Cool, but I wish they’d look at why people hate them, ignore the bullshit reasons, and focus on the good points — and work to improve them.
I haven’t cared about Assassin’s Creed since the first one. The fights are like playing Guitar Hero blindfolded, but on Expert, except if you fail, you die and have to start over. QTEs where you can’t even see the prompts are dumb. They had a cool vision for the game, but the actual implementation sucked.
Another game, I forget which one, had forced inverted X-axis and you couldn’t un-invert it. Bonus, the Y axis couldn’t be inverted like I like. So the game was completely unplayable.
Ubisoft is a weird beast. They keep putting out the same slop time after time and people keep buying it up. I think Ubi is just really good at production quality and marketing, and this is apparently good enough to garner sales over and over again. It’s like…they have talented devs, but they don’t let them cook. They have a very “top-down” approach to design to encourage consistency in their catalog, but it seems like it’s also what has caused them to stagnate.
On the one hand, I appreciate that they are fighting this fight and trying to put a kibosh on the next gen of gamergaters. On the other hand, I kind of don’t care so long as every game they put out is all flash and no substance.
Yeah none of those reasons were why people hated Shadows though. It was entirely racists. They aren’t gonna make any more improvements to their formula because Ubisoft doesn’t innovate, they’ll just wait for someone else to add an interesting twist to the open world formula and then steal that.
Oh yeah, I heard people didn’t like the idea of a Black guy in the Japanese AC game. Is that the one Shadows was? So yeah, that person may not have existed in history. Then again, neither did Robin Hood. Stories don’t need to be based in fact, and as much as the original Assassin’s Creed was all about historical accuracy, the whole Animus thing placed the game entirely within the realm of fiction and fantasy, which tells me any artistic liberties they take with the history you dive into is A-OK in my book! So I don’t care if that guy existed IRL or not. I was intrigued by the idea of a Japanese AC game… but put off by the developer.
And racists are idiots, just, full stop on that count.
he also 100% existed lol. Yasuke has tons of historical records about him because he didn’t exist in like ancient Japan, he was the bodyguard of Oda Nobunaga during the Sengoku era. like you said, racists are just idiots and can’t stand actual history that goes against their stupidity.
Hmm. While I don’t know what their QA workflow is, my own experience is that working with QA people to design a QA procedure for a given feature tends to require familiarity with the feature in the context of real-world knowledge and possible problems, and that human-validating a feature isn’t usually something done at massive scale, where you’d get a lot of benefit from heavy automation.
It’s possible that one might be able to use LLMs to help write test code — reliability and security considerations there are normally less-critical than in front-line code. Worst case is getting a false positive, and if you can get more test cases covered, I imagine that might pay off.
Square does an MMO, among their other stuff. If they can train a model to produce AI-driven characters that act sufficiently like human players, where they can theoretically log training data from human players, that might be sufficient to populate an MMO “experimental” deployment so that they can see if anything breaks prior to moving code to production.
“Because I would love to be able to start up 10,000 instances of a game in the cloud, so there’s 10,000 copies of the game running, deploy an AI bot to spend all night testing that game, then in the morning we get a report. Because that would be transformational.”
I think that the problem is that you’re likely going to need more-advanced AI than an LLM, if you want them to just explore and try out new features.
One former Respawn employee who worked in a senior QA role told Business Insider that he believes one of the reasons he was among 100 colleagues laid off this past spring is because AI was reviewing and summarising feedback from play testers, a job he usually did.
We can do a reasonable job of summarizing human language with LLMs today. I think that that might be a viable application.
Worst case is getting a false positive, and if you can get more test cases covered, I imagine that might pay off.
False positives during testing are a huge time sink. QA has to replicate and explain away each false report and the faster AI 'completes' tasks the faster the flood of false reports come in.
There is plenty of non-AI automation that can be used intentionally to do tedious repetitive tasks already where they only increase work if they aren't set up right.
Take-Two’s CEO doesn’t think a Grand Theft Auto built with AI would be very good | VGC
Sounds fair to me, at least for near-term AI. A lot of the stuff that I think GTA does well doesn’t map all that well to what we can do very well with generative AI today (and that’s true for a lot of genres).
