Hi, I’m Cleo! (he/they) I talk mostly about games and politics. My DMs are always open to chat! :)
I actually didn’t know this but I did play through that recently and I actually have really good things about how that game looks even to this day. I know they did some touching up and I’m assuming updated textures for the enhanced version but it aged a lot better than many other games from that era did
What’s really crazy is to compare Bethesda with CDPR. I’ve been replaying the Witcher 3 and it just struck me how I won’t have to wait 15+ years for the next entry. And to look at how much more efficient they’ve been in the past.
For a timeline, Witcher 2 released in May 2011 and then the Witcher 3 released in May 2015. Took 3.5 years to develop. Cyberpunk released December 2020, only 4.5 years after W3 had its last major DLC. Then in 2023 they released a very large update for Cyberpunk, about 2/3rds the runtime of the main game. And then in 2025 we’ll probably get the next Witcher game. They have like 3 games in active development now.
So what’s the difference with Bethesda? Well Skyrim sold 30 million units and Witcher 2 sold about 8 million. Less than a third the income. Yet if you compare CDPRs staff to Bethesdas at time of their next games, CDPR had doubled Bethesda’s work force. And guess what happened? Witcher 3 sold 40 million while fallout 4 sold 25 million. Thats despite Witcher 3 costing an estimated $81 million while Fallout 4 sits closer to 1.5x that at $125 million.
Then you talk about engines and it gets even worse. CDPR arguably started with a worse engine and I shouldn’t need to explain how much they’ve destroyed BS in that regard as well. Witcher 2 looks worse than Skyrim by a lot imo. But by the time their next game rolled around, it was an industry leader in graphics. And cyberpunk 2077 is like the next Crysis now while starfield is… oh boy. And guess what? After all that work on their engine, they abandoned it. Why? Because their resources are better spent making games and systems in an engine someone else updates for them. Bethesda meanwhile not only can’t juggle the ball of updating an engine and game dev, but they’re not even smart enough to swap engines.
Bethesda has all the signs of a dying studio and Microsoft is the sucker for buying them. And it’s a waste of talent more than anything. Talented people exist at Bethesda whose resources and career development would be far better off being applied on UE4.
Not if they keep on their BS. Let’s look at Fallout 4. The engine is absolutely the weakest part of the game. Can’t even keep 60fps in the city on any settings or on consoles. Frame times are all over the place. And the game isn’t even that pretty, it’s very ugly and textures are real bad. The story was pretty awful and boring, the writing in every way was forgettable.
So that’s why ES6 is screwed. It’s been downhill since Skyrim and even releasing a better looking Skyrim in 2028 on the PS6 isn’t going to cut it. It’ll be the most expensive budget title out there.
You say that but Arcane didn’t deserve this fate. I’d be rooting for a Bethesda game to fail but BioWare and Arcane? That’s just sad. They were both amazing studios ruined by BS. And the AAA space is large enough these days that actual big budget games can indeed innovate.
Like say though, I won’t exactly shed a tear for failing studios like Ubisoft or Bethesda that have been churning out the same crap for awhile now.
Also not every game needs to innovate and it’s not like you lose a lot by having average selling games come out. But even in games packed with AAA bangers, indies still sell incredibly well. It isn’t a zero sum game.
I thought this was common knowledge about the game but I’ll explain.
Now maybe I do need to get better and become a pro player but I have about 5k hours in the game. Since about 2016 I’ve played at the LEM/SMFC level which is about 5-8% of the top MM players. My current elo still hovers around 18,000 even though I play very rarely now, I play a handful of matches every other month at most. I also used to do a lot of the old overwatch system that let you watch matches of potential cheaters, I got very good at spotting them.
That isn’t to brag, I’m far from the best, but I quit playing around 2020 for a reason. The cheater problem is insane and Valve has done little to curb it. I got so suspicious that at one point I downloaded a publicly available cheat, popped it on a usb stick, and ran with it. I tried to use it intentionally without ruining other peoples fun btw. Even after running quite a few matches with it, no bad happened. And many years later that account is still not banned.
I got especially jaded when I saw people obviously using aimbots or wall hacks and they now have thousands of dollars in skins on their accounts. Meaning they’re so unafraid of getting caught, they put money on the line. That’s insane.
I came back for the CS2 update hoping they had fixed the problem and they absolutely haven’t. Every single VAC ban wave, go look at the leaderboards. Approximately 80% of the accounts get removed from the top 1000 players. That sucks.
And you think “cool well at least VAC” is working. Except it isn’t. Because those accounts cost, at most, $15 and the waves happen with many months between. Sometimes in excess of 6-8 months per ban wave. So that entire time, cheaters can freely exist with cheats until the ban comes down. Also insane.
All they’ve accomplished now seems to be getting rid of the most egregious spinbots and aim hacks. Other than that, the rest are still in the game and so now I play entirely casually.
