marelooke
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Posts posted by marelooke
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I finished episode 1 of The Council. Holy crap that was fun. If the other 4 episodes are this good then this is going to be a GotY contender for me.I've heard that the story goes full bonkers in the later episodes, which has me excited.
For those not familiar, The Council is the answer to the question "What if someone made a Telltale style game but also with actual gameplay?". It's mostly a narrative adventure but with some point n click and RPG Lite elements in it. Supposedly choices actually do matter as people have reported seeing wildly different scenes in later episodes based on choices they made in earlier episodes.
Anyway, I wont go into details in case anyone else here wants to play this, but I will say that I was given the option at one point of going to listen to a crazy young lady who may or may not be possessed by a demon or going back to my room where The Dutchess, who I have lovingly dubbed "Boobs McGee", was waiting for me. I don't think I need to tell you what I chose.
Onward to episode 2.
So what did the crazy lady have to say?
...what? Why are you looking at me like that?!
Glad to hear it's turning out nicely, I had made a mental note about that one when episode one launched.
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I'm sure with Microsoft funds, this issue will be fixed.
Yes! If we are lucky we will be migrated to the blissful software also used on the Forza forums. Oh, the anticipation!
/s
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Well that would completely defeat the purpose of having founded a separate company to hold the rights to their IP in the first place to prevent another Fallout situation. (Doesn't make that scenario a lot less likely, of course. Just annoying.)
Yup. But after the merger, there may be a little more stability that they no longer feel the need to store their original works in an escape pod.
If Microsoft were interested in producing further games in the Eora setting, it makes sense for them to not want to arrange licensing for it, or prevent DRIL from independently marketing Pillars-themed board games or frozen dinners or whatnot.
In some ways, it bodes well if you like Pillars of Eternity; it appears that Microsoft does too, and they have deep pockets.
Feargus has frequenstly talked about a Pillars game that looks like Skyrim. Including the IP in the aquisition makes this more likely to happen.
Honestly, I would play that...BUT the kicker is that lots of folks like Skyrim and Co. because of it's moddability. If you take out making easy mods, it becomes just another generic game that is quickly forgotten. At this point I see the same coming to The Outer Worlds, tbh. If it's not possible to make a house mod in one day, the majority of mod creators will pass up on it and it'll never get the same status as Bethsoft games have right now. Yes, these games are popular on console too, without mods, but I'm fairly sure the constant hype due to activity on PC has a big part in it.
Just look at Mass Effect. The games are mostly praised high, but do folks talk about them the same way they talk about Bethsoft titles? No, not at all.
Modders are quite wiling to put in quite a bit of effort assuming the foundation is there and they know that said effort won't be wasted. If the engine is open and the company is committed to sticking with it so that the modders know the effort they spend now will still be valuable later then I'm sure you can get a good modding community going (and I'll Beth this is one of the reasons they stick with the Creation Engine instead of tossing it for something new).
The main issue is to keep people around for long enough that modders can "get going", Fallout 4 was released over 3 years ago and I'd say the modding community has only really got to the more advanced stuff like a year ago (keeping in mind the GECK was only realeased like a year after the game's release) and is still ramping up in some respects. That's pretty long after most people are "done" with a game nowadays.
If you then manage to build an actual good game on top of that open foundation then you might just have a "The Elder Scrolls-killer"(*) on your hands
*) I just couldn't let the chance to dig up that old trope pass me by, sorry (No, not really...
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Bethesda: "We gave admin rights and the customer information of Beta testers"
EA: "Hold my beer"
It appears to me as if it's mostly companies that deal with end users that don't give a toss about this (re: hypernormalization?).
When dealing with other companies (or governments, I imagine), leaks like these mean lost business most of which probably won't be coming back soon, unless the competition that it went to gets hit by the same type of deal.
