A truly shocking number of people don’t use any form of adblock. I doubt that driving off the adblock users will have a significant effect on viewership (and even if it does, why would Google care, it’s not like we’re making them money).

It did. Boring bounty hunting that sends you to the same five dungeons on repeat, but bounty hunting nonetheless.

Pretty sure Creation Club downloads are just normal plugin files, no cracks should be needed to load them you just need the files from somewhere.

Without having to re-buy the game, yes. I’d even be willing to pay GOG a bit of money for the cost of hosting the files etc, but I’m not paying Bethesda twice. That’s just rewarding bad behaviour.

Because Bethesda games are exclusively single player and offer absolutely no way to decline updates. If they had the old version available as a “beta” or (even better) if Valve stopped dying on the “every game must be updated before launching it even single player games because fuck you” hill there wouldn’t be any outrage.

And the problem with Starfield’s cities is that they didn’t do that. Since Oblivion the charm of Bethesda’s city design was that every NPC (who wasn’t a guard) had a “life” of sorts. They’d tend to their businesses, but they’d also go home and sleep at night, go to the tavern in the evening, visit friends, etc. None of that is happening in Starfield, and as a result the cities just feel dead.

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It’s fairly common for CRPGs to give you full control over your party and their builds. I’m pretty sure you could in the original Wasteland (I’ll admit I never played it), which was a game that heavily influenced Fallout.

It’s less the age and more that they just plain don’t play well. They always feel like you’re supposed to be in control of a full party but you never are, even once you finally get companions they’re AI controlled (and it’s not even a good AI).

Daggerfall Unity.

No worries, happens to everyone on occasion.

WotC were the ones who needed to contract an outside developer. Larian obviously needed their help to develop a D&D game specifically to get the details right, but they’re quite capable of making a good game without them, that’s how they got the licence in the first place.

And that’s Starfield’s big problem. I’ve played the game and other than most people here I genuinely enjoyed it (and I’ll die on my “at least the role-playing aspect is better than Fallout 4” hill), but it’s also the first Bethesda game that I feel I’ve completed. I’m pretty sure that I’ve finished the handcrafted content. There’s no random interesting caves, camps or whatevers with unique design, little quest or just a bit of lore to stumble upon, just endless procedurally generated wastes dotted with the same three dungeons on repeat.

The law being what it is I don’t think they had much of a choice.

Technically yes. But if the games are no longer even being sold I’d argue that it’s perfectly fine to do it anyway.

Steam itself is a proprietary, DRM-ridden quasi-monopoly. Supporting Valve over Microsoft doesn’t make much sense. They’re both bad.

You don’t really need any excuses. You can build cargo links, there’s no reason for them to not simply connect all outpost storage. Yes, instantaneous access to everything, everywhere might be a tad unrealistic but is it really any more unrealistic than one person just plonking down a whole mining operation in an afternoon? I’d argue the added convenience would more than make up for needing a tiny bit more willing suspension of disbelief.

And that’s what I like about it. Instead of sitting you down at telling you a story they give you a world to tell your own stories in. I like having the freedom to be creative, and I like seeing and exploring the creative ideas of other people. It’s not something I’ve seen other companies really do.