comicallycluttered

And I bet there are plenty of people here who would enjoy your art and writing as well.

Yes please! I'd personally love to see/read it.

Hrm. Haven't been pacing well lately. Need to sort that out. Fucking exhausted.

In good news, I had my first appointment with the new psychiatrist yesterday. A pleasant experience, which hopefully bodes well.

Skyrim and the mainline Elder Scrolls games (Oblivion, Morrowind) can run fine on most setups these days. Skyrim: Special Edition was released in 2016, which is almost a decade ago now.

Edit: Forgot you mentioned platforms. Considering your hardware, don't play them on anything other than PC. The PS3 version of Skyrim in particular is a disaster.

Problem with them is sometimes mods are required for performance because they can be optimised terribly. There are actually some good mods which make the games play a lot better on older hardware, but it's been a while and I don't remember them.

Still, you're going to want to play mostly un-modded because too many mods will tank an older system. I personally think vanilla Skyrim can be pretty fun, so it's not a big deal, IMO.

The combat is a huge con, though. Bethesda hasn't ever really been "good" at melee combat, and have only started to improve their gunplay starting with Fallout 4.

That said, since I've brought up FO4, Fallout 3 and New Vegas should run fine on pretty much anything. Although, when I say "fine", I mainly mean "work", because optimisation is still terrible and bugfix patches might be needed.

Legit one of my favorite songs with Dio on vocals.

The entire album is great, honestly, but this song has always been my favorite.

Yngwie Malsteem's cover/tribute is fantastic as well.

Considering the chart still lists Starfield's release date as "H1 2023", it was probably made before Starfield's delay and Spencer's comments on it being 5+ years away are probably more in line with their current outlook.

Second rule, subsection B: Arch, btw.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Although, it's less foresight for random actions and more of a way to set the tone for the rest of the game.

There are two possible outcomes of how one of the early missions plays out, depending on actions you wouldn't initially consider.

There's a hostage crisis and if you don't listen to Sarif and get to the transport on time, they'll all be dead when you arrive there.

Thing is, you're not really given like a ticking clock on the top of your screen or anything. And in most games, you expect the "meet me there now" thing to not actually matter much, because oftentimes NPCs will act either as if we're perfectly on time or just make a minor note about it in dialogue. We're also used to most missions starting the same or only with minor differences depending on choice, but there is no explicit choice here.

So if you treat it like any other game, ignore the quest marker, and just wander around the building, exploring and looking for interesting shit before actually leaving, you arrive at the location and get berated because you took too long and now a bunch of innocent people are dead because you were fucking around.

If you go immediately, you have a chance to actually save them all.

I think you'll actually find a lot of stuff like this in immersive sims, just due to their nature, although it's less "we know you're going to do this exact thing" and more "you've got freedom and we know you're going to do something we didn't expect, so we'll embrace that instead of limiting your options".

I know that when Arkane was developing Prey, they knew the GLOO Cannon was going to be experimented with in a bunch of ways that they couldn't necessarily anticipate, so instead of imposing limits on it, they embraced it, gave the gun to you at the beginning (well, very close to beginning) and just said "go wild".

They basically turned what would otherwise just be a random, only semi-important utility into a super useful tool for traversal and combat engagement. Went from "cool, does gluey things" to "okay, I'm going to make a staircase with this thing because it looks like there's something up there".

Apparently, they were inspired by Bethesda's famous lack of usable ladders up until that point, which is pretty funny. Or rather, they used that as a metaphor for design in general (though, they did put up posters or notes or something that just said "NO FUCKING LADDERS", if I recall, but I'll have to find the video/article about that later).

It was basically this approach of "there doesn't need to be a ladder if you can make one yourself".

The factions are all boring. Permanent skills, with no respec options?! And for god’s sake, let me eat food on the ground by long pressing E.

Apparently that last one is being added with an update soon.

I think the factions are okay, but not nearly as good as their counterparts in previous games (eg. NCR > Freestar Collective, although that's probably more thanks to Obsidian than Bethesda).

Progression is a real grind. 32 hours in and I’m only level 22, AND I feel like I don’t have skill points in basically anything compared to how big the skill tree is.

Thank you. I'm in a similar situation and finding that the grind is really annoying with not a lot of payoff. And then you've got so many skills to invest in and you never quite know if you'll actually need some of them.

I know planets don't all have to be super interesting, but I dread landing on anything now, because they're just... so boring to me.

Running to buildings from landing spots is a real bore.

Don't know if you know this already, but bringing up your scanner and pointing it to your ship icon lets you fast travel to it.

Also, you can skip the whole "return to ship" thing altogether and open up the star map or whatever it's called and immediately jump to space and set course/land on another planet. I think it only works if you're unencumbered, though, but I'm not certain.

Edit: Lol, I accidentally misread that as "running from buildings to landing spots", so ignore that last bit. Hard agree on running to the buildings. At least in TES/FO there's interesting stuff along the way. Here, it's just rocks and minerals and maybe a few animals.

I think the problem is also that Bethesda doesn't really "do" vehicles, probably due to engine limitations.

Usually, it's just horses or "passenger" travel (like when you man the guns in FO4 birds). I guess one could maybe consider power armor in FO4 to be kind of like a "vehicle", but it works more or less the same as just walking around.

Oh, there is dragon riding in Skyrim, but it's a mess and you don't have that much control.

I'm surprised the engine can even handle space combat, honestly. And 360° movement as well, which would have been great for dragon riding in Skyrim. But most of the dragons in TES are dead, so we probably won't get proper dragon riding in whatever TES: VI is.

(Sidenote about dragon riding/combat: Before Larian delved further into CRPGs, they made a regular third person RPG where you could play as a dragon. It was actually pretty fun. Still didn't have full control, and it was only in certain sections, but it was entertaining. Divinity II: Director's Cut, in case anyone's interested. Don't know how well it's aged, but I enjoyed it a few years ago.)

Lol, that's actually fucking hilarious.

At the very least, they could have added viewable maps at those terminals in the cities, a lot like how some zoos usually have a fairly readable map, often with a "you are here!" marker to help out.