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At this point in X Rebirth I'm not sure which of the following is the hardest:
- combat
- figuring out the systems
- dodging bugs
- figuring out whether a problem I'm having requires #2 or #3
Case in point, given how the story so far has seemed like a big tutorial I've mostly been following that (well, I did put some wares in the freighter you get at the start hoping I'd be able to turn a profit on those. Then I appear to have lost the freighter due to progressing the story...
).Anyway, went through the missions and got to the point where I had to join the rear-guard for a freighter rescue operation. Except...nobody else joined. So I got swarmed by like 5 (or so, didn't quite have time to count them) Reivers and promply went ka-boom-ski (on that note, that's one looong game over screen). On reload I had to first kill one guy, then the rest appeared, along with my allies. Suffice to say things went a lot smoother that time... (and got me a new freighter. Which was not-so-coincidentally when I noticed the old one went bye-bye)
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X4 is getting relatively good reviews, so I fired up X Rebirth (curious what our resident X-masers think, assuming they're not all playing my favourite video game: "Wait and see").
Reasoning for picking X Rebirth (of all things): it's (supposedly) a dumbed down X version, so I, as a X-series rookie, might be able to ease into a "real" X game by using Rebirth as a tutorial (and X4 might get patched a bit in that time frame too, maybe drop in price some, you know, lots of possible benefits to be had)
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The new Prey looks weird...
It's like... Why even?
Because online means monetization? That's honestly the only thing I can think of. Well, aside from the devs really liking the idea.
Which is just weird, since the combat wasn't exactly considered Prey's strong point, which, imho, wasn't an issue with the single player experience (combat never bothered met at all anyway, personally). But if you turn it into a combat focused multiplayer DLC. Yeah, I don't know...
Personally didn't much care for the last DLC either, which was rogue lite stuff. Almost makes it look like the DLC are just chasing hypes.
As far as I know there's no single player, story driven, DLC planned at all so if anyone still has the game installed hoping for some story DLC, might as well free up some disk space and just hope we'll get a proper Prey 2.
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I've seen better faces in Failout 4.
I'm really happy for you, I'mma let you finish but Tandi had one of the best faces of all time
At this point I feel almost obliged...
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Looking forward to this while at the same time being slightly worried about the Microsoft deal now. I mean, it shouldn't affect this game, but any follow ups...
The Outer World has been in development for quite some time now, I don't think that the Microsoft deal could affect that. Also, Microsoft usually release their games on Steam as well as the Xbox/Microsoft store so there shouldn't be any worries.
Given that they are fishing up studios to make "exclusives" it might become a concern (but, as noted, it won't affact The Outer Worlds, tough it *might* affect any sequels, assuming there will be any, I mean, depending on who owns the IP and such).
I generally am not that bothered by where I get my games (I have my preferences, of course). If the game is good enough I'll put up with whatever Steam-clone they have (consoles are a no-go for me though). Alas, I also like race games and Forza has resulted in me absolutely loathing the Windows Store. It's just total and utter garbage and the thing hasn't improved in any measurable way between the release of Forza Horizon 3 (2016) and Forza Horizon 4 (2018). Hell, Forza Motorsport 7 still resets my language settings after every. single. patch. (or DLC or what have you, iow, at least once a month), thankfully at least Horizon doesn't rely on the Windows store to get something as frivolous as localization right, but geez...
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As I've already said in another thread here, I'm really hyped for The Outer Worlds now. I've got an old RPG character in stock that I never really got to play. She'll be perfect for the humor in this game.
(Her name ist Shannon Florence Riley, but she hates her middle name. Still, Shannon F. Riley looks too fancy on her business cards to drop the F. entirely, so she just changes topic every time somebody asks her about it. When I created her, I had a female version of Han Solo or Malcolm Reynolds with a bit of Saemon Havarian in mind.)
Well at least her first name isn't Endeavour...
Looking forward to this while at the same time being slightly worried about the Microsoft deal now. I mean, it shouldn't affect this game, but any follow ups...
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Fallout 76 and Bethesda is the gift that keeps on giving
Well darn, that's one creative way to discourage people from submitting support tickets...
