What the fuck are “modding values”? Women with ridiculous anime proportions and almost non-existent armor? Adding Shrek and Thomas the Tank to Skyrim? Gatekeeping mods to a small community of individuals who play on PC and have the technical skills to do that? Slaving away while the rent and bills like up out of some sense of obligation to a community? Hoping people donate? Putting all the time and effort into creating something and taking on all of the risk? Being. Subject to the whims of Bethesda’s management and hoping management doesn’t change their tune to be more like Nintendo?

How can you calin that Bethesda doesn’t give a shit about modders getting paid, when they pioneered the first real legitimate attempt at paying modders? That’s some serious cognitive dissonance. And perhaps the most important piece of the equation is the financial security it provides. The Creation Club paying modders up-front greatly mitigates the business risks of investing that much time and effort. It is not the best fit for everyone, but that allows a lot of mods to be made that never would have been possible otherwise. And it doesn’t remove any of the mods that already existed or prevent anyone from making free non-CC mods.

As for donations to modders- those companies like Patreon are taking their own cut as well. And that’s a legal grey area because modders are profitting off of Bethesda’s platform. Then you have the issue where Bethesda updates their game and provides an improvement for literally millions of people while a couple hundred PC players flame them on Twitter for breaking the mod they paid or donated for.

Personally, I’ve never donated or paid for any mods because I don’t use them. I’ve messed around with mods and the vast, vast majority of them suck. They feel completely out of place and ruin the vibe of the game. It’s not worth all of the hassle of installing a mod manager and working through all of the issues just to add memes to the game. The ones that add more quest lines are usually just way worse versions of the radiant quests that already exist. Maybe if I had a more powerful computer back in like 2012 or 2013 then graphics mods might have made sense, but with the updates in the Special and Anniversary editions there’s not much point. If I wanted to go back to Fallout 3 then maybe there’s an argument there, but I’m not really interested in going back there in general.

The “best” mods can be created In a variety of ways. I’d argue that the Hearthfire, Dawngard, and Dragonborn DLC’s are better than any free mod I’ve ever seen. The vast, vast majority of free mods are shitposts or school projects that no one cares about.

I mean… It’s hard to really find solid numbers because Bethesda hasn’t published them, but we know that Prey’s opening week of sales was 60% less than Dishonored 2’s was. All the estimates and discussion i can find on the Internet either concludes that the game lost money or, at best, broke about even.

It got great critical reviews. People who identify as “gamers” seemed to love it. But it gets compared to Bioshock a lot- Bioshock Infinite came out 4 years earlier and the market was saturated with similar games by the time Prey came out.

So I don’t think it’s unreasonable for management to want to move in a different direction. That direction ended up being a terrible one with Redfall, but i can’t automatically assume that the studio would have been any better off making another game like Prey.

You can find every example you could look for in history. Studios who changed direction successfully, like Insomniac going from FPS to 3D platformer. Gamefreak went from platformers like Pulseman to making JRPG’s and ended up making the most successful media franchise in history, while all of their later attempts to do anything else have failed miserably.

And it’s not as if it would have made sense to have Arkane make Weird West. You can’t just slash a AAA studio down to an indie overnight.

I still don’t understand why people have so much hate for Bethesda for… Paying independent creators to make better mods for their games and charging for those mods.

I can understand criticizing the execution: the quality and price of each mod, the grey legal area where these weren’t included in Season Passes that were supposed to include all DLC, etc. And I certainly wouldn’t call the results a success.

But nothing about it ever seemed particularly greedy or “unfair” to me. It solved a lot of problems that the modding community has. It protected the creators from having. Their content stolen and re-used or re-distributed. Mods (especially for-profit) were always kind of a grey area legally because… It’s Bethesda’s platform and IP. Bethesda may not be as great with modders as other companies, but they’re a lot better than the worst offenders like Nintendo. The Creation Club has better quality control. And it’s better for the end users- easier to install, usable on consoles, no need to go to sketchy 3rd party websites or mess with the installation. I know people complain on the Internet anytime Bethesda updates one of their games because it breaks their mods- I could be wrong but I’ve never heard of that happening with CC mods.

Seems to me like most of the hate for CC comes from people just wanting more content without paying for it.

A war crime according to… Who? Is there some treaty or convention that happened? Is there some customary international law that he violated? I can’t find the Hague anywhere on any maps in this universe but maybe I missed something.

Scarlet and Violet may only run at 10FPS and there are plenty of other flaws, but it’s still a ton of fun. And those are sequels, not remakes. The gameplay is a dramatic shift from everything the mainline series has done before.

Legends Arceus has performance issues too, but was was critically acclaimed.

As for the remakes, they’re generally pretty good upgrades. Gen 1 has really aged poorly, but FRLG are fantastic. I never liked Diamond or Pearl, but BDSP were really solid and fixed almost everything they could without making fundamental changes to the game. I’m really hoping they re-make Gen 5 because those are my favorite and they are stuck on the DS- my adult hands can’t handle holding something that small for hours on end.

Or… Maybe for most of human history we re-told the same stories over and over again for thousands of years until the relatively recent concept of “intellectual property” has forbidden us individuals from doing what comes naturally, forming this sort of weird resentment for when corporations do it?

Depends on how you define important"

The HD Zelda remakes would be nice to have on a real console.

It’s notable that there is still a Kirby game stuck on the WiiU.

I’ve heard good things about Nintendoland but I’ve never played it. Still, that’s kind of the soul of the WiiU so might not be likely to get ported.

