Rather than saying it’s better than say Oblivion, I’m saying it’s closest (among the ES games) to being what I’d want out of an “ultimate” ES game. Oblivion has mods that fix its bixest shortcoming (OpenCities and various magic mods) but I’m not inclined to give Bethesda credit for the work of modders.

Even Skyrim wasn’t bad. I put like a thousand hours into it. It’s just not exactly what I’d call “ultimate”.

Oblivion was good. It’s dated at this point and like Morrowind combat is not comparable to say Elden Ring. Oblivion solves the whole open world (as in OpenCities) thing in mods, but Morrowind has it to start with. Which is why I think Morrowind is the closest the series has been to my ideal.

Also ES has some of the best, deep, insane lore. The series is at its worst when it tries to be grounded.

Even Skyrim ends with you going to the afterlife to gather aid from the dead and fight the embodiment of the cyclical nature of time by imposing the concept of mortality on it. And somehow that was a bog standard dragon fight.

Unless they’ve made some major engine changes… I feel like it’s going to be hard to top games like BG3, Elden Ring, or even Breath of the Wild.

BG3 has the deep story and npcs. Elden Ring has the emphasis on combat. Breath of the Wild freeform exploration.

Yes, I want a game that combines all of those and in the ES series the closest was probably Morrowind (combat being perhaps the most notable lack.)

I don’t mind the fishing mini game in Breath of Fire 3. You can see all the fish and it’s just a matter of skill not patience. That said, it’s optional (the only fish you need, I believe you can buy) and trying to 100% it is a chore I’d rather not do again.

It’s not super painful in Soulsborne games but it’s still enough of an annoyance they got rid of it in Elden Ring.

I think it’s fun to work down a questline for an NPC, but I agree that attempts to make it more that a simple branching dialogue tend to fall a bit flat. I also tend not to like the gift giving grind a lot of games do. I much prefer to go do things with an NPC and often that forms a better bond than an NPC with more dynamic dialogue.

I frequently use Kate as a backup as well. Do you configure it in anyway?

My understanding of their desire is to be able to hold onto rights related to their settings and characters (and by extension you hold onto your own settings and characters) while forcibly sharing (SA) mechanics and to do this in a single license.

This is a goal that CC (BY) (SA) can’t solve simply due to the one license requirement. The intent was (though the execution failed) that you’d say ORC everything but <these names> and the result would be people could borrow the ORC mechanics and any improvements could be backported if it was good.

That said, I haven’t been following ORC very hard as I have no real interest in it. My own work I’m perfectly happy with CC-BY-SA on everything.

Polynesian for the original source of mana as a loan word would be cool. I also find stuff like Aztec would work really well for an RPG.

If I had a wish though, it would probably be to make a scaled down world that samples most of the historical cultures of each continent. Then do something where quests need you to do a bit of syncretism to solve them.

It would have to be motivated by the indie scene. Ideally with support from like Godot so people can just build games for the VM and have “native” support.

I’ve always thought we should have some sort of standard emulator format for games. I get that cutting edge graphics are always going to be too much to run through a virtual machine, but a lot of indie titles in particular could do it without problem.

We might need a few generations of emulators but it would still let us preserve games by just porting the VM instead of every game.

It’s not the worst thing. Like any other test there are more and less valuable methods. Imo, the hardest part is not coupling yourself to the incidental. All tests have that issue but UIs are almost entirely incidental. Styles, layout, and even data and function can be incidental and thus likely to change.

So so many unit tests I see don’t meaningfully test anything. It would be faster to just read the unit under test because the test itself presents nothing that you wouldn’t instantly recognize. Or the test is so tightly coupled to some arbitrary property that of course the test fails whenever you change something. UI tests at my current place are terrible for this, as they’re just comparing DOM structures so any change breaks it.