pcgamer.com

TheFeatureCreature, do games w 'I want to acknowledge that we messed up': NZXT addresses concerns about its controversial Flex gaming PC rental program and commits to taking action
@TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.world avatar

Nah, fuck them. They thought they could get away with this predatory debt-trap system that was marketed at children and they are clearly salty that they got caught. Not to mention the whole idea of not even owning your own PC or the data within which would set a bad precedent for everyone everywhere.

There are so many competitors in the industry NZXT operates in; it would be very easy to avoid ever buying their stuff again. And I intend to do just that. Get bankrupted, you pieces of shit.

deweydecibel, (edited ) do games w Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves'

The technology was created to replace voice actors. That’s the actual purpose. Its very existence hurts their profession and benefits studios. You can not be a studio, use this technology, and claim to care about ethics, anymore than Amazon can claim to care about the workers as it invests in the machines to replace them.

No one is holding a gun to their head forcing them to us AI. They made a choice. There is no “ethical” way to cripple the livelihood of working class people for the benefit of your business. Just stop using the word.

It doesn’t matter if you compensate or get their approval, because the fact is the existence of the technology in the industry effectively compels all voice actors to agree to let it use their voice, or they can’t get work. It becomes a false choice.

If there was no financial benefit, if it truly made no difference in how much a studio pays in labor or the amount the artists make, there would be no reason for studios to want to use it.

Even_Adder,

Do you have any source for those claims? There are plenty of better reasons to develop voice synthesis than replacing voice actors.

GalacticHero,

Voiced characters that use generative AI in real time instead of prerecorded lines and a dialogue tree come to mind as an obvious use. How cool would that be, to be playing an RPG and ask any character any question you want and get an actual verbal answer? No way you can do that with voice actors.

glimse,

Ever seen the game Vaudeville? It’s a fairly basic detective game but all the characters have their own LLM and AI voices. I bought it for the reason you described. I just had to see the technology in action and I can definitely see a future with generative text/voices in games.

It’s not perfect by any means but I think it’s a very cool approach to a detective game. There have been updates to it since I played that address most of the problems I had with it like characters forgetting past conversations and giving conflicting info.

Ookami38,

I had spitballed an idea similar to this a few months back. Build the characters, world, and situations, and give the AI that information. Pick a few specific pieces of info the AI would have to tell you at specific times, basically to act as guide rails. Then, let the AI and the player just… Interact.

glimse,

That’s pretty much Vaudeville. The only things you can do is click on locations and talk to people, each of whom has some bit of information you need to figure out.

It’s basically an experiment to see what works and what doesn’t with the idea. I appreciate that they kept the scope small (no quests, no WASD movement) and have been implementing changes as they discover the shortfalls (like the ones I’ve mentioned). If it ever does get released as a finished game, it’ll be more like a proof of concept for other games to build off of.

grrgyle,

Depends how much you’re willing to spend

nogooduser,

I find it to be very off putting that Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t have voice actors for the main character.

There are so many different races that would have different voices and different accents that it wouldn’t be financially viable to do that with voice actors either.

PotatoKat,

They originally did for the beta (for origin characters at least) but the players didn’t really like it so the feature was removed

GBU_28,

The only real ethical concern is around the training data. If all voices are compensated / actively consent to be used in an AI program, then this is just a tool. People losing jobs doesn’t really matter to an individual company. Industries change and technology advances.

So the real problem is they are using these types of tools, built of the skill of other voice actors, without properly compensating them or getting their consent.

style99,

What’s the point of bringing up “ethics?” The job only existed in the first place because of technology, and now people want to argue that there is a right or wrong aspect to it?

How about the poor candle makers or buggy whip manufacturers? Should we keep downgrading society just to keep a few “artists” happy?

DmMacniel,

Downgrading because we want people to stay employed?

ricdeh,
@ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

Then let’s go back to ploughing our fields by hand, surely that will create many new employment opportunities!

Ookami38,

Eh, we weren’t paying for that back in the day anyway.

Zorque,

More importantly, the system we all accept (willingly or not) requires that people be employed to survive.

It's not a matter of wanting to be employed, as needing to be employed.

card797,

The term Luddite comes to mind.

novibe,

Luddites were not anti-technology. They saw the progress of technology IN a primitive capitalist system and understood that technology would never benefit them, and always be used to subjugate them more.

If technology only benefits 0.1% of the world, and leads to the world dying, does it benefit humanity at all?

GBU_28,

The concern is that the training and potentially production voices are not properly compensated or consenting

It’s not so much that a new tool is used, it’s that it exists due to the artistic product of people who aren’t profiting from the novel use

A job coming or going isn’t the true issue

Cypher,

Good to see you have formed a strong opinion without having all of the information.

Deceptichum,
@Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works avatar

Technology making labour obsolete is the goal we should all be wanting.

Attack capitalism not the technology.

Zahille7,

True, but it’s not quite working out that way is it?

Postmortal_Pop,

That’s kind of the point though isn’t it? It’s not the car’s fault we can’t afford the gas. We need to stop arguing about the ethics of using AI and start arguing about the ethics of the people using it unethically.

There is a person in that studio that suggested using AI, there is a person who gave the go ahead to do it. Those people need to be the problem, not the toy they decided to play with.

Kaldo,
@Kaldo@kbin.social avatar

That's a very naive perspective though. We're not blaming the guns for gun violence, it's the people, but restricting access to guns is still the proven way to reduce gun incidents. One day when everyone is enlightened enough to not need such restrictions then we can lift them but we're very far from that point, and the same goes for tools like "AI".

msgraves,

you’re gonna have a bad time restricting software

Kaldo,
@Kaldo@kbin.social avatar

Very easy time if it's about commercial use (well, at least outside of china). Companies need to have licenses for the software they use, they have to obey copyright laws and trademarks, have contracts and permissions for anything they use in their day to day work. It's the same reason why no serious company wants to even touch any competitor's leaked source code when it appears online.

