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I loved Morrowind’s vague directions, they felt so authentic - like visiting a small town and getting directions from a local. Even a basic fetch quest felt like a journey since you had to check your journal and follow what the questgiver said or you’d get hopelessly lost.
Navigating by landmarks needs to be in more games. There have been a bunch of games since that let you turn off quest markers and item glows, but without any instructions all that leads to is the player wandering randomly until they stumble upon their destination.
It must have been surreal for Pratchett meeting Emma in person at the Snuff launch party. Since she voices the character herself, it must have been like meeting two separate friends at once - his writing correspondent and research partner, Emma, and his virtual guide/friend in Vilja.
That feels like a scene with the sort of bizarre, semi-irrational emotional undertones that Terry himself would often write about. I wish he was still around to ask how it felt.
I wish I could parse news coming out of China and tell which parts are jingoistic propaganda and which are actual news. They’ve leaned heavily on the narrative of Taiwan being a part of China and any invasion being necessary to bring them back into the fold, which is… honestly kind of terrifying. Invading for nationalistic reasons means it could happen even if it makes no sense and harms both parties more than either gains. See Ukraine for how that could shake out, except Taiwan is better defended and their allies have even more reasons to support them.
As for the chip side of things, it’s an open secret that Taiwan has their fabrication plants rigged to blow so the mainland can’t get their hands on them. A modern fab requires several years, multiple billions of dollars, and some extremely niche, cutting edge technologies and construction processes to build, and any damage renders them useless. There’s no credible way China obtains the fabs intact short of a coup or immediate surrender, or infiltration and sabotage on a level that they’d be making spy movies about it for decades to come.
Invading would cripple global chip production (TSMC produces roughly half the global supply, and more importantly the vast majority of high-end, nanometer-scale chips used by computers), crater Taiwan’s economy (along with everyone else’s, as microchips are the lifeblood of the Information Age), alienate the world (possibly leading to a major conflict), and accomplish nothing beyond a feather in the CCCP’s hat.
China has been building their own fabrication plants but they are still decades behind in the precision race, and I doubt they can meet even their own needs yet. Even if they press-ganged Taiwanese experts to restart their industry it’d take decades to bear fruit, if ever. Invading Taiwan would harm then just as much as it would the rest of the world.
And the worst part is an invasion seems to be a credible prediction.
Chinese authorities [accused] the DPP of selling out to the West in exchange for support for independence.
And yet my first thought was that this was a move by the US to obtain Taiwan’s best-in-world fabrication technology in case China goes through with an invasion in the next few years. So really China should be happy about this!
Existing contracts, a lack of infrastructure, and the cost of shipping and insurance would be my guess. Or simply just the economies of scale making it impossible for anyone other than a major retailer to do it.
Retailers can afford to lose a card or two to damage out of each large order (and usually make it back through upselling warranties that customers rarely use); the many individual packages with direct selling would make it far more likely some of them would end up damaged during shipping at AMD’s expense, and would be more expensive to ship than large bulk orders to boot. It’s far more economical to bulk ship to a distributor and let them do all the work.
Besides, would you trust GPU vendors with your deliveries? The “bad drivers” jokes write themselves!
I’d also give GameStop as an example. Even years after digital media took over, they still had significant influence over publishers, up to dictating advertising and release schedules. Partly due to contracts preventing publishers from pulling away, but largely because a lot of people only buy in stores - most significantly, gift-givers and others who don’t know anything about what they’re buying and need an employee to guide them. Holidays alone kept GameStop in the black for years after Steam/Live/PSN dominated the marketplace.
With graphics cards, I’d be willing to bet most people buying them know very little about their choices and need someone to guide them. Enthusiasts are the minority.
This seems pretty normal to me. Isn’t needing to remove copyrighted files when asked by the holder how it already worked?
It’s better than content hosts being held liable by default. Public file sharing would be a non-starter without a safe harbor provision (where the host is only liable if they don’t remove items they’re made aware of).
It sounds like they didn’t, but apparently Microsoft forgot to put together a contract for further work they were doing for the Master Chief Collection, so they were able to hold the MCC port of Halo Anniversary hostage contingent on Microsoft removing the clauses that had blocked royalties in their original contract. So they did get royalties for that port that amounted to tens of millions of dollars, but nothing for their original work.
Agreed. Dishonored came close, but also punished you for fighting lethally (which was 90% of your kit) so your melee options were limited to stealth finishers if you wanted the best ending. Mount & Blade was another decent try but I never loved its melee mechanics.
Dark Messiah also had the best spiders ever. It’s been nearly twenty years and nobody’s managed to top its implementation of one of humanity’s primal fears.
I used to play through the Baldur’s Gate trilogy every few years. Haven’t done that in a decade because I look at the three hundred hour playthrough time and know it’ll never happen.
