The video also calls out that one of the challenges in moving off of fandom is SEO. The fandom sites often are above the new sites even when the fandom site becomes a pile of unmaintained, vandalized garbage. This suggests that vandalism actually helps fandom.
The best thing we can do is not visit the sites and don’t link to them, instead using and linking to their new sites.
I completely agree. I think the point of the commenter you’re replying to is that this is the kind of game that will fix these eventually. It’s still disappointing for a launch, but eventually it will probably become better than CS1.
I recall ages ago having read a theory about this concept of compression. That most game worlds that we see aren’t literal, but rather are compressions of the world that characters experience. A city that we see might have just 5 streets, but that’s just the city being compressed to a manageable size. For what characters experience, there’d be hundreds of streets. And same thing for NPCs, as you put it. We mostly only see the important NPCs and a small sample of others, but there’s many NPCs that really are there for story telling purposes, they just aren’t shown.
It’s a really good technique if pulled off well. After all, it’s really hard to have cities in game. You have to do something to limit it. Either padding it out, making most of it unvisitable, “compressing” it, or… just not having cities. Every option has downsides, but at least the compression approach optimizes for gameplay and your time.
I love BG3. It’s a very different game from Skyrim though. After all, that city is basically a third of the game. Plus BG3 has all kinds of travel and camera limitations that Skyrim doesn’t. That’s what lets them make the city truly seem like a sprawling city.
By comparison, Skyrim basically lets you go everywhere and it has a far larger map. Skyrim chose the “big as an ocean, shallow as a puddle” approach when it comes to map design. Though NPCs are actually deeper than BG3. Skyrim NPCs have lifes, while BG3 is frozen in a moment.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has also done this very well. The build up to finally reaching the city of Baldur’s Gate really is worth the in game hype. The city is massive and the entirety of act 3 is spent within it. They use the standard trick of ensuring you can only visit part of the city, with much of the city being inaccessible but visible. That’s a great way to make the city feel like it’s actually city sized while still ensuring that the part you can explore can be explored in depth (as in, almost every building can be entered and is unique).
As contrasted with the GTA approach where the visitable area is far larger, but you can’t enter most buildings and it’s more generic.
I think it’s pretty hard for an open world game like Skyrim to achieve the way games like BG3 or TW3 do cities, though. After all, Skyrim basically lets you go everywhere, which makes it difficult to fake the size of cities. Skyrim also tries to have not one city but like a dozen cities and towns. I feel like if they wanted to make a realistic city, they’d need to really focus on a small number of cities (probably just one city and a few towns). I’m not sure of the Skyrim scale can really allow for cities as detailed as BG3 or TW3.
Skyrim also has far more in depth NPC, which have routines going all the way from waking up in the morning till they go back to bed. That surely adds scalability issues.
They could do a hybrid approach. Have many unenterable buildings and generic NPCs. But I’m not sure that’s a good idea. That’d make things look bigger, but it wouldn’t really be that much more content and it’d kinda waste our time in traveling to the good stuff. Or they could scale things down. They don’t actually need to span an entire province. They could have focused entirely on one city and surrounding area. But it does come at the cost of more limited lore options and a less varied map.
Personally, I like the Skyrim cities. They’re flawed, but very fun. Not a lot of games have the level of NPC detail that Skyrim has and none of them have the kind of massive, open world that Skyrim and Fallout have (I’d love more games like those).
The frustrating thing is they’re both being shitty for consumers. It’s terrible that they’re acquiring these previously cross platform publishers and making them exclusives, but at the same time, this is what Sony has been doing for a while (at best, they very recently have started doing PC releases but with a multi year delay, which I don’t really count as truly cross platform).
I’m doing an evil playthrough now and finding various things I missed from the first playthrough. But oof, I feel really awful about the horrible things the game lets you do. 😅
I’m sorry, but 99.99% is a laughable hyperbole. A huuuuge number of people have disabilities and disabilities are extremely diverse. A simple example is colour blindness. Google says 8% of men and 0.5% of women are colour blind. Video games frequently do use colour in a way that makes colour blindness a problem and colour blind modes are an accessibility option.
