Oh yeah, I wasn’t trying to say that Luanti had an incredibly original thought with volumetric lighting. There’s been (pre-resource-pack) volumetric lighting mods for Minecraft probably already a decade ago. I was rather just wondering, when the proof of concept has existed for a whole decade, why do they decide to include it now. It probably would have worked well even on weaker phones three years ago already…

Huh, half a year after Luanti introduced volumetric lighting. I find it hard to believe that Microsoft execs watch out for what Luanti does, but maybe a whole bunch of Android re-packagings of Luanti suddenly looked a whole lot better than Minecraft and that got through to those execs…? It’s a bit of a strange coincidence, at least.

I think, it’s a combination of things.

To some degree, it may make the player choice seem broader, as you can go full hero or full villain. In some sense, you can also go into the middle by kicking a puppy at one point and then helping an elderly lady at another.

But then, it’s also just hard to portray nuance. If the options are “pet kitty” and “punch kitty”, you know what’s what. But if it says “pet kitty” and “ignore kitty”, it becomes a lot less clear. Maybe the kitty does not want to get pet by a random stranger. You probably won’t be able to gauge its reaction from the character model to know what’s the right choice.
But you also won’t know what “pet kitty” really means. Will your character be gentle and back off, if the kitty does not appreciate the gesture? Or will they stroke that kitty until it bites them?

I’m actually aware of the difference, but would also argue that this difference isn’t that big. If you have to bypass security mechanisms to be able to use hardware as you please, that doesn’t sound to me like you actually own it.

Yeah, I was gonna say: Oh, like most laptops then? If the hard drive is not encrypted, you can just boot a different OS to access what’s on the hard drive…

Well, I mainly mean that they’d need to put in quite a lot of work to make the existing Oblivion mods work with it or to develop a new modding API. I doubt, they’d put that much work in for a cash grab remaster/remake.

I mean, I have heard of some weird constructs before, where games used their own engine for physics and whatnot, and only used Unreal for rendering. If that makes sense for them to do, that would preserve support for most mods.

The thing is, the age of the engine doesn’t say anything. The Unreal Engine started its development before 1998. But you do have to put in work to upgrade an engine over time and Bethesda doesn’t have Fortnite money for that.

If it is in Unreal, that’s going to be interesting. Presumably, mod support is out the window then.

Damn, the buildings in that screenshot do look like the terrible assets you got in simulator games ten years ago…

Sure, but so it’s still non-sensical to compare a transistor to a whole chip. That’s like saying a trumpet is louder than an orchestra.

1. No, it just isn’t.
2. If we’re somehow talking about an orchestra made up of lots of trumpet players being louder than a traditional orchestra, like alright, but then we still gotta figure out what it actually looks like in an orchestra. Does this new transistor actually use less space, for example? What’s the price for it? And so on…

Am I stupid or is a transistor a very different thing from a chip? Like, a chip has lots of transistors on it, but comparing them is still rather non-sensical…?

Well, my initial reaction was “What year is it?”. As far as I’m aware, this practice has largely fallen out of favor in the industry. And it’s been more than a decade since the last GTA release, so their stance might have changed in a similar vein, or at least their management would have likely changed.

Well, this news is about their valuation, i.e. their stock price, which is only partially tied to their profitability. If there’s bad news about their consumer cards, that could still lead to people selling their stock, because they expect other people to sell their stock, too. If you’re the first to sell, you still get a relatively good price compared to everyone else.

I think, part of the frustration is that many people have been wishing for realistic Pokemon games for a long time, to experience their favorite anime as if it was real. Pokemon Colosseum gave people a lot of hope when it came out a million years ago and then it’s just been disappointment after disappointment. Even the recent games hardly look better.

Yeah, honestly even if this guy was the greatest balancing guru in the world, why did they start two weeks before launch to try to get this right? Did they not do proper playtesting before then?

Yeah, fair point. It doesn’t make it impossible for a manager to decide to downsize the studio after a launch, but at the very least, you won’t draw as much attention to that being an option, when you don’t need to pitch a new project while you’re about to run out of things to do.

The problem is that even when a studio publishes a successful game which brings in sales over many months, you can still generally reduce short-term costs by firing those devs. And investors love short-term profits.

I have no idea, if it’s any good, but apparently this exists: https://content.luanti.org/packages/JALdMIC/aw_personaje_anthro/

I believe, you could in principle use any Blender model, although I’m guessing, they’d need to match in terms of animations. I’m not deep into either Luanti modding or Blender, so not sure how it works together, but here’s some documentation describing it: https://docs.luanti.org/models/using-blender/

I’d argue it all started, because Microsoft is Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_versions#Personal_computer_versions

Very interesting, thanks. I kind of got stuck on Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which used to have a food clock until a few versions ago, now it’s just no respawns. They also scale XP amounts up for higher levels, so when there are more low-level enemies around than needed, they won’t give you a ton of extra XP.

