Samantha Béart (who plays Karlach in the game), Theo Solomon (Wyll) and Dave Jones (Halsin) were asked how the success of the game had changed their lives and careers.
Okay listen I don’t want to sound rude, but I’m not that surprised. Maybe Karlach deserves a bit more recognition but while both Wyll and Halsin were both fine and perfectly adequate, I can’t say that either was the kind of memorable performance that gets you tons of new roles. Though it’s also in part due to the script and direction of course.
Got to agree. The voice work that really stood out in my opinion was done by Amelia Tyler (narrator) and Devora Wilde (Lae’zel). Everyone else was good and I REALLY enjoyed Karlach. I even did a play through with her as the origin character but it was because of the character design and writing more than the voice acting.
The game had a huge cast with many memorable characters and moments. Not everyone was going to shine through especially with some fantastic performances like you mentioned.
I think the title of the post is just deceiving and should be changed to the title of the actual article. And perhaps the article title was changed too but it is a more accurate title of the situation.
Except it’s totally not. Maybe the only 100% legal in every single country way, but not the only way by half. Fuck Nintendo. Fuck $80+ for a game. And fuck the switch 2.
In the case of them rereleasing old games without doing a remaster, in Canada at least, it is legal to have a digital back up for any game you own, and running it in an emulator is legal.
(Edit: I’m implying here that classic games are $80 on the Nintendo store, they are not. Still legal to have digital backups of modern games, still legal to emulate them as long as you own a physical copy.)
Sure, but it wouldn’t be $80 for most of them. (Edit: classic games on the Nintendo store are not $80, statement retracted. The general sentiment stands.)
Game deals is in New Westminster. Not necessarily great prices, but you can get Super Mario Cart for $60. And that’s a proper reseller, definitely get a better deal for a loose cart online…it doesn’t even have to be working. Get a better deal on one that isn’t functional, physical media degradation is one of the reasons why you’re able to keep digital copies.
You think they’re going to sell repackaged SNES and N64 games for less than that?(Edit: incorrect, they are in fact less than $80) How bout switch 1 games? Those are “modern” so significantly cheaper, still legal to have a backup, still legal to emulate…and will be run in an emulator on the switch 2, no native backwards compatibility.
As for switch 2 games…just waiting for a while getting them 2nd hand means they’ll be cheaper, if you can actually get a hardcopy, and all the things I just said still apply…
Wasn’t intentionally spreading misinformation. Classic games, as you said, are cheaper. However switch 1 games are still $80. And my point about legally being able to emulate them stands.
I’ll retract my statements on the cost of legacy games here and go back through my previous comments and change them to reflect this.
I can't tell if you were intentionally trying to mislead, but you know that this discourse was never about CAD, right? You know that the article is discussing USD, right?
It's not nitpicking to say that you've been misleading, whether intentionally or not.
Buying it used? That used to be the norm. Or getting it at the library for free.
I believe Nintendo (and other industry leaders) are going to find out that their old games are the going to be the competition to their new games. If it’s too expensive and the old games are fun…there’s enough of a backlog for people to play.
Here’s hoping! Not only has it ruined a lot of once-smaller games, but it’s also largely responsible for ballooning development budgets, so let’s get that down to something sustainable.
One of the most egregious cases for me was Assassin's Creed Odyssey. There was stuff for 40 hours aplenty, yet I spent most of those 40 hours killing the same goons over and over but with a different number over their heads, which meant I needed to spent more time in doing so.
If they had just aimed at making a memorable 30 or so hours, it would have been way better. This experience made me stop playing any Assassin's whatever games.
Opposite to this, there was "Still Wakes the Deep", which is a rather short but plentiful game.
"Indika, a nun looking to adjust to a monastic life. The twist in the tale comes in the form of her companion: she has a connection with the Devil himself"
That said, I never got bored of odyssey. It was was just a beautiful place to hang out. The game engine was amazing. With NPCs going about their business etc.
I wish someone would just use that engine for more stuff .
I meant it that I really enjoyed the setting, the characters and some game mechanisms. I just hated this need of making the game seemingly endless by repetition, and I wished I didn't have to be level X to be able to do Y, because the only way to level up was churning (for me that's a no bueno).
God of war and Jedi have done great jobs of finally showing AAA they can make a smaller game and still have a great following. I’m so sick of giant Ubisoft worlds that have nothing to do in them. They’re boring.
