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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.)
What I meant by it being too late is that once you’re a billionaire, you can fund your interests (like making the world a worse place) off the passive income you make from interest and investments. Licensing fees are probably a drop in the bucket at this point. Even if she makes tens of millions less due to a massive boycott (which is wildly optimistic), it wouldn’t affect her life or political activities a smidgeon.
And since Hogwarts Legacy was the game that finally dethroned Call of Duty and random sports games as the top seller of 2023, I doubt a boycott would be at all effective. Harry Potter was many people’s childhood, and they’ll buy it regardless of external factors just to finally live in that world.
Edit: I fully support anyone who chooses to boycott Rowling and anything associated with her. It makes sense to not want to support her in any way. I just wanted to point out the unfortunate truth that a boycott won’t actually hurt Rowling or her disgusting political activism in any meaningful way, outside of maybe bruising her ego. She’s not beholden to public image like a corporation is, so she won’t even make a token effort to appear less awful.
There are good live service games, but the blatant monetization bothers some people.
Take Warframe, one of the most popular live service games. Everything can be earned in game, including the premium currency as long as you’re willing to put in time and effort. However, every single UI element offers a way to spend that premium currency with higher presentation priority than the actual in-universe methods of doing whatever that menu is for.
Want a specific gun? Only 500 platinum for a fully kitted out model* (or 25,000 credits for the blueprint you actually want, and it wasn’t until fairly recently that they added tooltips showing where to earn things in-game). Building something? Only 20 platinum to rush construction, or you could wait a day. Want to customize your frame? Here’s a few dozen color palettes, 99% of which cost platinum.
* Which is such an awful newbie trap. Don’t buy weapons or frames off the Market in Warframe, kids. Their Prime variants, which are statistically superior, can be bought off other players for a fraction of what DE charges for the inferior regular versions. The Market is hilariously, blatantly overpriced and has been since the very beginning.
Space Engineers is another offender. It’s a block-building game and all of its DLC is cosmetic skins, but even if you don’t own the DLCs those skins show up as unique blocks in the block picker with a padlock icon that tells you to buy their associated DLC. It clutters up the UI to the point of worthlessness, but there’s no way to turn it off because it acts as an advertisement.
Let’s not even get into gacha games, which feed off of addictive impulses to have a small percentage of players pay thousands of dollars to subsidize everyone else who plays for free.
Live Service and Dark Patterns go together. Games as a Service requires a constant revenue stream to fund development, which incentivises predatory design patterns.
I get that, but she’s already a billionaire. The damage is done; nothing we as consumers can do will have a meaningful effect on her life. And the game studio is obviously against her views, given the positive presence of a clearly MtF trans character* in the first game.
* Which honestly bothered me (the obviousness, not the trans part), because the Potterverse is one where you’d imagine transitioning to be easy and perfect (take that, Jo). I think it would have worked better if that character had a flawlessly feminine voice and only revealed they were born male later in their dialog. The way it was implemented it felt like pandering to negate Rowling’s toxic reputation, which tbf it probably was.
It also mentions that the unannounced title is planned to have a “live ops” phase post-release, suggesting that the Hogwarts Legacy sequel could be a live-service game. WB Games has been quite vocal about doubling down on its live-service push in recent times, seemingly unfazed by the failure of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
That’s all you need to know.
I second this. Heat Signature is the perfect heist game, and there’s no feeling as good as when you get into the zone and take out or avoid everyone in a high-ranked mission and escape without being noticed. And when you’re not in the zone and screw up, it turns into pure chaos as you desperately try to salvage the situation. It’s great fun.
It’s by the same guy who’s making Tactical Breach Wizards, if that helps.
He’s excellent, but I’ll stress the “not a review” part. He’s hilarious but you usually won’t get a good look at the games from watching his videos. He’ll often take a single mechanic and spend the entire video breaking the game in half using it, which means he won’t show 90% of the game’s content or how it normally plays.
They released an excellent announcement trailer parodying the concept of announcement trailers three years ago. I haven’t seen a single thing about it since.
The second one suffered from being extremely rushed. Much asset reuse. It also made the game more “action-y” because I assume some souless suit said that kids don’t want tactics they want biff bam ACTION.
It also made every encounter consist of multiple waves, with enemy reinforcements popping into existence inside your party and rendering positioning nearly useless. It’s like they were going down a checklist of ways to make combat less tactical.
I hope they bring back spells like Virulent Walking Bomb from the first games. That one would poison an enemy and make them explode when they died, and if any enemy nearby died to the explosion or within the next few seconds they’d explode too, and so on.
It wasn’t the best spell, but it fit the “mages are one misstep away from becoming eldritch abominations” narrative and damn did it make you feel powerful when the secondaries went off and it turned an entire room full of enemies into mist.
Spec Ops actually did have choices where you could be good (or at least less bad), but ironically people missed them because they didn’t think being good would work.
For example, at one point you’re being harassed by an angry mob of locals. A lot of players simply shot them because a lifetime of experience with shooters told them that no other input would be recognized. But in actuality, if you fired warning shots at the ground or over their heads the civilians would flee without incident.
You may enjoy Dungeon Keeper.
I liked how SimCopter actually used the same systems as SimCity 2000, with cop cars coming from police stations and fire trucks from the firefighters. Well thought out SimCity maps actually made your life easier, rather than being window dressing.
I wish someone would bring back the concept. There was a SimCopter mod for Cities: Skylines back when it first released, though I think it was abandoned. That would be the perfect game for it, since half of SimCopter was dealing with traffic and Skylines had an amazing traffic simulation.
Mostly, I just liked the Apache helicopter you could use to blow everything up
Until you hit a nuclear power plant and it wiped out half the city (and probably fried your copter too) once it burned down.
UFOs would also start spawning when an Apache was present on the map and start abducting civilians and blowing up buildings until you shot them down. I think that was the only other disaster the game simulated?
Both can be played on modern Windows with Krimsky’s patches. They’d probably work in Wine, but I’ve never tested them.
I believe the last pre-Paradox build is still available under Steam Betas.
It’s a damn shame what Paradox did to the game. It turned from a near-perfect sim with excellent optimization and stability into a laggy, buggy mess with loads of DLCs that both fixed and introduced more bugs. So the usual Paradox product, where stability is completely random based on which DLCs you own.
Hey, I just wanted to say I bought Lunacid right after your comment and finally got around to playing it. I’m only at the Catacombs, but so far it’s excellent and a great throwback to Kings Field (though I miss having armor; with only weapons and rings there’s far less exciting loot).
Thanks for the recommendation, my friend!
There’s a much cheaper model, the Zero, that’s good enough for messing around with and performing simple server tasks like PiHole. Even it has had its price increase multifold over the years, though only to fifteen bucks from an original price of five.
It’s also much smaller than the already tiny Pi, being able to fit in a standard orange pill bottle. Though the downside of that size is smaller and fewer ports, so you need a USB OTG adapter (preferably a hub) and micro HDMI adapter to plug things into it if you don’t want to run it headless.
Apparently Rockstar paid around $5-10k per track for GTA IV, so it wouldn’t take much of a boost in sales to be more significant than the licensing fee income.
Music licensing for games is so dumb. You’d think the studios would remember the Guitar Hero effect, where having your back catalog featured in a game introduces it to a new generation and brings sales and new fans.
If anything, they should pay the devs for the exposure rather than the other way around. It’s not like I bought Hi-Fi Rush for the music, but I ended up enjoying and seeking out a few tracks due to it.
It’s in a weird halfway position, though it’s less cRPG and more action RPG with each iteration. The character creation in Daggerfall wouldn’t be out of place in a tabletop game.