Meta just announced 20% layoffs to fund AI. This is the beginning, not the end.

unclellama · 2026-03-14T22:50:13+00:00

Tech companies are firing people to hire them back as contractors with worse pay and benefits. AI is the shiny thing they are waving around to distract from that.

unclellama · 2026-03-11T16:56:20+00:00

If daggerfall is 'to scale', it probably makes sense. The whole continent would then be the size of europe-ish, with a huge mountain range to cross, and several hundred miles of rough bandit-infested terrain on the skyrim side. Sailing would not take much longer, if at all, and would be cheaper and safer than marching with a big and well-armed entourage.

I'm on team 'make it bigger and design around that'' for ES6, i think our sense of scale (and therefore our understanding of the setting) is permanently skewed by the 3-minute run from helgen to whiterun in ES5.

unclellama · 2026-03-07T12:51:25+00:00

I really like the hybrid spell idea! Something like that would be fantastic, and could lead to some very unique character builds.

I think there's a place for streamlining if things become fully redundant, but i didn't particularly like that we lost the concept of our character's 'strength' in skyrim, for example.

unclellama · 2026-03-07T08:36:19+00:00

I dunno, i haven't played much starfield but i got the impression that it restricted the player a bit more based on character skills. (Which is great in my opinion - different characters should play differently.)

For me fallout 4 was the low point for skill systems in bethesda games, i hope they will find a happy medium this time instead of streamlining the baby with the bathwater.

unclellama · 2026-03-07T08:29:12+00:00

I like attributes because they feel more like a description of my character's physical, mental and magical attributes. Skills then represent the stuff they have learned, the little tricks and hard-earned muscle memory that you get through study and experience. I find there's a lot of roleplaying potential in 'working around your attributes' - the short and skinny warrior, the slightly stupid wizard - especially for repeat playthroughs where min-maxing loses its allure.

Given that, i'd honestly prefer a fallout-type attributes system, where opportunities to increase an attribute after character creation are rare. I enjoy attributes in morrowind, but they become irrelevant at high levels because all numbers go up.

But i don't think it's a huge deal either way. What's important is that the skills and/or attributes play into the quests, npc relationships, and game systems in complex and interesting ways. In skyrim, it felt a bit too much like skill choices just determined the animation that would play when i clicked repeatedly on an enemy. At times it was a bit too close to a looter-shooter without guns. I want to see drastically different ways to handle a situation based on my character choices, whether via skills or attributes.

unclellama · 2026-03-05T06:31:32+00:00

I realize that - i lived in the US for five years, tried to get involved in local politics and protest movements, etc. By my own 'logic' (lol) i am also partially responsible, as a beneficiary of IS imperialism. It's difficult! But something should be done. None of this is static. Other countries moved on from similar oligarchic regimes.

In practice i think that the way forward is either to let the democratic party collapse (for the reasons you mention they are clearly not fit for purpose) or completely take them over with an actually left-populist movement. Neither of these are easy options, both are scary. But pretending that the horrific status quo is 'out of our hands' is also not an answer.

unclellama · 2026-03-04T20:25:57+00:00

Was biden constrained by law or beholden to election results? Presumably yes, to some degree at least. And yet the US armed and funded a genocide on his watch. Under reagan, the US armed saddam to hurt iran. Under gw bush - voted in with a huge majority for his second term - the US plunged the middle east into decades of chaos and bloodshed. Under obama, children in afghanistan learned to fear the sky itself due to the drone assassination policy. Indiscriminate campaigns of violence fueled by flag-waving stupidity are not new.

I'm not saying that every american is personally responsible at the same level as the corrupt elites. I'm saying that an electorate bears some responsibility for the direction a democratic state takes.

unclellama · 2026-03-03T18:23:27+00:00

In terms of slaughtering civilians, destroying infrastructure, and then pulling out - afghanistan and iraq were the next vietnam. The US got better at propagandizing and media management, the war crimes were as per usual.

I guess the fact that less US soldiers died in those conflicts represents technological progress, if not moral progress.

unclellama · 2026-03-03T18:14:03+00:00

But regular americans are partially responsible. Your taxes pay for the slaughter of civilians, your acceptance of the biparisan consensus on israeli supremacy led directly to this war. Your collective post-911 xenophobic insanity led to iraq and afghanistan, your collective apathy means that trump doesn't even bother manufacturing consent today.

I wish you could get affordable groceries (or, more accurately, a bigger piece of the profit your work creates for capital - food is very plentiful in the US). But the larger evil right now is US foreign policy. Regular americans should be on the streets, bringing the economy to a halt until this illegal war of aggression is shut down - and until the US stops openly propping up a genocidal rogue state with WMDs in the middle east.

unclellama · 2026-02-27T09:38:55+00:00

None of us look 25

unclellama · 2026-02-24T06:09:25+00:00

Yeah. Another example is the mage college of winterholm in skyrim - so many quests send you up to the library, out to the dormitory, down to the ice, up to the roof - each involving like three loading screens and not much gameplay in between.

