Produced by Niantic-ed Off.

There’s a weird level of hatred for the HD pack. Almost every video I’ve seen on the expansions shits on it and tells you to disable it in favor of the classic look.

Blue Shift was originally a bonus campaign for the Dreamcast port of Half-Life, which is why it was so short and didn’t add any new mechanics. When that port was canceled Gearbox turned it into a full paid expansion despite it having a fraction the content of Opposing Force.

You’re getting downvoted, but the move to fully-voiced dialogue absolutely killed the level of reactivity in games, and AI is one of the few ways to bring that level of detail back without bloating budgets even higher than they already are.

Voice acting is expensive (and makes rewrites expensive too), and spending development funds on anything players won’t hear is considered “wasted money” so you rarely see meaningful branching in storylines anymore outside of the biggest budget games. Conversations have also became short and stilted to keep recording costs and disk space down. Just look at the freaking encyclopedia that was Morrowind dialogue compared to the single sentence sound bytes used for conversations in Oblivion and Skyrim.

I’m not a fan of how AI has been handled by corporations, but if they set up a system where voice actors (and other creatives) could be hired to train models, get paid for every project that uses them, and they (or their estate) have the right to look at and refuse projects the same as if they’d taken the contract normally, I’d be all for the AI revolution.

There’s a middle ground where generative AI is fair to creative talent and opens up a world of possibilities. It’s unlikely, but hopefully one day we get there.

Skittles: “We doubled our output with this one weird trick!”

TL;DR: their argument is that using AI trained on an actor, even with said actor’s blessing, is unfair because it shuts out other actors who used to get work imitating that voice.

I think dueling is still technically legal in a few places.

That’s good to know, thanks! I was mainly thinking about traditional esp/esm mods; the script extender never even crossed my mind.

That’s just how low levels work in Morrowind, unfortunately. The first few Elder Scrolls took heavy inspiration from tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons, including making you roll for everything. Internally the game rolls after each swing to see if your attack hits, so you need to both hit an enemy physically and win a dice roll based on your skills.

You’ll want to make sure your character starts with at least one weapon skill at as high a level as your class and race allow. At 40+ skill you’ll hit most of the time rather than whiffing 90% of your attacks. There is also a massive penalty to hit chance when your fatigue is low, so spamming attacks will get you nowhere.

(I believe there are mods to make it work more like Oblivion and Skyrim where you only need to hit them physically and skills only affect damage, but I don’t know the names of those mods off the top of my head.)

It should be compatible with most mods, or it was when I last played several years ago. Major overhaul packs have engine tweaks included that aren’t compatible and the script parser in OpenMW is/was stricter than vanilla’s so one or two poorly written mods might need typo fixes in their scripts, but other than that it seemed to work just fine.

I’m shocked someone hasn’t grabbed the files from the Xbox release and used their implementation as a base. It wasn’t great, but it worked well enough on a controller considering how complicated Morrowind’s UI was.

*peers suspiciously at username* Hmmmm…

Anyway, OpenMW is amazing and the best way to play the game these days. The only bad thing I can say about it is the expanded draw distance shows how tiny the world map actually is, but that’s both not their fault and extremely minor considering how content dense Morrowind is.

So now my thief can simply stack crates to get to a store’s unguarded second level instead of grinding the acrobatics skill? Nice.

I know they try to remain faithful to the original design, but I can’t help but wonder how hard it would be for the OpenMW devs to integrate a full modern physics engine such as Jolt or PhysX into the engine. Probably much easier than building one from scratch in Lua of all things!

Modification of any other file types (like scripts, configs or libraries) is not allowed and the files will not be loaded by the game

It seems they’re blocked by the game itself.

(Copy-pasting my comment from the other threads)

Bad news for modders. From their FAQ:

The types of files that can be modified:

• Animations
• Textures
• Models
• Videos
• Sounds
• Shaders (only on PC)

Modification of any other file types (like scripts, configs or libraries) is not allowed and the files will not be loaded by the game and accepted by moderation.

So it looks like they are dropping the vast majority of existing mod support despite the new Steam Workshop integration (or more likely because of it, since now they’re responsible for policing their mods). I guess we won’t see updated versions of Anomoly or any of the other mods that kept the game alive and popular all this time.

The limitation on modified configs is especially baffling. In the old games they were the primary way of fixing the game’s jank, and you shouldn’t be able to make anything malicious with them (short of bad entries that crash the game).

IIRC the old XRay engine is open source (or the source leaked and the devs gave the okay for modders to improve it), so here’s hoping someone can reverse engineer and backport any major improvements this edition adds to the originals.

Bad news for modders. From their FAQ:

The types of files that can be modified:

• Animations
• Textures
• Models
• Videos
• Sounds
• Shaders (only on PC)

Modification of any other file types (like scripts, configs or libraries) is not allowed and the files will not be loaded by the game and accepted by moderation.

So it looks like they are dropping the vast majority of existing mod support despite the new Steam Workshop integration (or more likely because of it, since now they’re responsible for policing their mods). I guess we won’t see updated versions of Anomoly or any of the other mods that kept the game alive and popular all this time.

The limitation on modified configs is especially baffling. In the old games they were the primary way of fixing the game’s jank, and you shouldn’t be able to make anything malicious with them (short of bad entries that crash the game).

IIRC the old XRay engine is open source (or the source leaked and the devs gave the okay for modders to improve it), so here’s hoping someone can reverse engineer and backport any major improvements this edition adds to the originals.

I love your username.

As is tradition.

Plus, it doesn’t happen much (if ever) that a game gets delisted/removed, but I prefer having a local copy of game files for games I care about rather than trusting remote servers to always have it available.

I hear you. Games preservation is a travesty of greed. I have a folder full of installers for old abandonware in case the publishers decide to revive a franchise and DMCA the sites hosting them.

Though Steam must have a rider in their publishing contract to never be forced to revoke licenses or something, because delisted purchased games remain downloadable even when the game has been completely wiped from existence. They’re the one store I trust to not completely screw me over - even GOG has had to remove downloads before.

(On the other hand the way they allow developers to remove demos when the full game comes out is absolutely rage-inducing, but that’s a rant for another time…)

Much faster, yes. Unfortunately a lot of people have monthly bandwidth caps and a single game could take up a huge chunk of that, so better safe than sorry!

I have a 1TB/month download cap, after which speed is throttled to nearly nothing until the next billing cycle. With several people using the same connection it’s hard to know how much we have left, and redownloading a 250GB game could easily push us over.