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Blaster_M, do games w Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves'

While everyone here is screeching about jerbs, I would like to point out that using AI voices to voice an AI is an artistic genius in itself.

Stamau123,

Yeah it’s real luddite hours here

“How will voicebot 2.0 pay for his child’s oil now?”

trashgirlfriend,

Are you an idiot?

People are worried about the actual voice actors who voice act the characters.

Do you think GLaDOS was voiced by a potato battery?

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

The Luddites ruled actually:

The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of cost-saving machinery, and often destroyed the machines in clandestine raids. They protested against manufacturers who used machines in “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to replace the skilled labour of workers and drive down wages by producing inferior goods.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

It’s very similar to protesting the use of AI to make an obviously inferior product, but apparently you think it’s an insult.

nuzzlerat,

I’m sick of the Luddite slander. They were completely right and people need to know

VirtualOdour,

They were idiots trying to maintain a poverty based system simply because they weren’t on the very lowest rung. They were also proven very wrong, demand for textiles increased dramatically as prices fell and areas where there had been nothing but privation flourished into affluent communities with longer lifespans, better wages and improved living conditions for everyone even the lowest classes - this resulted in improvements literacy amoung the poor and resulted in the erosion of the class system as the early industrial era matured.

If the luddities had won we’d all be far worse off now.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

You are conflating technology and its benefits with the owning class’s misuse of that technology. Capitalist apologists love to do this because otherwise the crimes of capitalism would have to stand on their own and there would be no defending them.

It’s exactly this conflation that lets people claim that the luddites were entirely anti-technology, but they weren’t. Again this is a lie that has been spread by capitalists to defend their own image.

The luddites were killed and suppressed by the military and the government made industrial sabotage a capital offense, and then slandered them. Maybe if they’d won we’d live in a world where reporters weren’t murdered over the Panama papers for instance.

VirtualOdour,

So your argument is that their stated aims were a lie and speeches claimed to be from notable figures in the movement were fabricated after the fact? Further that their violent actions should have been overlooked and if they had been there would be no corruption in the world today?

Surely you can see how that argument is about as credible as flat earth?

I don’t understand why people think they can just rewrite history to suit their needs.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

What speeches? What stated aims? You need to make claims if you want me to address them.

VirtualOdour,

You want me to give you a history lesson? Funny that when you wanted people to believe an inversion of the history everyone knows you didn’t see any need for sources but now you expect me to meticulously demonstrate every word? and yes we all know it’ll never be enough…

It doesn’t matter though because you’re not serious about what you’re saying and literally no one would belive your nonsense.

Excrubulent, (edited )
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

E: You can scroll down to the dividing line if you want to read the history and not my condescending screed about your ignorance. I suspect you won’t read much of this so I’m putting this note here at the top to let you know that if you don’t read the whole comment then you’ll probably sound like a fool in your reply. I mean that’s already true but like… even moreso. If you don’t like the way I’m talking to you, you can refer yourself to the way you just talked to me.

Okay, so I think you’ve fucked up here. I think that because you seem to think I’m asking you for a demonstration, ie, for sources. But if you actually read my comment carefully you would know that I asked you for a claim. This was me politely asking you to simply say what you mean instead of hiding behind insinuations and vague hand-waving.

And the reason this is a fuck-up is because anyone who actually knew how to understand and source literature on a topic like this would have immediately known the distinction between making a claim, and demonstrating a claim. I have made quite clear claims but not yet demonstrated them. You have not made a single claim that could even be demonstrated, you have just assumed that everybody already agrees with your version to the point that it does not even need to be stated.

I also know it’s a fuck-up because I have heard this fact as a rebuttal of a common misconception several times from a number of trustworthy sources, and before I repeated it I quickly checked to make sure I had it right, and it does appear to be the consensus of historians; I found no evidence of a credible debate on this; nobody is replying to some other side on this; it is uncontroversial.

I said the same thing four different ways there because you do seem to have some trouble following what is being said.

I am now going to go beyond what I originally asked you for and give you some real information, and then after that, if you still feel like it would be a good idea, you can reply. I suspect you won’t want to though, because if you had the information to hand you wouldn’t have protested so hard against me asking for even the most basic stating of your position. You also might have read something and learned that you were wrong, but let’s not expect the moon. I suspect you went so hard because you realised you had nothing and you hoped I would be cowed by your obvious confidence, but I wasn’t. I was in fact somewhat invigorated by it.


