🚀 go-pugleaf

Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:

>On Sat, 18 Mar 2017 06:33:42 -0400, Mike S. <Mik...@nowhere.com>
>wrote:
>
>>On Fri, 17 Mar 2017 20:01:08 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
>><dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:
>>
>>>You're responding with that to a 21 year old post?
>>
>>I noticed that it is always gmail users who do that. Anyone know why?
>
>They use Google Groups.
>
>Google Groups, among other things, contains an archive of all Usenet
>posts (well, big-8 newsgroups anyway) and has a Usenet gateway. What
>it does not have is a very good interface that makes it evident that
>some of these posts are five, ten, or twenty years old. So people
>start reading some of these older groups - often re-directed there by
>a search query - and think the comments are new, and respond as they
>would to any new post, unaware that they are necro-posting.
>
>Google is aware of the problem (I am sure I am not the only one to
>have sent them an email about the issue) but apparently refuses to do
>anything with it. I wish they'd give the Usenet archive to somebody
>like archive.org and then kill their usenet gateway entirely, since it
>just causes confusion.

Google *caused* the problem and almost certainly did so deliberately.
Deja-Vu's layout was better and that was the original layout G-G had,
and then google changed it to make it harder to search for things,
harder to sort and much harder to see when things were posted.

>With that said, I think the better option is not to chastise
>googlegroups posters for their error but instead welcome them to the
>group, try to answer their question, and only then explain the problem
>(and possible solutions). Snarky answers just sour them on the Usenet
>experience and we could use all the traffic we can get here ;-)
>
>And the poster is correct; Bethesda games /have/ always been very
>buggy. Daggerfall was the absolute worst of all their games, though;
>it was so bad they included cheat codes in the game so players could
>get past the broken parts of the game. I am not sure if this is a
>fault of the expansiveness of their worlds and complex interactions of
>its various systems that make comprehensive testing impossible, or
>just bad coding practices at Bethesda HQ (or possibly an intended
>feature to differentiate their games from everyone else? :-) but
>Bethesda is famous for its roster of bugs. 

Well they have always pushed the limits way beyond what other companies
even dreamed of doing.

Because of hardware limitations (and cash flow limitations) I didn't buy
Daggerfall right away, not getting it until after patch .213 was out and
I can recall only one thing crashing my game ever.
The Vampire bug;  If you got the vampire dream meaning you were
infected, where you died determined what "tribe" of vampire you became,
and one of the 44 regions was apparently unlinked/forgotten, so if you
were there, the game crashed instead of you dying and being reborn.

>They've gotten a lot better about it, though; Skyrim still had a lot
>of bugs but most of them were fairly minor in comparison. You could
>actually finish the game without it crashing on you! l-)

Skyrim was a *lot* less in everything but graphics - more along the
lines of what other companies always offered.
Massively smaller world and almost no customization, vs the custom
spells and item and even *class* of Daggerfall, and a world that would
almost fit inside one of Daggerfall's dungeons (exaggeration sure, but
not a huge exaggeration.)

You could *walk* across the entire region in a very short time - a
region, that if you look at a map of Tamriel, is supposed to be the same
size as that covered in Daggerfall.
Daggerfall was the size of Turkey,) and Skyrim was 4km by 4km box.
[Ok yes a great deal of that was empty space and boringly randomized
stuff, but it was there, and you could walk across it.

Daggerfall had actual travel times, banks that meant something (gold is
heavy and you got letters of credit, just like people did in our past)
house ownership - and not "oh you did me a favor/quest line and now I
will permit you to buy *that* house" but rather you're at the bank and
they have a list of local houses for sale, buy as many as you like and
can afford, and oh yes, you can buy a boat too (can't sail it anywhere,
but you can have it and store stuff on it.)
Horse, horse and cart for extra storage, loading stuff onto your horse
or cart from the dungeon without leaving the dungeon.
Climbing, flying, and other skills and spells that vanished from the
later games as they simplified things for consoles.
Oh yeah, the biggie - that everyone did not know how to pick locks, only
thief types did - magic users used magic to open locks and big burly
warriors smashed things open.   Realism that is sorely lacking since -
Bethesda now would have the Incredible Hulk, when faced with a locked,
flimsy, hollow-core modern interior door with a structural strength
little more than tissue paper, stop and get out lock picks to get
through.

When it came to depth of things, Daggerfall was an ocean and Skyrim was
a puddle on the sidewalk.  A pretty puddle, but a puddle nonetheless.
Yeah it was buggy, but no other company ever even tried to make
something that deep and complex.

It was a single player rpg on a 486, running on DOS, that was bigger
than some, if not all, MMORPGs today - you have to give them credit for
even trying to build that.

If my math is right, Daggerfall has over 1000x the land area of Elder
Scrolls Online. (Turkey is 783,000 square km and ESO is 27x27, or 729
square km.)

It's the only game in which I ever felt a real sense of scale, that no,
you cannot walk across the world an a handful of minutes.
Use fast travel or spend literal weeks getting there in real time.

In Skyrim you had fast travel but unless it was an annoying walk (like
up that mountain) there was just no point, since you could run from one
end of the *country* to the other in under 10 minutes.

Even the Duchy of Grand Fenwick was twice that size.

>Anyway, to the original googlegroups poster, welcome to Usenet; thanks
>for your "insightful" comment (hey, some snarky is expected as part of
>the usenet experience). As noted, you are responding to a 21 year old
>post but that's not your fault. However, in future you may be better
>of using a proper Usenet client and provider; I recommend
>http://www.eternal-september.org/ (it's free!). Also, you're likely to
>find more traffic on c.s.i.p.rpg's sister newsgroup,
>comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action (which, despite its name, accepts
>discussion on all genres of game, not just action titles)

Xocyll
-- 
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of 
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably, 
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So 
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr