davehtaylor

Maybe it’s a misplaced modifier, like, the husband was with a squirrel, then she stabbed him.

Or maybe she fashioned a dagger out of a squirrel carcass.

Wow, that’s one of the worst-written articles I’ve seen in a while. It almost feels like a comment on something that we aren’t shown. Almost every sentence is missing essential context. When did he say that? In what context? Can we get a direct quote?

This article is absolutely just AI blogspam. A lot of words that say absolutely nothing.

The real problem is greed. These days, it’s not enough for a business to be profitable. For the guys on Wall Street, it needs to be even more profitable than last year. That goes so far that an old employer of mine complained not that they had lost money, not that they had not grown but that they had grown less than the year before and therefore all teams had to cut down on spending. To them, everything less than exponential growth is unacceptable and nobody even considers that the market is finite.

It’s absolutely unsustainable, and it’s destroying the entire industry (well, destroying everything else too, but here specifically for this discussion). Companies keep cranking out more incremental changes to their hardware that do not need them. Developers keep pushing out bigger and bigger and bigger games that cost more and more, chewing up and spitting out creative teams, burying players in predatory microtransactions and subscription fees that no one wants nor asked for. All so shareholders can make a few more bucks this quarter.

I just keep going back to that meme of “I want shorter games, with worse graphics, made by people who are paid more to work less, and I’m not kidding.” And they would make a killing with that if they’d do it. But they won’t because it doesn’t sound greedy enough to investors.

Didn’t Oblivion already have the difficulty slider? You could just adjust that, no?

Not sure how much it affected the scaling. I usually just stuck to Normal difficulty. But as you went on, in Kvatch and inside Oblivion gates, instead of stunted scamps or clannfear runts, you’d start seeing spider daedra, daedroths, storm atronachs, and Xivili. Going back through Kvatch the second time, or when you get to the end of the main quest going through Imperial city you would be overwhelmed with a huge mob of Xivili and spider daedra.

You mentioned immersion breaking, and that’s another big issue. Just walking around seeing bandits go from wearing fur or leather armor, to wearing glass or daedric armor, is just ridiculous.

which provided an immersive way of gating content and a real sense of achievement when you came back later with better armour and weapons to finally defeat the enemy who gave you so many problems earlier. Basically the same experience you had with Death Claws in Fallout New Vegas when compared to Fallout 3 - they aren’t just a set piece, they are a real challenge

This is precisely why I dislike level scaling at a whole. It ruins any sense of progression. And I do love the way FNV used the deathclaws and cazadores as a gating mechanism.

Not the person you replied to, but for me Oblivion has some long and rich faction quests, really interesting side quests, and Shivering Isles basically adds an entirely new game to it, there’s so much to do there.

However, my biggest issue is that the leveling system (particularly the level scaling) is completely broken. If you rise anywhere above lever 5 or so, the difficulty ratchets up so much it makes the main quest nearly impossible to complete. I know level scaling is a big topic in the industry, but for me, the way it’s implemented nearly ruins what is otherwise a mostly great game.

I also wish you weren’t able to join all the factions. Like, if you’re high up in the Mage’s Guild, why tf would the Fighter’s Guild want you to join them? That was something Morrowind did really well. You really had to be deliberate about those kinds of choices.

The problem with Starfield’s settlements is that they are entirely resource mining operations. They aren’t really settlements in the way Fallout’s are. You have to spend a phenomenal amount of time to get the perks needed to make it even remotely useful or manageable, and by the time you get there, it’s not even worth it (which is true for most of Starfield’s mechanics, IMO).

The problems is that’s not what Fallout is. It’s not a settlement sim. But when I played F4 for the first time, it felt just like Fallout Shelter with a quest tacked onto it, which is not at all what I wanted. Especially the way the game strongly pushes you into the Minutemen. It makes it extremely tedious for a new player. After the first time, I walked away from the game and didn’t come back to it for over a year. I decided to give it a go and completely ignored the Minutemen, and it was such a better game. But you have to know you can do that.

Also it wasn’t until modding was opened up that the settlement system got good, IMO.

I recently did another playthrough, starting with 1. When I got to three, I spent a couple hours with it and just gave up. It’s just so shallow, bland, and lacking compared to 1 and 2.

New Vegas is the sequel 1 and 2 deserved, and Bethesda tries really hard to pretend it doesn’t exist.

F4 has only had staying power simply because of the modding community. It’s succeeded despite Bethesda. Modders took an extremely mediocre game and made it something much more rich and interesting.

I was in a similar boat myself some years back. Maybe 2013-2014 ish. Had been working for years in Windows admin and wanted to get into Linux admin. Homelab, loads of scripting experience. Couldn’t even get my foot in the door. Every single company only wanted graybeards. I eventually gave up and went back to school to get into software dev. The sysadmin scene was just so brutal and seemed like it was shrinking everyday. I have no idea what things are like now, but it was bleak back then

Yeah, finding fucking timed dialogue events made me wanna chuck the disc out the damned window

Here’s two wildly different dialog options, that might have vastly different consequences. You have three seconds to decide. Fuck that shit.

Dunno if I’d call it a stinker, but my excitement for Starfield waned very quickly as I played. 20 hours in, it was still fun. 30-40 hours, I’m like, eh. Past about 60 hours I was completely disillusioned with it. The perk system is a nightmare, leveling up gets really difficult really quickly. Making money (especially after they hid all the vendor chests), getting materials, etc. is a tedious slog. The UI/UX for ship building and settlement building is painful. Settlement building in general is a pointless waste of time and takes way too long to get the perks enough to make it even remotely worthwhile.

It also doesn’t help that there’s not a native version for the Xbox One, and Cloud Play is miserable. Constant disconnects, jitters, long load times, long wait times.

SPOILER BITS

The main quest is completely pointless. It has no effect on anything. Outside of Constellation and the other Starborn, no one even knows anything is happening. Your choices don’t have any impact on anything. Side with the Hunter? Side with the Emissary? Outside of the number of dupes you fight at the end, it literally doesn’t matter. And getting to the end does absolutely nothing. Now you have to start over with a shittier ship you can’t upgrade, some armor that’s mostly fine, and literally nothing else. Nothing’s different. Sure, after enough times through, silly things start happening at Constellation. But what else? It’s not worth it.

The faction quests are fun, but then again, have basically no bearing on anything.

The companions are disappointing: ostensibly you have two lovable rogues, a religious zealot, and the most Lawful Good character who will judge you for even the slightest non-Squeaky Clean choices you make, though they all end up being basically the same.

Otherwise, you just keep running the treadmill: get all 10 upgrades to your Space Shouts, ship, and armor? And then what? Just keep going. Do it again. And again. And you still don’t have enough perk points.

On second thought, maybe I would call it a stinker. So fucking disappointing. It had so much potential.

I’ve often described NMS as Minecraft in Space. The “story”, such as it is, is completely pointless and superfluous. You just fly around, mine minerals, build stuff, and that’s about it. And it wears thin really quickly.

I’ve seen that phrase on bumper stickers many times. It’s fully unironic, and earnest.

It’s right up there with people who fly a blue line flag and a Gadsden flag together. Or the stickers that show a cross, a gun, and a heart. I saw one recently that was the word LOVE spelled out with various firearms.

They don’t have coherent ideologies. It’s just reactionary bullshit that’s wildly incompatible, but they’re too blinded by their bigotry to see it.

Related, I’d always heard that the /r/the_donald started as an ironic shitpost sub that was taken over by people who agreed with it unironically and then became 100% serious.

Poe’s Law, and all that.