How would a engine change affect the game design philosophy of Bethesda?
Performance? Visuals? Alright. But game design?
Creation Engine powers Starfield and Fallout New Vegas. Quests can be complex, dynamic, with multiple endings, with lots of ways to approach them. Or they can be flat fetch quests. The tools allow both and everything in between.
Bethesda just chooses to use the current game design framework and would choose the same on any other engine.
They are actually updating their game design principles. They stopped using game design documents, they simplified the quests, they try to make sure every play through gets to see as much content as possible. Maybe they should stop updating.
As I said Creation Engine did mot stop another studio from being creative.
They are not being hold back by Creation Engine in game design, they are stuck in a design philosophy and production strategy that until now has and got them lots of praise and sales.
They use the chest trick because saves reworking the inventory and container system. That would take time and left the game almost the same, so they don’t.
If they used Unreal engine they’d have to build a new inventory and container system from scratch, who knows if they would end up taking the hidden chest idea (it mostly works) and porting it?
The “Update your engine Bethesda” discussion is valid from many points of view, but most of the problems with current Bethesda releases are cultural. They don’t test nearly enough, they don’t have a “fun” game until a couple months before release, they don’t coordinate the content and mechanics production in any way, the quest writing is a free for all.
And until now things worked out. So they refuse to address those issues.
They have the money and resources to change engine. They CHOSE not to. Because they can make the game they want to make faster and more efficiently on Creation Engine. If they could not make the game they want they would be forced to move to another game engine.
If their idea for Elder Scrolls 6 can be made in CE they won’t change engines. If it does not, they aren’t some indie studio, they have the resources to swap.
They don’t want to. They have a formula, and the public and the market have spent decades saying that it’s good enough and want “Skyrim in Space”
If they want to change how inventory works they can, in whatever engine they are using. But why would they?
Also, I find pretty ironic to expect “Innovation” in a game with a number 6 attached to it, from a studio known for doing 3 franchises so similar to each other in gameplay and features that are used to describe each other. And to blame the tech for the lack of it.
I’m sure that many people in the studio are having a bad time with how quick the internet discourse has gone into “Starfield Actually Bad” territory. It’s not easy refining that kind of feedback.
BUT. BUT. I’m not sure about the “until now” because Starfield has sold incredibly well, even for a game launched directly in game pass and not supporting PS5.
Even if internet gaming people don’t like the game, the market said it’s ok. BioWare survived a few blunders until destroying their brand, and Blizzard still goes strong.
Making statements about why shitty games are not the fault of old technology is not a defense of said shitty games.
They always make the same game, they ship it broken and keep it broken. The best game in their franchises since at least since Morrowind was made by another studio. The lore is derivative and as deep as a puddle. They sell their games based on bullet points and features and not quality.
I don’t like their recent output at all. I find their design philosophy and quest design outdated and lacking, recent games feel older that previous ones.
But none of those things are the engine’s fault. They ship exactly the game they want to ship, and use the engine that lets them do it as efficiently as possible. If they are limited at all is in their production organization or lack thereof.
Are you denying that Skyrim, Fallour 3 and 4, or Starfield are commercial successes? Even Starfield was a critically acclaimed game for a while.
Most people are okay without mods because they can’t install them in their platform of choice so they don’t expect them. They have heard about them in articles and videos and find them an oddity of PC gaming, at most.
It is really easy to fall into an echo chamber and believing most of the people that buys Bethesda games are fixing them with mods. That’s an option only for a minority of players, and of those many won’t install them. They play 30~60 hours and won’t launch the game ever again.
When has that stopped any tech or fake-tech company from making their IPO?
The IPO is where the Venture Capitalist get their paychecks. Is that or being acquired by some big tech like Google or Microsoft.
The current vc investments can not really be recouped with profits. They exist to make company valuation as big as possible before the IPO, so they can as much money as possible selling as much as the company as they can without losing control of the board.
The company will pump REVENUE just before the IPO to increase valuation, but the PROFIT right now is inconsequential in comparación with the total addressable market. It’s all pure speculation and a terrible way to make a sustainable business, but it’s the best way to get a lot of money for the VC and the founders.
Yeah, writing prompts it’s the long term goal, programming will be obsolete.
Nobody that can write a problem in a structured language, taking edge cases into account, will be able to write a prompt for a LLM.
Prompt writers will be the useful professionals, because NO big tech company is trying to make it obsolete making AI ubiquitous and transparent, aiming it to work for natural language requests made by normal users or simply from context clues. /s
Prompt engineering it’s the griftiest side of the latest AI summer. Look a who is selling the courses. The same people that sold crypto courses, metaverse courses, Amazon dropship store courses…
I’ve never really put a protective case on my handheld consoles (NDS, Vita, 3DS). However, the Steam Deck is more expensive and weighs much more, meaning that even a small height fall could more easily damage it....
