Who wrote this? Like just this paragraph:

This shutdown doesn’t just affect Ryujinx

Nintendo is rumored to be looking at other emulators like Yuzu, eyeing them with the same scrutiny.

How does anyone covering this exact story not know about Yuzu? Did I travel back in time?

I actually didn’t know this but I did play through that recently and I actually have really good things about how that game looks even to this day. I know they did some touching up and I’m assuming updated textures for the enhanced version but it aged a lot better than many other games from that era did

What’s really crazy is to compare Bethesda with CDPR. I’ve been replaying the Witcher 3 and it just struck me how I won’t have to wait 15+ years for the next entry. And to look at how much more efficient they’ve been in the past.

For a timeline, Witcher 2 released in May 2011 and then the Witcher 3 released in May 2015. Took 3.5 years to develop. Cyberpunk released December 2020, only 4.5 years after W3 had its last major DLC. Then in 2023 they released a very large update for Cyberpunk, about 2/3rds the runtime of the main game. And then in 2025 we’ll probably get the next Witcher game. They have like 3 games in active development now.

So what’s the difference with Bethesda? Well Skyrim sold 30 million units and Witcher 2 sold about 8 million. Less than a third the income. Yet if you compare CDPRs staff to Bethesdas at time of their next games, CDPR had doubled Bethesda’s work force. And guess what happened? Witcher 3 sold 40 million while fallout 4 sold 25 million. Thats despite Witcher 3 costing an estimated $81 million while Fallout 4 sits closer to 1.5x that at $125 million.

Then you talk about engines and it gets even worse. CDPR arguably started with a worse engine and I shouldn’t need to explain how much they’ve destroyed BS in that regard as well. Witcher 2 looks worse than Skyrim by a lot imo. But by the time their next game rolled around, it was an industry leader in graphics. And cyberpunk 2077 is like the next Crysis now while starfield is… oh boy. And guess what? After all that work on their engine, they abandoned it. Why? Because their resources are better spent making games and systems in an engine someone else updates for them. Bethesda meanwhile not only can’t juggle the ball of updating an engine and game dev, but they’re not even smart enough to swap engines.

Bethesda has all the signs of a dying studio and Microsoft is the sucker for buying them. And it’s a waste of talent more than anything. Talented people exist at Bethesda whose resources and career development would be far better off being applied on UE4.

Not if they keep on their BS. Let’s look at Fallout 4. The engine is absolutely the weakest part of the game. Can’t even keep 60fps in the city on any settings or on consoles. Frame times are all over the place. And the game isn’t even that pretty, it’s very ugly and textures are real bad. The story was pretty awful and boring, the writing in every way was forgettable.

So that’s why ES6 is screwed. It’s been downhill since Skyrim and even releasing a better looking Skyrim in 2028 on the PS6 isn’t going to cut it. It’ll be the most expensive budget title out there.

Consumers don’t relate low inflation to bad inflation but as you can see the fed wasn’t able to hit its target all of 2020. That’s a really bad sign by itself, the US is very lucky that it never got a true recession/depression.

What’s funny about that part is I don’t disagree with the fundamentals of the mission. It’s an interactive cutscene which is fine. With better writing it could’ve been interesting but at the very least it should have an option to skip sections of it.

Id pay special attention to Study 4 which seems to really hit my key points of criticism as a layman. Study 4 controlled for census region but I’d really like to see this controlled for rural vs urban populations at a finer scale. Without that adjustment I question the validity of other studies included.

That said study 4, if I’m reading it right, still found a correlation with happiness in conservatives but that correlation did not survive when religion was accounted for. Which tells you everything you need to know.

The conservatism isn’t the primary ideology, this is just a roundabout way of asking if religious people report being happier and having more meaning and of course they do. The religious aspect almost overrules the political angle entirely.

If they fail to elect a speaker, we’re screwed. This causes a constitutional crisis.

That’s basically what was being said and it’s not functionally different because the vast majority of the public does not work in elections or their verification. In essence if 99% of the population does not have access to data or cannot interpret said data, trust is needed.

I think my feelings are mixed in that aspect. I used to really love Bethesda games but after playing 1500+ hours of Skyrim and many hundreds of hours of fallout now, I think I see it for its limitations as well. And the mods end up highlighting shortcomings. The vanilla games are still a fun time I think.

Also other games have just come in and created much better story arcs and characters that highlight how bad their writing tends to be. Skyrim was written okay but even then it never did anything that felt like plot development. Instead everything there goes as expected, you’re just wowed by the scenes and dragons.

And yeah I think Bethesda continues to lack polish in what they do and it’s really showing. Even when fallout 4 came out all those years ago, every piece about it felt dated. It felt more like it dated back to Skyrim in ways, so I can see why Starfield failed even if I plan on playing it. I just hope Bethesda fix their issues because Elder Scrolls 6 can’t have this many loading screens, this many bugs, or this flat of a story. Sadly they have a trajectory on all of those things.

That’s what I did. Played it once with no DLCs on release, then ignored it. But with mods it’s actually much better. And if you like the difficulty of New Vegas, the extended mod pack I used helped a lot with that.

I really missed the grit and dark tone of new Vegas and while it doesn’t live up to that, mods get it much closer.

That last part I especially agree with. It’s not really the fallout game I expected when it first came out and some where in this play through I gave up taking it seriously. It’s fun for what it is but I think the mods really highlighted how lighthearted and shallow most of the game is. I mean hell, Heather uses the conversation wheel I think and she even ends up a decent companion with actual development.

