Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20171111143841/@comment-3547390-20180819182504

That is wonderful to hear indeed, I look forward to this week and hope it all goes well on the server playing side :P

My father is pretty much the foreman of the company. He chooses who stays and goes for the most part, arranges the plans for the people working under him, and has an eccentric quirk involving chairs that resulted in everyone under him needing to stand. The boss suggested that I get brought on as a summer job since his son was going to be doing it as well and he really likes my father. His son wasn't really interested, so he left, while I proved my worth and thus was kept around. People know I am not going anywhere, I am too quick and efficient at what I do. When I was hired, my father made it clear that he didn't want me working under him, as that tends to not go over well, especially since my father is a bit expectant. So while most people are being run by him, I am pretty much an independent entity, only reporting to the CEO of the company.

Yes, Abandonware is a bit of a shaky entity sadly, you never really can confirm the legality status. At best, it is a bit of hand-waving since nobody is around to say otherwise. Look at System Shock 1, people thought it was abandonware for years, then a company comes along and they need to tear everything down. One great thing about shovelware and abandonware is that it is all on archived CDs. While internet links fail, we can still get this stuff 20 years later and see it perfectly fine. You can't say the same for some obscure mod on Gamespy. I really wonder how many hundreds of thousands of mods are gone forever. Somewhat depressing when you think about how we keep moving to more and more volatile methods. We can read books from thousands of years ago, but because Rapidshare was taken down a few years back I cannot download a legitimate indie game. One reason you can't really get gaming OCD, it is folly because it all is bound to be lost in time as we transition off CDs.

That would explain a lot actually. I had a brutal time because I was a Rogue again in Daggerfall. Spells cast by enemies were pretty much one-shot, I had no way to travel dungeons, and underwater was a nigh impossibility. I never really used spells in the game, no wonder it was a real nightmare until the end. The final portion of the game is actually rather easy, you get some powerful artifacts that make you able to handle things far better. But until then? Good luck against Vampire Ancients and Ancient Liches...

Precisely, Oblivion is NOT stable, especially when modded. Look online, you will see it is quite normal and accepted behavior to crash like crazy. On top of that, everything feels... shaky. It doesn't ever flow right, it feels like things somewhat added but the game is fighting against it, resulting in a lot of weird bugs and behavior. Skyrim is more of a predictable game, but has mods that can make it MORE unpredictable than anything I saw for Oblivion. Combined with far better support, menus inside the game instead of altering ini files, and stuff that tends to just work without fighting... Skyrim is a joke to mod in comparison to Oblivion. The number of conflicts in Oblivion modding is insurmountable and there are barely any proper survival mods. There is an entire community dedicated to survival in Skyrim. Needless to say, Skyrim's main benefit is being a lot better in the modding experience.

Nods, transparent water does have that negative side effect in Quake 1. I remember both Rottweiler and Dominus were wondering about the visible holes in the ground after they got their transparent water working. It is just something you have to learn to accept.

Makes sense to me. Ideally, I would like you to play on the "official" version of the server, which has been modded to have the best balance while making things either a bit harder or more interactive than the vanilla game. Since Dominus and Rottweiler stopped about two months ago, I haven't really had any bug testers, so it would be nice to see if everything is fully working in a cooperative run.

Also, it would be great to try out a mystery mod. Not sure what it is, where it belongs, or if it is even a mod. It is just a random file ready to be played that may or may not do something. Definitely the type of crazy thing to check out.

You are quite right, a name with a capital letter is just much more ideal. Skins could be fun to play around with... note that I will need to rebuild the patch for each skin change however, so you might want to pick some skin as your default.

Oh, that is definitely the case with some of the Quake skins. Some of them are absolutely atrocious looking in my eyes. Bossk looked pretty well done and detailed, so I use that one primarily. But then you got stuff like Jason, which just has such a fake looking mask, or He-Man. Plus then you got some things that look like they were ripped right out of the movie, including some weird lines around the edge, like MoleMan and Judge Dredd. Not really the best balanced skin collection; one hope for the future is to find one with more detail. I will say this collection is better than some of the others I have seen.

Morrowind does the opposite of that actually, voices are what the later games do more of. Morrowind is pretty much like reading a Wikipedia article. Except that is every person. So you try to read their dialog, but then a new character adds a new line of dialog that could be found on everyone else. The biggest problem with Morrowind wasn't just the reading, it was the fact that trying to figure out what you needed from NPCs would get so buried under an endless stream of text that it became exhausting to just talk to some NPCs.

Yes, that is pretty much the challenge with any game, even Quake. The benefit to Quake is that you pretty much have to patch everything yourself, which means you learn a lot what things do and can try to avert any conflicts. The official server has had some patched files, plus a lot of mods don't really contain the entirety of the mod due to including portions that were less balanced or would result in breaking things. Some broke patrols, others resulted in the game crashing on certain levels. As it stands, things work pretty nice.

Nods, if you want thieving, there hasn't been a proper experience. I am not even asking for the complexity of Thief, just a game that works stealth-wise. Morrowind will not give you that at all beyond the lockpicking element, while Oblivion will get really awkward. I once broke into a house for a quest, which alerted a guard from halfway across the city to follow me inside. There he just followed me around and watched me. He wouldn't arrest me until I talked to him, so I was able to rob the entire house while he just yelled obscenities. Not really stealthy...

I remember all of that fun. It is really weird to say that somehow playing Thief has gotten easier in 2018, even without NewDark, than it was back in 2001. Thief used to be notorious for me as one of the hardest games to install to the point you would want to keep it installed at all times to avoid the headache. Nowadays things tend to just work well as long as you have a DirectX wrapper.

Oh yes, taunts have always been a part of games as early as Quake, but flipping them off is something I haven't seen yet.