switchboard_pete

from the big stew out back

Hackers acting as if they’re doing a public service by bringing down a free publicly accessible tool is a new level of assbackwardness.

are the zendesk hackers the same as the ones who brought down the website initially?

giving somebody a gift card for a product or service you think they specifically will enjoy is objectively more personal than giving them cash, yes

“I’m Kamala Harris, and I approve this blessage”?! You stupid monkey!

e.g., starfield would’ve been a very different game had you been able to fly space -> surface, and had there been vehicles to do actual exploring with

it would’ve completely changed the way the game plays, and opened up new possibilities for design. it also would’ve removed many of the oft-criticized loading screens and made the whole experience flow better.

but they can’t do any of that, because the engine isn’t good enough to support it.

sometimes you can’t make a choice because the engine says no

Bethesda can’t improve because they keep catering for the lowest common denominator

even in your ideal world where they perfect the world, quests and characters, tes 6 is still going to suck if core gameplay plays the same as skyrim, which played the same as oblivion

they can’t improve that core gameplay without a better engine

new vegas and london are popular in the same way 1 and 2 are popular, which is “not mainstream enough to sustain a studio like bethesda”.

which is historically how they made up the difference between the lackluster gameplay

you and i must have been playing different bethesda games, because none of them have been particularly interesting story-wise

the average player doesn’t care about crunchy rpg systems. they do care if the core gameplay would’ve been outdated in 2010.

bethesda doesn’t seem to be able to improve the core gameplay because the engine can’t cope.

even if you fixed the writing and tossed out the awful procedural generation in favor of hand-crafted environments, at it heart it’s still going to play like a stripped down borderlands 1

the writing, yes

but if their engine is “perfectly tuned” then that means their engine is informing their design

they can’t make good design choices because they have to work within the limitations of an over-fitted engine

They’ve probably also put considerable work into the next project already

fallout 4 was 9 years ago, and people wanted them to switch to a new engine then

you’re right, of course, but good lord have they had ample time to course correct since then

“perfectly tuned” means their game engine is coupled to their game design, which yeah, more or less makes genuine creativity impossible

not to mention the psychological factors, like the hurdle of convincing higher ups to try something new when simply not doing that is 10x less work

counterpoint: if it isn’t the engine holding them back, then everyone left is just fundamentally bad at designing games (i’m not counting “let’s just copy what we designed last time” as design), and that’s worse

josh sawyer has said their engine has the best content creation pipeline he’s worked with, which is probably why they’re reluctant to give it up

but surely at this point they have to be doing something in the background to move to a different one. i seriously doubt they didn’t try to get space-to-surface flight working, but evidently the engine didn’t let them…which is more or less the same story as every other time they’ve tried to break out of the mold they’ve carved for themselves. it always ends up a janky mess.

whenever they build out actual new mechanics for the engine, like the settlement building in fo4, or the space flight in starfield, they’re always just grafted on, rather than being interwoven with existing systems.

imagine a spherical fox in a vacuum

what an incredible way to ensure you physically cringe the entire time you play any nintendo game with the sound on

the answers here assume that the base is a continuous, straight line

given one of the angles on the left triangle is a right angle on the diagram, but 80 if you calculate it, you can’t assume that

i see you realized that building factories isn’t free

congratulations

If you actually responded to what I said rather than deflecting you might learn something.

restate your point if you fluffed it up the first time, but no, what you provided initially was devoid of anything worth responding to

You keep repeating yourself rather than look at what I’ve already said.

because what you’ve said is nonsense that doesn’t address anything i’m saying

let’s keep this real simple: do you agree or not with the fact that spending resources to set up a factory in location A means you, right now, have fewer resources to spend setting up a factory in location B?

if no, where do the additional resources come from in the here and now? and, more importantly, why has china not already constructed an infinite number of factories?

I directly responded to the comparison to US offshoring that you made to explain why this is different.

and your argument boiled down “us bad china good”

If you took ten seconds to think about it, having any financial component makes my point correct and yours incorrect.

genuinely, what are you talking about?

• you can’t invest in factories abroad without by definition investing less in factories at home because resources are finite
• us outsourcing started with “it’s just supplemental” too, so you can’t use that as a bulwark against any notion of further outsourcing

and you’re coming at me to say that if money changes hands then that’s not the case?

my guy i already had the last word of consequence like 5 posts back when you stopped actually responding to things i was saying in a coherent way and started arguing with china

since then it’s all been for the love of the game

If you have constant demand for the good

quite literally, you’re now arguing with your own hypothetical

“As long as your demand is growing” -> not constant demand

but it doesn’t matter because i foresaw your difficulty with this one, and addressed both the case of constant demand and growing demand

all you do is just regurgitate the same nonsense over and over

maybe check your post history i think the call might be coming from inside the house on this one

you are comically bad at backing up a worldview you evidently hold so strongly, and it’s utterly fascinating to me