If you had looked up just the first source in the wikipedia article that I linked you, titled “What the Luddites Really Fought Against” and published in the history section of the Smithsonian Magazine, you’d have found these quotes:

The label now has many meanings, but when the group protested 200 years ago, technology wasn’t really the enemy

The word “Luddite,” handed down from a British industrial protest that began 200 years ago this month, turns up in our daily language in ways that suggest we’re confused not just about technology, but also about who the original Luddites were and what being a modern one actually means.

Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them. In truth, the secret of their enduring reputation depends less on what they did than on the name under which they did it. You could say they were good at branding.

As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”

Also because I can see your fingers racing to the keyboard about this: the first article on wikipedia is not the only thing I have read on this, I am simply using it because it is a good overview and starting point, and because it clearly shows just how easy it would have been for you to learn literally a single thing about this topic, but you chose virulent ignorance instead. I have in fact gone beyond wikipedia by giving you an actual source, and you aren’t even there yet. By failing to even state your position, you have refused to enter the arena of discussing facts.

Now, I did mention the Panama papers, and that was a nod to the way that the rich employ violence against their detractors, and perhaps that was a stretch, but I could make the argument to someone interested. I doubt you are.

The problems the Luddites were protesting are more closely related to the modern problem of Fast Fashion, in which vast quantities of extremely poor quality transient clothing is produced and destroyed every single year. It is an economic, ecological and social disaster that ironically employs many many people in the most brutal shop conditions. The “cheap” clothing you championed as the cause of the “flourishing” is exactly the problem that the Luddites feared, and it has not been good for the planet or for people. The horrendous work conditions of the industrial revolution also led to clothing factories where children were employed to crawl under operating machines and were frequently minced by them. This is the kind of barbaric treatment of human beings that the Luddites were against and that the ruling class had them killed to maintain. This sort of thing still happens today, but in far away countries with poor populations that you don’t see. Capitalism hasn’t resulted in plenty, it has resulted in abject poverty for the vast majority of the world’s population so that a small minority can live in luxurious comfort. I assume you don’t think that’s real capitalism or something, but you’d be wrong about that too.

The term Luddite did not come to have its modern meaning until the 1950’s, at which point anyone who had ever known a Luddite was long dead and they were not able to protest the slander, but popular perception is often given by the ruling class, so we get people like you who apparently go off the vibes of the word you’re familiar with and confuse that for actual knowledge.

Hildegarde, do games w Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves'

Have any of the involved voice actors confirmed the claims made in the article? I’ve seen multiple articles on this game, and the only quotes are from the game’s director.

So far I’ve only seen one side claim this is ethical. That’s not enough.

CosmoNova, do games w Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves'

I get that record sessions are a huge hassle and simply paying VAs per AI-generated voice line is easier for everyone, but it somehow makes Paradox look a little careless to me.

Stories like these also set a precident. This is what voice ‘acting’ will be like for a moment before it becomes effectively eliminated because voice libraries will become diverse enough quickly and there will be no need for a single more voice actor to be included. It seems like VAs are basically forced to sell their voice to AI companies quickly to at least make a quick buck before they never get a job again.

There’s probably no stopping it, but that made this read all the more frustrating to me.

NuXCOM_90Percent, (edited )

This is what (modern) voice acting has always been.

Actually read a few interviews with professional VAs or watch their streams if they do that. Two VAs actually interacting with each other and reacting is almost unheard of outside of very specific productions (and mostly are done as a stunt for some BTS footage). They read a dozen different takes of every line and go through like five different scripts worth of dialogue. And then they do “efforts” that are just general grunts and emoting that are used for the moment to moment gameplay and to pad out a scene that had heavy rewrites. It is why so many professional VAs can stream “their” games… because they genuinely have no idea what is going to happen.

