In the past few years, my workplace has used Webex, Zoom and Teams. I definitely hate that we’re using Teams now because the others are better when it comes to meetings. Teams is unusable for me half the time while the others just worked. Lag spike during the call? Now the microphone doesn’t work. Or it will work but no one can understand you while you talk.

In my work machine, mine has a special feature when someone shares their screen during a call and you go full-screen - the extreme audio lag feature.

Even Morrowind was a simplified version of Daggerfall, even though it was groundbreaking when it was released. They decided that the direction to take was to simplify the mechanics progressively, to make the series more appealing to more people, as opposed to adding interesting complications back as their tech develops. They succeeded in their mantra of “keep it simple, stupid”. I don’t have any hope that the next game will be more interesting. It will look prettier, of course.

Now, instead of debugging the code, you have to debug the data. Sounds worse.

Teams started out okay. But the recent update made it worse. The microphone constantly disconnects now. Earlier today I lost sound completely just when I was being asked to talk. And the sound starts to get choppy during screen shares. I rarely had these issues with Webex and Zoom. So it’s not even more compatible with their own software. EU doesn’t have anything to worry about. /s

It’s been years but Daggerfall to me feels like the ideal RPG. They did make it a point to make simpler games after Daggerfall. Beginning with Morrowind, the magic categories slowly got reduced, the skills were intentionally consolidated and reduced in number. That’s the reason why the later games sold really well. Starfield still sold well despite the valid criticisms but they should have trended into more complexity for a space game. Bethesda games are the junk food of games (and sports games are Mountain Dew or something).

To their credit, at least they’re still trying to build stuff. Microsoft avoids this problem by no longer innovating and just buying into whatever is trending. (Not that Google also isn’t doing the same). If you never build anything new, you never risk killing a product that didn’t trend, which happens a lot.