When I was young my parents would not let me get DDR: Konamix. They wouldn’t even let me buy it to play with a controller. Nevermind that I’m at the arcade with all of my arcade friends multiple times a week.
I was at my local tiny game store hanging out as I usually did all the time, and the guy working there (I was maybe 12, he was like 24) EXCITEDLY asked “HEY I got my preorder of Konamix, do you wanna play?!” And I was SOOOOO ELATED to try. I told him about my parents and not letting me get the game, and he was like “yo that’s horrible, I am so sorry!”
I played there for about an hour, until he got off work. As I was getting on my bike, I hear
“RAI!”
“Yes?”
“This is yours.”
Like a movie with a sports guy handing over his jersey to an eager fan, he hands me his brand new copy of Konamix. It was the sweetest thing anyone had ever done for me. I told him he can’t do that, it’s his preorder, and he said “it’s okay, I can get another one; you can’t.”
My parents were PISSED (and they knew I didn’t buy it, I couldn’t afford 40USD at that time)… but they ended up buying me a shitty Madkatz pad so I could play at home. I probably put it 400 hours.
Thank you, video game store dude. I hope you’re doing amazing now.
I really wanted to like it more because they made some really cool choices in the design of it. I can see why it didn’t sell well, but it should have at least been more influential
It might be nostalgia speaking, but I think the real issue is that a 20 year old game can actually be this good and popular. How can it be that it is more enjoyable than anything else I’ve bought over the last year (at least)? Doesn’t that say that game companies in general have dropped the ball on game design, focusing on graphics and money over content and gameplay? As I said, it might just be me stuck in my wonderfully comforting blanket of nostalgia…
I think it's almost definitely nostalgia speaking.
Granted, by the point Oblivion was made I was the nostalgia guy talking about how Bethesda games kept getting smaller and less ambitious. Most people saying that then did so because they were coming from Morrowind. Not me, I am a proper dinosaur and I was just pissed that after Morrowind dropped everything interesting about Daggerfall to make a console game they just kept moving further in that direction.
Was also not a fan of Fallout getting turned into Oblivion 40K instead of a proper turn-based CRPG.
Which goes to show this conversation isn't new and gaming is old enoung now that it has gone in cycles.
I mean, seriously, Daggerfall was continent-sized and was using procedural generation to make dungeons and build dialogue and quests and essentially reimagining how games could be made in ways that wouldn't resurface until what? No Man's Sky? Oblivion is bad Lord of the Rings. If anything it's the awkward middle child now, because man, the Imperial City in Oblivion feels hilariously tiny and basically deserted against modern RPGs. There are five people running loops and having canned conversations. Coming from Baldur's Gate 3 or Cyberpunk to this is... a bit of a shock.
"Why is an old game good?" feels like an odd question. It would be silly to ask that of any other medium, wouldn't it? The most beloved classics being beloved isn't an indictment of modern stuff, especially when cherry-picking the greatest hits and ignoring how many flops existed back then too.
Clair Obscur came out the same time and it’s probably the best RPG I’ve ever played, and I’ve played every noteworthy one in the last 40 years at least. GOTY at the LEAST.
I hear this rhetoric a lot, which shows me that a ton of people have a much harder time than me finding the good stuff, even though there’s so much of it out there.
I mean I am all for criticising creatively bankrupt mush like Ubisoft et al pushes out and Call of Duty 420: Black Ops 69 or FIFA or whatever but we can’t pretend there are literally no good games being released nowadays either. Just now we had a month with both Blue Prince and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 being released within weeks of each other. BG3 and Alan Wake 2 releasing in the same year was just two years ago.
There are plenty of not just good but great recent games.
How can it be that it is more enjoyable than anything else I’ve bought over the last year (at least)?
Possibly because you’re buying the wrong games? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a massive nostalgia-on for Oblivion, and I picked up the Remaster, and it’s cool…
But there have been a lot of great games so far this year. Just this month alone, Blue Prince and Expedition 33 have both been fantastic. Both better than the Oblivion remaster imo.
