I mean, yeah. It’s an industry that has a near-unlimited supply of starry-eyed fresh college grads to throw into the meat grinder, and the executives of these companies absolutely love to take advantage of that. Maybe if enough devs leave the industry they might finally have to start respecting the people who work for them out of necessity.
People watch star trek and listen to fortunate son and miss the message in both of those pieces of art so I’m pretty sure someone would miss the political message in just about anything.
Does anyone really listen to RATM anymore? Tom Morello is a multimillionaire who hordes money instead of giving charity. Hes a hypocrite and a sell-out.
Music and film don’t demand that you engage with them in the same way as video games. There are some games where you literally cannot play them without engaging with their narrative and message. Spec Ops: The Line is a good example of this. It actively pushes back against the player’s natural inclination to play it like a modern military shooter and not absorb the message.
It’s actually very possible to miss the message of Bioshock. Andrew Ryan built the perfect city and Atlas ruined it. Andrew Ryan cast him out, but Atlas brought the player character as his final ultimate weapon. You eventually rebel, saving the capitalist Utopia.
I have seen people who abided by this interpretation. Any art with any level of subtlety can be misinterpreted. It’s inherently subjective and depends on the viewer’s personal biases.
Are you unfamiliar with capitalism as a theory? Or Ayn Rand? Yes, capitalist utopia. That’s the entire libertarian ethos. Libertarianism is a political framework, pure capitalism is its economic policy.
Don’t get me wrong, the only Libertarianism I’ve ever known is intertwined with Capitalism. But they aren’t the same thing, and I always read BioShock as being a take on Libertarianism specifically.
I dunno how you could miss it in Spec Ops, that game is extremely blatant with messaging. I recently patient gamered it and was rather unimpressed. Bioshock still holds up though.
IMO it was a mistake to patient gamer Spec Ops. The whole point was that it was a pushback against the rhetoric of the US military and simultaneously a critique of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (and knockoffs thereof), which had just exploded in popularity. By not playing it when the things it was critiquing were in the zeitgeist, you don’t really get the same experience. Plus, the marketing for the game deliberately hid the fact that it was intended as a critique; it was marketed as yet another modern military shooter.
I think you can patient gamer it but it only works if you’re heavily familiar with that time.
I was really into COD4 and grew up during the Bush administration so I knew exactly what Spec Ops was critiquing. If you don’t have that experience though I agree it does not land.
What I didn’t like was the blunt messaging. I was expecting something a little deeper or more subtle than what I got. As a game, the clunky movement/cover system, simple enemy AI, and guns that just didn’t feel great hampered the experience. It’s very linear and there are forced choices (eg white phosphorus) that give you control but no choice but to be evil. The graphics are lackluster compared to its contemporaries, but I did enjoy the soundtrack at times. I really got into it with a few of those songs. Unfortunately that only happened a few times during the weekend I beat it in. It was okay, but I was expecting a lot more based on what people said about it.
Appropriately for the thread, the WP scene had a choice: walk away. It kept telling Walker to walk away. The player could have shut the game off.
That’s the pivot point: if you’re just playing a game about Walker, then having a choice doesn’t matter, you’re just being told a story about a lunatic. But, if Walker is a stand-in for you, and you’re playing the game “because you wanted to be something you’re not - a hero”, then not only is playing on a choice, choosing to play war porn in the first place is a choice.
I was expecting something a little deeper or more subtle than what I got.
That’s the problem when these things gain reputations. The reputation builds it up to be more than the piece of art can deliver.
Now imagine playing it when it was new and you weren’t “expecting” anything but a military shooter. It would still be just as blunt, but it landed back then far more effectively than when you go in knowing the reputation the game has built in the many years that followed.
IMO a lot of the subtlety comes from the imagery and symbols around you as you progress through the game. The vibrant tree that you pass that burns up when you look back, etc.
As far as gameplay goes it is very linear. The only “choice” is to stop playing. If I remember correctly the development behind Spec Ops was very rushed so they didn’t have time to so any of those branching paths.
I appreciate it like I would a visual novel more than I do an interactive game.
a lot of the subtlety comes from the imagery and symbols around you as you progress through the game
One of the things I did appreciate about the game was seeing how grimy and worn down everyone got as the game progressed. That was an excellent small detail.
I feel like this is all driven by MS diving full force into AI stuff. Their capex is going to be insane so they’re cutting shit left and right to keep Wall Street happy while they set cash on fire trying to make AI something more than anime profile pic generators.