Paying to train a limited use model off of a specific VA (or even a group of VAs) is the “logical” extension of that. And, arguably, it is a “good” one (with some MASSIVE caveats). Everyone lost their god damned mind over that FPS that came out last year where the announcer was (allegedly?) a model trained off of a VA. But it also meant that you could have stuff you would never have had otherwise. Nolan North isn’t going to get a paycheck to sit in a booth all day commenting on random matches. But a model that can read out a team’s name and string together different reactions? That is actually really cool and WAY better than the traditional sports game approach of “The Champion! just went through… A Table!”*

Like almost everything AI? The key is to focus on creators’ rights and control what can and can’t be used as training data. Because the genie is out of the bottle and ain’t going back in. But if we can protect the rights of what goes into training data? Then people are still paid for their effort/creation.

Do I think this was done “ethically”? I don’t know. But with everything Paradox has done in the past few years? I assume “not in the slightest”. But the concept is sound and one that we need to standardize sooner than later.

Of course, we also need UBI so that people’s lives aren’t tied to their jobs but that is a bigger mess.

*: Also, if you don’t think those aren’t already stitched and blended together with most of the same tech then I have a bridge to sell you


I’ll also add on that there are very good reasons to pay for models based on VAs. Brendan Fraser infamously permanently-ish hurt his vocal cords because of the performance that were expected of him in his prime. Same with a lot of VAs (I think David Hayter is one?) who basically need to smoke a pack a day when they are “in character” to get the right gravely voice. And while Stephanie Beatriz played it smart and made sure her “Rosa” voice was something she could maintain, a lot of actors and actresses basically can’t be the character they are famous for because it is killing them.


And pulling a solution out of my ass that is surely missing important aspects of the industry?

if I just want Nolan North or Felicia Day to voice a character then I buy the use of their model from their agency and am charged based on how much dialogue they have in a given game. If I want to use them as a character going forward (so what ANet tried with Felicia before they realized she was too expensive and decided to give Zojja permanent brain damage so she wouldn’t ever have dialogue again)? I can pay by line at a much cheaper rate.

But if I want Nolan North to do a voice that isn’t just Drake? Then I am paying him to train a new model and it gets a lot more expensive. And I can pay more to “own” that training data with the same caveats regarding future use. The main idea being that I want to make sure my Nolan North performance doesn’t end up in a competitor’s game next week.

deweydecibel, (edited ) do games w Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves'

The technology was created to replace voice actors. That’s the actual purpose. Its very existence hurts their profession and benefits studios. You can not be a studio, use this technology, and claim to care about ethics, anymore than Amazon can claim to care about the workers as it invests in the machines to replace them.

No one is holding a gun to their head forcing them to us AI. They made a choice. There is no “ethical” way to cripple the livelihood of working class people for the benefit of your business. Just stop using the word.

It doesn’t matter if you compensate or get their approval, because the fact is the existence of the technology in the industry effectively compels all voice actors to agree to let it use their voice, or they can’t get work. It becomes a false choice.

If there was no financial benefit, if it truly made no difference in how much a studio pays in labor or the amount the artists make, there would be no reason for studios to want to use it.

Even_Adder,

Do you have any source for those claims? There are plenty of better reasons to develop voice synthesis than replacing voice actors.

GalacticHero,

Voiced characters that use generative AI in real time instead of prerecorded lines and a dialogue tree come to mind as an obvious use. How cool would that be, to be playing an RPG and ask any character any question you want and get an actual verbal answer? No way you can do that with voice actors.

glimse,

Ever seen the game Vaudeville? It’s a fairly basic detective game but all the characters have their own LLM and AI voices. I bought it for the reason you described. I just had to see the technology in action and I can definitely see a future with generative text/voices in games.

It’s not perfect by any means but I think it’s a very cool approach to a detective game. There have been updates to it since I played that address most of the problems I had with it like characters forgetting past conversations and giving conflicting info.

Ookami38,

I had spitballed an idea similar to this a few months back. Build the characters, world, and situations, and give the AI that information. Pick a few specific pieces of info the AI would have to tell you at specific times, basically to act as guide rails. Then, let the AI and the player just… Interact.

glimse,

That’s pretty much Vaudeville. The only things you can do is click on locations and talk to people, each of whom has some bit of information you need to figure out.

