leftzero

leftzero, rok temu

I’m not sure Townscaper can be called a game either, but it certainly is an excellent relaxing and enjoyable way to waste one’s time.

leftzero, rok temu

Activision Blizzard was already about as anti-consumer as possible, so in this particular case at worst nothing will change, at best Microsoft might actually clean house and there might be some improvements for the consumers…

leftzero, rok temu

Yeah, sorry, I was thinking from a PC standpoint and sort of ignored the whole console perspective (though, frankly, the console market seems to have been absolutely fubared from its inception, from a consumer standpoint, so anything Microsoft does will probably be as relevant as farting into an ocean of shit…)

leftzero, rok temu

Luckily, Activision Blizzard already stopped investing in quality and started shafting customers quite a while back, so worst case scenario (in this particular case, your criticism is still valid for most others) nothing changes, best case scenario Microsoft actually cleans house and the market becomes slightly less anti-consumer with one of the worst offenders gone…

leftzero, rok temu

CD Projekt Red…?

leftzero, rok temu

TESIV Oblivion is 2006, Tachyon The Fringe is 2000… 1994’s Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger has a whole IMDB page, with the likes of Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, and Malcolm McDowell playing main characters.

And there’s earlier games with less stellar casts, like 1991’s Tex Murphy: Martian Memorandum. Actors in games have been a thing for quite a while.

leftzero, rok temu

Oblivion is TESIV.

leftzero, rok temu

And John Rhys-Davies!

leftzero, rok temu

Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, and Malcolm McDowell (among others) in Wing Commander III Heart of the Tiger (1994), for instance…?

leftzero, rok temu

With Malcolm McDowell and John Rhys-Davies.

leftzero, rok temu

The point is that, other than Gabe, Valve doesn’t have any shareholders to put before their customers. A publicly traded company, on the other hand, effectively has no choice but to cause as much harm as possible to their customers and to society in general in order to maximize short term shareholder profits, leading to runaway enshittification.

leftzero, rok temu

Exactly, Steam got where it is because it managed to be more convenient than piracy (as Gaben himself said, piracy is a service problem), as did Netflix before the fragmentation (and rampant enshittification) of the streaming market made piracy once more the most convenient (and better quality) option.

Epic store exclusives don’t promote Epic, they promote piracy, as that is the second most convenient option after Steam (it’s worth mentioning that Steam also acts as unobtrusive DRM; infect your game with malware like Denuvo and suddenly piracy again becomes the more convenient — even the only reasonable — option, as cracked games perform better and are more stable than malware DRM infected ones; Steam provides a good enough and, more importantly, harmless option for both consumers and developers, something no alternative, including piracy, has managed to achieve).

And, of course, the instant Gaben retires and Valve goes public and begins to enshittify itself we won’t be going to Epic or GOG (unless they manage to replicate what Steam has achieved), we’ll be back to sailing the high seas.

leftzero, rok temu

Then we’d go back to sailing the high seas, until a better alternative shows up; as Gabe said, piracy is a service problem.

leftzero, rok temu

When their launcher is literal malware or they engage in anti-consumer practices like exclusives, no, they are not good for the customer.

(Not that any publicly traded company can be good for the customer, mind; by definition they can only be good for the shareholders; any benefit they might accidentally provide to the customer or to society is an inefficiency that will eventually be corrected through enshittification. The only reason Valve isn’t entirely harmful is that they aren’t publicly traded yet.)

leftzero, rok temu

Nah, comparing them to cosmic horrors is giving them too much importance, I think.

I’d rather compare them to, say, the diarrhea that forced that plane to turn around a while back.

No cosmic anything, just a foul horrid unending flow of liquid excrement purposelessly ruining everyone’s day, making everything shittier, and stinking the whole place up for decades to come.

leftzero, rok temu

Is he talking about trying the paid mod thing again…? Because the game’s been moddable since day 1 (or -7, if you don’t count the early access as day 1), and the nexus is already full of mods, including the script extender…

leftzero, rok temu

Eh, it’s all the same 26 year old gamebryo engine, we can probably just use the Skyrim tools. Or the Morrowind ones. Hell, at this point modders have probably made their own better ones, like they made the script extender, and wrye bash, and whatnot. 🤷‍♂️

leftzero, rok temu

No, succulents.

leftzero, rok temu

Heavy objects tend to be completely OP and are used to cheese combat.

You shut up. Barrelmancy and goblin tossin’ are perfectly legitimate martial arts!

leftzero, rok temu

“Didn’t Denuvo come out after Fallout 4 launched?”

“No, it came out a bit more than a year earlier.”

leftzero, rok temu

If you’ve got windows 10 try updating to 22h2 (no, really; a consequence of Bethesda being acquired by Microsoft, I suspect), and update your GPU drivers.

That got it running on my 980ti, so it should also work with the 1070.

leftzero, rok temu

They got rid of the dialogue wheel and went back to a list of options (influenced by character background / skills), so at least there’s that, I suppose.

leftzero, rok temu

Best comparison I’ve heard (by Gopher, if I recall correctly) is Outer Worlds, but less silly, and bigger by several orders of magnitude.