I’m sure that, while 17k may be mathematically and technically true, they’re going to be virtually indistinguishable. I’m pretty hyped for the game but I also don’t care for the obviously clickbait claim.
It’s nice to know the ending will touch upon your actions thoroughly, but I suspect it will be a lot like the The Witcher 3 technically having 40-something “endings” (but really it’s just 3 major outcomes with some variations on the details).
I agree and I suspect companions are carrying a lot of the weight for this calculation.
Hypothetically, if there’s 10 companions with 10 individual endings each you’d get 100 endings right there. Add in 10 main endings and you get 1000, add in 4 major side quests and 4 variations each and you’re at 16,000 ending variations.
I’m not entirely sure why, but I don’t think that adds up. 10 companions with 10 different endings is a total 100 endings, however there are apparently 1.7x10^13^ combinations if you were to pick any 10. I don’t entirely know if I did the math right there.
So you don’t have 1000 endings from the 100 total companion endings and 10 main endings, you have 110 total endings.
Either 17,000 is a figure from the various combinations (compare that to Fallout 3’s purptorted 300 endings) or there are 17000 total ending “slides.” The former is much more likely.
Unless I’m getting the math wrong myself, for any “pick 1” combination set like this we’re dealing with just multiplying the combination sets together. Technically we’re multiplying by the factorial of the sample size, but 1!=1.
We’re not picking any 10 from within the subset of 100; you cannot pick both ending 1 and ending 4 from companion A and then no ending at all for companion C. I’m assuming each individual sub-ending is mutually exclusive with the rest of its sample space. That difference of assumptions is what led to your 1.7x10^13^ combinations.
You’re probably more right than me here, but I’m just not following. Does it matter whether or not to pick 1 from 10 sets of 10 or to pick 10 from a single set of 100? We don’t care about what set each individual item came from, just that it’s unique and the number of possible combinations.
Edit: Probably just best to dismiss this. I clearly have no idea what I’m talking about.
Yes, it matters. If you’re picking 1 out of 10 each from 10 different sets, you get 100 combinations. This also limits the sample space to what is possible.
For simplicity’s sake so we can do math that we can intuitively figure out, look at it as picking one from binary choices, with three companions. So you have companions A, B, and C. With possible endings A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2.
If you pick 1 from A, 1 from B, and 1 from C you get 2*2*2 possible outcomes, or 8.
If you pick any 3 from the set of 6 (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2) you get 6!/(3!*3!) possible outcomes, or 20.
With the former, you always get one ending for each companion. Every companion has an option selected, and every companion does not have multiple endings selected. With the latter, you might get 1 from each companion. Or you might get A1, A2, and B1 — with no endings for companion C, and two endings for companion A.
How can ending A1 “A lived happily ever after” and ending A2 “A died midway through the player’s journey, never having found happiness” both happen? They cannot. We need to use a system that limits the sample space to exactly 1 per companion, even if that option itself might be “doesn’t show up in the end slides.”
Since it’s variations of the combined ending, each permutation would count as unique. Meaning that 10 companions with 10 endings each would total 10.000.000.000 variations,
putting aside the ethics of DRM in general (ew) and that this developer has already made a fortune on a mod virtually unequaled... my biggest problem with this kind of thing is that bugs happen. "mines" implies that the goal will be to do something malicious to pirates. so what happens when there's a bug in the detection code, or in the auth server, or when you didn't test it on some specific quirky hardware-software combo, or when a cosmic ray strikes the RAM stick and flips the wrong bit?
a paying customer gets fucked -- or a lot of them do. all for the petty greed of someone who can't envision the obvious fact that the actual pirates will just fuzz your bomb logic and patch it out within two days.
As a formerly hardcore, now infrequent pirate, I wholeheartedly agree with this.
I’ve even pirated ANSYS at one point because the cracked version was a lot more reliable than the version I had for free, due to shoddy DRM (FlexLM, what a garbage licence management).
While mod authors are free to charge money for their mods, including DRM in a mod for a game that doesn’t have DRM (beyond basic steam account check) is kinda messed up. Adding deliberate bugs to mess with pirates is even more messed up. Why waste time making your product worst with drm and intentional bugs just to piss pirates who would never buy your product in the first place anyway?
