I’m just glad that Skyrim didn’t drop when I was in college. There’s certainly a whole genre of 'X was Y years ago, I feel so old!"; but there’s nothing like the evocation of that time to drive home how much brighter everything seemed and how purposelessly I’ve been drifting since.
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also @rocketpj
You could also go the Tale of Two Wastelands route. Fallout 3 and NV in one engine, at the same time.
https://taleoftwowastelands.com/
I just wish the devs had made it easier to get to New Vegas than it was when I first played it. They might have changed it now.
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Thanks, I’ve been pretty lucky at getting all the parts I need, sans scalpers.
I’m on a discord that sends notifications for stock drops, it only took me a couple weeks of trying to get a 3070 Ti from Best Buy.
That depends on how you like to play, there are more hardcore game modes and also mods that make the game more difficult in other ways. Personally i find playing with extra difficulties thrown in to be a pain in the ass, i want to be an OP wave of death and i’m ok if the game ends up being too easy by the end. If i want difficulty i’ll play Dark Souls.
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They were “technically” a 3rd party but they were the original developers of the Fallout series back when it was isometric. But i presume you full well know this is the case, i’m just being pedantic about the 3rd party thing 
All of the Bethesda made ones are at best “just ok”, but i agree that the series was infinitely more fun when it was isometric. It being more tactical and turn based made the encounters more challenging, i really loved the many branching possibilities in random stories you could engage in, and i liked how your character build and party members could also highly change how people reacted to you and what you could do. They do this in the Bethesda game but it doesn’t really commit to the same degree as the OG games did which is where i’m ultimately disappointed.
I do think that the Bethesda made ones added some good lore to the setting that was really solid, but the mechanics and immediate story has always been more lack luster.
For those jonesing for an experience that is closer to the OG Fallout games i can’t recommend the Wasteland series enough, the newest one being Wasteland 3 and it’s really good.
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Ooo, pedant wars! (jk)
Granted, a lot of ex-Black Isle and Interplay guys were at Obsidian when they made NV, but not a lot of the original game’s team, including the pivotal guys Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson, who went off to form another seminal RPG developer plagued by bugs, Troika. Tim and Leonard both eventually ended up joining Obsidian, while Jason ended up at inXile, who made the pretty great Wasteland 2 and 3 you referred to 
The teams and games that sprung from Fallout and Looking Glass Studios are fascinating to follow, and have made some of my favourite games, and it’s even better when there’s cross-pollination between the two groups.
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I did very much enjoy that one; though, as you note, the early stages in F:3 and the route you need to take to get to NV are a bit tricky.
My understanding is that some of that may be down to the degree that, while assets from both games are included, NV mechanics more or less overrule 3 mechanics where the two conflict; and there’s a significant change in damage handling between 3 and NV.
3 was mostly Damage Resistance based, with DR reducing incoming damage by a certain percentage(capped at 85% for the player; I think just a defined value for NPCs, not sure if any or all human NPCs actually had theirs calculated based on what they were wearing; but supermutants and scorpions and stuff just had a defined DR). Damage Threshold was either nonexistent or confined to a few really obscure items.
NV brought DT back to the table in a serious way: DR is applied first; then the DT value is subtracted from the remaining incoming damage(subject to the limit that DT cannot eliminate the last 20%); which effectively made good armor a lot more valuable; and weapons with high per-shot damage functionally mandatory for opponents with nontrivial DT.
Inconveniently, Fallout 3 throws you into supermutants and mirelurks pretty much the moment you wander outside the little band of baby’s-first-raiders; and that wasn’t so bad under F:3 DR-only rules; but ToTW replaces those with NV supermutants and mirelurks; which add some modestly credible DT to go with the modestly credible DR that they had in 3; but does not make it any easier than in 3 to find a really punchy weapon in the early game.
Compare to NV, where you could go much further encountering only humans with mediocre to nonexistent armor, along with low end ghouls and geckos and mantisis and coyotes and stuff; and high DT opponents only really happen if you wander off the encouraged path(looking at you, Cazador death road near goodsprings that is not a good shortcut; or that valley past the graveyard where the giant scorpions live and you will not); or once you’ve had the chance to get some decent guns or specialist ammo that specifically reduces DT.
I don’t know exactly how ToTW could have organically worked in handing you a service rifle and a stack of 5.56AP without it just feeling intrusive; but it’s definitely true that the early game of F:3 was not balanced with DT in mind. Last time I played I ended up having to scrounge together the bits for the Railway Rifle; which I would normally never bother with, just because that’s about the only good per-shot damage you can find in Megaton.
You mean that you aren’t supposed to climb just out of reach of the deathclaws just past Black Mountain and derail the whole plot? I managed that only once on the cazador death road, but they are far more scary.
I think the Black Mountain/Quarry Junction run is legit; there’s actually a lot of room there(especially since the supermutants in that area typically aggro by just plinking at you with hunting rifles at enough range that you can take the damage with basic leather armor and maybe a couple of stimpacks); but cazador death road is pretty much only navigable if you use the (always kind of cheaty-feeling to me; but within the game rules) Courier’s Stash gear and start by hammering them with the mercenary’s grenade rifle.
Even that approach can get pretty nerve-wracking if the wrong bugs survive and start coming for you; but it mostly works, it just feels wrong to have an excellent condition grenade rifle well before you’d usually be able to get your hands on one.
that sounds a lot like this:
i wonder if the drm was seeing the third core as a different system
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I just decided to play skyrim again, without even realizing the anniversary edition is coming. I’ve played with some mods in the past, usually just the ‘unofficial S:SE patch’ and lots of graphical things and Inigo.
The graphical stuff is a black hole whose event horizon you do not want to cross.
