That’s fair, bet they are nice ass pants.

There is definitely a good chance of that. Bethesda was heating up at the time and definitely catapulted the series to international success and fame.

But, and this is just the rambling of an old man, I’m not too concerned about a games popularity. Fallout 1 and 2 are a couple of my favorite games of all time, and basically everything Troika put out are absolute gems. VTM Bloodlines is still a game I go back and play every couple of years or so.

So yeah, there was a good chance Troika would have still gone under, and Fallout would have languished in obscurity, but I’m pretty sure one of what would have been my favorite games of all time vanished into nothingness when Troika lost that bidding war.

Still, I can cry myself to sleep on one my other favorite games, New Vegas.

Maybe, there are a lot of shames in life, and it would have been great to see what they could have done with more dev time. But Bethesda said “we will let you do it if you can get it done in 18 months” and Obsidian said “hell yeah!”.

And given that situation, I am actually glad they spent the effort on the writing and player agency over bug fixing. A “better managed” development might well have been far less ambitious.

Now Troika games not winning the bidding war for the Fallout license, that’s a damn shame.

There is a hard “yes/no” answer to this.

It looks like a first person shooter, so you might expect it to play like a fun FPS game. Is it fun in that way? No, not really. Mods can fix this a bit, but it will never be Doom 2016.

It is published by Bethesda, so you might expect it to have fun exploration like Morrowind, Oblivion, or Skyrim. Is it fun in that way? Kinda, but it’s a bit theme-parky and the explorable world is less “open” than other Bethesda offerings. What you find is always fun, but the “getting there” part is only so-so. (Kinda the opposite of other Bethesda games this way)

So why is it still talked about so much and called a masterpiece then you might be asking? Well, in the spirit of the great CRPGs, the narrative agency is insanely good. Where many RPGs give you the illusions of choice, New Vegas is the ultimate “choose your own adventure”.

While there is no “wrong way” to play a game, if you want to see why people love New Vegas, try to stop thinking about RPGs from the BioWare “paragon/renegade” dichotomy, and instead try to really consider, “what outcome do I want to happen”, and New Vegas will surprise the shit out of you with how much agency they really give the player. In this way, it is one of the GOATs. (And I’m not talking about the exam)

Yeah, Obsidian has a bad habit of that. Crazy thing is they still managed to make one of the greatest RPGs of all time, crippled and short on development time.

Its a bit “theme parky”, but the writing and narrative agency is just so good it’s unreal.

“Kinda sorta” is definitely the best way to put it.

On the incredibly infinitesimally insignificantly microscopically small chance that Trump somehow accidentally but actually stops the genocide, I won’t bother looking that gift horse in the mouth. I’ll just be thankful and move on to the litany of other problems.

No one thinks it’s a case of “weird racism”, but it does seem politically and/or financially motivated. If it was a legitimate threat, they could have informed the public as to the actual threat. The fact that they didn’t implies doing so would undermine the decision.

Beyond that, most folks are not mad TikTok is getting banned, they (myself included) are mad that obvious and legitimate threats to the public relating to social media and data harvesting are being ignored. And to avoid having that conversation, TikTok is getting a blanket ban.

What if it actually is a very credible threat from an outside actor? Is there a world where that’s possible and acceptable to you?

So to answer this question, yes, that is possible and acceptable in two (not mutually exclusive) worlds. One where the actual threat is revealed so it is obvious why it needs to be addressed. Or two, where the government is (or better yet already was) acting in good faith to protect Americans from the other more obvious threats of social media and data privacy violations.

Without one or both of those worlds, it is extremely difficult to assume this was a decision made in good faith. Afterall, they didn’t create rules to prevent TikTok from harvesting data, nor create rules that propaganda needs to be monitored and labeled. They didn’t draft up a Digital Bill of Rights to protect Americans, and then ban TikTok for violating it. They just dropped the ban hammer with a “trust me bro”.

And given that, it also shows how far the government is willing to go to avoid holding American companies accountable. Which, imho, is the crux of why so many folks are peeved with this ban.