They tried. Then apple dropped 32bit binaries support.
Apple is a very expensive partner to have. They do whatever they want with their ecosystem and many developers have been burned when apple decides to make their work obsolete or outright copies it and makes part of the bundled in apps.
So. It would be amazing if valve updated every one of their games for new versions of macOS and if they would kept MacOS proton support. But macOS is a moving target that will break backwards compatibility whenever it suits apple. So I understand that is hard to justify the investment.
In the end MacOs and Linux where less than a 1% of the Steam user base. But one is an open ecosystem where there is competition and some semblance of respect for backwards compatibility and the other is a closed and sometimes hostile environment.
The technology used by Valve is Irrelevant. The operating system losing support is not even supported by apple. The users of that version of MacOs are at risk because they use a closed source unmantained operating system.
As I said Apple is not concerned with kind of old software. They expect everyone to move up with them, developers and users, or get left behind.
Portal is a game released THE SAME YEAR the iPhone was. In classic hit PC game time that’s “nothing”, you expect to be able to run it, but in Apple’s timeline is ancient history. Take a look into how many iPhone games just won’t work anymore.
It’s getting bigger, but I said they WERE less than an 1%. And macOS was bigger that Linux for ages.
Then Apple proved they were not an ideal alternative platform, being even more closed than Microsoft, and not understanding the games ecosystem, so Valve pivoted and got into the Linux thing, failed with the Steam Machines, pivoted into Proton, and now I have a Deck.
Bots are routinely rounded up and banned. A lost follower is not necessarily an unfollow.
The article is reaching for a narrative. The lady they talk about has done other things in this period of time. Other stuff has happened. The change in followers is minuscule in relation to the magnitude, so it could be noise.
It could be homophobia obviously. It could be some controversy about unfortunate body image declarations. It could be noise. It could be the war on Middle East and a round of banned bots. It could be too much time since the last record. She could be losing the spotlight. The social network could be purging deleted accounts.
The reason “homophobia” is a guess. The reason “bots” is another. None invalidates the other because in both cases you have to make assumptions about the motives of 100.000 entities.
Also could be 5.100.000 followers lost and 5mil gained. The article talks about the delta, but there is not a reliable analysis about the composition of the following and its change over the last months, except one simple number.
Didn’t you go into Turing machines and the Halting problem from that?
That was my intro into computation: regex, automatas, state machines, stack state machines, formal languages, grammars, Turing machines, Hanting Problem, P NP.
A tree can be seen as a formal language. Look into L-systems.
If you generalize what a symbol is (the rgb value of a pixel) you can write a grammar that ends producing a list of pixels. You can then place it in a 2d matrix and you have an image.
I guess a better approach would be wave function colapse, but seems to me like it could be formally described as a grammar (CS or CF, dunno, would have to look into it)
I’m really sceptic about that kind of metrics because many of them take carbon offsets into account, and carbon offsets are mostly greenwashing.
Power mix in the world right now is over 50% coal and gas, and only hydro is over a 10%. This is worldwide, so mix varies depending on where you are.
In the end EVs are no making a dent in power demand. They are increasing it. The percentage of fossil fuels is maybe going down but total fossil fuel consumption is increasing as our demand does. Green energy is only taking some of the slack from the increase.
EVs will be remembered as the thing we did to keep using cars and feeling good about it.
Such an interesting idea! (sembr.org)
[Opinion piece] Starfield Killed My Hype For The Elder Scrolls 6 (www.thegamer.com)
Reddit has never turned a profit in nearly 20 years, but it just filed to go public anyway (edition.cnn.com)
Tough break, kid... (programming.dev)
Protective case or not? (www.spigen.com)
I’ve never really put a protective case on my handheld consoles (NDS, Vita, 3DS). However, the Steam Deck is more expensive and weighs much more, meaning that even a small height fall could more easily damage it....
Don't let go! (ani.social)
Would you be interested in a game about energy generation and distribution?
I recently got interested in the physics behind power plants, and the electrical network as well as heat networks....
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was asked by Verge why there is no support for the Steam Deck for Fortnite (lemmy.ml)
Billie Eilish lost 100k followers after coming out (www.thepinknews.com)
Billie Eilish has lost a whopping 100,000 Instagram followers since coming out last month and sharing she was attracted to women.
sigma star (discuss.tchncs.de)
image transcription:...
Yes, also Teslas (media.mastodon.scot)
It's official, Microsoft now owns ABK (news.xbox.com)
Microsoft changed it's data policy
Couldn’t find a good article so here are the change notes: privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/updates...