Sno

There was definitely some pretty harsh scaling in Fallout 3 too, but the experience certainly wasn't smoothed out as much as Oblivion's. I was also probably being a little too hard on Skyrim, i do think it handles it a lot better than Oblivion did. Oblivion was the low point here, the whole game just feels so smoothed over and uniform, I think you need those peaks and valleys.

Yeah, absolutely, if you fell behind the growth curve in Oblivion, you would get absolutely wrecked by scaled enemies on the default difficulty. Skyrim has a similar scaling scheme, but it's harder to fall significantly behind the curve in that game because of the new character growth systems. Oblivion was also really bad about just taking weak enemies and ramping up their stats until they can hurt you, that was the worst thing about how they handled it. Morrowind did do some enemy scaling, but in the sense that it would actually start inserting new and tougher enemies in amongst the weaker ones. I also really liked how there was a kind of implicit hierarchy of challenge. Wild animals kind of came lowest on the totem pole, then your generic cavern bandits, then the undead, and then dwemer automatons a little bit beyond that, then you're into the sixth house enemies, and finally the daedra as the big scary end-game enemies. In Oblivion and Skyrim, you're never really faced with making a choice about having to steer clear of a location that seems like it might be really dangerous to you, because you can kind of safely assume that everything will be scaled to your level. (Again, Skyrim is a bit better about it than oblivion, they do actually do a bit of difficulty gating.) I think that's a big part of why Oblivion, and Skyrim to a lesser extent, can have a feeling of sameness in all their dungeons. The other big issue with scaling is that it... When it comes to discovered items and quest rewards, you don't, as much, get those highs of "Aha! I found this awesome thing in this dungeon!" There was a super cool multi-cell dungeon in Morrowind started from a quest given by a random bar patron somewhere in Vivec that i used to do early on in most of my Morrowind playthroughs. It had a lot of really great items, including a few daedric ones. That doesn't really happen in Oblivion and Skyrim, since you mostly always get level-appropriate rewards. Beyond that, glass armor and daedric armor are really rare in Morrowind, there's only a handful of NPC's that wear glass armor, and maybe only one that has daedric. Contrast to Oblivion, hit level 20 and the game decides to just start throwing bandit after bandit with full suits of glass armor at you. It makes the cool stuff feel not so cool. (This specific issue, i feel, Skyrim is a lot better about.) In short, i think dynamic scaling sucks. Kind of a bit of both? There's just so much to those games, and it tends to overlap in unexpected ways. It's not like TES games are simple, linear paths. I love getting into a TES game and just picking random direction to head off in, just set out exploring. Finding new quests, incidental events, dungeons, towns, settlements, whatever. (Or, when it comes to Oblivion and Skyrim, witnessing quirky AI routines do ocassionally surprising things.) I think you can tend to miss out on a lot in those games if you're determined to stick to the main quest paths, there is so much going on in every TES game.

Glad to hear.

I concur, fuck everything. What a nightmare. Edit: Also, apparently widespread attacks are now happening. So uh... Has this site been patched yet?

What armor do you have?

I also find that annoying. I seem to recall it being more prevalent in Oblivion than it was in Skyrim, but still annoying. It's a thing that inevitably crops up in the process of normal play and it's especially hard for me to ignore. It might well just be a different kind of symptom for the same thing eot was talking about, however. Knowing too much about the game to simply take it at face value. You sort of have to force yourself to take a few steps back.

I really loved Winter Solider, thought it was a great movie. I don't know how i'd rank the other MCU movies, but Winter Soldier is right up near the top. There's so much that works about that movie, any issues i could raise are so minor. (I liked the first movie a whole lot too, but it's so different.) The thing i'm finding admirable about the MCU is the consistency of that franchise. It's nine goddamned films in, and when i think of the worst movie in that series, it's a movie i still mostly enjoyed. (Right now, i'm thinking Dark World is probably the most problematic entry in the series. I also think Iron Man 2 is way more forgiveable now that the things it tried to set up have actually paid off, even though later films ended up being much better at seeding in connections without pulling away from the main narrative. It's a different kind of filmmaking though, this huge interconnected thing.) There are so many other studios preparing efforts to try and mimic the succes Marvel has had with the MCU, and i'm pretty sure most of them are going to fail hilariously. (I want to believe JJ Abrams and Disney can pull off their plans for Star Wars, and that's probably the only one i'm hopeful for.) Probably one of the things that has been keeping the MCU thriving is their willingness to play around with different tones and even completely different genres, the DC/WB films could probably learn from that. Which plot holes?

I guess i've never really looked at TES as a game to "beat". To me, it's a tool for generating stories, and abusing the broken alchemy system to be incredibly overpowered isn't, to me, an interesting story to play a part in. Saying these things, i'm realizing that i hold TES games to completely different standards than i do most other games. I guess perhaps it would be awesome if you could have a game like TES that was also mechanically rock solid, but i generally try to be pretty realistic about games that are so huge and so ambitious. Skyrim got closer than ever before to that lofty ideal, but you still ultimately end up with things like how much people are willing to waste their time grinding levels for blacksmithing. Where does it stop? Does that need to be "fixed" too?

TES games aren't really games you should try to min-max, is the point to make. The flaws are absolutely there, but the experience is so inherently adaptable that it doesn't really matter unless you're prone to noticing and being bothered by such things. Magic and alchemy in Morrowind are also completely broken, but you won't really care because it's fun regardless and there's nothing in the game that pushes you to notice that something's wrong.