Just because AI tech bros live in a bubble of their own, thinking they can just take and repurpose anything they need, doesn't mean it should be like that - for the most case it isn't and in this case, the law just hasn't caught up with the tech yet.

msgraves,

actual example please not like your other friend Luddite on the other comment

fcSolar,

It’d be dead easy, actually. Don’t even have to actually ban it: For image generating models, every artist whose work is included in the training data becomes entitled to 5 cents per image in the training data every time a model generates an image, so an artist with 20 works in the model is entitled to a dollar per generated image. Companies offering image generating neural networks would near instantly incur such huge liabilities that it simply wouldn’t be worth it anymore. Same thing could apply to text and voice generating models, just per word instead of per image.

msgraves,

disregarding the fact that the model learns and extrapolates from the training data, not copying,

have fun figuring out which model made the image in the first place!

Cocodapuf,

That said, this choice wasn’t actually a problem right?

I mean this game doesn’t use voice actors normally. If they used ai voice actors for this update only to represent the ai characters… isn’t that just appropriate?

Previously all characters in this game were represented only by text, so literally nobody is being replaced here.

Another way to think about it would be via representation. We get worked up when an ethnic character on screen is played by a different ethnicity, an actor in blackface for example. And in that vein using ai for organic characters could be seen as offensive, but using ai for ai characters would not. In contrast could we see using human voices for ai characters to be insensitive? That may sound far fetched, but this is sci-fi, the ai characters in the game are fully sentient and in their fictional universe would have rights, the whole point is to make the player think about what that means.

Well I guess I have my takeaway, I may consider boycotting any game that uses human actors for ai characters. Just get an ai actor… seriously.

Postmortal_Pop,

Honestly, I’d argue that that’s exactly what AI should be for. Either being used by that one guy to give voices to his passion project because he can’t afford to hire voice actors, or to add a touch of the uncanny to an AI character.

ChicoSuave,

In practice, capitalism will use technology to subjugate others instead of allowing technology to free us from work.

Mnemnosyne,

Yes, as long as people keep focusing on fighting the technology instead of fighting capitalism, this is true.

So we can fight the technology and definitely lose, only to see our efforts subverted to further entrench capitalism and subjugate us harder (hint: regulation on this kind of thing disproportionately affects individuals while corporations carve out exceptions for themselves because ‘it helps the economy’)…

Or we can embrace the technology and try to use it to fight capitalism, at which point there’s at least a chance we might win, since the technology really does have the potential to overcome capitalism if and only if we can spread it far enough and fast enough that it can’t be controlled or contained to serve only the rich and powerful.

HeartyBeast,
@HeartyBeast@kbin.social avatar

The technology is magnifying the flaws in capitalism

hrtgnt,

yea, see i just don’t like how we first automated creativity instead of like, idk, manual labor???

Takumidesh,

Manual labor has been being automated since the industrial revolution.

Pxtl,
@Pxtl@lemmy.ca avatar

Okay but I still have to fold my own laundry.

Womble,

And do you wash your clothes in a bucket, wring them out in a mangler before beating your rugs with a stick to get the dust out of them?

Pxtl,
@Pxtl@lemmy.ca avatar

And I don’t make my own paints either when doing art. I still agree with the basic original point:

It is disappointing that we’re currently automating creativity far faster than manual labour. I’m angry that my art is getting automated away faster than my folding of laundry.

Womble,

The original point being:

yea, see i just don’t like how we first automated creativity instead of like, idk, manual labor???

emphasis mine, but this is just incorrect. Technology has been reducing the need for manual labour (or rather increasing the amount of useful work done with manual labour) since the wheel and the plow.

billiam0202,

It’s not; you’re just looking at the beginning of automating creativity when labor automation has been going on for over a hundred years. The introduction of new tech is always more disruptive than refining established tech. Besides which, VA is particularly sensitive to disruption because every VA does essentially the same job- one AI can be programmed to speak in thousands (millions?) of different voices, whereas one manual labor job doesn’t necessarily require the same actions as another.

Also it’s funny you complain about laundry, given how much doing laundry has been automated.

Don_alForno,

And people still have to lift heavy shit, crawl around in dangerous spaces and generally harm their health to make a living.

Katana314,

I have an idea for the practice that could help us better explore practical uses. Basically, a company may train an AI off an actor’s voice, but that actor retains full non-transferable ownership/control of any voices generated from that AI.

So, if a game is premiering a new game mode that needs 15 new lines from a character, but their actor is busy drinking Captain Morgan in their pool, the company can generate those 15 lines from AI, but MUST have a communication with the actor where they approve the lines, and agree on a price for them.

It would allow for dynamic voice moments in a small capacity, and keep actors in business. It would still need some degree of regulation to ensure no one pushes gross incentives.

Nibodhika,

Congratulations you essentially described what Stellaris devs did.

otp,

claim to care about the workers as it invests in the machines to replace them.

A company that invests in UBI could make that claim!

Obviously Amazon doesn’t do that now. But I could see it happening when people stop being able to buy their junk

Summzashi,

Old man yells at cloud

smeg, do games w [PCGamer] Helldivers 2 is the least I've felt pressured to spend money on a game in years, so of course I'm buying everything in the store

Is this a sponsored post by a bought-and-paid-for shill, or is the writer just so worn down by microtransactions over the years that they’re Stockholm-Syndromed into thinking this is somehow OK?

