Thing is, what’s the alternative? Either you put a hard limit on the inventory, or you give players an infinite inventory. The latter can be made to work, but it also takes away the element of risk.
Perhaps ‘inventory size’ could be tied with difficulty settings. If you want a Deus Ex-type experience where you really have to be picky about what you bring, maybe that should be down to the player; and so should a huge inventory that lets you bring everything everywhere.
I actually really like what starfield does. It’s a rolling scale, the more encumbered you are the more you have to pause and “recharge” O2. So being over by 2 won’t affect you a lot, but over by 100 sure will
I agree, I don’t mind much of how they handle encumbrance itself except for the constant nagging from my companion. Personally, I just don’t think they interrogated the concepts of encumbrance at all - which isn’t surprising of course, bethesda design seems to have so many sacred cows it may as well be a holy dairy.
In my opinion, it works best to make loot non-sellable. It takes away the need to fill your inventory with tons of garbage, just to carry it to the store. Instead, your inventory can be reduced to a size that meaningfully limits your options during challenges and forces you to select your equipment strategically.
Not so much for these games, but this conversation had me thinking about alternate mechanics for loot sales in the open source game I work on, and I think one solution is to have any loot of any value use more of a pawn shop/consignment mechanic. Rather than selling guns individually maybe you can put your crate of used weaponry up for sale on the black market, and then you have to wait for a buyer. Might take a long time depending on how much they’re worth.
Hmm, do you mean with a limited number of slots of what can be on offer in the pawn shop? So, that players can maybe grab one or two trophies for selling and leave the rest behind? Otherwise, I’m not sure, what your idea is. 🙃
No, I mean when you the player want to sell your items you have to put them up for sale on the black market and wait for buyers, and there’s a simple demand algorithm that determines what kind of price you’ll get and how long it will take.if you’ve flooded the market with cheap guns, you don’t get much for them.
I’m a hoarder in these games. If I can store all my stuff back at my base like in Fallout 4 and Skyrim then I’m happy. As long as they don’t pull the Fallout 76 stunt where you need to pay monthly for extra storage.
I completed the game without issue, for the most part. The most annoying bug was one where my main character stayed permanently asleep. Saving then loading fixed it. Act 3 is noticeably not as good as the first 2 acts, but it didn’t ruin the game for me.
Same here. The only obvious bug I encountered was that Gale somehow was convinced that he and I spent a night together, which we definitively didn’t. I liked Act 3 best though. It felt like all the threads that were set up in the first two acts were coming together for a satisfying /interesting conclusion (stuff like the stolen Gith egg for example). I feel like the 3rd act swims or sinks depending on how many plotlines you’ve set up in your game until then.
IMO, what is there in Acts 1 and 2 still more than justify BG3’s price tag and glowing reviews. While I wish Act 3 was more polished (and yes, the ending does feel a tad rushed and underwhelming), what is there in Act 3 is still plenty.
I’m hoping for an expansion for an Act 4 to bridge the gap between Act 3 and the ending, maybe set in the Upper City, with better outcomes for our companions. However, with all the branching choices that already exist in the game, simply the feat of having to create one more story might be a nightmare.
That’s not true. RAM usage in open world games depends on how much assets are being loaded. We’ll need an in-depth analysis to determine if it is bad optimization or not
i mean, its bethesda, yo you really expect any kind of optimization ? and at launch at that? its a sad state of affairs but alas, that is how tripl a is nowadays
I think the only way that could possibly work is if all manufacturers followed the same specs. That way games can be developed for all platforms equally.
3DO tried this, and failed spectacularly. Any other way would stifle competition though, which is bad for everyone.
I’m confident there’s a way to make it work. 3D Printers operate with this model for the most part (thanks Jeff Prusa!)
Effectively, console manufacturers should agree on some kind of standard architecture, which, to be very realistic and blunt (apologies as this isn’t necessarily the tone of the post, but I like trying to make things work in some way), as long as Nintendo is in the console game, it’s gonna be a bit difficult (unless we just let them do whatever they want console-wise and have the others create some kind of standard home console arch). As someone who is dipping their toes into game development, that is something I would love to see.
Xbox One/Series S/SeriesX and PS4/5 are x86 PCs, Switch is an ARM phone.
So, in the lowest level they are pretty out of the shelf hardware. Electronics are getting way to complicated to invest in the development of custom hardware architectures for a single product.
