Quoting: scaineI honestly can't be bothered to respond to that kind of negativity, except to point out that a) Skyrim is the 15th best selling game of all time. It's the fifth best-selling on PC.

Ah, yes, sales numbers and numbers of people using it.
The number one mark of a great entertainment product.
I'm sure all those highly-knowledgable-about-games CEOs, managers and marketing people (those who really make and play games, you know) would agree with you.

Personally, I never had a doubt mobile games are the pinnacle of gaming. Just look at how many people play them!

I never got why there were any rating systems or talks about superfluous stuff like depth of game mechanics, choices, challenge, how well they achieve their design goals, etc. when all you need to judge a game is to know how many people bought it!
It's not as if anything like a "lowest common denominator" gameplay would help crappy, but highly polished or marketed products sell in huge numbers these days...

Quoting: scaineAnd b) I enjoyed it hugely, sinking around 130 hours into it over multiple playthroughs.

So what? I played it for 400+ hours according to Steam. Surprised even me. And Skyrim certainly is a much better game than Oblivion - it's still a far cry from what it could have been, looking back at Daggerfall and Morrowind (both very flawed, too, but at least not in gameplay depth areas).

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I've never been a huge CK2 fan.
I just found all the Sims-style character babysitting (who gets to marry who, who is happy/sad, give X a present, give Y a job, ...) to be rather distracting from the better-than-EUIV combat/levy system and the kingdom management.
Wish there was a way to disable or automate all that stuff and play the game more like EUIV or Vicky.

And don't even get me started on the hoops you have to jump through just to not have your realm fall apart if you are stuck with Gavelkind.
On one hand, they want it to be historically accurate, but on the other hand, all that leads to is you killing off all your sons after the first (or killing off your spouse after the first son). Pretty dark comedy, there...

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: scaineThis was one of the first few games that made me "wow" at the potential future of PC games. Free-roaming, first person, RPG progression with quests, guilds and more. Amazing freedom. Obviously, the game kind of suffered as a result - I remember often wondering what the hell I was meant to do next! In fact, I got that feeling quite a lot in Morrowind too, I think. It wasn't until Oblivion that they made the primary quest more prominent.

Great to see this get the same kind of love that Morrowind has enjoyed with OpenMR [External Link] though.

Damn, you must be disappointed now so many years later then, about all the unrealized potential I mean.

I know I am.
After Morrowind, things just went downhill with Bethesda.
Thankfully, with projects like these and OpenMW, we'll have more than enough Morrowind and Daggerfall for many years to come ;)

And who knows, maybe someone will pick up the ball of gameplay depth they dropped from Oblivion onwards (when they started replacing deep RPG mechanics with clicky action combat) and do something with it.

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With all these modifications, the game is more playable now than ever.
And really a great example of how you don't need a high poly count for a good atmosphere.

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For those who don't know what Space Station 13 is, Sseth has got you covered:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URJ_qSXruW0 [External Link]

@Liam: The images in the article don't load for me.

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Quoting: TcheyAlso, i find the perf mid-game to drop quite a lot, and with 50+ units on screen, it’s not great. Could be my computer, but for similar situation, i have better perf with SupCom or Zero-K.

Unfortunately, the game's rather bad performance is well known.
IMO it is mostly due to them using JavaScript (Spidermonkey afaik) for scripting. JS simply wasn't made with high performance in mind, that's just not where it shines.
But now that the script engine is that deeply integrated since years, you can't just rip it out like a bad tooth to replace it with a shiny C# or Lua tooth. At best, I could imagine more scripting logic being rewritten in C++, only called from script.

Actually, the latter makes most sense IMO, as that is how scripting should be used anyway (as in, if it is performance critical, don't do it in script, do it in C++).

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Quoting: TheRiddickWhy not SMAA? its superior!

Because it is a lot harder to implement.
FXAA is a relatively simple post-effect, just blurring together neighboring pixels more or less. One of the reasons it makes stuff quite blurry and some prefer having no AA at all over FXAA.

SMAA is more involved, effectively "intelligently" smoothing edges instead of just blurring. But it also requires a lot more GPU power (and afaik CPU as well for the preparation?).

It is possible their graphics pipeline is not set up for that. Who knows.

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I knew what to expect from the discussion when I saw the game's name & trailer and wasn't disappointed.
"China bad!" in the first comment, even. Glorious :D

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I prefer cider, personally. But we don't really have that as software.

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Whenever I see any kind of Retroarch news I get this itch...

I have to remind myself: "No! Not now! Your backlog is way too long already without you playing console/arcade games from 30 years ago!"

Sometimes, I forget or willfully ignore my reminder.

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