Tick_Dracy,
@Tick_Dracy@lemm.ee avatar

Might be both 😅

iAvicenna,
@iAvicenna@lemmy.world avatar

we are living in an age where paying more money to a game for full content after buying it is “refreshing”

smeg,

I think this is just what happens when an art gets big and becomes an industry. Film buffs don’t get (too) wound up at every new formulaic action movie, soulless remake, or low-brow comedy (and all the money-grabbing tie-ins that come with them); maybe we should all just chill out and stop worrying about the mass-market blockbusters when there’s still a wealth of great stuff to play.

Carlo,

Yeah, I think this is a great take. It’s pretty easy to avoid all the mercenary practices that tend to plague most “AAA” titles these days— mostly by not buying the games at launch; eventually they all come around as giveaways, or at least at a deep discount. And as you say, there are a plethora of small developers putting out amazing games all the time. I’ve been getting a ton of mileage the last couple of months out of Vagrus and Dredge.

smeg,

Preaching to the choir mate, I run freegames@feddit.uk, I acquire recent-but-not-brand-new AA-but-not-AAA games faster than I can play them! It’s still a great experience to be a patient gamer.

Carlo,

Subbed, thanks! Looks like a good resource.

Goronmon,

I think this is just what happens when an art gets big and becomes an industry.

Video games have been an “industry” for decades though.

smeg,

Yeah but it’s become way more mainstream with the rise of mobile gaming (because suddenly half the population of the world is a potential customer)

iAvicenna,
@iAvicenna@lemmy.world avatar

Maybe you are right but it is a bit like when search engines are flooded with crap: super annoying. I would any day prefer fewer options of mid to high quality stuff to whatever this is.

smeg,

This is the first time I’ve even heard of this game. Just ignore the big paid-for marketing announcements and find real people’s recommendations.

Zahille7,

I mean Skull & Bones, the $70 always-online piratey piece of shit from Ubisoft, has an ad in the game for the Premium Edition - which, I shit you not, the first line of the description says “premium edition gives you access to the Full Game.”

Like, fuck any form of modern gaming whatsoever after this point. I bought the Arkham games cause they’re on a huge sale on steam (literally $10 for the whole trilogy, and Origins is currently $5) and have been having a fucking blast replaying those amazing games.

smeg,

I made a couple of posts recently about how it doesn’t really matter that there’s all this money-grabbing because we’re so spoiled for choice from the past few decades. My conclusion was that there’s no point in worrying when I’ve got a big pile of great games to play already!

yamanii,
@yamanii@lemmy.world avatar

Diablo 4, a full priced game, has microtransactions that are as expensive as the game itself, and skins that cost as much as 30 USD, when a game doesn’t fuck the people as hard it draws attention.

Woht24,

That’s such victim mentality. That’s like saying you like Guard A over Guard B because Guard A doesn’t beat you as severely.

Andrenikous,

Yeah that’s unfortunately how the industry has been headed for games from major developers and publishers.

JTskulk, do games w The official Nintendo Museum appears to be emulating SNES games on a Windows PC, which is slightly embarrassing

Eww extremely embarrassing that they used Windows.

Mwa, (edited )

not alot of people know linux come on

Edit: I forgot linux is commonly used in servers 🤦‍♂️ but not rlly much in the home side

desktop_user,

everyone I know has heard of it, I’ve told em’ about it.

Mwa,

I only know alot of people who use linux here in lemmy and people who like privacy
Edit: excluding server side

Johnmannesca,
@Johnmannesca@lemmy.world avatar

The Switch runs a custom version of Android, so they technically know at least one form of Linux

LorIps,
@LorIps@lemmy.world avatar

It doesn’t? The Switch uses an OS based on the OS of the 3DS which is based on FreeBSD and uses a microkernel.

Johnmannesca,
@Johnmannesca@lemmy.world avatar

I realized after the fact; at least it has a posix shell though

Mwa,

Doesn’t switch use freebsd

Johnmannesca,
@Johnmannesca@lemmy.world avatar

Oops you’re right my bad

BuboScandiacus,
@BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz avatar

Nope

kworpy,

please get a personality

wormer,

REAL

Abird1620,

No

Hupf,
@Hupf@feddit.org avatar

Getting a personality by dressing their PC exactly the same as anyone else? Sounds right!

kworpy,

i never disputed that??

DmMacniel, do games w The official Nintendo Museum appears to be emulating SNES games on a Windows PC, which is slightly embarrassing
@DmMacniel@feddit.org avatar

I mean…

All of those mini consoles (NES mini, SNES mini) are already SOCs with an emulator.

RangerJosie,
@RangerJosie@lemmy.world avatar

Corps are shameless. No amount of hypocrisy is enough to make them reconsider their evil.

InverseParallax,

Yeah, that shallow appreciation is why you can’t truly understand them, it’s like calling a shark evil when it eats a baby seal.

They are, but you need to understand the system so you can know how they get where they get, and how to counter them.

Don’t just be an angry mother seal.

Mango,

Why are you here? You’re more cringe than Nintendo right now. There’s absolutely no reason to insult that guy.

InverseParallax,

Because I’ve worked with the marketing assholes who lead to these decisions, and if you don’t get why they make them and how to get them fired for those decisions, you’ll never change anything.

That’s the difference between being a child, and being effective.

Mango,

Ooohhh, you’re trauma dumping. Well carry on then. Tell us about the good corps who are just getting ruined by evil marketing assholes.

InverseParallax,

They’re not, Jesus, what is wrong with you?

They’re greedy and ambitious, but also cowardly.