Inigo is required.
In a lot of ways, I think Skyrim stands the test of time because it looks decent enough and it’s fun enough. I find myself going through the environments going “wow this is pretty” even though it’s clearly not up to snuff with the latest Unreal Engine 5 “look it’s real life!” demos. The open world-ness is somehow manageable, and while it’s got a lot of weird janky broken bits, it’s still just fun. I mean, I can run around as a lynx with a ponytail wearing heavy knight armor and punching people’s souls right out of their bodies while my follower kittycat tells me it smells funny in here.
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There’s a major bug in Oblivion related to sneaking and acrobatics. There’s a mod to fix it. The modder’s only explanation for the bug is a debug test that was never removed from the release. Unfortunately, the fix is far too quick and simple for Besthesda “elite” programmers and testers.
Thing is Bethesda was also a publisher, and owned other Devs. So while the in house, Elder Scrolls end of it ain’t done much. The entire Dishonored series came out in the meantime. Fallout 4 from their own team as well. Among other things.
It’s not like they’ve just been sitting around. They were never particularly quick on this stuff either. 4 Years between Morrowind and Oblivion. And 5 for Skyrim after that. I wouldn’t have pegged it as “a decade”, but aside from Starfield there’s been a not terribly successful push towards MMOs and an apparently pointless run at mobile games in the meantime.
Seems like they’ve more been distracted by big publisher shit than sitting around feasting on Skyrim dollars.
This is a bit the point of Bethesda games. And it was as true of Morrowind and the earlier games. Took a bit longer an more effort back then though.
That’s not Bethesda. It’s a sadly common industry practice, though it’s hit Oblivion more than once. IIRC they had a similar issue with Sony over Alpha Protocol. In both cases the low reviews were part and parcel of the Publishers cutting resources and work time.
Multiple big companies have done the PR thing where they “promise” not to connect bonuses and payouts to Metacritic scores. But it seems like they just find other ways to not pay out.
Zenimax was Bethesda. Basically just a shell company put together to contain Weaver’s big company ambitions. Weaver both made the Zenimax move and brought on Altman. He didn’t exactly come off well during his ouster either.
So a Bethesda game? They’ve been grind fests since Oblivion.
I’m rocking a RX 480. Grandfathered in from the previous build. It was a great price to performance ratio at release and I got a very good deal.
I typically plan on a GPU every 2-3 years, and generally get 6-8 years out of full build with an upgrade cycle that also involves more ram and upgraded CPU or 2 somewhere in there. Mostly because I like to, not because it’s required.
I built this box pretty much right before COVID hit, with the idea of picking up a GPU in the fall of 2020. The 480 was already kinda long in the tooth for my liking.
Thing is it was doing just great. And still is. At 1080 I still haven’t run into anything it doesn’t run just fine on “high”.
You can also pin it to a single core in Windows settings. Been a bit but think it’s right there in Windows Task Manager.
Most of them. InXile is the other Interplay descendant. Microsoft bought them too.
Troika had died by the time Fallout landed at Bethesda and Oblivion got involved. Though the principals didn’t land back at Not Black Isle till after NV was out.
Goodness, where has the time gone, eh? This is that game in my Steam library that i still haven’t completed and return to every so often to confusion because i’ve forgotten what i did up to that point, i think the last time i was in there i’d somehow caught a bit of vampirism and had to use a guide to remove it. Still had many memorable moments - being chased by frost t****s or giants, gaining and losing lydia of course, first dragon kill, spending hours in one of the massive underworld dungeons that litter the map… It’s a remarkable achievement though (equally the modding community) like the way they employ perspective tricks to make the world seem larger than it is.
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Lost me at the first sentence:
When it came out in 2011, this must surely have seemed to the outside world like one of the nerdiest games around: potions and spells, axes and swords, dark elves and giants and, of course, dragons. But Skyrim nevertheless became one of the most widely played games ever
If this article was from 1984 describing Dungeons and Dragons 10 year anniversary it would be spot-on, but were games of that ilk “nerdy” in 2011? The same year Game of Thrones came out?
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I used to play Skyrim a lot like you. Then I took an arrow to the knee.
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I did see that one (Denuvo: “Hey there pirate! those two cores may share an L3 cache with latency only a shared die can manage; as well as having the same memory controller and PCIe root complex with the same GPU connected to it; but obviously they are different computers!”); but I think my problem was not related to something like that; both because while I was trying to solve it I saw reports from people with all manner of more-than-2-core CPUs; and because the CPU I had was a Phenom X3; which was the cheap-seats version of the Phenom X4, produced by salvaging the 4 core parts that had a defect on one of the cores; rather than a “2 cores plus one specialized different core” design of some kind.
I certainly can’t entirely rule it out, given that DRM systems, by design, are opaque and designed to fail deadly if they think something is wrong; but the CPU I was using had no feature/capability differences between the cores.
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Yeah, the TES game where esoteric TES lore was at its most optional; and viscerally satisfying hack-n-slash at its most refined; obviously too nerdy for normal people because it had dragons and you could shoot fireballs rather than having an M4 and shooting off-brand soviets or the popular conception of what a ‘terrorist’ looks like…
Either the writer just need a ‘much surprise, such counterintuitive, wow’ opening; or they are forgetting that the NES hit the US in 1985(with more than a few fantasy-themed titles): video games are officially a thing where people who grew up playing them are starting to edge toward retirement age; not some cultural edge case.
Funny enough, Microsoft owns both Obsidian and Bethesda now. Maybe we can finally get the New Vegas sequel we all deserve.
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And inXile too! So they could even bring Brian Fargo back in for a new Fallout.
First thing you see when launching a new game of the original is “BRIAN FARGO PRESENTS” 
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