Edit: “Trilogy” being what fans called BG1+2 plus the Throne of Bhaal expansion to 2. It’s kind of weird now that there’s an actual Baldur’s Gate 3.
Heroic is the fun kind of hard (most of the time). It at least feels like someone playtested it. Legendary in Halo 2 however is just brutally unfair, and even if you play perfectly it’s completely down to random chance whether you’ll succeed. As in you’re literally at the mercy of RNG in the enemy AI deciding whether you’ll be instakilled with no possible defense. Those fucking Jackal snipers…
And it’s even worse in co-op because you need to restart from the last checkpoint if either player dies, whereas on other difficulties (or Legendary in the other games) the other player can continue playing and you’ll respawn if they make it to a safe area. That one change makes co-op controller-snappingly frustrating.
Beating it in multiplayer is a legit praiseworthy achievement. Either that or a sign of deep masochism.
I finally started a blind playthrough of Dave the Diver after letting it sit in my backlog for ages. I’m not that far in, but it’s great so far. The core game loop is fun and relaxing and the characters are all memorable.
And the over the top pixel art cutscenes, man. Worth the price for those alone.
Hey, at least they added inventory sorting!
You know, after a decade of people asking for it. And without fixing the several fundamental design flaws that made the inventory a nightmare to use without sorting in the first place.
But at least they thinly papered over one of the game’s most hated bits!
The Elder Scrolls, infamously. Since they are open-world games, they use heavy level scaling so you can explore wherever you want from the very beginning.
It was alright in Morrowind. There, your level just controlled which enemies appeared, so you wouldn’t encounter high-tier daedra in the overworld until your level was in the teens and you actually stood a chance.
Oblivion utterly fucked it up by having everything scale to your level. You could revisit the starting area and a normal bandit would be wearing a full set of magical heavy plate worth tens of thousands of gold while demanding you hand over twenty coins to pass. Combine that with a weird player leveling system that punished you for picking non-combat skills or leveling up as soon as you could, and people loathed Oblivion’s leveling mechanics.
Skyrim’s scaling was somewhere in the middle, which lead to combat being inoffensively bland the whole way through.
I think Blackwater renamed to avoid tarnishing whoever was hiring them, not because they themselves disliked their reputation. If their employment wasn’t at the mercy of elected officials who have to care about optics, I bet they’d still be parading around their old name with pride.
It’s been decades and the first name that pops into my head when someone says ‘PMC’ is still ‘Blackwater’. Do you have any idea how much war crime they’ll need to do to get back that level of brand recognition?
Nah, it’s just the most horny that are also motivated enough to make the mod. There are plenty of others for other games.
Between paid commissions and putting downloads behind affiliate links (later replaced with Patreons), they were also a way for horny teenagers to make a lot of money. Porn and furries (and furry porn) apparently bring out the big spenders.
You know how sometimes you can get the camera to clip through a character model’s head and see how they have a fully modeled mouth and eyes inside? My understanding is that the Cinematic Mod in question did the same thing with one of its Alyx models, just with a fully modeled womb and ovaries and such. It was clearly meant for making porn, but got added to the mod anyway.
Though I only know of the FakeFactory stuff third-hand via hearing other people tell the story, so it’s possible things got exaggerated along the way.
Right, and they should have fixed them - especially since people literally put together wiki pages documenting every known bug in the game. But all Bethesda did was upgrade the engine a bit (make it 64-bit, add some new graphical effects, implement support for microtransactions) and release the same broken game again and again. The engine upgrades fixed a few crashes, but for some reason Bethesda refuses to patch logic errors in their Papyrus scripts (the code that controls the actual game content) even though those are way easier to fix than engine bugs.
If asked, I’m sure they’d say it was to avoid breaking mod compatibility or something, which is kind of bullshit considering nearly every mod works with the unofficial patches that do what Bethesda refuses to. And they’ve been like this since the very beginning. Their studio is synonymous with bugs.
It’s mind-boggling how they get away with putting such little care into their multi-billion dollar franchises.
Godot has one of the better explanations of vectors and their uses in games in their documentation, if you haven’t checked that out yet. It focuses on their practical use rather than going deep into the mathematics (though there is quite a bit of that too).
And if you don’t understand the math, the documentation also explains when and how to use specific methods, so you can still use it as a cheat sheet when working on your project even if you don’t fully understand vectors.
(And you’ll probably have an “ah-ha!” moment when working with them yourself. Like a lot of math, vectors are much easier to understand with practical, non-abstract examples.)
Embracer is also splitting into three separate companies to shed the tainted Embracer name, all still owned and run by Wingefors of course.
Asmodee Group (for board games) and Coffee Stain Publishing (for indie games) are the only two with official names last I heard. The unnamed third is the big one and Embracer’s direct successor, but I guess they’re delaying naming it to minimize bad press associated with the new name.