I haven’t played the Jedi games, but it’s crazy that the new God of War games are somehow a demonstration of restraint, as that one from 2018 is probably twice as long as I would have liked, and Ragnarok is longer still, according to How Long to Beat.
I know this is a cynical critique of capitalism, but even so, capitalists love lowering budgets and charging the same amount. Quite frankly, I’d happily pay the same or more to get a game with less bloat in a lot of cases.
Things like these make might heart warm. They remind me of a time when video most games where about making a good experience for the users, not about endless MTX and soulless always online games that all try to be the same thing. Good to see that there are still some people in the industry, who carry own these principles.
well I guess it was because the person who spearheaded the game project was also someone who liked and knew what games were about. Now that it has become a lucrative industry, the whole dynamics has shifted to something else.
Normally these articles are slightly alarmist making it sound like a company will fall over becuase of one bad game release and when you look at the share price over time it is still up. but this one is interesting. EA are down 15% over the past 12 months because of this one drop.
Yeah most game news websites don’t understand stocks but in this case, DA Vanguard was a massive failure. In the press release, the game was played by 1.5 million people. Not copies sold, just played. This probably includes people that just bought a month of EA Play to check it out.
The newest fifa game (EA sports FC now) also under-performed but they didn’t say much about it beyond that. A few more flops and it sounds like EA could be following Ubisoft into crashing hard.
They won’t say that though, because they have a built in narrative of “we were too woke”; convenient excuse for a less micro transaction heavy game to be blamed, as well as an excuse to be more strict on themes in their games. None of the problems are solved, but they have a scapegoat.
I don’t think this is a narrative EA is leaning into. Frankly, even if it sold less than they forecast, I’m sure they were happy they sold as much as they did given the troubled production it was converted from.
I don’t particularly think it is either, just that’s it’s conveniently there. The prevailing narrative about failed games recently has been wokeism, and not just the simple fact that games are increasingly shitty as the point isn’t a compelling narrative or gameplay, but how many micro transactions can be squeezed out of a franchise.
I don’t think so, but it is “woke”, and that’s a good enough reason for many to stick their fingers in their ears and claim that’s why it didn’t sell well.
Another way to see that 15% drop is hinted at in the article:
EA FC generates around $2 billion annually, Reuters reports, with around $800 million of that made up by Ultimate Team.
Loot boxes made EA $800M last year. It’s easy to see why EA and other publishers demand MTX in games. Can we amend “Don’t preorder” with “and ignore micro transactions”?
@ChicoSuave Pretty sure that ignoring micro-transactions has always been "a thing" to take a stand against. But of course, when it comes to the general public, no one ever does.
“It was not our intent to nickel-and-dime it, but it came across that way,” he said. […]
"A large part of the problem, Whitten said, was that Unity “didn’t communicate effectively… There were areas where there was some confusion, and we could have done a better job.” […]
“That’s on us,” he continued. “We didn’t do a good enough job… of delivering the information that would help people.”
It shows how dishonest he still is: Of course, they wanted to nickel-and-dime everything. People were not “confused”, they were outraged. No matter how much of a mess Unity’s initial explanations of the details were, the core message was pretty clear: Unity was aiming to get as much money out of developers as it can and it did neither bother to iron out the details of the changes, nor assess the potential damage their plans could do.
Rumours from inside Unity said that their own employees warned management, but managment saw a chance to make money and plowed ahead.
And going by Whitten’s statements, they still want to hide behind meaningless corpo-speak and the same people who got their business into this mess now claim that they have changed their ways.
Exactly. It’s a load of horseshit, and they got caught. Moving forward, there’s no reason to believe they won’t slowly add the policies back piecemeal after all of the outrage has died down.
I mean there’s nothing inherently wrong with that (if only they charged last-gen prices as well lol)
but anyways here’s a bunch more shit they’ve done:
charging full price for basic rereleases
removing reviews from the switch eshop
killing emulation projects
patenting basic gameplay elements
sued a man so hard he was forced to pay them part of his income for the rest of his life
and for a few older ones, just to show that they’ve been shitty this whole time, actually:
attempting to kill game cheating devices (like the game genie)
attempting to kill video game rentals
preventing 3rd parties from releasing games on competitor’s consoles, essentially giving themselves a monopoly
(also they’re partly owned by the saudi government, so, there’s that)
(and pls remember that, despite all of their shit, nintendo is far from the worst. it’s a systemic problem, not an individualist one. remember that ubisoft covered up sexual assault for years and that microsoft is literally engaging in genocide. the problem is that capitalism lets these companies get away with it.)
