Glad to hear this. Years ago I worked with Obsidian engineers (who may or may not still be there, I have no idea) and I absolutely loved the systems they had built for their games. They were able to create games with a massive amount of content with a relatively small team of engineers, so I’ve always rooted for them.
I liked (didn’t love) and completed the first Outer Worlds but I thoroughly enjoyed Grounded - even though I never played through to the end game. I’ll definitely give this one a go.
Good news! You’re allowed to skip them and instead play the hundreds to thousands of older games you’d surely love, but that slipped under your radar at the time. Plenty to hold us over until publishers and studios learn their lesson.
There will always be passionate developers eager to put down the work and make good games. There will be a lot of shit they will try to shovel down our throats, but it’s just as easy to ignore it.
I think it will go the way of the NFT. People who don’t understand tech will hype it beyond belief and then the actual developers will go “this is useless” and not use it.
Well, maybe not exactly like NFTs because NFTs were actually useless while AI looks like it might have some actual niche use.
honestly for most people i feel like AI has already a solidified use, “the magic thing that answers all your questions and generates pretty pictures*”
compare that to NFTs which had strictly no use for the average person. i think what we’re seeing with AI is quite different
will the hype maintain itself when the AI bubble bursts, the VC money dries up, free options get removed and paid options significantly ramp up in price? that remains to be seen
*(the fact that the answers and pictures are often garbage is irrelevant. as long as they’re good enough often enough, it has value to many people)
Once the VC funding is gone and AI companies need to become profitable, I don’t see myself as an individual paying for some LLM, at best I’d try to setup a free LLM like deep seek on local hardware, but maybe corporations might pay for AI access for their employees if they think it provides some benefits, even if that’s not really true in the long run
Wild. Sounds like Subnautica 2 dodged a bullet. Hope they sue the literal pants off them and then build the spiritual-Subnautica-2 we all always wanted with the damages awarded and the Early Access money that they know we’re going to give them the moment they announce it.
And RIP Inzoi, we barely knew you before you got infested with AI bullshit and it sounds like that’s only going to accelerate to hyperspeed now.
Inzoi was dead on arrival in terms of quality already. It’s so half baked and barebones the AI crap only served as the moldy cherry on top. Some players have pointed out it was obviously a K-Pop idol simulator before they marketed it as a Sims game. There are still a number of interactions in that AI slop for an excuse of a game that only make sense in this context. Oh well, luckily we live in the golden age of Indie games and don‘t have to put up with this.
Ehh, I wasn’t worried about that until the AI stuff happened. Even a K-Pop idol simulator would’ve been an interesting start. Filling in the content to a level that creates compelling stories and gameplay takes time. It takes years of expansions for Sims games to start getting decent levels of content and stop feeling soulless and shiny and bland compared to the previous game (arguably Sims 4 hasn’t even gotten there yet but that’s more of a Sims 4 problem).
Once Inzoi started trying to fill in the content with AI they thought they could rely on that to shortcut their way to success but I knew it wasn’t going to work. It needs the human touch, it’s gotta be quirky and have its own individual character. K-Pop idol might’ve been exactly what it needed to stand out if they had leaned on that instead of trying to fill in the gaps in content with bland and soulless AI, which is exactly what life sim games DON’T ever need more of.
I don‘t think a K-Pop simulator would‘ve sold very well. Especially not in the west because a lot of it seemingly revolved around romantic relationships and keeping them secret at all cost. Even as little as being seen with the opposite sex in public is career suicide for an idol. That seems like a tough pitch for a game tbh.
I’m not going to pretend I can judge its potential for commercial success, I’m just saying I think that hypothetical K-pop idol game would’ve been a more interesting game than Inzoi is currently or seems likely to ever be in the future I see for it now. That said, I’m not dying on this particular hill and I don’t have any particularly strong opinions about it so if you think I’m wrong about that you’re totally entitled to that point of view and I’m not going to try to defend my beliefs any further, I think I’ve said all I could possibly have to say about Inzoi at this point. Where the game goes from here is something which reality will eventually tell us, but I’m not optimistic about it.
I can see your point, though I belief it would probably be as superficial and soulless as an idol game as it is now. But I completely agree it‘s not a hill worth dying on. Inzoi in it‘s current form is a bit of a disaster and it will probably stay that way.
Bruh, I still haven’t bought the first game because I don’t wanna give money to Microsoft… now I won’t buy the sequel because I don’t wanna give money to Krafton. Madness.
Marcin Paczynski told The Game Business he could “write a book”
Please do
He didn’t even know that he owned the rights because this was just a package with his inheritance … we have a lot of stories like that.
Wow, no wonder the dude wasn’t aware. “Oh, just a box with papers. Meh”
stories like developers whose physical documentation of IP ownership was torched in a fire
It’s always interesting to know which games’ rights might seem “completely lost”, just so we can 🏴☠️ in peace. Say, wasn’t this strategy something GOG did originally? Just sell and see if the current rights-holder shows up?
That’s Microsoft now. And they’ve never seemed gung ho about GOG (I can’t think of any MS game that GOG listed while MS had control over it). Considering their “Dreamlist” thing and the status of Freelancer on it, I’m sure GOG has been lobbying hard with Microsoft to work with them, though.
Oh shit it is, and is owned by a Microsoft subsidiary that owns all sorts of games on GOG. Elder scrolls, Fallout, Doom, Quake, Dishonored, and more. GOG would be screwed if they pissed them off enough to get all those series taken off!
The upshot is that since nobody knows whether they own it or not there is nobody bothering to actively enforce copyright, so you can just download the games for free if you want on NOLFrevival.
Both NOLF 1&2 and Contract JACK are available on the website above, patched and fixed to work on modern machines.
YMMV but when I tried NOLF 1 for the first time earlier this year I sadly found the gameplay so poorly aged I wasn’t having enough fun to make myself finish it - despite the setting, theme and writing being quite fun.
I might give it another shot at some point though, it was a critic’s darling back in the day and I’d like to be able to say I have played it.
If you make a good effort to identify, locate, and contact copyright holders, but the path runs cold, can you disregard copyright? Maybe by claiming fair use or lack of traceable copyright?
Trademark requires active use. I don’t believe there’s such a thing for copyright. Are there limits other than regular fair use and documented year expiration?
No. You don’t get to just decide you have the right to use someone else’s work just because you coudn’t find them to ask, any more than you get to decide that you can use their car. Them not actively selling their works isn’t the equivalent of leaving the car derilict on public property.
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