He added: “Anything that involves backward-looking data compute and LLMs, AI is really good for, and that and that applies to lots of things that we do at Take-Two. Anything that isn’t attached to that, it’s going to be really, really bad at…. there is no creativity that can exist, by definition, in any AI model, because it is data driven.”
To make a statement about any AI seems overly strong. This feels a little like a reformed “can machines think?” question. The human mind is also data-driven; we learn about the world, then create new content based on that. We have more sophisticated mechanisms for synthesizing new data from our memories than present LLMs do. But I’m not sure that those mechanisms need be all that much more complicated, or that one really requires human-level synthesizing ability to be able to create pretty compelling content.
I certainly think that the simple techniques that existing generative AI uses, where you just have a plain-Jane LLM, may very well be limiting in some substantial ways, but I don’t think that holds up in the longer term, and I think that it may not take a lot of sophistication being added to permit a lot of functionality.
I also haven’t been closely following use of AI in video games, but I think that there are some games that do effectively make use of generative AI now. A big one for me is use of diffusion models for dynamic generation of illustration. I like a lot of text-based games — maybe interactive fiction or the kind of text-based choose-your-own-adventure games that Choice of Games publishes. These usually have few or no illustrations. They’re often “long tail” games, made with small budgets by a small team for a niche audience at low cost. The ability to inexpensively illustrate games would be damned useful — and my impression is that some of the Choice Of games crowd have made use of that. With local computation capability, the ability to do so dynamically would be even more useful. The generation doesn’t need to run in real time, and a single illustration might be useful for some time, but could help add atmosphere to the game.
There have been modified versions of (note: very much NSFW and covers a considerable amount of hard kink material, inclusive of stuff like snuff, physical and psychological torture, sex with children and infants, slavery, forced body modification and mutilation, and so forth; you have been warned) that have incorporated this functionality to generate dynamic illustrations based on prompts that the game can procedurally generate running on local diffusion models. As that demonstrates, it is clearly possible from a technical standpoint to do that now, has been for quite some months, and I suspect that it would not be hard to make that an option with relatively-little development effort for a very wide range of text-oriented games. Just needs standardization, ease of deployment, sharing parallel compute resources among software, and so forth.
As it exists in 2025, SillyTavern used as a role-playing software package is not really a game. Rather, it’s a form of interactive storytelling. It has very limited functionality designed around making LLMs support this sort of thing: dealing with a “group” of characters, permitting a player to manually toggle NPC presence, the creation of “lorebooks”, where tokens showing up trigger insertion of additional content into the game context to permit statically-written information about a fictional world that an LLM does not know about to be incorporated into text generation. But it’s not really a game in any traditional sense of the word. One might create characters that have adversarial goals and attempt to overcome those, but it doesn’t really deal well with creating challenges incredibly well, and the line between the player and a DM is fairly blurred today, because the engine requires hand-holding to work. Context of the past story being fed into an LLM as part of its prompt is not a very efficient way to store world state. Some of this might be addressed via use of more-sophisticated AIs that retain far more world state and in a more-efficient-to-process form.
But I am pretty convinced that with a little work even with existing LLMs, it’d be possible to make a whole genre of games that do effectively store world state, where the LLM interacts with a more-conventionally-programmed game world with state that is managed as it has been by more traditional software. For example, I strongly suspect that it would be possible to glue even an existing LLM to something like a MUD world. That might be via use of LoRAs or MoEs, or to have additional “tiny” LLMs. That permits complex characters to add content within a game world with rules defined in the traditional sense. I think I’ve seen one or two early stabs at this, but while I haven’t been watching closely, it doesn’t seem to have real, killer-app examples…yet. But I don’t think that we really need any new technologies to do this, just game developers to pound on this.
that’s 1200 highly self-motivated workers that are now competing with you and me for the “boring” jobs. Not to wish ill on these former journalists - I hope all these people have landed in good places with stable incomes. But man… this job market just keeps getting more and more brutal. Jobs are eliminated and more and more workers are competing for the same tiny pool.
