Perhaps Bethesda should. Might do them some good to know how far behind their tech is compared to their competitors.

I’m surprised that “I’d like games to not need mods to be good” is somehow controversial.

I really don’t want to have to spend time figuring out which additional things I need to install to make their games good. I’d rather they were good out of the box.

Then don’t say dumb bullshit that isn’t even consistent.

Take your own advice and get the fuck out of my mentions.

That’d be amazing.

For me it’s that I’ve played loads of games that use Bethesda’s tooling and it just ends up feeling pokey and samey to me. They’re hamstrung by their technical choices and after all these years I just don’t have it in me to get excited about their latest stab at making their wheezing toolchain cough out another needlessly sparse experience.

Hooray.

1. Your assumption is completely incorrect.

2. It isn’t that the engine is an iteration, it’s that it’s an iteration of an engine that is legendarily janky.

Now, when I say “engine” I’m using it as short-hand for “the way Bethesda uses the engine, its associated tooling, and media”. I’m aware that the GameBryo engine (or whatever they’re calling its latest descendant) can be used to make stuff that’s decent, but the open world RPGs that Bethesda uses it for are a terrible fit for it.

Their games succeed despite the engine, not because of it, and I’d love to see them build on something that I don’t pick up and immediately go “Yep, it’s another game using their technology, guess we’re in for a tiny map and a handful of NPCs”.

I am not expecting a developer to start over from scratch. I’m hoping that a company as wealthy and successful as Bethesda might consider using a different engine that actually allows for the kinds of worlds their devs clearly want to create. It’s obviously not going to happen, as why bother when people will buy their games regardless, but what can I say, I’m a cynical optimist.

3. Could my notifications on here, for once, not light up with someone picking a fucking fight with me over dumb bullshit? I obviously didn’t mean “write something from scratch” and that’s the thing you fixated on for some baffling reason. Bethesda games are known for their jank due to the tech they choose to use. That isn’t news and it isn’t controversial. Right, I’m going back to bed.

I’m out of the loop - is that just another iteration of the engine Bethesda has been using forever or did someone finally punch whoever keeps making that call in the right body part to make it stop?

called for a “whole system reset”

Our politicians are far too comfortable with the status quo.

I’d consider paying for a few months occasionally. I’m not paying for a year.

For me there’s a lot of video gamey ness to the AC series. I don’t find this breaks my immersion because the character I’m playing as is canonically in a simulation.

If the Animus wasn’t there as a framing device there’s a lot of stuff that I would find extremely hard to look past. I think it’s a great way to justify loads of stuff that would otherwise marr the experience.

The game character coming out of the Animus appears a lot up to AC3. There’s sections in AC 4 in the game dev’s offices, I’ve not played Unity, and there’s the stuff with Layla in Origins (incidentally, it’s only just occurred to me that I went to school with someone called Layla Hassan!).

There’s a lot more of it in the Desmond games, including part of AC3 where one gets to do assassin shit in modern times.

Flag shagger upset that there’s other flags?

Sounds like you’re talking about the Animus as sections where the player isn’t in the historical period rather than what I mean, which is that the historical experience takes place in an in-universe simulation.

It was an example to illustrate my point, not the entire line of reasoning. There’s loads of other stuff I feel the Animus side of the setting works well for, I just didn’t feel like writing an essay so provided just one example to support my line of argument.

Maybe they should just ditch the whole Animus plot.

I think if that was going to happen it would have happened after AC3.

Personally I’m glad the Animus is there, it makes it much easier for me to suspend disbelief about so many things in those games. I wish AC3 hadn’t messed up Desmond’s story though, I wanted a cool conclusion, rather than having Desmond get Poochied.

But for me, it was always the annoying immersion killing part.

I’m always exactly the opposite! For me it lets me forgive all the gamey-nonsense. Why can’t I leave the map? Because this ancestor never did so there’s no data for anywhere beyond here.

Yeah, I was expecting a race and got a Let’s Play and quickly lost interest. Nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t what I was interested in watching.

They listed it in the race category and declared a winner at the end too, which muddied the waters a bit more than I’d like.

Still, glad you enjoyed it!

Runs I enjoyed:

• American Idol
• Grandma, No!
• Balatro
• Super Mario 64

Not as much stuff as I’d usually enjoy. I still need to watch a couple of runs but my biggest disappointment was the Super Mario Maker 2 troll “race”. Felt more like a Let’s Play. Normally Mario Maker is the highlight of the marathon for my wife and me, so perhaps our expectations were too high.

Not originally.