I agree, strong typing is for weak minds. I work with a weak mind so I want strong typing.

There’s no difference in speed between typing disciplines. In point of fact, there cannot be. You must know the structure of your data to program against it. Whether you write it down explicitly or implicitly changes nothing but the location you wrote it down.

My guess is that this is really a measure of how much abuse the language will tolerate. C# probably lets you get away with a bunch of things (like checking for nulls) that F# requires.

Rather than saying it’s better than say Oblivion, I’m saying it’s closest (among the ES games) to being what I’d want out of an “ultimate” ES game. Oblivion has mods that fix its bixest shortcoming (OpenCities and various magic mods) but I’m not inclined to give Bethesda credit for the work of modders.

Even Skyrim wasn’t bad. I put like a thousand hours into it. It’s just not exactly what I’d call “ultimate”.

Oblivion was good. It’s dated at this point and like Morrowind combat is not comparable to say Elden Ring. Oblivion solves the whole open world (as in OpenCities) thing in mods, but Morrowind has it to start with. Which is why I think Morrowind is the closest the series has been to my ideal.

Also ES has some of the best, deep, insane lore. The series is at its worst when it tries to be grounded.

Even Skyrim ends with you going to the afterlife to gather aid from the dead and fight the embodiment of the cyclical nature of time by imposing the concept of mortality on it. And somehow that was a bog standard dragon fight.

Unless they’ve made some major engine changes… I feel like it’s going to be hard to top games like BG3, Elden Ring, or even Breath of the Wild.

BG3 has the deep story and npcs. Elden Ring has the emphasis on combat. Breath of the Wild freeform exploration.

Yes, I want a game that combines all of those and in the ES series the closest was probably Morrowind (combat being perhaps the most notable lack.)

I don’t mind the fishing mini game in Breath of Fire 3. You can see all the fish and it’s just a matter of skill not patience. That said, it’s optional (the only fish you need, I believe you can buy) and trying to 100% it is a chore I’d rather not do again.

It’s not super painful in Soulsborne games but it’s still enough of an annoyance they got rid of it in Elden Ring.

I think it’s fun to work down a questline for an NPC, but I agree that attempts to make it more that a simple branching dialogue tend to fall a bit flat. I also tend not to like the gift giving grind a lot of games do. I much prefer to go do things with an NPC and often that forms a better bond than an NPC with more dynamic dialogue.

Polynesian for the original source of mana as a loan word would be cool. I also find stuff like Aztec would work really well for an RPG.

If I had a wish though, it would probably be to make a scaled down world that samples most of the historical cultures of each continent. Then do something where quests need you to do a bit of syncretism to solve them.

It would have to be motivated by the indie scene. Ideally with support from like Godot so people can just build games for the VM and have “native” support.

I’ve always thought we should have some sort of standard emulator format for games. I get that cutting edge graphics are always going to be too much to run through a virtual machine, but a lot of indie titles in particular could do it without problem.

We might need a few generations of emulators but it would still let us preserve games by just porting the VM instead of every game.

I finally got around to emulating Breath of Fire 4, though I restarted to play on the computer since some friends were interested in watching.

Got a few options. Maybe I fall off a cliff while walking backwards. Visit the UK and get struck by a car. Or the Canaanite god of death. Hopefully, it’s quick.

I wonder if Summoner Eidolons might not just be the way to go then? They come in a variety of forms and Synthesist gives you a framework for how they merge with people. Obviously there will need to be some narrative restrictions in place to make the whole “it’s actually a mech” work but otherwise it’s at least premade and works with the Pathfinder rules.

In retrospect, I don’t know what else Witchburner could have been about lol.

That’s very cool! Hopefully a second edition gets made since that would be amazing to get your work included!

It worked fairly well. We went through a number of designs and that was the simplest we thought would work. There’s still a fair amount of difficulty establishing Aggro against groups but that’s basically a feature.

Aside from the elemental planes, what sort of themes are you looking at exploring?

A really cheap way to do mechs might be to steal the Synthesist Summoner as a gestalt class. Otherwise, Lancer is sort of the go to for mechs which shouldn’t be too hard to just bolt on the mech parts.

I’m not familiar with Witchburner, what’s that about?

There was an article that I can’t find at the moment, that talked about monsters that changed the way I approach them.

The idea is, monsters are a symptom. There’s something else that’s wrong. You might need to kill them but that won’t solve the problem and eventually a new monster will appear.

So the way I approach things is by thinking about what’s wrong and how that might manifest. Often the same “monster” works in multiple cases and the underlying cause makes each instance feel different because it acts differently based on the cause.