The Indiana Jones game is cool. I haven’t played Split Fiction yet, but it looks really good as well. Just to name a few.
Edit: More that I remembered: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. Wanderstop is pretty chill. Xenoblade Chronicles X was finally released on Switch (game map is like 5x the size of Skryim or something…). Atomfall. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is pretty cool if you’re into that kind of thing.
I was really motivated to get one to play the Demon’s Souls remake, beat it 3 times in a week, and since then I’ve probably spent more time updating the system and collecting the monthly ps+ games than actually playing.
I gave up after PS4 had no games and the few it did have were ported. Except Bloodborne, but emulation caught up and runs it better.
Now I’m just PC/Deck + Nintendo. Xbox I dumped after the 360.
Or just PC/Deck and a used Switch 2 later is my new plan. It’s going to cost too much new.
Maybe not interesting, but it was a big change from being the guy who owned every successful console and some oddballs imports from the 70’s onwards at one point.
I’m pretty similar in the console to PC shift. Pretty much had all consoles and handhelds through Xbox 360/Switch/PS3.
I still miss the Wii controls (I hate moving my neck for anything VR) but I don’t think with Switch 2 motion controls/mouse will get me back on Nintendo. Twilight Princess and Metroid Prime Trilogy were awesome on Wii. Only reason I bought a Switch was for Zelda but I didn’t care for it and eventually gave my switch away, never finished BoTW. I don’t think Metroid Prime 4 is enough for me to justify buying a whole console. So I’m planning to get a steamdeck instead of the switch 2.
If we ever see a world where nintendo games are on steam and you don’t need a nintendo account to play them, I would totally buy up all my favorite games and play them on PC.
Otherwise I really don’t care for the business model of re-buying the games I already own, just re-released on the latest console. Don’t care for paying for online access. And the few games they have really aren’t compelling enough for me to justify buying a console when I have hundreds of unplayed games in my steam library. (my humble bundle subscription snowballed my library lol)
The steam backlog included. I actually started chipping away at mine last year inspired by a tuber challenging themselves to get through all of theirs in a dramatically arbitrary amount time for the clicks.
Basically doing the same without the pressured deadline:
go alphabetically not picking and choosing or it’ll be all crap you keep skipping over to pick from at the end.
play for two hours minimum
if you don’t like the game by then, drop it forever.
I got it down from 304 games to…126 as of yesterday lol. Not humble bundle here, but the very first steam sales. The worst are the old indie games publshers bundled in that I didn’t seek out myself. Most simply do not hold up if they ever really did.
Same. I was so hyped for the hardware, but the games never came. I guess it’s because Sony went all-in on live service games that ended up getting cancelled instead of backing lots of single player games like they traditionally had. Steam Deck took my PS5’s place and eventually even got me into PC gaming to play what my Deck couldn’t — and PC gaming on Linux at that. I doubt I will buy any future PlayStations now, not after how this generation went. There hasn’t been a single PS5 game that I wanted to play that hasn’t come to PC anyway. Like you said, can’t beat the catalog. Plus modding capability and backwards compatibility.
It’s impossible to beat “every game ever made.” Which while it may not play some games now, the platform will eventually play those, too. One way or another.
Because Myasaki has very publically spoken about thinking AI generated stuff is horrible and soulless, and that he’d never use it. Them coming out with a Ghibli filter felt like it was a reaction to that.
Well for one, they didnt come out with a Ghibli filter, they just removed restrictions on imitating art styles and using ghibli style just became a trend.
And honestly who cares what Miyazaki thinks? He’s famously stuck in the past, stubborn and kind of elitist.
I am honestly not informed enough to say whether the whole Ghibli trend grew organically, or whether it came from OAI marketing.