It’s ironic considering their early days in gaming. They were targeted by Universal over a BS lawsuit for using “Kong” in Donkey Kong and him being a gorilla like King Kong.
Now they’re pulling the same crap on smaller people/businesses and also working with the very company who did the lawsuit to bring their games to the movies.
I’m playing this game right now and it’s honestly a six out of 10. The only reason to launch the game at all is because of the world design which is top notch. So top notch it scores all of those six points, because the plot characters story and gameplay are all a let down otherwise. This is the type of game that will disable the controls for your magical flying broom and then tell you that you need to climb a wall. I wish it wasn’t so successful so they didn’t think this formula was so good, because if they made the game actually good AND a Harry Potter property, that would have really been something special. But as it is now, it’s just an uninspired video game painted in a pretty coat of a popular franchise. I’m sure we’ll get a sequel.
I would have loved to have this game as a kid. It may be a 6 out of 10 but most of the other harry potter shovelware they shit out when the movies were coming was at best a 0.2 out of 10. The only arguably not that bad one was the prisoner of azkaban movie based game.
IDK. Most of the early games were actually pretty entertaining. I fairly recently played sorcerer’s stone on the gbc, and it was still pretty fantastic.
I’m curious, what open world games do you rate as a 9 or 10? I’m not saying Hogwarts did anything revolutionary, but it did most things pretty solidly. It’s been a while since Ive played an open world game that does a good job on making the world actually feel alive.
Subnautica gets a 9/10. Fallout 2 and 3, if we’re specifically going RPGs. NieR: Automata for action RPGs. Look at Persona for school influenced RPGs. I’d have geeked out so hard if we got even Persona-style class experiences in Hogwarts Legacy. Instead, all we get is completely contextless montage cutscenes.
Yeah I wish Hogwarts Legacy had taken more inspiration from Persona. Having a schedule, working on social links, engaging in fun activities outside of school, it all lends itself incredibly well to a Hogwarts game.
Unfortunately it sounds like the creators haven’t ever even touched a Persona game. I remember before the game launched they were asked if there’d be romance options, and they seemed almost offended by the thought since the characters are kids, despite Persona doing the same for literal decades.
Going to a ball in Hogwarts Legacy, or going on a date in Hogsmeade, would’ve been so much fun too.
Imagine that, teens dating… What a wild concept, they didn’t even had to play Persona, our own culture is filled with teen drama series, even DC made gotham academy.
Not the person you asked, but for me personally to rate some open world games:
Hogwarts: 4-5/10. It’s pretty damn bad IMO, beyond the fan pandering.
Avatar Frontiers of Pandora: 5-7/10, it’s a slightly worse Far Cry (which is already damn tepid) but looks insanely pretty which makes it a good braindead time waster.
Cyberpunk 2077: Originally 2/10, laughably underdesigned and so buggy it felt like industry-criticizing sarcasm. Nowadays 7/10 if including the expansion, still quite buggy but not in a bad way, and the redesigned combat and character systems feel artificial but pretty fun. City still too dead and underdesigned, sadly.
Skyrim: 6-7/10, damn impressive at the time, but only briefly as the game was shallow as all hell, even in its best moments. Still impressive but it’s all on the mods and hence the players, not the game designers.
Witcher 3: 8-9/10, essentially same design flaws as modern CP2077, but given its fantasy world suffers much less from it, of course the empty countryside is, well, empty.
Subnautica: 10/10, amazing horror vibes, good progression, not too open and not too confined, focus on exploration.
Outer Wilds: 10/10, completely open and pure exploration, reductive game design done perfectly right.
No like… it feels pretty obvious they weren’t that way originally, if that makes sense? That this got changed after the game was already out for a while, this wasn’t how it was designed at first?
I got Subnautica for free twice (PlayStation and Epic), I should really look at giving it a proper try. I have the feeling it’d be really good in VR, played No Man’s Sky in VR recently and I immediately loved it while on flatscreen it didn’t click with me as much.
