Of the original Dark Souls? Vaati’s series is very illuminating but the story itself is mostly told through the item descriptions and NPC interactions.
This summary on the wiki covers the overarching story!
Ready when its ready sort of thing. Right now it looks like everything build, buy, and character design related are mostly finished.
So now they are working on gameplay and simulation which wont be easy for an indie team considering how much developing power it always took to develop the sims. As it stands there are basic things like sitting and hugging but with clipping and weird animation glitches. Not to mention they promised an open world yet to be seen in a functional state besides lots.
I wouldnt expect Paralives to be ready until mid 2024 at the earliest. Join their discord cause they post monthly updates on what they are developing with gifs and screenshots.
“We had multiple publishers actively coming to us,” explains Pietro, “and be like, ‘Hey, we want to make this game.’” And many of those big publishers were initially unperturbed by Steam’s ban. “The main reaction,” he recalls, “was, ‘Leave that to me… I know everyone at Valve, let me figure it out’, and so they’d take the game, and a month later they’d come back and be like, ‘No, you’re fucked. Bye.’” And seemingly nothing will get Valve to budge. “We’ve tried everything,” Pietro continues. “I was already in touch with a real human being [at Valve] since our first onboarding on Steam… but they were like, ‘I’m sorry this happened… I don’t have insights on the reasons for the ban. I’ve brought your plea to the review team and they’ve declined to re-review and their decision is final.’”
Wtf? It sounds like someone powerful at Valve made a mistake and would rather let this studio close than admit it.
Edit : Caught this on a re-read. Definitely sounds more sussy now.
In the early build reviewed by Valve, day six featured a scene in which a man and his young daughter visit the farm. The daughter wants to ride one of the horses, resulting in an interactive dialogue sequence where the girl rides on the shoulders of a naked “horse” while it’s led by the player.
Yeah, I’m on the side of if it’s legal it should be allowed, but having read about the scene and watched the trailer I think it’s kind of disingenuous for the developer to pretend this was a surprise. Getting that on to steam would be a coin flip even without the recent controversies.
Given that it’s being allowed on multiple different platforms now that the “child riding a naked person in a horse mask” sequence has been removed, it definitely stinks of spin from the dev trying to get more publicity.
Feels like they’re just trying to use the controversy as publicity.
If it looks like a dog, barks like a dog, it is a dog. They are definitely pulling out a publicity stunt. Their site proudly promotes the fact that they got banned off steam. You bet that is intentional.
disingenuous for the developer to pretend this was a surprise
Given that the game is going to release on Epic Games Store, GOG, and Humble Store, I actually do find it surprising.
Steam / Valve seems to be the outlier here.
The description of the scene that got the game banned is not even remotely sexual, just a bit weird / uncomfortable which is the entire point they’re trying to make. And that scene is not even in the game anymore.
I discovered that game long after it was abandoned, and I love it. My dream is a version of this with a slightly modernized UI (especially since it was made for low-res 4:3 screen ratios), maybe more movie genres and mod integration for user content like planet coaster.
An indie developer doesn’t really need these & it may not even be that easy to get one. It’s tied to NDAs & you can use regular xbox consoles to test your own games.
I guess you are right. I was under the assumption every developer needs it. But it makes sense they don’t as they can develop on the PC and just “export” it to Xbox. But why would a AAA developer need this then? They can develop (and I assume for the most part they do) on a PC as well and test the games on the regular console. Just curious.
I would assume that the devkit has more features to make developing easier, and testing on the Xbox console is probably a little janky without a devkit. Maybe it’s the kind of solution that makes sense for a small studio, but doesn’t scale up for a larger one?
I always thought the dev mode on each regular Xbox is used for development, that makes this thing easier to test. I know the specialized dev kits have more RAM capacity in example. I don’t know how much involved and features they provide. Probably some sort of debuggers and the like… now that you mention features, it makes sense. Especially larger games do not have spare RAM and other stuff left to add the development tools on top of it.
Looks like my initial assumption is the entire opposite, this only affects AAA developers. lol.
I’m actually not sure who this affects. Initially I thought maybe you were right, until I considered that indie devs have this workaround. But I don’t think AAA devs will be affected by this much, either, because they already have all the dev kits they need. I guess there’s a possibility that a developer might want to make something bigger than ever for Xbox, but that possibility seems lower and lower every day. Even if they didn’t raise the price on the devkits, we probably won’t see another huge third party game come out for Xbox. When I think about something like GTA6, I think either they already have all the devkits they need to complete a port job, or else they will just skip releasing on Xbox entirely.