Bethesda needs to get away from the companions just randomly coming up to you to spill their life story now that you reached enough XP. They can do better and the mods I’ve used show how simple it would be to do so

This isn’t a review of the vanilla game, but I get your point. I was mostly just debriefing after the long playthrough after going back to it all these years later.

I think it’s less that the mod lists don’t work together in Skyrim and more that I just never felt cohesion the way that FO4 modders appear to have worked out.

For instance, this mod pack has several moments that modify the main quest. And other mods work with that. Or there’s mods that interconnect beyond basic dependencies and assets, creating quest lines that play nicely together.

I’m not saying it doesn’t exist in Skyrim mods, I’ve done a lot of that as well. It just seems like there was coordination here by the community more than in Skyrim from what I’ve seen. Personal experience, could be wrong.

You might give Fallout another go though and do what I did and choose the modded endings. Far more interesting and I engaged with the vanilla story very little. DLCs are also worth it

I think the game is good/fine without mods but with mods it’s absolutely a great game. I would absolutely recommend the mod pack that I used. I paid for the nexus pro membership thing to have it all auto-installed for me, it was a breeze. Cost me $10 or whatever but it’s worth it to not have to spend the time installing everything. And I liked the ability to install the add on mod pack for added difficulty but honestly ignore the needs system entirely.

I played using the vanilla survival mechanics and it was fine. Food is easy to find and so is water but it just gets annoying at some point if you just want to adventure. Survival does limit you to saving at beds though, which are common 90% of the time. The other 10% it either creates some good tension as you actually fear for your life but also some annoyance having to retry stuff and wastes time. Up to you.

As for recommendations, just realize that the mod pack I used did indeed take 150+ hours to complete most of the quests. That being said, even if you did a fraction of that it’s not a waste of time. You will have to get a little further into the game for the mods or DLC to really hook you. Do Nuka World DLC sooner rather than later.

I mostly ignored the settlement stuff entirely. I did a little bit of what it asks and tried to get into Sim Settlements but I just didn’t care.

I think what I would mainly say is don’t make the game too tedious for yourself and feel free to focus on the mods. I actually didn’t complete the main story until the very end of my play through and I’d recommend that as well. Also, just do the Fens Sheriff stuff. It’s really that good and the vanilla stuff is very boring.

As for add on mods, I think an unlimited carry weight is not a bad idea to enable. Inventory management is hell in this game even with the backpacks. Other than that you don’t need to add much at all. If you need any help my DMs are open

They do get cheaper but the cheaper ones don’t get made because they aren’t worth anything anymore. Like sure you can get a 500GB HDD which used to be a moderately priced option and is now basically trash or free. The prices go down, but the key is that consumers no longer want the old thing either.

It looks like it depends on the drive size but also I think the pandemic has leveled this out in recent years. Some additional data I found by BackBlaze shows a bit more of the story though they have changed their drive sizes which leads to a more interesting graph.

Interpreted the other way, I don’t think that makes sense because on the whole storage has always gotten cheaper with time. Hard drives may cost the same, but they’re larger capacity so really this would only work as an argument if hard drive storage space stayed the same and prices remained the same for consumers but went down for manufacturers.

Also there’s a lot of competition in the space similar to other chips so I don’t see how a company making NAND or platters can afford to sit on their hands like that. The whole point of drive innovation right now is to drive the price per GB down for B2B sales. And that usually translates well to consumer sales too.

Not at all. The price of storage has plummeted so much that most video games comfortably use ~100GB for large games and don’t care because even SSD storage is extremely cheap.

If you don’t believe me, here’s a post on Reddit that shows it off pretty well.

I thought this was common knowledge about the game but I’ll explain.

Now maybe I do need to get better and become a pro player but I have about 5k hours in the game. Since about 2016 I’ve played at the LEM/SMFC level which is about 5-8% of the top MM players. My current elo still hovers around 18,000 even though I play very rarely now, I play a handful of matches every other month at most. I also used to do a lot of the old overwatch system that let you watch matches of potential cheaters, I got very good at spotting them.

That isn’t to brag, I’m far from the best, but I quit playing around 2020 for a reason. The cheater problem is insane and Valve has done little to curb it. I got so suspicious that at one point I downloaded a publicly available cheat, popped it on a usb stick, and ran with it. I tried to use it intentionally without ruining other peoples fun btw. Even after running quite a few matches with it, no bad happened. And many years later that account is still not banned.

I got especially jaded when I saw people obviously using aimbots or wall hacks and they now have thousands of dollars in skins on their accounts. Meaning they’re so unafraid of getting caught, they put money on the line. That’s insane.

I came back for the CS2 update hoping they had fixed the problem and they absolutely haven’t. Every single VAC ban wave, go look at the leaderboards. Approximately 80% of the accounts get removed from the top 1000 players. That sucks.

And you think “cool well at least VAC” is working. Except it isn’t. Because those accounts cost, at most, $15 and the waves happen with many months between. Sometimes in excess of 6-8 months per ban wave. So that entire time, cheaters can freely exist with cheats until the ban comes down. Also insane.

All they’ve accomplished now seems to be getting rid of the most egregious spinbots and aim hacks. Other than that, the rest are still in the game and so now I play entirely casually.