How are these people not seeing that they are actively trying to censor shit with the shyte excuse “keep politics out of my games”, and then turn around and yell censorship as soon as people ignore their bigoted crap.
The rhetorical question highlights the complex nature of the debates around modding and game customization. The term “censorship” can indeed be used selectively to further one’s viewpoint, whether it’s calling for the removal of political elements from games or protesting the removal of a mod.
However, maybe it’s worth considering that people may hold these opinions without necessarily harboring bigoted intentions. The desire to keep politics out of games, for some, might stem from the view that games should be an escape from real-world issues. Conversely, concerns about censorship could arise from a belief in preserving the open nature of modding communities.
What we’re really grappling with is how to balance the broad spectrum of user needs and societal responsibilities. Accusations of bigotry or censorship often serve to shut down dialogue rather than facilitate a nuanced discussion about these complex issues.
So while your question is rhetorical, it does bring to light the need for more open and honest conversations about the competing values that are in play here.
In my opinion this entire debate is not political at all but is simply made to be a political statement because people don’t understand it.
Having someone forbid the use of cheese in video games because that person doesn’t like cheese is just never going to happen. If cheese comes out to be an extreme health hazard like smoking it can become political but if the only argument is “because I don’t like it” you are always going to be wrong.
Your arguing about taste and feelings. There is no point to it, as there is nothing to convince. At that point you are just telling someone their taste or feeling is wrong.
But for some reason people think they can influence someone else’s own feelings about how they feel when they get addressed as their birth gender. And for some reason it is made into a political problem because of how strongly people think they have to have control over this. It doesn’t affect them, and the only possible outcome is that a minority will suppress their emotions. There are no competing values in any way.
I don’t like cheese, but you won’t hear me bitching about people eating cheese next to me in a restaurant even if I don’t like the smell. And you especially won’t see me making this political, because that is so incredibly selfish and ignorant that it wouldn’t even be something I’d ever consider.
Humans using past work to improve, iterate, and further contribute themselves is not the same as a program throwing any and all art into the machine learning blender to regurgitate “art” whenever its button is pushed. Not only does it not add anything to the progress of art, it erases the identity of the past it consumed, all for the blind pursuit of profit.
Me not knowing everything doesn’t mean it isn’t known or knowable. Also, there’s a difference between things naturally falling into obscurity over time and context being removed forcefully.
And then there’s when its too difficult to upkeep them, exactly like how you can’t know everything.
We probably ain’t gonna stop innovation, so we mine as well roll with it (especially when its doing a great job redistributing previously expensive assets)
If it’s “too difficult” to manage, that may be a sign it shouldn’t just be let loose without critique. Also, innovation is not inherently good and “rolling with it” is just negligent.
Where did the AI companies get their code from? Is scraped from the likes of stack overflow and GitHub.
They don’t have the proprietary code that is used to run companies because it’s proprietary and it’s never been on a public forum available for download.
Stable Diffusion uses a dataset from Common Crawl, which pulled art from public websites that allowed them to do so. DeviantArt and ArtStation allowed this, without exception, until recently.
Devil's advocate. It means that only large companies will have AI, as they would be the only ones capable of paying such a large number of people. AI is going to come anyway except now the playing field is even more unfair since you've removed the ability for an individual to use the technology.
Instituting these laws would just be the equivalent of companies pulling the ladder up behind them after taking the average artist's work to use as training data.
How would you even go about determining what percentage belongs to the AI vs the training data? You could argue all of the royalties should go to the creators of the training data, meaning no one could afford to do it.
How would you identify text or images generated by AI after they have been edited by a human? Even after that, how would you know what was used as the source for training data? People would simply avoid revealing any information and even if you did pass a law and solved all of those issues, it would still only affect the country in question.
Literally the definition of greed. They dont deserve royalties for being an inspiration and moving a weight a fraction of a percentage in one direction…
If AI art is stolen data, then every artists on earth are thieves too.
