AI can be a great tool if used properly to enhance human work but companies seem hell-bent to instead have just AI do all the work, cutting human beings out completely and “saving costs”. Recipe for disaster.
Personally I feel that way about Morrowind - mechanically it’s like a stripped down, worse version of Daggerfall while also being an inferior implementation of a fully 3d game than Oblivion.
Morrowind is imo the best from a gameplay mechanics perspective. The utility magic alone was such a huge loss for future games.
I could cast levitation, walk up to the moon prison, magically open the lock, use chameleon to sneak inside, steal stuff from 30 feet away with telekinesis, and if the guards find me, jump down with slowfall and then escape underwater with waterbreathing.
Daggerfall has most of that, and has extra stuff like the ability to climb walls without magic! IMO the dice-roll combat also feels way better in Daggerfall than in Morrowind.
Of all the TES games Oblivion has aged the worst. If you didn’t play it at the time its really hard to be objective about it now. Too much Bloom and ugly potato faces combined with its floaty, clunky combat make it a chore to play today. Game had some great quest writing though and Shivering Isles is a GOAT expansion. It also has an undeniable, if somewhat unintentional, goofy charm to it that I love.
At the time a lot of Morrowind fans hated it for going against established lore and “dumbing down” the series, but it did well critically and was generally well received by the public. It got a lot of people, including myself, into the series. I went back and played Morrowind and loved it so I can see a lot of Oblivion’s weaknesses more clearly, but I still have a soft nostalgic spot for it in my heart.
I absolutely agree with you. And I did play it back when it came out.
There’s a few more things that goes in the “Meh”-pile of changes Oblivion brought to the table. Like the boundless fast-travel system and streamlining magic (although I did like the quick-cast mechanic. But that got scrapped as fast as it was implemented with Skyrim) and so on.
Yeah personally I reckon that Oblivion and Daggerfall are the two best TES games ever made - both are better than Morrowind, and significantly better than Skyrim.
I also reckon that Starfield will be up there with Oblivion and Daggerfall a couple years after the modding tools are released!
Yeah, as someone who hasn’t played Starfield and has no interest in playing it, all their criticisms were just saying they didn’t care for the style starfield was going for. Which is fine, but that doesn’t make it a bad game.
It could be that “NASA punk” is boring to 99/100 people, but that doesn’t mean a game in that style is bad. I think we can all agree that games that are enthralling to a very niche set of people are a good thing, because we all want that game to be for us. We don’t want or expect every game to be equally enthralling to every person.
Starfield could have been a great game. But the general route Beth has taken with Fallout, and continued in Starfield, doesn’t appeal to me. Pointless building filler, environmental storytelling over actual storytelling, radient quests everywhere and so on.
I have no doubt they’ll do the same with TES. Just half-assing it really. Skyrim was already pretty flat, so…
Yeah, Morrowind was mind blowing when it came out. Then I skipped Oblivion, and Skyrim, mechanically, wasn’t that much of a leap over Morrowind. Sure it looked better and had voice acting, but it still feels like a static world. I wouldn’t consider Witcher 3 to be quite the same genre as TES, but imo W3 raised the bar for my expectations from Bethesda. So far I think they still have not made a game as good as W3.
No don’t you understand? They gathered two other people, who work directly with them reviewing games the same way they do. If they don’t like it it means it’s a bad game. Obviously!
It could be interesting for procedurally generated games. Imagine a world with no fixed map, settlements where every person is completely unique and will talk to you about any subject you want to talk to them about (instead of the same canned phrase or two), a completely different roster of baddies to fight every time, maybe even the storyline itself never plays the same each time, or the style of play changes from game to game. I’m hopeful we’ll start to see some truly unique games with AI helping out, though I’m guessing we’ll get a mountain of shovelware that just uses AI to generate shitty non-sensical art assets and meaningless dialogue.
Have you played/seen Vaudeville? It’s a detective game where every character had their own LLM and TTS trained for a specific personality.
It’s super janky and I never finished it because I kept getting conflicting info from characters but…it’s a really great use case for it. The massive caveat being that it requires an Internet connection.
AI-generated maps and NPCs might be ok. Ditto fights, though there would have to be playtesters whose job it is to make sure the result is something winnable and acceptably fair.
The main issue there would be that there IS no continual certainty of that. You'd have to either be able to rerolled entire encounters — which would be jarring — or force the AI to DM what happens when you lose an impossible battle — far more rewarding, provided it doesn't keep doing it. But it may keep doing it. This would be impossible to ever test adequately. Every game on the market may be a hard mode Bethesda game.
