how unexpected! personally I thought cs2 would launch with brand new features and improve on existing ones from the previous title! who could’ve guessed!
I’m very surprised as well, was looking forward to this game but now I will naturally wait and see what gamers say. It’s also going to have performance issues, so I expect we end up with reviews being Mixed fairly quickly…
Honestly, and this game hasn’t earned much leeway by releasing with the performance issues stated, but I think it’s appealing to a different crowd. Cities skylines was always a bit too goofy, whereas 2 has a bunch of new features that focus on actual city management but those often get overlooked by the lack of charm.
Personal note: in that last linked article, they compared BG3 vs SF to Disco Elysium vs Outer Worlds, and I think this is hilariously just showing how much this is about their predilection for narrative-core games.
I like Disco Elysium. I like BG3. They are much better narrative RPGs. I also feel absolutely no desire to go back and replay them.
I go back to Outer Worlds and Starfield. They are much better open world RPGs.
Like, chill PCG. It’s a good game, enjoyed by lots of people. If your staff is more into narrative-core RPGs with linear progression, that’s cool, but you don’t need to demonize Starfield to enjoy BG3. The worst Bethesda game? Worse than '76? Come on.
FO76 had a rocky start for sure, but they have made a ton of updates. It is easily better then Starfield now. If you compared them release to release then FO76 would be worse, but I think they are comparing current state.
Personally, hard disagree. I don’t find FO76 fun at all. The world feels small, the characters are boring, and finding zany houses sprinkled around breaks any versimility of the world, which is the cornerstone of Bethesda’s games.
I think the houses fit in the world, but the world is definitely small. I still enjoyed my time in it a lot more than my time in Starfield, which is mostly open fields with the occasional settlement/work site/lab dropped in. I don’t think Starfield is a bad game, just not an exciting one.
Fallout 76 is a lot better than what it was at launch but it’s still nowhere near close to Starfield. It’s a weird mesh of ideas that don’t really fit together but are still enjoyable separately.
I like Disco Elysium. I like BG3. They are much better narrative RPGs. I also feel absolutely no desire to go back and replay them.
Really? This is crazy to me. I get Disco, but outside of intentionally regenerative games (such as roguelikes/lites), I don’t think I’ve had my hands on a more replayable game than BG3 in years. There’s so much you don’t see in a given playthrough.
I don’t doubt it has new events, new ways that things can pan out, etc… but it’s the same characters, the same goblin camp, etc.I am very big on exploration, and without a world large enough to find places I haven’t seen, or at least places that it’s been so long since I saw that I don’t remember it, I bounce off games very fast.
Yes and no. My second play had countless new characters–three of them playable–several new zones, and a ton of new gameplay. I was constantly finding new places, new encounters, new conversations. I know there are still several zones I haven’t poked around in.
The main story beats don’t change much but there are still a lot of branching paths to get to them. Hell, you could even completely skip the goblin camp if you wanted.
Game studios just don’t do the kind of extra work to cover player choice like Larian did here. It’s why the game made waves in the industry. I’d say unless you really went over it with a fine comb the first time around (125 hours or more), it’s absolutely worth revisiting at some point.
The wording of this is so stupid for a lot of reasons. Specifically with how ambiguous “AI” is. The ghosts in pacman are AI.
If they’re talking about generating code bases, that’s just not going to happen.
If they mean LLMs being used by programmers in code editors as a useful tool, like GitHub Copilot, then that’s awesome and an increase in productivity.
Artists can use generative AI art for quick textures like repeating grass textures. An AI will not be able to match an art style or theme, it has a limited scope and can’t be hand crafted like what’s required in game with poly budgets.
Devs obviously love better tools. These save time and increase productivity.
I think you’re on the money, but I have to disagree with one point: AI will absolutely be able to match an existing art style, if not now then very soon.
I’m just glad Daggerfall got some appreciation. It is horribly outdated now, but back then it was the first game that really let me explore an open world and role-play as whoever I wanted to be (within the limitation of the game of course). I could do anything I wanted, go anywhere I pleased.
I don’t think I ever got far in the plot, but I spend months exploring every other nook and cranny. I still remember the vibrant online community it created in the form of webrings where people shared tips or showed off their screenshots in self-made geocities websites.
Yeah, I’ve spent hundreds of hours in Daggerfall and never got far with the story, but I did figure out how to fly in the void outside the dungeons and shoot the really hard monsters with arrows! Daggerfall is so ridiculously big it probably has hundreds of towns that have only ever been visited by one obsessive kid who made a point to click on them all.
I almost gave up on Starfield because the main quest is just chasing MacGuffins around the universe, apparently? But I started doing the Ryujin Industries side quests and those are kinda fun I guess.
The side quests really make the game. My issue came down to after that first playthrough I did all the quests… So in ng+ what do I do, different choices?
I remember seeing those articles. It was just tough putting together a life and stacked character and complete quests to throw it away for my experience which was another normal boring one (clarify, only boring because it was all exactly the same, I liked my first playthrough).
