Is assassin’s creed any good? Once a game becomes a franchise with a bajillion releases I just tune it out. Feel the same way about marvel movies. Maybe they’re good, maybe they’re bad, but I’m more annoyed that they’re trying to shove it down my throat, so I tune out.
There’s two or three good ones in the series. Thankfully the rest aren’t as bad as Far Cry which is just about the shittiest franchise I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing.
Obviously subjective, but I was a very big fan of the series for the first several entries, kinda began losing interest around Unity (although in hindsight, Unity is probably one of the best ones in a few ways, but at release it was a very buggy mess).
I am not personally a fan of the way they have ignored the modern day story line after around 3, as I am one of the few on the planet that actually found that part of the narrative compelling and the part I was really playing for.
I don’t like they gameplay changes since Origins, and it has increasingly become more of an action game over time and less of a dope assassin game.
Unity is flawed, but somewhat of an underrated gem. It’s such a shame that it released in the state it did and got the reception it did because that’s pretty much what caused Ubisoft to pivot into the style of the Origins and onwards style games.
Imagine what could have been if they built on what they had in Unity? The free run up/down system had so much potential and - while janky - the Unity parkour can produce some of the most pleasing, slick and stylish sequences. Just look at the stuff people are pulling off!
Also, revolutionary Paris is the best realised city they’ve ever made for an Assassin’s Creed game.
The downfall began when Ubisoft abruptly wrote Lucy out of the story after Kristen Bell asked for more money. Then they killed off the literal main character one game later, and nowadays you’d be excused for forgetting Desmond ever even existed given how little the modern day matters to the plot.
I’ve played pretty much all but the most recent. They have their ups and downs. The first was almost like a proof of concept. Kinda boring, but the story sets up the sequels. There was a good overall story arc in the Desmond/Ezio trilogy (Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations) that hasn’t been duplicated since.
AC3 was a bit of a breath of fresh air, being part of the American revolution, but it wasn’t for everyone. The story was being deviated from earlier games too much. AC4 is, for me, still the best single-player pirate game out there. It continues with Rogue. Both of those games I highly enjoyed.
Unity (Paris during French Revolution) and Syndicate (Victorian London) both have fantastic maps and character design, but gameplay and story just wasn’t as interesting to me. The series was feeling stale.
To Ubisoft’s credit, they knew that too and entirely revamped the gameplay and menu system starting with Origins (Ancient Egypt), then Odyssey (Ancient Greece), and Valhalla (Vikings during 9th Century). Valhalla was really fun. I love how they change certain villages up throughout the year… adding festivals/challenges depending on when you play. The maps were just getting too huge and overwhelming at this point.
I play the games now mainly for exploration. Gameplay and story are secondary as they aren’t as interesting anymore. They really put a lot of detail into their surroundings and do their research on history, whether real or fantastical. It’s escapism to another land in another time.
Ubisoft is not Rockstar. The story is no longer the reason to play these games. They are forgettable. The Desmond/Ezio storyline of the earlier games are no more. However, we don’t have to wait several years to play a sequel.
Valhalla was the only one that I paid full price for since it was 2020 and we were still basically trapped in our homes, but definitely got my money’s worth. They seemed to take more time making Mirage so I’ll check that out eventually. They are remastering some of their old games so I’d play those over the dated originals.
The Far Cry series has a similar feeling for me, but with a first person perspective. New lands to explore, new stories and characters, but some are better than others.
OK when have they produced trash? BioShock rules so wtf is your crusade (which i generally like) doing on this post rn?
Theyre literally talking to the people and they’re like - were taking the time to make the game good last one was good and we want to keep it that way."
So yeah let’s consider the obvious turning of that pendulum (quality and crap being more profitable and thus in a way easier to produce in the system we are stuck with being in)and be reasonably hopeful for a reasonable reason for a change
I’m having a great time with Borderlands 3 right now. They did so much to improve the feel of those games with that one. Standards are incredibly high if that’s trash.
Oh great now that guys rage makes way more sense I’m seeing a legit pattern now… Sorry I just didn’t want to google a controversy… Thanks for the info 👍👍
That’s the ticket right there, right in the caring. That should be the way going forward. Please. There will be more videogames eventually so let’s make things WORTH our time, both theirs to spend creating them and ours to spend playing them. Let’s make sure its worth all that collective effort yes?