I’ve played around with Angband and ToME a few years ago, and I tried to like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead multiple times, but yeah, I feel like that’s probably the reason then why they never clicked for me quite like DCSS. I am absolutely the worst for optimizing the fun out of games, if given the opportunity.

Yeah, its game mechanics are very similar to Civ5, which is still considered one of the high points in the Civ series. And it does reproduce them quite well, so I do think that can give you a good impression, if Civ is for you.

Then again, I do own Civ5, but still end up playing Unciv instead, because I’d rather have my laptop not screaming at me while it runs in the background and I do a couple turns every so often…

I was thinking that roguelikes are kind of the antithesis to what he proposes, as you’ve got rapid character progression (paired with rapidly rising difficulty) and you certainly don’t want to get attached to your character. Didn’t know there was roguelikes with cannon fodder, though. 🙃

I mean, stock price rarely correlates with actual need and more with just hype. If you expect many people to buy a given stock, it makes sense for you to buy before them. If you expect many people to sell a given stock, it makes sense for you to sell before them. The actual need kind of just provides a baseline, i.e. even if the hype dies off completely, it’ll still make some profit and pay out some fraction from that to anyone who’s willing to park their money there.

It would certainly be weird, after their recent games were so story-driven. You can’t tell a good story, if you need to always keep the end open for possible expansions.

Yeah, and they often launch with loads of systems where future content could be plugged in, but the actual content itself is typically bad or at the very least incomplete. The publishers try too hard to build a platform rather than a good game…

Yeah, theoretically the exact model for monetization isn’t as important, but many publishers are hoping to get players to pay subscriptions indefinitely.

Fucking hell, man, with how many very publicly visible security problems they had last year, you’d think the stakeholders would be on board with doing security for a bit.

Decency or even legality. If Zuck knowingly hosts hate speech, you don’t want that federated onto your platform or you can be sued, too.

I think, a big part of the problem is that much of the cost is sunken into things that don’t really teach you too much. The basic game concept prototype can probably be developed for less than $10m. You do still learn some things by making really nice graphics. But then making those nice graphics as well as sounds, voice recordings and world design for your massive open world, that’s when you’re just doing more of the same at quite the scale.

I could never get over how boring the gameplay of Infamous looked. Comparing it to a third-person shooter is pretty apt. Like, you’ve got these crazy lightning powers, but 90% of the time, you just use your hand buzzer to give folks a bit of a zap. Riveting.

There’s rumors of Bethesda working on an own Oblivion remake…

It runs in the Skyrim Special Edition engine, so should work wherever SSE works. And SSE does work in Proton under Linux.

I can’t believe, they chose Thank Goodness You’re Here for the lead image, but wrote “thank God for that” into the title.

Yeah, that frustrates me a lot, too. They almost had it right, that they need to go beyond realism to make truly good-looking games. But in practice, they say that only to show you the most boring-ass graphics known to humanity. I don’t need your pebbles to cast shadows. I can walk outside and find a pebble that casts shadows in a minute tops. Make the pebbles cast light instead, that could look cool. Or make them cast a basketball game. That’s at least something, I haven’t seen yet.

The big problem for these AAA studios is that this is their unique selling point. Hyper-realistic graphics and sprawling game worlds. If they stop doing these, they’re hardly different to the games from five years ago (which you can still buy and cheaply at that). And they’re hardly different from indie titles. They would enter quite the competitive market.

I do agree that we’re at somewhat of a breaking point. The production costs grow to absurd levels. The graphical advances are marginal. And not many gamers can afford the newest hardware to play these titles. But I don’t think, there’s an easy exit strategy for these AAA studios…

Not quite in the spirit of this post, but I managed to complete Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for the first time this year. It’s been my favorite game for a few years now, but it’s a roguelike and doesn’t allow for many mistakes, so lots of starting over.

That is also the complete list of games I completed this year. I started replaying Thomas Was Alone, but somehow the platforming passages were a lot more frustrating to me, so haven’t finished it…

I always thought, it worked quite well to have different areas with weaker or stronger enemies. That way, you have challenges to match to your character’s strength, but you still have a form of progression and you get shown your power-level when you pass through a low-level area again. Downside for game studios is that this requires good world building, to guide players where they should or should not go. And yeah, that wasn’t exactly Oblivion’s strong suit with mostly everything looking like a high-fantasy meadow…

I don’t know about New Vegas, but the trick with Morrowind is that when the guy tells you, you need to go to a cave west of town, that you then get lost, run into a naked barbarian and help get his clothes back, then you run into a lady who got robbed, but fell in love with the robber, so you help reunite them, and then you’re halfway across the map and have long forgotten that you were supposed to find a cave, but you had a much better time than you could have had in that cave.

Also, the cave might be south of town. It happens. 🙃

Reminds me of how frequently folks get color blending wrong (using linear blending results in darker colors). Or also volume sliders (using a linear scale results in much stronger volume changes near supposedly-silent volumes).

It just looks/sounds vaguely right and then no one ever questions it…