“Acted alone” pretty much always means stochastic terrorism. Very few people radicalize themselves.

It’s in a weird halfway position, though it’s less cRPG and more action RPG with each iteration. The character creation in Daggerfall wouldn’t be out of place in a tabletop game.

The Elder Scrolls, infamously. Since they are open-world games, they use heavy level scaling so you can explore wherever you want from the very beginning.

It was alright in Morrowind. There, your level just controlled which enemies appeared, so you wouldn’t encounter high-tier daedra in the overworld until your level was in the teens and you actually stood a chance.

Oblivion utterly fucked it up by having everything scale to your level. You could revisit the starting area and a normal bandit would be wearing a full set of magical heavy plate worth tens of thousands of gold while demanding you hand over twenty coins to pass. Combine that with a weird player leveling system that punished you for picking non-combat skills or leveling up as soon as you could, and people loathed Oblivion’s leveling mechanics.

Skyrim’s scaling was somewhere in the middle, which lead to combat being inoffensively bland the whole way through.

I think Blackwater renamed to avoid tarnishing whoever was hiring them, not because they themselves disliked their reputation. If their employment wasn’t at the mercy of elected officials who have to care about optics, I bet they’d still be parading around their old name with pride.

It’s been decades and the first name that pops into my head when someone says ‘PMC’ is still ‘Blackwater’. Do you have any idea how much war crime they’ll need to do to get back that level of brand recognition?

Nah, it’s just the most horny that are also motivated enough to make the mod. There are plenty of others for other games.

Between paid commissions and putting downloads behind affiliate links (later replaced with Patreons), they were also a way for horny teenagers to make a lot of money. Porn and furries (and furry porn) apparently bring out the big spenders.

You know how sometimes you can get the camera to clip through a character model’s head and see how they have a fully modeled mouth and eyes inside? My understanding is that the Cinematic Mod in question did the same thing with one of its Alyx models, just with a fully modeled womb and ovaries and such. It was clearly meant for making porn, but got added to the mod anyway.

Though I only know of the FakeFactory stuff third-hand via hearing other people tell the story, so it’s possible things got exaggerated along the way.

I don’t see FakeFactory on the credits page, though it wouldn’t surprise me if he changed his username after all the mockery he got for fully modeling Alyx’s internal reproductive organs.

If it worked anything like the GLOO Cannon from Prey, I would have been satisfied even if it were the only major innovation in the episode.

The downfall began when Ubisoft abruptly wrote Lucy out of the story after Kristen Bell asked for more money. Then they killed off the literal main character one game later, and nowadays you’d be excused for forgetting Desmond ever even existed given how little the modern day matters to the plot.

Control shares the same universe and is more actiony, from what I’ve heard. It might be worth checking out if you haven’t already.

And to complete the trifecta, there’s also Aseprite for pixel art (it’s free if you compile it yourself).

Now I kind of want a Flintstones RPG.

Right, and they should have fixed them - especially since people literally put together wiki pages documenting every known bug in the game. But all Bethesda did was upgrade the engine a bit (make it 64-bit, add some new graphical effects, implement support for microtransactions) and release the same broken game again and again. The engine upgrades fixed a few crashes, but for some reason Bethesda refuses to patch logic errors in their Papyrus scripts (the code that controls the actual game content) even though those are way easier to fix than engine bugs.

If asked, I’m sure they’d say it was to avoid breaking mod compatibility or something, which is kind of bullshit considering nearly every mod works with the unofficial patches that do what Bethesda refuses to. And they’ve been like this since the very beginning. Their studio is synonymous with bugs.

It’s mind-boggling how they get away with putting such little care into their multi-billion dollar franchises.

Because Bethesda didn’t focus on fixing script bugs in those re-releases, only engine ones. The game logic remains a tangled mess of bugs and the unofficial patches that actually fix things barely needed to change at all to support each new edition.

To paraphrase an old tweet: “parentheses - for when every thought comes with bonus sub-thoughts”.