Thing is, looking at some games, Horizon and Elden Ring being a prime examples, we can have both great games with great graphics.

You don’t really want better games with worse graphics, you want better games that don’t use great graphics as an excuse to bad gameplay.

Imho you’re wrong there.

Amazon has every incentive to write down Twitches infrastructure cost as far higher than it needs to be, to make Twitch look unprofitable.

Both to audience and shareholders. It’ll allow them to force more advertising and push up sub prices while making the main corporation revenue look better.

This while the long term plan looks to be more about getting an excuse to shut down the public facing side of Twitch and get rid of having to deal with the streamers and viewers as direct clients and renting out streaming infrastructure to other streaming sites instead.

They want to condense their streaming services to simply be simple products they can sell or rent out to other sites rather than having to deal with a load of consumers and legal liabilities that come with them.

That’s what makes it extra messed up.

In the text of the article, they actually link to the kids video.

Yet the include of the page, they use that CTWC video.

So this isn’t lazy or by accident, this is completely deliberate.

Yeah, and if the OG video was just a minute or so long, I get including it while “reporting” on it.

This kid did a 45 minute run, which CTWC included in their video in its entirety, their own contribution, being the intro and interview, are only a few minutes tacked on at each end.

It’s infuriating.

Why did Polygon include the CTWC video at the top of their page instead of BlueScuti’s?

They are already stealing his views reposting his entire video with some bullshit commenting from them over the top of it and now Polygon is supporting that kind of behavior.

The kid did the work, give him the damn views.

The A770 is actually fantastic, even more so for the price.

What was garbage was the drivers and they’ve come a long way in bringing them up to speed.

They had and to some extent still have a rather gigantic hurdle to cross getting older games up to speed, but the decision to employ at least partial Vulkan translation instead of trying to get DX9/10 drivers up to speed was a huge leap already.

For modern games, when they are at least tested to run on the Intel cards, they perform on par with cards from AMD and Nvidia that cost $150+ more.

And no, this isn’t coming from some Intel fanboy, I haven’t bought an Intel CPU since Coppermine and for GPUs I’ve simply switched between what was the best for a specific priceclass at the time I upgraded. And whenever something really new came along, like Kyro3D and PhysX cards (and now Intels GPUs), I bought those too.

Also realize that Arcs ray tracing engine beats AMDs and keeps up with Nvidias in their first iteration of the chip.

Their tech is sound and fully has the potential to be a competitor.

Uhm, it says it reached a new agreement with WB that makes the bought content available, "“for at least the next 30 months”.

When that license expires and the PR winds are right, they’ll remove it permanently.

You still didn’t buy what you bought.

I switched to Microsofts keyboard because of this.

The Google one used to be perfectly fine when you wrote multiple languages in a single sentence.

These days, even if I just write dutch, french or english (or, not and), it does absolutely idiotic autocorrects.

Don’t have that issue with Microsofts keyboard.

Also, the google one has become very laggy for me in certain apps, especially on my tablet. If I try to comment on a Youtube video, it takes a good 30 seconds before I can actually type anything.

It’s gotten far more complicated that that, but we can keep it with "Suspect of running a (or multiple) charity scams, eventually paying a token amount that is only in line with reported revenue, not with revenue that can easily be checked from the vods of the charity streams.

People are also forgetting that he spent the past decade creating systems and tech for NMS that he can now use in his new game. Systems and Tech he didn’t have in hand when dreaming up NMS.

Modders already have ways to get paid for their work, without Bethesda trying to take a cut.

If Bethesda gets to normalize this, before long they’ll disable free mod support and you’ll only be able to get mods from them.

Exactly. There’s assloads of precedent that if you allow a single company to normalize this crap, it’ll be an industry wide thing within 5 years.

It happened with paid DLC, it happened with Microtransactions in full price games, it happened with pre-sales, it happened with subscription fees and season passes in full price games.

People keep pulling this “bwah, it won’t be so bad”, for it to get 10x worse than anything we expected.

Yeah, people kept saying that when people like TotalBiscuit were warning against micro transactions, paid DLC, pre-sales, etc becoming the norm.

Now the entire industry is shaped around it.

Because the endgoal is that something like the nexus can’t exist as only mods published through CC can be loaded.

Until they make it impossible to load mods that don’t come from their store.

There’s 1001 existing avenues for modders to charge for their work, avenues they use, from Patreon versions of mods to plain simple donations.

The issue here is that Bethesda is trying to get in on that action and try take a cut.

They are laying the groundwork to transform the field for when they make it disallowed to use the other long existing avenues and only allow modding through them, possibly arbitrarily putting a cost on everything and taking a cut on everything.

An Israeli firm bought them.

First app I installed with fdroid is Yet another Call Blocker and it’s the one app I haven’t swapped out for an alternative yet.

Software patents need to be shorter.

Hardware ones I think can be as long as they are, but need loopholes and tricks closed that allow for extending patents on the same thing artificially.

Best would be to have many different categories with vastly different duration and the durations need to be reviewed periodically.

