It’s always fun when two terrible tech giants fight it out.

The problem is that when the other half of the country learns that fact, they think “Good.”

Still seems up in the air. Just looking at the current numbers from CBC, the NDP is only slated to take 8 seats, so it seems like BQ is going to be the one with the cards, assuming the tides don’t suddenly shift.

WSA is deprecated, though.

Likely not, it seems wasteful if the product is otherwise good in all other important regards. I’d just cover up the LED with tape or paint.

I think Bethesda has definitely fallen off in recent years, but I am a bit confused by the point this post is getting at. We learned at launch that Oblivion is a remaster, not a remake, and it’s just the original game running under the hood with a new coat of paint and some minor tweaks. And it’s a pretty high-effort remaster at that.

I just think it’s a bad example to use of how the company isn’t getting better, when the point of the remaster was to change as little of the core game as possible. It’s as good now as it was back then but it’s still a 19-year-old game.

Starfield is what should be killing everyone’s expectations of Elder Scrolls 6.

The main problem with it in Oblivion was that the enemies grow stronger as you level up, and since a lot of people didn’t understand the leveling system, they’d wind up with horribly underpowered characters in the late game. Some people deliberately remained at level 1 to keep the enemies easy.

Yep, the old “optimal” way to play, if you didn’t want to focus so hard on efficient leveling, was to make all of your major skills ones that you never planned to use. That way, for the skills that you do use frequently, you can increase those as much as you want while still sitting at level 1, allowing the player to become considerably stronger while enemies stayed at the same difficulty.

Alternatively, if someone messed up character creation, they could also simply choose to never sleep and never trigger the level up dialog. But there are a couple of quests which require the player to sleep to trigger an event, so folks would have to be smart about how they go about engaging with those.

Ghost of Tsushima is not quite as big as more recent Ubisoft games, though. Valhalla was just a stupidly large game with not much meaningful content in it. Just big for the sake of being big.

I heard that Shadows was supposed to be a bit smaller, but guessing they still don’t know how to really pare down the scale to match the content.

As someone who played waaaaaay too much of the original game back in the day and was very concerned about a remaster doing it justice, I have to say it turned out about as well as it possibly could have.

It didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel or make fixes for things that weren’t broken (other than the leveling, at least), it just turned Oblivion into a modern game while still being Oblivion deep down inside.

I am curious to hear perspectives on what Skyrim-only players think about it, because while the Oblivion remake is arguably now the most modernized Elder Scrolls game, it still doesn’t have some of the gameplay and QoL improvements that later came to Skyrim. It’s a perfect remaster for me, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are folks out there thinking, “Why is there no dual wielding,” “What’s with the weird zoomed in dialog system,” “Where are all the skill perks,” or “Why are there no NPC companions,” and similar.

I also do hope that Bethesda or the community releases an updated version of the construction set soon so the modding scene can take off again for the game. From what I hear, the original Oblivion construction set is able to be used in the remaster with a good deal of messing around, but modders don’t currently have the tools needed to interact at all with the Unreal Engine 5 wrapper.

Schrödinger’s Truth

You and me both. I am still upset by the fact that my state had RCV on the ballot several years ago but voted it down because the majority-Democrat politicians in office here were afraid to endorse anything that might erode the party’s dominance.

God forbid a left-leaning state run the risk of electing actual leftists.

Sorta, but not to let the Democrats off the hook either, with their uncanny ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Chuck Schumer and his conspirators can never be forgiven for agreeing to pass the Trump budget that is now funding his agenda.

Schumer’s entire argument that they should play along until Trump’s approval rating hits some arbitrarily low number is infuriating, and reeks of the sort of calculated politicking where the only priority is to do whatever it takes to stay in power, rather than to do the right thing. Hope that bites him and the others who voted with him in the ass.

The very real push to vote for Trump or not vote at all due to Biden’s botched (to say the least) handling of Palestine was not in good faith, though, and I saw that type of rhetoric everywhere.

Edit Downvote me and don’t bother responding you coward who can’t face up to the genocide being directly facilitated and endorsed by the U.S.

I didn’t downvote you, for what that’s worth, so I hope that’s not directed at me. But shame on me regardless I guess.

I do think that is giving liberals and the left too much credit.

A lot of the infighting from among the left during the past election felt pretty artificial, to be perfectly honest, and most of the “Genocide Joe/Holocaust Harris” types seemed to just evaporate after the election ended. Maybe just because there was nothing really left to say after all was said and done, but I just find it hard to believe much of that discourse was in good faith. I’m surprised to read a number as low as 18%, but almost 1 in 5 still isn’t nothing.

Agreed. Based on ongoing circumstances and the general response from other high-profile animators in the industry, I am inclined to think that Miyazaki and others at Ghibli are still against AI art. But I also do feel that the quote from 2016 is being reused without the essential context.

Miyazaki opened his response by talking about a friend of his who suffers from a physical disability, which is entirely irrelevant to the topic of generative AI. In context, it was directed at a reinforcement-learning AI model that some artists implemented to try to animate human-like models in unorthodox and unnatural ways, with the proposed utility of using it for zombies or similar. Their suggestion was that these unnatural learned movements are meant to be seen as disturbing and monstrous.

The “insult to life itself” remark was with regards to how they seemed to be making a mockery of disability and, with his friend in mind, was not something he could approve of.

But how much longer does AfD’s popularity line keep going up before the government does start working? Do we even expect the current government to be meaningfully different from the previous in that regard?

4 years comes quicker than you think.

One predicates the other, though.

Clearly Germany is not doing enough to put a stop to the rising conservatism movement, and the next election might not end as favorably as a result.

It’s not so much that the Supreme Court is being ignored as much as it is that they refuse to do anything about it. They’ll offer some occasional platitudes by ruling against Trump to make the public think that the system is still working as designed, but stop just short of actually enforcing those rulings.

Trump is a Republican.

Congress is controlled by Republicans.

The Supreme Court is majority Republican.

The other branches of government could stop this but they’re all enabling this to happen.