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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • 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.)






  • (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.


  • 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.


  • Personally I use my hard drive for storing large games that I’m not actively playing (to be moved back to an SSD when I do), small games (<15GB) where the load times won’t be super long, games with distinct levels with loading screens (hard drives suck for open-world games that stream in assets during play), and games that are just too stupidly large to comfortably fit on my SSD (like freaking ARK, which takes up several hundred gigabytes with the DLC installed).

    One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that delta-patching can take ages on a hard drive due to all the random read-writes. Small games (a few gigabytes) can be uninstalled and redownloaded in less time than it’d take to update them. I would avoid putting games that update frequently on your hard drive for this reason.


  • When I played Subnautica on a HDD during Early Access the pop-in was unbearably bad, but optimizations during development fixed the worst of it. The removal of digging and terrain modification alone basically solved pop-in for most areas - the mushroom forest was still pretty bad, but they also patched that later in development.

    Initial load-in will likely take a while though. It took a few minutes to get into the game from the main menu the last time I had it installed to a HDD.