I guess I’m the odd one out then. I’m a huge Sci-Fi fan. Ender’s Game still stands as my favorite book after all these years. But I’m not too crazy about fantasy. I’ve bounced off of books, shows, and movies that my friends and family loved. They just seemed to be mediocre stories with fantasy paint on it and people who like Wizards were able to gloss over the holes.
It’s not unheard of for people to not be interested in the other genre. But those people are outnumbered by consumers who just want the new thing.
There’s nothing wrong with that. I tend to lean more to sci-fi myself. But the premise argues that it and fantasy are somehow different, when they’re not. It’s a criticizes generative AI, which is valid, but doesn’t question why the two genres have to be at odds when it obviously has a blend of both.
Tell that to everything I like, star trek is fantasy adjacent, star wars too, all of chinese fantasy (especially the movies) are technically fantasy but have so much stuff that works like scifi just using magic engines and shit, low magic matches epic scifi, its literally just is science driving the cool thing or is magic, its set dressing, it can be swapped. Harry potter can be the same story but with a scifi setting, idk what im even saying im rambling at this point.
Yeah, stuff like venture bros, tom strong, etc. with science heroes, next to fantasy stuff, shows how its pretty much the same stuff just different devices, science fiction explanations are as realistic as fantasy explanations for how things function, its all bs and not real science typically either way, I love hard magic where they explain it like its science and theres a deep logic to the world and how everything works. Like brandon sanderson stuff
People might have a preference, sure, but that’s not what’s happening in Split Fiction; the game makes it seem like sci-fi writers think fantasy isn’t a form of legitimate artistic expression, and vice versa. It’s hard to imagine any fan of either genre today being that hardline about the other.
Check out Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh.
Ender’s Game was my favorite book for many years but I can’t recommend Card’s books any more.
Luckily, Some Desperate Glory ticks all the boxes and then some.
About the level of writing I’ve come to expect from a listicle, but I take particular issue with the fact that they list Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2 as separate items but clump the three Dragon Age games together into one, when the Dragon Age games have much more variation between each game than the POE games do.
Which means that the game disappearing from storefronts is one of the better case scenarios. It’s entirely possible that they’ll patch out the licenced songs from the soundtrack from every digital copy of the game.
We’re also dealing with language differences. English is not the developer’s first language. What may seem a clear sentence to a native speaker, could be easily misinterpreted/mistranslated to something similar, but different enough that the answer changes.
It seems that the AI use was early in development, and limited to temporary placeholders that were going to be replaced. Since they were patched out within days of release, that seems to imply they already had replacement assets on hand, they were just missed during final checks before release.
The answer from the devs also changed prior to the awards show that implies that they may have had an updated interpretation of the qualification question or answer. If they thought the question was about AI use in the final product, then accidentally missing a placeholder swap shouldn’t be disqualifying. Likewise, early experimentation with the tech and then deciding not to use it probably should not disqualify either. But if the qualification is a hard yes/no with absolutely no context or consideration whatsoever, then that’s a different outcome, and hence them clarifying for the awards team.
Personally I think the hard limit without any room for consideration or interpretation is a shit qualification. Especially considering that isn’t really the case for most awards. Look at the definition of “indie” for example. There’s a half dozen different interpretations people have ranging from having to be self published, avoiding just large publishers, or just the publisher not having creative influence. That’s a lot of interpretation comparatively.
Infinite came out 3 years ago and though they’ve done updates and general live service garbage there haven’t been any major releases since. Halo isn’t a yearly release schedule, charging full price for the same game every year like sports games, so i’m not seeing the slop…
Ever since 545 take over from Bungie, halo fans hasn’t been eating good. 4 is really bad, 5 is subpar, infinite is just ok. Not to mention the spinoff and tv series.
Halo 4 was mostly good, especially the story, but they listened too closely to the complainers and scrapped the story line. They haven’t been able to commit to villain. Didact? Killed off at the end of 4, and then resurrected and killed off in a comic. Jul 'Mdama? Introduced and explored in Spartan Ops and books/comics. Killed off in the beginning of Halo 5. Cortana? Resurrected/Introduced as a villain in Halo 5 and killed off between 5 and 6(Infinite). Atriox? Introduced in Halo Wars 2 “killed off” between the opening cutscene of Halo 6 and the first level. Escharum(Atriox lite), Introduced in 6 and killed off in 6. Harbinger? Introduced in 6 and killed off in 6. But wait, Atriox isn’t really dead and he’s totally going to come back in Halo 7 and be a long term villain. For real this time.
