I’ll admit I’m using it loosely here because it’s fun

Say the line Bart!

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

What the fuck are “modding values”? Women with ridiculous anime proportions and almost non-existent armor? Adding Shrek and Thomas the Tank to Skyrim? Gatekeeping mods to a small community of individuals who play on PC and have the technical skills to do that? Slaving away while the rent and bills like up out of some sense of obligation to a community? Hoping people donate? Putting all the time and effort into creating something and taking on all of the risk? Being. Subject to the whims of Bethesda’s management and hoping management doesn’t change their tune to be more like Nintendo?

How can you calin that Bethesda doesn’t give a shit about modders getting paid, when they pioneered the first real legitimate attempt at paying modders? That’s some serious cognitive dissonance. And perhaps the most important piece of the equation is the financial security it provides. The Creation Club paying modders up-front greatly mitigates the business risks of investing that much time and effort. It is not the best fit for everyone, but that allows a lot of mods to be made that never would have been possible otherwise. And it doesn’t remove any of the mods that already existed or prevent anyone from making free non-CC mods.

As for donations to modders- those companies like Patreon are taking their own cut as well. And that’s a legal grey area because modders are profitting off of Bethesda’s platform. Then you have the issue where Bethesda updates their game and provides an improvement for literally millions of people while a couple hundred PC players flame them on Twitter for breaking the mod they paid or donated for.

Personally, I’ve never donated or paid for any mods because I don’t use them. I’ve messed around with mods and the vast, vast majority of them suck. They feel completely out of place and ruin the vibe of the game. It’s not worth all of the hassle of installing a mod manager and working through all of the issues just to add memes to the game. The ones that add more quest lines are usually just way worse versions of the radiant quests that already exist. Maybe if I had a more powerful computer back in like 2012 or 2013 then graphics mods might have made sense, but with the updates in the Special and Anniversary editions there’s not much point. If I wanted to go back to Fallout 3 then maybe there’s an argument there, but I’m not really interested in going back there in general.

The “best” mods can be created In a variety of ways. I’d argue that the Hearthfire, Dawngard, and Dragonborn DLC’s are better than any free mod I’ve ever seen. The vast, vast majority of free mods are shitposts or school projects that no one cares about.

I mean… It’s hard to really find solid numbers because Bethesda hasn’t published them, but we know that Prey’s opening week of sales was 60% less than Dishonored 2’s was. All the estimates and discussion i can find on the Internet either concludes that the game lost money or, at best, broke about even.

It got great critical reviews. People who identify as “gamers” seemed to love it. But it gets compared to Bioshock a lot- Bioshock Infinite came out 4 years earlier and the market was saturated with similar games by the time Prey came out.

So I don’t think it’s unreasonable for management to want to move in a different direction. That direction ended up being a terrible one with Redfall, but i can’t automatically assume that the studio would have been any better off making another game like Prey.

You can find every example you could look for in history. Studios who changed direction successfully, like Insomniac going from FPS to 3D platformer. Gamefreak went from platformers like Pulseman to making JRPG’s and ended up making the most successful media franchise in history, while all of their later attempts to do anything else have failed miserably.

And it’s not as if it would have made sense to have Arkane make Weird West. You can’t just slash a AAA studio down to an indie overnight.

I still don’t understand why people have so much hate for Bethesda for… Paying independent creators to make better mods for their games and charging for those mods.

I can understand criticizing the execution: the quality and price of each mod, the grey legal area where these weren’t included in Season Passes that were supposed to include all DLC, etc. And I certainly wouldn’t call the results a success.

But nothing about it ever seemed particularly greedy or “unfair” to me. It solved a lot of problems that the modding community has. It protected the creators from having. Their content stolen and re-used or re-distributed. Mods (especially for-profit) were always kind of a grey area legally because… It’s Bethesda’s platform and IP. Bethesda may not be as great with modders as other companies, but they’re a lot better than the worst offenders like Nintendo. The Creation Club has better quality control. And it’s better for the end users- easier to install, usable on consoles, no need to go to sketchy 3rd party websites or mess with the installation. I know people complain on the Internet anytime Bethesda updates one of their games because it breaks their mods- I could be wrong but I’ve never heard of that happening with CC mods.

Seems to me like most of the hate for CC comes from people just wanting more content without paying for it.

Scarlet and Violet may only run at 10FPS and there are plenty of other flaws, but it’s still a ton of fun. And those are sequels, not remakes. The gameplay is a dramatic shift from everything the mainline series has done before.

Legends Arceus has performance issues too, but was was critically acclaimed.

