It would also require more optimized builds, leaving little wiggle-room for mistakes.

How?

For any set of stats, it wouldn’t matter if you got there at level 2 or level 20. Mudcrabs built for an optimized level 10 wouldn’t spawn just because you are level 10. They’d spawn when you’ve spent as many points as you would have, had you optimized to level 10.

The real issue would be “the Draugr are training” kinds of builds. If you put half your points into personality… the bandits did not.

you simply get a flat 12 points to spend every time you level up.

… that’s the wrong problem entirely! Complicated leveling was just another minigame to optimize.

If they wanted it to be painless, they could’ve leveled the world according to your total stats. Attack the player based on how much their numbers went up, instead of how often they went up.

The deeper problem in Oblivion was that you could blast goblins with a single fireball at level one, and then when you got stronger and put all your points in kill-stuff-harder attributes, the same fireball against the same goblins just tickled.

Wait what? They even said they fixed the leveling, in the announcement video! This was the one thing everyone agreed was broken, and it barely mattered which mod you chose to fix it, because all of them were an improvement. How’d they fuck this up twice?

Talked shit to some dunmer, didn’t know he was from Maar Gan.

That’s what I’m on about. We have the technology to avoid going ‘hold up, I gotta get something.’ There’s supposed to be a shitty version that’s always there, in case you have to render it by surprise, and say ‘better luck next frame.’ The most important part is to put roughly the right colors onscreen and move on.

id Software did this on Xbox 360… loading from a DVD drive. Framerate impact: nil.

They had trouble increasing memory even before this AI nonsense. Now they have a perverse incentive to keep it low on affordable cards, to avoid undercutting their own industrial-grade products.

Which only matters thanks to anticompetitive practices leveraging CUDA’s monopoly. Refusing to give up the fat margins on professional equipment is what killed DEC. They successfully miniaturized their PDP mainframes, while personal computers became serious business, but they refused to let those run existing software. They crippled their own product and the market destroyed them. That can’t happen, here, because ATI is not allowed to participate in the inflated market of… linear algebra.

The flipside is: why the hell doesn’t any game work on eight gigabytes of VRAM? Devs. What are you doing? Does Epic not know how a texture atlas works?

Guinan: “More?”

Data: “Please.”

The episode, summarized:

Nobody listens to Worf.

Nobody listens to Worf.

Nobody listens to Worf.

Nobody listens to Worf.

Nobody listens to Worf.

Nobody listens to Worf.

Data listens to a deck of cards.

They are cats. If you see that butt wiggle, prepare to dodge.

Letting TVs absorb set-top equipment was a mistake. You want to keep that modular stuff separate from the big expensive rectangle, so if it any of it gives you backsass, you can take it out back and beat it to smithereens with a sledgehammer.

More importantly: don’t make games that rely on runaway success.

If your game is fun even if only a dozen people buy it, great! If it requires ten thousand global players right out the gate, and will cease to function once that number drops, you are fucked, by design.

You have to get the right drink, though.

But for peaceful purposes only!

Finally, we have built the Torment Nexus, from the beloved book Do Not Build The Torment Nexus.

Blame ClearChannel. Nickelback emerged near the peak of one company fucking up commercial radio throughout the US. This new band played inoffensive pop-alternative-country melange, seeming broadly acceptable to everyone without exciting much of anyone. Their image was squeaky-clean while their conventionally attractive frontman looked vaguely rugged. All very saleable, but aggressively generic.

So: take an audience at peak rude irony. (This is the era of Celebrity Deathmatch, “Mike Tyson ate my balls,” and Game.com ads calling their customers morons.) Subject them to the same middling singles over and over. Ask how they feel about this merely okay experience taking up air time that could easily be Destiny’s Child, Third Eye Blind, or Shania Twain. Try not to act surprised when they smirk and say they hope the entire band dies.

People hate Nickelback because it’s fun to hate Nickelback. It is easy and rewarding to hate Nickelback. Everyone knew about them, but nobody was a diehard fan. You could perform ingroup bonding with nearly anyone by saying “Fuck Nickelback, right?” You could privately grumble about hearing “How You Remind Me” for the dozenth time this week, without any baggage like Creed’s religion-bait popularity or various artists’ public feuds. Hating Nickelback is uncomplicated. To this day, I have no goddamn idea what Chad Kroeger is like, or what he’s into, or what he’s done. But I still knew his name without checking.

And nobody’s replaced them. Rampant piracy deepened people’s musical tastes by letting them choose what to listen to, instead of the constant deluge of lowest-common-denominator payola. Streaming later made it polite and acceptable to pay artists nothing. Meanwhile, internet forums and thousand-channel cable packages allowed culture to splinter. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a Taylor Swift song. I don’t care, and I don’t have to. Having any reputation become memetic like this is obscenely unlikely now. To have that reputation be… mediocre? Unthinkable.

After the inauguration? No, fuck that guy.

We can cross off “Ride BMX on DMT with DMX.”

Splitting hairs, but a green card only means permanent residency.

And NOTHING HAS CHANGED in twenty years - yeah? Not a fucking thing that should shift how they release games. Consoles are still sooo different from PCs, with their AMD x64 CPUs and AMD RDNA GPUs.

Relevant XKCD.