Ephera
- 2 Posts
- 275 Comments
Yeah, I was thinking that recently when I realized I’ve known
the crazy plot twist in Star Wars
(Luke’s daddy issues)
for as long as I can remember.
I’ve also known
so many iconic characters and scenes
(Yoda, R2D2, Chewbacca, the metalkini, C3PO, when they boop the Death Star etc.)
before I was even old enough to watch the movies, too.
I’m sure they’re cool movies, with lots of cultural relevance, but they’ve been spoiled in every possible way for me, specifically because the older generation loves them so much that they can’t shut up about them.
Yeah, then you should get a mod for that. I can absolutely understand your qualm. Morrowind came out in an era when RPGs were still computerized DnD, and that’s a design decision which aged particularly poorly.
Admittedly, it was also perhaps just a bad design decision in general. In DnD, you don’t either roll a dice for each sword hit. Nor are you able to miss an enemy from just not being near enough. At the very least, they could’ve played a different sound, if your sword connects, but does no damage.
Yeah, it is the green bar. And yes, it drops from attacking.
As has already been said, stamina potions are often quite worth it. But it also helps, if you switch to walking for approaching an enemy, for example (instead of running). If you’re sprinting across the landscape and get ambushed unexpectedly, then yeah, the game punishes you for being exhausted.
In general, Morrowind is much more roleplay than the later parts. You can optimize the fun out, by waiting around until your stamina recovers, every so often. But the game gives you enough opportunities to become filthy rich and overpowered, so that you shouldn’t need it.
Speaking of the combat, I can’t say i’m a fan. Maybe there’s something i’m missing but it’s definitely a lacking point of it. I just find myself jabbing at the enemies until either one of us drop dead.
One thing that’s perhaps not obvious from today’s viewpoint, is that stamina affects your hit chance quite a bit.
It is also a good idea to be rather skilled in your weapon of choice.
And of course, the real pro tip is to install a mod which changes the hit feedback. 😅
The problem is that all of this happened outside the law. Calling it a “DMCA takedown” is misleading, because it’s not making use of the DMCA’s mechanisms. There actually are hefty penalties for false DMCA claims, but only if you file them with a court.
I assume, Valve may be liable as well, for distributing copyrighted material (especially after they’ve been notified of it). At the very least, YouTube also has a system like that, where they allow claimants to bully creators with no repercussions.
Basically, Valve, YouTube et al need their own copyright takedown system to be preferrable for companies, so that those use it instead of filing an official DMCA claim.
Of course, the root cause of the problem is still the DMCA.
Well, there was an effort to solve it on a technological level, via the Do Not Track header (DNT). The idea was that when users actively signal they don’t want to be tracked, then even in weaker jurisdictions, you can’t justify doing it anyways.
But Google and Facebook said outright that they would not honor DNT, which meant virtually no webpages could honor it, since Google Analytics and the Facebook Like-button were omnipresent on the web at that point.
And then Microsoft killed it off for good by enabling it by default in Internet Explorer. That meant the DNT header did not anymore necessarily represent a user actively choosing to not be tracked, so it became meaningless in court.
Well, and after that had failed, the EU came about with the GDPR to solve it with laws.
But here it also needs to be said that a cookie banner is effectively only required, if you implement tracking.[1]
But of course, the ad industry did not want webpage owners to realize they could avoid needing a cookie banner by removing ads or going for non-tracking ads, so they spread a whole bunch of FUD.
And now we’re here, with cookie banners virtually everywhere, which are often not even GDPR-compliant either (like the PC Gamer cookie banner here), since it’s supposed to be just as easy to decline, as it is to accept. If it is not, then that’s not legally consent, because consent has to be freely given.
TL;DR: Ad industry bad.
Cookie banners are only ever relevant for personal data (because the GDPR is). And you don’t either need them when the user has implicitly given their consent, for example when they put something into their shopping cart, then they obviously consent to you storing their shopping cart contents for the purpose of purchasing those items. ↩︎
I would still call it virtually the same game, especially since they didn’t even bother to fix lots of awful bugs.