It’s basically an experiment to see what works and what doesn’t with the idea. I appreciate that they kept the scope small (no quests, no WASD movement) and have been implementing changes as they discover the shortfalls (like the ones I’ve mentioned). If it ever does get released as a finished game, it’ll be more like a proof of concept for other games to build off of.

grrgyle,

Depends how much you’re willing to spend

nogooduser,

I find it to be very off putting that Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t have voice actors for the main character.

There are so many different races that would have different voices and different accents that it wouldn’t be financially viable to do that with voice actors either.

PotatoKat,

They originally did for the beta (for origin characters at least) but the players didn’t really like it so the feature was removed

GBU_28,

The only real ethical concern is around the training data. If all voices are compensated / actively consent to be used in an AI program, then this is just a tool. People losing jobs doesn’t really matter to an individual company. Industries change and technology advances.

So the real problem is they are using these types of tools, built of the skill of other voice actors, without properly compensating them or getting their consent.

style99,

What’s the point of bringing up “ethics?” The job only existed in the first place because of technology, and now people want to argue that there is a right or wrong aspect to it?

How about the poor candle makers or buggy whip manufacturers? Should we keep downgrading society just to keep a few “artists” happy?

DmMacniel,

Downgrading because we want people to stay employed?

ricdeh,
@ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

Then let’s go back to ploughing our fields by hand, surely that will create many new employment opportunities!

Ookami38,

Eh, we weren’t paying for that back in the day anyway.

Zorque,

More importantly, the system we all accept (willingly or not) requires that people be employed to survive.

It's not a matter of wanting to be employed, as needing to be employed.

card797,

The term Luddite comes to mind.

novibe,

Luddites were not anti-technology. They saw the progress of technology IN a primitive capitalist system and understood that technology would never benefit them, and always be used to subjugate them more.

If technology only benefits 0.1% of the world, and leads to the world dying, does it benefit humanity at all?

GBU_28,

The concern is that the training and potentially production voices are not properly compensated or consenting

It’s not so much that a new tool is used, it’s that it exists due to the artistic product of people who aren’t profiting from the novel use

A job coming or going isn’t the true issue

Cypher,

Good to see you have formed a strong opinion without having all of the information.

Deceptichum,
@Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works avatar

Technology making labour obsolete is the goal we should all be wanting.

Attack capitalism not the technology.

Zahille7,

True, but it’s not quite working out that way is it?

Postmortal_Pop,

That’s kind of the point though isn’t it? It’s not the car’s fault we can’t afford the gas. We need to stop arguing about the ethics of using AI and start arguing about the ethics of the people using it unethically.

There is a person in that studio that suggested using AI, there is a person who gave the go ahead to do it. Those people need to be the problem, not the toy they decided to play with.

Kaldo,
@Kaldo@kbin.social avatar

That's a very naive perspective though. We're not blaming the guns for gun violence, it's the people, but restricting access to guns is still the proven way to reduce gun incidents. One day when everyone is enlightened enough to not need such restrictions then we can lift them but we're very far from that point, and the same goes for tools like "AI".

msgraves,

you’re gonna have a bad time restricting software

Kaldo,
@Kaldo@kbin.social avatar

Very easy time if it's about commercial use (well, at least outside of china). Companies need to have licenses for the software they use, they have to obey copyright laws and trademarks, have contracts and permissions for anything they use in their day to day work. It's the same reason why no serious company wants to even touch any competitor's leaked source code when it appears online.

Just because AI tech bros live in a bubble of their own, thinking they can just take and repurpose anything they need, doesn't mean it should be like that - for the most case it isn't and in this case, the law just hasn't caught up with the tech yet.

msgraves,

actual example please not like your other friend Luddite on the other comment

fcSolar,

It’d be dead easy, actually. Don’t even have to actually ban it: For image generating models, every artist whose work is included in the training data becomes entitled to 5 cents per image in the training data every time a model generates an image, so an artist with 20 works in the model is entitled to a dollar per generated image. Companies offering image generating neural networks would near instantly incur such huge liabilities that it simply wouldn’t be worth it anymore. Same thing could apply to text and voice generating models, just per word instead of per image.

msgraves,

disregarding the fact that the model learns and extrapolates from the training data, not copying,

have fun figuring out which model made the image in the first place!

Cocodapuf,

That said, this choice wasn’t actually a problem right?

I mean this game doesn’t use voice actors normally. If they used ai voice actors for this update only to represent the ai characters… isn’t that just appropriate?