Do you think artists just spontaneously conjure up art? No. Through their entire life of looking at other people’s works, they learned how to do stuff, they emulate and they improve. That’s how human artists come to be. Do you think artists go around asking permission from millions of past artists if they can learn from their art? Do artists track down whoever made the fediverse logo if I want to make a similar shaped art with it? Hell no. Consent in general is impossible too because whole lot of them are likely too dead to give consent be honest. Its the exact same way AI is made.
Your argument holds no consistent logic.
Furthermore, you likely have a misunderstanding of how AI is trained and works. AI models do not store nor copy art that it’s trained on. It studies shapes, concepts, styles, etc. It puts these concepts into matrix of vectors. Billions of images and words are turned into mere 2 gigabytes in something like SD fp16. 2GB is virtually nothing. There’s no compression capable of anywhere near that. So unless you actually took very few images and made a 2GB model, it has no capability to store or copy another person’s art. It has no knowledge of any existing copyrighted work anymore. It only knows the concepts and these concepts like a circle, square, etc. are not copyrightable.
If you think I’m just being pro-AI for the sake of it. Well, it doesn’t matter. Because copyright offices all over the world have started releasing their views on AI art. And it’s unanimously in agreement that it’s not stolen. Furthermore, resulting AI artworks can be copyrighted (lot more complexity there, but that’s for another day).
It’s a tool that can be used to replicate other art except it doesn’t replicate art does it.
It creates works based on other works which is exactly what humans do whether or not it’s sapient is irrelevant. My work isn’t valuable because it’s copyrightable. On a sociopath things like that
What gives a human right to learn off of another person without credit? There is no such inherent right.
Even if such a right existed, I as a person who can make AI training, would then have the right to create a tool to assist me in learning, because I’m a person with same rights as anyone else. If it’s just a tool, which it is, then it is not the AI which has the right to learn, I have the right to learn, which I used to make the tool.
I can use photoshop to replicate art a lot more easily than with AI. None of us are going around saying Photoshop is wrong. (Though we did say that before) The AI won’t know any specific art unless it’s an extremely repeated pattern like “mona lisa”. It literally do not have the capacity to contain other people’s art, and therefore it cannot replicate others art. I have already proven that mathematically.
The fact that the same user reinstalling the game counts as 2 installs makes this doubly absurd. The decision is already baffling by itself but the idea that you could take a financial hit for an install that didn't net you any additional income is... Jesus.
“not always possible for other developers”, mostly because they’re busy shitting out rubbish, buggy titles riddled with micro transactions (or whatever nonsense they can get away with to nickel and dime their customers)
People took note of how great BG3 is because it’s just a good game, you’re not be treated as a resource they can squeeze to get extra cash
For some reason, something as simple as using the F5/F8 as quicksave/quickload keys felt like a blast from the past. Maybe it’s been around the whole time and I stopped noticing, but it reminded me of playing old RPGs.
F9 was used in most Bethesda games for quickload. Not sure if this was a typo but AFAIK I only used quicksave before but it still counts as a hard save in BG3 which I appreciate.
Not only does it count as a hard save but there is 25 fucking slots for quick saves by default. And you can increase it. And you can quick save and quick load in the middle of a conversation, save scumming whatever skill checks you want if you’re a loser like me
This article speaks right out of my soul, when comparing Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077 2.0.
The quest qualtiy itself is comparable, but the delivery of Starfield makes it solely my job to create immersion (which I can and will do), while Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 grabs me by my balls and drags me into the world.
Spoiler for a small quest in CyberpunkWhen the barkeeper leans slightly forward, looks carefully right and left to make sure no one is listening and then tells me he suspects his wife sees someone else, I smell his parfume and I notice he relaxes his hurting back by stemming his arms onto the desk, because he is doing a double shift. Having Silverhand commenting on every step of the quest and turning it into a noir detctive story, making fun of me, added more immersion to a “follow person, report back”-mission. That I then can just call the quest giver on the phone, as a normal being would feels life like.
A similar quest in Starfield:
I talked to the barkeeper in Starfield from the wrong angle and he only turned his head and it was very uncanny valley, because over the whole conversation I was questioning how he can still talk with a broken neck.