Agreed, I think it also hurts the games trying to even have a singular “villain” in the first place. Halo 1-3 had villainous figures, but I don’t think anyone was under the belief that just killing the 3 Prophets would solve the problem of the Covenant, or that killing the Gravemind would mean that the Flood would never be a problem again. The Halo series relies on having compelling factions with clear purpose and ideology to act as antagonists in a more general sense.
The Prometheans in 4 weren’t bad, but outside of the Didact, they had no real purpose or personality. They were just an obstacle. I was really looking forward to the premise of 5 with the concept of going rogue and tackling the underlying themes of fascism at the heart of the UNMC, but then it just rapidly pivoted to some other garbage with Cortana and the Guardians which led to nothing in the end anyways. And so I didn’t even bother to play Infinite.
Well, the Gravemind is definitely not dead as it’s mind resides in either the Domain or an adjacent dimension. Hell, the Flood aren’t even sterilized from known infection locations. But like you said, the factions all have a clear purpose. Even the Flood in Halo 1, before the Gravemind was even introduced, were working towards a goal though consuming the minds of the species it encountered and fixing the Covenant ship. Hearing Cortana say that the Flood were fixing that ship was chilling. Zombies repairing an FLT capable spacecraft?!
A lot of my disappointment in 5 was how irrelevant and misleading the advertisement was. Nothing even remotely similar to this happens in the game. Hunt the Truth had so much better writing then 5 did. Let those people write a spinoff game.
For the longest time I refused to watch the Halo show because I heard that Master Chief takes off his helmet. But then I gave it a shot and it’s a really really good show, and they did the adaptation solid justice.
They made changes where it (mostly) made sense and were truthful to everything else.
They set up a back story that explains how we got a John-117 in the games. Someone who is socially reserved, doesn’t talk much, never takes off his helmet, and prefers to work alone. The ending of the second season was a setup for season 3 to start exactly where Halo 1 started.
The music was phenomenal, cinematography was on point, acting was great, story line was compelling.
I’m normally the person who’s a stickler for not changing a story at all, but the Halo universe was originally told through a game that was more about story beats than actual literary writing. So there’s a ton of room for the in-between conversations and events.
I think the show got an undeserved bad rap. If more people gave it a chance they may have actually liked it.
Halo fans got an actually decent show. Whereas Wheel of Time and Tolkien fans got the abominations of a show we got.
The first few were really good on console. I played the first one on PC as well and there was definitely something missing with mouse and keyboard controls. The vehicles especially.
You have to remember that most FPS on consoles were pretty terrible back then (e.g. Medal of Honor series), and there was a lot of experimentation to try and find a control scheme that didn’t completely suck, along with just the right amount of aim assist. Other devs were still wrestling with that into the Xbox 360 era. Sony put so much effort and money into Killzone, and it wasn’t anywhere near as good as Halo.
Plus, split screen co-op made it very popular. It’s one of the few games to keep that into the modern era as well.
Oh, then Battlefield 1942 then. People here were saying 2005 so I went with the one I knew from 2005. Also, first isn’t always best, the BF games made Halo look like a school project imo
I did miss the “on consoles” part of your quote though as I was referring to playing on PC so my bad.
Even Halo 5 had redeeming qualities. I legit wish Infinite would be treated like a fan made game and ignored so they can make a Halo 6 that concludes the Promethean saga.
I thought all xboxes were x86 hardware running some variant of windows under the hood?
Edit:
“The Xbox system software is the operating system developed exclusively for Microsoft’s Xbox home video game consoles.[1] Across the four generations of Xbox consoles, the software has been based on a version of Microsoft Windows”
"Though initial iterations of the software for the original Xbox and Xbox 360 were based on heavily modified versions of Windows, the newer consoles feature operating systems that are highly compatible with Microsoft’s desktop operating systems, allowing for shared applications and ease-of-development between personal computers and the Xbox line. "
I'm pretty sure the shared applications it's referring to there are UWP apps, which use a different set of APIs to traditional Win32 apps that are only available on full Windows versions. I looked into how Edge works a bit more, and it sounds like Microsoft made a special translation layer to take Edge's Win32 API calls and turn them into UWP ones. I guess games would be possible to run like this too?
The problem with articles like this is that they only focus on games that are bad asagame, and ignores games that are good to excellent, but that are still bad because they screw their players over, engage in abusive business and labor practices, or are simply owned by dogshit people.
As you can tell, I’m waiting for the Jimqusition end of year lists.
On one hand, I applaud EA for at least attempting a new IP this time around instead of churning out yet another sequel, but on the other hand, damned if Immortals of Aveum didn’t look like the most generic thing out there.
polygon.com
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