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Started playing the Prey Mooncrash DLC and...well, what can I say, so far I still really wish they'd just made a story DLC instead of this.
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Are Valve saving Half-Life 3 for VR or have they just stopped caring at all.
As it stands (one never knows) it's not even in the cards. There were some projects in that direction but none of them were good enough so they all got canned. At this point Valve's thinking (and I tend to agree) is that nothing they could release would live up to the hype that has built up over all these years.
Fwiw the (or "a") draft for the Half Life 2: Episode 3 storyline was "leaked" by the (one of the?) writer(s) (who is no longer at Valve) so you could read up as to what at least that person had planned for Episode 3.
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And the Half-Life 3 will be still in development...
That would still be an improvement over its current state
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Played and completed Transmissions: Element 120, neat little (free) game set in the Half Life universe.
Took me a little under 2 hours to 100% and that's with having to restart a few sections due to bugs, or to get achievements.
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IIRC, the original Belgium report stated, that physical CCGs are uncomparable to any form of digital lootboxes, because some kimd of odds or so. But I can't find the article right now.
As I recall, it was because all items had the same rarity. The company being compared against printed all cards in the same quantity.IIRC, the original Belgium report stated, that physical CCGs are uncomparable to any form of digital lootboxes, because some kimd of odds or so. But I can't find the article right now.
Cards in most collectible card games don't have the same chance to appear (those collectible sticker books were used as an example iirc), so that in itself won't be enough.
From the article I translated way back when:
Also from the original article are the "rules" (probably heavily simplified for the sake of the article) the gambling commission uses to determine whether something is gambling (tried to translate as literally as I'm able):
- there has to be a game element
- there have to be certain stakes that lead to gains or loss
- there needs to be a factor of chance
There's no game element to acquiring card packs for physical card games, hence they're in the clear.
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Okay, I lied, I opened up a couple of my booster packs. I couldn't help myself. I got Drow Ranger in my first pack!
Drow Ranger is arguably the best hero in the game right now, going by what the people that have been playing it for months have been saying. When I looked on the marketplace Axe (considered by most to be the second or third best hero) was the most expensive card being sold, Drow wasn't even for sale, likely because nobody is willing to part with one of their Drow cards.
Booster packs are obviously loot boxes, perhaps the original loot boxes, and very obviously gambling (I'm guessing Artifact is not available in Belgium?). I'd be lying if I said opening the packs wasn't exciting, though. Luckily, I know I have the willpoer to not just buy a bunch more packs after I finish opening all the ones that came with my initial purchase, even if I really want a Prellex and a Kanna and I don't get either in my remaining packs (I haven't so far).
Couldn't be bothered to look up the actual report, so I'm just going to quote a quote from this BBC article ("Yo, I hear you like quotes so I put a quote in your quote."):
But others pointed out that the Belgium Gaming Commission's definition specifically requires there to be "a game element" in opening the crate, which differentiates loot boxes from trading cards.
Arguably this could be considered a loophole just waiting to be abused and I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the video game industry got physical trading card games in trouble due to their greed sooner or later.
EDIT: typo
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Bethesda owns Gamebryo. It's their engine since years.
Yeah... I'm gonna need a source on that. As far as I'm aware they simply forked the project and rebranded. It will take a while for them to transition away from the underlying architecture of the library and the game logic built around it.
Ok, so I went ahead and read the Wikipedia articles about both Gamebryo and the Creation Engine. From what I gather Bethesda's fork isn't quite that old (< 10 years). Skyrim being the first Bethesda game using a (presumably) lightly modified version of it. So despite its issues I'd say Fallout 4 marked a clear step forward for the engine.
Based on what Wikipedia says using it for Fallout 76 seems like it was just a bad idea as the concept of a single player apparently was a core assumption the engine made. I imagine just getting that to work on top of all the networking seems like it must have sucked up all the time of the engine team leaving other quite crucial changes behind, which could explain why, aside from the networking, the engine seems to have barely evolved since Fallout 4.