As for the remakes, they’re generally pretty good upgrades. Gen 1 has really aged poorly, but FRLG are fantastic. I never liked Diamond or Pearl, but BDSP were really solid and fixed almost everything they could without making fundamental changes to the game. I’m really hoping they re-make Gen 5 because those are my favorite and they are stuck on the DS- my adult hands can’t handle holding something that small for hours on end.

Or… Maybe for most of human history we re-told the same stories over and over again for thousands of years until the relatively recent concept of “intellectual property” has forbidden us individuals from doing what comes naturally, forming this sort of weird resentment for when corporations do it?

I’m trying to verify these numbers and I’m not finding much.

The closest I can find to a source is that these were claims from Moshe Elad in articles in Tablet Magazine and Algemeier.

In Mashal’s case, he was the treasurer of Hamas at the time and Elad seems to be just attributing the entirety of the organization’s assets to him personally.

I’d be really interested to see if anyone else can find more concrete proof of this claim than I could.

How quickly people forget how common it was to see Roach on rooftops in the Witcher 3.

GTAas an entire series has tons of reels of people doing ridiculous and hilarious things.

I’ve never understood the weird hate for Bethesda games in that regard.

I would have absolutely zero interest in an Unreal Elder Scrolls or Fallout game.

There’s already hundreds, maybe thousands of indie games trying to be that very thing available on steam today and they all suck.

Lol that’s absolutely not an excuse, or else we would see dozens of games with this happen every year. Somehow almost every game to every feature tastefully censored nude scenes managed to do so without modeling genitalia, but Beyond: Two Souls is an exception.

In a world where modeling costs money, studios are looking to spend less time modeling than they need to. Not more.

I remembered something else just after I posted this- i’m surprised it didn’t come up in my first searches.

The other controversy was in Beyond: Two Souls. It was one of the first modern games to use motion capture for voice actors to get more realism. After release, people found that the devs had made a fully nude model of one of the characters. They never scanned the actor (Elliott Page) nude, but modeled what was missing. It doesn’t appear in normal gameplay, but was accessible in debug mode.

Creepy as fuck.

In fairness to David Cage, his response to those (and other) allegations was:

“I have never said or even thought such things. I fully understand people were shocked by seeing those words, and I am deeply sorry for the pain and confusion they have caused to women and the LGBTQIA+ community. The quotes are abhorrent, and they do not reflect my views, nor the views of anyone at Quantic Dream.”

Did he say it and/or believe it? I have no idea. But certainly something to think about before buying a Quantic Dream game.

I kept on checking throughout the day yesterday- Verizon’s website said no outages, but istheservicedown showed most of the east coast of the US was down.

I also heard from friends with business class Internet that they were fine.

Redoing animations? To me, that’s definitely more than a re-master. The musical equivalent would probably be something in the mixing phase- adding or adjusting effects, changing pan, level, EQ, automation, etc.

Technically it was never released on PS5. It was released on PS4 and later received an upgrade patch for the PS4 Pro.

But yeah it works with backwards compatibility on the PS5. I would expect the PS4 Pro patch to work but I haven’t tried it myself.

That’s over 7 years old. Roughly the length of a generation. I think re-mastering console games from 2017 is reasonable in general.

Not for HZD though. It was already one of the best-looking games on the PS4, and then they added a free upgrade for the PS4 Pro to get checkerboard 4k. Like… What’s left to improve?

Maybe upgrade from checkerboard to full 4k? The FPS seemed fine for me playing on a base PS4, but perhaps there’s room for improvement there. The initial load time to open the game is pretty bad, but if you don’t switch between games often that’s not really a problem. I haven’t tried the PC version yet, but perhaps there were some UI improvements there they could apply to consoles?

My main complaints with the game that I’d like to see fixed would probably be beyond the scope of the term “remaster”. The facial animations during dialogue were pretty uncanny in the base game, but they’re good in the DLC and sequel. Also the itemization system was clunky and felt like it was trying to be similar to an online multiplayer experience for some reason.

That’s assuming she gets them as kittens.

Old cats are often considered less desirable. Parents want to get their kid a cute little kitten, not a 13 year old cat that’s going to trigger a conversation about mortality with their 5 year old human child soon.

Kittens are also a pain in the ass. Bundles of energy with no manners.

So my first thought is that she either fosters older cats or just adopts them to give them a good golden year or two on the way out.

Or if she rescues strays there’s a greater risk of having health problems already.

Or maybe she is evil as the comments suggest. I have no clue lol.

1. I’m so fucking tired of pixel art games. And I’ve noticed recently that going back and playing actual 16 bit games with real pixels feels so much better. It’s hard to say for sure what it is, but I have a few theories.