Like the fact large parts of x86 is still patent protected is an obscenity.

An AI image is a result of a technology, which falls under copyright.

A method to generate AI audio is the technology itself, which falls under patent law.

These are two entirely different things that should never be conflated.

I don’t particularly hate my voice when played back.

I just don’t recognize it as my own voice at all.

Depending on how extreme the NO! answers are, they may delay it or split the 100$ DLC in 2 50$ DLC, which you both have to get to actually play the game.

Because the delay is part of adblocker detection on non Chrome based browsers.

All I have left to say about Google and Youtube in particular is that Youtubes ads have become so problematic, both in amount and quality (like seriously, people get banned for using innocuous words in videos targeted at adult audiences, yet completely fucked up ads are squarely targeted at children) and at this point, it’s time for YouTube to die.

A new platform needs to come along.

Which will be hard since Google has such a stranglehold on the datacenter and backbone level that they have an absolute advantage when it comes to bandwidth and storage costs. Which is the main cost for video platforms like YouTube.

I suspect this is less of a slowdown and more of a “we’re trying to detect adblockers and in Chrome we can do most of this check on the application level which is fast, while on Firefox we have to do it the extra slow way and we CBA to optimize any of it because the delay is to our advantage.”

That’s an other issue the game has.

It brings several features that are done 1000x better in other games, like Empyrion, NMS, Elite, etc, etc.

Part of the issue is that it also took them 2 months to get any sort of qualified patch out the door.

The previous ones only fixed like 2-3 game breaking bugs each and that was that.

The most recent one does a tad more, but still nothing to write home about.

Some people keep parroting that Bethesda has always had a absolutely horrid trackrecord of patching their messes, so you shouldn’t complain about that, but I refuse to give them a pass on that.

People that keep saying that are pretty much saying “yeah, me dog shits in my bed every single day and I’m not going to do anything about it because they’ve always done that.”

Stiffed?

To get an award you have to have earned it.

They weren’t stiffed on anything as they didn’t earn anything.

This while from day one they were talking like they deserved a Grammy (which they literally posted on their press release page).

There’s two sides to it.

1 is that it was heralded as being this massive intricate space game with a near endless things to do.

2 is that it was heralded as being the first of Version 2 of Bethesdas game engine.

1 turned out to be a play with words as while there is quite a bit to do in the game, barely any of it is captivating as it’s even less deep than most things you do in Skyrim and FO4, but it’s kinda true as the game creates an NG+ loop where your gameworld resets whenever you do the main quest (which you can do in a rather short time) which results in a virtually infinite things to do, as you get to redo the same content over and over and over.

The NG+ loop also makes it so that no matter what you do in the game feels like it’s an utter waste of time. As you will reset it after finishing the main quest and don’t have the ability to go back to universes you’ve already interacted with.

2 turned out to be utter bullshit as the engine has all the same bugs it has had since Morrowind, no new features to speak of (some say the ability to load more planets and generating those small landing areas is new, but you could load DLC maps in their engine going back as far as Morrowind and the procedural generation of the landing areas is very barebones and done better in ARGP and other games going back 25 years) and the engine only has a couple graphics features tacked on that FO4 didn’t have yet.

And I mean tacked on, the new graphics capabilities aren’t really integrated in the engine, just tacked onto it with ductape and superglue from external APIs.

What their version 2 of the engine needed was an actual ground up rework of the graphics pipeline to integrate natively all the crap they tacked onto it since Morrowind.

This while the new version of the engine also reduced a ton of modding features that made all their previous games so great, to be extremely watered down and some ultimately useless, meaning that it’ll take even more time for mod authors to bypass Bethesdas programming to integrate features the old games already had.

Added, it took all of a week for a modder to add XeSS, DLSS and FSR into Starfield, which should’ve been part of the game out of the box.

And it took Bethesda 2+ months to integrate these same features themselves.

Exactly.

The only time I ever look at the store tab in Steam is when there’s a sale on.

Otherwise, all I ever see and use is my library.

Yes and no.

It’s not like Epic had to start where Steam started.

Yeah, my SSD can do somewhere around 7GB/s read/write, barely half that with the encryption enabled.

And I have an external USB carry with an NVMe drive which should be perfectly capable of doing the maximum (1GB/s on a USB3.1 port) , but with encryption enabled, it’s struggling to do over 350MB/s

I was hit with the bouncy horse bug the very first time I booted up Skyrim.

All game content and story issues aside, what pisses me of the most is that a month after release, we still only had a microscopic amount of bugfixes that don’t even address some of the larger issues with the game.

I don’t want to bring up BG3 again, but at this timespan after the game release, Larian already fixed THOUSANDS of bugs, big and small and overall, the game was much less obviously buggy than Starfield is. It’s issues were more inconsistencies in logic and a handful of quest breakers, but otherwise not even noticeable until you read the patch notes.

It’s crazy to me there’s so little action from Bethesdas side in fixing this heap. I guess it rolls into their bullshit PR of pushing for Awards (they are literally looking to get a Grammy …) and saying the game is nigh on perfect.

