isleofdia [any]

checking thru the Nexus comments of TR, and someone is saying updating from 24.12 will require a new game since old areas got renamed, rip.

looking forward to eventually setting foot in Anvil or the Reach at around 400 hours or so, 200 hours after touching down on the mainland

playing through Morrowind for the first time ever after having bought it years back and only just got to Balmora, and im really blown away by how much more effort was put into the worldbuilding and its cohesion, both by Bethesda and modders. factions, for ex, appear so far to have more flavor and idk, “interactivity” and RP potential for the PC than Oblivion and certainly Skyrim. im invested in this shit, fr.

also it took me about 26 hours(!!) just to move from Seyda Neen to Pelagiad to just settling into Balmora with a v brief visit to Vivec with modded quests and gameplay, im p sure doing the majority of the TR+PC+SHOTN combo I mentioned in my other comment would take hundreds of hours easily. one could prob start now and by the time they reach the end of current content, another update to one of those three Tamriel Rebuilt/Project Tamriel mods will have dropped.

gdi I just started a full-255-plugin playthrough of Morrowind with MGE XE a few days ago containing Tamriel Rebuilt, Project Cyrodiil, and Skyrim Home of the Nords about a week ago and now a new update drops 😭. do I update now (or wait until some patches for new update with other mods also drop) and regenerate a merged patch and Distant Lands files in my ongoing playthru or is this going to req a new game??

someone already put up a mod on Nexus called “OG Body Type” to revert it to M/F 🙄

devs dont want to optimize their games anymore, smh

all the specs from this Remaster is honestly too much; storage size, 32 GB RAM to run it comfortably, prob need high spec CPU and GPU as well…

from browsing the skyrimmods subreddit over the course of the day, people discovered that the remaster contains pretty much the same file structure and formats as used in the original, with plugins able to be loaded up and edited in the old Construction Set as well as TES4Edit. Saw one thread where a commenter mentioned that modders on Discord believe that meshes are “statically linked” or baked into the formids, as opposed to being linked at runtime or “dynamically linked”. seems like mesh edits and animations could be the modding wall for the remaster if that’s confirmed.

roughly the experience i’ve had every time I’ve tried to get back into modded Skyrim years after spending untold hours with modded 32-bit Skyrim. Wabbajack’s automated modlists are the only reason I attempt to try, and when i initially start a game, my reactions are 1) I don’t recognize anything in this game now wtf and 2) damn, my mid-spec laptop from half a decade back just isn’t good enough.

Skyrim modding is honestly too labyrinthine in posdible scope for me now to do much manual adding and tinkering

me for the past three days going crazy with a new portable SSD and downloading all the moddable games and Wabbajack modlists I can stuff. just uninstalled Baldur’s Gate 3 on that SSD after not being able to run just the Mod Configuration Menu properly.

the tepid, sometimes feverish, high of imagining the possibility of fully modded games frustrated every so often by an error or crash. its a mostly disappointing cycle for me and yet i keep coming back

where did you see anything about Skyblivion being out? the only statement from their official accounts point to a release sometime in 2025.

tho allegedly, a leaker on twitter is claiming the Oblivion Remaster is 120 GB and drops sometime tomorrow…

edit: oh wait, post title is sarcastic lol

just about every entry on this top ten happened during a recession/downturn of some of kind lol. apart from Great Depression, there’s two from the Great Recession and the last two were at or just before COVID was announced in the US and “lockdown” and a recession followed after that. not a great omen!

edit: September 5, 1939 is when the Nazis invaded Poland yeesh

went back and watched that section of the game again and man, the party really just pushed that task off onto Vaan for him to debase himself with and then get kidnapped, smh

could this be considered XII’s ‘Tidus laugh’ moment??

for all the Vinland Saga-heads out there, I’d recommend The Bugle Call: Song of War. First chapter is among the best opening chapters I’ve read of any manga so far, especially among action/war mangas, and I’ve read one comment on MangaDex that likened it to the entire development of the first arc of VS, but more cramped and rushed. I might be a bit biased in my evaluation of it tho, given that I also decided to listen to the Tchaikovsky Manfred symphony while reading it, and listening to the first movement while reading the first chapter was a transcendental experience for me.