Google also says 15% of the world has some degree of hearing impairment. That’s admittedly biased towards seniors, but I can find numbers that say 9% of 20-39 year old Canadians have detectable hearing losses. Captions are an accessibility option.
And those are just two examples. There’s tons of disabilities out there. Even when an individual disability might only be 0.1% of the population, add them all together and there’s a substantial number of people who are left out by lack of one accessibility option or another. Aside from obvious disabilities, there’s also just general worsening of reaction times as people age.
Yeah, I’m hearing impaired and need captions. I’ve never seen a major game without them for many years now, and recent games have gone above and beyond with things like captioning sounds (not just dialogue) and directional indicators.
I kinda hope someday they’ll remaster the original Assassin’s Creed. It’s the only non-spin off in the series that I haven’t played. I own a copy, but gave up on it because it has no captions and I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying.
I also love how difficulty settings are much more common now. I’m never gonna buy a Dark Souls game. Fuck those. I tried the first game and learned my lesson. Thankfully, most games these days don’t take such an elitist stance with difficulty. It’s really common that games these days will let you change difficulty on the fly. Some games have split puzzle vs combat difficulty. I’ve seen some games have specific settings just for reaction timing. And also love those settings that highlight interactive objects so I don’t waste so much time looking for subtle hints that something is interactive.
Monopolies aren’t based on the mere existence of competition. It’s based on power and market share. Eg, Chrome has a monopoly. Firefox, Safari, and a few niche browsers exist. But Chrome is the utter vast majority of the market and has pretty much all the power on dictating web standards as a result.
Microsoft had competitors when they got sued for their IE + Windows monopoly. But they had an utterly massive amount of the market share and used that to push their own browser.
All of the following? Why would you need to be better in every way? There’s a perfectly valid use case for trade offs. Eg, let’s say some competitor had exclusives, no VR, the store interface was a little worse, and it was only roughly comparable on many other points. If it’s simply faster and more lightweight, that’s its competitive advantage. Or if it focuses on being open source and DRM free like GoG, that’s a competitive advantage.
Expecting something to be better in every way (than something with a massive head start) or else it might as well not exist? That’s just unreasonable. I don’t require a clothing store to be better than Walmart to shop there. I mean, the clothing store doesn’t even sell fruit! Why would anyone shop there when you can go to the Walmart and buy some grapes with your jeans?
It’s definitely not merely a matter of not bothering to make a decent store though. I mean, do you think Epic is held back by not being bothered? The way they pour money into their store, I’d it were easy, they’d have it. And having a decent store isn’t enough. It’s kinda like social media in that you need the crowd effect. People want all their games in one place with integrations like friends, mods, achievements, etc. AFAIK, there’s no open standard for most of these things, so you need a big market share to convince devs to make the change.
Yes! Can confirm it’s fixed. It’s great and revitalized my interest in using certain characters. I had almost sworn off some characters because of the bug and now they’re back on the menu.
Druids are insane. Owlbear does utter bonkers damage. Far beyond what I could do with any other character (I can’t tell if that means I built my other classes wrong). Only downside is that druids feel super limited. Usually to just melee attacks with no items and most equipment doesn’t even do anything (there’s little reason to ever purposefully revert to your original form, since you’d just eat a wild shape charge).
Baldur’s Gate 3 is great at story and choices, which I think is where a lot of praise comes from. But it has a lot of really questionable issues with smaller mechanics.
The one I’m hating the most is how NPCs react to many summons and wild shape. Having a wild shaped party member makes most NPCs run away screaming, which is very painful in the NPC heavy areas of act 3 and basically discouraged you from even using wild shape or summon elemental, even though those are both incredibly powerful. You can dismiss the summon/wild shape, but it uses resources, so it sucks to do so. People have reported the bug for months but it doesn’t seem on the devs radar (they purposefully made NPCs run away – it’s a “feature”).
And just the other day, I discovered weirdness with warlock spell slots. Something about having used an elixer that gives me an extra spell slot (and then having consumed the spell slot) was preventing me from casting certain warlock spells (I think those of the spell slot’s level) because it claimed it needed that spell slot, even though I had higher level warlock spell slots. So a bunch of my spells couldn’t be used! When I searched, I found many reports about similar issues when people multi classed.