Sometimes I feel like I’m the only gamer that doesn’t give a fuck about review scores. I’d rather see for myself or hear about it from someone who I know has similar taste. Especially when it’s pretty common now for people to brigade those scores into oblivion or to massive new heights on a knee-jerk reaction to absolute fucking bullshit.
Definitely not the only one. But it’s not just games either, it’s cinematography too. Or even food, really. When you watch 500 movies a month, everything looks exactly the same. Not to mention that half of these critics companies are completely untrustworthy, and often post either uneducated reviews, or just plain garbage. Think of something like IGN’s Redfall video. The game is obviously horrible, but the person playing it didn’t know how to hold a controller. Or the one with Cuphead, where they failed the tutorial.
tldr: I only really trust opinions of my friends. These review sites have no value
The cuphead one was a self deprecating joke based on the fact that he wasn’t really used to that kind of game and wasn’t in the best conditions either to do that, bu he was the only one who could review that in that moment. It’s been years and you still bring that up…i can’t see why
Not only that, but the journalist extensively praised the game, too. Shawn touched a bit on the subject during his Cuphead video: Cuphead: The fake outrage.
The truth is, most gamers (and most people online, nowadays) parrot lies they hear on the internet without checking their source.
Interesting video, thanks! There’s so much to unpack, but i’ve had that feeling before, that those arguments are often built from scratch. As for many hard games recently published, they have indeed been appreciated at a critical level as well. As for me…I played hard games in the past. Everyone can do it, but we don’t always have the time. I appreciate difficulty in a game, but i can’t play these games at times…
User reviews tend to be far more reliable than professional critics. Critics have so much incentive to go against the orthodoxy, there’s no trust with them. The big review sites like IGN are meaningless to me. The numbers have also gotten inflated to the point of meaninglessness. Like I don’t think there are very many games I would describe as “10/10, perfect”, yet that is a common score from reviews sites for any new game.
Sometimes there will be specific critics whose reviews I trust, but almost always those come with a lot of examples of actual gameplay. Like, I used to really enjoy TotalBiscuit’s reviews (rip), but he always published his review as a video where you could see exactly how something looked when he talked about it. He wasn’t trying to tell you if a game was good or bad, he was simply telling you “what is it?” And “what do I like about it?” Then you could decide for yourself if you thought you would like it too.
I don’t think it has a place in a work of fiction like Cyberpunk 2077. Maybe a small reference somewhere. The Russian government is a bunch of cunts, but not every piece of media needs to reference that constantly. I could also imagine that it would be could annoying if you’re playing Cyberpunk to distract yourself from the war as an Ukrainian and then you’re still constantly reminded of it
It can make political points, but the war in Ukraine does not exist in that timeline. So it makes no sense to directly refer to it. And forcing it into only the Ukrainian translation without the developer being aware of it is just unprofessional.
Anything negative about the Russian government is probably accurate and deserved. Extending that to the Russian people is iffy at best.
And remember this game is rather explicitly fifty years in the future, so anything current will be as relevant as Vietnam references are today. Not even counting the alternate history and corporatocracy of the setting.
Localization is generally contracted out to external studios. With the dozens of languages games are released in, localization is rarely done in house, especially for languages added in a patch well after release.
When CDPR says “These lines have not been written by CD PROJEKT RED staff and do not represent our views.” It makes sense.
The localization team, being fluent speakers of Ukranian, can be expected to have strong opinions on the war, so they chose to add the anti Russian lines.
It makes sense for CDPR to remove the lines. Sure their PR teams will apologize for the ‘offense,’ but the real issue is a localization team going rogue.
Cyberpunk 2077 is set in a far future californian dystopia. In an alternate history world where the present day would be unrecognizable to us. A future where Russia and Ukraine and others have reformed into a new USSR. This war in Ukraine did not happen in cyberpunk.
Adding references to the war in a localization is undermining the setting. Despite CDPR’s stated support for Ukraine, this is not how they want to do things. They are going to change the lines.
Honestly, it’s a really good game now. The writing is solid (not winning Oscars, but there are engaging and well written characters who will make you feel things), the combat is fun, you can flow freely between stealthy and loud as suits your preference, and there are hours upon hours of really enjoyable side missions. As a longtime Shadowrun tabletop player/gm I especially loved the gigs, each of which is just a self contained run. Go to this place, steal/plant/kill/ferry/rescue, get paid, done. They’re all great little puzzles to be solved in dozens of different ways.