I personally really don't think I'd enjoy something with a randomly generated cast/main story for the same reason I wouldn't be interested in owning one singular book whose writing changes every time you read it. I don't play to kill time; I play for the stories and I get attached like hell to the good ones. I replay them ad nauseam because I miss the characters.
I think it would be an intensely entertaining idea either as a New Game+ or for those games to have a wildcard setting that you could turn on and off. That way, there's no lack of devs who get to tell the tale they wanted and players can mix it up when they're bored. Otherwise, you've downgraded the job of the entire company to filling the AI in on background lore and nothing else.
Other aspects:
• for those that do get attached and wanna re-experience it, you'd need a way to save the information behind the game you just played. That file might be fairly gigantic?
• Would also lead to a weird market for other peoples' saves. The way modders already make quests, but for an entire plot.
• NPCs and party members that all look like randomized sims.
Depending on how it’s done, it could make the game better or worse, just like any other tool. I imagine there will be a lot of growing pains as devs figure out what works and what doesn’t.
I could see an mmo using it for small random side quest generation where any npc could give you a quest tailored to the character. That kind of stuff would go along way to make big open worlds more “living”
ML models ‘learn’ by generating non-human-readable arrays of weights, that’s a little pixie-dusty. But it’s use there is narrow, in a supporting role. My comment was about the core ‘making radiant quests feel tailored to you’ thing. It woulf still be a set of tables with fillable blanks, it’s structure and content decided by humans with a little random or maybe AI-gen content dropped here and there to add variety. Otherwise it won’t communicate the resulting quest to the system.
As a developer (not of games, but still), I would actually be interested in a tool that can generate simple code snippets for me to correct and assemble into a more complex system. But yeah, as you said, there will be growing pains as everyone figures out the optimal use cases for AI in development
Personal note: in that last linked article, they compared BG3 vs SF to Disco Elysium vs Outer Worlds, and I think this is hilariously just showing how much this is about their predilection for narrative-core games.
I like Disco Elysium. I like BG3. They are much better narrative RPGs. I also feel absolutely no desire to go back and replay them.
I go back to Outer Worlds and Starfield. They are much better open world RPGs.
Like, chill PCG. It’s a good game, enjoyed by lots of people. If your staff is more into narrative-core RPGs with linear progression, that’s cool, but you don’t need to demonize Starfield to enjoy BG3. The worst Bethesda game? Worse than '76? Come on.
FO76 had a rocky start for sure, but they have made a ton of updates. It is easily better then Starfield now. If you compared them release to release then FO76 would be worse, but I think they are comparing current state.
Personally, hard disagree. I don’t find FO76 fun at all. The world feels small, the characters are boring, and finding zany houses sprinkled around breaks any versimility of the world, which is the cornerstone of Bethesda’s games.
I think the houses fit in the world, but the world is definitely small. I still enjoyed my time in it a lot more than my time in Starfield, which is mostly open fields with the occasional settlement/work site/lab dropped in. I don’t think Starfield is a bad game, just not an exciting one.
Fallout 76 is a lot better than what it was at launch but it’s still nowhere near close to Starfield. It’s a weird mesh of ideas that don’t really fit together but are still enjoyable separately.
I like Disco Elysium. I like BG3. They are much better narrative RPGs. I also feel absolutely no desire to go back and replay them.
Really? This is crazy to me. I get Disco, but outside of intentionally regenerative games (such as roguelikes/lites), I don’t think I’ve had my hands on a more replayable game than BG3 in years. There’s so much you don’t see in a given playthrough.
I don’t doubt it has new events, new ways that things can pan out, etc… but it’s the same characters, the same goblin camp, etc.I am very big on exploration, and without a world large enough to find places I haven’t seen, or at least places that it’s been so long since I saw that I don’t remember it, I bounce off games very fast.
Yes and no. My second play had countless new characters–three of them playable–several new zones, and a ton of new gameplay. I was constantly finding new places, new encounters, new conversations. I know there are still several zones I haven’t poked around in.
The main story beats don’t change much but there are still a lot of branching paths to get to them. Hell, you could even completely skip the goblin camp if you wanted.
Game studios just don’t do the kind of extra work to cover player choice like Larian did here. It’s why the game made waves in the industry. I’d say unless you really went over it with a fine comb the first time around (125 hours or more), it’s absolutely worth revisiting at some point.