It's actually a really old practice, "the first DRM". You'd place things in your game that could only be solved by having the manual on hand, meaning you purchased it. Many games took a jovial approach to it, letting you play the game, but in a broken state if you answered incorrectly and indicated you'd pirated it. Castles II comes to mind, also Kings Quest 5. Others did the "die if you didn't have the manual", but those let you go on ... just knowing you'd lose every single time.
as someone from belgium it still doesn't make sense. there are media and even game related official organizations and groups in flanders and belgium like VAF or FLEGA. if the government wanted to boast about Larian being a belgian founded company, going through one of those channels would make much more sense.
Every time I read anything about starlink, it all just seems so quintessentially American.
You’ve got effective monopolies of communication infrastructure, which causes everyone to be underserved, and instead of just fixing the monopoly problem, you fire off infinite rockets full of cell towers that burn up in a year
I wouldn’t say I’m underserved (I live in a tech hub). Overcharged? Definitely.
Rural folks do have a hard time without satellite though, and one thing a lot of Europeans do not viscerally realize about the States is how big the country is, and how much empty space there is.
Even as someone living on the east coast of the US, I’m always surprised when I visit the Midwest and Central US to see just how much “nothing” there is. At least compared to the relative density of driving up and down the northeast corridor
I’m angry at you because I’m about to defend an Elon Musk project… But Starlink is used in many countries. (in)Famously in Ukraine. The idea has merit for anyone living in remote areas (northern Canada, war-torn areas, etc.).
Ukraine is a fantastic example of how bad the whole thing is playing out. Remote areas are always better served by actual infrastructure investment however.
The idea has merit for anyone living in remote areas (northern Canada, war-torn areas, etc.)
I will grant you war torn areas, and remote islands, but rural continental communities are better served with terrestrial infrastructure. Just because someone's willing to fill the sky with space junk as a means of masturbation doesn't mean it's the best solution for public infrastructure.
Yes it will. Just like doing the exact same thing for power and phone lines to every single place in the entire US ran prices up. Difference is we paid for it and enforced companies do to it. For internet access we just paid for it and then never made them provide the internet access to everyone everywhere.
Laying 200km of fiber for a town of ~1000 will always be more expensive than it is worth (for an ISP) and that math only gets worse when you look at last-leg hookups for people spread out ~5km apart around the area and not living directly in the town.
… which is maybe why things that are essentially critical to a developed country’s lifestyle probably shouldn’t simply be companies. If we go off of “it’s not profitable”, public transport wouldn’t be any good, postal services would suck, etc.
The internet should be a public service like mail.
Also, in the US they paid the ISPs to hook everyone up to fiber, and then they just… didn’t.
Terrestrial includes wireless solutions, which are better suited for many last-leg hookups in situations like these.
Sure, there's a lot of places where these won't work (eg. mountainous areas), but there are also questions about whether people living that remotely even want broadband or wireless.
Also, serving a community of 2k people as far as 1000 km might cost hundreds of millions. So I don’t believe the 2k community would be happy to pay $5k each monthly to make it profitable for the ISP.
Look up LMG when linus wanted to connect two warehouses that are meters apart with entry level networking solution.
First, no one is talking about standard home-grade routers, though there is technology to make those work at longer distances. We're talking about say a cellular network, which is considered broadband in most of the US and has an existing infrastructure. Many of these areas are already going to have cellular access, and upgrades to existing networks are significantly cheaper and easier to maintain. There are long-range wifi solutions, and those work too, but most require line-of-sight, so as i stated, aren't suited for say mountanous area.
Name one community that is stretched out over 1000k. That's not community, that's a fucking state or territory. Seriously, that's more than 10x the width or height of Rhode Island.
Again, as I said, it's questionable whether those people even want high-speed internet in the first place. You're probably not living remotely to be on-the-grid.
Governments generally fund the buildout for this, so it's rarely on citizens anyway.
The LMG video is irrelevant. Linus is far from an expert.
Sorry English isn’t my first language so I meant 1000 km far from networking infrastructure. Not stretched out over 1000 km.
Linus isn’t professional. I just want you to have an idea of the cost. Specifically the fiber optic cables.
That doesn’t include maintenance, professional installation, and hardware to distribute the connection to multiple users / houses.
Even wireless solutions would not make it viable. I am not an expert but I would assume you need 100 towers for 1000 km (a tower for each 10 km) to relay data to keep speed and stable connection in check.
The average cost of a barebone cellular tower in USA is $250k without networking hardware. This would result in $25,000,000 just for towers.
If each person in the town of 1000 subscribed and paid $100 monthly it’d be $100k a month which I don’t think would cover the operation expenses of the service.
I understand a lot more about this than you’re assuming.
