stuff people throw at them unfair? Likely. Is it completely unwarranted? No. Should they defend it? Also no.

I think it’s technically still there… hidden behind custom fronts.

I can second that. Valheim has a very neat balance between exploring, fighting and building. If you don’t progress to quick, even your base is relatively safe. Although I now have turned off raids completely. So my base is always safe and if I want action, I can venture out into the world. I like that.

Google had deals that were revealed. For example Spotify was exempt from paying those 30%.

Does this replace the third party Better Thermostat?

Nope, you aren’t the only one.

It pisses me off each time, but I also expected it.

I can still throw away my fire tv stick then. At the moment it still does the job I bought it for and I won’t produce unnecessary garbage for something that might happen in the future.

Remember that there were also big campaigns against tape recorders and VCR. They even managed to get VCR vendors to implement a feature that prevents users from skipping ads. So it’s not like it’s simply legal, the media corps were just not as successful in their lobbying as they are today.

You can btw “simply” opt out from this in the settings (look for “featured content” and disable it).

Yes it should be opt-in, but it’s not that hard to keep the fire tv (stick) being a good device for the price paid.

Westwood fits into that list.

I don’t blame the engine. There are other studios out there with custom engines that evolved over time. Also Creation Engine evolved a lot.

That they work with many connected scenes instead of a continuous world also has advantages … it allows them to easily change the “world” between scenes by simply linking you “back” to a different scene (for example city under siege which before the dialog was not under siege). It’s how they work. They could do the same shit with Unreal if they wanted to and if they believe this kind of game design is the only feasible for their story telling, they would shove it into another engine as well.

I also don’t think the game feels “old”. I do think it feels like it is conceptionally unfinished. They had many ideas and you can see a lot of different systems in the game (space fights, planets with different biomes, ship building, base building, and so on and so forth). Each of these systems in itself has some kind of concept, but all these systems together are missing a clear concept, IMO.

From what I know, game dev typically works in modules that get thrown together. And this also seems to be the case here. However the “big picture” wasn’t refined or they realized that it needs a ton of small adjustments all over the place (conceptionally AND technically) to make sense of it and it looks like they were not able to deal with the complexity of that.

As a result we have a game that is okayish. It tells some stories, and offers a lot of content, but it feels not nearly as stunning as it should have and it’s not on a single front ground breaking.

told me that I should be able to come to work when I was able to play World of Warcraft

From your name I assume you are German. In that case your employer could suck it, even if you played on Monday. You can do whatever the fuck you want if it doesn’t conflict with you getting better. So if the doctor advises to stay in bed and sleep and you run around town for fun you could rightfully get in trouble. But if you have a broken leg you might not be fit for (your particular) work but could of course still play computer games. If you are on sick leave for mental problems you could even go on vacation because that might even benefit your mental health.

That could help, but if a file is not shared that much (yet) or not many people are online at the moment, a single peer will still share many more parts, likely ending up with having shared significant amounts.

That is essentially how bittorrent works anyway. In Germany people lost in court over this. Also portions of a copyrighted file are a problem. If they can “proof” that they got a relevant portion (more than the typical fair use seconds) you are still on the hook.

Nice idea, but then everytime a video that contains anything licensed by the content mafia is uploaded (even partly), the user in question breaks that license opening themselves up to lawsuits.

In a perfect world where only properly free content is shared that model would work. But that is not how most content shared on YouTube looks like.

I wish there is a github FOSS script that does this for new windows builds.

https://github.com/topics/windows-11-debloat

That will be irrelevant when the control freaks take over. Case in point: anti piracy ads in the good old DVD/BluRay days. Unskippable shit that ironically only punishes people who bought legitimate media.

But why? If you don’t need moving parts, don’t use moving parts. Simplicity is king.