Saying ‘Nintendo’ doesn’t hurt much, the corporation is almost numb to criticism, it knows it will sell games.

Find the marketing moron responsible and destroy his career, that’s the only way you make a difference.

Do this enough times, and eventually they become more afraid of the community’s wrath than their ambition to get a promotion by kissing ass.

Take down a few VPS of marketing, you’re can start influencing them, because they’ll start community outreach before doing shit.

Corporations are a hard outer shell to protect the sensitive inner meat, don’t attack the shell, take down the inner bits.

Mango,

The people change, but the streets are always the same.

InverseParallax,

The fear is what matters.

These careers are everything to them, they will gladly fuck whoever they need to to survive, but if you make them more afraid of the community then they’ll actually try to listen.

There was a brief period back in the late 2000s/early 2010s when Google listened to people.

That died by the time I joined, but I worked with people from before and they clearly didn’t give a shit about the customers anymore, it was all internal politics for promotions, you’d never get in trouble for pissing off customers.

Make them afraid of you, make them fear doing anything to piss you off, otherwise they’ll sell you out for their bosses and shareholders every time.

Mango,

Remind them how expensive windows are.

Flax_vert,

The Switch has a SNES emulator as well

DmMacniel,
@DmMacniel@feddit.org avatar

The 3ds was a full on emulation machine. Heck it started with the Wii!

vaguerant,
@vaguerant@fedia.io avatar

I'd say it started on at least Nintendo 64. The original Japan-only Animal Crossing game for N64 had playable, emulated Famicom (NES) games. Nintendo even ran a special offer to get an N64 Controller Pak with Ice Climber pre-loaded which you could plug into your controller like a game cartridge and play inside Animal Crossing.

DarkThoughts,

Nintendo had uses emulators for a long time. This really isn't anything news worthy.

ampersandrew, do games w Ubisoft comes crawlin' back to Steam
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

Despite the best efforts of major publishers including Activision, Electronic Arts, Rockstar, Bethesda, and others, not to mention the far better deal offered to developers by Epic, Steam is more dominant than ever—and in the end, they all came crawlin’ back.

They’re all crawling back because they did not give it their best effort. They just wanted the full 100% of the sale revenue without doing the hard parts. To be fair to EA, for the first few years, it looked like they were actually going to try.

Dudewitbow,

its more or less that yes. they saw the money but not the time and effort to get users to use your platform.

and its not like impossible, as long as you can create games people will play and stay at itll work (e.g Riot), but they legit put such little effort in the launchers that it was creating a negative user experience, and never put in the money to make it better.

ryathal,

Yep same thing with all the streaming services, just taking the Netflix money was probably a better move for a lot of these services.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

Eh, it’s so easy to hop between streaming services that I don’t have the same hangup there. You subscribe for a month, watch what you want to watch, cancel, and then go to the next one. You can always resubscribe later. When you buy a game on a given storefront, you’re stuck with their feature set forever.

exu,

As a user there simply was/is no incentive to use other stores when the game is the same price. There has to be a reason for me to buy somewhere else.

kbin_space_program, do gaming w Escape From Tarkov dev finally caves, says people who paid $150 for the game will get access to its new mode 'in waves'

"I'm extra sorry that our lawyer got back to me and said the previous wording we did around the 'all future DLC inclusion' was legally binding and we'd get the pants sued off of us unless we changed course."

BmeBenji, do games w The wild successes of Helldivers 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 send a clear message: Let devs cook

The wild monetary successes of Call of Duty and Fortnite send a clear message: treat unsupervised children as prey and you will earn billions of dollars

Fedizen,

also roblox

SendMePhotos,

Especially roblox

echodot, do games w In a week dominated by Silksong and Borderlands, co-op roguelike Shape of Dreams still managed to launch on Steam as an instant top-seller

I have an issue with the idea that Borderlands is dominating gaming news. I didn’t even realise it had launched so I wouldn’t exactly call it popping off the shelf.

MyNameIsAtticus,
@MyNameIsAtticus@lemmy.world avatar

I was going to comment the same thing. Maybe it’s just the circles i’m in, but like the only thing i’ve heard about it is the price and the performance issues on PC

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

Boards like these don’t talk about Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed much either, but all of these are multi billion dollar franchises.

echodot,

Yeah but I would have known thwy had released because they would have been advertising or something. I don’t feel like anyone’s spoken about Borderlands since that comment about how it should be $90 or whatever.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

That’s interesting, because without even really looking for it, it came up in Nintendo Directs, Keighley presentations, Sony presentations, and any discourse about games moving around release dates on account of GTA VI. For whatever reason, this game’s release date was moved up by a couple of weeks over its initial release date announcement, and that pretty much never happens, so it made headlines for that too. Oh yeah, and while trying to watch streamers play Borderlands, those streams have been interrupted by ads for Borderlands 4.

Goodeye8,

I get where you're coming from, I found out Borderlands 4 launched when I saw the news about it having performance issues. That said, if you look at Steam charts Borderlands 4 is just smidge below Silksong numbers and at the time of writing this comment Silksong is the 4th most popular game and Borderlands is 6th most popular game, barely beaten out by a game called Banana (which I've never even heard of and I have no clue why it's that popular).

Localhorst86,
@Localhorst86@feddit.org avatar

Banana (which I’ve never even heard of and I have no clue why it’s that popular).

It’s an idle/clicker game that drops steam items that can, theoretically, be sold for money. I can’t recommend it.

echodot,

I thought steam banned those kind of games.

Localhorst86,
@Localhorst86@feddit.org avatar

I can’t find any info about a blanket ban on idle/clicker games, and quite frankly, I don’t see why valve would ban them.