I stopped playing ESO years ago after around 10,000 hours of playtime. It’s nice (or perhaps unsurprising) to hear that they still haven’t addressed how badly they messed up the story structure and pacing. Rather than have the expansions be an accessory to the main story and tutorial - they acted as replacements. A game design choice I’m 99.9% sure was made by management and not by any actual dev team. It was a confusing, convoluted mess with only a few expansions but I can’t imagine how bad it is now with even more.
To be fair, ESO shouldn’t really be on this list. ESO was developed by Zenimax Online, not Bethesda Game Studios (Todd Howard’s team). It’s as close to Fallout or Starfield as Prey or Doom are (same publisher, different devs).
I love the first one so much that I’ll buy this thing regardless so I don’t really care if it sucks at launch or not I’m going to enjoy it for a number of years
Yeah thanks for the heads up, I’ll buy it in a year after release, when it’s patched, for 50% discount on a steam sale. Or maybe in two years foe that botched launch apology hit discount of 70%.
I’m more worried about it being a traffic simulator more than a city builder like the first one without any expansions. I would like to design a city I want to live in. It’s good to be honest about performance at least.
Have you watched any of the feature highlights and accompanying dev talks? Visually speaking, the game looks worse in a lot of really bizarre ways, but the actual city simulation gameplay looks like it’s been much improved. There really wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but they added a lot of the depth that’s been seen in older Sim City titles, as well as what looks like an actually currency based economic model, as opposed to the shallow approximation of an economy that existed in Cities Skylines. They also added the frankly crucial changes to traffic AI that was added to CS1 via mods, into the base game. It looks like as far as the city simulation goes, CS2 will be a solid improvement and there have been a couple well known CS1 YouTubers that seem to confirm that.
That being said, I fully expect this game to look rough and maybe perform even rougher at release, but it does at least look like I definitely wouldn’t recommend anyone buy this at launch unless they pull some big improvements out of their asses which judging by this statement, they don’t plan to, but it is also releasing on gamepass…
Nope, I don’t follow any gaming media other than what I see when browsing all in Lemmy. I just noticed a new Cities Skylines game under Steam’s top seller list so I only know what I saw from the previous game. My main hope is I can make walkable cities.
“You can also create dedicated roads that only allow buses and service vehicles to operate on them, and tram tracks can be built separately bypassing road traffic altogether.”
“Walkable areas in the city can be created using the pedestrian street along with the pedestrian path and bridges. The pedestrian street prohibits all other vehicular traffic except for service vehicles and delivery trucks bringing resources to local businesses.”
Personally, I think I would prefer they hold the game back and do whatever patches or updates they need to help with performance, rather than release a game they know is buggy. I guess it’s nice that they’re actually telling us before people buy the game, and they will be releasing updates. But frankly to me this feels like they’re going to be fighting an uphill battle when they launch the game. Plenty of people won’t see this message, and just buy the game expecting it to work, then turn sour due to the poor performance. You could end up with people refunding the game and never coming back with stuff like that.
How is that awful? The deep dive videos are all we need to understand generally what the new things are, and why we should be looking forward to it. Isn’t that all marketing can do?
I mean what were you expecting a month from release besides like maybe one additional trailer? The original trailer exists and I’m sure they’re paying to run that somewhere. And once someone sees it they can go watch the dev videos.
If they cared about peaking hype they wouldn’t have told us about the performance problems. But frankly they don’t need to hype CS2 or even sell big at release and they’re well aware of it. Games like the latest annual COD have to sell as much as possible at release because they need players to fill the servers, they need to have an established player base to sell the battle passes to after a month, and the game has a maximum shelf life of a year, before it’s abandoned for the next game. But CS on the other hand doesn’t need to do any of that. It has virtually zero competition so it has a captive audience of everyone who likes modern city builder games, and it doesn’t matter when you buy it, because they aren’t making another one for 5-8 years. They know exactly how much money they’re going to make from this game and they’ll get yours too, whether it’s at release or a year from now.
To put it in perspective, COD games are made fast, and have to sell fast. Since CS1 released, there have been TEN Call of Duty games. In that same timespan were about to get ONE new Cities game.
It sucks, on one hand I’d prefer a delay so they can release what they’re happy with - but on the other this is a developer that I know and trust to continue working to make things better for a long time. For many other games this would leave a bitter taste, but for this one it’s a bit of a shrug for me.
