Surely it blocks snipping tools new recording feature on windows 11 though right?

Honestly with how many absolute bangers Obsidian has put out even just recently, I’m very excited for this and for Avowed. Looks like 2025 will be a very big year for them.

Doing this off of the back of games like Pentiment and Pillars of Eternity 2, I just love this studio. They’ve basically replaced Bethesda in my mind and I have far more hope for Avowed than Elder Scrolls 6 at this point

Who wrote this? Like just this paragraph:

This shutdown doesn’t just affect Ryujinx

Nintendo is rumored to be looking at other emulators like Yuzu, eyeing them with the same scrutiny.

How does anyone covering this exact story not know about Yuzu? Did I travel back in time?

I actually didn’t know this but I did play through that recently and I actually have really good things about how that game looks even to this day. I know they did some touching up and I’m assuming updated textures for the enhanced version but it aged a lot better than many other games from that era did

What’s really crazy is to compare Bethesda with CDPR. I’ve been replaying the Witcher 3 and it just struck me how I won’t have to wait 15+ years for the next entry. And to look at how much more efficient they’ve been in the past.

For a timeline, Witcher 2 released in May 2011 and then the Witcher 3 released in May 2015. Took 3.5 years to develop. Cyberpunk released December 2020, only 4.5 years after W3 had its last major DLC. Then in 2023 they released a very large update for Cyberpunk, about 2/3rds the runtime of the main game. And then in 2025 we’ll probably get the next Witcher game. They have like 3 games in active development now.

So what’s the difference with Bethesda? Well Skyrim sold 30 million units and Witcher 2 sold about 8 million. Less than a third the income. Yet if you compare CDPRs staff to Bethesdas at time of their next games, CDPR had doubled Bethesda’s work force. And guess what happened? Witcher 3 sold 40 million while fallout 4 sold 25 million. Thats despite Witcher 3 costing an estimated $81 million while Fallout 4 sits closer to 1.5x that at $125 million.

Then you talk about engines and it gets even worse. CDPR arguably started with a worse engine and I shouldn’t need to explain how much they’ve destroyed BS in that regard as well. Witcher 2 looks worse than Skyrim by a lot imo. But by the time their next game rolled around, it was an industry leader in graphics. And cyberpunk 2077 is like the next Crysis now while starfield is… oh boy. And guess what? After all that work on their engine, they abandoned it. Why? Because their resources are better spent making games and systems in an engine someone else updates for them. Bethesda meanwhile not only can’t juggle the ball of updating an engine and game dev, but they’re not even smart enough to swap engines.

Bethesda has all the signs of a dying studio and Microsoft is the sucker for buying them. And it’s a waste of talent more than anything. Talented people exist at Bethesda whose resources and career development would be far better off being applied on UE4.

Not if they keep on their BS. Let’s look at Fallout 4. The engine is absolutely the weakest part of the game. Can’t even keep 60fps in the city on any settings or on consoles. Frame times are all over the place. And the game isn’t even that pretty, it’s very ugly and textures are real bad. The story was pretty awful and boring, the writing in every way was forgettable.

So that’s why ES6 is screwed. It’s been downhill since Skyrim and even releasing a better looking Skyrim in 2028 on the PS6 isn’t going to cut it. It’ll be the most expensive budget title out there.

I thought this was common knowledge about the game but I’ll explain.

Now maybe I do need to get better and become a pro player but I have about 5k hours in the game. Since about 2016 I’ve played at the LEM/SMFC level which is about 5-8% of the top MM players. My current elo still hovers around 18,000 even though I play very rarely now, I play a handful of matches every other month at most. I also used to do a lot of the old overwatch system that let you watch matches of potential cheaters, I got very good at spotting them.

That isn’t to brag, I’m far from the best, but I quit playing around 2020 for a reason. The cheater problem is insane and Valve has done little to curb it. I got so suspicious that at one point I downloaded a publicly available cheat, popped it on a usb stick, and ran with it. I tried to use it intentionally without ruining other peoples fun btw. Even after running quite a few matches with it, no bad happened. And many years later that account is still not banned.

I got especially jaded when I saw people obviously using aimbots or wall hacks and they now have thousands of dollars in skins on their accounts. Meaning they’re so unafraid of getting caught, they put money on the line. That’s insane.

I came back for the CS2 update hoping they had fixed the problem and they absolutely haven’t. Every single VAC ban wave, go look at the leaderboards. Approximately 80% of the accounts get removed from the top 1000 players. That sucks.

And you think “cool well at least VAC” is working. Except it isn’t. Because those accounts cost, at most, $15 and the waves happen with many months between. Sometimes in excess of 6-8 months per ban wave. So that entire time, cheaters can freely exist with cheats until the ban comes down. Also insane.

All they’ve accomplished now seems to be getting rid of the most egregious spinbots and aim hacks. Other than that, the rest are still in the game and so now I play entirely casually.

(A very solid game that openly allows cheating and does little to ensure fair competition)

Ah that makes sense, it’s oddly suspicious they’d do this out of the blue. Though I am curious at the arbitration. Can they not include a clause that just says that the forced arbitration can be waived by them when they so choose? I feel like they would make carve outs for these big cases if they could to where they can still arbitrate on smaller cases which costs them less.