For them, it’s free money:

  1. the developer has to pay a flat fee for the game to appear on the storefront
  2. the developer has to pay an additional fee to enable community items
  3. both the developer as well as valve receive a percentage cut of the sale price in the community marketplace
Goodeye8,

I get what kind of a game it is. I don't get how that is so popular. We're talking about player counts that not even Destiny 2 could reach. The only rational conclusion I came come to is that those numbers have to be botted.

Localhorst86,
@Localhorst86@feddit.org avatar

my guess is that a lot of people let the game idle in the background to farm items, that’s why it’s so “popular”. It’s not “active players”, it’s just a large number of people farming items in the hopes to get one they can sell for a larger sum.
Afaik it has been in the top charts for over a year.

ICastFist,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

Gaming GabeN’s system

CallMeAnAI,

Record launch. 200k concurrent.

Deestan, do games w 'This is only the beginning': Metal Gear Solid fans lose their minds as David Hayter returns to voice Solid Snake in a new teaser

Kojima, the driving force of Metal Gear is gone. What is left is a corporate committee who through focus testing and guesswork try to keep the franchise on the road roughly in the same direction it has been going and avoid crashing into stuff.

They will make any new version look and feel as much as possible as the previous games, only deviating for committee-approved reasons of monetization, trend chasing, or marketing appeal.

What they will not and can not do is to strap a rocket to the roof of Metal Gear Solid, take a hard right and drive the car off the road and into the hills and launch it over Mount Everest. They don’t have the will, the auteur ability, or the trust of the fanbase.

Kojima could do that, which is what made the franchise what it is today.

MGS is dead, but Konami owns the pelt. What comes out next is just taxidermy with animatronics.

Son_of_dad,

As far as I’m concerned the series is definitively over. 5 was the final. You don’t really need Kojima for remakes, just a team of good devs who love the series. But I also don’t trust Konami to pull that simple thing off. What is with the really bad “remake” ports from all the game companies in the last few years? Is it that hard to remake a game?

NuXCOM_90Percent,

As someone who thinks Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is the best Metal Gear since Solid 1*, I really do wish it had become an ensemble world. Platinum doing Raiden/Grey Fox. Imagine IOI making an ACTUAL stealth game set in that world. Hell, I could even see a timeline where Arkane made a game where you play as The Cobras. Instead, we just kept going back to the Snake well and had ever increasing dissonance between cutscene, boss, and normal gameplay characterizations.

As for bad remasters/remakes: A lot of that is that this is The COVID Year in terms of releases. These are most of the games that would have had most of their dev cycle during lockdown and were heavily delayed or had massive scope changes to meet release windows. Sometimes that means we get truly amazing games (BG3) and sometimes that means we have shovelware that just needs to avoid sunken cost fallacies.

And the other aspect is that a LOT of studios, particularly Japanese ones, are in the process of upgrading their tech. I loved Like a Dragon: Ishin (and am so excited for Gaiden next week). But that was a VERY small scope/ambition game (a mostly beat for beat remake of one of the lesser PS2 games) that was pretty openly about exploring Unreal Engine. And there have been a lot of games that are less open about “Hey, we are mostly dicking around to see if this tech works for us”.

*: 3 was awesome but very much “Empire Strikes Back”… in a lot of ways including the conspiratorial “So did the Creator actually write this? Because a lot of signs point to ‘no’”. And 5 was an awesome sandbox with no plot or pacing to speak of

Son_of_dad,

I played the main series and never played the side, PSP games like peace walker, so I was completely lost when playing 5. I was wondering what this setting and people were for a while, until I realized I had to go back and read up on peace walker.

NuXCOM_90Percent,

Having played Portable Ops (fine), Peace Walker (fine), and Acid 1 and 2 (FUCK YEAH): 5 was still mostly nonsense.

All you get from PW/PO (since PW largely felt like a redo of PO and PW was a prototype for the format of TPP):

  1. This random lesbian was in love with The Boss but ended up fucking Huey and is Otacon’s mom. And somehow that is the least problematic portion of her arc.
  2. Paz is basically the jailbait version of EVA in that she is a spy who betrays you but also everyone wants to fuck her but her true love is, and always will be, Big Boss. And don’t ask how old she is because nobody wants to know that.
  3. Chico is your loveable sidekick that you never really gave a shit about but he is like 12
  4. Big Boss has either stopped or started using Big Boss as a title for the umpteenth time because we can’t play as someone not called “Snake” and has something that may or may not be Outer Heaven built on an oil rig.
  5. Don’t think too hard about why Skullface is basically just Hot Coldman but more of an edgelord.

A friend summed it up perfectly: Ground Zeroes works a LOT better if you pretend that Peace Walker didn’t exist and this is just “the adventures of Naked Snake”. Similar to how we never really know what Solid and Otacon did as an NGO before they became international terrorists in MGS2.

Son_of_dad,

I still have no idea who skull face is or what’s his deal

Grangle1,

I hate it when developers make what they say are side games in a series essential to canon, especially when they don’t tell you they’re doing it or when they go into the side game not planning to make it canon and then decide it’s canon during or after development.

Or I should say, I hate it when developers make the next main series game assuming you’ve played the essential “side” game and leave out or half-ass their catch-up for people who haven’t played it. I call it “Chain of Memories syndrome” after when Kingdom Hearts made Chain of Memories essential to fully understanding KH2.

BaronVonBort,

What they need to do is take whoever the next director of the game is going to be, strap them to a chair Clockwork Orange style and mix the entire Criterion Collection and Evangelion for about a year or two.

