Poggervania

Regarding your point on not being able to be matched up against blocked players:

This is not healthy for a game with matchmaking to allow players direct control over its matching system like this. In a PvP game this would especially be a problem, but it has problems in PvE games as well. In this situation, meta players would just block other non-meta players, effectively lowering the matching pool to two different queues in a single large pool. In this scenario, it would be more efficient for the matchmaking system to just have two separated queues, which brings me to the next point.

I would argue the opposite. Vermintide 2 employs this exact thing and it’s been working pretty well - it actually does punish people who get blocked a lot by other people, and if you’re being blocked by a ton of people, there’s probably more than just “skill issue” and “you’re not running meta” going on. You do get sweaty people who block non-sweaty people, yeah, but it’s not hampering the community of the game in the slightest - and that game is waaaaaay smaller in size than something like Helldivers where you can get blocked by a ton of people and still play with other people due to the sheer size of the playerbase.

iirc these are the guys working on the Knights of the Old Republic remake, right? Good news for that project if that’s the case, and good news for Saber in general!

the harm caused by this software was “manifest and irreparable.”

Except it’s arguably not, because it’s not like the 1 million copies of the game was stolen and could not be sold anymore. The game is still available for sale, and it is still making them money - all people did was pirate a single copy of the game 1 million times.

Also, if they sold 20.8 million units, and assuming every single instance of pirating was done by people who did not buy the game (read: lots of people bought a legal copy and “pirated” it anyways for better performance on Yuzu), they lost out on 5% revenue as of this time of writing.

Very sad Nintendo couldn’t sell another $60 million worth of games /s

Love how the courts are framing this. “ROMs are illegal software.” “Emulators are for playing pirated software.”

Ngl I kinda want them to use this logic and see what happens when they try to apply it to Nintendo’s own Virtual Console, which are emulators playing ROMs basically.

Hell, the games you can play in Animal Crossing are literal emulators with ROMs since they found iNES data in the headers.

Last time I’ll respond to you since it seems you’re a Bethesda fanboy - or at least a very ardent defender.

I think you overestimate how many people actually install or care about mods. Many people just seems to like what Bethesda does.

Then why did Beth go out of their way to include mod support for consoles for Skyrim and Fallout 4, as well as announce mod support for console versions of Starfield? Plus people were clamoring for mods on console versions of their games even going back as far as Morrowind - but their games back then were more complete, so you are correct in that more people were okay with not having mods because at least the games were decent enough.

Oblivion was a smash hit on Xbox without mods. Since that the main sellers seems to be the console versions.

During 2006? Yeah, you’re correct - but interesting you’re bringing up Oblivion instead of Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and even Starfield. Y’know, the games that have been pretty devoid of any worthwhile vanilla content.

Two things: 1) You’re making it sound like swapping engines is incredibly easy (it’s not, and you have to train staff on how to utilize it from the ground up and that can take a while), and 2) you’re probably right on why they keep using CE, and the sad reality is that Bethesda absolutely intentionally designs uncooked barebones games because they realized they can just have the fandom make actual interesting content, or QoL changes. They also know that Creation Gamebryo Engine does limit them a lot to what they can do, but rather than going through the cost and time of changing over engines, they just let the fandom create the script extenders that are available for literally every single game of theirs since Morrowind so modders can literally do things the base game can’t let them do.

So this is more of a case where the craftsman has shoddy tools, but they don’t care because they’ll churn out a piece-of-crap and have their audience improve it for them for free. And then the craftsman will have the gall to try and get a cut of the audience’s work somehow.

Funnily enough, what you said is pretty close to what happened in canon. The Emperor at the time (I forget who it was, probably Tiber Spetim) had a legitimate methaphysically-powered Gundam/EVA unit and used it to basically terraform the jungles of Cyrodill into what we see in Oblivion

So he basically modded Cyrodill with the power of Numidium.

Actually, you can argue that they are still limited by what the engine can do - which, in turn, means it affects game design due to the fact they might want to implement an idea, but either they would need a hacky way to do it (like trains in Fallout 3 being a fucking equippable hat with an NPC running underneath the map, which is probably why their Fallout games don’t have drivable vehicles) or simply cannot due to technical limitations of the engine.

