Split Fiction and everything from Hazelight is fantastic.
…That’s about it.
I guess churning stuff out like F1 or Sims DLC every year isn’t particularly offensive, and they didn’t mess up ME LE too bad. And they have a history of some neat originals.
What I’m saying is EA isn’t really the mega villain anymore. And maybe the longer-term horizon allowed by going private will help?
They’re being sold to the Saudis. The same guys who hacked up a journalist so they will continue the EA tradition of hacking up developers, only now 100% more physically.
Serious question. What difference does this make? They’re already a shit corporate soulless entity, how much worse can things get? I already avoid 99% of their games
My EA internship at one of their Canadian offices was the best experience I’ve had in the gaming industry. I feel for my colleagues there, no doubt the work culture is about to get real toxic for them.
Private equity is the death knell to any brand. For example Joanne’s was sold to private equity. I’ve worked for companies owned by private equity, they are there to extract every last cent for themselves while the brand is whittled away. Any cent that would be invested is instead given to the investors so they can buy new Audis and boats.
I’m not saying EA didn’t deserve it, but this is for sure the end of EA as we’ve ever known it
I’d say good riddance, but with Jared Kushner involved, I can’t imagine any good will become of it.
With Trump suggesting he’ll be able to control TikTok’s algorithm, crackdown on political opponents (starting with Comey and Willis), along with getting television networks to bend the knee about what gets aired… this could be just another avenue of controlling the media
Coming back to SimCity 2000 today, I find it much harder to callously play with the lives of my virtual citizens. The years I’ve spent as a homeowner, parent, and city-dwelling adult make me at least pause before I willingly inflict that kind of pain on my tiny subjects.
I can totally understand that feeling! I played a fair bit of Cities Skylines. To unlock all buildings you have to inflict quite a lot of chaos to your citicens, e.g. garbage needs to pile up like crazy or crime needs to be really high.
The biggest issue I have with all of these is that the dialogue is never connected to the actual actions of the npcs.
Its easy to have an npc say something, but tying it to gameplay mechanics isn’t. So we end up with people asking for this in new games, but all you get is conversations disconnected from the gameplay. I’m sure there is someway to make it feel more “right”, but we’re a farcry away from making true open world games like this.
That sounds like no one really tried. Like, sure, you’ll get bullshit occasionally, but in the code you know exactly what the NPC is doing, so crafting a prompt based on that is not really that hard and will work most of the time, especially for the simple NPCs.
It’s not that the dialogue doesn’t sound right, it’s that the dialogue is disconnected from the game.
A great example was someone did this with Skyrim a while back. In the dialogue they convinced the NPC to join their party. But there isn’t any code logic to allow that, so the NPC is talking like they joined the person’s party, but the gameplay itself doesn’t support it.
Now for animal crossing you could make it work a bit easier cause the character can’t directly interact with the NPCs, but then again it also makes the endless dialogue less impactful.
A great example was someone did this with Skyrim a while back. In the dialogue they convinced the NPC to join their party. But there isn’t any code logic to allow that, so the NPC is talking like they joined the person’s party, but the gameplay itself doesn’t support it.
That’s the exact type of scenario I was thinking as well. I had seen another video for Skyrim with AI dialog where they used it to haggle with a merchant who agreed to drop the price of an item in the shop. But an item’s gold value is baked into the game itself. An NPC can say they’ll lower the price, but it will still cost the exact same (barring the normal modifiers based on skills/quest completion/disposition/etc.)
The concept is really cool, and I hope to see some more interesting attempts to incorporate more of that adaptive kind of dialogue and gameplay, but its not going to be easy to figure out how to make it work.
That’s essentially the thing that makes LLMs as unreliable as they are in everything else; they run on probabilities that have no anchor in reality. The game is just another contained reality to which the model has no direct connection.
Now if Nintendo released something like this I might actually enjoy the Animal Crossing series again. The dialogue in the newer games is so soulless and repetitive.
i mean, i don’t like pirating. i get a shitton of “free” (okay, minimal cost tax-subsidized if you want to pedant. probably a dollar a month that I’m gladly paying anyways) games from the library. i buy maybe one game a year.
You didn’t even mention Epic’s giveaways or the games that come with a month of Amazon Prime. If you needed a gaming library in a hurry, there are great games given away for free or cheap on PC all the time.
I was going to buy my wife the latest Lara Croft trilogy for Christmas a few years ago and then epic gave it to me for free so I had to actually think about her gift
arstechnica.com
Aktywne