We’re a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.
We’ll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it’s fun.
We’ll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second.
Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded.
Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?
These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We’re already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren’t shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We’ve been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that’s already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they’ve threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can’t is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.
Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You’re not special, you’re not original, you’re not the first; this is just another boss fight.
I feel like most copypastas (at least the ones that I can think of) were initially received poorly. The 300 confirmed kills one and the vaporeon one are unfortunately the only ones I can remember off hand, but they definitely were
Here’s some more food for thought: what happens if they piss off the Eve players? Those clowns have basically been training themselves on how to come out on top in a no-hold-barred capitalist system.
And scams. Or baits, escalations, and war strategies.
I ran my small alliance for a bit. The organization skills corralling 200 active people for an op is insane. Spending days prepping and doing logistics moving tons of ships. Making arrangements and mutual defense agreements. It was arduous work.
Then to have the fight not happen. Or the target not to drop. And having to manage the morale of everyone who devoted the time for it or purposely made sure they were free.
Honestly, most new games just fucking suck. They’re too expensive, often don’t run properly at launch even on excellent hardware, and those that don’t have micro-transactions built-in require you to purchase DLC to get the whole game.
On the other hand, the older titles almost always run well on my machine, have a ton of community DLC, and in general are just designed better because they were built to bring the player as much fun as possible, not to extract as much money as possible.
Plus, the quality content generated from 2005 - 2015 represents some of the best ever, and can provide hundreds of hours of enjoyment before you even get into the 2010s. Why waste money on something that may not work, and that I likely won’t enjoy as much as the games I bought 10 years ago?
It’s why I usually wait at least a year after release to consider whether or not I’m going to buy a title.
I don’t know if I agree about new games. This is a bit of a problem with some AAA games though. The indie game scene is still thriving as far as I can tell, in some genres more than others. (E.g now is a great time to be into FPS games.)
A good old game can occupy you for many hours though, and it’s hard to make good games period. I’m not surprised that a few older games dominate the market.
I tend to agree with you, I think the downfall started in the ps3 era since that’s when online was in every console. I understand your idea that it was bad in ps4 era since devs had the time to figure out how to makes things worse due to the ability to use the internet to sell things/deliver patches.
For sure, and my backlog is huge. I have tons to still play. I’m just now getting around to gta5 on my steam deck. I also just finished re-playing the original ff7 with some mods that made it look way nicer than back when I played it on my ps1 in the 90’s. I could go another 5 years without catching up to 2020 if I wanted to.
Amen. I also have a ton of issues with contemporary game design—padding playtime with procedural generation, prioritizing graphics, world size, or narrative over gameplay… etc.
Nowadays, I feel as if every game tries to compete for "most game" while lacking cohesion and polished ideas.
And to top it off: non-optimized game size. I'm sorry—I don't care if your game is $2.99, I'm not downloading 80GBs just to try a game I may refund an hour later.
Totally. Even with good new games, best to wait until they are cheap and completely stable. The impatience to play something the day it releases hasn’t been a thing for me since like 2010… which I agree with you were just generally better, more exciting times for the medium.
Those hours were safely recalled from your memory by the government Bureau of Memetics to protect your peace of mind. Thank you for your understanding.
well, they are still slowly actually adding more stuff to the game. I dont think they intend to scam anyone since they occasionally allow people to play the game for free and without that i would have been inclined to buy it many times now to see what kind of game it is (and would have felt scammed). Now i just keep waiting for them to add enough stuff for the game to be worth getting, but after hearing they might add somekind of p2w shop crap i think i might just forget about the whole thing if it really bad.
Its too bad if the game collapses at some point since it really has promise. I resent them for first fucking around with the money they were given and making it all seem like a scam even when there is potential for it to not be.
the promise i see comes from things that are actually in the game. Though it still needs more to be worthwhile, so i’m not risking my money yet. They just need to add more fun things to do and fix the problems with what they already have and it would already be kind of ok, provided they keep adding stuff.
I think the fact that they are very very glacially slowly delivering on things at least, all the while self-discovering software development instead of learning it, that aggravates me even more. Bloober Team could finish this faster and more competently than these clowns...