I’m not trying to justify a day one purchase; I held off for over a year and I’m glad I did. But the game as it is now is well worth the money.
one of Cyberpunk 2077’s Ukrainian dialogue line alters “We’re fucking through” to a Ukrainian phrase that roughly means “Go fuck yourself in the same direction as the ship did”.
One line of police dialogue referring to the game’s Scavengers faction has been altered from the English “Couldn’t all these assholes bite it out in the Badlands?” to a Ukrainian phrase that translates as “Couldn’t all this rusnia bite it out in the Badlands?”
Some of the phrasing in the inventory-
There are also apparent references on inventory screens to Ukrainian state messaging during the war. “‘Є перевага’ literally means ‘there is an advantage’,” Tarasov told me. "A reference to the governmental digital initiatives’ branding during Zelensky’s tenure
And some graffiti-
There also appears to be brand new graffiti in the game that references Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014. “The graffiti represents the outlines of Crimea, the peninsula that was illegally annexed from Ukraine by russia in 2014,” Tarasov told me. “Juxtaposed are the Ukrainian coat of arms and taraq tamga (the symbol of Crimean Tatars).” The suggestion is that in Cyberpunk 2077’s world, Crimea is part of Ukraine.
Indeed, who are they even going to piss off, it’s not like there’s a ton of people playing in Ukrainian who’ll be offended by the localization choices. (Although maybe in 20 years or something, references to the warship and such might be harder, but I imagine the crimes one will make even more sense)
I’m 1000% behind an Anachronox reboot or sequel. The cliffhanger at the end of the original game is one of the largest unanswered questions of my childhood.
Is there any ethical AI, all they do is take data people posted online and then profit off it. With the original creators not getting a say if their data gets used or any profits derived from it.
Though Getty did introduce their new AI today that was only trained on images they own the copyright to. Arguably, still not ethical, but at least it's things they own the data for.
I didn't dig too much into it, but my guess would be no.
Even if you could verify, it's still an ethical grey area as it's taking works they paid photographers to generate new works potentially without crediting the original photographers? Their own website tells people they have to credit the original photographer, and I'd be surprised if the AI lists all the works it used to create it.
We did this in a previous org. Basically, we had a bunch of user-generated data, users would then classify a sample of that data, and then we’d train our model on those classifications.
I don’t see how it would work in game dev though, unless they’re using AI to customize an NPC’s behavior based on the player’s actions (i.e. teaching an enemy to block player attacks). Generating models and whatnot would just have too small of a data set to work with.
I'm not a fan of games that are designed by committee, and I fear AI-generated games would take that to the 11th degree.
Given that, I feel very specific aspects could still be vastly improved by AI, like games that implement procedural generation; I feel like his mention of procedural fears more of everything becoming procedural, instead of it supplementing the pre-existing applications of it. Those kinds of games hit a plateau at a certain point in the gameplay loop - the limitations of the tiles or combinations of assets starts to become very predictable and doesn't achieve the purpose it sets out to at that point.
Also to take into account, AI needs a dataset to train it, and to avoid the homogenization he fears would involve producing datasets for specific tasks, and differentiating them from one another; to me, devs producing these unique datasets to sell is inevitable, and there's definitely going to be a lot of "shovelware"-quality datasets being thrown around. The ethics of the data contained in a lot of those kinds of ones will definitely be questionable.
Some games don’t even have fucking KEYBINDS, which the most basic of accessibility features.
This will only change when stores (like Steam) start cataloguing these types of features and letting people setup default filters to hide all games without them.
The users have to make them hear that releasing any game without basic accessibility options is unacceptable. This will only happen when the majority is pushing for it, not just those that need the options.
Until then, make sure you leave a negative review and get a refund when you see this kind of thing, even if the game is otherwise good. Pirate the game instead if you still want to play it anyway. They have to be told that this is unacceptable.
I mean most games can’t even bother to give colorblind people a slider or a palette of colors to change the red outlines and tints they put on things. That’s a way easier problem to solve than variable sized text in a UI.
rockpapershotgun.com
Aktywne