(A very solid game that openly allows cheating and does little to ensure fair competition)
Pretty sure he was already warm because invading Poland was so not cool.
Ah that makes sense, it’s oddly suspicious they’d do this out of the blue. Though I am curious at the arbitration. Can they not include a clause that just says that the forced arbitration can be waived by them when they so choose? I feel like they would make carve outs for these big cases if they could to where they can still arbitrate on smaller cases which costs them less.
(Also updating my post text, thanks!)
Well now I’m hoping that the Switch 2 has a working emulator within a handful of months after release.
I believe that Vortex, the nexus mod manager, has Linux support now that I have heard is fairly straightforward but I haven’t tried it myself.
I will say though that I recently used Vortex for modding my Fallout 4 playthrough and it was a breeze on windows while using a Nexus mod collection. Takes a lot of the pain out of modding for sure. So if you can get their mod manager running I think it’s worth a try. Could be as simple as downloading Vortex, finding a collection of mods you like, downloading the collection (usually a temporary subscription is nice for this, and then running the game. You could be done like I was in a matter of a couple hours.
In my opinion apple doesn’t provide great value for the hardware and they’re lacking on the repair front. But when it comes to software, it’s so far and away better that I can’t justify staying on android. I mean forget about iMessage but go watch apples recent event and ask yourself how many of those features have parity on android. Very very few of them do. And androids watch OS is a joke and always has been.
Like yes the apple ecosystem sucks to be stuck in, but it’s also a strength if you embrace it. Nothing like those interactions between devices exist elsewhere. And the only other thing is configuration but it’s a minor pain point, not something I’d decide an OS on. It’s not that iPhone just works, it’s that it works at all. Many features on android aren’t widely supported and often get abandoned. Android just adds and adds more useless things every year without the refinement they need to focus on imo.
I see AI as being more useful in things like Bethesdas radiant quest system. Theoretically an AI could generate quest and character dialog and react in unique ways to game world events. As far as game elements, machine learning is actually a pretty good way to have dynamic difficulty where the player is pushed as far as they can go and game elements are tweaked accordingly. Or the AI could even design unique quest items and names if trained right.
Plenty of applications for it but I think we’ll see it overused in some games which will lead to bland or non-cohesive elements that on the surface are fine, but don’t amount to anything unique. Like imagine cyberpunk but written by AI and it’d be mostly generic dialog with few connecting ideas. It’s not impossible for AI to get better at that though and maybe if it were only trained on other game dialog or if it gets approved by a human first, it could be incredible.
You’re not in the minority, I just think they should’ve committed to the bit more? The blending of styles is the weird part. Minecraft is already low fidelity and increasing the detail has always worked in the past for these movies. It’s part of why wreck it Ralph, the Mario movie, and even the emoji movie all did pretty well.
I actually enjoyed seeing stuff like the piglins and nether all dressed up and fancy. I just think the people are presented as if the movie contains no animation and it doesn’t work. If they want to make it work, do the Sonic thing and blend the worlds by putting animated spaces in the real world.
Randy Pitchford also says he isn’t smart, it’s just usually in more words and in a daily tweet
I Think a lot of these drones are consumer based drones so yeah they often do come with their own hardware to control it. Though I imagine the Ukrainians are hacking the drones somewhat to rewrite things to shoot them.
I’ve also seen simple tech like the steam deck get used which is interesting.
Exactly. I remember this really being an issue with Far Cry 4. The villain there had me on the edge of my seat since the intro and I still think FC4 was one of the best far cry games to exist. The setting was amazing, mechanics worked really well, and the vehicles rocked.
The thing it flopped on completely was interactions with the main bad guy and any semblance of story development. It wasn’t nonexistent, but the main villain is criminally underused in that game and is on screen for maybe 15-20 minutes total.
But now we have the issue of far cry doing the Ubisoft signature multi-zone storytelling thing where the story is not linear and it’s completely wrecked by that. This game has the same exact issue that’s been here since FC5 and I hate it. I’d rather they keep the lookout points around and have a worse world and a better story with actual progression and characters. It’s like they’re determined to make games at a 6 or 7 out of 10 level.
I mean yes but imo the solution isn’t any of that. The problem is that Reddit has super niche communities that people expected to have enough users to build here. That isn’t the case. And we shouldn’t be looking to transplant entire communities because that rarely works.
People really need to hear this: You need to be cross posting every single niche community post into a more general community. There are too many posts on here that exist in a knitting community but not in a general hobby community that’s more active.
This is how Reddit works and we need to follow the template. You need strong pillars that people can flock to and then branch out from there. Examples might be r/funny, r/sports, etc. Then if people want super populated places to go and chat and post, those general communities are there. If they’re new, they can find your niche community by browsing the populated places. We don’t need templates for communities, we just need to have a few really populated places with high engagement to promote natural growth.
Who wrote this? Like just this paragraph:
How does anyone covering this exact story not know about Yuzu? Did I travel back in time?