(I know this is a shitpost, but I couldn’t resist lore-dumping)

The Dark Sign is actually Gwyn’s curse on humanity to seal away their potential (the Dark Soul being the only fragment of the First Flame that can be shared and passed on without weakening, he feared humanity growing powerful enough to topple the gods through sheer numbers). That’s why the Dark Sign appears as a flame encircling the Dark. When the First Flame weakens enough, his seal becomes visible as the Dark within humanity begins breaking free.

Shivering Isles rivals Morrowind in my mind. It has a strange and unique setting and most of the content is incredibly well-written, which contrasts sharply with the standard medieval setting of baseline Oblivion (mandatory reminder that Cyrodiil was supposed to be a rainforest, but the devs retconned it to make development easier).

The other expansion, Knights of the Nine, was just a bunch of fetch quests to unlock an armor set and was disappointing in comparison to even the base game (though at least the final boss fight was cool). It also put behavioral tracking on the DLC’s rewards that would disable them if your character gained infamy, forcing you to repeat a bunch of boring travel quests to fix them whenever this happened. There’s a reason KotN never comes up in discussions about the game.

Yep.

Yeah, it ran on AOL’s platform and was a multiplayer dungeon crawler similar to SSI’s other stuff.

Digital Molecular Matter, the DMM you mentioned in Force Unleashed, is just as interesting IMO. It calculated how objects would break under various types of stress and produced some of the best and most realistic destruction in gaming. It even simulated wood splintering vertically when twisted!

I’m guessing it had similar problems to Euphoria since I haven’t seen it mentioned since.

90% of Oblivion’s voice acting budget must have gone to paying for Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean to say a few dozen lines. It’s long been a meme that basically every other person in Cyrodill shares the same six or seven voice actors.

Jeremy Soule did amazing work. Unfortunately it turned out he was a terrible person and he was blacklisted from the industry after multiple allegations were made against him during the #MeToo movement.

I’m still on dual 1080p monitors and a machine that’s more than a decade old and was mid-tier at best when brand new. I’ve only upgraded the GPU and doubled the RAM, yet it still runs basically everything at an acceptable framerate. Hearing that would boggle the mind of my younger self, who struggled for days to get Neverwinter Nights (the Bioware one, not AOL - you know you’re old when you feel the need to specify) to run at more than four seconds per frame in outdoor areas on a fairly new machine.

They announced a 2025 release date back in 2023, and as of the last video update a few months ago it seems they’re still hoping to hit it.

I haven’t seen how they handled the Shivering Isles yet, but if they managed to make the Plane of Madness boring then I’ll be more than a little annoyed.

Ha. Years counted for more back then. Remember, this was back in the day when graphics technology made a qualitative leap every few years. Nowadays things have stabilized and the focus is on boosting framerate and pixel count, but back then each generation was a monumental leap forward in fundamental rendering tech.

It’s a marketing tactic called “shadow-dropping”. It’s a risky tactic that relies on word-of-mouth for marketing instead of an expensive ad campaign. It tends to be used either when the company isn’t confident in their product, or if the drop is so desirable that it’ll sell well regardless of marketing.

We can assume this is the latter, though it’s possible Bethesda were also hedging their bets due to the remake’s lack of mod compatibility since long-tail revenue from modding basically carries them for the several years between game releases.

This is my main complaint with the remake so far. Original Oblivion was bright and vibrant, which stood out due to the obsession with brown-filtered “realism” in games at that time. Trees almost looked like they were painted with pastels.

The colors in the remake are noticeably toned down. It still looks great, but it lost that dreamlike quality that sold Oblivion as a fantasy world.

Oblivion uses Gamebryo. Creation is Skyrim and later games. That might seem pedantic since it’s a newer version of the same engine, but one of the major reasons for the rename was Bethesda ripping out the Gamebryo rendering code and replacing it with their own, more modern renderer.

The modders have still done amazing things with Oblivion, but they’re limited by the ancient Gamebryo tech. Postprocessing shaders, high-poly meshes and texture upscaling can only do so much, especially on a 32-bit engine that can use at most 4 gigs of RAM (2.5 gigs if Bethesda didn’t set the LAA flag and the end user hasn’t installed a 4GB patch).

The original is also required to enjoy Skyblivion, the fan-made remake with much more love and care put into it, when it comes out later this year.

I hope future installments steal from some of their competitors. A few of them (I think Jagged Alliance 3 and some Valkyria game on consoles?) have a system where aiming is done in first person using a reticle that displays a large circle the shot is guaranteed to land within and a smaller circle with an x% chance of it landing within.

It doesn’t make the game any easier in most situations, but it feels a million times better when you can visualize the exact odds and see how you could possibly miss before you commit, plus you no longer need to worry about missing point-blank shots just because the RNG hates you.

