GOG is getting a nice little pr moment off of this but you’re getting basically the same license, no matter where you buy the game.

The root of evil in digital distribution is the DMCA anti circumvention clause: it is illegal to circumvent a DRM protection to gain access to some copyrighted work, even if you in actuality possess a license to the work. This law gives big platforms far too much power to control how you interact with their products.

It should be legal to modify a work to allow it to be played offline, to make copies for archival purposes, to fix the work to run on newer platforms, etc. As long as you have a license to the work you should be allowed to take steps to ensure your rightful access to it.

By the way, the root beyond roots of evil in digital distribution is the insane length of copyrights themselves. Why are patents 20 years, but copyright extends to 120+? The answer is pure greed.

It gave your horse extra health actually, so not purely cosmetic. But I think in a single player game that also has extremely good modding tools, it doesn’t really matter. If you want to pay to win your single player game, you do you.

Horse armour was mostly a landmark for showing companies that consumers were willing to pay for micro stuff like that. The potential return vs effort invested was crazy. Todd himself said that they try doing nice DLC that gives you good value for your money, but it’s hard to justify business-wise when the horse armour is so cheap to make and sells so well.

Why do these websites feel the need to write an article mindlessly regurgitating two Hideo Kojima tweets? You could just go and read the tweets themselves instead.

So weird that only 15% of Steam sessions are using controllers. I thought everyone had a controller. Most games are just better with a gamepad.

Even if that was true, not all games have the same number of players. Counterstrike and dota 2 regularly top the most played list on steam, and are terrible with a controller. It shouldn’t be surprising that most sessions have a kb/m if that’s what people are mostly playing.

It is very fun if you want to be sure that you aren’t missing anything the game has to offer.

You’ve hit upon the crux of the issue, in my opinion. FromSoftware games in general are built on exploration and discovery, finding crazy cool stuff in some dark corner of the game is a big part of the experience. However, for discovery to be properly rewarding you have to allow for the possibility that the player will just miss the stuff you’ve hidden. Indeed, in a blind playthrough of Dark Souls you’re likely to stumble upon a bunch of different secrets and still miss 50% or more of them.

That’s gonna be excruciating if you insist on “100% completing” the game. It kind of goes back to older days of gaming when there was no internet and no guides, and you just played the game and were happy when you saw the credits, and had no idea you even missed anything. I feel like modern games with their map markers for everything and completion percentages visible have kind of changed the way many people approach games.

Not to say there’s anything wrong with using a guide, play the game how you like. And there is definitely an argument that if you bought the whole game, you’d like to experience the whole game.

is a mechanism for pilfering the shooters organs and selling them on the open market

I understand the sentiment (not that I agree), but this has myriad practical issues. For one, there is no open market for organs, and creating one would make the healthcare system extremely fucked for poor people. Secondly, harvesting organs basically requires the person to die in the hospital. Preferably not full of bullet holes.

collecting his life insurance

My main issue with this is that you screw over the beneficiary of the insurance, who may not have any responsibility for the shooting but could very well be harmed by not having the financial support. Imagine a shooter with a newborn child as beneficiary of the insurance policy; would it be just to take that money from the child?

It’s just the hot new release of the week. Gaming “journalism” sites need to get clicks for their ad money so they pump out shitty filler articles non-stop about whatever is popular. I mean, look at this shit. Before this it was Helldivers.

Bethesda has always had an approach to designing cities where they feel you must be able to enter every building and talk to every NPC. You can see this since at least Morrowind. This design constraint makes it prohibitively expensive to design large cities with hundreds or thousands of inhabitants. That’s why you see “cities” in Bethesda games with several dozen houses at most. In Oblivion, there are less than 200 people living in the capital of an enormous empire, the imperial city (300 if you count the guards). Skyrim has a total population of 700 or something.

In the Witcher series they don’t feel the need to do this and can just plop down buildings without any interior, and NPCs that only give you a generic voice line. That makes it feasible to create larger cities, although there’s a sort of suspension of disbelief required. Most of the people you meet don’t actually have a house and just walk around. If you try to investigate the city as more than decor the illusion quickly falls apart.

Not saying one approach is better or worse than the other, just different tradeoffs.

Written on 1 April 1998. definitely a joke, though it does work.

Indeed, I could have worded that a bit better. But I think we agree on the fundamental points.

I think for these types of discussions it’s really necessary to clearly define what “low level” really means, something both you and the author kinda skip over. I think a reasonable definition is about the amount of layers of abstraction between the language’s model of the machine and the actual hardware.