Then just for good measure have them write a page of names and slap them anytime a name nears anything of normal.

Then, and only then, should they be allowed to start working.

4am,

This comment needs to become a copypasta. Not because it’s silly, but because it’s accurate and brutal.

pixxelkick,

try to keep the franchise on the road roughly in the same direction it has been going and avoid crashing into stuff.

Based on their last attempt they couldn’t even manage that. Have we already forgotten that as soon as Kojima left the company, Metal Gear Survive came out?

PS, Kojima has a really cool Instagram where he posts his thoughts and stuff he likes, if anyone is a big fan and wants to sub to him. Dude has some radical tastes lol

etchinghillside, do games w I'm so glad I waited nearly 3 years to play Cyberpunk 2077, but I dread the fact that this is our new normal

I can hold out until it’s $19.99 – this is normal for me.

FunderPants, (edited )

I bought it for less than that from a pawn shop during the peak hate. I remember the pawn guy being like “that ones got real bad reviews” and I said “I’ll try any game for $14”.
I tucked it away for a year or so and then loved it.

mp3,
@mp3@lemmy.ca avatar

I bought a used PS4 copy of No Man’s Sky for 5$ before the Next update came out.

FatTony,
@FatTony@lemmy.world avatar

One - two years is a mere blink in the life of a patient gamer. I’m patient. I can wait.

Rooty,
RickyRigatoni,
@RickyRigatoni@lemmy.ml avatar

Massive L for even considerimg giving them any money at all.

flux, do games w CD Projekt recommends starting a new game when Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 drops: 'starting fresh will enhance your overall gameplay experience'
@flux@lemmy.world avatar

“Hey gonks! Remember that game we released and was dirty as hell but you all gave up the eddies because we told you it was preem. We finally have the game we should have released just 3 years later. Go ahead and flatline your 200hr characters and reboot.”

AttackPanda,

I wish I had the fortitude to start over at 140 hours deep into my character but damn I’m not sure I do.

VentraSqwal,

Same. But I have wanted to explore other characters. My current one I made a baseball bat wielding, hard punching, aggressive nomad punk with a heart of gold, with some sniper secondary skills. Basically what I imagined a nomad would be like, with the skills I thought they’d have.

I kind of want to see what it’s like as full stealth or a corpo hacker or a street samurai katana wielder or knife thrower.

JJROKCZ,

If you got 200hours out of release then clear you got your moneys worth out of the game and enjoyed it, promises not kept or not.

Personally the game could’ve been better but I certainly enjoyed the one 120ish hour playthrough I did and had no major issues other than some texture bugs or weird physics, I had a capable PC though not a last gen console trying to play at being modern.

anonono,

by that definition you get your money’s worth of every movie you watch in the theater, the longer the better.

it’s a shitty take.

don’t pretend they didn’t screw up.

muse, (edited )
@muse@kbin.social avatar

And don't circlejerk over the dead horse that this game is unsalvageable because it had a shitty release. People forgave No Man's Sky, but the internet won't let this one go.

anonono,

You got it completely wrong.

Shitty games with shitty releases go into oblivion, the game is obviously good.

I’m not criticizing the game, I’m criticizing the company and the billionaries that preside it and decided people swallow it all up if they launched a game in the state they did.

orbitz,

I agree but I think it took about this long from Cyberpunk released till there was a better outlook on No Man’s Sky and I bought both at release, I enjoyed both, but I’d say at release Cyberpunk was a better game at launch (I didn’t have any bugs I got lucky). NMS did much more work on content in the following years to where it’s barely the same experience. Has been awhile since I restarted Cyberpunk will do for 2.0 though. Maybe I haven’t caught much newer content and they added it but it seemed updates were tweaks / fixes than content.

RaivoKulli,

People shouldn’t have forgiven NMS for their blatant and shitty lies either

MiltownClowns,

The analogy your looking for is that you get your money’s worth out of every movie you see 3 times in the theater but only pay once.

it’s a shitty take.

don’t pretend you didn’t screw up

Primarily0617,

if there was a movie that was 200 hours long and you chose to stay for the entire duration and not walk out, then you either enjoyed the movie or you need to learn about the sunk-cost fallacy

barsoap,

weird physics

MOTORCYCLES SUDDENLY DID NOT STOPPIE ANY MORE

My disappointment was immeasurable and my day was ruined. This was a feature, not a bug.

Retrograde,
@Retrograde@lemmy.world avatar

Oh I’m sure someone’ll mod it back in

gothicdecadence,

I did a heavily modded 90hr playthrough and loved it. Dealt with a ton of crashes though 😅 I’m planning on playing this vanilla finally, or very lightly modded for UI and stuff.

JJROKCZ,

Yea I played vanilla release over 100 hours, then some ui/qol mods. Looking forward to a vanilla 2.0 and dlc run then maybe see what some of these overhaul mods are doing a few months after that once they’ve been patched up

RaivoKulli,

I played it on PS4. CDPR said it plays surprisingly well on it.

Lmao

TigrisMorte,

PC launch play was mostly fine. Only Console launch, mostly caused by massive delusion about min. spec.s, was f'd up completely. The PC issues were also the easiest to fix and even when they could fix the Console issues, they had to convince the Console store's Owners that the relaunch wouldn't be a shit show. But then I play on PC and so expect similar to last time, once I buy it after it launches.

WeLoveCastingSpellz,
@WeLoveCastingSpellz@lemmy.fmhy.net avatar

Petty AF. Massive update that overhaults the game and dlc its common practice to restart at updates like this

flux,
@flux@lemmy.world avatar

I’m actually a fan of the game. I’m excited to play it. I just find it funny they are saying they have made it so much better that they recommend starting over. My point is that they are saying they finally got a lot of things “right” in 2.0 that we were playing an inferior game with quite a few quaility issues. Probably due to deadlines, etc. I’m happy devs continue to improve based on sales and feedback to make it better.