The dev kit probably has many debugging & logging features. It probably allows quick switching between the big Xbox & weak Xbox to test both without needing the deploy your game build twice.
Afaik you can only develop UWP apps on retail Xbox. Aka Windows Phone apps. Aka “those shitty programs with horrible UI that made Windows 8 everyone’s favourite Windows version”.
Some say the same thing about literally everything besides working 80 hours a week for minimum wage and sucking your boss’s dick for the pleasure.
You want to create an educational and rehabilitation program for the folks who have problems with it, knock yourself out, otherwise stop insisting on your right to control other people.
doesn’t have to be an ethical nightmare. Public domain datasets on local hardware using renewable eletricity, who’s mad now, the artist you already can’t afford to pay because you have no fucking money anyway?
Training an AI is orthogonal to copyright since the process of training doesn’t involve distribution.
You can train an AI with whatever TF you want without anyone’s consent. That’s perfectly legal fair use. It’s no different than if you copy a song from your PC to your phone.
Copyright really only comes into play when someone uses an AI to distribute a derivative of someone’s copyrighted work. Even then, it’s really the end user that is even capable of doing such a thing by uploading the output of the AI somewhere.
The only sane and ethical solution going forward is to force to opensource all LLMs.
Jesus fucking christ. There are SO GODDAMN MANY open source LLMs, even from fucking scumbags like facebook. I get that there’s subtleties to the argument on the ProAI vs AntiAI side, but you guys just screech and scream.
Then you should provably know that image gen existed long before MLLMs and was already a menace to artists back then.
And that MLLM is generally a layered combo of lots of preexisting tools, where LLM is used as a medium that allows to attach OCR inputs and give more accurate instructions to image gen AI part.
Beyond the copyright issues and energy issues, AI does some serious damage to your ability to do actual hard research. And I'm not just talking about "AI brain."
Let's say you're looking to solve a programming problem. If you use a search engine and look up the question or a string of keywords, what do you usually do? You look through each link that comes up and judge books by their covers (to an extent). "Do these look like reputable sites? Have I heard of any of them before?" You scroll click a bunch of them and read through them. Now you evaluate their contents. "Have I already tried this info? Oh this answer is from 15 years ago, it might be outdated." Then you pare down your links to a smaller number and try the solution each one provides, one at a time.
Now let's say you use an AI to do the same thing. You pray to the Oracle, and the Oracle responds with a single answer. It's a total soup of its training data. You can't tell where specifically it got any of this info. You just have to trust it on faith. You try it, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. If it doesn't, you have to write a new prayer try again.
Even running a local model means you can't discern the source material from the output. This isn't Garbage In Garbage Out, but Stew In Soup Out. You can feed an AI a corpus of perfectly useful information, but it will churn everthing into a single liquidy mass at the end. You can't be critical about the output, because there's nothing to critique but a homogenous answer. And because the process is destructive, you can't un-soup the output. You've robbed yourself of the ability to learn from the input, and put all your faith into the Oracle.
I’m pretty sure that generating placeholder art isn’t going to ruin my ability to research
AIs need to be used TAKING THEIR FLAWS INTO ACCOUNT and for very specific things.
I’m just going to be upfront: AI haters don’t know the actual way this shit works except that by existing, LLMS drain oceans and create more global warming than the entire petrol industry, and AI bros are filling their codebases with junk code that’s going to explode in their faces from anywhere between 6 months to 3 years.
There is a sane take : use AIs sparingly, taking their flaws into consideration, for placeholder work, or once you obtain a training base on content you are allowed to use. Run it locally, and use renewable sources for electricity.
as someone who has studied ml since around 2015, i’m still not convinced. i run local models, i train on CC data, i triple-check everything, and it’s just not that useful. it’s fun, but not productive.
Is that a problem with the existence of llms as a technology, or shitty corporations working with corrupt governments in starving local people of resources to turn a quick buck?
If you are allowing a data center to be built, you need to make sure you have power etc to build it without negativitely impacting the local people. It’s not the fault of an LLM that they fucked this shit up.
Are you really gonna use the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument to defend LLMS?
Let’s not forget that the first ‘L’ stands for “large”. These things do not exist without massive, power and resource hungry data centers. You can’t just say “Blame government mismanagement! Blame corporate greed!” without acknowledging that LLMs cease to exist without those things.
And even with all of those resources behind it, the technology is still only marginally useful at best. LLMs still hallucinate, they still confidently distribute misinformation, they still contribute to mental health crises in vulnerable individuals, and no one really has any idea how to stop those things from happening.