(Also updating my post text, thanks!)

I believe that Vortex, the nexus mod manager, has Linux support now that I have heard is fairly straightforward but I haven’t tried it myself.

I will say though that I recently used Vortex for modding my Fallout 4 playthrough and it was a breeze on windows while using a Nexus mod collection. Takes a lot of the pain out of modding for sure. So if you can get their mod manager running I think it’s worth a try. Could be as simple as downloading Vortex, finding a collection of mods you like, downloading the collection (usually a temporary subscription is nice for this, and then running the game. You could be done like I was in a matter of a couple hours.

I see AI as being more useful in things like Bethesdas radiant quest system. Theoretically an AI could generate quest and character dialog and react in unique ways to game world events. As far as game elements, machine learning is actually a pretty good way to have dynamic difficulty where the player is pushed as far as they can go and game elements are tweaked accordingly. Or the AI could even design unique quest items and names if trained right.

Plenty of applications for it but I think we’ll see it overused in some games which will lead to bland or non-cohesive elements that on the surface are fine, but don’t amount to anything unique. Like imagine cyberpunk but written by AI and it’d be mostly generic dialog with few connecting ideas. It’s not impossible for AI to get better at that though and maybe if it were only trained on other game dialog or if it gets approved by a human first, it could be incredible.

You’re not in the minority, I just think they should’ve committed to the bit more? The blending of styles is the weird part. Minecraft is already low fidelity and increasing the detail has always worked in the past for these movies. It’s part of why wreck it Ralph, the Mario movie, and even the emoji movie all did pretty well.

I actually enjoyed seeing stuff like the piglins and nether all dressed up and fancy. I just think the people are presented as if the movie contains no animation and it doesn’t work. If they want to make it work, do the Sonic thing and blend the worlds by putting animated spaces in the real world.

Randy Pitchford also says he isn’t smart, it’s just usually in more words and in a daily tweet

This isn’t what was happening. It’s a tale as old as time, once a corporation becomes large enough it will buy up scrappy competitors and allow them to fail so that they can take the ideas and staff who would otherwise be resistant to the business getting sold.

This happens because even if 50 of those ideas fail but you have 1 guy who comes up with a battle royale game mode, it pays off. None of these companies want to own and manage 50 indie studios, so they shut them down and absorb them on purpose.

And big studios aren’t even immune from this. I think Bethesda is keeping their name, but they’re in dangerous territory. Obsidian is hanging by a thread and barely got saved from this. DoubleFine still exists for the moment. But look at what happened to Tango Gameworks getting shafted by Xbox. The industry devours indie studios day by day for the hope of their stock growth, don’t be fooled

Aren’t the brand new LCDs still in stock an 15% off? Still a decent deal

I didn’t say they weren’t banning people, I said they aren’t really playing the cat and mouse game. VAC is a known system and it doesn’t actually affect cheating in any meaningful way since the game is free, steam accounts are easy to create, and time between VAC waves is extremely long.

Go play a few matches of CS2 on competitive without buying the premier and tell me that they’re doing anything at all that is effective. It’s gotten so bad that playing on non-premier games I will get a cheater in the lobby about 75% of the time. And premier isn’t immune but it’s about 20% of the time.

Most of what needs to be done is that their servers need to clean up and stop sending so much data to the client and also the servers need anti-cheat. There’s been some suggestions of this by people getting banned for moving their mouse to fast repeatedly, but that’s about all they’ve done of note.

If you think that the company who has almost entirely abandoned TF2 and left it to rot to cheaters is doing much with CS, I think that’d be a bad assumption.

And yet they really don’t do anything about it, I have yet to see evidence that they engage in the cat and mouse game. A lot of cheaters have full inventories of skins and have been cheating for many years at this point with the same cheats

Look the perk system was bad but it’s wasn’t Fallout New Vegas bad. It was okay for a Fallout game but they probably should’ve done level ups by doing each 5 levels gives you 2 SPECIAL points to spend rather than spending normal points on the core stats.

Obsidian is off doing things and making games better than Fallout, they’d only come back because their studio isn’t extremely profitable and needs the cash.

Really though, please just go buy their games and play them. Outer Worlds got slated as pretty average but I’m still really excited to play that and Outer Worlds 2.

Read a book that goes over the development of Stardew written by Jason Schreier and covered Eric a good bit.

The dude was was worth multi millions shortly after Stardew had launched and it hadn’t even occurred to him to buy a new car. Jason hung out with him and watched him climb over the seat to get into the drivers seat of his car because the door was broken. Then at some point Jason asked him how it felt to be a famous developer and Eric basically just said he didn’t care about the fame and actually didn’t want it. He just wanted people to enjoy what he made.

Saying Stardew Valley is a passion for Eric is an understatement. By the time he finished the game, he basically hated working on it. And ever since its launch, he’s worked on it for no reason other than to make a better game.

Eric Barone is a shining light in an industry of constant shame.