Chev,

You make it sound like they are forcing you to do so. You have the freedom of choice.

flux,
@flux@lemmy.world avatar

Of course. I’m happy they are allowing you to continue. I’ll keep going as I like the game.

Rampsquatch,

If you sunk 200 hours into the game, was it really that awful?

flux,
@flux@lemmy.world avatar

No it’s a good game. I like it even with the qc issues because it’s ambitious. But the devs are basically admitting that they worked on it for 3 years to fullfill the original vision and it’s so much better that it’s worth starting over.

mp3, do games w Todd Howard asked on-air why Bethesda didn't optimise Starfield for PC: 'We did [...] you may need to upgrade your PC'
@mp3@lemmy.ca avatar

The missing part is that the user with a 4090 complaining had a CPU from 2017 🥴 https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/b8c595d0-663f-45d4-b60e-e8738b8945b7.png

NOT_RICK,
@NOT_RICK@lemmy.world avatar

What’s a CPU bottleneck? I have the magic gpu

capt_wolf,

Yeah, I’m not buying that either. I’m on a 2014 i7 and a 3060 playing on ultra. My sole issue was not running on an SSD which I resolved yesterday. That kid is clearly playing on a potato and lying.

NewNewAccount,

At what framerate?

Piecemakers3Dprints,
@Piecemakers3Dprints@lemmy.world avatar

Lying at any framerate is still lying.

NuPNuA,

I’m shocked at home many PC users are still running HDDs given that SSDs have been standard ok consoles for three years now.

Viking_Hippie,

They’ve pretty much been standard for gaming and containing the os on PC for 5 if not more. HDDs are still good for storage, but only luddites and people trying to save money in the stupidest way would have their games on them.

rambaroo, (edited )

Playing on ultra on a 3060 ? So you’re getting 20-30 fps? Because that’s what it gets on mine with a much newer CPU. I had to turn it down to med-high to average 45 fps

Annoyed_Crabby,

Lol, dude used up all the money to get a GPU.

Vordus,

Considering that this thing runs great on a Series S (which is CPU-heavy, but with a weak graphics card) that makes so much more sense.

rambaroo,

Gotta love the Bethesda fanboys upvoting this one cherry picked comment. They’re are like 70 comments in there with all different combos of system specs complaining about performance.

addie, do games w Everyone thinks the Deus Ex remaster looks awful and they're right: 'They really turned those 1999 graphics into 2003 graphics'
@addie@feddit.uk avatar

I didn’t ask for this.

The original looks fine; it’s gone from ‘okay for 2000’, through to ‘dated’ and back to ‘retro charm’ again. Plus you can turn up the resolution and fps to silly levels, which wasn’t the originally intended effect but is pretty nice.

All early 3D games look so bad that the slight year-on-year improvements are nearly irrelevant now. A hideous AI texture ‘upgrade’ doesn’t bring it to to modern standards, and distracts from the truly amazing game behind it all.

CosmoNova,

The funny thing is the original is only playable with fan patches so technically I can see demand for a remaster. They just really fumbled this in a weird way.

ulterno,

playable

as in “it does not work on Win 10”?
Because I found it playable, myself. It was on Win 7, if I remember correctly.

bryndos,

I enjoyed the original just fine on windows 2000.
I didn't even know there were fan patches.

mohab,

I didn’t ask for this.

My first thought. I still regularly see the original in top 10 lists to this day. Not sure who asked for this.

duhlieluh,

I still regularly see the original in top 10 lists to this day.

you just answered yourself, idk what is wrong with people lmao. why do they feel the need to complain about everything.

mohab,

So you’re saying they’re trying to cash in on the game’s popularity with a crappy remaster? You’re either a troll or you need to work on your logical deduction skills if you can’t figure out why people are complaining.

duhlieluh,

the fuck?? why would they remaster a game that no one liked and no one wants to play? if its a crappy remaster then that sucks, but its pretty fucking obvious if you think for 2 seconds and use the context clues in your own comment.

i think this entire thread needs to work on their logic skills, take a moment to comprehend before going full piss mode. what is crappy about their remaster? their “ai graphics”? unfounded stupidity and cynicism over a game that hasnt even been released yet.

who asked for your pissy comment about it?? oh no one? you should probably stop leaving comments because no one asked and theyre gonna be bad anyways. good job trolling though fr, you did well.

mohab,

Yo, do you work on the game or something 😂 What a crash out. This is hilarious.

Go tell your bosses to make an original IP instead of cashing in with low-effort remasters.

duhlieluh,

right, another response with no actual substance. this is truly hilarious. i definitely work for the company that is producing this and im obviously spending my time on lemmy asking people whats so bad about it. good observation. ill let my boss know not a single person complaining knows what the fuck theyre talking about, then he will check my lemmy account and pay me for talking to dumbasses on a social media nobody in my life has even heard of. genius.

prole,

I think you maybe need to get off the Internet, take a breath, and a step back for an hour or two.

duhlieluh,

i love how you realised you were wrong and shifted to a character attack! that was clever.

duhlieluh,

why in da world would they try to breathe new life into a beloved game 😡

mohab,

Because it’s already beloved and very much alive.

duhlieluh,

i wouldnt have considered it very alive before the remaster was announced. there are millions of people that will now be able to play it on their new consoles, and millions of people that will consider playing the game for the first time.

if you dont understand why remasters exist (obviously you dont) seek help. there is a reason why there are so many remasters, people like them and they buy them. if you arent one of those people thats fine, but if youre not the target audience just ignore it? why tf are you complaining about it and belittling it before it even exists? thats like saying they shouldve just kept crash bandicoot, spyro, tomb raider, etc. with no modernization and say fuck the new generation if you want to play it you have to endure the headaches and bs

if you dont want remasters just dont buy them. its that easy. some people want native ultrawide support, QOL features, cloud saves, graphics that arent 240p, etc. etc. without having to install 30 mods and still have a shitty experience.

sorry you have to be so pissy when people are enabling others to enjoy a beloved game.

mohab,

Hey, if you’re OK buying a game that looks worse than the original for QOL improvements that could, and should, be patches, you go ahead and support exploitative business practices.