I’ve seen this Linus video, plus I’ve seen projects like these work and have a good grasp on the cost. The Linus video can’t explain any of that, And he’s pretty clueless in general.
There’s a reason google and other companies use wireless and cell for this exact reason. Building ands maintenance is cheaper than satellites.
Your estimates assume totally new infrastructure, but that’s not the case for most rural communities. They have existing infrastructure that can be upgraded. You’re also wrongly assuming they’re going to put up towers across this distance. They would only put them where needed.
More importantly this is in comparison to satellites, which are even more expensive and this particular low orbit has a short lifespan.
It’s not a solution for the cabin in the top of Mount Everest or the middle of the ocean, but as i said in my original reply they are best for the vast majority of people.
There is a need for satellite communication comms, but we have it already today. I’m just not convinced this particular project is worth the cost.
Again most importantly, there’s not a ton of evidence that people living in remote areas want broadband.
In on starlink because it's now the only half decent option. There is a fairly strong 4g tower reception but it's underprovisioned and gives less than 3mbps downloads. 25 up though. We did have ADSL for a long time but they've shut that network down.
And the country should fix this just like during electrification and running phone lines to everywhere.
In the US we paid for internet to be run everywhere (like we did for electricity and phone lines), then the phone companies just didn’t do it. Neither congress nor FTC followed through with any consequences for companies not doing this. So here we are in the US.
But as a said elsewhere neither electricity nor phone being run to rural US homes was cost effective for companies. So the US decided that was shit and paid for it to get done. Started to do the same for internet access. Phone companies refused, used the money for other purposes, inflated prices faster the inflation, etc. and yet neither FTC nor congress held them accountable. Other countries have done the same thing for power and phone, there is nothing fundamentally different about physical internet access stopping anyone from doing the same thing.
It will never be commercially viable to run a cable into the extreme rural reaches of North America. People just don’t understand the scale of the expanse.
I agree for some definitions of rural, but I don’t know if you have an idea on just how remote rural can mean. Try looking around northern Ontario in Google maps if you’ve never done it before. It’s fascinating. So many tiny towns that are only reachable by boat or plane. They’re not islands, but they might as well be, with how isolated they are.
But even for towns that aren’t nearly so remote, no company is going to lay down quality infrastructure to accommodate every random farm that is spread several dozens of kilometers away from the nearest city. Even without capitalism, it’s an expensive use of resources to connect isolated areas.
Satellite internet has existed for some time now for those areas. I wonder if star link is really worse than those alternatives, or if people just love to hate Musk.
The previous satellite internet was more expensive, had much higher ping times and lower transfer Speeds because the satellites where fewer and further away from earth. This mean more people had to share a lower bandwidth. You could use email and some text heavy websites, but bloated news sites with Autoplay ads, video calls or online games not so much…
Building rural infrastructure is incredibly expensive. I grew up about 25 miles from the nearest city, and to this day there are still no cell towers or broadband in the area. Just dial up internet that maxes out at 28.8 baud running over copper twisted pair. It’s frankly archaic.
My parents inquired with the local telco, and for 7 miles of fiber I believe they wanted to charge somewhere around $13 million for their rural neighborhood - just for the trenching. For like 20 farms.
I lived in a semi-rural area that had fiber access 1 mile away on the same road and they refused to run it unless i paid them $20k. The area was separated by a railroad track, which required permits and they didn’t want to deal with it.
As much as this is true, this is also a solution that’s doesn’t have a lot of alternatives for very isolated areas. You can technically run undersea cables to everywhere, but it’s actually faster and easier to have LEO satellites serve places like Antarctica. Some smaller island nations, the middle of Africa, etc.
There are problems with every solution, but this was always an inevitable solution for worldwide communication.
oooh nooo i can’t play cod at pro levels, that’s worth endlessly throwing satellites that struggle to stay up for a year before becoming space junk and requiring us to burn a whole bunch more fuel to keep another load up for barely a year
So, you’ve never had to rely on satellite internet? That was a rhetorical question.
Had a client not far from here, only option was satellite. Couldn’t even get 3G at the time. 950ms+ ping times.
We were trying to hook up a simple RDP system, PC to PC, and I finally had to tell him it wasn’t possible to do anything but FB and email, and that would be miserable. Hell, almost nothing was possible.
before becoming space junk
So you don’t get speed-of-light delay, and you also don’t get low-altitude orbital decay. You won’t admit it, but you have no idea what you’re talking about it. But you’ll be back to double down on your ignorance! FFS, just stop.