Maybe they’re just buying these studios to acquire their IPs, code and artwork to train new AI’s on. Then close the studio, as you’ve acquired all its data and it serves no further purpose to them. Probably hoping to release full AAA-AI slop in the future. Don’t think it’ll work and they’ll waste enormous amounts of energy and resources before the AI bubble bursts and everyone realizes that current ‘AI’ (LLMs) will never become AGI.
Eh? They’ve been chasing the one-off Xbox 360 high for two generations now, and are nowhere near it. Sony have near full dominance in the console space. Valve have so much dominance in the PC space that they’ve got people to try Linux.
The aim of GamePass was that people would stream games and not need a console at all, and that just hasn’t happened for them. Their entire gamble was on cloud gaming, and it’s not paid off at all.
As much as the higher tiers of PSN aren’t as good value as GamePass, it’s certainly lead to higher quality games for Sony’s platform as they can still get sales revenue from shorter or niche games, rather than just looking at a single figure and laying off whole studios.
I’d much rather pay money for a full game now (and I’ll be honest, my day one purchases this gen are limited to games I’m really interested in), or wait and play on sub later (and it’s about 18 months I think for games to go “free”), than have half a game on sub now and get nickle and dimed for the rest of it.
I like watching it. But i like to see the faves I played throughout the year get recognition and hear a little bit from the Devs when they receive the awards. Announcements are a bonus for me. Plus I prefer to watch things fully even if they had already passed rather than just looking up the winners (in the case of the game awards). It would be like being into a sport but just looking up the results the next morning instead. I prefer to watch the full game unknowing of the outcome, and I take that mentality with me with both award shows (that i care about) and even Nintendo directs and it’s counterparts (which admittedly the game awards is half of)
The main problem with the Steam awards is that they don’t respect the actual release dates. For example, Red Dead Redemption 2, a 2018 game (or a 2019 game if you go by PC only) was named the Steam GOTY in 2020.
Steam also had little to offer in the years that were heavy on Epic exclusives and great games like Kena or Control, resulting in it being hard to think up a nominee.
Moreover, if I remember correctly, they also bar prior winners from their “most supported game” type category, which makes no sense because some games, like Euro Truck Simulator 2, get regular content and technical updates to this day. On the other hand, The Witcher 3 recently won in a category despite having been untouched for years.
Yeah the dates thing is an issue but it is because they take the Steam release of the game. That and they take from the last award to the next one not a calendar year. So RD2 was a 2020 game awards on Steam.
But yeah it feels weird I agree.
The most supported one I understand but the idea is to not have the same game every year even if it has been supported plenty otherwise Terraria would still be there…
The Witcher case I do not know… But the issue there is like any public voted stuff people don’t always vote based on category but they vote what they like. Or maybe they only played that game of the category so they vote that one etc… Some places might play with the numbers around behind the curtains and choose another one if it doesn’t make sense… but that also doesn’t feel right.
Hitman VR won the VR title despite being a bad port to the best of my knowledge. Because people without VR saw it as an option and said that sounds cool then picked it.
If you want it to be good, it will still take hard work. Your own training data, your own ideas, your own work. There’s no way to do anything worthwhile with an LLM that takes no work or thought.
This. AIs are basically garbage in, garbage out systems. More general an AI system harder it will be tailor to a specific game. That means companies will need their own training data to supplement it. AI is not “plug anywhere, do anything” type of a solution.
That’s not maximum profit, though! They could have created timed content, events, literally anything and would have probably made more money because of the cultural relevance…
Governments should only allow big mergers in exceptional circumstances
Big conglomerates should be broken up
They are bad for the workers, and bad for the consumers. Half of the time, also bad for the shareholders (according to an old McK study). Lives are being ruined for billionaires to gamble for more billions.
I love how this headline, too, doesn’t tell us what it’s about. But fair enough, it’s a good way to poke fun at the clickbait problem.
And frankly, the shitty part is that by now clickbait headlines/titles have become utterly ubiquitous. To the point where most users will no longer even notice, because they’ve become 100% of headlines.
I’m not Nintendo supporter and play Switch games on emulators. But one justification is, that this is current generation system. And while the developers are not responsible for, this enables easy piracy, and basically each first party game got leaked early and was playable before or shortly after launch. So lot of these people connect the wrong dots and say that the emulator “supports” piracy, which is not true, but depending on the view could be interpreted by some haters.
The Ryujinx isn’t illegal and I am pro emulation (I have terabytes of Roms for all kind of systems) and Open Source. The above statement is not MY justification, but what I think is what most Nintendo supporters will say. I talk about this subject with my bro, watch YouTube videos and read forum comments and that is what I get from them.
aftermath.site
Ważne