Bethesda Thinks Fan Remaster of Oblivion Is 'Very Special' and Supports It
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
It's fine to be skeptical about the intentions of big family, but it's also fine to enjoy the cake once in a while.
It even kind of irks me when people talk about “Bethesda” when it's really “Microsoft Corporation presents Microsoft Gaming presents Zenimax Media presents Bethesda Softworks presents Bethesda Game Studios”.
Not picking on you in particular since the same thing happens with iD Software, Github, NPM, and many many more. I feel like there's a collective lack of straightforward language to discuss the influence of this kind of corporate structure. Falling back to the singular-subsidiary name with the rest unspoken is probably exactly what they want.
The rest is on journalists to be sure to mention "Microsoft owned Bethesda" more often.
1. It makes it clear how few powerful people are owning everything.
2. It makes it obvious there's something wrong when you see that the 30 different bottles you can buy in front of you are all from coca colla
3. It makes it very obvious that there's something fishy about "chocolate chips by a france by b luxembourg by c switzerland by d ireland by big conglomerate by mondelez international"
As we all know, GitHub is not "by" Microsoft (as in, written by them). It's under their control now, and sure, they've made a lot of changes, but the actual code was written before Microsoft purchased them.
But really it could be anything else including new symbols.
You see, whatever you use would become instantly SO ABUNDANT that this symbol would get a whole new meaning.
I recently (last year) found out that nestle does not have an interest in Purina livestock feed, only the pet feed. It made shopping for feed a lot easier, but I'm still wary. At least Smucker makes pet and animal feed.
I am a firm believer in boycotts, usually indefinite. Nestle, Samsung, and General Electric and all their subsidiaries are my current ones. No one can hold me accountable for any malfeasance by any of those companies as I refuse to give them any money.
You own Microsoft. It's a public company.
Scale matters.
I would also have it that any contract controlling that person's interest is nullified so if you're trying to use a proxy to get around the law you'd have to be very sure you trust them because they are the legal owner.
(Also, any form of equity investing that isn't a tax nightmare. You'd have to love doing K1s.)
I've no idea what a K1 is. Presumably something from your country. If the tax system in your country is so broken it can't cope with humans, you should probably fix it.
No they aren't, that's the point of a defined-benefit system like a pension. You don't own it but instead get guaranteed payments from it.
Owning things involves risk; it's not always good.
So my pension is owned by me. I can buy an annuity from that but there's no reason that can't be a service company owned by a person just like insurance.
Again, it's solvable.
There were few Russian individuals against the war, it does exist. But they are exception regardless of the camp they are in.
I understand why Nintendo has tried to use a lo-fi artstyle, make games with only subsets of the total bestiary, and generally limit development. Hell, I even understand why Palworld gave up on unique attack animations and just went with guns.
I wouldn't agree that their other franchises are stale right now either. Certainly not compared to Ubi's, Microsoft's, etc.
Plus, there's that whole CIA thing.
I thought their customer support sucks ? In France they got a law suit because they refused to replace the joystick of their latest portable gaming machine when they had an insane rate of failure.
For example, wii homebrew is not taken down by nintendo, even if there has been a recent "discovery" that the wii homebrew had relied on decompiled nintendo SDKs.
Nintendo's litigious intention always has been profit driven (and this includes vaguely IP related issues, such as palworld's game mechanics - which i think is frivilous but apparently not according to the courts).
…Especially adult passionate fans of children's media.
Do you happen to have a link handy to an opinion document? It seems weird that Palworld’s “mechanics” would put them under fire but somehow development teams behind Tem Tem and Nexomon (and Cassette Beasts and Abomi Nation and ...) get away with selling games that are primarily about capturing and/or befriending different monster species and pitting them in fights against other monsters.
A funny thing about Nintendo games I've always noticed is how completely disconnected the fans are from the people making it. Like, people argue about Zelda games' lore and timelines and such, but Nintendo cares about this so little that BotW and TotK have the same plot even though one is a direct sequel.
I'd guess that zero of those "Zelda T-shirt and cargo shorts" people work at Nintendo and that almost none of their employees have had video game-themed weddings. (Well, the US office is in Seattle so that one's definitely possible.)
In any case the corporate entity as a whole is not conscious. A strictly behavioralist approach is appropriate there. If it does the good thing it gets the carrot, if it does the bad thing it gets the stick. We can't win it's heart and mind because it has neither, so we have to settle for keeping it's behavior in line.
The moment such a project might affect sales in some way (that i am unable to imagine right now, but is possible surely), they will backpedal and find ways to take it down.
A friend and old-school RuneScape player told me he was quitting over this: https://www.ibtimes.com/runescape-devs-backtrack-hd-mod-ban-...
Bethesda signaling their blessing might not have happened if others hadn't made such spectacular messes of their own relaunches.
But I will say, while the graphics are better than the original Oblivion, Unreal 5 is NOT an improvement over the engine they used for Skyrim, not from a visual point of view, at least not for me. Quite frankly, I'd much rather have Skyrim-era graphics, which are plenty good enough, and Skyrim's quick startup times, than have to wait for shaders to load as you do with lots of recent games.
Skyrim does load fast, though, even on switch. Which wouldn't need to compile shaders anyhow.
If this is typical for Unreal 5 it's what I'd call a deprovement (rather than an improvement).
Either way, something about the remaster makes me fatigued playing it. I might try turning off all AI and motion blur and go for higher FPS and see if that helps. It isn't the only game that does this to me, but i find with games from the 8 and 16 bit era (as a comparison), they load so fast and close so fast that the second tedium sets in at all i can just quit; the newer games there's already a time investment just to get to "in control of a character", at least for me, on PC.
But IIRC this was a problem with the original too, not something I can blame on Unreal 5. :-)
It using the UE5 renderer of course means the usual reservations of that engine also apply - it will most likely never run smoothly, as Unreal Engine games invariably have more or less severe stuttering.
See the change log here: https://www.afkmods.com/Unofficial%20Skyrim%20Special%20Edit...
Only a very small amount of the issues fixed there where integrated into the official patch releases.
0: I recall reading somewhere that the game uses a really old version of Bethesda's proprietary engine too - but only for physics.
Personally I doubt the "leaks" have anything to do with the release date. The game worked fine on day one for me. Yes there are some bugs, but none serious and none that made me think "this was rushed".
The only good fallout after the first two is the one they weren't involved with. And it was the mods for skyrim that made the game.
Speaking as a grownup who got about halfway through a few years ago, Fallout 2 sucks.
I don’t care for Oblivion but I hear the remaster crashes a lot, whereas I’ve had 3 crashes in 400 hours of Starfield. Two of those crashes were BSODs that Microsoft was responsible for. Maybe the Oblivion remaster’s instability indicates they will stick with Creation 2 in TESVI: I was skeptical that UE memory management was a good fit for BGS games’ complex global state. My suspicion is that Creation 2 uses multithreaded scripting, and Starfield on release had some odd bugs suggesting dangling threads (e.g. NPCs which stayed stuck on “busy” and couldn’t be interacted with). But in recent updates they’ve hammered a lot of that stuff out.
[1] Obviously Microsoft has a strong incentive for console exclusivity but the other side of this is that BGS games always sucked on PlayStation. Morrowind was also PC/XBox only, and Bethesda’s roots are in PC development.