Whenever a company addresses a something like this, like insisting a thing that is rumoured to be happening isn’t happening, it is almost certainly happening.
To be fair, the rumor isn't that Microsoft is getting rid of consoles. The rumor is that they're making decisions that will, in a handful of years' time, almost certainly result of getting rid of their consoles.
The distinction is that they're making a decision that will likely result in not making consoles anymore. It's like how governments don't decide to increase traffic; they decide to expand freeways to more lanes, but the only thing that can come from that is that they increased traffic. They think they're solving a problem, but they're actually, usually, making it worse by those actions that we have a historical record for how they play out.
Haven’t there been some pretty flagrant cases where someone said “we are not doing XYZ” and then like 3 months later there was a big press announcement stating “guess what? We’re doing XYZ, and think you’re going to love it!!”?
3 months being exactly one financial quarter. They probably weren’t lying, they were committed… for that quarter. When they read the numbers next quarter, well that’s completely unrelated to today’s commitments!
I doubt they will. The market for NAND and ram is insane at the moment, RAM has gone up 100% in the last 3 months. Announcing a price too early could lead to having embarrassingly increase price shortly before or after launch, or take a loss on the products.
That’s not to say I don’t share your sentiments. I too hope they announce it sooner rather than later, but understand why they may be apprehensive.
Additionally with how the USD is tanking and the ever looming risk of new tariffs being added on a whim, there is a real risk that even without global price increases the price needs to be increased for the US specifically
The funniest thing he ever tried to sell was Milo.
Basically an AI character game before even shitty LLM generative AI existed. You had to have been the dumbest, most gullible rube to have believed anything about that shit.
It’s obvious that demo was 99% fake and the eventual end product would have been way more scripted and simple than what he hyped it to be (I mean, it’s Molyneux). But he’s also been backstabbed by Microsoft on that one.
The Kinect prototype he was working with was not the Kinect that was eventually released. At one point Microsoft cut corners and removed the internal processor that was suposed to make Kinect work, leaving the console to deal with all the extra computation. It was barely possible to make a simple Kinect game not run like shit, making something relatively smart and responsive would have been a pipe dream.
I was fairly young at the time and wondered how they would try to pull this off. To the surprise of no one who was a little older than me they simply didn‘t. The only thing that was pulled was the project itself.
It’s been awhile since I played Godus, but I don’t remember micro transactions. May have forgotten, but remember it just being a super simplified version of populous. I only played in early access though, not sure on changes or if it ever had a full release.
I believe it. There was a steamcommunity post last year detailing all the cut content. I believe some of it has been added back through the patches (I only played through the game once, around launch).
To me the tadpole consequences is the most egregious, as the whole system and decisions connected to it feel so hollow when they end up not mattering at all.
Yeah, stuffing more worms into your brain being purely a beneficial mechanic with no drawbacks is a very weird choice. This whole system was honestly better in early access than it ended up being, having the tadpoles be just a dialogue option with a very easy check but consequences the more you used them. The ring that Omeluum gives you was even supposed to help, only to get changes into a boring Charm resistance ring on release.
I don’t know if it’s been culled by now in patches, but when I played there were still lines by the narrator talking about the consequences and “if you do this, there’s no going back” regarding the brain worms. All lies, it turns out.
I have no clue why they cut it, but having it actually impact your potential choices and your endings would be thematically appropriate and make for fun and difficult gameplay choices, I would have thought.
The lack of consequences for the brain worms - and lack of rewards or even mentions for abstaining! - was part of why Act 3 soured me on the game quite a bit. Come on, not even a silly achievement for not using any Illithid power all playthrough?
Yeah, I was very dissapointed by that as well. As far as I’m aware, the only time it matters is when
Act 3 spoilerThe Emperor offers you the Astral tadpole, if you used any worms you have to pass a check that grows harder the more worms you consumed to resist using it, if you abstained you can just say no.
Yeah but even that is pointless because there are literally zero consequences to accepting the Astral Tadpole! Even though you’re half Illithid supposedly it all kinda just goes away in the happy ending. I don’t get it.
As I recall there are two decisions. First you get the choice of the Astral Tadpole, which opens the outer ring of mindflayer powers and gives you black veins in your face and the status “half-Illithid”.
Later - as part of the ending - you can decide to become a full on mindflayer, because for some arbitrary narrative reason the mcguffin can only be operated by one.
Furthermore, there is an option to destroy the special “gift” if you can resist accepting it. However, all you get for doing so is a few brief lines from the Emperor. Your companions don’t seem to notice, and there isn’t even an quest log update.
This is fine, no issues really, but if you’re offended by something in a video game fictional story that was made over 20 years ago you should go touch grass.
eh. i get the ‘need’ for these companies to have the disclaimers and i honestly appreciate that they are not changing anything here. but the mob is fickle and seemingly can’t distinguish real life from the online life where being offended somehow gives them clout.
Yeah the Japan level made my jaw drop… the early 2000’s really were the last time you could be this blatantly racist against the Asian Community in popular media… But I’d rather go “Oooof” than pretend the game was never like this.
Do you see any merit to the pushback against such media?
You sound like you favor rationalism, and I agree with dismissing people who are crazy, but setting crazy people aside, do you see potential harm in promoting negative racial and ethnic stereotypes?
