The problem is IMO much bigger. Every connected and/or IoT device becomes physical waste if the vendor shuts down the backing infrastructure.
Every product (physical or digital) should be considered as a unit with the required technical infrastructure. Companies/producers should only have two choices: keep maintaining the infrastructure or publish everything necessary for individuals and/or a community to take over. This must be ready from the moment such a product enters the market and it must be part of the “will” of the company so if it goes bankrupt, the whole process can be triggered more or less automatically.
I take issue with the requirement being “when it’s no longer supported” for similar reasons. I can foresee an argument where a company advocates for some scenario where they’re going out of business and can’t do it, and some 75-year-old judge who hasn’t played a video game since Tetris lets it slide. Still, this is the shot we have, and we need to take it.
Next one ditches all the filler and just goes straight to shagging a series of elves, demons, were-bears, cthulhus, etc. One after another, there are so many cthulhus to shag and you are the chosen one.
I know Lemmy hates it, but I really think AI could play a core part in the future of multiple choice RPGs.
I’m not saying let it be free and build the entire game, but if you train a model to be a certain character and add limitations so it doesn’t go too wild, then that could be massive imo.
Still have a human storyline and imagination behind the game, but use AI like the tool it is for certain parts.
Unless I see major advancements in the technology, I think AI will be a great tool in the toolbelt for developers operating on lower budgets, but Baldur’s Gate 3 is going to have people expecting the best from Larian’s games going forward, and that’s going to mean human writing and human performances. I think without those major advancements in the technology, it’s going to come off as lesser quality.
Seriously? You play a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 and your first thought was “damn, this game could really benefit from having less handcrafted, professionally written dialogue”
In the future I think it’s a really viable option to create more immersive and interactive games. The technology is pretty far away though, not to mention I don’t think most machines could handle the load while also running a game. It’s at best a dream right now, but a pretty interesting idea for 15 years from now.
That’s a pretty big assumption about where the tech is going. In my experience it’s really stupid to try to predict what tech will look like more than a year or two into the future, let alone over a decade.
You could have a fully man made storyline, but then expand the world in a way that is currently impossible.
Even if you train a model for main characters/stories, it would still be built off the work of writers, the model would simply be the character they’ve written.
I think the way video game devs/people are (from what I can see from outside) they are well poised to realize someone making an LLM or a finetune or whatever you want to call it – that produces master level dialogue/stories/whatever is (will be) a skill just like storytelling/writing is.
If I were a JRR Tolkien or Herbert with a universe in my mind, it would be so much more pleasing to make an engine that generates anything from that world that to just write out a few stories from it.
If I were a JRR Tolkien or Herbert with a universe in my mind, it would be so much more pleasing to make an engine that generates anything from that world that to just write out a few stories from it.
One of the foundational tenets of good writing is that worldbuilding is just masturbatory unless it serves the story. You don’t create a cool world and work your way backward into a story. You create a great story and craft a world around it which supports the story you’re trying to tell. The stories are the thing that have value, not the setting or the lore.
Telling a great story is a completely orthogonal skill to worldbuilding, and it requires creativity, emotion, and authorial intent. Star Wars and Harry Potter are both dogshit at worldbuilding, but they’re both some pretty rad stories. Avatar: the Legend of Korra is set in one of the best fantasy worlds ever created and it was a very mediocre story.
Not the opposite at all. Tolkien didn’t know what the One Ring was when he wrote about Bilbo finding it in the Hobbit. Good worldbuilding is iterative. Tolkien went way too obsessive for LOTR and a lot of the worldbuilding he did was purely for his own pleasure rather than serving the story.
Keep in mind he didn’t try to publish The Silmarillion while he was alive. And also that the vast majority of LOTR fans don’t give a shit about stuff in the Silmarillion if it isn’t also relevant to the story of LOTR.
I’m a DM, and I can tell you that as fun as worldbuilding is, no information about your world is real until players learn and remember it. And if you try to loredump on them, they won’t actually remember stuff.
Worldbuilding is fun, but it’s also masturbatory; it’s only fun for the DM until the game’s story makes it matter for everyone else.
If I were a JRR Tolkien or Herbert with a universe in my mind, it would be so much more pleasing to make an engine that generates anything from that world that to just write out a few stories from it.
Tolkien was a linguist with a deep fondness for nature and spirituality. He loved creating languages and building beautiful, natural worlds around them. I can’t imagine a single person who would be less enamored by the idea of machinistic language devices that people use to “generate everything”. I think he would be either bored by this possibility or deeply disturbed.
Tolkien also had a deep disdain for industrialism and automation, which is what inspired Isengard in the books. When he says Saruman has “a mind of metal and wheels”, it’s implied that the reader understands why this is a way of saying that Saruman is evil. He definitely wouldn’t be a fan of MindOfMetalAndWheelsGPT.
Perhaps but I can’t see anyone who is interested in creating and communicating fake worlds eschewing the idea too much. If you make a fake world, there’s no way you could ever ‘get it all out’ since you’re just one guy. This would open up that possibility to make a world bigger than yourself and what you can get out of your brain
Maybe now, but everyone was afraid to fund 100MM BG3 because they thought no one wanted CRPG and they want Fortnite or whatever. Hopefully Larian spawns more people who actually care about their users instead of just greed
Frankly I think that’s just recency bias. It’s new so it feels better. Before BG3 came out, most people agreed DA:O was the perfect CRPG, or Mass Effect, and just look at the sheer number of video essays on YouTube praising the quality of F:NV.