Previously all characters in this game were represented only by text, so literally nobody is being replaced here.

Another way to think about it would be via representation. We get worked up when an ethnic character on screen is played by a different ethnicity, an actor in blackface for example. And in that vein using ai for organic characters could be seen as offensive, but using ai for ai characters would not. In contrast could we see using human voices for ai characters to be insensitive? That may sound far fetched, but this is sci-fi, the ai characters in the game are fully sentient and in their fictional universe would have rights, the whole point is to make the player think about what that means.

Well I guess I have my takeaway, I may consider boycotting any game that uses human actors for ai characters. Just get an ai actor… seriously.

Postmortal_Pop,

Honestly, I’d argue that that’s exactly what AI should be for. Either being used by that one guy to give voices to his passion project because he can’t afford to hire voice actors, or to add a touch of the uncanny to an AI character.

ChicoSuave,

In practice, capitalism will use technology to subjugate others instead of allowing technology to free us from work.

Mnemnosyne,

Yes, as long as people keep focusing on fighting the technology instead of fighting capitalism, this is true.

So we can fight the technology and definitely lose, only to see our efforts subverted to further entrench capitalism and subjugate us harder (hint: regulation on this kind of thing disproportionately affects individuals while corporations carve out exceptions for themselves because ‘it helps the economy’)…

Or we can embrace the technology and try to use it to fight capitalism, at which point there’s at least a chance we might win, since the technology really does have the potential to overcome capitalism if and only if we can spread it far enough and fast enough that it can’t be controlled or contained to serve only the rich and powerful.

HeartyBeast,
@HeartyBeast@kbin.social avatar

The technology is magnifying the flaws in capitalism

hrtgnt,

yea, see i just don’t like how we first automated creativity instead of like, idk, manual labor???

Takumidesh,

Manual labor has been being automated since the industrial revolution.

Pxtl,
@Pxtl@lemmy.ca avatar

Okay but I still have to fold my own laundry.

Womble,

And do you wash your clothes in a bucket, wring them out in a mangler before beating your rugs with a stick to get the dust out of them?

Pxtl,
@Pxtl@lemmy.ca avatar

And I don’t make my own paints either when doing art. I still agree with the basic original point:

It is disappointing that we’re currently automating creativity far faster than manual labour. I’m angry that my art is getting automated away faster than my folding of laundry.

Womble,

The original point being:

yea, see i just don’t like how we first automated creativity instead of like, idk, manual labor???

emphasis mine, but this is just incorrect. Technology has been reducing the need for manual labour (or rather increasing the amount of useful work done with manual labour) since the wheel and the plow.

billiam0202,

It’s not; you’re just looking at the beginning of automating creativity when labor automation has been going on for over a hundred years. The introduction of new tech is always more disruptive than refining established tech. Besides which, VA is particularly sensitive to disruption because every VA does essentially the same job- one AI can be programmed to speak in thousands (millions?) of different voices, whereas one manual labor job doesn’t necessarily require the same actions as another.

Also it’s funny you complain about laundry, given how much doing laundry has been automated.

Don_alForno,

And people still have to lift heavy shit, crawl around in dangerous spaces and generally harm their health to make a living.

Katana314,

I have an idea for the practice that could help us better explore practical uses. Basically, a company may train an AI off an actor’s voice, but that actor retains full non-transferable ownership/control of any voices generated from that AI.

So, if a game is premiering a new game mode that needs 15 new lines from a character, but their actor is busy drinking Captain Morgan in their pool, the company can generate those 15 lines from AI, but MUST have a communication with the actor where they approve the lines, and agree on a price for them.

It would allow for dynamic voice moments in a small capacity, and keep actors in business. It would still need some degree of regulation to ensure no one pushes gross incentives.

Nibodhika,

Congratulations you essentially described what Stellaris devs did.

otp,

claim to care about the workers as it invests in the machines to replace them.

A company that invests in UBI could make that claim!

Obviously Amazon doesn’t do that now. But I could see it happening when people stop being able to buy their junk

Summzashi,

Old man yells at cloud

Mirodir, do games w Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves'

I’m not really up-to-date on voice synthesis. Have we reached the point where we can get enough training data from just a handful of voice actors to train a model of this quality?