The author is correct that nowadays, on lots of hardware, there are considerably more abstractions in place and the C abstract machine does not accurately represent high performance modern consumer processors. So the language is not as low level as it was before. At the same time, many languages exist that are still way higher level than C is.

I’d say C is still in the same place on the abstraction ladder it’s always been, but the floor is deeper nowadays (and the top probably higher as well).

It is occasionally amusing to go to Wikipedia’s manual of style “words to watch” page:

This page in a nutshell: Be cautious with expressions that may introduce bias, lack precision, or include offensive terms. Use clear, direct language. Let facts alone do the talking.

Then look at some news headlines and see how many of them violate the rules on that page. Headlines are shit.

The number varies a little bit (I’ve seen estimates 600-1200 kWh) but this is well within an order of magnitude of being correct. It’s the nature of the competitive mining network and the proof of work system: if you can spend more computing power (i.e. energy) than everyone else there are lucrative mining rewards to be had. At the same time adding more computing power to the network doesn’t add more transaction processing power, because mining difficulty is constantly adjusted to keep the speed more or less constant.

This naturally leads to exorbitant power consumption per transaction. Note that most of this power is not being purchased at EU exchange prices (mining naturally moves to where electricity can be had for cheap to maximize profits).

Why did people ever think that was going to work I don’t know. It never even worked in No Man’s Sky, the reason people consider that game good now has nothing to do with the procedural generation.

Strong-arming your customers is a terrible strategy in the long term. You’re counting on your customers staying not because they like your product, but because they have no better choice available, or the switching cost is too great, so they’re forced to stay. This can get you extra short term profit but almost ensures long-term doom. Your customer is going to drop you like a rock at the first opportunity, and eventually that opportunity will always come.

They released this jam project like two days ago. I highly doubt they’ve ported their in-progress game to a new engine in that short amount of time, that’s a significant effort that could take months.

My hot take on Bethesda is, they simply don’t do game design. They take their previous game, slap whatever is the fashionable mechanic of the day on top, and just roll with the punches until it sorta kinda works.

They haven’t done any real game design probably since Morrowind. Since then they’ve added weapon armor crafting in skyrim, base building and weapon customization in fallout 4, and now in starfield they’re adding procedural planets, resource mining, Ship building… the game is collapsing under sheer feature count.

The problem for me is, it’s not enhancing the core Bethesda experience; they are rather diluting it. All this extra crap just distracts from the actual thing I want from a Bethesda game, which is a big open designed world filled with interesting locations, characters and quests that you’re free to discover as you like. The procedural content especially is, like, antithetical to the formula.

It’s not that deep. Here’s the two main critiques leveled towards the game in the article.

• you don’t always know the consequences of your actions, and they’re not always predictable: a seemingly sensible choice sometimes ends badly, and a seemingly dumb choice could get you a reward
• you can load a save and redo your things whenever you want, i.e. save-scum

These are both somewhat obvious just from the structure of the game. Ultimately the conclusion the author is shooting for is that this makes Baldur’s Gate 3 a bad game but a good piece of interactive fiction.

The author uses the mechanics of chess often as sort of an example of the pinnacle of game design which to me is telling. Video Games are much broader than that. Insisting that people should not call the thing you don’t like a game but instead “interactive fiction” is pedantry at best, and gatekeeping at worst.

Sure, if you view the game through the lens of chess you will come away with these flaws. But for example, if you always knew the consequences of every choice the narrative tension would be destroyed. Of course chess has no such concern, so if we’re looking at games through that lens then narrative tension is of no value. Ultimately I think this is just a very narrow viewpoint of what games should be.

I think there’s a group of people who are just going to avoid quality completely and have entire factories running at normal quality only. Kinda similar to how some people don’t really do nuclear.

If you don’t like the concept of going into space though maybe this expansion is not for you. I think the base game will get the bot upgrades for free anyways.

I don’t know… if we assume 8.8oz total for matter and antimatter together. All of that mass will be annihilated and converted into energy. I calculate that would yield 22,421,767,037 MJ, let’s say 22,000 TJ. According to wikipedia, Little Boy had a 63 TJ yield, so this grenade is around 350 times that.

If it was 8.8 ounces of antimatter, it would combine with 8.8 ounces of normal matter to convert a total of 17.6 ounces of mass into energy. That would result in like 700 Hiroshima’s total yield.