It’s not even about predictions or estimations - everything’s so many years late everyone stopped counting. They just… don’t seem to understand “scoping”? The pitch is “ultra-realistic life-size universe sandbox simulation” and they keep hitting walls because they’re using tech that’s completely inadequate for the task at hand but they won’t let that deter them. They’ve probably reimplemented every subsystem of the Crysis 3 engine a dozen times by now, and it’s still not anywhere near capable of achieving even a tenth of their ambitions. Fuck, they just very recently got their server meshing thing barely working after like a decade of development (at the cost of rewriting everything again of course).
It’s like watching a team raising billions to build the Burj Khalifa but all they have is a bunch of dry sand and some spoons. Deadlines aren’t really the issue.
I worked at 2k when they first started making this game back in 2017 - and I worked in VERY close proximity to the studio making this game.
So bullshit. Its taking so long because take two is run by indecisive, cheap, executives who have pretty much taken the studio that was making it, based in Novato, CA - KILLED IT - and moved almost the entirety of production over to Canada because its cheaper.
Its taking a long time because it takes a long time to kill a team, remake a team, and then restart production from the ground up. Pipelines take years, and in most cases, multiple titles to optimize/streamline. The executives running this show can’t decide what to do with the game and they have already basically killed an entire team in order to reform it in a cheaper country. These are executives that just do not know how to let a team run itself. They are far too hands on and they don’t know shit about actual production.
Take two also basically gutted the other studio they had in Novato, Hangar 13, which was working on a 3rd person action RPG code named VOLT. They worked on that game for around NINE YEARS. Before completely cancelling it. (Does anyone know what its like to work on something for nine years and have absolutely NOTHING to show for it?) But before they cancelled it they layed off the team that was working on it multiple times in order to move Hangar 13 from its primary location of Novato, CA over to, in large part, the czech republic, and UK. Both places substantially cheaper for making games.
The czech republic is actually the boom town of the game industry right now because its so fucking cheap. So many game studios have been made and reformed over there.
And people wonder why so many US game devs are being laid off. Its all executive greed. All of it. – And if you believe this is taking so long solely because of “Quality” - you are kidding yourself.
Even sadder is that there are no popular EU streamers throwing their weight behind the initiative. What are they waiting for? Does PewDiePie still stream games?
PewDiePie moved to Japan and while I have no idea what he’s uploaded (or not uploaded) I get the sense he’s basically retired. He’s doing surfing, rock climbing, art, I don’t know that he cares enough anymore to support it.
I can’t imagine ever working on any project that large. Most of your people will essentially have zero communication with each other, and release a half-assed overbudgeted product as a result
But does the texture artist need to talk to the modelers? Of course. Do they need to talk to people in sound design? Maybe. What about game engine and programming? Maybe. What about writers? Maybe.
The fact is, you’d probably have a better product at the end of the day if everyone were able to coordinate their efforts.
Not everyone needs to talk to everyone. But many people need to talk to many people.
Microsoft had to abandon the initial Vista project and start over because they couldn’t manage a team of 1000 developers. People working on adjacent features had to go through so many layers of management that in some cases the closest shared manager was Bill Gates. For something like getting a change in the shutdown code reflected in the shutdown dialog.
Huge teams become exponentially harder to manage efficiently.
NES releases don’t bother me because I was still a kid when I played them. Things released twenty years ago bother me because it seems like yesterday given that I was already an adult with an established career and a mortgage.
No that’s the point I’m making. When I read the headline I was horrified that it’s been that long since the original and they’re not even talking about that.
No I didn’t say it originally came out then I said that my first knee-jerk reaction was that it couldn’t possibly been that long since the original and then I came to realize it’s been so much longer
Agreed, pre-orders are a thing after all…but it’s possible that it still works too often and also that gamers are becoming a bit more jaded about marketing. I don’t buy anything till the Metacritic and Steam reviews are out, and I only watch gameplay videos any more cause who cares about the cut scenes? I’m sure I’m not the only one. Consumers eventually learn their lessons but then a new crop of consumers comes up.
Call of Duty is a good game tho… I personally don’t like it but there is a reason it’s so popular. Outside of Battlefield there really isn’t much else out there on the quality level of call of duty as far as arcade shooters go.