Paper Mario Color Splash is notable, though I don’t think it sold well. If they ever do a compilation of the second wave of Paper Mario games it’ll probably get included.

I liked Pushmo World. I wouldn’t mind a new entry in the series, though as a puzzle game the line between sequel and remake is kind of blurry and irrelevant.

Sega loves to do Sonic compilations so I would guess Rise of Lyric would get re-released at some point.

There’s the infamous Star Fox games. Nintendo has been known to re-release old games that were obscure, sold poorly, or were just plain bad before. But I wouldn’t expect that for a decade or two. Either as part of a compilation or hidden away with a bunch of other games on a digital storefront.

Devil’s Third may end up as lost media someday. The spinoffs probably do too. Pokemon Rumble, plus the “party” and “sports” games.

I’m trying to verify these numbers and I’m not finding much.

The closest I can find to a source is that these were claims from Moshe Elad in articles in Tablet Magazine and Algemeier.

In Mashal’s case, he was the treasurer of Hamas at the time and Elad seems to be just attributing the entirety of the organization’s assets to him personally.

I’d be really interested to see if anyone else can find more concrete proof of this claim than I could.

Oh I remember seeing that in development a while back when I looked up what the BioShock devs were up to. I didn’t realize it released!

Another similar game in my backlog is Vale: Shadow of the Crown. Except instead of having a visual flash, the game relies entirely on audio cues to play and is completely blind-accessible. So completely different, but somehow feels like the same realm.

I actually love this in videogames. It’s a really cool way to interact with the environment and literally see the world through a different lense with a level of control that no other medium of storytelling can achieve.

Maybe this dude should go watch a movie if he doesn’t want to interact with things.

I mean, that kind of stuff already exists today with the current copyright laws. I remember as a kid reading all sorts of X-Men books and wondering why the characters in the cartoon were so different. Did Han shoot first in Star Wars?

I played the Ratchet and Clank (2016) game this year that’s like… Kind of a re-make ish of the first game? Except the story is quite a bit different, there’s new characters added and some old ones removed. Half the old levels are gone and there’s a couple of new ones added. Mechanically it’s a completely different game. And yet that’s even from the same studio.

How quickly people forget how common it was to see Roach on rooftops in the Witcher 3.

GTAas an entire series has tons of reels of people doing ridiculous and hilarious things.

I’ve never understood the weird hate for Bethesda games in that regard.

I would have absolutely zero interest in an Unreal Elder Scrolls or Fallout game.

There’s already hundreds, maybe thousands of indie games trying to be that very thing available on steam today and they all suck.

No thats Nostradamus

I think this could be stemming from another creator’s jokes.

Her name is “CitiesbyDiana”. I believe she started doing Cities Skylines and Truck Simulator content but that transformed over time into talking about urbanism in real life. She makes short-form videos that are hyper-edited “brainrot” and usually have AI voices. Either celebrities like Trump and Biden or OC characters like “Lane Man”- a prodigy of Robert Moses who advocates for paving the entire world with highways.

She’s also moved to to other things. If you’ve seen memes about food or pharmaceutical grade glycine from Dongua Jjnglong, it originated with her ironically simping for the company as a joke.

I’ve noticed she’s started to use AI to manipulate videos from podcasts, including Talk Tuah. I haven’t seen this particular one video, but this seems right in line with the kind of content she creates.

Lol that’s absolutely not an excuse, or else we would see dozens of games with this happen every year. Somehow almost every game to every feature tastefully censored nude scenes managed to do so without modeling genitalia, but Beyond: Two Souls is an exception.

In a world where modeling costs money, studios are looking to spend less time modeling than they need to. Not more.

I remembered something else just after I posted this- i’m surprised it didn’t come up in my first searches.

The other controversy was in Beyond: Two Souls. It was one of the first modern games to use motion capture for voice actors to get more realism. After release, people found that the devs had made a fully nude model of one of the characters. They never scanned the actor (Elliott Page) nude, but modeled what was missing. It doesn’t appear in normal gameplay, but was accessible in debug mode.

Creepy as fuck.

In fairness to David Cage, his response to those (and other) allegations was:

“I have never said or even thought such things. I fully understand people were shocked by seeing those words, and I am deeply sorry for the pain and confusion they have caused to women and the LGBTQIA+ community. The quotes are abhorrent, and they do not reflect my views, nor the views of anyone at Quantic Dream.”

Did he say it and/or believe it? I have no idea. But certainly something to think about before buying a Quantic Dream game.

So fight mud with mud and make it harder to recognize the true intent.

Or better yet, make it so that the symbols are just way more commonly associated with non-asshole meanings.

This may be controversial, but I think the way to combat dog whistles like this is to overuse them and muddy the waters. Make it so the Nazi’s aren sure whether the “pattern noticer” they are interacting with are antisemitic or not.

ISIS went from being an Egyptian goddess and a great band to a poorly translated acronym for a terrorist organization because everyone let the terrorists win on that one. The swastika has been a neat and simple symbol used by a variety of cultures with a variety of meanings ranging from positive to neutral until it was taken by the Nazi’s. 88 is a really neat looking number that’s done nothing wrong.

Society keeps on ceding cultural ground to assholes and the rest of us have to tiptoe through every piece of communication in fear of being associated with them.

What’s next? How long until some fascists start to use the “cool s” that we all doodled in our notebooks in school? Are we going to have to stop using any numbers with less than 3 digits? Will Allah, Jupiter, and Thor join Isis as symbols of fear?