New games come along and old games look paltry in comparison. It doesn’t mean the older ones are actually worse. But you’ve had decades to enjoy DA:O, while BG3 still feels like it has secrets to uncover. It still is unexplored territory, and that’s exciting.
Personally I think that once the dust settles, it will be clear that, apart from limitations due to when each was made, these games are all equally 10/10 games in their own way. It’s not as though BG3 is without flaws. And it’s still actively being worked on.
But not me – None of them have ever reached my bar except for BG3 – I care less about video game stories and more about mechanics/freedom of choice to be fair
Chrono Trigger FF3 SNES (FF6) Final Fantasy Tactics FF7
I don’t know what that guy was talking about. There have been so many games released with amazing stories. It’s just the ghost of Jack Welch has slithered into gaming and rather than make great titles we get microtransaction shit games.
That statement in itself is quite sad, when one of the reasons everyone called it out as being an amazing game is because it was huge, well crafted, and made by a company that actually seemed to give a shit.
I don’t say this to diminish their achievements, because I’m 80 hours in and still not done, but it’s a spectacularly low bar that Larian absolutely launched themselves over. At a time where companies seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel, Larian did the exact opposite, and reaped what should be the most obvious of awards (do good work, get lots of money).
I speak to enough dipshits at work spewing word salad, this is what I wanted with my escapism, people who follow the fucking conversation not some AI bot resume filling buzzwords about the plot.
Not less handcrafted, but AI enhanced on top of the already excellent written dialogue.
If I want my entire BG3 gameplay to be about grilled cheese, then I would be able to when talking to every NPC while still getting the excellent story about mindflayers. The cheese is just on top.
100% the future. Like has anyone put all the billion pages of lore from TES into a GPT finetune? Surely that would make better dialogue than HALT! for the 900000000 time right?
I have used AI to RP some stuff (don’t ask), and while the higher end models, and even the better self hosted models are really good at answering in a way that makes sense and works in context, it is pretty hard to make them do anything, new, interesting, or unexpected, without prompting it specifically.
Nothing that I’ve seen playing around with LLMs makes me think that a well-written work of fiction could be improved by including them, unless there is a significant leap in capability.
And this is ignoring all the discussion about LLMs and copyright/stolen content.
I think AI Dungeon proved that you could have a great Gen AI-driven campaign experience, but the novelty wore out really fast after it was used up as streamer bait and the ethical considerations are just too much of a risk.
So much talk about "what makes a Mana game" in there, and yet for me the one thing that made Secret of Mana a game that I cared about was the 3 player co-op that absolutely ruled. Still no indication that this game even has 2 player action. I was super disappointed when I could finally play a fan translation of Seiken Densetsu 3 on PC back in the day and it was only 2 player, and lately I've been increasingly disappointed as everything since has been a single player affair.
Call me crazy, but the series hasn't been great (it's still been good, just shy of great) since the SNES outings and I am really wish they'd get the game back to the multiplayer that made it great.
Interesting. I didn’t even know the Mana games had multiplayer. I’ve always played them for the replayability and character building (and the story, of course).
Being able to play the fan translation of Seiken Densetsu 3 in the early aughts was what really cemented my love for the series. I was ecstatic to learn that its remake was made so faithfully.
Yeah, I own Collection of Mana and Trials of Mana and played it both ways. Trials in particular has got me very excited for Visions, but I really hope that they're doing multiplayer and ideally 3 player to throw back to the greatest aspect of Secret.
I own the same haha. Trials not having multiplayer was a bit of a letdown. More detail would have been nice too but it was fun to see it all in 3d. I made it pretty far but never ended up beating that one.
Whilst your opinion here is totally valid, it’s worth knowing that as a coop player of the mana games, you are a very, very small minority of players.
Almost everyone plays these games single-player, so they need to focus on that first. You’re right that the secret of mana means coop for a lot of people, but also, it’s worth understanding that almost everyone doesn’t experience that.
Yeah, this is the real rub here. Without the co-op it's not really anything special, there are even games out there doing Action RPG better these days so I can't imagine why you'd choose to not embrace the couch/online co-op crowd that'd put this back at the head of the pack.
Seriously, I’ve been dying to find a good couch co-op game and I straight up can’t. I’m just gonna get two or three Bluetooth controllers and do secret of mana with my phone.
I watched both of the videos, it sucks. I like him as a YouTuber, but it sounds like they are about to get in a lot of trouble even if the IRS doesn’t do an audit. Very odd they just say on the money, I’m sure they’ll be donating it within the next few weeks
Happy to see the game moving forward, and thrilled that so many players are happy about it. Idk why but CS stopped feeling like CS to me with GO. I’ll definitely try CS2 out, but I wish I was excited about it too.
Does anyone know if the custom server/maps community made a place for itself with GO? My peak CS experience (probably mostly due to my ages at the time, was 1.6 with the wacky custom maps, WC3 servers, super hero severs… And then in Source the zombie servers were so fun, especially the ZE (Zombie Escape) maps. Few things in life are as memorable as successfully escaping the mines of Moria from a hoard of player zombies.
Really wish they had re-released 1 and 2 as a double pack similar to Pikmin 1+2. I guess they thought it was too soon to release the first again because of the 3DS remake. Although now that I think about it, they totally could have just made an HD version of the 3DS remake as well. It would’ve been nice to have the entire series on one device.
Given that it will eventually be open-source: I hope somebody hooks this to a capture card, to have relatively lag-less motion smoothing for console games locked to 30.
I might just buy this at full price even though I don’t have any intention of playing it any time soon, just to show support for a game studio that is still doing it right.
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