I like the game, it has a strong message behind it. It’s tough rebuilding your mantis ship decked with other quest ship materials and your alignments when you get a not crazy NG+
Weird that the author includes ESO. That’s an outsource game using Bethesda’s IP. They might as well include Fallout NV (which would of course top the list if it were included)
Ideally AI could be used to reduce the amount of work required to produce AAA assets, and allow that time to go back into quest design and world building. Or just reduce development time so we can get great games more often.
Yeah, another tool like licensing a game engine or procedurally generated content. It will still require a lot of review and revision, custom work to overcome edge cases, and direction to meet your goals.
Just like automating a agriculture, manufacturing, photography, and food production.
The biggest issue is that due to how capitalism works the reduction in labor effort means people lose out on income instead of society as a whole benefiting through being able to have more free time.
People are a bit optimistic about how it could be used, it’s still a bit dumb. In all likelihood it’s likely to be used in asset creation since that’s one of the pricier aspects of game design, automating and replacing the more grunt work stuff. Not design so much as textures, object modeling, etc., which are already easy to do via AI (and easy to train, avoiding lawsuits by keeping things in house). That’ll displace “artists” although texture creation is a bit of a slog anyway.
Should people be worried about writers? Maybe, but I’m not-- at least not yet. AI can create filler, but it’s story writing is abysmal. You’ll still need a creative behind the curtain to build the world, subvert tropes, and so on. AI can assist but if it’s better than you on writing, you really shouldn’t be a writer.
To use an example from when ChatGPT became mainstream, a certain scifi serial magazine had to close submissions because they were bombarded with cheap and fast short story submissions. According to the editors, these stories were some of the worst they’ve ever seen. I forget the name of the magazine, but I thought it was pretty funny since I was playing with the tool and couldn’t agree more.
None the less, it’s probably for the best. I hate making assets, and my wife used to do translation and that’s really boring and under paid. A lot of game design is incredibly boring and laying off people making those things is probably in their best interest, those jobs suck. Main downside is the business class of the industry will pocket the profits instead of reinvesting in their products or reducing prices.
The fuck is what, the jobs in question won’t even pay rent. Translation, for instance, is contract work and pays less than minimum wage if you do it well and it’s not a job of passion. If that’s what’s keeping you afloat, your problem isn’t with the gaming industry, it’s with society itself.
Quitting that work was also the best decision my wife ever made, so fuck off with bleeding heart nonsense. Those jobs aren’t jobs society should have.
Those jobs are jobs society does have even if you think it shouldn’t. You know what happens if ai takes everyone’s jobs that you think shouldn’t exist? No one has any money. No society is laying out plans for this, no one is setting up any systems to help people when this happens.
And who saves the money? Share holders. you have the problem with society, everyone else is just trying to pay rent.
Even if you remove the jobs, it doesn't create jobs. If you remove those jobs the people who were taking them are still there.
Where do they go when the jobs are gone? Is this just meant to force those people to change careers? Did your wife's skillset transfer anywhere or is she still unemployed? Or did she get a new job that has nothing to do with translation?
Well putting it another way, labor market always stabilizes, and it’s only the last few decades labor didn’t raise with demand (at least in the U.S.). But inevitably people find work or create work, the speed of which could be days or it can be decades depending on a ton of factors that won’t fit in a one off explanation on Lemmy (especially given how much people don’t like hearing what I have to say, regardless of my own training in policy lol).
But to explain at least a little nuance, people in jobs with low entry requirements often do change industry and people with training or education sometimes do. Tech companies gave us a great example recently with massive layoffs. Reports are still out but it seems like many of them just found more work or made start ups. It was kind of interesting that some left tech, but it’s a high paying job and even outside of layoffs, there’s a concept that if you want a raise, you change jobs because there’s always someone looking for programmers.
My wife actually ended up in localization, which is slightly different from translation but has room to go up (which she did). Same industry. Not going to dox her, of course, but she managed to get work within a week and has a weirdly high success rate even if the industry still grossly underpays everyone (gaming is a passion field). Bilingual skill is not easy to train, so she was valuable-- she just didn’t know it when she was just doing contact based translation work.
Ugh, and there’s another long winded explanation I meant to avoid, haha. Look, I don’t worry too much about it if you’re American (or Western European). If you guys want to get upset about something, it can and will harm the jobs that were outsourced decades ago. Translation for instance is big in Eastern Europe (e.g. Romania) and automation easily removes those jobs.
Ideally, yeah, AI should be used to automate boring grunt work and enable more people to engage in something creative. Maybe those jobs in the future can transform into something like managing AI’s output and fixing unique edge cases, where human input is still required.
Yes exactly! And ideally in the short term we can minimize the damages that charges like that make. I’ve seen places where factory jobs left, and it’s not great without some intervention.
I’d love basic income but… not optimistic, but we can always dream.
While I know they just wanted to shit on Starfield, but at least I like how they’ve put Oblivion & Morrowind at the top, because I agree those two are by far the best on this list.