I’m in the middle of a playthrough right now, and while I’m enjoying it (I originally came to this thread to post about Remnant 2, then read your comment and realized I agreed with every single thing you said), it’s frustrating how they chose to design things. The games had great intentions held back by poor implementation.

They wanted to make the game replayable, but they did so by artificially limiting what you could encounter in a single playthrough. For completionists this is torture. For one-and-done players it could be a deal breaker.

They wanted endless exploration, but the random maps make exploring unrewarding. I lost count of the number of interesting map features that ended up being completely empty aside from common enemies and some smashable pots (which are empty 90% of the time and drop a paltry amount of basic currency when they aren’t). Remnant 2 is at least way better about this than the first, where the maps were a chore to get through.

They knew one of people’s favorite things about Souls games is piecing things together from obscure clues, so designed the game in a way that the entire playerbase would work together to learn how to unlock everything. The downside is that obtaining many basic things like classes and gear requires ARG-level shenanigans (plus a hefty dose of luck), and if you don’t use a wiki you’ll miss some of the game’s best content.

And the constant hordes you mentioned are a result of the game needing to drip-feed ammo drops to the player since most guns can burn through your entire reserve in under a minute of fighting, especially against the bullet sponge bosses. That Engineer archetype I linked to in my first comment has a mechanic where it regenerates ammo for its special weapons over time when they’re not in use - something like that (or the first Mass Effect’s heat mechanics) would have been preferable if they wanted to force players to swap weapons from time to time rather than get complacent. They clearly played with these ideas during development since there are a few weapon mods and archetype powers that work like that.

I love the gameplay, the lore, the characters, the visual and sound design, hell nearly everything save the parts I complained about, but I’m left with the unpleasant suspicion that these games would have been significantly better if they dropped half of what made them unique in the first place.

Yeah, Microsoft kept the publishing rights to the first game and Tango gets nothing if you buy it.

I don’t know if they still do it, but Microsoft used to give a free month of Game Pass to entice new signups. If that offer’s still open, you could grab it and play the game without giving them a cent.

The Remnant games are a completionist’s nightmare. Want a specific weapon or bit of kit for your build? You need to hope the right world shows up early (three of the worlds switch their order around each playthrough, so based on luck a specific world could be the first you go to after the tutorial, or it could only show up right before endgame), hope the right main quest for that world is picked (each world has two mutually exclusive storylines), hope the side quest and/or dungeon that drops that item is generated, hope the tile it spawns in is placed on the map (usually but not always guaranteed), hope you don’t miss it entirely due to 90% of the world looking identical… and if it’s dropped by an optional boss, you even have to hope that boss is picked from the pool of choices. It’s insane how random it all is.

And it’s not just gear. As you noted, the archetypes (your character classes) are also gated this way, plus have absolutely ridiculous unlock criteria to boot. Have fun finding the archetype that requires a leap of faith off a random border of a specific map into an opaque cloud of poison, then a second blind drop immediately after to grab another item before you choke to death! Don’t worry if you didn’t know about it, it’s only the best archetype for fighting bosses as a solo player. Better hope that world showed up early in your playthrough and you are the type of player who’s okay dying repeatedly while exploring - which, as this is a Souls-like, revives the dozens of enemies between the last checkpoint and the spot you died*.

One of the archetypes was only found through data mining, the unlock criteria was so obscure. I shouldn’t need out-of-game knowledge and to pass several dice rolls in a row just to have a chance at getting to content I enjoy.

It’s telling that the class dedicated to exploration and level grinding is unlocked by beating the game. You’re expected to play through the campaign several times to see everything, but since it’s all random you’re just as likely to roll stuff you’ve already done. Which the developers clearly realized since you can roll individual worlds as side adventures.

* Though at least one thing that sets it apart from other Souls-likes is that you don’t drop or lose anything on death. However, they compensated for that by making currency drops a miniscule fraction of what they are in other games in the genre, necessitating even more grinding.

Edit: and I actually like Remnant 1 and 2. The gameplay and story are good, the worlds are gorgeous, and the voice acting is phenomenal, but it’s all dragged down by the random generation mechanics. At least 2 is a solid upgrade on that front - the first game felt far more empty and lifeless.

Hi-Fi Rush really is a nearly perfect game. Everything from the gameplay to the art style to the animation to the writing is just… *chef’s kiss*

Made me even more mad over everything that happened to Tango Gameworks (and, frankly, the game industry for the past decade or so)

Fortunately for Tango Gameworks, they did find a buyer (Krafton) after Microsoft cut them loose, and they kept the IP and plan for more Hi-Fi Rush content.

Let’s hope the new owners treat them better.