This is like saying a good wood carver can still be good if they have shoddy tools, when the reality is that a good craftsman is only limited by the quality of tools they have. If I can’t fully realize my wood carving because my knife is too blunt and do the best I could with what I have for an inferior design, is that my fault or the tool’s fault?

Hot Take(?): Nintendo should stop making consoles and just allow their games on Steam since the Steam Deck is basically what the Switch wishes it could be

Bruh, TES games are button mashers if anything. Dark Souls and any other related games has got TES games beat by lightyears in that department.

TES lore, on the other hand, is just as interesting as Dark Souls lore for different reasons - mainly how wacky and weird the stuff Kirkbride wrote for Morrowind and Oblivion, like the fact gameplay mechanics like saving and loading, console commands, and even mods are legitimately canon thanks to CHIM, or the factoid that Pelinal Whitestrake might have been a time-travelling gay cyborg depending on how you interpret his descriptions. And who can forget that Vivec, a living god, has a spear that is implied to be the penis of Molag Bal after Vivec gave him a blowjob and bit his dick off. Then you got shit with Lorkhan, the Dreamsleeve, and of course Talos being 3 different people at the same time.

I wouldn’t say “clearly still early access”, but it does lack the polish on a lot of small things.

BG3 Act 3 Spoilers below because Iunno how to do spoilers on Kbin

Like the fact on release, if you use Speak To Dead on Gortash, you get a completely unvoiced dialogue with Bane himself.

So how long until Cities Skylines 2 becomes the new Crysis for modern hardware?

When you’re so old you forget expansion packs existed before DLC and MTX

Woah, that looks like the same list of Redditors who don’t read the article!

Try reading the article

I hope not, it’s two different systems and I personally prefer VT’s system.

Vermintide is literally “click button”, but the intricacies come from the weapon itself; what is the combo order for light and heavy attacks, when can you weave certain attacks into other attacks (e.g. doing Light 1 -> Heavy 2 -> Block Attack -> repeat for dealing with heavy armor units with a halberd vs Heavy 1 -> Light 2 -> Block Cancel -> repeat for hordes), the properties of each weapon (how much stagger does it cause? Can it cleave through lots of enemies? Does it do more armor damage or is it better for non-armor enemies?), how much can you block vs dodge attacks with each weapon… it’s more akin to something like a first-person Dark Souls or Dynasty Warriors.

Mount and Blade, on the other hand, doesn’t really have an in-depth combo system with weapons being more or less the same and I just turn up the sensitivity so I can flick the camera to do extra damage ez pz. Not really engaging imo.

You say that as if any of those games or series are truly original:

Fortnite

Fortnite just copied other survival games like Rust and Ark. Epic put their own spin on it by combining it with a battle royale - sorry, with a PUBG game mode.

Zelda

If you’re talking BoTW and ToTK, you can argue they just copied other open-world games like The Elder Scrolls and Far Cry and added a Zelda flair. Weapon degradation was even present in the older TES games.

Pokemon

Pokemon is just a kid-friendly version of the Shin Megami Tensei games without the fusion mechanic. Some of the Gen 1 Pokemon designs were also more or less lifted straight from Dragon Quest.

Minecraft

It was more or less virtual Legos when it first came out, and the survival mechanics gave it a unique spin.

So if you really wanted to, you can reduce all of the games you mentioned into their influences and what they straight-up copied. Funny thing is, these are all very well-received games because their core gameplay mechanics and designs were very good, and they added their own spin on things. Copying others isn’t a bad thing so long as you’re either iterating on it to improve it or to do something different to it somehow.

It also helps if the game is genuinely fun or interesting to play. I can tell you I’m having a hell of a lot more fun watching people play this than recent Pokemon games, and it’s making me consider dropping some money to buy the game.

If a game copies what another game does but does it better and/or gives it own spin on things (which PalWorld arguably does, considering that you can have your Pokemon Pals fight with machine weaponry and also enslave capture people as Pals), I don’t see how that can be a bad thing. Otherwise, people should be up in arms about every roguelike Metroidvania or Soulslike game.

Except they haven’t? Pretty sure both Zero and LAD at the very least didn’t charge for NG+, same with 6. No idea about the Judgement games.