And don’t forget to continue to freak out at online strangers for not joining you on your bootlicking adventures. That’ll make your life better, I’m sure.

duhlieluh,

cannot believe you think the og looks better. that is extremely baffling. at least everyone else will admit the original looks like absolute trash. the textures are seemingly 240p or less with no actual lighting or depth. pngs posted on a blob with horror inducing hands lmao. nostalgia≠quality.

and truly none of it fucking matters because more people will still get to play a wonderful game, it is being made more accessible for everyone and being released on new platforms.

you want them to patch in a complete graphical and QoL overhaul, port it to the switch, ps5, and series x, introduce cloud saving, ultrawide and dual monitor functionality etc all for free? oh, you didnt read any of that and you are being pissy for no reason? damn.

prole,

Found Aspyr’s PR

Rai,

As a fan of Brutalmoose’s retro streams, this is an affront

prole,

I like them as well, I just wish he wouldn’t include games for literal toddlers… Nobody can make that shit interesting.

Rai,

I find them plenty interesting during Bingo… and Humongous games always slap

prole,

Just not for me I guess… not trying to watch a grown play some janky old Putt-Putt adventure game made for 4 year olds.

Rai,

That’s fair! I do want that. It’s nostalgic.

duhlieluh,

where do you get the “ai” part at? i see no reference to that or evidence, maybe im blind though.

prole,

I didn’t ask for this

Ok, Adam

FarceOfWill,

I didn’t ask for this.

What a shame.

Sanctus, do games w Apex Legends writer gets laid off 24 hours after the character she wrote is revealed, because that's what the games industry in 2025 looks like
@Sanctus@lemmy.world avatar

Bullshit like this is why our industry is a mess, Nintendo may be greedy fucks but their code is good because the same dudes have been working there since the fucken 80s.

chemical_cutthroat,
@chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world avatar

I mean, if you want to emulate a corporate ethos, I don’t think Japan should be the benchmark, either…

NOT_RICK,
@NOT_RICK@lemmy.world avatar

Their crunch culture is def bad (they’re going to kill Sakurai one day), but there is quite a few things they do right. They don’t lay people off and their executives take accountability. Iwata took a significant pay cut when the Wii U flopped.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

They can’t lay people off, so they just put them in a room with no work to do until they get so bored that they quit. It’s the same thing but different.

pennomi,

I’ll take my chances with the boredom room.

TheGoldenGod,
@TheGoldenGod@lemmy.world avatar

Exactly, I would start taking naps and watch movies. You can’t bore or shame me into quitting, the second I know it’s a game, I will be breaking a b**** lol

Caesium,

forreal I write as a hobby and I spend as much free time at work sticking it to the boss by writing lol. if they literally handed me a room with little stimuli and let me bring my notebook in I’d be living

Cort,

Just making sure you realize the company would have the copyright for anything you create while on the clock…

Sanctus,
@Sanctus@lemmy.world avatar

“Fuck, well, publish it as another light novel. I’m sure they’ll quit soon.”

Redjard,

Ah your next novel is done? Make sure noone reads it, it would diminish the value of the tax-writeoff when we delete it.

yetAnotherUser,

You wouldn’t have a notebook. Any and all stimuli would be banned as the purpose is making your experience horrible.

Also, you get incredibly mundane tasks as well. Maybe you’ll get a couple sheets of random symbols and are tasked to count a certain letter. And if you don’t do this task you can be laid off for underperforming.

samus12345,

Whatever you do, please don’t throw me in the briar patch boredom room!

JcbAzPx,

Why would I quit my dream job? Getting paid so sit doing nothing is my life long goal.

tiredofsametab,

In Japan, the barrier to firing workers is much higher than in many other places. Even layoffs for financial reasons are tough and can be challenged. This is one reason companies sit on hordes of cash here is to weather financial issues, but it also has negative economic impacts as well. That said, Nintendo are a bunch of greedy cunts IMO, and I try never to buy anything new from them anymore (just buying used where they don't get a cut).

Semjaza,

In the US the barrier to firing workers is much lower than in other countries. Even layoffs for purely arbitrary or personal reasons are easy and hard to challenge in courts. This is one of the reasons companies have little free capital and choose to lay off many workers as soon as the market looks to be turning. But it also has positive economic impacts as well. That said, EA are a bunch of greedy cunts, and I try never to buy anything new from them anymore (just buying used where they don’t get a cut, if they released any games worth owning).

pulido,

I think a lot of what comes out of Japan is better than the West because they haven’t given up their idea of the company man.

Like it or not, having to switch jobs every few years is going to impact your performance.

Most of you have no idea how much easier it is to process information when you accept that you’ll be doing it the same way for decades.

desktop_user,

at least the west is starting to acknowledge the torturous monotony of doing the same job for decades.

pulido,

Lots of people prefer the comfort of familiarity.

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