Whenever these massive tech companies started laying people off during 2020 was when I went “well shit”. I was only a year into my job and struggled to find something even somewhat relevant at that point prior to covid. I thankfully still have that job for now but I don’t know what’s next
Tech workers have become a dime a dozen now it seems. Heck all workers seem to have. Now with the whole AI thing I’m trying to think of what I can pivot to.
Tech is ruined for me personally. I don’t want to touch AI. I’ve been considering some kind of business i can start myself or like…I don’t know really. I’m just burnt out and don’t know what the future will look like. There’s so much uncertainty
You mean easier to remove? The battery is already removable. It’s not glued or soldered in place. But you do need a spatula thingy to open the shell of the controller and actually get to it.
In all my many years of gaming and superfluous amount of controllers, I’ve rarely had problems with a Sony internal battery. When I have, I simply opened up the controller and replaced it (mind you I needed to source the battery). But its never been an issue and a fairly easy process.
The controllers I’ve always had any kind of issue with ensuring I had charged and/or replacement batteries has been Xbox controllers.
I only know up to the 360, which had the battery casing on the outside you could easily remove with a clip latch. But it also had notoriously bad power issues, not iust with the controllers but the console itself. Faults in the PSU and overheating were the two most common causes of the infamous RROD.
The term “removable battery” typically means there’s no disassembly required. Or at least nothing any more complicated than a battery cover. As much as it’s an easy process for those with even minor mechanical skills, your initial wording creates the sort of slippery slope that led to us needing a government to step in so that phones and other devices would have removable batteries again.
During a Q&A session following Sony’s latest financial results, Tao said that despite the negativity surrounding Sony’s live service offerings thanks to the issues with Concord and Marathon, she still believes live service games are worthwhile because they’ve added a revenue stream that didn’t exist for the company five years ago.
Competing with their own old games has probably been a nuisance for them and anything that makes playing their old games more difficult is probably welcome.
Ignoring the price change itself. The original switch launched March 3, 2017. The only excuse for this thing costing more than about 90 usd pre-tarrifs is due to the outdated hardware being so old and hard to get (though knowing nintendo they have tooling in-house for “reasons”).
Do people just seriously not give a fuck and buy this ancient thing because of the exclusive games? I mean, I get it, nintendo are royal pieces of shit for locking all their games down inside of a captive platform. But that’s a great reason not to buy this shit.
I know our house got it bc we wanted to play Animal Crossing. A lot of homes get a Switch 1 because it makes the most sense for kids, especially after the durable Switch Lite came out. It’s just cheaper and easier-to-use than competing devices. The only real competition is phones and iPads, and smart parents know that games on those devices can be predatory in a way that Switch games usually aren’t. I know it’s not exactly as black-and-white as that, but I think a lot of parents see it that way.
Do people just seriously not give a fuck and buy this ancient thing because of the exclusive games?
This is pretty much true of all consoles. People play games, not consoles, and they’ll use whatever hardware they need to.
I mean, I get it, nintendo are royal pieces of shit for locking all their games down inside of a captive platform. But that’s a great reason not to buy this shit.
Again, universally true of consoles, though unlike Xbox where games have become more and more crossplatform, or PS where some games are getting licensed for PC ports, Nintendo’s head is so far up its own ass that it won’t even let you record gameplay without worrying about a DMCA.
Fuck Nintendo, but for the same reason as Oracle: because they spend more on lawyers than the people who actually do the work creating something. Also, they could use some modern hardware for a change instead of always being multiple generations behind.
I played this for 6 hours straight. Lovely port so far but there are some minor bugs. Namely in the point scoring results screen with flickering text sometimes probably z fighting. I also had the mini map get bugged position and overlap the lap times upper right a couple times.
Other thing I noticed was timing differences at higher frame rates like the steam train crossing the desert road.
OpenGL is very slow considering what it has to render. Used Vulkan but I tested OpenGL briefly and it chugged at 2160p with 120hz and frame interpolation on. AA was off.
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