You take a commonly used architecture, fork an Operating System that you have access to, bundle as many libraries as makes sense and call it a day. No one is going to use weird quirks of the hardware except if you make some deal with Unity or Unreal.
Certainly, I myself am on a Linux machine with a 1070Ti and a Xeon 1650 processor that’s never left it’s socket since it was placed in there in some factory. I would guess it’s somewhat rare to have a machine such as this because it was originally meant as a workstation (I can tell because the door has handles on the inside that make it an effective shield), and I would guess anyone who does have this set up will have Windows installed on it.
That being said, differences in software between Windows and Linux is slowly becoming irrelevant with the continued development of proton and the various FOSS alternatives (i.e. GIMP replacing Photoshop). For the most part, the only differences these days are certain games from certain studios that for whatever reason decided not to check a box that says “Yes, I want this to work on Linux.” This of course disregards any specialist software that was only ever developed for Windows, which I’ve read numerous examples of.
It’s a different model entirely, most copies of windows sold will never have a game installed on them bar the pack-ins. No one is buying a console to do spreadsheets.
I’m amazed everyone seems to have forgotten the open nature was an Achilles heel for the 3DO model, then it occured to me that the console is 30 years old and I’m even older lol.
The fact is that the console market works how it does, advanced tach at reasonable prices, because the platform holders make money on an ongoing basis from each user. Getting rid of that model will mean consoles selling for the same price as equivilent specced PCs at launch.
Yeah, you clearly have no clue what you’re talking about, but just want to be outraged.
No, that’s not what they’re using it for.
Pre-concept art phase is when you grab literally anything to do a very generic “here’s my idea” demonstration. It can be a screenshot from a game you recently played, a cinema poster, a photo of your cat, something you found on DeviantArt or Pinterest, a doodle you made with a pencil, cloth fragment, an interesting rock you found on a stroll, simple render, anything.
But, getting all these takes a lot of time - you have something in your head and now you need to find an image or an item that will more or less represent it. So you spend hours on Google Images trying to refine your search, only so that you can then post it on the ideas board, and for it to be replaced completely by actual concept art.
This is where they’re utilising GenAI. And they’re not even replacing this process entirely, they’re using GenAI on top of everything else - basically, using all the tools available to speed up the process.
Concept artists then still take over (they have 27 of them and open positions to hire more - right now) and create concept art, which is then turned into assets by appropriate artists (they have a bunch of open positions for artists right now as well).
All this anti-AI panic has blown this so far out of proportion that it’s almost comical.
This right here. People who complain about this obviously don’t know how concept artists work. At this stage in the process, AI isn’t replacing artists, it’s mostly replacing shutterstock and Pinterest.
I’ve had an idea of making a visual novel with gen AI, but I’d want to attach “Placeholder: AI Artwork” in a visible location for each sprite. And I only even consider that because I’m not exactly a known game dev and don’t have ready access to artists.
Larian should likely expect if they’re taking shortcuts in their position, they’d get backlash. I can at least recognize that they’re trying to be moderate about it.
How do people feel about this company using generative AI? That was a concern of mine around The Finals; they’ve defended the decision on voice acting and it made me wonder where else they’re using it.
EDIT: Learned some new things from the responses, certainly an interesting situation. I’ll consider them.
Embark released blog posts about how they’re integrating AI into their development workflow back in 2019/2020. The entire studio was founded by former Dice devs bc they were burned out with game development and had quit, then realized they could build tools and pipelines that allowed them to focus on the fun parts of game development, and got together to form Embark and do exactly that. Their vision preceded the vast majority of the public’s awareness of AI, and was not influenced by the current wave of LLMs and generative ai.
If you want to hate feel free that’s your prerogative, but be aware that anything Embark makes is going to be built on tools and pipelines that deeply integrate some form of AI/ML, and just stay away from anything the studio makes. It’s your loss really because their games are the first in a long time (in their genres) that I can feel the love the devs poured in seeping from every single aspect of the game, but again it’s your prerogative.
To defend the voice acting in The Finals - they obtained the consent for all the voice actors they use, and they pay them a commission for each new line they generate. It’s believed that one of the reasons they made that decision was to have things like improvised dialogue possible by the announcers (Scotty and June), for example.
They definitely aren’t cheating people out of money, fortunately.
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