I’m kind of used to devs releasing apologies for their games after a bad release and the following review bombing. It’s almost guaranteed to happen for any modern AAA game, it’s the sorry state of the industry. But now, we’ve reached a point where devs apologize for their games before they’re even released. This shit is hilarious.
What’s next? “We’re going to release a game four years from now. You should temper your expectations, it’s probably going to suck.”
I mean, kudos to them for warning the potential customers, instead of lying to them or luring them in with nice trailers and trying to silence journalists by prohibiting them from showing game footage (I think I remember someone doing that…). Although I’m not sure how I should thank them. Should I buy the game because they were honest? Or should I not buy it, because, well, they were honest? I’m confused.
I mean, I think it just demonstrates that the problem is not on a development level, but rather on a project management and (particularly) an executive level.
Crunch and unreasonable deadlines in the gaming industry are the norm, and there’s too much pressure from higher up to deliver a product as soon as possible, even if it isn’t 100% ready.
Unfortunately, there’s no real good answer for this as a consumer… If the game does well, the execs who set the deadlines pocket the profits. If it does poorly, the developers who worked on it bear the brunt of it by either getting insufficient raises, an even higher level of pressure on the next game, or at worst, get laid off.
The real answer would be widespread industry unionization. Efforts to do this are ever-so-slowly being made, but it’s not even remotely close to being a reality. I’d say that if the game appeals to you and you don’t mind performance issues at launch, buy it, but if not, then don’t.
problem is not on a development level, but rather on a project management and (particularly) an executive level.
In any industry as time progresses the production becomes more and more capital intensive and that needs more and bigger investors and all that capital means that there is a bigger risk and that is mitigated by the investors by requiring “their guys” to staff the management and these people are unusually really bad for the technical and actual value side of the business on the long run, because they are usually people with financial or marketing backgrounds. They fundamentally work by the logic of profit maximization and there are always easier and more surefire ways toi achieve that than with supplying a good product. It’s even worse when the end product is something that could be considered “art”. In AAA it all eventually leads into pushing bland installments under rushed deadlines for the same once successful franchise out one after another, just because that is where the risks are lowest and money is still being made.
You're failing to take Paradox's lifecycles into account. Even though they're only the publisher, keep in mind that they're used to supporting games for 8-10 years after launch. Cities: Skylines came out in 2015 and has seen continual development ever since. Its performance was also abysmal at a point, but people kept playing and the devs kept improving it to the point where nobody even fully remembers why we cared about SimCity going to shit when Cities: Skylines was right there.
Given that Paradox has near decade-long lifecycles for their games the launch window is utterly meaningless. Hell, Europa Universalis IV had an expansion released earlier this year and it was released in 2013.
That game had the unfortunate timing of being released when everyone knew CK3 was around the corner. It ended up being seen as a stopgap release and that just got worse when CK3 came out. It got a couple of DLCs but the players just weren't there anymore. It has some good ideas.
Of singleplayer games, it may be Quake. This one was created before the recent remaster and compatible with different engines.
In honor of Quake’s 20th anniversary, MachineGames, an internal development studio of ZeniMax Media, who are the current owners of the Quake IP, released online a new expansion pack for free, called Episode 5: Dimension of the Past.
Episode 6: Dimension of the Machine was released in 2021. Quake was released in 1996, making it 25 years.
I have a feeling there's probably some obscure-ass Nethack clone that's been getting regular updates since the creator first programmed it on a PDP/11 but outside of that I can't think of any actual commercial products that have received expansions that long after.
Yeah, guess, Doom and Quake are the earliest non-arcade games that are still accessible to current generations of players making it somehow relevant. I feel like only Sega could do something, like releasing one of their classics updated with some new content, but it won’t be the same as original cartridge releases and obviously incompatible with them.
Sure. But if you know your product is going to be trash, why not jump ahead of the curve and victimize yourself to start with? It’s not difficult to do these days, and why wouldn’t you do it? Altruism? At this point, not assuming this happens is just naive.
the game will be optimized eventually. if you want to wait until then, do so. me, I just want to play this. I don’t care I’ve been waiting a long time for this game, and I have a very powerful desktop PC so I don’t really care.
I am upset they do not have a native Linux build this time around, however. And I don’t care that proton has gotten good, a game like this needs to run natively to get the full experience. The first one did and Unity makes it trivially simple to export builds to other operating systems.
pcgamer.com
Gorące