Todd Howard has said Bethesda is working on solutions to shorten the length of time between its game releases.

Get capital, spend capital to hire people, do work on games in parallel instead of serial?

I don’t care how long they take on a single game – I mean, that just translates into a higher purchase price, and I’m getting a pretty good return in terms of gameplay hours from their stuff per dollar. However, the fact that getting the next game in a series requires waiting for a huge game pipeline to clear is a pain.

I wasn’t actually a huge fan of The Outer Worlds, didn’t really click for me. I mean, yeah, it’s got a lot of similar elements to the Fallout series, but it’s got some important stuff missing that’s part of what makes Fallout interesting for me. It wasn’t terrible, but it just wasn’t Fallout for me…kinda felt like I was slogging through the thing.

• Not much to stumble on in the world outside the cities. Fallout tended to work by having one constantly “stumble across” things in the world, kinda kept up a seamless flow of new things happening. I’ll add that I think that the lack of this is part of what some people didn’t like with Starfield – one can run into things when jumping into a system, but feels more artificial and “gamey”.

• It’s technically open-world, but there’s little reason to backtrack. I played it in mostly linear fashion.

• The perks are a big part of Fallout for me, the interesting character-building. You can choose neat things that interact and substantially change how one plays. The Outer Worlds perks are nearly all minor stat tweaks.

• Aside from the handful of science weapons, most of the weapons in The Outer Worlds play in pretty much the same way, aren’t that memorable. Maybe one gets a slight buff relative to the other. Not a lot of interesting characteristics or story around them the way there is, say, Ratslayer.

• I realize that this is subjective, but Fallout has historically had moments that the designers made impressive and memorable to me, where one said “wow” the first time through. For me, some were Liberty Prime being activated and the subsequent mission in Fallout 3, maybe the Brotherhood of Steel airships arriving in Fallout 4, or the godrays shining through the gratings at ArcJet Systems in the A Call To Arms mission. There wasn’t really a point where The Outer Worlds did that for me. Everything felt more-or-less like what I’d expect in the runup to the mission, didn’t really have “wow” moments.

There were some things that I liked about The Outer Worlds relative to the Fallout series:

• I found it to be pretty stable and bug-free. Fallout has improved recently, and if one counts it, Starfield was quite good, but historically, the whole series has often had a lot of bugs, especially at release.

• There were story-altering choices. Not quite as much as Fallout: New Vegas, but more than, say, Fallout 76.

And most importantly, I hope TES6 and the next Fallout are not Xbox exclusives…

I’d assume that they’re gonna come out for the PC as well, at least.

EDIT: Wikipedia lists the platforms for TES6 as Windows and Xbox, and says that it won’t come out for other platforms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_VI

The game’s exclusivity to Windows and Xbox consoles has since been repeatedly confirmed.

I’m assuming that, absent Microsoft specifically trying to go out of their way to block it, which I’m not aware of them having a history of with their other titles, that the Windows binaries will also run on Linux via Proton.

So, context for those not familiar is that Fallout: New Vegas had a limited development period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout%3A_New_Vegas

The game had a somewhat short development cycle of 18 months.

Here’s a list of credits for Fallout: New Vegas:

https://www.mobygames.com/game/48717/fallout-new-vegas/credits/windows/

Obsidian was purchased by Microsoft, so both Bethesda and Obsidian are under that umbrella.

Looking at some of it:

Project Lead: J.E. Sawyer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Sawyer

He last did Penitment in 2022 at Obsidian.

Executive Producer: Lawrence Liberty. Looks like he’s doing other things, last being Marvel Snap.

Producer: Mikey Dowling. He last did Inkulinati at Obsidian in 2023.

Producer: Jason Fader. His last credit is the Fallout: New Vegas DLC Lonesome Road, so I doubt that he’s around.

Producer: Matt Singh. Last credited on Fallout: New Vegas, so probably not around.

Producer: Tess Treadwell. Last credited on South Park: The Stick of Truth in 2014, so probably not around.

Additional Production: Brandon Adler. He was credited with “Additional System Design” on Pillars of Eternity II at Obsidian, with some playtesting elsewhere after that. Might be around.

Addition’s Production: Matt Rorie. No credits since Fallout: New Vegas in 2010, probably out of the picture.

Lead Artist: Joseph A. Sanabria. Last credited with Armikrog in 2015, so he’s probably out of the picture.

Concept Artist/Vault Boy Artist: Brian Menze. Last credited with The Outer Worlds at Obsidian in 2019, so he might still be around.

World Building Expert: Scott Everts. Ditto.

User Interface Artist: Jason Sereno. Last credited on New Tales From the Borderlands from Gearbox in 2022, so he’s probably elsewhere.

Character Artist: Daniel Alpert. Last credited for Pemitent at Obsidian, so probably available.

Character Artist: Aaron Brown. Last credited for Planescape: Torment – Enhanced Edition at Beamdog, so he’s probably elsewhere.