And yeah, Myasaki can be a bit of a dick, but I don’t think he’s wrong here. I worked with both LLM and image generation for some personal projects, and you have to coax it a lot to get anything halfway usable, and even then, it isn’t great. Even stuff that’s heralded as exemplary by the corps behind the trend mostly seems kinda shitty.
Also, even if you like GenAI, most of the stuff that OAI is doing right now feels like desperate attempts to keep the hype train rolling, to justify their frankly ludicrous valuation.
A lot of people care what Miyazaki thinks because he created over a dozen films that are beloved by millions because of their artistry, is well respected in the anime/manga world, and is generally regarded as a master of his artform. People tend to take your words seriously when they have nearly 50 years of experience and success behind them.
The issue with Rowling is more that she started talking out her rear end about something of which she doesn’t have much, if any, understanding. If she gave you advice on writing YA fiction, it’d be worth something. Miyazaki is a visual artist broadly respected for his art, so his opinions on visual art have some weight. If it was about the cultivation of kumquats, I think I’d ask a farmer.
Almost no one knows how SD works. That’s not the point. He’s not contrasting it against some other GenAI concept to compare training cost. He’s looking at it based on the results. You don’t have to know how to build a CPU to compare benchmarks for ones built by someone else.
Except how AI works is pretty crucial to the entire anti-AI argument.
The amount of people that claim AI just collages together pieces of existing “stolen” art and use that as an argument against AI is ridiculous.
And your CPU example isn’t great since you would be comparing CPUs to other CPUs, it would be more apt to talk about someone who doesn’t know how a computer works to demonise computers in general and advocate doing maths by hand instead.
Actually, yeah, that’s a bad metaphor from me. Comparing benchmarks would be comparing AI models.
He’s not comparing benchmarks. He’s comparing results, so it’s more about maybe error rate than processing speed.
I guess it’s like comparing the result of an approximation versus an explicit computation. GenAI makes an approximation of art. It very quickly spits out something that looks a bit like the intended answer. It even gets you close enough to be totally satisfactory for some purposes, in the same way 3 can be a usable approximation of π for some purposes. However, the picture is not the full purpose of creating art. Art is a form of communication, transmitting something from one mind to another using indirect means because telepathy isn’t available. AI is not trying to communicate anything. It’s just an approximation of something someone could say.
Miyazaki is someone with years of experience in creating art so he understands the ‘language’ of art better than some. He has ‘fluency.’ AI images hit the uncanny valley for artists because they are attuned to the difference between what an art is supposed to look like vs what the imitator approximates. They have the fluency to spot the fake the same way you might be able to spot someone speaking your native language as a mother tongue vs out of a phrasebook. Because he is ‘fluent’ in art, people take his words on art seriously, just as one would generally take a born-and-raised German’s words seriously regarding German grammar.
Art is a form of communication, transmitting something from one mind to another using indirect means because telepathy isn’t available. AI is not trying to communicate anything.
That’s like saying photography isn’t art because a camera isn’t trying to communicate something. Like AI it’s a tool uses by people to convey that idea.
Like when I use AI generation, I have an idea or specific image in my head and I do my best to come up with a prompt that will produce what I want, or more usually, I use photoshop, so piece piece several pieces together and edit it a bit so the match is more accurate. At a fundamental level, if you consciously try to clear your mind of any existing biases regarding AI, then it’s not really any different to photography or photoshop as an artform.
AI images hit the uncanny valley for artists because they are attuned to the difference between what an art is supposed to look like vs what the imitator approximates.
That is a somewhat valid point, but there are AI models for specific tasks, say generating human faces, that co trolled experiments have found that people can’t distinguish between the AI content and the real thing. There is also plenty of traditional art that hits the uncanny valley or simply doesn’t look right, but that doesn’t make it any less art, does it?
Because he is ‘fluent’ in art, people take his words on art seriously, just as one would generally take a born-and-raised German’s words seriously regarding German grammar.