“We followed through on 60% of our promises, so you should pay us 200% of the value. If you want even more premium content, we’ll give it to ya! For a premium…”
On the one hand, let’s be real - clearly PalWorld takes more than a little “inspiration” on a bunch of different Pokemon IP. The illustrations, modeling, and just visual style overall matches in many ways almost perfectly for many of the creatures. They are like off-brand versions of Pokemon with the exact same eyes, mouth types, etc. in many cases as if they were illustrated by Ken Sugimori himselfhttps://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/4e6a9e85-e9ae-4407-86b2-7aadae1a5943.jpeg.
Additionally, the game involves using handheld ball devices thrown at wild world-roaming creatures you capture after cutting down their health by some amount to increase the catch percentage and different “grade” balls have increased chance for capture.
There is also a nefarious organization competing with you for capturing these wild creatures like Team Rocket.
But on the OTHER hand, the leveling up, breeding, base-building, the various ability tech-trees, item crafting, and just overall engine complexity is VASTLY superior to what appears to now be an almost EMBARRASSINGLY behind set of game design mechanics in the actual Pokemon games… it’s sort of a Saints Row vs GTA IV situation here where they were an obvious copy off, but improved in enough ways that ended up being a fun game in itself.
Copying off exact art asset styles is one thing you shouldn’t do… but taking Nintendo’s gameplay ideas and expanding upon them vastly and being told to remove said mechanics as if they stole code is asinine and sets a bad precedent.
Every time there’s been a popular game, there are a thousand copies off them that twist and evolve those mechanics until something else comes along.
Nintendo came along with platformers after Pitfall on Atari. Sonic copied 2D platforming basics from Mario like running to the right and jumping on enemies but changed so much. Final Fantasy copied off Dragon Quest, which itself was a digital idea based off of Dungeons & Dragons. Doom to games like GoldenEye to Halo to Call of Duty to PUBG to Fortnite to APEX Legends…
This feels like taking advantage of grey area in the realm of visual IP similarity to shut down someone making their gameplay design mechanics look antiquated by comparison.
Really embarrassing for Nintendo to be doing this, when clearly what Nintendo should be doing is doing like what Fortnite did when APEX came along and added location / enemy / weapon call outs and just STEALING the mechanics they weren’t clever enough to think of on their own and implement better versions in their own games… but clearly they’d just rather have a monopoly and continue lackluster work.
There are over 1,000 pokemon. I think it’s a Tolkien situation- where famously, you can’t write fantasy without using ingredients that Tolkien created, because if you do, obviously it’s from Tolkien, and if you didn’t, the reader is asking why not? That kinda deal.
If you set out to create a game involving collecting, or even looking at and cataloguing, a bunch of different fantasy creatures, you’re going to have some that are at least a little similar to pokemon. The electibuzz/grizzbolt example you gave is a fantastic one. You’re claiming it’s stolen, but that there is a cat creature with a single lightning bolt in it’s belly. Versus a… monkeything? Covered in them. My point here being, even if they didn’t steal (which, I’m sure they did, there are other, better examples) at a certain point you have to accept that with 1,000 pokemon, there’s going to be overlap, so you either need to just be up front about the stealing, or you need to spend 5x the amount of development time making sure none of your creatures have overlap.
Personally, Pokemon has been around for more than 25 years. Even if they released a million games a year, they shouldn’t get to gatekeep ‘all creature-collection simulators that you use balls for and that you can ride like a dragon.’ Fuck that. They got infinite money back on their initial investment, and they shouldn’t be allowed to just own the ideas. This is the kind of bullshit that makes me (a lifelong pokemon fan) want to never, ever, ever give them money again.
If you set out to create a game involving collecting, or even looking at and cataloguing, a bunch of different fantasy creatures, you’re going to have some that are at least a little similar to pokemon
I think Cassette Beasts pulled off the Pokemon gameplay format without making anything that Nintendo could try and sue over.
That sounds like a “look someone managed to pull that off so it’s definitely possible” argument. In other words “you can enter the collectable creatures scene by spending that amount of effort”. And it shouldn’t be that way. The price in effort shouldn’t be that high.
Actually, it should be the customers who decide if your product is worth the effort of playing it. There are a lot of rehashed games in various genres (e.g. horrors, walking simulators) and wee see no issue with them even though they are using exactly same mechanics, or sometimes even assets. What matters is users’ reception. If users think your product is worth it - it means you spent enough effort already. If your product would be a low effort creation users wouldn’t spend money on it in the first place.
