bjornk

9 hours ago, Kendo 2 said:

There's no way to 'ruin the thread' since we're not that kind of site.  We'll let Nexus and LL corner the market on pointless censorship.  That's the ONE thing their staffs are good at.

We can always go back to character builds anyway, and even though seems off topic, it may still be a good idea to occasionally discuss the things affecting character builds.

By the way, the whole concept of "character builds" with self-imposed restrictions and all, is great for role-playing but only to begin the game with. In other words, the character needs to change a bit throughout the game, which makes the playthrough more realistic and organic, otherwise he/she would be pretty much like a machine, like a Terminator built to kill humans or something.

Character level is a concept which is, first of all, unrealistic, as it doesn't exist in the real world, it's also "unimmersive" for the same reason. It really doesn't matter whether a game has level scaling or fixed levels, it's a design choice for the lazy and unimaginative developer. Due to its nature, it's almost always poorly implemented, which isn't surprising.

To most developers, higher level usually means more health points (HP), which is another unrealistic and ridiculous concept that lazy devs keep using. Bullet sponge enemies, enemies that can fight just as efficiently even with only 1 HP, balancing issues, or endless grinding to level up in order to achieve/access something or someplace etc. are just some of the bullshit caused by the idiotic "character level" and ""health point" combination.

It's perfectly possible to create a game that gives the player a sense of progression without resorting to character levels or HP. There are already a few games that try to do something different (e.g. Scum).

The real world is the best guide and reference for the ones who want to create better games.

@Kendo 2Sorry for ruining your character build thread.

@Kendo 2 By "tools", I didn't mean modding tools, perhaps I should have used "ways" instead. What I was thinking of was a game world that runs multiple AI layers, from the layer of AI that manages critter/NPC behavior to the layer which manages macro level strategies for, say factions. It would be a world in which things happen without player intervention. In fact, you can simply be a spectator in it and just watch how things change.

In that world, a blacksmith would actually produce stuff and without tools and supplies he would go out of business, and a thief could actually go an steal the blacksmith's hammer to force him out of business and so on. Now, imagine you're a character in this world, not a Dragonborn, The Vault Dweller, The Chosen One or anyone special, just a random guy who wants to survive and possibly become successful in whatever he's doing. Now, in such a world, a player could easily create his own stories.

As I said, in order to build a game world like that RPGs need to look at other genres, specifically strategy games, simulations and survival games, and adopt things from them.

As for people building the game world themselves, yes, it's a cool concept, which may particularly work well in an MMO. An even better idea could be giving people an empty world and let them populate it from the ancient times to the modern times, create civilizations, rediscover things,...or simply fight each other and perish... Something like a planet size Rise of Nations, played in 1st/3rd person.

IMO, role-playing games should stop trying to tell stories, and instead they should give the player tools to create their own stories, which would require a much better AI at both micro and macro levels. I know they won't be willing to take risks by trying new ideas, so instead they should adopt features from other genres, such as simulation and strategy games. In order to give the player more role-playing freedom, RPGs need to become more like toys, and less like games.

By the way, there's one thing I definitely like and appreciate in Skyrim in terms of both role-playing and immersion which is books and bookshelves. Yeah, they're a bit buggy, but whoever came up with that idea did a good job.

First of all, like I always say, Skyrim, like all other Bethesda games that I know of, except maybe the earliest TES games, is an infuriatingly stupid game. Although, if you're an 12 old kid, who still does what his parents tell him to without questioning, you may not notice this.

Yes, you can join almost every guild or faction with no consequences. You can even sell your soul to multiple Daedric beings (Hircine, Nocturnal etc.) and if you're a Nord, you are also supposed to go to Sovngard when you die, so I have no idea how that works. This is all because Bethesda treats open-worlds pretty much like a "theme park". You are actively encouraged to have fun with everything available in this "theme park". Hence there are no restrictions on what you can do in there.

All guild quest lines are extremely linear and stupid anyway. You do whole work, while the rest of the guild sit on their asses and wait, claiming that they are somehow "busy"... You still do all these stupid things because there's nothing else to do in the game. Once you've finished every available quest, except the stupid radiant ones, all you can do is to go and fetch/kill things again and again and I can't imagine why anyone would do that.

The whole game is basically a fetch-fest, fetch that, kill that... Yes, there are no consequences, but more importantly, you have NO CHOICE! You can never refuse to do things, simply because Bethesda didn't make the parts of the game where the player had refused to do something. You either do what Bethesda wants you to do or let the quest stuck in the journal forever... It's difficult to role-play in a Bethesda game because they assume too much, they never imagine that some people may want to do things differently.