Any other good quality shooters tend to be PC only and are a lot slower paced. Squad, hell let lose, escape from Tarkov are all great shooters but those games are very slow paced compared to call of duty.
Halo is similar as is Destiny but those are in a fantasy setting and a lot of people like the realistic setting of call of duty.
Its a good game but most releases are DLC level, yet they are forcing the player to buy, at least every few releases, because you slash the remaining userbase every time you release a new game.
I think the issue is there’s a constant influx of young gamers entering the market and all the old tricks are new to them. The teen to young adult age bracket is very lucrative and will never stop unless we stop having sex and procreating. If we all abstain for like 20 years, we’ll finally disrupt big gaming and also have no one in chat insulting anyone’s mother.
I’ll be a minority voice considering the other comments. But maybe just pay for onlyfans or whatever you guys use. I’m a generally attractive woman (I can surmise from interactions while trying to date) and I really don’t like the idea that my likeness would be used for something like this. Get your jollies off, but try and be a bit consensual about it. Is that so much to ask?
It isn’t too much to ask. According to Dr. K of HealthyGamerGG (Harvard Psychiatrist/Instructor), research shows that the release of non-consensual porn makes the unwilling subjects suicidal over half the time. Non-consensual porn = deepfakes, revenge porn, etc. It’s seriously harmful, and there are other effects like depression, shame, PTSD, anxiety, and so on. There is functionally unlimited porn out there that is made with consent, and if someone doesn’t want to be publicly sexually explicit then that’s their choice.
I’m not against AI porn in general (I consider it the modern version of dirty drawings/cartoons), but when it comes to specific likenesses as with deepfakes then there’s clear proof of harm and that’s enough for me to oppose it. I don’t believe there’s some inherent right to see specific people naked against their will.
I wonder if part of the emotional risk is due to the general social stigma attached to porn. It becomes something that has to be explained and justified.
If done to grand excess, deepfakes could crash the market on that, so to speak. Yeah, everyone saw your face on an AI-generated video. They also saw Ruth Bader Ginsburg, their Aunt Matilda, and for good measure, Barry Bonds, and that was just a typical Thursday.
The shock value is burnt through, and “I got deepfaked” ends with a social stigma on the level of “I got in a shouting match with a cashier” or “I stumbled into work an hour late recently.”
My main concern is for kids and teenagers. They’ll bully people for no damn reason at all and AI porn allows for bullies to do more fucked up psychological abuse, and that could be made much worse if victims have no recourse to fight back.
I think it would be too big of a privacy overreach to try to ban it outright as I think what people do on their own computers is their own business and there’s no way to enforce a full ban without being incredibly intrusive, but as soon as it gets distributed in any way I think it should be prosecuted as heavily as real non consensual porn that was taken against someone’s will.
So I’m not disagreeing with you, but you’re assuming they’re making deepfake images, and the article doesn’t specify that. In fact I’d bet that it’s just AI generated “people” that don’t exist.
What about AI porn of a person that doesn’t exist?
However, one of Salad’s clients is CivitAi, a platform for sharing AI generated images which has previously been investigated by 404 media. It found that the service hosts image generating AI models of specific people, whose image can then be combined with pornographic AI models to generate non-consensual sexual images.
Deepfake pornography is super goony but if I had to look for a silver lining, at least nobody had to undergo the actual physical degradation of making porn. It’s still gross in its own way, but it’s a different kind of gross that seems worse in some ways but better in others.
I’m not sure if I feel strongly enough about it to have a consequential opinion either way but I’m trying to at least judge the situation objectively.
I think you raised a valid point. The non-consensual nature of deepfakes pushes it into the realm of abuse material and maybe that’s worse overall than the general exploitation of women going on in the adult film industry, even if those are supposed to be “consensual” on paper.
I know someone who’s into really dark romance stuff, like really hardcore stuff, but she’d never do some of this due to safety reasons. I can totally see her generating scenes of herself in those situations.
I have a question and I hope that people here will discuss this because I really want to understand the general opinion on this.
Is it wrong to deepfake someone without their consent so long as you don’t share the content and it’s all stored locally? I’ve seen this come up and my general opinion is that it isn’t. I know that isn’t the case in the article, just want to hear why people would disagree.