What tangible benefit is there to LLMs that justifies their absurd cost? Honestly?
You misunderstood, I wasn't saying you can't Ctrl Z after using the output, but that the process of training an AI on a corpus yields a black box. This process can't be reverse engineered to see how it came up with it's answers.
It can't tell you how much of one source it used over another. It can't tell you what it's priorities are in evaluating data... not without the risk of hallucinating on you when you ask it.
As much as i love the 1st one, and that was playing it 3 years ago, I will not be playing this one anytime soon. I’ll wait for a deep discount if they are trying to sell us what should be in the base game as dlc
The difficulty of a game I've found to be separate from whether it's fun or not. I'll play a game till it's end if it's fun, even if it takes me a long long time. If it's just difficult, but a bore, dropped.
Nightdive have said something along the lines of “just because we made a remaster doesn’t mean we won’t also make a remake”. I’m still holding out hope they will.
I’m not optimistic though. SS1, even in the EE, was ROUGH. SS2 is not that far off from Deus Ex and immersive sims… really haven’t evolved much past that. That combined with the endless funding faucet shutting off makes me pretty sure they’ll be sticking to more popular franchises and the like (allegedly the next big Nightdive announcement is at Quakecon).
I would 100% love a Nightdive (or similar) remaster of Deus Ex. But my point is more that it really doesn’t need it, mechanically. If you were to go boot up DX after having played nu-Prey or Shadows of Doubt or whatever, it would be familiar. Some rough edges but no more than going back to DOOM after… DOOM 2016. And SS2 (and Thief) is maybe one notch further than that.
Contrast that with SS1 where it honestly had more in common with what would become the mechwarrior games than DOOM (see also: CyClones).
As for funding: Plenty of indie devs have talked about it. Xalavier Nelson Jr is always a good listen (he did a few episodes of Remap Radio). Late 2010s/early 2020s, getting funding for a video game was, if not easy, very doable. That is more or less what let Nightdive establish themselves as the weirdos who go REALLY REALLY hard on loving remasters of older games.
But between economic uncertainty and the realization that COVID was probably a localized peak for the gaming market, it has gotten a lot harder for basically every studio to get funding. Which is likely why Nightdive seem to be doing every single iD/MS game they can or games that are part of multimedia franchises (e.g. Dark Forces).
So Quake 4 is a no brainer (would love 3 but that is multiplayer first which gets risky). And while Nightdive CLEARLY love System Shock (it is more or less what the company was founded on), getting the funding for a full “game” a la 2023’s SS1 is a much bigger challenge than a ridonkulous source port/patch. There isn’t a company that is really going to be eager to fund that because it isn’t part of a major monetizable franchise (although Dommy Bug Mommy SHODAN as a Disney Princess would be peak dystopic hellscape) and there would be a hard sell in terms of it significantly increasing market share over the remaster.
I feel like I’m way more critical of Deus Ex than some, but I’m not sure I agree that it doesn’t need mechanical refinements. From gunplay to AI to stealth there is a ton of jank there and I’d hesitate to call any of it modern feeling. Even Warren Spector was aware of this at the time, with that quote about how it’s basically a 7.5/10 FPS, a 7.5/10 stealth game and a 7.5/10 RPG, but its unique selling point is that it’s all those things at once. Personally I think the story, world, atmosphere and concept still hold up incredibly well. The rest could do with modernizing. Not least the voice acting. But I guess with the Mankind Divided sequel being canned I should have limited hopes about a Deus Ex remake getting funding.
The funding bit makes sense, I thought you were referring to something Nightdive-specific, but the post-COVID slump is something we’ve been reading about for some time now. I had hoped SS1 Remake sold enough to merit funding for a full SS2 remake as well, but maybe I need to temper my expectations.
What are you talking about bad voice acting? DX:MD was all serious and professional but it lacked the comic charm of lines like “A bomb’s a bad choice for close range combat”.
It’s rather amazing that this one guy keeps churning out fixes for FromSoft’s complete inability to understand multiplayer.
That said, I do plan to try the vanilla setup first (finishing up Shadow of the Erdtree before we change over). I just worry about my wife and I dropping into a session and having some rando who either wants to faff about; or, we run into the type of toxic behavior which seems to inundate online games. We had pretty good luck with Vermintide 2, back in the day. But, with way too many years of playing WoW, we’ve also run into a lot of assholes. And we just don’t have the patience for that sort of thing anymore.
I mean the game doesn’t have any sort of text or voice chat so people can’t be very toxic. At most they’ll run off and get themselves killed or disconnect, which from what I hear isn’t too uncommon.
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