That’s actually exactly what they did to fix it. They now allow you to flag sinks as bathroom or kitchen sinks, which simply controls whether or not the dish washing function can be accessed.

The way The Sims does it is actually pretty interesting. The individual sims have very little behavioral coding involved. They’re basically just monitoring their individual needs. The vast majority of the objects contain “advertisements” that they broadcast, and the sims can simply look for nearby advertisements to decide on what to do.

Basically, you have a sim. They are simply listening to advertisements that are being broadcasted by the objects around them. Maybe the kitchen sink says “Clean +3” while the shower says “Clean +7”. If the sim’s cleanliness meter is low, they’ll check for local “clean” advertisements and choose one. As their needs get lower and lower, they’ll be more likely to pick stronger advertisements. So a slightly dirty sim will be likely to choose the sink, but a very dirty sim will choose the shower.

Then once they get to the chosen object, the object basically goes “okay, here’s how to interact with me”. The sim simply pulls from that pool of interactions for the specific object. There may be flags for specific interactions based on certain conditions, or certain traits that make a sim more likely to choose one object over another. For instance, if your sim is a witch, they may have specific magical interactions available. Or if a sim has the Active trait, they may be more likely to choose fitness-based advertisements.

This makes adding expansions very easy. You don’t need to do a ton of coding for individual sims, to “teach” them how to use new objects. You simply add new advertisements to the objects you’re adding to the game, and make sure your interactions are properly flagged for the various conditions that can exist. And now those objects can be dropped directly into existing save files without any fuss.

Worth noting that this advertisement system is what caused the infamous “my sim is using the bathroom sink to wash dishes” complaint that plagued the series for so long; the bathroom sink was nicer than the kitchen sink, so it had a better advertisement. The sim wasn’t looking at advertisements based on why they needed a sink. They just knew they needed a sink to wash dishes, and picked the one with the strongest advertisement.

Yeah, OoT feels dated by modern standards, but that’s largely because it set the standard for 3D games. Future games have built upon the mechanics, but OoT was what paved the way.

There are systems that will use a hidden hyperlink (which only a bot would see and use) which directs them to an infinitely long/wide junk link tree. It means they end up trapped in bot-purgatory and stop crawling the rest of your site.

The issue is that it means you end up consuming resources just to keep the bot trapped.

Blizzard is bad about this with WoW too. A lot of the content is only available as launch-day cinematics, and is vaulted once the expansion has launched. Getting the full plot for WoW as a new player is basically impossible, because so much of the game has been hidden from players.

It’s to create FOMO, and keep players active. If players know they can access content whenever they want, there’s no incentive for them to log in right now.

Watching Dutch slowly descend into paranoia and separate himself from Arthur (primarily due to Micah’s manipulation) was a wonderful bit of environmental storytelling. It was a B-plot that was running in the background whenever you return to the gang campsite… But Arthur only really begins to see it after it is too late for him to stop. Because by the time Arthur realizes what is happening, Dutch has already firmly made up his mind about Arthur, and Arthur has already started trying to get out of the life. And Arthur having doubts only serves to cement Dutch’s paranoia.

I was pleasantly surprised by New Dawn. I had some big complaints about 5, so I initially assumed New Dawn (being a direct sequel to 5) was going to be more of the same. It was an interesting take on the series’ formula.

I’d argue that is just another example of why delaying games isn’t a bad thing. 2077 clearly wasn’t ready at launch, and would have benefitted from a delayed launch.

Yeah, the Witcher 3 release should have taught the game publishers this. CDPR delayed the launch by several months because the game wasn’t ready to ship yet. And the game was phenomenal, and received rave reviews pretty much across the board. Gamers were disappointed about the launch, but basically went “this game will be worth the wait.”

Holy shit, I had forgotten about SOLDAT. My friends and I used to play that on the library computers in middle school.

IIRC it had a portable version that you could boot from a flash drive. Or at least the installation happened on your local user account, so it didn’t require admin rights from the school IT team.

Also, the old Dungeon Siege games. IIRC, 1 and 2 both had LAN multiplayer, where each person took control of a different character. It was basically the groundwork for the gameplay that Dragon Age Origins built upon.

Or give the awards directly to the credited teams, and not to the companies.

We don’t give Oscars to film companies. Imagine if an actor won an Oscar for a movie role, but didn’t walk up on stage to get it because they were already working on another movie. Sounds asinine, right? So why is it accepted in the game dev community?