Second-biggest chunk of the console market, effectively necessary for the PC market, gobbling up studios and publishers like fucking Galactus, and these empty suits still treat “making less money than the number we pulled from our asses” as losing money.
“Sold out” doesn’t mean anything. For the last four generations, Sony has deliberately underproduced consoles at launch, specifically to claim ‘It’s flying off shelves! We can’t keep it stocked!’ This free publicity stunt even worked for the PS3… which struggled for years.
That said, yeah, apparently the Xbox whatever-it’s-called sells about half as many units per year, compared to either the PS5 or Switch. Rough.
On the one hand I fully agree. They have plenty of resources to be working on multiple projects at once.
On the other, it’s very easy for studios to lose their way when spread too thin. There is value in staying focused.
On the third hand, it’s taking an absurdly long time to build their games now. It’s clear the Gamebryo/Creation Engine is no longer fit for purpose. I don’t give a fuck about object permanence for 10,000 cheese wheels. I want fewer loading screens, much better facial animations, much better lighting, much better performance, and MUCH better collision handling. Unreal proved YEARS ago that functionally unlimited polygon assets were achievable with good performance with dynamic mesh loading. Gamebryo is absolutely shitting the bed with the assets in Starfield. Maybe it wouldn’t take 5+ years to build these games if they weren’t shackled to Gamebryo.
It’s weird, because they absolutely need to switch things up… but also they have a winning formula and so long as the games sell they will never adapt.
For me, the biggest fault isn’t the tech itself (at least not directly), but the game design. Every time they strap another system to that Frankenstein’s monster of an engine, those systems need to be justified in gameplay, which is harder to do the more there are. As everything grows in scale and scope, each component, whether locations or mechanics, feels less individually compelling. Then they hide mechanics behind the tech tree, which solves one issue by focusing the player experience, but now the quests feel even more bland because they need to appeal to every possible build.
Except you’re looking at Unreal from a purely graphical perspective and as if Bethesda’s slowest process was making the engine work. If either of those two points were the issue, we’d have a whole bunch of Bethesda-style games on Unreal already, but we don’t.
I was gonna say that it matters on laptops, and I don't know if I'd say that most people playing games are doing so on the desktop, but the actual quote is more reasonable than the title:
In notebooks, it matters greatly. In desktop, however, it matters, but not to everyone.
Handheld PCs are exploding in popularity, I wouldn’t be surprised if that overtakes gaming laptops as a market rapidly and eats into desktops too - especially if Microsoft really puts effort into the handheld Windows experience. Efficiency is everything for handhelds - even if it’s plugged into power you still have to deal with that heat.
AMD are right though, desktop PC gamers couldn’t give less of a shit about efficiency, they want raw power.
I worry in chasing the latter they might miss out on a huge opportunity to gain market share laterally by expanding the handheld market, rather than just trying to fight NVIDIA in raw power where NVIDIA is strongest.
Yeah sure… If they just kept it to a sane number like Chrono Trigger did so much time ago, it would be much better. Why are we counting permutations as “different endings”?
I know that the mini is something of a niche product but I don’t get why. Who is asking for these giant bricks of a cell phone? Well everyone apparently is, but why? I’d love apple to design a clamshell foldable so that I could get an even smaller pocket footprint
My phone is a screen I use for reading, viewing media, using UI, etc. It’s a web device. Real estate matters, and larger keyboards are easier to type on.
Larger screens are harder to use one handed though. I really just want a screen sized to be used one handed by most people. I’d also argue that with Swype and similar stuff, typing on a keyboard really doesn’t need that much accuracy these days.
I used to be a small phone guy, but I hadn’t actually used a bigger phone before. I decided on a 14 Pro Max as “something different” when it came time to upgrade and I can’t go back to smaller.
You don’t even need that many ‘if’ statements. If you’re stringing together a sequence of cause and effect binary decisions (as so many RPGs are wont to do), then you only need 14 of them to get over 16,000 possible combinations!
I feel like this is Bioware’s hail Mary, the fact is they dug up this franchise from the dead after anthem flopped and probably want to make a game in an established franchise that they felt they could deliver a successful product. I hope it turns out great, I love Bioware games, been a fan for a very long time and the Bioware name deserves more recognition than what people give it these days. They don’t even have the comfort of swtor to give them a little side revenue anymore since they had to sell that off. Hopefully this game turns out as good as they hope it does, I know I will play it if it’s good.
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