kbal

Sorry devs, not even trying to stop me from playing Infiniti Nikki can make me want to play Infiniti Nikki.

Whether or not you have to be, if you are online for a single player game they are probably collecting data. Or trying to. Use opensnitch.

It’s striking how many of the things they’ve changed seem to be slightly for the worse:

• the lockpicking and persuasion minigames are a little less fun
• the level-up choices are dumbed down
• the speed at which you gain levels is even faster
• the local map is weirdly hard to find for some reason
• the HUD looks worse
• there is much telemetry
• there are framerate problems

Then there are the things I’d have expected them to improve that are unchanged:

• they didn’t give us better difficulty settings
• there’s no walking slowly with the controller
• level scaling has most (but not all) of the same problems it did
• the day/night cycle still flies past at hyperspeed
• horses still report your crimes to the telepathic guards (okay I guess they had to keep that)

Of course there are mods to fix most of those problems. Oblivion is a great game, and it’s good to see a lot of new people playing it for the first time.

That was my reaction watching it on Twitch. Playing it in person is way more fun, the nostalgia got me. Still, Skyblivion will probably be better-looking as well as having better mod support.

The AI-generated speech animations are strangely exaggerated like it’s some kind of lip reading training program. There’s no hair physics. You don’t get a shadow in first-person mode. The persuasion minigame UI looks worse than it used to. Sometimes the NPCs look off to the side while they’re talking to you as if the camera’s in the wrong place. Considering that the main point is to make the old game look nicer, they seem to have neglected a lot of little details.

Brilliant marketing trick: Keep people waiting for the next game in the huge blockbuster series for 14 years and they’ll be eager for whatever they get

Eribees and Mortalbeef will be streaming it on Twitch as soon as they can download it, along with many others. Might be interesting.

Seems like a sign that it will not be optimized at all.

I’ll be surprised if experimenting with ways to capture and contain the modders in order to extract money isn’t one of the main goals of the project.

No particular reason but for that sort of thing I just do su -

I like to actually log in as root on a terminal to do admin stuff, never got into sudo really. Old habits, you know.

Un-modded Skyrim has health regen (even during combat) unless you turn on “survival mode” but overall it’s a much better game if you spend the first 30 hours installing mods. In particular the melee combat can be much improved with MCO and related things. Or just pick a wabbajack, I hear Tempus Maledictum is one that people like.

Oh, literally unplayable. That’s even better. I was imagining a “lesbian? y/n” toggle in the settings that did absolutely nothing.

approx $6.84USD

Huh. So definitely not worth it then. Just buy a space heater instead. When I did it a few years ago I got $500 out of it, but it cost me a $350 video card which died soon after.

Is it really down to TSMC being unable to keep up? It seems plausible but I didn’t notice anything in the video to support it. Are there other sources that point to it as the problem?

Edit — for circumstantial evidence I did find this: https://wccftech.com/tsmc-reaches-100-percent-utilization-5nm-3nm-supply/

Hey AMD, here’s an idea: Ramp up your manufacturing, make an RX 9050, MSRP $350, flood the market with them, win the GPU game.

Requires 3rd-Party Account: Ubisoft

Singleplayer gameplay requires an active Internet connection

I was about to buy an Assassin’s Creed game, until I paused to read the fine print.

That’s right “industry execs” — you just need to turn down the romance by 40% and the sex by 15%, add 50% more friendship and 25% more adventure, control for the desired level of political correctness, add just the right variety of behavioural feedback loops, and you’ll have a maximally profitable game.

Firefox (with good settings, or Librewolf) + uBlock Origin + Decentraleyes + NoScript (with default permissions removed) is probably > 80%.

Buying Civ VI at launch was one of my worse decisions. Glad to be sitting this one out at least for a year or two until the game is actually finished and we can see if it’s any good.