I’m sure if Cassette Beasts could accumulate that kind of playerbase and profits, Nintendo would’ve sued them too.
Honestly? I see more Totoro in there than Electabuzz.
Where does the line get drawn between inspiration and stealing? I’m not trying to be facetious, it’s just the kind of question that I think a lot of people will have vastly different answers to.
The line? Usually you need to be doing something conceptually different. This knockoff electrabuzz wouldn’t have raised as many eyebrows if it was in a farming simulator, or a card game.
It’s like if you had a chainsaw gun in your game, and your game was a third person shooter set in a dark gritty sci-fi world where you are fighting subterranean monsters called the Focus Board.
Pokémon TCG would probably make a stink about that too. I would agree that more needs to be done to differentiate them but the Guns and the art-style should do that pretty well.
Using balls to capture and store Pals was a big mistake though and they definitely should’ve made a few more drafts on some of those aspects before reveal.
If you set out to create a game involving collecting, or even looking at and cataloguing, a bunch of different fantasy creatures, you’re going to have some that are at least a little similar to pokemon.
If you search for a fox fire witch you’ll see different interpretations on that. But somehow Palworld made a fox fire witch extremely close to an art of a fanmade Mega Delphox.
I’m not talking about the lawsuit, I’m responding about the idea that eventually people will create monsters that looks similar to Pokémon because of the vast amount of Pokémons, Palworld clearly tried to be close as legally possible.
That VGC site has a pretty good sum up of Palworld: cynical and souless, but nonetheless a pretty fun game to play, and I fully agree. Pretty much every design up to version 0.3 was fully copied from pokemon. The more recent patch that added the big island on the south has more original-looking monster designs, though others are still pretty obvious ripoffs.
Additionally, the game involves using handheld ball devices thrown at wild world-roaming creatures you capture after cutting down their health by some amount to increase the catch percentage and different “grade” balls have increased chance for capture.
They did that on Craftopia, too, only it was to catch animals rather than monsters.
There is also a nefarious organization competing with you for capturing these wild creatures like Team Rocket.
Not really. There is a criminal syndicate, a bunch of violent hypocritical hippies, a corrupt police and some Borderlands style psychos, none “competing” with you, they just want you dead. I think only the syndicate would “count as team rocket”, but they’re up for all crimes.
This feels like taking advantage of grey area in the realm of visual IP similarity to shut down someone making their gameplay design mechanics look antiquated by comparison.
Palworld became a target at first because of that visual similarity but, as much as the pals obviously resemble pokemons, they’re visually different enough to be considered original and a case on those grounds alone would go nowhere. Which is why Nintendo shifted from IP to Patent bullshit.
At a fundamental level, why should copyright exist? Is it helping society here by incentivizing Nintendo? No. Contemporary copyright has it wrong, and I think your starting assumptions ignore that fact.
If I spend millions of my own money and hundreds or thousands of hours of my own time to build something, another company should not just be able to yoink that, put a coat of paint on it, and leave me with nothing to show if theirs just happens to get more popular or be advertised a little better. I don't think the current laws are good but, absent basic income and such for everyone, I see why something should exist.
Sorry but why not? If you can’t afford that don’t make it or don’t publish it.
We see with open source that lack of copyright is not restricting anyone’s creativity and ability to create. In fact the open source world is significantly more creative and productive than proprietary one.
open source doesn't pay my mortgage, pay back any business loans, put food on my table, etc. as the sole breadwinner in my family.
To be clear, I have contributed in a minor degree to open source and build things for fun; this is specifically about why copyright exists in certain domains. I also think it should be something more like 3-5 years max. I am a software engineer and used to work in the games industry for a number of years (though not anymore).
Not being able to steal something someone put a ton of time and/or money into for a couple of years without compensating them at all is ruining society... how exactly?
Here’s where you fail to think when you call this “stealing”. You don’t own intellectual property as it didn’t come from the vacuum of your head. It’s built from millions of other contributors and our collective intelligence.
Don’t like this? You’re free to leave this to people who do and go do something else. No one’s forcing you to do this. You’re not even aware of your own entitlement.
