Veraxus

And that. The list of “nopes” is so long I missed the most obvious one!

Always online, live service, Denuvo, and characters that are not remotely faithful to their source material abilities…?

Hard pass four times over.

Maybe we’ll get lucky and Gaben will leave ownership of the company collectively to it’s employees.

Daggerfall remains, to this day, one of the best games ever made. I still have my original boxed copy, and several pre-patched CDs that Bethesda would mail out back in the day. I replay it a few times a year, because it’s held up so well and there is nothing else that scratches the same itch.

I frequently wonder what Bethesda would be like today if Peterson, Lakshman, and Lefay had stayed at the company and Todd had been chased out, instead. Those three created The Elder Scrolls from scratch - lore, gameplay concepts, all of it. They had a TES Bible covering the story from Arena to Oblivion… and one by one, Todd excised all their influence from the franchise.

I miss the oppressive, grimdark atmosphere and lore, the complex world simulation, the unprecedented freedom, the unflinching maturity, and the epic, massive dungeon crawls.

I don’t see anyone trying to make a game like that again, ever. Certainly not Todd Howard’s Bethesda.

…are they going to apply this rule to Nintendo or Sony…

They absolutely should. Closed ecosystems should be illegal. They are literally an intentional form of unethical, predatory trust.

I’m sure not preordering and I will wait until plenty of detailed reviews and gameplay videos are out before I buy. As solid as NMS is right now, it was a steaming pile on release. I won’t risk it again.

Oh, did GM just step in it this time. Being stupid and removing important features is one thing, but straight-up defamation like this is another.

Google and Apple’s lawyers must be salivating a river right now.

Daggerfall had some basic guiding principles that have been slowly stripped away by every new release…

1. It was unapologetically grimdark. The lore was dark, sinister, and scary… very Robert E Howard meets Lovecraft.

2. It was obsessed with simulation. They wanted a world that functioned logically… hour to hour, day to day, season to season, character to character, and as seamlessly as possible.

3. It strove for tabletop-level freedom without limits. You could climb, sneak, swim… across rooftops, in streets, in dungeons… there were no barriers whatsoever.

4. It reinforced that decisions have consequences, with multiple paths if you followed the main story.

With Morrowind, they killed the grimdark and gutted the lore. They replaced the existential dread of the lore with “weirdness”. They took the mature, unflinching tone out behind the shed… replacing it with T-rated YA content. Oblivion finally completed the transition from grimdark to sterile high fantasy. This is especially heinous because the Elder Scrolls Bible laid out the franchise from Daggerfall through Oblivion, and Oblivion was supposed to be the final, the darkest, most oppressive game in the series, being literally about the end of the world.

While Morrowind strove to preserve some of the simulation, the grand multi-season scope pared this back somewhat. From there, it never evolved or advanced at all, with each new game using the same minimal, basic simulation.

The tabletop level freedom was completely axed as a guiding principle. Instead, the gameplay became much more gamey. No longer would you sink if you tried to swim while carrying too much weight, climbing has been completely non-existent, dungeoneering mechanics - and dungeoneering as a major gameplay loop - were removed en masse… and all while the seamless open world has had more and more seams - loading zones, invisible walls, etc - added.

And finally, all consequences were removed as basic principles. You could join any and all guilds or factions, your choices had no ramifications or outcomes or branching paths… there was not so much as an attempt to maintain an illusion of impact on the story or simulation.

These are the things people are talking about when they complain about each new TES game being lesser than the one before. And worst of all, they took all this withering away of ambition and applied it to Fallout, gutting the IP’s very soul… and nobody really noticed this trend until Starfield, because it was a new IP that was less prone to being viewed through rose-tinted nostalgia.

Every Bethesda game that comes out (not just TES) is worse than the previous. Objectively. Because Todd Howard has removed every shred of fearless ambition from the company.

See, this is what I’m talking about. We have entire generations of people parroting this nonsense because they started with Morrowind and never actually played Daggerfall. It’s incredibly sad.

40h is where I gave up, too. I would stopped much sooner, because everything feels like the worst kind of MMO grind… but folks kept telling me “keep going, it gets better!”

Narrator: It never gets better.

Two decades.

Daggerfall was way, way, way ahead of its time… but when Vijay, Peterson, & LeFay left Bethesda it was all downhill. Morrowind was a pale shadow of Daggerfall, and it only went downhill from there as each release stripped back progressively more and more of Elder Scroll’s ambition and personality. Who was responsible for all this anti-ambitious anti-progress? Todd Howard.

I really like Orion, which is based on WebKit… but it’s Mac only. 😢

Remember, Firefox is great and has no dependency on upstream Google code.

Use Firefox.

Persona 5 Royal

You realise the AI is being trained on pictures of real children, right?

Disingenuous and misleading statement. No readily available AI is trained on CP.

So it’s wrong for it to be based on one child, but according to you the AI “art” (as you keep calling it) is okay as long as there are thousands of victims instead?

Disingenuous and misleading statement. I’m guessing you don’t understand how AI works. As for AI output, a randomly generated nonexistent person is nonexistent. Simple as that.

Sidenote: I disapprove of nonconsensual Photoshop and AI illustrations of real people, except for fair use cases such as satire. AI is just another illustrative tool, and the choice of tool is beside the point.

So you’re cool with images of 6 year olds being penetrated by a 40 year old as long as “tHe Ai DrEw iT sO nObOdY gOt HuRt”?

No, I am not. And that is still utterly unimportant. It doesn’t matter how I feel about someone’s fictitious illustrations, sculptures, writings, or anything else created by a person or AI that is wholly fictitious.

That’s literally the whole point I am making: It doesn’t matter how I feel about it, it doesn’t matter how YOU feel about it. It’s not real. Neither you nor I nor anyone else has the right to judge someone else’s art.

Careful, any time I point this out, the fascists come out of the woodwork to call me a pedo.

Criminalizing the creation, possession, or viewing of entirely artificial artwork is beyond unethical; it’s extraordinarily evil. I don’t care if you find someone’s artwork gross, troubling, distasteful, immoral, etc… that’s art. Victimizing real people is not “art” or “speech” or “expression”… so as long as that isn’t happening there is no ethical grounds whatsoever for restricting a persons exercise of expression, especially in private.

Social consequences for creating, sharing, viewing certain artwork is one thing… but the government or law punishing someone for it is a different thing entirely.

That said, this specific case is different in that the doctor DID in fact victimize real children by using secret photos and recordings of them to create the images. That crosses way across the line that I laid out above. Additionally, he possessed actual CSAM (which he may have made himself), and so is absolutely guilty of sexually victimizing real children. That guy deserves everything he gets in prison.

Wow, that was fast… but I am IN!

This. This. This.

100% this.

Cancel. They don’t deserve your business. They keep making worse and worse decisions that are more and more anti-consumer. Don’t give them your money. Don’t reward this behavior.

Only insofar as Heineken is associated with Netherlands.