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.
But even before recent tariffs, modern console prices weren’t dropping nearly as fast as history suggested they should. In fact, Sony first raised the nominal starting price of the PS5 Digital Edition back in 2023, way before Trump’s current trade war was even on the horizon.
I’m not saying Trump is to blame but this is misleading. Trump hurt our economy with tariffs during his first term nearly 10 years ago. During 2023 he was releasing “Agenda 47” policies, in which he specifically mentioned more tariffs. Here’s Trump threatening tariffs 8 months before Sony raised the price
For regular people, Trump tariffs came out of nowhere in 2024. Corporations and people holding stock have different perspectives.
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
You can’t compare current generations to previous because starting with the PS3/Xbox 360 the generations became artificially extended.
With no no new impending hardware, there’s no impetus to reduce prices and clear stock.
The OG Xbox 360 launched with a 20 GB hard drive (2005). That got a price cut when the 60 GB version was announced (2008) and that coincided with the much more expensive “Elite” with 120 GB. Similarly that had a price cut when the 250 GB version came out in 2009.
arstechnica.com
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