I completely agree.

FO4 showed to me that they are fundamentally unserious about Fallout as like, a setting of stories, and also that they have no idea how to make compelling gameplay.

Addictive maybe, sure, but not interesting.

I never understood why anyone would play FO76 at all. Just a mess, better alternatives existed at the time for very similar gameplay.

Yeah lol, FO76 is a game the way like, a dead MMO or SecondLife is a game hahaha, its a … digital space, hahaha!

What I’ve said in the past and I still think is that they should have, for FO4 done either:

A) totally drop the base construction schtick, completely redraft the main story, make it a lot more compelling.

Or

B) nearly totally drop the main story, and go full in on the base construction schtick. Other major factions have bases they are building and maintaining, they get different kinds of blue prints, need different kinds of resources, have different styles of overarching like strategic AI governing what the factions act like, what they value materially… turn the game into much more of a procedurally generated like, active sim, of a wasteland.

But they split the diff and went for half baked versions of both, and basically it was bland and boring.

Chaotic Good? Chaotic Neutral? Chaotic Evil?

… Chaotic Copper.

Just a copper gremlin, hahaha!

Yeah I mean like… a full on conversion at the level of Fallout London or something like that, but with access to more ‘guts’ of the engine… done by pros?

Yeah, I’d bet Obsidian can do something like that, at the least, and it would be broadly better than FO4, again at the least.

Also my absolute random bet for FO5/ES6 will be radiant enemies along the line of Spore creatures, hahahah!

Tbf I agree that their more recent games haven’t been great… but I do think they are both more lean as a studio, and their recent games have been of better quality than Bethesda’s recent slop.

Well the last time Obsidian got their hands on the then current Creation Engine, they hot rodded it and got it to do things that Bethesda had stated they wanted to be able to do but couldn’t figure out how to do.

What would a wholly updated FO5 even… have be different? What are the systems that would be reworked?

No one has any idea because no one has mentioned anything at that level of detail, at all, that I’m aware of.

Also what, like, Bethesda is going to somehow make the Creation Engine not a giant pile of shit, with now 15 more years of acculumated technical debt from never doing a full ground up rebuild… ?

Anyway my suspicion is that MSFT is generally pissed at Bethesda for spending stupendous amounts of money over the last decade and a half, making basically one decent game that was a commercial success, one maybe commerical success that was a PR disaster, and then a combo PR+commercial disaster.

That, all in addition to FO5 and ES VI are as best we can tell literally just dreams, concepts of a plan.

Sharma’s job is to make Xbox as profitable as it can be, partially to stem the damage from Xbox itself’s fuckups over the last decade, Spencer’s ‘buy every IP’ plan only works if that leads to actually profitable games…

… but Sharma also has to make Xbox as profitable as it can be to cover for the incredible amounts of money MSFT has spent on AI/LLMs, Windows itself going to shit, mass abandonment of Windows and Windows enterprise software thats been going on in Europe since Trump Round 2 started.

They also can’t build a mod manager to save their lives.

God help you if you think they understand anything about how to write any OS agnostic code.

In other news: ModDB still exists. Same with GameBanana.

Well I think Obsidian will be better able to do a Fallout game than Bethesda, but oof yeah maybe fire Emil and Todd, if you want to start fixing Bethesda’s problems.

See the primary problem with Bethesda is that its leadership are incompetent hacks that haven’t had a new idea muchless a good idea in a decade, and they’ve have promoted a hugbox culture with 0 accountability anywhere.

Thats how something like FO76 and Starfield and the FO4 update that broke everything happen.

In case anyone is unaware:

https://gamingpromax.com/obsidian-new-fallout-game-confirmed-bethesda-2026/

Yeah, Asha Sharma told Obsidian to drop basically everything they were doing, and now they’re tasked with making another Fallout game.

Bethesda is also tasked with making a new Fallout game. Well, more accurately, they’ve been tasked with that for years, got a head start.

… only one of these studios is currently publically pissing and shitting themselves over how difficult that will be.

And its not Obsidian. Haven’t heard much from them.

Probably because they are busy, you know, working.

Yep! In my own history, sometimes they just believe you without further explicit proof, but yeah, they do often ask for some kind of proof and usually that is just basically screenshots like this. Might take em a while to process it in the ‘escalated support’ tier, or what not, but yeah it generally does work.

I did not know that, but that entirely makes sense.

I’m American; if we had a ‘pirate party’ type party, it would be considered a terrorist organization by our pedophile president and his cult of closeted christian racist theocrat morons.

But uh yeah… world economy and society broadly is hugely run by tech and tech companies, you’d think a more nuanced and informed discussion about tech law and policy would accompany that… but nope!

You can’t.

Windows will rewrite your boot partition, when it feels like it.

It can be commanded to do this remotely, also. Its called a Windows Update. And Windows buries itself below Ring 0 via Pluton/TPMv2.

It does this because the NSA likes being able to keep tabs on everyone.

The precise/exact way this works is hardware/setup dependant, and changes every 6 months or so, ish, but yeah this bootloader fuckery nonsense has been going on for years now, in dual boot setups, and there really is not a plausible explanation for this continuing as a persistent ‘problem’, other than Windows makes NSA backdoors into your entire system, or breaks shit while trying to.

Dual booting is dumb if you value system security and stability.

Howabout this:

All social media algorithms that direct content flow to users are required to be open source, in perpetuity, at least for viewing, so that actual unbiased folks can audit them. Maybe make a new liscense class for this, if need be, so companies can still own the code, but it just has to be publically reviewable.

Would you install blackbox code on your pc?

Well, would you let a blackbox determine what information is fed into your own brain?

Mandate systemic transparency.

In today’s episode of “fucking obviously, duh,”… fine-tuned digital brainwashing algorithms do in fact have generally ‘bad’ effects on the human mind.

Some say they may even be addictive and habit forming!

More at 11!

Ooops! All HotPockets!

🫂 … 🥛

You can’t hustle a hustler.

… What indies are working with the Source engine?

S&ndbox?

Black Mesa Source?

G-String?

Do… do you mean modders?

Almost nobody just outright develops a game they intend to sell, on Source, because you’d have to liscense the engine from Valve.

Which costs a significant chunk of change.

The token response is automated.

What, you think theyre gonna hire … corpo social media numbers of content reviewers? Thousands to tens of thousands of people?

The whole company is like 300ish people.

Thats smaller than say… Bethesda.

They use bots, algos, analytic metrics, to evaluate the absurd amount of all kinds of content on Steam.

It also anagrams to:

gridlick

… do with this information as you will.