UESPWiki:Podcast/2 26

News

UESP:

Extra Life 2020 is over! 
Over $4200 raised by our team!
Streams were a ton of fun
Schnappi trial was a success!
Thank you everyone who donated and volunteered their time
Pylawn’s Blades workout killed his body
A sample of a small side project of mine…





ESO:

The Undaunted Celebration is ongoing.
Run dungeons and the last boss drops a Glorious Undaunted Coffer once a day, and purple undaunted coffers every other time
At the same time, ESO is hosting a free week. The logic of doing this at the same time as one of the more crash prone events could be questioned. The free week ends December 9th, the day before the release of Cyberpunk 2077. 
ESO is also on a 60 percent discount right now for the standard edition, pretty decent. 
Xbox stability patch was accidentally pushed a few days early
PC/Mac/Stadia patch Monday December 7th
PS4 Patch Wednesday December 9th
The Patch notes from the Xbox system indicate what the root of a number of the crashes seem to be.
Lighting and Spell effects seem to have been tweaked and are the cause of a big chunk of the crashes
Bugged dungeons, housing permissions, Item sets not working after death, and other bugs have been reportedly fixed.
The winners of the TamrielTogether guild contest announced!
Dauntless Bananas
Goldleaf Acquisitions
#TamrielTogether—Guild Contest Winners! - The Elder Scrolls Online

Legends:

The final Legends monthly reward is coming on January First. After that, Legends will cycle through previous cards for any remaining month of its life. 

Blades:

Blades had an update! Nothing major, but it’s better than its older brother Legends is doing these days. 


Call to Arms:

Didn't watch it, but saw screencaps in their discord, CtA news Mirmulnir model shown off Steam and Shadow (chapter 2, set to start Feb 2021) introduces factions 
Dwemer 
Dark Brotherhood
Blades
Thieves Guild
Nightingales Sets
Dwemer Centurion and Ballista 
Dwemer Spheres and Spiders 
Frostbite Spiders 
Council of the Dark Brotherhood 
Dark Brotherhood Aspirants 
Flame Atronachs 
Adventurer Wanderers 
Adventurer Delvers 
Imperial Vanguard 
Stormcloak Shieldbreakers
Trolls 
Giant Frostbite Spider 
Chapter 3 teaser with some dragon text, possibly saying vudein Vu - dawn, end of darkness; dein - guard, keep 
Dawnguard!

Other:

The Creation Club update that was anticipated before the New Year has been postponed, without a reason given or a new window for release provided. Considering the timing, the motivation behind the change was likely to avoid Cyberpunk’s release window. 

Supporters

Patreon:

Growltiger
Edward Wolfe
Ailurus 
Vonskii 
Johnna Mullen
Chris Wheeler
Jordan T

Twitch Subs:

Zaph__Kiel
Azaren94
Tomofhyrule
FioFioFi0
Roses_Lion
DaSlackster
Justsmooty
Informal_deviant
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Paisleypaesan

Extra Life Donors



iTunes:


Wiki:



Community Creators Spotlight!
WIll be back again soon!

Scholarly Pursuits
I will ask our guests what they have been working on in the world of TES! This can be game play, wiki work, discord things, anything relevant to UESP/TES that you’ve been working on the past couple weeks / when you were last on the show.

Pylawn
Extra Life
63k Parse in False Gods!
All my body is pain
 
Doc
Lots of Trials
Healer test to heal through the ice prisons (or prisms)
Cleared vSS
AKB
3070
Upscaling stuff
These are probably the most interesting things I can talk about.

Topic: When the games are gone…
It’s inevitable with the world of Online games that there’s a chance we won’t always be able to play our favourite games anymore. If we look back at some older games, it becomes increasingly difficult to play them. So what are we going to do when Legends finally shuts down, or if ESO ever goes offline?

What is sadly the normal fate of an always online game that loses official support is that it is dead. No one gets to play it anymore. MMOs are especially prone to this fate, here is Wikipedia’s category keeping track of 210 MMOs that have shutdown: Category:Inactive massively multiplayer online games

However this doesn’t have to be the case. For example, depending on how the game is setup, it could be fairly simple to patch the game to work offline. If all the game was doing was checking with an authentication server that it was a legitimate copy, it is theoretically fairly simple for the developers to just make it so it doesn’t need to communicate with that authentication server anymore. For games like MMOs, where major parts of the game are usually on a shared server, this is much more difficult, although not impossible. There have been cases where some major multiplayer games have been completely restored by its community (sometimes while the game is still officially running, but that’s not a topic we’ll get into). One example that sticks out in my mind was a Warhammer Fantasy MMO, where the developer stated after the game shutdown he programmed in a “museum mode” into the game. While it would no longer be playable as a game, you could still look around and see what the game was. As far as I know, “museum mode” was never officially enabled, as the owners would have had to flip the switch before they shut it off, and they chose not to.

The most positive outcome for fans is the game going open-source. While some games can be saved from death by an extremely dedicated community reverse engineering the entire game, if a game’s source code is made available it will absolutely never die. Here’s a list of Wikipedia’s significant games that have gone open source: List of open-source video games

With that basic level of information established, here is a look at TES games, and their ultimate fates.

Arena: Was made available for free on the tenth anniversary of the initial release. While it wasn’t made open source, this was the next best thing, and the game was fairly easy to emulate. I would say this is an extremely positive way for a company to handle a game like this.

Daggerfall: Was made available for free on the fifteenth anniversary of the initial launch of the franchise. Basically exact same conditions as with Arena, and at the time really set a very positive precedent for how Bethesda was going to treat its backlog going forward.

Battlespire and Redguard: These two were put in the same boat. 2014 rolled around, and we were all excitedly anticipating at the very least Battlespire being released after both of these spent more than a decade where they were basically unplayable… and we were all a bit saddened that it did not happen. While the free release of Arena and Daggerfall was technically going “above and beyond”, it was still sad to see the trend die. Then 2015 rolled around, and these two were saved by GOG making them available for purchase again. 

Stormhold, Dawnstar, Shadowkey, Oblivion Mobile: Officially, they are all dead as it gets. Unofficially, Stormhold, Dawnstar, and Oblivion Mobile were emulated and were still available in some form. Shadowkey spent longer being unavailable even in an unemulated form. Because of this, copies of the game routinely went for hundreds of dollars. This has recently changed with a working emulator having recently been released. The popular term for these games is “abandonware”, where a game has no official support and is not officially available for sale. 

Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim: These games are so widely available that them actually dying in any meaningful capacity is extremely unlikely. Additionally, there has been a community effort to create an open-source engine with OpenMW. While focused on Morrowind, it has also shown to be a potential solution for Oblivion and Skyrim. Essentially, these games are as unkillable as it gets.

Legends: Oof

Blades: Eh…… 

ESO: Really the main question.