Role-playing is in a way adapting to changing conditions, therefore, as I always say, what a good computer role-play game needs is a living, dynamic world, that would replace the DM in a tabletop RPG. This is especially true for the types of open-world, sandbox or semi-sendbox games, such as TES or the Fallout games that Bethesda makes. Unfortunately, I have not seen a single RPG developer yet who understands this fact.

By the way, playing as a mage or in general, magic in combat sucks big time in Skyrim. Most of the spells, including the shouts are extremely weak and useless after a certain level. You have to mod them and give them a boost if you want to continue playing as a mage. This gets especially annoying when you are to defeat enemies whose levels are tied to the player's. For instance, I somewhat recently finished the College quest line as a level 100+ mage and I had to defeat level 240 (PCx1.75) magic anomalies... As you can imagine, most destruction spells were useless, just like the two other mages (Faralda, whose max level is 50, and Arniel, who has a fixed level of 30) who were supposed to help me fight them. You see, Skyrim is so fucking stupid, it has enemies whose levels are either equal or higher than the PC and they scale up every time the PC levels up, but most other NPCs in the game have either a fixed level or a fixed "max level"... Ugh!

I hate level scaling! If an RPG has level scaling, you can safely assume that the developers aren't very smart or creative in terms of designing game play mechanics, and they'd rather stick to known formulas of, well, ancient times... Level scaling is NOT the real problem with RPG game play mechanics though, it's a side effect of having character levels. Unlike skills, characters shouldn't have levels, it's a very stupid and unrealistic concept. I hope one day it gets completely eradicated...

Quote

Banksy has released a video showing how he secretly built a shredder into one of his paintings that self-destructed after it was sold for more than £1m.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-45770028

Suppose it'd be quite fitting if the buyer paid for it with shredded banknotes...

All I've been doing for the last couple of years is to create a female Breton and then pretend that she's a Forsworn lass. I use Alternate Start's Forsworn start and I also add her to the actual Forsworn faction so that I won't have to kill them, and I don't, even if that means one less enemy faction. Even when a quest seemingly requires killing one, I try to find a way to avoid it.

By the way, strangely, adding her to the Forsworn faction also makes my character say things like "Forsworn forever!", "For the Reach!" etc. while in combat, which is pretty immersive. I really wish there was actual content in the game to support this type of game play, or at least a mod. It would be quite an experience living with the Forsworn, hunting in the wild, learning spells from auntie Hagravens and so on... I wish Skyrim was a more complex game for more intelligent people, sadly, it's just a glorified fetch-fest and full of missed opportunities...

Anyway, being a Forsworn also makes you feel less lonely in Skyrim, you can pretend that you have friends and family living somewhere in the Reach, which I definitely prefer to being a nobody in Skyrim.

I don't do pure evil or pure good characters, or very specific characters like yours. Other than being a Forsworn, my characters are pretty much self serving types, neither good or evil, and I try to do every single quest in the game. If, say a Daedric quest, forces me to do things that I despise, I somehow find a way to take revenge or at least use it to my advantage, such as sacrificing the follower in the Namira quest to Boethiah...

In terms of skills and stats, I usually reduce her starting stats down to 50 instead of the default 100 and I also use the Uncapper mod to reduce her XP gains from tasks like alchemy, smithing, enchanting etc. and only allow her to gain XP from actual combat, but I also reward her with more perk points and more stat gains for each level, so that she can surpass everyone else on higher levels.

Unfortunately, there's level scaling in Skyrim which is to me very infuriating as I can't find any decent equipment if I start the game as a level 1 char so I sometimes use "setlevel" right after character creation and raise her level up to 50, but keep her stats and skills at level 1. In other words, she becomes the level 1 character who pretends to be level 50.

I also like to become both a werewolf and a vampire. Yeah, I have a mod for that too. With Better Vampires mod becoming a vampire surely has many advantages...

TL;DR:  Come, come and face the Forsworn!

Windows 10 users never have to worry, they're in Microsoft's safe hands...

Quote

The Windows 10 October 2018 Update, known as version 1809, has been pulled amidst user files being deleted upon upgrade.

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-has-pulled-windows-10-october-2018-update-users-files-go-missing

I don't think we have one here, so there you go...

GET SHADOW WARRIOR 2 FOR FREE! (quick, only about an hour left!)

I don't know who's more pathetic, his daughter who's obsessed with her eyebrows, or him, needing to rant about it...  but it would be tragic if he hit and injure someone while ranting and driving like an idiot...

To be honest, this is really a subject which I'd rather not touch with a ten foot pole, as I'm neither a fan of the Witcher games nor the books, but from what I can see, the comments are a bit biased.

Yes, judging by Yong's video the author sounds a bit delusional, if not greedy, but paying only $9500 for an IP that has allowed you to make five games, also sounds a bit unfair. I'm pretty sure they received a "sympathy discount" from the guy, for being the "Polish youth pursuing their unrealistic dream" or something similar... I think he'd probably ask for much more, if it was a major international company asking for the usage rights...

Anyway, I'd like to hear the whole story from both sides first, before coming to a conclusion, but I don't really care... I quite honestly hope that the author takes back the usage rights and prevent CDPR from further milking the Witcher IP and CDPR will hopefully have to learn not to rely on someone else's IP...

The mod is hideous, I agree, but who is Ibramovic? The football (soccer) player? I don't get it.

Not going to comment on an idea without seeing how it's implemented... but just want to mention that the last time I heard about Berners-Lee, he approved a DRM standard for the Web, namely EME (Encrypted Media Extensions), which was "supported by Netflix, Google, Microsoft, and Apple, as well as the Motion Picture Association of America, all of whom made financial contributions to the W3C"...

On 9/25/2018 at 4:10 PM, Kendo 2 said:

Senile Scribbles is hard to beat. 

I think GamerPoop Skyrim series is even harder to beat.

Why don't they make an animated Witcher series instead?

11 minutes ago, Kendo 2 said:

Hey, I liked EDI too.  Huge perv you're talking to here.

Yes, okay, EDI is probably the best one, but I've never played the 3rd game.

Skyrim is just so fuckin stupid... It's literally a game for 12 year olds, made by 12 year olds... It's like a Star Wars episode but the only characters in it are the Ewoks and Jar Jar... and possibly some other annoying shit... I still keep playing it, although I use hundreds of mods, and that's simply because it's the type of a game I like, but if CDPR had made the same game I bet it'd be much cooler.

1 hour ago, Kendo 2 said:

Liara all the way. 

Ugh, never understand why people like her. She's childish, awkward, kind of an obsessive stalker... Not to mention she's blue and *gender fluid*... No, just no! The only female character I like in ME is my femshep(s).

On 9/26/2018 at 2:32 AM, Kendo 2 said:

Say hello to Yennifer, Australian actress Yvonne Strahovski.

BTW, she's Miranda Lawson from Mass Effect.

Like the name Yvonne, in fact that's the name of my current character in Skyrim. :D Didn't know she was Australian. She could play Ciri as well if the actor for Geralt was older. She was okay in Chuck, I guess, but I hate the Lawson character in ME... and her stupid ass.

39 minutes ago, ritualclarity said:

People have no "respect" they will cuss you out for a minor mistake. Linus did this and admitted to it. There is one thing to tell someone that their work is unacceptable and quite another one to call them names and cuss them out.  That is unprofessional.

I somehow doubt that Linus had insulted people for "minor mistakes". Those instances were most likely major issues with the code or with the coding style, or about ideas that were downright stupid. Calling them names may be unprofessional, may be even childish, but keep in mind that empathy goes both ways.

That's true, but I think many people are still unaware of the situation.

Well, desktop use of Linux has never been its strong point. It usually runs on servers. Also, not sure if it's a fork or not which is being developed totally independently, but Android OS is based on the Linux kernel.

"Meritocracy is a dystopian delusion"... Well, it seems to me that these people basically are clueless and living in their safe spaces, all they care about is themselves and they don't even have any idea what their views and wishes would lead to... what a confused, selfish and dumb group of people... not to mention, extremely toxic...

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Coraline has had a troubled incident in the past with a contributor of Opal project. There was a discussion taking place on Twitter where Elia, a core contributor to Opal project from Italy, said “(trans people) not accepting reality is the problem here”.

Coraline was neither in the discussion nor was she a contributor to the Opal project. But as an LGBT activist, she took it to herself and demanded that Elia be removed from the Opal Project for his ‘views against trans people’. A lengthy and heated discussion took place on Opal’s GitHub repository. Coraline and her supporters, who never contributed to Opal, tried to coerce the moderators into removing Elia, a core contributor of the project.

While Elia wasn’t removed from the project, Opal project maintainers agreed to put up a code of conduct in place. And this code of conduct was nothing else but Coraline’s famed Contributor Covenant that she had pitched to the maintainers herself.

But the story didn’t end here. The Contributor Covenant was then modified and a new clause added in order to get to Elia. The new clause widened the scope of conduct in public spaces. This malicious change was spotted by the maintainers and they edited the clause. Opal eventually got rid of the Contributor Covenant and put in place its own guideline.

https://itsfoss.com/linux-code-of-conduct/

Looks like the performance of the 2080 is pretty much identical to 1080 TI. 2080 TI is slightly faster but not fast enough to justify its price. In short, "Just don't buy it!".