Eh I think patents in video games just ruins the fun for us since Nintendo/game freak/Pokemon whoever can’t make a good game if their lives depended on it.
I’m a little torn on your comment, because om the one hand you are right and on the other these lawsuits have nothing to do with the designs or art style at all.
clearly PalWorld takes more than a little “inspiration” on a bunch of different Pokemon IP
There’s 1025 Pokemon at this point in time - how the hell are you supposed to create a unique pokemon at this point in time? Even pokemon can’t create unique pokemon anymore.
The same way Digimon, Monster Hunter monsters, and every other unique IP looks nothing like Pokemon. Make completely original designs that don’t look like fan art or knock offs of another artist’s specific trademark style.
I just assume that as long as everyone is fine with derivations produced by AI (text, pics, music), all derivations that don’t look exactly like original Pokemon are fine (also real people put some effort into those). Palworld compared to Pokemon is a much better product than, say, Fifa XX compared to Fifa XX-1. Also Pokemon series is notorious for useless editions of the same games masked as separate products - that level of rehashing feels much more illegal to me.
they barely changed the overall “palmon” to the orignal pokemon they stole from. kinda hard to defend palworld when they just copy and pasted, and slightly changed the feature.
I wonder if the next one will take so long that the world it satirises is long gone. Facebook being parodied in GTA V no longer makes much sense, for example
I hope they have at least two cities like Miami (beaches and organized crime) and Orlando (Disney and big business). Could be cool to have a three like SA to add in either Daytona (racing and rednecks) or Tampa (ghetto Miami).
… Untill Florida gets absolutely wiped out by a combo of its housing market and tourism economy simultaneously eating shit (this is currently occuring), and then also gets slammed by a, oh i dunno, a series of near record breaking hurricanes … in a record breaking short amount of time, and then can’t rebuild because FEMA either doesn’t exist or is massively underfunded.
Oh and way more people will die, and there will be way more property damage than there otherwise would be… becauase all the agencies and funding that went into tracking hurricanes just got cut to almoat nothing.
Its been … what, over a decade, between GTA V and 6’s planned releaae date?
I’d say that chances are actually quite good that within 10 years after 2026, Florida becomes essentially a mostly destroyed disaster zone, with maybe a few parts of semi-civilization… like a swampy version of the first Mad Max movie.
(For reference, GTA V is based on an amalgamation of LA, San Fran, San Diego, out into the sticks… oh and while we are in thr GTA V to GTA VI gap, a huge chunk of LA got burned to the ground, yay climate change!)
(To me, the challenge of GTA VI would be… how do you even fucking do parody anymore? The country has gone batshit insane during the game’s development, I will be amazed if they actually manage to work in the biting and underhanded social commentary that previous GTA games had… because it would be essentially impossible. My guess is it’ll have some parody and satire, but nowhere near as much as 4 or 5… and the story will basically just be about some cool badasses who are cool and badass and are getting their bag however they can because YOLO)
After looking at the jokes featured in the leaks…it hasn’t aged a day.
Tap for spoilerConspiracy theory maggots / qAnnon think Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook is downloading your brain to China and the country of Finland doesn’t actually exist
Definitely. I reckon on my first console I bought games for (2000 or so.), you could get a game roughly fifteen quid, within a few years (2005) it was 40 quid, and not long after that (Around 2010-2015.), £60. My wages didn’t increase like that.
Since when is flying on a monster patentable. What a bunch of bullshit. Nintendo has really used up the last of any good will the company had. I will not be giving them a dime from here on out.
Yeah, Nintendo seems to think they are untouchable. They can do whatever, charge whatever, not even innovate anymore with the Switch 2, and attack fans. I’m done with Nintendo, the only way I’ll ever play any of their games is on the high seas.
I really hope this doesnt take off. I tried out Star Trek: Infinite and the tutorial uses an AI voice. It just sounded bizarre and jarring, completely took me out of the experience.
This deal solves the problem you're encountering, because it allows game companies to use real voices to generate dialogue. It will sound a hell of a lot better than the 100% AI generated voices you dislike.
And it will protect voice actors' jobs because the deal effectively requires new contracts for each use out of scope of the previous contract (i.e., the "opt out" language), and it encourages game companies to continue to rely on voice actors rather than switch to 100% AI generated.
Without this deal, game devs will just go 100% AI (and the tech will improve dramatically), and within a year or two, game voice actors will have no jobs to contract.