Good analogy, but there’s still a barrier between the type of art miyazaki is fluent in and AI art. Like imagine a British person saying your English is wrong because you’re using American English or AAVE. Would you take them as an expert because and denounce those variations because they are not British English? Or would you consider their ignorance of the other side limiting to their expertise?
And also, I feel I should add, Miyazaki is famously not a fan of digital art. Should we take him as an expert on art and view digital art as less than traditional art? Or should we just roll our eyes at the stubborn old man stuck in his ways?
…when I use AI generation, I have an idea or specific image in my head and I do my best to come up with a prompt that will produce what I want, or more usually, I use photoshop…
Therein lies the difference. You have an intended target and use tools to create it. The artistry is in the skill and effort put into communicating your internal concept. To my knowledge, people generally aren’t saying AI is useless in a creative process, just that typing in a few words and hitting ‘generate’ until you get something cool, or just running a filter over an image to make it look like a drawing, isn’t artistry.
…there are AI models for specific tasks, say generating human faces, that co trolled experiments have found that people can’t distinguish between the AI content and the real thing.
I failed to communicate my idea clearly enough. I’m not talking about the artefacts that sometimes make images look weird. I’m talking about the deep brain sense that one can develop that can tell the difference between someone acting vs emoting, singing vs lip synching, etc. An ingenuous performance has a different character to it that can be said to fall into the uncanny valley.
There is also plenty of traditional art that hits the uncanny valley or simply doesn’t look right, but that doesn’t make it any less art, does it?
That depends. If hitting the valley is intentional and done using skill, that’s just normal art. If it has intent but not skill, it’s incomplete art. It’s failing to communicate as intended, much like I failed with words above. It’s part of becoming good at something to screw it up, though, so it’s to be expected sometimes. If it has skill but no intent, that’s craftsmanship rather than artistry. Craftsmanship is great but has a subtle difference in how it is experienced.
there’s still a barrier between the type of art miyazaki is fluent in and AI art.
That’s not so good as an analogy. AI imagery isn’t art by itself. Even in your example of your own work, it’s materials, at best. Saying AI image generation is artistry is like saying hiring someone else to paint a picture makes you an artist. Even ‘prompt engineering’ at its finest makes one an artist as much as project management makes one a programmer. So, the general argument comes from the pretense rather than the tool. Bringing your sentence closer to the mark would be something like ‘There is a barrier between art, which Miyazaki is experienced in, and this particular type of tool one can use.’ It’s an apples to oranges comparison, like comparing the field of astronomy to a camera.
Should we take him as an expert on art and view digital art as less than traditional art? Or should we just roll our eyes at the stubborn old man stuck in his ways?
That’s an obvious false binary. People are perfectly capable of being right about one thing and wrong about another. You give his words weight because of his expertise. That doesn’t mean you have to take them as gospel, but ignoring all of an expert’s opinions because you dislike some of them, or some implications of them, is a terrible idea as well.
Miyazaki, the shit take machine deadbeat dad who’s kinda known for being overall somewhat of a cunt? That miyazaki? His opinions don’t matter to me personally.
I expect to be burnt at the stake for this but SMH you people are falling over yourselves over someone just because he made good anime.
He wasn’t a deadbeat dad. He was a workaholic and distance father, but he provided for his kids.
He was a workaholic and expected the same level of commitment from his employees, not more. He frequently reanimated whole scenes while his eyes would allow it. Difficult to work with? Sure. Cunt? Nah.
His work consistently had anti-war, pro-environmental and pro-worker/socialism themes. He made something more then “good anime”.
I’m wondering what shit takes you think he has or why they should outweigh his other accomplishments.
btw, Miyazaki grew up around his uncle’s plane factory. That’s why he has an appreciation of flying scenes and why he made Wind Raises, which really isn’t pro-war when you start dissecting it.
edit: He also has some of the best written female characters, each unique and sensible for the story.