Stereotypes exist for a reason. They aren’t made up, non-existent characteristics. 90% of people that are getting offended by such things are not even part of the group that’s being stereotyped. It’s usually white liberals that are “offended” by any of this. Are they beneficial? probably not, but they sure are not nearly as harmful as people like you make them out to be. As a straight white man, I’m vilified by the mob regardless of my positions on anything, and that in itself is a stereotype. So I don’t put any stock into hypocritical perceived slights against humanity.
sorry my life doesn’t revolve around your internet drama. got real shit to deal with. like work. and life. idgaf what you think about me of what point you think you’re making. have fun with what little “power” you think you have here. i couldn’t care less about this.
how is it hypocritical? idgaf what you think, just like you likely don’t gaf what I think. you’re just out to call people names behind the safety of a keyboard and screen.
Even if I agree some games have gone too far on censorship, I don’t like having this totalitarian attitude to any kind of “offense”.
There are certain weird themes I really like in niche games, but I acknowledge if they were “thrown in” to a game about shooting or adventure, would sour the experience for a lot of common players. I’d point to perverted character designs as a common one - sexualized character designs are obviously appealing to some players, but to others they can actually make it hard to get absorbed in the story of a game like Xenoblade Chronicles 2 or Nier Automata. Even for a series like Persona, there have been players that decided “What weeb shit” and abandon the game because of the way female characters get harassed at times.
It’s easy to call it “political”, but politics comes from personal opinions - and it can genuinely affect how people view the media. These days I have a much more vehement reaction to stereotyped Native-American depictions (“Indians”) over when I was a kid. I doubt it’d make me hate Tomb Raider, but I can see why they’d have a warning.
I know speculation is fun, but until we know the price officially, all of this is moot. Wait until next year when they announce actual pricing and judge it then for its value.
I, personally, don’t think it’ll be a successful product if it isn’t less than $800. They don’t have to have it cost console prices, but it does need to be at least somewhat within spitting distance. If the price is the cost of an Xbox or Playstation plus, say…a year of their online service subscription, I think that could be marketable.
If it’s closer to a grand, it’ll be a flop like the first Steam Machines.
Literally not how any of this works. You don’t let AI check your work, at best you use AI and check it’s work, and at worst you have to do everything by hand anyway.
From a game dev perspective, user Q&A QA is often annoying and repetitive labor. Endlessly criss-crossing terran hitting different buttons to make sure you don’t snag a corner or click objects in a sequence that triggers a state freeze. Hooking a PS controller to Roomba logic and having a digital tool rapidly rerun routes and explore button combos over and over, looking for failed states, is significantly better for you than hoping an overworked team of dummy players can recreate the failed state by tripping into it manually.
I mean, as a branding exercise, every form of sophisticated automation is getting the “AI” label.
Past that, advanced pathing algorithms are what Q&A systems need to validate all possible actions within a space. That’s the bread-and-butter of AI. Its also generally how you’d describe simulated end-users on a test system.
I mean, as a branding exercise, every form of sophisticated automation is getting the "AI" label.
The article is specifically talking about generative AI. I think we need to find new terminology to describe the kind of automation that was colloquially referred to as AI before chatgpt et al. came into existence.
The important distinction, I think, is that these things are still purpose-built and (mostly) explainable. When you have a bunch of nails, you design a hammer. An "AI bot" QA tester the way Booty describes in the article isn't going to be an advanced algorithm that carries out specific tests. That exists already and has for years. He's asking for something that will figure out specific tests that are worth doing when given a vague or nonexistent test plan, most likely. You need a human, or an actual AGI, for something on that level, not generative AI.
And explicitly with generative AI, as pertains to Square Enix's initiative in the article, there are the typical huge risks of verifiability and hallucination. However unpleasant you may think a QA worker's job is now, I guarantee you it will be even more unpleasant when the job consists of fact-checking AI bug reports all day instead of actually doing the testing.
This wasn’t even the company, they let random people on the internet submit videos. Something nobody with two brain cells to knock together would think was a good idea.
When asked who his target audience for his games was, Takahashi answered that he was. “I make games that I feel satisfied with, so I’d like people to play them if they want to,” he replied. “I guess I probably should make games while thinking about the target audience, but I’ll work on that in my next life.”
I absolutely adore this game, but imo it’s a terrible candidate for a remaster. The graphics were already stylized so I doubt a graphics update would make much difference. It’s a puzzle game so the replayability is already low. And I can’t imagine that developer commentary get people excited about buying the game again.
I wish this was successful, but I can see why this went sideways.
Hopefully game developers stick to their guns and start migrating future projects and training to other engines like Godot. They played their hand once I wouldnt trust them to not screw you in the future
Re-Logic (Terraria’s developers) have already gone on record saying, "even if Unity were to recant their policy and statements, the destruction of trust is not so easily repaired.” That’s the stance I think every developer should be taking. Unless you have a Unity game that can be released by the end of the year, all devs need to seriously consider switching engines.
And when the code starts open source if they do a move like that (see Elasticsearch vs Opensearch, or Terraform vs OpenTF) then the community can fork it!
I love the idea of an open source engine becoming the industry standard, even if just for indie titles. Blender is a great success story and shows that FOSS can compete with industry standard creative software.
IIRC Godot’s reduzio mentioned at GDC there was considerable interest from various publishers and developers in building their own engines ontop of Godot.
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