Character Artist: Kevin Manning. Last credited for Red Faction: Guerrilla - Re-Mars-tered at Volition in 2018, so he’s elsewhere and may out of the game.

Environment Artist: Cochey Cantu. Last credited for LEGO 2k Drive at Visual Concepts Entertainment in 2023, so he’s probably elsewhere.

Artist: Roger Chang. Last credited on Marvel Spider-Man 2 at Insomiac in 2023, so he’s probably elsewhere.

I dunno. I’m not gonna go through the whole list, but I’d say from that sample that while there are still a number of Fallout: New Vegas people around at Obsidian, approximately 2/3rds are elsewhere.

EDIT: It does look like two of the three Troika guys from Fallout 1, Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, are at Obsidian as well. The third, Jason Anderson, is at inXile, which Microsoft also acquired, and has done at least some work on the Wasteland series there (the series that inspired Fallout originally).

EDIT 2: And Ron Perlman, the narrator for Fallout: New Vegas, appears to still be doing voice acting projects for various movies and games, though he’s 74 and I dunno how much more work he’s got left in him.

I don’t know how much of the Fallout: New Vegas group is still there. Fallout: New Vegas was done 15 years ago.

But the (mainline) series has also had successful games done by different studios. Fallout was Black Isle. Fallout 2 was Black Isle – with the leads from the first game having left to join Troika. Fallout 3 was Bethesda. Fallout: New Vegas was Obsidian. Fallout 4 was Bethesda. Fallout 76 was Bethesda.

I figure that if there have been that many handoffs done successfully, they can probably manage to do another.

Fallout’s been full of Americana. The Euros haven’t had their shot at running around in places they know.

So, I’m not saying that I agree with them slagging on Bethesda here. Hell, they haven’t even released their mod yet. Doesn’t break things for their players.

But there is legitimately an issue where Bethesda pushes out an update and mods break. They have talked to a few of the very core mod creators early before to help alleviate breakage, but it can still leave mod-using players with a broken environment for some time.

Obviously, Bethesda’s primary responsibility is to people playing vanilla, the stuff that they release.

But there are a lot of modders and people playing with mods, especially a decade after release.

Some of it is just a hard technical problem. There’s gonna be some degree or breakage at updates.

But I think that it’s also true that there are a few things that Bethesda could do to help alleviate the breakage beyond what they have.

Plus, you know, even aside from mods, doing a beta branch does have some benefits. Lets Bethesda find out about some bugs before they push an update to everyone. They won’t catch everything with internal testing.

One route might be to push out a new release for a month or something on a beta branch so that modders can see what breaks and provide some time to fix it prior to it being pushed out to everyone.

Take longer to get updates out, but reduce windows where mods are broken.

It’s still circular. The ESA doesn’t run the Library of Congress. They can argue that the LoC shouldn’t do that, but they don’t have decision-making authority in that.

I’m just curious why a new designation hasn’t sprouted up for one or the other to make things less confusing.

There is for one of them: you mentioned it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soulslike

A Soulslike (also spelled Souls-like) is a subgenre of action role-playing games known for high levels of difficulty and emphasis on environmental storytelling, typically in a dark fantasy setting. It had its origin in Demon’s Souls and the Dark Souls series by FromSoftware, the themes and mechanics of which directly inspired several other games. Soulslike games developed by FromSoftware themselves have been specifically referred to as Soulsborne games, a portmanteau of Souls and Bloodborne.

I mean, okay. But it’s not really the ESA’s responsibility to archive art and cultural works for posterity. They’re going to care about whether it’s going to affect their bottom line and if the answer is “yes”, then they probably aren’t going to support it. Why ask them?

There was a point in time in the US when a work was only protected by copyright if one deposited such a work with the Library of Congress. That might be excessive, but it could theoretically be done with video games. Maybe only ones that sell more than N copies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit

Legal deposit is a legal requirement that a person or group submit copies of their publications to a repository, usually a library. The number of copies required varies from country to country. Typically, the national library is the primary repository of these copies. In some countries there is also a legal deposit requirement placed on the government, and it is required to send copies of documents to publicly accessible libraries.

I’m guessing that the US is gonna do the TikTok ban too, then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet

The splinternet (also referred to as cyber-balkanization or internet balkanization) is a characterization of the Internet as splintering and dividing due to various factors, such as technology, commerce, politics, nationalism, religion, and divergent national interests. “Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it”, wrote the Economist weekly in 2010, arguing it could soon splinter along geographic and commercial boundaries.

Next year, we might see many…bishojo…raising games… These are incredible times.”

Uh. Let’s, for the sake of discussion, hypothetically assume that 2025 is the Year of the Bishojo Raising Game.

That isn’t what your game is, right? What’s the connection?