Or is this a case of them using those voice actors for fine-tuning a pretrained model and just being quiet about that?

Dremor, (edited )
@Dremor@lemmy.world avatar
Mirodir,

Yeah, if Mozilla’s goal is 1200 clips/day and 2400 validations/day then I have a strong suspicion that Stellaris uses a pretrained model and there are no royalties for the people whose voices were used for the pretraining. Not that it would be feasible to spread royalties among that many people in the first place.

What could point against that suspicion though is that Stellaris doesn’t need a “perfect” model so maybe they can get away with much, much less. After all the whole gimmick is that it is in-universe AI. A (near-)flawless model would be (near-)indistinguishable from a regular voice actor. Then there would’ve been no need to hire a bunch of voice actors to train an AI in the first place.

Assuming that it is pretrained -> finetued though, the only hope is that those initial files were donated willingly and not scraped somewhere. Otherwise their “ethical” argument goes out the window.

Amaltheamannen,

They claimed they specifically used an ethical model with a license where they pay the person whos voice was trained on.

ricdeh,
@ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

Why .fr lol?

Dremor,
@Dremor@lemmy.world avatar

Automatic added due to my browser language (I’m French)

TheBat,
@TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

I’m French

Sorry to hear that. Hope you make it through.

Dremor,
@Dremor@lemmy.world avatar

I could have had a worse fate… Like being American.

loo, do games w Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves'
@loo@lemmy.world avatar

Still waiting for them to fix their game and not produce even more DLCs

nutsack,

what is broken in stellaris

originalfrozenbanana,

My mid game builds 😢

bionicjoey,

Skill issue

originalfrozenbanana,

Probably

BombOmOm,
@BombOmOm@lemmy.world avatar

From my experience, nothing. I’m not sure what the guy is complaining about.

loo,
@loo@lemmy.world avatar
  • They changed the keybindings without giving you the ability to edit keybindings yourself
  • The performance is bad
  • The game speed is linked to framerate and the longer your run is, the slower your game runs
  • The former point results in players in multiplayer getting kicked because of synchronization issues
  • Many minor bugs such as science ships getting trapped at one planet because they cant ever finish surveying them
  • DLCs being absolutely overpriced sometimes
  • Mechanics being absolutely unbalanced

I bought the game on release and played the game for over 700 hours since and I had to witness many patches that introduced so many bugs

ThirdWorldOrder,

Not saying you’re wrong but it’s funny that you’re disparaging a game that you’ve played for 700 hours.

loo,
@loo@lemmy.world avatar

I love the game and at times I couldn’t stop playing. The more it got patched the more issues I had with it and I haven’t played in a while. Still waiting for Falling Frontier to be released :)

ThirdWorldOrder,

I have around 700 hours in CK3 and feel the same pain you do

loo,
@loo@lemmy.world avatar

Just Paradox things

nutsack,

that’s the type of player you want an analysis from, right?

ArmokGoB,

I’ve played 1,300 hours of Destiny 2. I basically wrote my graduate thesis on how it uses psychological tactics to exploit its playerbase and how contemporary business models in gaming are harmful to consumers. Anyways, I gotta grind out my red borders before TFS drops.

Zekas,

Performance is tied to pops. Easy to get around by using a smaller galaxy, still bad yes but solvable.

cooljacob204, (edited )

Late game performance and dsyncs comes to mind.

Cowbee, do games w The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO
@Cowbee@lemmy.ml avatar

Same thing happened to Bethesda games, each is more popular than the last and each has lost more of its magic.

Katana314, do games w The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO

I’m wondering if better AI could save this genre. I always hated the fragility of any soldiers I wasn’t actively controlling, having idle workers, workers trying to chop wood in the middle of enemies, etc.

If the computer can take your high level commands but also put out logical low level ones, and maybe also punish high APM, it might restore some of the moderate-paced feel of the game.

PapstJL4U,
@PapstJL4U@lemmy.world avatar

Why would you punish high apm? Thats punishing people for being better.

If you free up actions, good players will use the free space for other options.

If it only taked 50% skill to defend an expandion, people will double expand or expand and attack at the same time.