The fact that they put all that effort in leads me to believe they're probably going to want to include some form of multiplayer in future Creation Engine games (TESVI co-op? Not certain how I feel about that), if not then this could have been a very expensive mistake.
It would be easy to say they could have built a new engine in that period (I mean, teams have built engines in less time), but... How big is Bethesda's engine team? How talented are the people on there? How about the tooling around it? I mean, working on something you have vs building that same thing from scratch are quite a different ballpark. And of course, while building a new engine, you can't really use it to build anything...
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Bethesda owns Gamebryo. It's their engine since years.
Right, I was wondering about that. It wasn't really clear from the GameBryo website, though admittedly I didn't dig particularly deep.
In that case it's a matter of priorities I imagine, and the right ones not being set...
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You can write code with extremely non-deterministic behavior, but the art of programming once you know how to tell the computer to accomplish a specific thing, involves writing code that is modular in relation to how other code is used in relation to it, and further disallows improper use of these modular abstractions. Well, often times that very last bit is not accomplished so you end up with either very rigid code that is tightly coupled to other rigid code. Or you end up with highly modular code where either issues propagate, or weird corner cases arise as people interface with abstractions in ways that were overlooked. So improper use is not being sufficiently guarded against. All this added abstraction layer can hide bugs or propagate them deeply through the system. Even highly modular systems can become deeply "rigid" as the code becomes increasingly self-referential with interconnected dependencies.
Then the larger issue is that in maintaining a code base, you need your team to have the proper institutional knowledge to manage the code. But people leave, or forget things. So then you establish a large amount of overhead to maintain this knowledge, but that knowledge will always be out of date and incomplete. This problem plagues every old code base and is worse when the code base as so much momentum that the older work of the past is paying for the incredibly inefficient maintenance teams. IBM and Oracle are notorious for basically being drug dealers getting companies hooked on their legacy software, where they mostly sell support contracts.
Basically Gamebryo is old and not sufficiently modular at the levels of abstraction that matter most. Guerilla games for example if the designers need something, the engine people roll out the solution to their creative teams. Bethesda uses the extension architecture provided by Gamebryo to bolt their own extensions on, at the expense of lacking control over the abstractions themselves. All the abstraction and compatibility layers additionally build in overhead and opportunities for bugs. A large "surface area" of code means that some bugs will go forgotten or will lack any expert who would understand the system enough to fix the bug on the teams budget.
Bethesda really needs to hire a small passionate team to start something brand new from scratch, using the best in-house technologies of all their studios as "reference implementations" for a future engine. CDPR did this with the REDengine, it's not like it's impossible. Rockstar's engine probably share's a lot of similar issues with Bethesda's but at least that is entirely in-house. Short of building something new, unless idTech is really not suited for asset streaming in a large open-world game I'm surprised they just don't retrain up on that engine. Zeni acquired one of the finest engines in the industry and are even already sharing it among most of their studios.
Honestly with the amount of "content ambition" Bethesda has, and the fact they are building this all out using someone else's engine. I'm not surprised they spend most of their time on the game build on top of the engine as opposed to prioritizing the foundational tech. That was never part of that studios make up. I think it's time for it to become part of it.
I take it Bethesda doesn't have any control over the GameBryo engine? In which case looking for alternatives might be a good solution if outright buying GameBryo isn't an option (might be a rather good investment given how tied to it they are).
As someone who (currently) works on rather old and large applications I shudder each time someone casually suggests just throwing something out and starting over. Depending on the state of the codebase refactoring is usually way more cost effective than tossing everything out (and leaves you with a working, usable codebase while you're doing it), especially since a lot of knowledge tends to be embedded in old code (starting over in 99% of the cases means relearning the hard lessons that were already encoded in the old codebase all over again). Not to mention losing all the tooling and knowledge built around the engine, both inside the company, but (especially in Bethesda's case) also outside the company.