This is especially important in light of the trend toward dynamically generated dialogue in RPGs, etc. Without allowing an AI to train on real voice actors, dynamically generated dialogue will have to be 100% AI generated (no human voice involvement).
Voice acting in all fields is already a diminishing market because of AI generated voices. One of my coworkers had to get a job where I work because his VA jobs basically dried up. This agreement stanches the bleeding by permitting the use of AI trained on VAs (but only allowing use on a per-contract basis). Without that permission, AI would just be trained on open source / freely available voice samples, and there would be no contracts, and VAs would just .... not exist anymore.
I disagree with it “solving” the problem. I’ve yet to hear an AI voice that actually works/sounds like an actual person. I’ve heard sentences or two that are somewhat passable at times, but never enough for actual dialogue. Regardless, your entire comment also does not address the issue presented at all, that voice actors did not agree with this deal.
Clearly you haven’t seen the videos of Biden, Trump and others playing Minecraft… Because man that works… And probably that wasn’t the latest technology.
I have. If you think those are perfect replicas then I have a bridge to sell you. Go listen to them again, they’re close-ish but there is always something a little off that sticks out when listening to it.
If I have to listen close-ish then they don’t stick out or they do very little so sounds good enough to me. Let again we don’t need exact replicas for gaming.
Plus probably lot of usage would be to pregenerate stuff not realtime so they can fix specific cases where it sounds weird by editing or similar.
I agree. The key factor is getting this settled before some smart people get this working seemlessly. It’s stupid to hear that there wasn’t any unionised info decisions for a union though. I guess you ask the union to speak for you but it’s the unions job to speak back.
extreeeeeme doubt. The moment an AI has to inflect emotion it really fucks it up. You’ll spend 5 hours and $200 of compute costs getting it to say “Great, thanks” sarcastically, when an actor could do it in a single take as part of doing the entire script.
Honestly I just don’t think a lot of people will care. They’ll just get used to the lower quality. AI only has to be ‘good enough to still sell’. Do you really think that gamers are the consumers that are going to be ones to fight back against it? The same consumers that have rolled over to basically every other exploitative practice ever conceived of?
I think people will be bothered if the voice acting in their games sounds like it could have been done by Stephen Hawking (or with less exaggeration, like an actor doing their first reading of a script).
at the levels we’re talking - maybe an indie studio could deliberately, stylistically, pull it off. But a AAA studio? To whom their VO budget is less than what they pay an executive. It just leaves them open to competitors making a game with good voice acting, and their own game getting panned in the press.
Speaking of Star Trek and AI voices… Majel Barrett supposedly recorded her voice so that it could be used in the future by software to make her talk again.
So fuck Google Assistant or whatever. Where’s my Enterprise Computer app for me to talk to?
The finals uses ai voices for announcers and I could not tell the difference so there’s definitely something there. I think it works in that setting because the inflections is so set.
Nintendo is shitty for patenting this, sure, but why was the patent granted? This has happened numerous times for big tech companies where an overly broad patent is granted that allows them to stifle innovation and bully smaller companies out of business instead of properly competing with government protection
Exactly. Nintendo is not our friend, but it’s also playing by the rules it has available to it. It’s the rulemaker’s fault if the rules are shite.
As a publically traded company in the current system, Nintendo is not in the business of making video games, it’s in the business of making shareholder value. Video games are just a tool for doing that, exactly how a PC is a tool for writing documents or developing software. At the end of the day, companies have more than one tool at their disposal, and are going to use all of them to compete.
It’s on us to take away the tools we don’t think they should have access to, not on them to voluntarily not use the ones that are in play.
Classic American response: “companies aren’t responsible for the shitty choices they make, they can make as many shitty choices that harm people for profit as possible at all times and it’s just business”.
I’ve grown to hate that famous quote “It’s not personal, it’s just business.” because it’s almost exclusively used to excuse people when they choose to act like sociopaths.
Systemic change is needed when the system allows for that exploitation. That is not excusing companies. Noone should be able to do it is the right reaction.
No one should be able to do it is the right reaction, but ‘Nintendo deserves no blame or shame for choosing to do it’ is the wrong reaction. Nintendo could have used all the money it spends on IP lawyers to instead lobby the government to change the patent system, but they chose not to.
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