As for Starfield, It’s basically Skyrim in space. To me most of the criticisms Starfield gets outside of the -to me- irrelevant technicalities (loading screens, performance) apply to Skyrim as well. I played Skyrim at release and I was super disappointed, now playing Starfield felt largely the same, but a wee bit better. I don’t think the whole RPG progression system makes sense in a scifi rpg shooter, so that part is worse than Skyrim obviously, but at the same time the planets & various biomes make open world exploration more fun to me, though the main story is equally bad & there are a lot of immersion breaking things that make no sense “in space”. For example I love the digipick minigame, but it’s immersion breaking as f. (and then there is that part where I just joined a serious intergalactic organization & after like 1-2 missions they sent me on a diplomatic quest to decide the fate of the galaxy, basically)
Personally I feel that way about Morrowind - mechanically it’s like a stripped down, worse version of Daggerfall while also being an inferior implementation of a fully 3d game than Oblivion.
Morrowind is imo the best from a gameplay mechanics perspective. The utility magic alone was such a huge loss for future games.
I could cast levitation, walk up to the moon prison, magically open the lock, use chameleon to sneak inside, steal stuff from 30 feet away with telekinesis, and if the guards find me, jump down with slowfall and then escape underwater with waterbreathing.
Daggerfall has most of that, and has extra stuff like the ability to climb walls without magic! IMO the dice-roll combat also feels way better in Daggerfall than in Morrowind.
Of all the TES games Oblivion has aged the worst. If you didn’t play it at the time its really hard to be objective about it now. Too much Bloom and ugly potato faces combined with its floaty, clunky combat make it a chore to play today. Game had some great quest writing though and Shivering Isles is a GOAT expansion. It also has an undeniable, if somewhat unintentional, goofy charm to it that I love.
At the time a lot of Morrowind fans hated it for going against established lore and “dumbing down” the series, but it did well critically and was generally well received by the public. It got a lot of people, including myself, into the series. I went back and played Morrowind and loved it so I can see a lot of Oblivion’s weaknesses more clearly, but I still have a soft nostalgic spot for it in my heart.
I absolutely agree with you. And I did play it back when it came out.
There’s a few more things that goes in the “Meh”-pile of changes Oblivion brought to the table. Like the boundless fast-travel system and streamlining magic (although I did like the quick-cast mechanic. But that got scrapped as fast as it was implemented with Skyrim) and so on.
Yeah personally I reckon that Oblivion and Daggerfall are the two best TES games ever made - both are better than Morrowind, and significantly better than Skyrim.
I also reckon that Starfield will be up there with Oblivion and Daggerfall a couple years after the modding tools are released!
Yeah, as someone who hasn’t played Starfield and has no interest in playing it, all their criticisms were just saying they didn’t care for the style starfield was going for. Which is fine, but that doesn’t make it a bad game.
It could be that “NASA punk” is boring to 99/100 people, but that doesn’t mean a game in that style is bad. I think we can all agree that games that are enthralling to a very niche set of people are a good thing, because we all want that game to be for us. We don’t want or expect every game to be equally enthralling to every person.
Starfield could have been a great game. But the general route Beth has taken with Fallout, and continued in Starfield, doesn’t appeal to me. Pointless building filler, environmental storytelling over actual storytelling, radient quests everywhere and so on.
I have no doubt they’ll do the same with TES. Just half-assing it really. Skyrim was already pretty flat, so…
Yeah, Morrowind was mind blowing when it came out. Then I skipped Oblivion, and Skyrim, mechanically, wasn’t that much of a leap over Morrowind. Sure it looked better and had voice acting, but it still feels like a static world. I wouldn’t consider Witcher 3 to be quite the same genre as TES, but imo W3 raised the bar for my expectations from Bethesda. So far I think they still have not made a game as good as W3.
No don’t you understand? They gathered two other people, who work directly with them reviewing games the same way they do. If they don’t like it it means it’s a bad game. Obviously!
Yeah thanks for the heads up, I’ll buy it in a year after release, when it’s patched, for 50% discount on a steam sale. Or maybe in two years foe that botched launch apology hit discount of 70%.
Depending on how it’s done, it could make the game better or worse, just like any other tool. I imagine there will be a lot of growing pains as devs figure out what works and what doesn’t.
I could see an mmo using it for small random side quest generation where any npc could give you a quest tailored to the character. That kind of stuff would go along way to make big open worlds more “living”
ML models ‘learn’ by generating non-human-readable arrays of weights, that’s a little pixie-dusty. But it’s use there is narrow, in a supporting role. My comment was about the core ‘making radiant quests feel tailored to you’ thing. It woulf still be a set of tables with fillable blanks, it’s structure and content decided by humans with a little random or maybe AI-gen content dropped here and there to add variety. Otherwise it won’t communicate the resulting quest to the system.
As a developer (not of games, but still), I would actually be interested in a tool that can generate simple code snippets for me to correct and assemble into a more complex system. But yeah, as you said, there will be growing pains as everyone figures out the optimal use cases for AI in development
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