Morrowind and Oblivion's leveling systems are both completely broken. Daggerfall's might have been too, i don't remember. The crux of it is that when you create your character, you choose your major skills, the skills that contribute to gaining a level. Nothing else does, but everything still contributes to the size of the attribute bonuses you get when you level up. This creates a weird situation where focusing on your primary skills nets you a substantially weaker character than you would otherwise have ended up with by focusing on your minor skills - only intermittently using major skills so you can level up and reap the rewards from focusing on those minor skills. I mean, the TES games are not competitive in any way and consistently featured adjustable difficulty, but it was still a dumb and broken and completely counter-intuitive system. I always hated it, i was glad to see it gone in Skyrim.

This is a good, frank interview that lets slide a lot of interesting details. I like the idea that you may not necessarily even know if something is hostile, or under which conditions it may turn hostile. Gone Home is also cited as an influence, so presumably Soma will have some manner of ghosts.

The way i understand it, the heartbeat function is used to verify the integrity of a secure connection to a server, it sends packets back and forth between the host and the client and if that goes out of sync or is interrupted, the server is supposed to know something is wrong with the connection. The problem is, it doesn't validate the contents of that heartbeat, so a malicious attacker can say it's sending data to the server when it really isn't, and when the server tries to respond, it starts spitting out random memory contents because there was nothing else to actually send back. The guy who actually wrote the offending piece of code was out there doing some interviews about this, he says it was a simple mistake and makes the argument that for something as important and widespread as openSSL, there aren't enough people peer-reviewing contributions.

Yeah, it's been useful for that.

http://www.cnet.com/news/which-sites-have-patched-the-heartbleed-bug/ Cnet compiled a much more comprehensive list that seems to seeing ongoing updates and additions. However, one of the issues here is that while many big sites have patched the hole, many have yet to renew their ssl certificates as a related precaution. Also, at the end-user level, most of your stuff will likely see automatic updates to fix any possible vulnerabilities, but you should all check the manufacturer sites for your routers, or the sites for your custom router firmwares, to see if those are vulnerable.

WHAT IS HAPPENING?!

Not really, no. TimeShift explicitly just gives you awesome time manipulation powers, but the abilities in Singularity tend to work more like BioShock plasmids, with lots of strange and situational effects. They kind of have the same plot conceit though, but i think Singularity ends up being a little more satisfying while TimeShift doesn't really go anywhere or do anything. (I actually like TimeShift quite a bit, but it's definitely a flawed thing.)

I thought the 2009 Wolfenstein was pretty great, but it doesn't seem like anybody played it. It was quite similar to Raven's exceptional Singularity, which released the very next year, and which similarly seemed to not meet sales expectations. (Likely leading to Raven's current demoted position of being an asset farm for CoD.)

Machine Games is a bunch of ex-Starbreeze leads, and i think The Darkness and the Riddick games are all phenomenal. So yeah, i'm super excited. Additionally, while it's more tangential, I also felt that Raven's outings with the series were always quite good, so Wolfenstein as an entity never exactly went away in my view.

It's been years since i played Morrowind, but i seem to remember that sticking with lighter weight weapons early on would significantly improve my chances on the hit/miss rolls, i believe because you eat through your stamina at a much lower rate with those weapons. (Low stamina negatively affecting your chance to hit.) I'm a big fan of the TES games, and Morrowind remains my favorite game in the series. It was always more than a little crash prone, and while it's filled with ambitious and interesting systems, it would still be pretty forgiving to say they were flawed. The reason i ended up sinking probably hundreds of hours into it was mainly because its world, Vvardenfell was such a vivid and interesting location to explore. I also loved having a quest giver tell me road directions to a location, and then me having to head out and follow road signs to get there. No easy quick travel and no always-present quest marker to absent-mindedly chase up and over mountains.

Password generators always just seemed to me like an extra vector for something to go wrong. Anyways, lastpass also has a web tool for checking websites. (That appears to have updated since i last looked at it, it's significantly more useful now.) Edit: Codicier beat me to it, looks like. I've seen a lot of news sources make inqueries to various companies and... It's all very ambiguous. Particularly with a lot of the larger services like Google, it seems like parts of the network have been addressed while fixes are still pending for other servers.

How does lastpass work? What does it do?

So heartbleed's really scary, maybe the scariest security hole the internet's ever seen. These two articles sum it up fairly well. (Other reports indicated that the attacks can even be directed to compromise the site's main encryption keys.) A lot of bigger and more critical sites are reporting that they've closed the vulnerability, but it had existed for two years and it's potentially been exploited for months. Steam, in particular, has apparently been hit pretty hard. (I've seen people even advising to completely reset steamguard, claiming that secure session tokens may have even been compromised, not just passwords and personal information.) The other scary part here is that if you go around resetting your passwords, there are only very limited ways to know which sites were vulnerable and which sites have since closed the vulnerability. You can do your due dilligence and be just as at risk as before. That's where the real damage is going to happen, over the next few weeks while smaller websites lag to patch the vulnerability. How about the idlethumbs sites?

Some of the rapiers deal hilarious amounts of damage when combined with enchanting spells. You give up the kick with the rapiers though, i didn't like that.

There are two classes of greatsword in the game, keep in mind. The Zweihander is an ultra greatsword, but there are also standard greatswords that swing much more quickly, still scale with strength, and are generally pretty awesome. Yeah, i played a dex/faith knight and mainly used medium shields and basic longswords. I stuck with the silver knight shield mostly, and either the barbed straight sword or the balder side sword, depending on the situation. Among other things, i also had heavy armor with havel's ring, along with wrath of the gods, great magic barrier, and sunlight blade for miracles.