It’s a mantra about teaching people and then expecting them to forget it. Doesn’t work. They’ll default to what they already know.

My freshman English teacher got married in October and I called her by her maiden name the entire year.

Like all programming mantras, it’s not universally true, but it’s annoyingly reliable. It reflects the shape of the human brain.

First learning is last learning.

Same reason we still do console.log("FUCK").

Nothing good is allowed to happen ever again.

It would also require more optimized builds, leaving little wiggle-room for mistakes.

How?

For any set of stats, it wouldn’t matter if you got there at level 2 or level 20. Mudcrabs built for an optimized level 10 wouldn’t spawn just because you are level 10. They’d spawn when you’ve spent as many points as you would have, had you optimized to level 10.

The real issue would be “the Draugr are training” kinds of builds. If you put half your points into personality… the bandits did not.

you simply get a flat 12 points to spend every time you level up.

… that’s the wrong problem entirely! Complicated leveling was just another minigame to optimize.

If they wanted it to be painless, they could’ve leveled the world according to your total stats. Attack the player based on how much their numbers went up, instead of how often they went up.

The deeper problem in Oblivion was that you could blast goblins with a single fireball at level one, and then when you got stronger and put all your points in kill-stuff-harder attributes, the same fireball against the same goblins just tickled.

Wait what? They even said they fixed the leveling, in the announcement video! This was the one thing everyone agreed was broken, and it barely mattered which mod you chose to fix it, because all of them were an improvement. How’d they fuck this up twice?

Talked shit to some dunmer, didn’t know he was from Maar Gan.

Never give Nintendo money.

That’s what I’m on about. We have the technology to avoid going ‘hold up, I gotta get something.’ There’s supposed to be a shitty version that’s always there, in case you have to render it by surprise, and say ‘better luck next frame.’ The most important part is to put roughly the right colors onscreen and move on.

id Software did this on Xbox 360… loading from a DVD drive. Framerate impact: nil.

They had trouble increasing memory even before this AI nonsense. Now they have a perverse incentive to keep it low on affordable cards, to avoid undercutting their own industrial-grade products.

Which only matters thanks to anticompetitive practices leveraging CUDA’s monopoly. Refusing to give up the fat margins on professional equipment is what killed DEC. They successfully miniaturized their PDP mainframes, while personal computers became serious business, but they refused to let those run existing software. They crippled their own product and the market destroyed them. That can’t happen, here, because ATI is not allowed to participate in the inflated market of… linear algebra.

The flipside is: why the hell doesn’t any game work on eight gigabytes of VRAM? Devs. What are you doing? Does Epic not know how a texture atlas works?

It’s April. Have you looked outside lately? Reality’s pretty fucking green.

Oblivion is aggressively verdant. The fuck happened?

Brown RPG was the one before that!

All the cool kids left.

… and reporting itself can be a bannable offense.

More importantly: don’t make games that rely on runaway success.

If your game is fun even if only a dozen people buy it, great! If it requires ten thousand global players right out the gate, and will cease to function once that number drops, you are fucked, by design.

Damning comments from 2023.

I do not need lossless copies of an image someone didn’t even draw.

Wanking is about the emotional connection to a JPG, said someone I deeply pity.

Everyone’s convinced their thing is special, but everyone else’s is a done deal.

Meanwhile the only task where current AI seems truly competitive is porn.