Is that Hanford, CA? lol, I remember the drinking water problem there.

Mario games are all right, except for all the platform jumping.

You don’t need the biggest map ever to make a good game. You do, however, need the biggest map ever to make a good Elder Scrolls game. People referring to BG3 don’t really understand the essence of the Elder Scrolls, a vision the series has pursued all the way back to Arena.

I agree with everything he said. But I’ve also been saying things like that for thirty years. I remember when Morrowind came out complaining about companies using extra processing for shitty 3D graphics instead of sticking with high quality 2d that works perfectly fine and putting that extra processing power to work on better AI or something.

I think the problem is that better graphics is the one thing they can do that will please a mass audience. Sure, there are plenty of other things they could be doing, but I would bet that each of them has a niche appeal that will have fewer fans to spread the cost among. Thus producers of “AAA” titles pretty much by definition have to pursue that mass audience. The question is when they reach that point of diminishing returns and be becomes more profitable to produce lower cost niche titles for smaller audience. And we also have to factor in that part of that “profit” of pleasing that assumption our society has that anything with niche appeal is necessarily “lower” in status than mass appeal stuff.

I think we are approaching that point, if we haven’t already reached it. Indie stuff is becoming more and more popular, and more prevalent. It’s just hard to tell because indie stuff tends to target a smaller but more passionate audience. For example, while I am looking forward to trying Starfield out, I may be too busy playing yet more Stardew Valley to buy it right away, and end up grabbing it in a sale. (I haven’t even really checked if it’ll run on my current gaming laptop.)

We have multiple generations of developers releasing like this. With a few rare exceptions (which are the only games from 15+ years ago most people remember), all games release buggy. Even on console, for every Super Mario Bros. that played the way it was supposed to, there were ten unplayably buggy examples of licensed shovelware. And half of “Nintendo Hard” was just that these games were janky as fuck.

Games are hard to make. Ridiculously huge and complex games are even harder to make. If you think you can do better, please do so.

Murderous at each other, not the player.

Their games have always been as wide as an ocean and shallow as a puddle. That’s what we like about them. Get out of my giant splashy pool!

And yet you keep buying them?

Goddamn, stop doing that and get out of our fandom!

Because fandom is basically a bunch of entitled brats with nothing better to do.

“Whatever reason” being that without the dumbing down, the NPCs were so murderous that, however hilarious it was, it rendered the game unplayable.

People talk about it all the time. Longtime fans just don’t care. I’ve been playing these since Daggerfall. Bethesda Softworks makes a very particular kind of game this is very appealing to some of us, and nobody else makes them like that, not that I’m aware of. You think Skyrim was buggy on release? It’s got nothing on Daggerfall, but I loved it anyway.

Mods make the game better, give them a longevity they wouldn’t otherwise have. Skyrim with Frostfall and a needs mod is almost my dream game. But I was perfectly satisfied with the game on Day 1.

You can’t even show genetalia in porn in Japan.

In Street Fighter at least, there’s at least as much male skin shown as female… more, really, due to the fact that males are allowed to go bare chested. From Ryu’s chest bush popping out of his gi, to Balrog wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, there’s no shortage of male skin in those games.

I imagine some are genuinely mad about the nudity, I imagine. Remember “video games are for children” and “if a child sees a nipple (let alone a penis!) the apocalypse will begin”. Just because gamers are gamers doesn’t mean they’re not still part of the larger culture.

It all reminds me of the controversy among older TES fans over the lack of nudity in TES3: Morrowind. There was a lot of European vs. American in those threads (and we had a genuinely cross-pond fandom back in those days). Arena and Daggerfall had nudity, and a few of our European posters expressed indignation over the change.

I see a different future. The tendency of wealth to be drawn upwards as position comes to replace labor as the primary means of gaining wealth ultimately puts a cap on progress. It’s a soft cap, meaning it might happen sooner or happen later, but it will happen sooner or later. Eventually, the imbalance reaches a tipping point, where the slightest jolt to the system sends the entire thing crashing down. Maybe people get pissed enough that general rebellion breaks out. Maybe the population becomes sufficiently stressed and undernourished and, therefore, immunocompromised that a global pandemic goes well beyond COVID into Bubonic Plague territory. Maybe peoples faith in the system becomes so thoroughly damaged that law breaks down generally, forcing those ultra rich to devote so many resources to security the people providing the security become the new elite. Allowing “position” (in Classical Economic parlance, “Land”) to be in itself a source of private revenue sows the seeds of destruction for a progressing society.

Of course, once enough people die and enough capital is destroyed, society starts over again, going once again through an age where labor is in the drivers seat, until population and capital base recovers.

The industry can’t learn this lesson from their customers, because they didn’t get the bad idea from their market. It’s a society-wide trend, a symptom of a whole economy under the control of a narrow coproate elite that knows little to nothing about the industries they control or the products they produce. They contribute nothing to the productive process. They only work to streamline the parasitism that infests our society.

I have experienced this on the production end, as well. I used to work in pest control. For a brief period of my career, I was lucky enough to work for a midsized regional company, grown from a small family business, that was focused on solving actual customer problems. We did tons of one shot work. We did do quarterly and bimonthly service, but there was no particular pressure to subscribe, or to cajole customers who wanted to cancel service (because we’d successfully dealt with the problem) into continuing service.

Then the elderly couple that owned the company sold us to a global megaconglomerate (one of the “Big Three”). Over the course of a year, our focus changed. “Recurring revenue” was now the watchword, which is a tough fit in an inherently seasonal industry. And the reason they do this, in pest control, in game development, in every industry that can potentially produce any kind of surplus wealth, is because the owners (“investors”) neither know nor care about any of the details of the industries they control. All they want is regular and ever-increasing revenues, in exchange for nothing at all. You can’t even say it’s in exchange for access to their savings, because though there is a little actual savings in the system, that’s chump change compared to the ever growing wealthy elite that controls our society and devours our productivity.

Wouldn’t just going straight to the main menu qualify as an “interactive state that accepts player input within 20 seconds”?

Neither of these things can be true, because they’ve been around since long before Microsoft got into the console game. I’m pretty sure Atari 2600 games had that prompt. I know NES games did.

Awesome. Now if someone asks if I’ve played BG3, I can sardonically reply, "Isn’t that the game with the bear sex in it?

All companies do bad things. The only question is whether or not you know about them. I personally am of the opinion that not buying particular products is only useful as part of a coordinated boycott. Otherwise, it’s just empty virtue signalling.

Perhaps we should have some sort of a gamers consumer organization that coordinates boycotts over specific issues. I would be willing to participate. And it’s not like you can’t allow the company’s reputation figure in to your decision to buy. But no form of absolute morality, divorced from reality, is either helpful, or even particularly healthy.