Katana314,

It’s a question of whether to reward a player that can see that the opponent is using rock, take a step back, start building paper, and send them out even if they take time doing it; versus a player that just super-optimizes building an army of rock to send against armies of paper, and give them the best chance of winning by perfectly kiting every attack on the field.

There’s certainly an argument that some groups would like the tournament of APM, but I think a lot of people didn’t bother with high level StarCraft because they saw Koreans clicking 15 times a second and figured they can’t keep up. It’s like how fighting games work to demonstrate they’re not rewarding button mashing.

A_Random_Idiot, do games w The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO

RTS games going mainstream are what killed my precious baby boy Command and Conquer.

God damn EA. Tiberium Wars was blegh, but what they did with Twilight… Thats just molestation of a corpse.

Khanzarate,

I liked tiberium wars.

One of my favorite games actually.

A_Random_Idiot,

Okay, and?

You’re allowed to like and enjoy things, even bad things… Hell, theres entire fandoms around liking bad things (like B-Movies), that doesnt make them less fundamentally bad. and it doesnt make you wrong for liking them.

Vex_Detrause, do games w The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO

There was one on Xbox original where you talk using the headset. It’s military with tanks, etc. Its like "unit 3 attack objective A… All units hold… Unit 3 patrol… It was awesome but the campaign was short and as far as I remember there was no skirmish/play with PC.

EncryptKeeper,

Tom Clancy’s End War?

WarlordSdocy,

I think that is a separate genre of games now, I’ve seen a few different games like that.

camr_on,
@camr_on@lemmy.world avatar

Endwar! I remember yelling into the mic to attack because it never understood me lol

SteveNashFan, do games w The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO

Star Wars: Empire at War is a classic with more nontraditional gameplay and light 4x elements (no diplomacy). The modding scene is rich too, with Thrawn’s Revenge for the EU and multiple Clone Wars mods.

Potatos_are_not_friends, do games w The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO

Going to throw a shout out for Against The Storm.

It takes my favorite part of Age of Empires (setting up the dang base) and distills it into the perfect game.

Now if someone can figure out how to make the other half (the combat) really good.

kibiz0r, do games w The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO

I like the concept of an RTS.

Deciding how to invest my resources, where to expand, when to attack, defend, or retreat, scouting and countering my opponent’s plans…

…but when it comes to the physical act of doing this stuff, it feels so horribly awkward that it’s like I’m fighting the UI more than my opponent.

Clicking and dragging selection boxes as if my troops are always in a rectangle formation? Right-clicking to attack but accidentally moving instead… And ugh, the endless series of tedious build queues.

The actual mechanics feel more like data entry — the kind with real bad RSI — than military leadership.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

FYI, there are a handful of games that put unique spins on the genre out there. Most of the ones I can think of off the top of my head put you in control of a “cursor character” that’s like a commander. It puts a speed limit on APM, which I think gets the genre back to focusing on strategy. There’s also Northgard, which is like a cross between an RTS and a 4X game, and pieces of the map are tile-like, so rather than this unit moving to these coordinates, you’re commanding a unit to move from this tile to the one next to it. Then there’s the Total War series, where the battles are slow paced, and the macro level resources are handled in turn-based strategy.

bionicjoey,

Mount and Blade (Warband, WFAS, and Bannerlord) is another that I would say puts a unique spin on RTS. You are down on the ground with your troops and need to give orders like when to have certain troop groups attack, retreat, change formation, etc. You have the opportunity for your own skill as a fighter to matter, but once the battles reach a certain size, it becomes far more important to have a tactical advantage than to just be good at fighting yourself.

AHemlocksLie,

You may enjoy Zero-K more than most other RTS, at least. It’s in the Total Annihilation style like Supreme Commander or Beyond All Reason. One of the ways it sets itself apart is with a diverse array of commands you can issue to your units so they can micro themselves. I haven’t played much of it, so I can’t give a ton of examples, but it has commands to do stuff attack while maintaining distance, compared to how StarCraft 2 forced you to learn to stutter step your Marines, manually alternating between moving and shooting.

It’s also free and open source, based on the Spring engine, and available on Steam. It felt like it played well and was filled out well in terms of mechanics and units when I gave it a try a year or so ago, but I just haven’t been playing any RTS lately.

magic_lobster_party, do games w The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO

RTS games demand so much time and patience from the player to learn. What’s the proper build order? What’s the best unit composition? How many workers should get allocated for each resource? These things aren’t always obvious. And you don’t have time to read all descriptions because the time is ticking.