But I think, we can both agree that Morrowind would need a significantly larger overhaul, if you wanted to make it feel ‘modern’. You’d need voice acting. Perhaps optional quest markers. Well, and the combat system would basically need reimplementing from scratch.
For PC, there’s already OpenMW to do that: https://openmw.org/
Basically, it’s a fan reimplementation of the Morrowind engine, which you feed the original game files into. It also has a number of improvements over the original, like higher resolution, higher view distance and virtually no loading times.
I’ve only heard of them being trash so far. I was hoping they’d still have some resemblance of fun. But if the small fraction of folks who’ve upgraded to a Switch 2 actually were to play more than those on Switch 1, then that would be a pretty clear sign that it just isn’t fun on Switch 1.
But yeah, I’m not yet taking that for granted from this piece of news. I would assume, they wanted to drop the Switch 1 so quickly, because then they can start extending the game in ways that use more resources, which might be fine on their other supported platforms.
Some game a friend wanted to play also requires these and she complained that she had to reboot into the BIOS to enable these every time she wanted to play. We told her that the battery on her mainboard might have run out of juice.
…but yeah, we’re techies. There must be so many people who this also happens to, who will not learn of the solution. She did say, she did not expect there to be a solution, she just assumed you have to do that every time.
Hmm, they might’ve scrambled to add Recall et al, because those other features you named don’t particularly need to be offloaded. Except for maybe TTS, you’re not gonna run these in the background all the time. And if you need the occasional translation, it’s fine, if it takes a bit longer.
At least, I would’ve absolutely seen headlines à la “Microslop wants you to buy an expensive new PC – to do things your current PC can perfectly fine”.
I actually reinstalled it myself after writing that comment. 😅
I only really started to fully appreciate it, when I learned that drifting gives you a boost. So, if you’re going around curves, you pretty much always want to drift, which then kicks your speed up once you stop drifting. Maintaining a higher speed than your car normally goes, is vital for beating the harder difficulties.
Mario-Kart-at-home by the way: supertuxkart.net
Buy now for $0 and get Rocket-League-at-home for free on top!
(It’s one of the game modes in SuperTuxKart. 🙃)
But yeah, $80 is kind of wild, even just because it’s fundamentally still a cart game. You pretty much need a group to regularly play it with, otherwise you won’t get your money’s worth out of that.
If you enjoy pinball, this one is decent: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.dozingcatsoftware.bouncy
I also think ANY game should have a “full potato” mode capable of running in older computers with NONE of the fancy graphics stuff that we have access to today, despite having a decent computer now.
Problem is that the fancy graphics stuff isn’t just additive.
For example, raytracing is actually relatively simple to implement, since you just make light behave like it does in real-world physics, according to a couple relatively straightforward rules and material properties.
Lighting without raytracing involves tons of smokes and mirrors hacks and workarounds. For example, mirrors were often faked by building the same room behind the wall, with everything inverted, including the player character’s animations.
So, making a game with potato graphics typically requires building a second version of the game.
Of course, there can be a mode that does just turn off the additive stuff, so only that which does not require changing the game implementation. But that can just be one of the graphics presets…
I mean, sure, I do understand what’s happening on a logical level. I’m just so baffled, because this whole internet thingamabob was architected by the military.
It was intentionally built, so that parts of it could fail without disrupting the rest. When a corporation fucks up, it was supposed to take down the servers of that corporation, not also a good chunk of the rest.
But unfortunately, this internet thingamabob is merely the closest approximation we have for the “perfect market” that economics theory calls for, so it still doesn’t actually self-regulate like that whole theory would love to believe.
In fact, it is so much worse, because now monopolization happens across the whole planet. Particularly also because we don’t have a functioning “world government” that could enforce competition at that level via laws.