My angle is that doing a deepfake of someone in private hurts zero people and is an extension of fantasy. I don’t see the creation of fake nudes any different than writing fantasy erotica about someone. And I also don’t see it as different than creating fake nude art of them by hand or with photoshop. Like if you do it in your head anyways, which is completely normal, then aren’t we just worried about the outside effects and not the fantasizing itself?
It’s at least as wrong as fantasizing about them if they aren’t already romantically involved with you.
How wrong that is, is up for debate. It will definitely creep them out and they can never find out about it.
If it’s just in your head, at least there’s no physical way they could ever find out. You’d have to admit it. But if you have it on your hard drive, a hacker could get it and blackmail you with it, or just distribute it.
So my stance is that there’s a non-zero chance of doing harm to them, and so it’s wrong. I wouldn’t do it. I also wouldn’t create it with Photoshop, or by hand, for the same reason.
If you want to jerk off, do it to existing porn, or imaginary people porn. Don’t create porn of real people without their permission, even if you think nobody will ever see it other than you. Accidents happen, and they don’t deserve to bear the cost of that.
The first part, absolutely. But I think a lot of that is biological so I don’t see fantasy as a problem. You should keep it to yourself though.
The second part I think Id somewhat agree with except the hacker can’t blackmail you with it because it’s just as likely that they created it. And even if they did blackmail you, I would view that as the damage caused by the hacker, not by the individual.
Like if someone put something nasty about me down in their diary where they expected it to be private, and a hacker sent me an email of that diary page, that’s entirely the hackers fault. The diary writer was expressing an emotion or desire or whatever in complete privacy. Was their creation wrong? No, I don’t think so.
And to be clear I’m not saying people should go to this type of fantasy, this is all a thought exercise for ethics, but I think a lot about this stuff because as much potential for bad as it has, it also has some potential for good. All of the women I know experience behaviors such as stalking, obsession, unwelcome sexual advances, etc. on a regular basis. There is a reason those men don’t turn to free porn. Incel behavior is also just as bad in many ways. So could AI and deepfake stuff result in many of those men keeping that stuff to themselves more? Maybe.
And before you say that these perverts will just send fake nudes to you and harass you that way, we should absolutely be prosecuting people that do so. That’s an entirely separate convo tho.
How anyone could think that going so far as to invoke thoughtcrime is relevant in this discussion is beyond me. It should be self evident to anyone that fantasies are a thing. They’ve been a thing for the entire history of the human race. In no way do fantasies compare to creating reproducible and sharable media of someone in a pornographic situation without their consent.
You can’t transplant your fantasies into someone else’s head. Your fantasies literally cannot hurt anyone. On the other hand, imagine if you found out that someone was distributing pornographic material depicting one of your loved ones. It can quite literally ruin someone’s reputation to be seen in a pornographic situation.
Your argument is some slippery slope fallacy shit.
Reread the comment I replied to and then reread my comment. You are putting words in my mouth. I never mentioned anything about sharing anything nor implied anything of the sort.
You’d have to admit it. But if you have it on your hard drive, a hacker could get it and blackmail you with it, or just distribute it.
There are lots of sick fucks that will distribute it themselves and even send it to their victims to harass them directly. It’s already happening.
I don’t think it’s possible to ban it outright, and I think what people do on their own computer is their own business so long as they aren’t connecting to other computers, but we should have strong laws against distributing it and treat it the same as distributing secretly taken real nudes against someone’s will. Victims need recourse against harassment.
I guess this was just one level of abstraction too much for you huh?
The entire issue here is AI being trained on people’s data without them knowing or giving permission. The question of who’s likenesses and which photos are being used is an excellent question and it’s a big part of the problem here.
I think most gamers would have been perfectly happy with a trip to the Borealis just for the closure of the thing, even if the gameplay brought little to nothing new to the table other than some nice new visuals and arctic setpieces.
Instead we got Half Life: Alyx which was a stunning albeit niche experience in the same old City 17, which retconned Episode 2’s cliffhanger with another, different cliffhanger. For fuck’s sake, Gabe.
It was the same for HL2 though. I played it like 10 years after it was released, didn’t make the game worse. With VR the first experience will probably be even better in the future.
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