I would understand if it was a third party license, but is there any reason why engines are not open source? It doesn't seem like a developer team whose engine isn't selling would keep it to themselves, specially when the result is a vibrant modding scene that will expand the longevity of the games and give them data on player behavior.Yeah, Gamebryo is already setup to favor the modder. It actually takes a lot of effort to build a proprietary engine that is partially closed off from the user, but another portion is open for easy interfacing. Engines that favor the internal team and prioritize highly tuned optimization like what id, Naughty Dog and others push above all else, are not going to be modder friendly unless the entire source is open.
Even with engines that have an open source like other idTechs and Unreal, you aren't getting far with any practical modifications at that deep of a level with the code base, especially not without picking the brains of the internal dev teams. Stuff like Brutal Doom is the ideal state of modification but not has that source been available forever, it's also taken a long time for those sorts of projects to get off the ground.
Maybe the problem with Fallout 76 is that they didn't opened to the modder community; with that amount of user generated content and Bethesda moderating it, they could have had a better release. Although I do have an issue with moderation as it enforces values; I generally like to have a wider selection rather than a sanitized one.
Bethesda has been looking at ways to clamp down on the nodding community for years at this point going by their initial Steam Paid Mods. Since Morrowind, their games have been doing quite well on console; which explains the streamlining of many of the features; and modding has never been a viable option on console. I know Skyrim and Fallout 4 are supposed to have "mod support" on console now, but I think it may be limited to the Creation Club. The Creation Club itself is an updated version of the Paid Mods but it is only limited to Bethesda created products; with the launch of Fallout 76 we finally see Bethesda shutting out the modding community entirely for a over year leading to a perceived reliance on Creation Club. Combined combined with their overwhelming reliance on an engine that is close to 20 years old with problems detailed by those more knowledgeable we have a recipe for a great disaster.
We will see what happens with Elder Scrolls 6, but I wouldn't be too optimistic at this point.
Imho Bethesda (Game Studios) lives and dies by their modding community. Their games simply aren't good enough to stand on their own. Their insistence on sticking with GameBryo is, imho, proof of that. Switching engines and rebuilding their internal tooling and knowledge base would be costly and painful, but perfectly doable. But switching engines and destroying all the built up community knowledge is what would really set them back decades.
If they have any semblance of an intellect they might try to nab some of the modding profits (which they are doing), but outright shutting off modding in their single player games would be economic suicide.
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I tried getting to Hurston, couldn't make it in one jump so had to go through a rest stop. Got disconnected from the server after getting to said rest stop. Was back in Port Olistar when I logged in. Couldn't be bothered to make that long ass jump again. Meh. Might try again soon-ish.
UI needs a bunch of work still as well. I seemingly had enough fuel to get to Hurston in one go but the game wouldn't let me for some reason (it didn't bother telling me). Even after getting to the rest stop I should have been able to jump straight to Hurston as I had enough fuel left (according to the HUD anyway), but for whatever reason I couldn't. Not sure if there's something else I was running out of (Oxygen maybe? Who knows...)
Still a lot of work to be done there. Fixing the insane travel times, for one, especially if you're just going to punt people back to start on disconnect.
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"morally" bankrupt for making a bad game
If you'd actually watched the video you'd have known he doesn't call them morally bankrupt for "making a bad game".
How else are you going to get all the clicks, tho?"morally" bankrupt for making a bad game
By making up something "edgy" the video is supposedly about instead of watching it.
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SkillUp's Fallout 76 review dropped. And hoooo boy...
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Didn't get any games, per se, but I grabbed some DLC on sale:
- Prey: Mooncrash (finally cheap enough that I'm willing to get it)
- XCOM2 War of the Chosen (and tactical legacy pack, came as a bundle, no idea what that is)
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What are you playing right now?
in Computer and Console
Posted · Edited by marelooke
On topic, made it to Mastery Rank 26 in Warframe. Huzzah.