First, in old games that actually use pixels, everything has to snap to the grid. For these pixel art games running at 1080p or maybe higher, what is supposed to look like a pixel is actually a square made up of multiple pixels. In 16-bit games, a sprite can only move distances the same size as a pixel, but in these modern ones the “pixels” can move by fractions of their own size. It loses all the neat, discreet, visual appeal and becomes messy looking in my opinion.

Second, the color pallet is too large. Old games had a limited selection of colors, and often in order to make the most of them the colors used would be significantly different from each other, while still all being part of a cohesive pallet. We are used to millions of colors, but consoles like the GameBoy Color and SNES only had ~32,000 to pick from total. The GameBoy Color also has a software limitation to only have 56 colors on-screen at once. Using a full, modern color pallet without those limitations allows for colors that are close to each other to be used. That’s great for 3D models where we are thing to mimic reality, but for pixel art it just makes everything look messy and sloppy. There needs to be a sharp, distinct contrast for pixels to be satisfying.

Third, there’s just too much stuff happening. This I could probably adapt to, but I just have this expectation that pixel games should just be a few moving sprites and maybe a couple of background layers.

2. The name “Arco” tells me absolutely nothing. It’s not memorable. It’s a complete blank slate that gets washed away. I’m not even certain if that’s just a proper noun from the game or if that’s just a different language word.

3. A hybrid turn-based/real time strategy game? My instinct is that sounds like the worst of both worlds. It has been successful before- Transistor and Paper Mario come to mind. But in general, if in playing a turn-based game it’s because I want the chill, low-pressure experience. I probably want to be less than sober. And introducing real-time elements means that those games get pushed into the real-time category when I choose what I want to play and when. And if in playing a tacts game, 99% of the time in going to choose a turn-based one and get lit.

4. As many others here have said, I’ve never heard of this game. I think this is a legitimate problem facing a lot industries, especially digital products. Doing some quick searching I found someone estimating that Spotify sees about 55 days worth of new audio uploaded every day. Everyone is creating and we don’t have enough to line to consume.

Personally, I suspect that if I went through the exercise of looking at my Steam library and trying to project when I would be able to play through all of the games I currently own, it would probably exceed my life expectancy. Definitely if you add in all of my console game collection.

There’s not a great solution. Corporations try to punch through the noise with marketing. One of the most important pieces of Steam as a platform is their ability to promote games. There are whole networks of influencers- streamers, video creators, podcasters, bloggers, magazine writers, etc all trying to help sort out the games worth playing.

But the problem persists - there are too many games being made. And I don’t want to just say to put up more barriers to entry, because indie development is important for getting fresh new talent and ideas into the industry. Some of the best experiences I’ve had have been indie games, and some of the worst offenders for cranking out banal, mediocre time sucks have been huge corporations with giant marketing budgets.

The only solution I can think of is more “platforms” rather than games. Minecraft, GTA V, Skyrim. Especially with mods, you can get a unique and interesting experience without having to invest into learning and understanding a whole new game.

Amazing. One of the best purchases I’ve ever made.

It’s rare for me to see games in my library that are not supported, although there are a few. But there is a difference between running and running well. Demanding games will get maybe an hour of battery life and the fans will be pretty loud the whole time. Some games (especially strategy games) really work better with a full keyboard and a higher resolution screen. Some games I just would not want to play on a handheld. But most of the time the games that I want to play work well.

One trick I use to get better battery life and performance is streaming. I use Chiaki to stream from my PS4, and Steam Link (as a non-steam app lol) to stream from my desktop. It’s often worth it for the fan noise reduction alone.

It’s even better at emulation. It’s a great machine for PS2 and GameCube games- I have the back buttons and track pads mapped to speed up, pause, slow, and rewind gameplay and to control save states. I have not dialed it in yet, but I think with some tweaking you could probably use the gyro and/or track pads to do some good Wii emulation. 3DS and DS are great too, mostly because of the track pads. Anything older emulates fine, but isn’t as impressive.

I have gotten PS3 and Switch emulation to work, but the fans go on and the battery life goes down, so I don’t really use it for that. Plus storage is a bit tight and PS3 games are huge.

It does feel like Valve was just a little too early. I wish the screen was 1080p.

The 2230 SSD’s that it uses were kind of uncommon when it released. The weird size made them more expensive and they had lower capacities. I managed to get a 512GB one, but I wish I could have gotten like 2TB. It seems like that’s changing now though. Similarly, I wish microSD cards came in larger capacities. Storage just seems to get used up so fast these days.