It’s in a weird halfway position, though it’s less cRPG and more action RPG with each iteration. The character creation in Daggerfall wouldn’t be out of place in a tabletop game.

The Elder Scrolls, infamously. Since they are open-world games, they use heavy level scaling so you can explore wherever you want from the very beginning.

It was alright in Morrowind. There, your level just controlled which enemies appeared, so you wouldn’t encounter high-tier daedra in the overworld until your level was in the teens and you actually stood a chance.

Oblivion utterly fucked it up by having everything scale to your level. You could revisit the starting area and a normal bandit would be wearing a full set of magical heavy plate worth tens of thousands of gold while demanding you hand over twenty coins to pass. Combine that with a weird player leveling system that punished you for picking non-combat skills or leveling up as soon as you could, and people loathed Oblivion’s leveling mechanics.

Skyrim’s scaling was somewhere in the middle, which lead to combat being inoffensively bland the whole way through.

I think Blackwater renamed to avoid tarnishing whoever was hiring them, not because they themselves disliked their reputation. If their employment wasn’t at the mercy of elected officials who have to care about optics, I bet they’d still be parading around their old name with pride.

It’s been decades and the first name that pops into my head when someone says ‘PMC’ is still ‘Blackwater’. Do you have any idea how much war crime they’ll need to do to get back that level of brand recognition?

Nah, it’s just the most horny that are also motivated enough to make the mod. There are plenty of others for other games.

Between paid commissions and putting downloads behind affiliate links (later replaced with Patreons), they were also a way for horny teenagers to make a lot of money. Porn and furries (and furry porn) apparently bring out the big spenders.

You know how sometimes you can get the camera to clip through a character model’s head and see how they have a fully modeled mouth and eyes inside? My understanding is that the Cinematic Mod in question did the same thing with one of its Alyx models, just with a fully modeled womb and ovaries and such. It was clearly meant for making porn, but got added to the mod anyway.

Though I only know of the FakeFactory stuff third-hand via hearing other people tell the story, so it’s possible things got exaggerated along the way.

I don’t see FakeFactory on the credits page, though it wouldn’t surprise me if he changed his username after all the mockery he got for fully modeling Alyx’s internal reproductive organs.

The downfall began when Ubisoft abruptly wrote Lucy out of the story after Kristen Bell asked for more money. Then they killed off the literal main character one game later, and nowadays you’d be excused for forgetting Desmond ever even existed given how little the modern day matters to the plot.

Control shares the same universe and is more actiony, from what I’ve heard. It might be worth checking out if you haven’t already.

Now I kind of want a Flintstones RPG.

Right, and they should have fixed them - especially since people literally put together wiki pages documenting every known bug in the game. But all Bethesda did was upgrade the engine a bit (make it 64-bit, add some new graphical effects, implement support for microtransactions) and release the same broken game again and again. The engine upgrades fixed a few crashes, but for some reason Bethesda refuses to patch logic errors in their Papyrus scripts (the code that controls the actual game content) even though those are way easier to fix than engine bugs.

If asked, I’m sure they’d say it was to avoid breaking mod compatibility or something, which is kind of bullshit considering nearly every mod works with the unofficial patches that do what Bethesda refuses to. And they’ve been like this since the very beginning. Their studio is synonymous with bugs.

It’s mind-boggling how they get away with putting such little care into their multi-billion dollar franchises.

Because Bethesda didn’t focus on fixing script bugs in those re-releases, only engine ones. The game logic remains a tangled mess of bugs and the unofficial patches that actually fix things barely needed to change at all to support each new edition.

8 changed a lot of UI for no reason other than to chase the mobile market. 8.1 reverted a lot of that and people liked it, but the damage to 8’s reputation had already been done.

If they kept the edition alive for a few years 8.1 might be remembered as a redemption story like Windows 98 Second Edition, but they rushed 10 out the door - as a free upgrade, no less - to get back the goodwill they’d lost.

Windows ME was a crapshoot. One of our computers blue screened a few times during the couple months we had it installed; the other couldn’t even run an hour without hard crashing.

Nowadays I can’t even remember the last time Windows crashed. Newer versions are definitely a lot more stable, though suck in different ways.

The funny thing is the whole commercialization process started with one of the future partners messaging the project lead out of the blue on LinkedIn. I don’t know about you, but taking ideas from a random LinkedIn user doesn’t strike me as good business sense.

Then again, getting something out of your years of unpaid volunteer work must be incredibly tempting, given how many open source projects have sold out over the years. At least it was to form an actual legitimate company this time, unlike when SuperSU (the Android root solution before Magisk came along) sold themselves to a scummy foreign ad company. That one still ranks as the all time top WTF sale.

Could be worse. At least it’s not Microsoft’s support forums:

Hey, I see you’re having problems with . Try the following and see if it fixes your issue.

Open a command prompt and enter ”sfc /scannow".

I hope this helps!

(Reply marked as solution, thread closed.)

It’s a forked up world.

CyanogenMod, which was the base of most custom Android ROMs at one point. After taking venture funding, incompetent business majors crashed and burned the project trying to commercialize it. It was then forked and LineageOS was born.

The main problem with Java (or garbage collected languages in general) as a first language is needing to unlearn the bad habits it ingrains when you move to a systems programming language with manual memory management. Other than that it’s a pretty good first language, though I’d suggest learning a bit of C at the same time just to get a basic grip on things like pointers and stack vs heap.

Edit: it occurs to me that C# would be the perfect learning language. It’s very similar to Java and an easy first language, but you’d also learn about stack allocation through structs, and can teach pointers using unsafe (though I think unsafe code is still GCed, so this wouldn’t help with the memory management side of things. Haven’t touched C# in fifteen years so I’m not sure how it works anymore).

That could take a lifetime!

I’ve seen code with binary data (such as icons) baked into constants. I can’t wait for the three hour narration of base64 encoded pngs.