So, the network leads to companies monopolizing on top of it and then monopolies necessitate that the respective companies do as poor of a job as possible, because this reduces costs and increases profits. As a result, major parts of this military-grade internet now falter every few weeks.
Oh man, these global outages are really getting out of hand. A few days after the recent AWS and Azure outages, I suddenly noticed that I couldn’t reach certain webpages anymore. And I genuinely didn’t even bother trying to debug, because I just assumed that it’s another global outage.
In the evening, I did look into it and noticed that my router was at fault (presumably DNS got bugged by a recent update). That was just wild to me, that I genuinely deemed it more likely that several major webpages went offline together than that my home setup is fucky.
I have been expecting that to happen in gaming in general. I feel like the reason we aren’t seeing it right now, is because it would feel quite pointless to integrate it into a game, if it isn’t actually properly integrated.
For example, if you tell an NPC to jump off a cliff and the LLM responds with “Excellent idea!”, then well, you expect the NPC to do that thing.
Or if a dragon crashlands next to an NPC, you expect it to notice and not tell you calmly about the weather.
You need code for these things. Tons of code.
To some degree, Bethesda will have the money to do that sort of thing, especially since they’re now owned by Microsoft, which’s investors are extra horny for AI.
And they already have a reputation of jank and Todd Howard lying, so there’s perhaps less of an expectation for an NPC actually reacting to a crashlanded dragon.
But even then, this whole thing might just end up being a very expensive gimmick.
In particular, you can’t expect console players to have a keyboard for chatting. You can try to do voice control instead, but you also cannot expect players to have a (decent) microphone, or for them to be talking to their console when they want to play late in the evening.
So, you can’t really make this LLM thing part of the core gameplay. Everything will still need to be solvable without it. Which gives it very high potential to become a gimmick.
Maybe you could have pre-canned questions like we currently do and then an LLM responds, kind of keeping the context of your conversation in mind? That might still be annoying, though, when as a player, you can never be too sure, if it gave you all the relevant info, or you have to repeat the question another time.
Yeah, I might be showing my age, but my interpretation of “a better game” was right away “a more fun game”, which got followed up with the thought: Did it make them more fun?
I feel like we had fun figured out pretty well in the last century already. And in many ways, the higher specs are used to add realism and storytelling, which I know many people enjoy in their own way, but they’re often at odds with fun, or at least sit between the fun parts of a game.
Like, man, I watched a video of the newest Pokémon game and they played for more than an hour before the tutorial + plot exposition was over. Practically no fun occurred in that first hour.
Just imagine putting coins into an arcade cabinet and the first hour is an utter waste of time. You’d ask for your money back.
Yeah, that is crazy to me. I understand them wanting to make other games in between and that making those games takes a few years each. Rationally, I’m on board with the decision-making and the math that leads to this.
But that the result is a generation who didn’t have an Elder Scrolls part released in their childhood, that still feels like far too grand of a concept.
Starting to sound a lot like a self-fulfilling prophecy, that companies and investors get cautious and pull out their money, which is what makes the bubble burst.
But well, for good reason. You wouldn’t need to be particularly concerned about everyone else pulling out, if there was a clear return on investment, if you knew more money to come out of your invested money.
Well, on desktop I’m actually quite happy with that setup. I like writing with my default editor, because I know all the keyboard shortcuts. And apparently, you can configure Joplin to use an external editor, but then I don’t know what it adds. I also really don’t want to be running an Electron app at all times.
On mobile, I might have more of a use for it. In particular, I need reminders there. But I’m not happy with the sync format that it uses. It adds a lot of metadata and additional files, and names the note files with UUIDs. I’m guessing, it will likely also not be able to load files that I’ve created on my desktop by hand, because those will be missing all the metadata.
So yeah, if I get desperate, this might be another choice in the future, but not for now.
- Ephera to
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To be fair, Sarah Bond was in a similar position and is a woman of color, too.