Right? A lot of games have no win condition it was just to see how far you could get. Already saw some good examples on the comments, but pacman is another one. There is the kill screen but that’s just cause the game wasn’t made to go that long.
Pharaoh/Cleopatra includes somewhat detailed descriptions of life in ancient Egypt in context of the gameplay. You have a beer production chain; the game has a short outline of beer in ancient Egypt.
It has great gameplay too that stands the test of time.
If the least used operating system. Why limit your audience to such a small niche to begin with? Game development isn’t cheap. You tend to not want to lock out your chances of recouping that by blocking 90% of potential players
It’s still an argument, given that this historically wasn’t the case. And Mac used to have a bigger share of the pie. Do they even make Mac only games anymore?
But those numbers pretty much prove my point. Unless you’re already set up to be making games specific to a system, there’s no point in starting from scratch to only name something for 1-2% of the market.
If the least used operating system. Why limit your audience to such a small niche to begin with?
… which is no longer true. Also supporting Linux does not mean its limited to Linux only. This is in addition to Windows. And supporting Steam Deck comes with some extra goodies for the publisher, as they get some extra marketing in Steam itself and by videogame outlets, fans and YouTubers speaking about it. Do not make the mistake and look at numbers without taking context into account.
Your argumentation only explains why devs didn’t create Linux native applications in the past. I said its no longer the case. So don’t misunderstand me. What you said is true for the past, not today.
The short answer is in many cases it’s just not worth it. Maintaining a Linux build is not free and the possible market share gain is fairly minimal. Add to that the possibility you get it for free through proton and your reasons for investing the dev effort shrink.
I’ve heard an argument for maintaining Linux builds because Linux users will provide better bug reports but that mindset is unlikely to ever survive in a big studio
It does not matter. The point I was referring to you is that Linux is no longer the least used operating system and why its not limiting to that operating system when creating native Linux support. And no, its not about Native Linux Only games, its Native Linux games in addition to Windows games.
Your argument which I quoted is no longer an argument today.
This is not what you said. This is not pedantic. ok you know what you are right and happy birthday. No need for toxicity here. If you don’t even know what you are saying and changing your argumentation over the discussion we had.
I didn’t say anything (you might notice I’m not op). What I am saying is that you are willfully misinterpreting the spirit of op’s argument. Also, nice touch saying no toxicity and then being toxic. Very classy
You added “only” in there. You can compile a game for each OS natively (and many games do). Native in this context refers to the binary itself (ELF, EXE, bin, etc), and the OSes that can run it without using some kind of compatibility layer.
Honestly, we all can’t be much more useful than any of the “Top 10 games of 2024” YouTube videos because we don’t really know your friend or his tastes.
A Steam gift card seems like a good idea? Let him pick his own games?
The beginning of D:OS2 felt like a cheat code to get more BG3 after I’d already finished BG3, but as time went on, I found that everything from RPG systems to pacing of combat/non-combat is leagues better in BG3, to say nothing of the production value that’s obviously better in BG3. Still a good game, but the improvement between each of their RPGs is immense.
I have to say I very much prefer the combat system in OS as it feels much more natural and less restrictive than the DnD combat in BG3. Of course the latter has far more content, but I’m looking forward to Larian’s next game where they can finally go wild again and do things they want exactly the way they want.
I felt far more restricted by D:OS2’s armor system. Freeform classes sound great on paper, but it also means you kind of naturally end up at a spot where you’ve got everything instead of making meaningfully difficult choices in classes or multiclassing. Learning abilities from books leads to a lot of money bottlenecks and leveling decisions that I didn’t care for. The way that the combat usually doesn’t have any chance to hit, but then does very occasionally, makes missing an attack feel like bullshit rather than a calculated risk. I’m also looking forward to whatever they do next, maybe even a sci-fi interstellar RPG, but I hope they don’t go back to the Divinity well too often for RPG mechanics.
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