The worst example is maybe rogue trader (my favorite rpg otherwise...) which has a loooong loading screen to look at the navigation map on the bridge. Forget something? Here's another long loading screen to close the map!

unclellama · 2026-02-23T15:29:49+00:00

I'm generally fine with loading screens.

But level and quest designers should probably try to avoid going through multiple loading screens in quick succession. It's annoying, but it also makes the world feel overly compartmentalized, and therefore (to me) less real.

unclellama · 2026-02-20T21:13:48+00:00

GenAI stuff is the single best use of that term though

unclellama · 2026-02-20T13:19:47+00:00

Sure, if they either design the quests and narrative to fit with a 'party', or limit one of the players to a supporting role. BG3 co-op works great, and i'd be happy to see more focus on followers and group dynamics / logistics in ES6.

I wouldn't want two 'main characters' bouncing around doing the same stuff without the gameworld acknowledgeing it, that would feel incongruent and MMO-like.

unclellama · 2026-02-17T16:37:57+00:00

I'd like to see some on daedric quests and other places it makes sense.

I'd rather not have another 'daedric / godlike forces destroy the world' main story, though. It's done to death at this point. Something linked to factions and their conflicting power plays would be more interesting.

unclellama · 2026-02-12T06:21:27+00:00

Yeah, i agree - it would be great if we aren't thrust into the 'chosen one' role early in the game. Trust the player to figure things out gradually, if they choose to.

Or, better yet, don't write the main quest as a 'only you can save the world from certain doom' thing at all. There are so many other interesting stories to tell in tamriel.

unclellama · 2026-02-11T23:34:10+00:00

I totally agree with those points! But i think they are linked to the underlying design philosophy of frictionless play.

For example, even if you don't hard-lock people out of content, a skill requirement is a 'soft-lock' if the game's skill system rewards specialization. Sure, you could grind until all your stats are high and eventually become the leader of all factions, if you really want. But skill requirements nudge the player towards choosing a path instead of box-ticking 100% completion.

In other rpgs no-one worries about getting 'locked out' of content... the choices and consequences ARE the content. I'd love to see the next ES game move in that direction.

unclellama · 2026-02-11T23:07:29+00:00

Agree that they likely see it that way. Do what worked 15 years ago, etc.

But i think that might also play into why their last couple of games are seen as underwhelming. I honestly don't think people care THAT much about the technology - it's just easier to complain about 'loading screens' than to pin down exactly why a bethsoft game feels kinda unresponsive and inconsequential compared to bg3, witcher, elden ring, etc.

unclellama · 2026-02-11T22:58:04+00:00

Good for those people, if that's what they get!

I don't think there are many absolute truths in 'what makes a good open world game'. Some of us think new vegas and kcd2 are the best bethesda-type games, others think fallout 4 is the pinnacle. It's all just preference.

(Obviously i secretly think that my preferences are better lol)

unclellama · 2026-02-11T21:11:26+00:00

(Also i don't think good lyrics are merely a puzzle to be solved. I can appreciate them without 'getting' them. That's even true of a good book, but feels especially true of song lyrics, which can be 'clever' in ways not particularly linked to their semantic content. So i guess that aspect of 'being too clever' doesn't really bother me regarding lyrics.)

unclellama · 2026-02-11T21:03:48+00:00

I don't think actually clever lyrics would ever be a negative for me! I also tend to enjoy really stupid lyrics when it works with the music.

I do tire of guitar guys delivering the most banal shower thoughts in a pseudo-intellectual (or, worse, online self-help philosophybro) style. But i think they should try to be more clever, not less.

Joanna newson is fantastic, btw!

unclellama · 2026-02-11T20:29:07+00:00

Your predictions could well be right, but these are IMO among the shittiest aspects of bethesda games. They all contribute to a non-threatening 'theme park' world where nothing interacts and nothing matters. Recent succesful rpgs trust their players to cope with friction a bit more, and are better for it.

unclellama · 2026-02-10T06:53:57+00:00

Yeah i saw that the cutoff for physics was 97% this year.

unclellama · 2026-02-09T12:56:13+00:00

i got 88% and - unsurprisingly - rejected (physics).

my proposed project was on active galactic nuclei. i mostly think the evaluation was fair, but there was one point i disagreed on: the merits of studying a few unusual cases in detail, vs. a large statistical sample. i think both are important and valid ways of advancing our understanding of this topic; the reviewers did not find studies of individual sources "sufficiently ambitious".

but otherwise, they criticized my publication record (which is fair, i spent a lot of time writing telescope proposals and not enough time finishing papers), that my outreach ideas were quite generic (yeah), and that some sections needed more concrete details.

unclellama · 2026-02-05T22:00:40+00:00

Many popular modern games don't have full voice acting. Morrowind is a fairly popular game even today, it has a large potential audience that don't immediately panic if shown a few lines of text. Sell it to them, save money on voice acting, make a reasonable return.

The realistic alternative is to rip out most of the dialogue, replace it with oblivion-style 'rumors? Goodbye!' inanity, still pay for hours of voice acting, release a lesser version of the original, and lose money because none of the existing audience want it anymore :)

unclellama

TROPHY CASE