Issak is one I found and binged yesterday which I also enjoyed. Classic ‘one apprentice seeks revenge on another for killing their master’ premise, only its happening in the Holy Roman Empire at the outset of the Thirty Years’ War. My only foreknowledge of the Thirty Years’ War comes from Matt Christman’s Hell on Earth podcast series, but it was still pretty pog when Wallenstein makes his appearance. One of the major charas is a follower of Thomas Müntzer, tho I doubt that connection will be taken as far as it could. CW for gore thruout, and attempted SA in first chapter.

If you don’t mind long strip style, then I’d like to plug again Martial Wild West. A wuxia set in Han Dynasty-settled Turtle Island; it gave me a lot of Kenshi vibes. Am waiting for it to come out of hiatus…

does anyone happen to know why Kazakhstan is so strong at this and the like? Prob tangential, but I’m reminded of how Kazakhstan consistently produces Olympic medallists in combat sports like boxing and wrestling.

the difference in fitness on display between the NYPD and Team B in the obstacle course is staggering. NYPD just waddling about as if they were elementary schoolers on a playground (and then DNFed less than a quarter into the overall track lmao) while watching Team B’s performance made my core hurt.

also the Emirati commentator went hard for Team B’s run lol

personal nitpick with Rimworld since ive only run with small colonies of about 6 - 10, but I wish base game was more… flexible when it came to moving on the world map, even for temporary locations, wasn’t so heavily focused on the home colony to the point where I have to tab back and forth between the majority of my characters exploring a map and one or two guys managing home base. sometimes I wonder what’s the point of generating a world map when I wouldn’t be able to explore more than a quarter at best because the game requires u stay in one location

Kenshi: after hundreds of hours put into the game and going thru multiple cycles of starting a new game, struggling to make money, fighting, losing, fighting again, building and automating a base, etc, and all the emergent storytelling that comes out of that – I feel like it was only the combat-related systems that were fully fleshed out and ultimately, the only way to interact with the world in a meaningful way is through combat. Though the visuals and worldbuilding do great of offering the promise of a lot, the dialogue system is not developed enough to allow for any dialogue mods that integrate well with and impact the world or player characters. Animations systems are similarly limited, with the system allowing for minute customization and replacement of combat animations, and very little room for any animations not combat-related.

believe they’re talking about Yellowstone, directed by Taylor Sheridan. His whole directorial output since Yellowstone, including two prequels, Landman, maybe Tulsa King as well, center around private property struggles and “expanding the frontier”.

Out of all the manhwa (mostly action) I’ve been casually reading, I’ve been most impressed by “Martial Wild West/Wild West Murim”. It’s an isekai where the Han dynasty was the first entity to colonize the United States, but apart from like the first chapter, there’s barely any narrative focus on the reincarnation aspect of the MC, much more focus on what a Han-dynasty-colonized-western-US looks like and how it’s structured, its connection to the mainland, and of course, martial arts. Has an interesting arc some chapters in about how indigenous Americans interact with the Han settlers. And the art is outstanding imo, a departure from the more anime-esque aesthetic other action manhwas I’ve read use. Reminded me quite a bit of Kenshi, though maybe I’m leaning too much into that comparison given that they both share desert environments and martial arts.

Otherwise a fan of:

How to Use a Returner/Regressor Instruction Manual

The Skeleton Soldier Failed to Defend the Dungeon/Skeleton Soldier Couldn’t Protect the Dungeon

I Became the Tyrant of a Defense Game

Manhuas:

Nan Hao & Sheng Feng

Eternal Club/I Built a Lifespan Club (plot goes absurd once the MC starts to go international with his operations imo)

Tamen de Gushi/Their Story (RIP to this cute lesbian love story)

Legend of Star General

Release That Witch (think someone once described this as ‘fantasy Dengism’?)

Iron Ladies/Metal Goddess Soldier (in which I think this was written from a Chinese nationalist perspective and the antagonists are like, pretty blatantly a NATO/American empire analogy, and they get their shit violently wrecked)

Andy Kim’s campaign page features several blurbs where he touts his work as a “civilian advisor to American generals in Afghanistan under both Democrats and Republicans” and he loves to bootlick the troops, so “fucked” is an apt descriptor. Also linked being anti-DPRK to him being pro-Israel, but that’s par for the course tbh.