So, I haven’t played Pokemon Violet, but looking at Wikipedia, it sounds like it’s got a multiplayer game mode:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokémon_Scarlet_and_Violet

Mode(s): Single-player, multiplayer

I don’t know what the implications of buying what he was selling are, but it’s possible that it functionally allowed players to cheat in multiplayer, which kind of ruins the experience of other players.

If it only affects a single-player game, on the other hand, I don’t really see a problem being caused.

I’d also add that I kind of feel that at least for this particular form, even if it is multiplayer cheating, while it’s probably not practical to mitigate every form of cheating in a multiplayer game, it’s probably possible to design the game in such a way that it can’t be attacked in this particular way.

Yeah, I’ve had a couple Kobos. If you just want to put arbitrary documents on it to display, they work well.

I think that the problem is, though, that while eInk ebook readers are really good ebook readers, they’re a specialized device in a world with a lot of general-purpose portable devices that people are already carrying.

They have extremely long battery life compared to an LCD or OLED display, and they work fine in brightly-lit environments like outside on a sunny day. And even if you want to use them in the dark, they have a soft backlight that can use very little power. And they’re really light and thin.

But…I carry a smartphone. And a tablet. And a laptop. Maybe not everyone carries all three, but they probably have at least one of those. And so you gotta ask yourself whether you want a really good ebook reader that’s only really good at reading ebooks (and can run a web browser or similar slowly and poorly), or whether you can tolerate using a device that can read ebooks and can also do things like browse the Web and play videos.

I’d only really suggest that someone consider a dedicated ebook reader if they’re regularly carrying paper books around with them because they want to use those books outside or the like. I do that and I still don’t think I’d get another ebook reader. It just doesn’t buy me enough extra functionality.

I often want to use a non-ebook-reader device to refer to the Web or something to look up something related to a book that I’m reading, and if I’m doing that, I’m using a general-purpose device anyway.

By the same token, MP3 players can be really good MP3 players. Like, they can have really long battery lifetime, and be really small, have physical buttons, etc. But very few people carry dedicated MP3 players today, because they already have a general-purpose smartphone with them that can act as an MP3 player…and even if it isn’t quite as good as a dedicated hardware device, it’s still good enough. They still exist, but there’s enough overlap that for most people, they probably aren’t worth getting. Same thing for audio recorders. And I think that ebook readers are in that camp too, albeit maybe not to quite the same degree.

For context, here’s what prices ran for NES games:

https://www.33rdsquare.com/how-much-did-the-nintendo-entertainment-system-cost-in-1986/

Here were some of the most popular titles and their prices in the mid-1980s:

• Super Mario Bros – $40-50
• The Legend of Zelda – $45 when new
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – $42 initial price
• Metroid – $35 at launch
• Kirby‘s Adventure – $39.99 original MSRP

I’m going to adjust for inflation to 2024:

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

• Super Mario Bros - $115.36-$144.20
• The Legend of Zelda - $129.78
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - $121.13
• Metroid - $100.94
• Kirby’s Adventure - $115.33

Yeah, but I don’t think that this is really Facebook so much as VR in general.

Ads have funded a lot of content in the past. I don’t mean just in the Internet era, but in the TV era and the radio era and the newspaper era. We’re talking centuries.

Unless you’re gonna get people to pay for your content, which can create difficulties, attaching it to ads can be a way to pay for that content.

Now, all that being said, that isn’t to say that one needs to want to choose ads or needs to want to choose ads in all contexts or can want unlimited ads. I’d generally rather pay for something up front. Let’s say that it takes $10 to produce a piece of content. For ads to make sense, it has to make the average user ultimately spend at least $10 more on some advertised product than they otherwise would have, or it wouldn’t make sense for the advertiser to give the content creator $10. I’d just as soon spend $10 on the content directly instead and not watch the ads. Ultimately, the average user has to pay at least as much under an ad regime as if they just paid for the content up front, and doesn’t have to deal with the overhead of me staring at ads.

But for that to work, the content provider has to be able to actually get people to pay for whatever content they’re putting out. If it gets pirated, or people disproportionately weight the cost of that up-front payment, or people are worried about the security of their transaction, or what-have-you, then the content provider is gonna fall back to being paid in ads.

This particular idea probbaly has technical limitations.

A device can only monitor and analyze and modify what a user is viewing if it’s being used as a pass-through device in a daisy chain of devices.

As long as there is any device out there that can take multiple video signals from different inputs, let the user choose which they want to use, they can just not daisy-chain them, have them connected in parallel to different inputs. And even if one could try to get manufacturers colluding on creating a world where daisy-chaining is the only option, they have no incentive to do so on this point – in doing this, they’re trying to steal eyeball time from each other.

Now, that being said, I suppose that device manufacturers may not care, if 95% of users are going to just daisy-chain their devices. If it’s only a few privacy nuts out there who are constantly keeping on top of the latest shennanigans and figuring out how to avoid them, if the Roku manual says “daisy chain” and most users just follow the pictures there…shrugs