I sometimes get commissioned to make a logo here and there. This would come in very handy.

I’ve never used vector programs. What is a “live tracer”?

Lower expectations…?

Bethesda Game Studios has been on the decades-long trend of watering down all their proper RPG elements. Morrowind is significantly more jank in combat and movement than Oblicion. Oblivion significantly more jank than Skyrim.

However, Skyrim is over simplified compared to Oblivion in all of its RPG mechanics, and has removed a number of gameplay features that were previously present (e.g. Spell crafting). In turn Oblivion is itself more mechanically shallow than Morrowind, significantly lacking in such things as speech options.

The Oblivion Remaster is so more a reminder of something we’ll never get anymore; an open world RPG that isn’t as weighed down as Morrowind and not as over-simplified as Skyrim (though honestly complex NPC interactions need to come back from Morrowind).

TES VI will likely have better combat than Skyrim, but still incredibly dated compared to other games, and mechanics that can barely be called “RPG” anymore.

Cool. I use Linux too, by the way.

I expect a good company to know and work with good tools, not cheap ones.

Then you’re incredibly naive and haven’t paid attention to the gaming industry these days.

You’ll expect it to always suck because you’re the consumer. UE has, since UE4, put itself in the position of being the number 1 go-to engine everyone thinks about when doing amazing visuals as easily and cheaply as possible. Even indie devs instantly think about Unreal when thinking about good looking graphics.

So yes, I blame the engine for making itself a cheap, lazy way of making great looking graphics, because it’s even effecting how GPU’s are being developed.

That’s Unreal Engine 5 for you. Expect anything made with UE5 to be this way.

Yes. You could already do that in the OG Oblivion. The regions of Tamriel were already mapped out.

In Skyrim you also have the chance to spot the Imperial capital. It exists as a low poly model in-game.

Tuborg and Carlsberg are also made in the same city. Doesn’t make them the same beer.

People like that are incredibly shallow. I’m probably going to get shit for this, but it also exists on both sides.

Example; Kingdom Come Deliverence 2:

Before the game’s launch it was getting pasted by certain people for “repeating the same mistakes as the first one” in regards to diversity.

Then it turned out the game has one gay romance option, and I think one briefly encountered North African merchant. Now it’s getting pasted by other types of people for being “woke.”

Goes to show that such loud-mouths get greatly effected by the smallest kinds of tokenism. So if course just changing the text in a menu is going to be such a big deal!

Oooh modders will find a way. Nexus has already been slowly populating with smaller, simpler mods. It’s only a matter of time before more complex mods come around.

Hopefully the same mod can be updated to fix it in Oblivion Remastered.

It’s normal for a Bethesda game to have every town’s NPC be a named character with routines. So to do that in Oblivion would require programming a whole bunch of additional named NPCs that don’t exist in the original game.

Perhaps a crowd system could’ve been implemented… But… I can’t think of any Bethesda Game Studios game that ever used crowd systems.

Careful! If your card doesn’t support DX12 you’ll not even be able to launch it. UE5 in Oblivion Remastered does not have a DX11 fallback and will refuse to launch.

WHO’S THERE!?

Come out of the shadows, you creep!

Where did you go!?

Hmm… Must’ve been the wind…

Proceeds to calmly walk back to idle with an arrow stuck through the face.

Little tip for transcoding:

Friend of mine in the Netherlands has a server at home with Jellyfin. He bought the weakest A series ARC card (forgot the exact model number), because he found out all the ARC cards use the exact same hardware for transcoding. Meaning there’d not be any performance difference between the lowest end card and the highest end card.

Check that info yourself, of course, but me and my group of friends have been using his Jellyfin for watch-parties and it’s been going great.

Honestly, a number of animals have regenerating teeth. Many animals in the past (like dinosaurs) also had regenerating teeth.

Humans are missing out.

Only with Unreal Engine games, it seems. That includes Direct X 12 implementations in Unreal Engine 4 games:

• The Ascent runs at 2 fps on the main menu, where it basically just renders one dude standing on a roof with a completely red background. It’ll also freeze.
• Outer Worlds Spacer’s Choice Edition also runs at 2 - 5 fps in menus, has low framerate in-game, and crashes every 5 to 10 minutes.
• I have Conan Exiles. Not DX12, but still UE4. Should probably give that a try and see how it goes…
• Oblivion Remastered refuses to launch. Says my system doesn’t support DX12.
• Nightingale also refuses to launch. Same error.
• A couple of indie games still in development switched from UE4 to UE5 and now crash immediately after trying to launch.

Works just fine on everything else. My card is the Arc A770:

• Can get a reasonably stable 40 fps with ultra settings (including ray tracing) in Cyberpunk 2077.
• Helldivers 2 is great. Had to use launch commands to force DX11 at first, but after a few numbered updates to MESA that’s no longer a problem.
• Baldur’s Gate 3 is great. Avoid the option to launch the game with Vulkan, though. It is really badly implemented and causes very obvious graphical glitches all the time.
• I get a stable 50 fps on KCD 1 on ultra. Though I have only played it for three hours recently (started a new game).
• Very smooth in Sins of a Solar Empire 2, except for truly massive fights (thanks to the large VRAM size my card actually does a better job at rendering large battles than some of my friends with more powerful cards).

For none game related stuff:

• Great performance in Blender 3D, though it’s finnacky to set up and I think I still didn’t do it right (can’t get One API to work), but despite that it still performs fast in cycles.

Can’t run the game because Unreal Engine runs like crap on Arc GPUs… Or in this case, not at all. :/

I’ll have to wait till MESA 25.1 drops later next month to see if it fixes my issues.

Besides that, from the few gameplay videos I’ve seen; I don’t like the Argonians. From the reveal video the developers said they’re using the same lip-sync animations for all races/species, and it’s very easy to tell that the large, blunt faces Argonians have in the remaster are a design decision for this. It still doesn’t look right either because the teeth inside their mouths are animated with the lips.

Other than the Argonians, however, the game looks great. Just wish I could play it. This was my first Bethesda game, and the first open world game of its kind I played.

Yeah, I’m very confused. Maybe his favourite mod got banned or something?