Honestly, good. I don’t think every game needs to be this massive, sprawling open world that takes a hundred hours or more to complete. There is plenty of room for a more focused experience. And that’s coming from someone who is a big fan of open world games in general.
As fun as the Witcher is, the world may have been too big. Not every location had a quest, not every quest was necessary… some side quests were kinda bad. And it had a lot of collection bloat. The first zone wasn’t too bad. Small and focused, with collection stuff. It’s pretty nice. But trying to 100% everything after that is a nightmare.
Skyrim is a weird one, the main game is not the main story, but rather all the side stuff. It had collection bloat, but in the form of dungeons and quests. It didn’t really do the whole “legendary gear is in this obscure chest on the top of this random mountain that you have to visit on the 3rd Tuesday at 5am” thing. So while Skyrim is pretty big, it doesn’t feel like nightmarish, collection bloat that’s overwhelming.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was able to take both these approaches and make it work. It has a tone of secrets and things to collect. But it was done in a way that It didn’t feel mandatory. You feel satisfied doing the main story, but also by just going around and doing the side content like in Skyrim. But like Skyrim, sometimes people just want to stop the msq at certain places and just chill in the game doing random whatevers. However, like Witcher all the random collections and side content does feel overwhelmingly impossible to complete in its scope. I found a few YouTube channels dedicated to secrets and obscure side content in this game and its insane how much there is. And a lot of it is missable after certain points in the story. There is no way to 100% this game without a guide. With Witcher and Skyrim its at least possible without a guide.
25-30 is perfect to me. I’m currently playing Mass Effect, and I’m at about 30 hours and on the last mission. Just long enough to get in the world but not so long that it wears out its welcome.
Yeah, a lot of the time games like that are mostly spent running between locations. I just played through RDR2 again and as much as I love the game, most of the ~80 hours of content it has is traveling between missions on horse. I think 25 hours of pure content is just fine unless that 25 hours also includes uneventful traveling.
AI tools can be a “power multiplier” he said, though insisted this isn’t “corporate speak” but “words we’re hearing from studio heads and heads of production”.
So not from the people actually doing the work or buying the products.
I also don’t see any acknowledgement of the training source data, so I’m assuming that despite his assurances about authorship, it’s been trained on license violations.
We as humans can take steps to lessen our impact on the planet. We cannot stop climate change. The planet by design will always change climates. It has changed without humans influence and it will continue after we are gone.
Yep that’s absolutely not what people are talking about when they say ‘climate change’ in this context, they mean anthropogenic climate change, and you know it. Your bad faith response shows you have no interest in an honest discussion.
Don’t be pedantic. Anyone with half a brain knows that when someone brings up “climate change” they’re referring to “human-made climate change” — and it’s completely uncontroversial that the changes we’ve made since the industrial revolution have greatly outweighed the changes of the Earth’s natural climate cycles.
All I ask is in what way are LLMs progress. Ability to generate a lot of slop is pretty much only thing LLMs are good for. Even that is not really cheap, especially factoring the environmental costs.
or a silly, halfwit race to build out the infrastructure (because they’re smoking their own product) that could crash the economy.
You’re only seeing the upsides - make nifty pictures, ai music, whatever - because the entire shitshow is a free or exceptionally underpriced preview of what’s to come. while everyone from google to grok to your mom fails to find a way to actually profit off of it all when they have to figure the costs of the water, power, training data, lawsuits and other shit into the actual equation it blows up.
These aren’t my ideas - please, take a break from your preconceptions and read:
Where is the idea that LLMs will ever to curing diseases coming from? What is the possible mechanism? LLMs generate text from probability distributions. There is no reason to trust their output because they don’t have built-in concept of true or false. When one cannot judge the quality of the output, how can one reliably use it as a tool for any purpose, let alone scientific research?
LLMs are actually spectacular for indexing large amounts of text data and pulling out the answer to a query. Combine that with natural language processing and it is literally what we all thought Ask Jeeves was back in the day. If you ever spent time sifting through stack overflow pages or parsing discussion threads, that is what it is good at. And many models actually provide ways to get a readout of the “thought process” and links to pages that support the answer which drastically reduces the impact of hallucinations.
And many of those don’t necessarily require significant power usage… relative to what is already running in data centers.
The problem is that people use it and decide it is “like magic” and then insist on using it for EVERYTHING. And you go from “Write me a simple function to interface with this specific API” to “Write me an application to do my taxes and then file them for me”
Of course, there is also the issue of where training data comes from. Which is why so much of the “generative AI” stuff is so disgusting because it is just stealing copyrighted data left and right. Rather than the search engine style LLMs that mostly just ignore the proverbial README_FBI.txt file.