Now yank out the rest of the boring Starfuckers plot. The game is worse because of the main “story” (and NG+ shite).

You don’t get arrested for misconduct. You get sued.

You get arrested for sexual assault.

At least loverslab mods make this a reality.

Starfield is currently a 4-5/10 game and by the time Modders will be done with it, probably a 9/10 game (10/10 if someone mods the whole main story out of the game).

But that’s not what modders should be wasting their time on. They shouldn’t be fixing the game.

Besides, the changes and oversimplifications Bethesda has made to the engine and the extraordinary announcement that the modkit will take a year to be released, will vastly delay the amount and quality of mods that will be released for the game.

Baldur’s Gate was a 7/10 game on release, mostly due to the issues with Act 3. But they took all of a few weeks to fix the vast majority of major issues and bring the game upto 9/10. Every patch and hotfix they released fixed thousands of small and large issues.

Meanwhile Bethesda announced updates right after the game released, fixed like 4 progression breaking bugs and nothing else.

10 days after announcing they were working on bugfixes and patches, not a goddamn peep, not a single thing fixed beyond those 4 small fixes.

It’s straight up disgusting how these corporations operate.

I’d agree with making life easier on the devs, if that was the purpose.

The purpose is making everything cheaper by removing complexity. And said removal of complexity, makes for far less varied content in the game. If your system is strong enough to spawn large crowds in the game, it quickly becomes obvious there isn’t much variety in terms of clothes and armors in the game.

As for making it easier to make full armors, sure, but only full armors.

One of the big things that has made the modding scene so vibrant is because slot item clothes have been created and ported over since Morrowind and Fallout 3.

It makes it so that there is a large volume of mods that simply carry over with minimal work.

Making it simple being the key requirement.

If you now want to import just the whole of the VTAW collection for Fallout 4 and the many variants created for it by other modders to Starfield, you’ll have to combine all variations of all 100 something clothing sets and armors, manually, instead of simply being able to wear all individual pieces.

And like I said earlier, that’s not 100x a job (that’s how many sets there are in VTAW, each with 5-15 items per outfit), but 100(hands)x100(shoes)x100(coat)x100(pants)x100(left arm armor)x100(right arm armor)x100(left leg armor)x100(right leg armor)x100(shirts)x100(mouth, yes that’s actually an official slot)x100(underwear)x100(hats)x100(jewelry)x100(glasses/masks)x100(other accessories), etc, etc, etc, etc, etc combinations you have to combine and bring together and edit.

It won’t only make for an obscene amount of work, but will also make the disk size requirements for all these combinations go from 1000 or so items to exponentially more, as every combination now is its own mesh, rather than simply a reference to an item slot.

In FO4, there are 60+ item slots (with modding tools, there’s even more than that). The most commonly known and used by Bethesda themselves for vanilla assets are:

Hat
Eyes
Mouth (for cigars, cigarettes, lower face maks, surgical masks, etc, etc)
Pants
Shirt
Chest
Left Arm
Right Arm
Left Leg
Right Leg
Backpack
Weapon
Boots / Full outfit (they use the boots slot to equip single mesh outfits)
Gloves

But there are also slots in the background for jewelry, earings, ring (like the weddingring), top hair, long hair, undershirts, underpants, beards, eyepatches, shoulders, belts, capes/backpacks, left hand, right hand, bracelets, weapon on back, leg addons like gunbelts, headbands, necklace/scarves, offhand weapon, etc, etc and many more agreed upon and assigned by the modding community.

Starfield as far as I can see only has suit/clothes, helmet/cap, backpack and gun slots. None of them layered.

So to release mods with many clothing and accessory items, you’ll have to manually combine all of these or only release a few full outfits.
And you won’t have a choice in what body you use as they need to be baked into the single outfit.

What made Skyrim and FO4 so awesome was the fact you could pick and combined all these different mods, some pants from here, some shirt from there, a standard left light armor on one arm, a modded right arm armor on the other arm, a gun holster on one leg, a standard armor on the other, a mask from some obscure mod and a hat from some sex mod.

Easy peasy to have a completely unique outfit and even possible to use mods to have every single NPC in the game use a random outfit comprised out of all the available clothes items you loaded into the game through mods.

You could really make every single NPC you came across wear something unique to them very easily.

Starfield now has about 40 armors and about as many (or a little more) full outfits (of which many are just very small variations on the same full outfit), but that still only makes 100 or so possible clothing and 100 or so possible hat combinations.

In Fallout 4, even with only the default clothes and armor, you had less “sets” of armors (light/mid/heavy variants of metal/leather/gunner/atom/minutemen/raiders/covenant/etc,etc), but you were able to combine any one of them to result in far more possible armor combinations than the 40 in Starfield.

In Skyrim and FO4, you could load thousands of clothing and armor items into the game and wear any combination of any of them and have NPCs wear any combination of them.

Still not sure what creeps me out more, the weird facial expressions or them laser focusing their attention at you most of the time.

And then not at all at times they should.