Well saying the nemesis system wouldn’t have worked well in other games is almost assuming that it wouldn’t be changed or evolved to fit other genres. People forget that the real damage some patents/copyrights do is not in their explicit existence, it’s the sphere of influence they exert on related concepts entirely. We weren’t just robbed of the nemesis system, we were robbed of anything even slightly resembling it.

And I feel like once you understand that you realize it can be adapted to greater things. Spider Man games could have used it. Assassins creed would have been an amazing place for experimentation with those ideas. Could be adapted to Star Wars games, dragons dogma, yakuza, borderlands. And it doesn’t need to be a central focus of these games like it was with the WB games. But even the concept of having enemies that kill you be leveled up in some way is now tainted.

This is awesome! Loved reading the last one and this one has so much stuff to look into.

Genuinely thanks for that first line. I’ve held that idea for a long time without the correct words for it to explain how I feel to other people.

I feel like it also compliments the philosophy of “why not?” As in, “if nothing we do matters, why not be kind? Why not love people? Why not help people present and future?” If good and evil are equal utility, why not be a good person?

Hot take but I think it’s because people stop having or seeking out novel experiences. Most of people’s lives are repetitive and boring jobs with barely any time to zone out in the evening. And once your kids move out and you’re with a long term partner, hardly anything is dynamic in your life. Or fresh. Or unexpected.

I think that type of speculation is acceptable usually but their self driving tech hasn’t significantly improved in a while and has been out for years, so those expectations should be mostly priced in by now.

You add that to their falling sales figures and the fact that they spent crazy money developing cyber truck and have had multiple recalls on it already, the stock is completely out to lunch. Usually they’re somewhat in touch with reality. Like Apple is a bit out to lunch but its movement is still news-based somewhat. Not the case with Tesla, they’re not out to lunch they’re out till next year in Tahiti

No they don’t think it will hold that value, yes they think that musk is helping enhance it (and I agree), no they don’t think his actions as CEO are helping their core fundamentals, and quite possibly his last actions were years ago unless you count him being at their press events as work.

This isn’t unique to Tesla btw, they’re just the largest example. Nvidia is also right behind them.

Why? Shareholders do not care about the health of the company so long as its stock price is high. And Teslas stock price is not based on any fundamental principle of investing.

Their market cap, or the total value of all their shares, is currently worth more than the next 30 largest auto manufacturers COMBINED.

Let me put it this way: Every single car sold in the United States this year could be made by Tesla and they still wouldn’t even be close to being worth what they are right now based on company fundamentals. Thats how insane this is. Shareholders of the company couldn’t be happier and yet their company is declining in sales and killing off its customer base. Absolutely insane.

It’s because Nvidia is an American company and also because they make final stage products. American companies right now are all overinflated and almost none of the stocks are worth what they’re at because of foreign trading influence.

As much as people whine about inflation here, the US didn’t get hit as bad as many other countries and we recovered quickly which means that there is a lot of incentive for other countries to invest here. They pick our top movers, they invest in those. What you’re seeing is people bandwagoning onto certain stocks because the consistent gains create more consistent gains for them.

The other part is that yes, companies who make products at the end stage tend to be worth a lot more than people trading more fundamental resources or parts. This is true of almost every industry except oil.

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

A lot of people exist on twitter because their favorite celebrity or news cite or company exists on there. The problem is that the lefties and LGBTQ folk create a ton of twitters content and are also a huge majority of those celebrities.

So while I think twitter will become a sort of right wing cesspool, BlueSky will be much different. Especially since BS has the ability to essentially build your own echo chamber on purpose. Which I actually think is fine because some of the echo chambers I’d compare to the instances on here that try to keep people safe and civil like beehaw. But the moment bluesky keeps getting celebs and organizations to make the swap, it’s all over for twitter. There is a critical mass there that will migrate regardless and honestly the echo chamber design means right wing folk would also do well on the platform if they know what they’re doing.

From what I understand of the protocol, the federation just isn’t the same but provides some of the same benefits. Im not an expert, correct if wrong.

Essentially when I looked into it, the main benefits are stuff I actually prefer as opposed to the current implementation on fediverse in some regards.

The main idea being that users own their data on their own server (or collective server) and can choose to remove or take that data elsewhere to different apps or potentially even accounts. This is a lacking feature in the fediverse and it’s a common contention. If I get blocked on Lemmy or Mastodon, my data goes away. Especially since most people are not likely to host an instance themselves (since it’s an awful user experience) whereas BlueSky data can easily be stored by a third party that is trusted.

But yes you’re right, this still promotes large platforms. However again it gives users more control over what they host on which platforms and keeps their data in one place. That’s a huge advantage imo.

I don’t so much mind this future. It’s not quite the free speech platform that the fediverse is but it’s closer. Moderation can be much more lax and focus on TOS breaking or illegal things. And hey if at some point BlueSky is too woke or whatever the hell people say, they can literally pick up their server with their content and build an app elsewhere. The implementation is different but the end point is largely the same which is cool.

That’s some harsh criticism for CDPR who otherwise has a really good track record for games not released during the height of COVID.

If you want an actual bad studio to paid with Bethesda, I’d argue Ubisoft is a much more apt pairing.

They mourn our passing with gas passing

Yeah I mean I wonder how much water would be saved in water scarce places if people just stop having lawns for no reason.

People can put actual effort into their homes exterior and invest in native grasses and plants that way. Save a lot of water and end our troubles with toxic runoff

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.

What’s funny about that part is I don’t disagree with the fundamentals of the mission. It’s an interactive cutscene which is fine. With better writing it could’ve been interesting but at the very least it should have an option to skip sections of it.

You say that but Arcane didn’t deserve this fate. I’d be rooting for a Bethesda game to fail but BioWare and Arcane? That’s just sad. They were both amazing studios ruined by BS. And the AAA space is large enough these days that actual big budget games can indeed innovate.

Like say though, I won’t exactly shed a tear for failing studios like Ubisoft or Bethesda that have been churning out the same crap for awhile now.

Also not every game needs to innovate and it’s not like you lose a lot by having average selling games come out. But even in games packed with AAA bangers, indies still sell incredibly well. It isn’t a zero sum game.