Not to mention good APM and battle tactics.

Shooters are much easier to understand: aim and shoot. You don’t need to follow YouTube guides to understand that.

A_Random_Idiot,

Shooters are much easier to understand: aim and shoot. You don’t need to follow YouTube guides to understand that.

They demand so much time and patience. Whats the best weapon load out, where to move to be safe from fire, how to avoid enemy snipers, trying to figure out the excessive complexity of what WSAD does.

RTS games are much easier to understand. You drag a box around your units, and click the enemy and watch them blow up. You don’t need to follow youtube guides to understand that.

magic_lobster_party,

My point is that there’s usually an easier level of entry for other types of games. You aim and shoot, and you get instant feedback if you succeeded or not. You don’t need to understand advanced meta to get this, although it can help.

For many RTS games it can all be dependent on how fast you expanded your economy, not on how you play your units. You can fail the entire game because of bad gameplay early.

Drummyralf, (edited )

You don’t meed to have any advanced meta knowledge to play most games. There are options like playing against easier ai’s or similarly skilled players.

Look at some Low Elo Legends from the game Age of Empires 2 on Youtube from T90. Most don’t use advanced meta.

Heck, I as a kid never used advanced meta and had loads of fun.

The internet TELLS you that the latest meta is necessary and that you play suboptimally. But they’re just optimizing the fun out of the game for you if you’re not that kind of player.

This mentality is even worse in competetive shooters. People playing the latest “meta” even though they don’t realize they don’t even have the skill to pull that meta off. I wish the “internet” would just let players have fun in their own way. And that playing games “suboptimally” can still be just as fun and rewarding an experience.

/rant

cynar,

I think the key difference is that it’s “easier” to apply a meta to a RTS game. In shooters, the meta often involves quick reflex decisions, where to hide, where to shoot etc. This is hard, and requires practice. It also means there is a significant number of players not applying it, or doing so sub-optimally.

With RTS games, the metas are easier to apply. This means that, in human Vs human games, the newer players often get flattened. It also means that far more complex metas can be developed and applied.

Shooters tend to back load the difficulty curve. It’s easy to get into them, and not do badly, but hard to do well. RTS games tend to front load the difficulty. You need to get over the initial hump to get “ok” with it. Once over the hump, the curve smooths off and you get good fairly rapidly.

One of the big differences between nerds and normals is that nerds enjoy punching through that wall. The difficulty is seen as a challenge, not an impediment. Most people want a faster feedback loop on the dopamine reward. FPS type games deliver that extremely well.

haui_lemmy,

Important addition: the majority of people isnt equipped for this kind of game. Patience and ability to grasp this kind of thing is what makes the computer nerds the computer nerds.

Programming and sysadmin stuff isnt really popular either for that express reason.

joneskind, do games w The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO
@joneskind@lemmy.world avatar

I wish I could play a game where I could talk in real time instead of click, prepare attacks with my generals before the battle and settle a strategy, and where the fastest tabber-clicker is not the one who always wins.

Why? Because I’m getting old, that’s why, and anyone who ever played a competitive RTS knows exactly what it means.

maynarkh,

Try the Total War games, especially the older (non-Warhammer) ones. Units take time to carry out actions, there is no point and not really a way to do insane actions per minute counts, as if a unit is engaged in melee, it can’t really disengage without losses. There is also a great scale to the whole thing. I loved Shogun 2 for example.

I also like Eugen games like Wargame, Steel Division or Warno if a modern shooty type thing is more your game. Maybe try Regiments, that one is also good and maybe a bit less complex than Eugen titles.

Neither of these has base building, both are more of a “this is how many soldiers get for this battle, use them wisely” type game.

joneskind,
@joneskind@lemmy.world avatar

Thanks mate

Zoot,
@Zoot@reddthat.com avatar

You have just perfectly explained why I loved Shogun so much! It was much more forgiving to learn, and to then excel at. Very much a fun RTS. Atleast the original was very well made, I should try the second one.

darkdemize,

Shogun 2 is arguably the best TW game imo.

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