And the “this is magic” is on both sides. The evangelists are demonstrably morons. But the rabid anti-AI/“AI” crowd are just as bad with “it gave you a wrong answer, it is worthless”. Think of it less like a magic box and more like asking a question on a message board. You are gonna get a LOT of FUD and it is on you to do additional searches to corroborate when it actually matters.
Like a lot of things AI/“AI”, they are REALLY good at replacing intern/junior level employees (and all the consequences of that…) and are a way to speed through grunt work. And, much like farming a task out to that junior level employee, you need to actually supervise it and check the results. Whether that is making sure it actually does what you want it to do or making sure they didn’t steal copyrighted work.
Have you ever programmed an interpreter for interactive fiction / MUDs, before all this AI crap? It’s a great example of the power that even super tiny models can accomplish. NLP interfaces are a useful thing for people.
Also consider that Firefox or Electron apps require more RAM and CPU and waste more energy than small language models. A Gemma slm can translate things into English using less energy than it requires to open a modern browser. And I know that because I’m literally watching the resources get used.
I am not implying that transformers-based models have to be huge to be useful. I am only talking about LLMs. I am questioning the purported goal of LLMs, i.e., to replace all humans in as many creative fields as possible, in the context of it’s cost, both environmental and social.
I can guarantee you that there will not be a point in time at which everybody on the planet just decides to stop using AI out of the goodness of their hearts.
If someone said this in 1970 it would be just as true as you saying it today. Would you have used generative AI tools for video game development back then?
This really depends on what you consider “progress”. Some forms of AI are neat pieces of tech, there’s no denying that. However, all I’ve really seen them do in an industrial sense is shrink workforces to save a buck via automation, and produce a noticably worse product.
That quality is sure to improve, but what won’t change is the fact that real humans with skill and talent are out of a job because of a fancy piece of software. I personally don’t think of that as progress, but that’s just me.
Typographers saw the same thing with personal computing in the latter half of the 90s. Almost over night, everyone starting printing their own documentation and comic sans became their canary in the coal mine. It was progress but progress is rarely good for everyone. There’s always a give and a take.
As another user said, typographers still exist. And, until now, computers weren’t really a threat to their job security. They were just a new set of tools they had to adapt to. But, if I was running a business and had little regard for ethics, why would I hire a typographer when I could just ask an AI to generate a new font for my billboard, and have it done in 30 seconds for free?
I get the argument that AI is a tool that lowers the barrier of entry to certain fields, which is absolutely true. If I wanted to be a graphic designer today, I could do it with AI. But, when I went to sell my logo to the small company down the street, I’d have to come to terms with the fact that the owner of that business also happened to become a graphic designer that very morning, and all of a sudden my career is over before it started.
That’s like saying that colonies on Mars are the future. In the future colonies on Mars will be the direction things are going, (assuming we don’t global warm ourselves to death first) but we’re not there yet. AI have yet to prove themselves.
The new contract ensures “safety guardrails” around AI, which includes “consent and disclosure requirements for AI digital replica use and the ability for performers to suspend consent for the generation of new material during a strike”.
Great to see. Now we’ll see if this actually ends all of the voice actor strikes in the industry. I know there were a bunch that started due to this strike but actually hinge on the company’s stance on allowing non-union members to remain non-union.
Bitch please. We’ve put up with your crap for so long and we still play it…
Get out of here with that horse shit. Get fucked. Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on. At best, I’ll wait for a sale, at worst, I’m never playing your goddamned franchise again because you’ve run it into the ground with enshittification.
I’m absolutely ready to pay 80$ for a game. But then I don’t want to see scummy shit like lootboxes or advanced access in it. If I pay 80$ I expect to see a game release that isn’t half-baked and has to get fixed with hotfixes and patches over the next two months but that just works out of the box and that doesn’t try to get me to spend even more money on it. That also includes no content that they’ve already produced being held back for DLCs.
This has always been my counterpoint for the Nintendo haters when they complain about price. (Although they are a shit company in several other ways) Because when my daughter wants a new switch game if its a top tier Nintendo title its going to be a finished game with zero bugs and zero concern about problematic content for me.
It’s possible to be dismayed at price raises that don’t affect you, because it will affect others. I was never in the market for a console and do not anticipate buying new electronics anytime soon, but I am sure that this will sadden others who find themselves priced out. Besides, I don’t know what the future holds. Maybe an existing electronic of mine breaks and I find I need a replacement, so the price hikes will touch me.
This is what got me about the RTX 50 series cards from Nvidia. People with 4090’s getting upset at the prices and lack of supply as if they must purchase one.
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