It was released with the original placeholder AI assets, but patched out within 5 days. It’s pretty clear that they just missed replacing those assets prior to release.

I don’t know exactly which assets, or exactly how many… but from several article it seems one of them was a newspaper only used in the prologue, that no one would notice without directly looking at it up close, which 99.9% of people would never do, and could easily be overlooked doing final testing for game breaking issues prior to release.

And the failure to properly disclose could easily be explained by them messing around. Early in development, deciding not to use AI, and then forgetting about it. Which also explains it being left in for release accidentally. Updated assets were clearly made, just never replaced.

The disqualification had nothing to do with the assets being there for the release, it was solely about development as mentioned in every statement from the awards. Meaning even if it hadn’t been there at release, they still would have been disqualified. Hard criteria like that which disqualifies any sort of context or consideration is not fair. Especially when we’re talking about cutting edge technologies that teams will obviously be experimenting with before making decisions.

I call it enhanced autocomplete. We all know how inaccurate autocomplete is.

That’s because they make an insane amount of money by taking 30% of every sale on their platform, which nearly everyone uses because they’re a near monopoly and the alternatives are terrible. Around $3.5 Million per employee, nearly 5x the next highest company, which is Facebook at around $780,000 per employee.

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-profit-per-head-from-steam-commissions-is-out-there-and-at-usd3-5-million-per-employee-it-makes-apple-and-facebook-look-like-a-lemonade-stand/

VPNs aren’t hard to detect, especially if you’re using a major service.

Probably the wording in the article that seems to say exactly that?

The Singapore Government’s Factually website states that all goods brought into Singapore are subject to goods and services tax, currently pegged at 9 per cent. However, travellers are granted GST import relief based on the duration of their trip.

Those who have been overseas for 48 hours or more are entitled to GST relief of up to $500. For trips under 48 hours, the value is capped at $100. The GST rate is currently pegged at 9 per cent.

These amounts apply to the total value of goods bought overseas, excluding liquor and tobacco. Any value above the relief limit is taxable, and travellers are required to declare it upon or prior to arrival.

Singapore work permit, employment pass, student pass, dependent pass or long-term pass holders, as well as crew, are not entitled to GST import relief.

The term goods isn’t specified, but could easily be interpreted to mean absolutely anything they want potentially.

They’d have to host it from somewhere not related to Meta in any way, otherwise someone on the fediverse would find that link and spread the word, and it would be blocked the exact same way. It only takes one person making that connection, Meta knows they’re hated.

The point they’re making is that they don’t need to scrape the data. It is available via federation. Scraping the data is less efficient and can negatively affect the platform performance, versus the built in federation system where that data sync is intentional.

Especially when Meta has a fediverse presence. The reason they’re scraping is likely because instances have blocked theirs, in part to prevent this exact thing.

If you’re fine paying $50-60 for what amounts to a community graphical overhaul mod that’s fine. I expect more from an actual developer with access to the source code.

A remaster should be releasing Oblivion with an updated engine and graphics, and bringing in some gameplay enhancements from newer games. Technically this meets those requirements, but only by the bare minimum and all of those can be achieved with community mods for free.

A remake would be completely abandoning the decrepit Gamebryo/Creation Engine that’s clearly dragging all of their games down now, and has been for over a decade, and actually giving us something that doesn’t feel like it came out 20+ years ago.

I love the Elder Scrolls, Oblivion is one of my favorite games of all time, and the only one I ever bothered to get every achievement for back on the 360. But I won’t accept a half assed remaster for nearly full price just because it’s what Bethesda wants to distract everyone from the fact that Elder Scrolls 6 isn’t coming out anytime soon and they couldn’t just release Skyrim for the 12th time.

Don’t accept paying for mediocre products just because you’re desperate for content.

More than a coat of paint. They didn’t actually port the game to Unreal 5, they just used it to make the graphics look better. The modding community could have done this years ago if that’s all they wanted to do. Skyblivion is more of a remaster than this official one.

With all of the resources of the original development and sources, I expect more than the modding community is capable of.

It’s not even much of a remaster. They just slapped a coat of paint on it.

The Gamebryo/Creation Engine is still there running the game, it just uses Unreal 5 for the graphical elements. And they updated some of the levelling to work more like Skyrim, because the Oblivion system sucked in comparison.

It’s still the same 20 year old Oblivion under the hood.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but calling it a remaster is a bit disingenuous.

They just can’t help themselves. They just have to be violent assholes and prove their inferiority to everyone else whenever they have the chance.

If I’m looking at dates correctly, Disney filed the strike AFTER it was in the public domain already. So it was a bullshit strike from the beginning, not just something that was struck before it entered the public domain and was left over.

The DMCA needs to be updated with fines for clear bullshit claims like this. As it is, there is no penalty for a company to just claim everything. I’d even be okay with platforms like Youtube receiving a portion of that fine for having to be in the middle of the bullshit copyright claims that were overturned because. Give the platforms an incentive to make the process streamlined and straight forward instead of the crap we have now.