Honestly with how many absolute bangers Obsidian has put out even just recently, I’m very excited for this and for Avowed. Looks like 2025 will be a very big year for them.

Doing this off of the back of games like Pentiment and Pillars of Eternity 2, I just love this studio. They’ve basically replaced Bethesda in my mind and I have far more hope for Avowed than Elder Scrolls 6 at this point

A lot of people exist on twitter because their favorite celebrity or news cite or company exists on there. The problem is that the lefties and LGBTQ folk create a ton of twitters content and are also a huge majority of those celebrities.

So while I think twitter will become a sort of right wing cesspool, BlueSky will be much different. Especially since BS has the ability to essentially build your own echo chamber on purpose. Which I actually think is fine because some of the echo chambers I’d compare to the instances on here that try to keep people safe and civil like beehaw. But the moment bluesky keeps getting celebs and organizations to make the swap, it’s all over for twitter. There is a critical mass there that will migrate regardless and honestly the echo chamber design means right wing folk would also do well on the platform if they know what they’re doing.

From what I understand of the protocol, the federation just isn’t the same but provides some of the same benefits. Im not an expert, correct if wrong.

Essentially when I looked into it, the main benefits are stuff I actually prefer as opposed to the current implementation on fediverse in some regards.

The main idea being that users own their data on their own server (or collective server) and can choose to remove or take that data elsewhere to different apps or potentially even accounts. This is a lacking feature in the fediverse and it’s a common contention. If I get blocked on Lemmy or Mastodon, my data goes away. Especially since most people are not likely to host an instance themselves (since it’s an awful user experience) whereas BlueSky data can easily be stored by a third party that is trusted.

But yes you’re right, this still promotes large platforms. However again it gives users more control over what they host on which platforms and keeps their data in one place. That’s a huge advantage imo.

I don’t so much mind this future. It’s not quite the free speech platform that the fediverse is but it’s closer. Moderation can be much more lax and focus on TOS breaking or illegal things. And hey if at some point BlueSky is too woke or whatever the hell people say, they can literally pick up their server with their content and build an app elsewhere. The implementation is different but the end point is largely the same which is cool.

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.

They use a hybrid system now and only use peer to peer when dedicated servers aren’t enough, so they could just swap to purely dedicated servers.

However ignoring that, even a peer to peer system can do similar tricks if you don’t isolate the host peer to just one machine. That can even be done by spot checking with a company owned server. You use the server as a verification peer and have it as a backup host to the assigned peer. If your verification peer gets different ram values or what not, you shut the server down at the very least and place that peer on a suspicion list.

But even if they went the cheap route, just distribute the peer network. Let’s say that you have a game of 12 people. You could make it so that each peer is only assigned a certain part of the simulation and players (with overlap on assignments) and cannot track the entire simulation. It’s more complicated than a single server hiding info from you, but they could at least make it to where you’d need multiple infected peers to take over a lobby.

I don’t mean individual servers. What I more meant was let’s say a game uses a standardized anti-cheat. Like EasyAntiCheat or Battleye or similar. And whoever runs your game service (Steam, PSN, Xbox) can vet these anti cheat programs and allow them to create a record on your account of cheating.

And obviously these things get false flags so you can account for that, give people strikes and allow appeals. And games would have the option of banning you for: having too many strikes total, violating only a specific anti-cheat X times, or ignoring this system except to place extra suspicion and resources on those already having strikes.

Also having an account tied to hardware is a no brainer and I’m surprised that this doesn’t get employed often. I know IDs can be spoofed but that’s another barrier potentially.

I think the best thing I’ve heard for long term solutions is to fix a lot of the cheating using server side solutions. In a game like CoD, that means the server doesn’t send you player positions unless you absolutely need to know them.

The other thing honestly is just increasing the investment required to cheat. That could mean that in order to play competitive game modes, you need to have signed in at least once for 4 weeks straight and played the game. Or you need to be a certain level. Issue hardware bans and IP bans to people. Require phone number verification.

What those things do as barriers is actually increase the potency of current detection methods. This should also carry over to accounts. I’m not sure why steams VAC ban system isn’t more popular. As in accounts need to be flagged as a whole when cheating in just one game is found.

There are many solutions but it’s just not a big deal for companies as the prior person said. Plenty could be done to at least make cheating harder and cost more time/money. But that won’t happen

Looks like they use Easy Anti Cheat services which run at the kernel level on windows but not on Linux, that leaves a huge loophole available for Linux which I actually believe will increase cheating dramatically.

As for the software development, that’s on EAC to fix. And in fairness it doesn’t make sense for them financially to do so. Cheating already costs these companies a ton of money to fix as is.

Not to mention that some of the cracks are incredibly lightweight in the first place so even disabling a small amount of their code would improve things. Removing the encryption mechanisms alone works wonders.

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.

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.

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.