I talked to the barkeeper in Starfield from the wrong angle and he only turned his head and it was very uncanny valley, because over the whole conversation I was questioning how he can still talk with a broken neck.
They might have fixed it by now but a certain little fortune teller has a very similar issue in an elevator in cyberpunk.
After helping him out I had a certain Ripperdoc showing which arm he operates with by raising it. Only his arm rotated backwards as if his elbow was turned around 180 degrees, arm clipping through his biceps.
But at least in Cyberpunk I’ve got the feeling that a bug like this is an honest oversight, whereas Starfield gives me the feeling that Creation Engine (2.0 these days?) should have have been killed, burned and buried after Skyrim. Each game since (and including) Oblivion I’ve felt like I’m looking at limitations I already noticed in the previous game built with Creation Engine or NetImmerse/GameBryo.
I haven’t played starfield and don’t intend to but I played cyberpunk on launch thanks to a covid scare and even on launch it was a good game to me. Had it’s problems but I got 300 hours out of it before the year ended.
Questgiver: “Hello, I don’t know you stranger, and I don’t trust outsiders. Can I help you? Oh, you want a quest? This evil company in Neon does bad shit and I need you to inject this virus and make sure it doesn’t get back to me. Also, the mayor here is evil AF. Don’t say that out loud, he has ears everywhere. I trust you stranger with my life. Have 8000 creds for picking up my mail, and 2000 creds and a unique purple gun for blowing up half of the city.”
I’m all for unions. But I’m not sure how it translates to good for players. Unions exist for fair wages and working environment, not direction of how games should be made.
Edit: People sure seem to get the wrong impression with my question. As I said in the very first line, I am for unions. They’re great and we should strive for fair working wages and hours, especially in 2023 where wages are stagnating while having massive inflation. We should have happy employees and I prefer my games made by happy employees. Failure to keep the wages up is creating shit ton of societal problems.
Issue is the delusion people are presenting here. Unions are not magic. It doesn’t automatically improve unrelated things. What people are missing is that there is no evidence the union has ever advocated for a better product. If one exists, despite my desperate attempt to find one, then it’s clearly a fringe case. All the replies are making a huge logical leap of simply saying happy worker produces better product with no reasoning behind it. Unions never argue for better product. That’s just not what unions do. It argues for the betterment of workers.
Unionizing increases productivity for some sectors. But they’re usually rare and only seen in specific industries. They generally have no significant impact on productivity based on research. If it straight up increased productivity and made better products, every company would love it. The argument is counter-logical. Companies do what is efficient. Even if we assumed individual productivity is increased, there’s still no evidence that these individuals would have the capacity to change the direction in which the product is being made in the upper tier.
No, it doesn’t. Pushing people to burn out doesn’t make more or better products, it just burns people out. People are more productive when they have work life balance
As someone in the industry I feel the opposite. A lot of features that are almost finished but cut despite being integral to the experience come from higher up pressure. The expectation to always overwork leaves no room to commit a little bit extra when it’s necessary because you’re always drained to begin with. There is also no room for creativity, playing around, or polish, because the deadlines are based on the bare minimum that will sell.
Of course unions can and do have more power in the direction of the game. Employees can also voice concerns to managers and owners without the fear of a bullshit termination. They’re pretty awesome for everyone.
Seems like people who are being fairly compensated in a comfortable work environment will make a better game than people being underpaid and overworked?
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. The reason wages are low is because the games industry attracts a lot of talent, so companies can get good talent for less. So I don’t expect unionizing to help in terms of quality of work produced, but it should improve wages and working conditions.
Quality of a product is not just a result of quality of talent (see: “I hate sand.”). Management, direction, and quality of life of the talent has a profound impact. If you want the highest quality product, especially in an industry that requires collaboration, you want your talent to be happy.
Maybe, but I feel like any quality gains would be minimal since people are already passionate about their roles (else why would those roles be so desired?). Then again, the Valve model really works, so it really depends on whether unions can change company culture, or if they’ll just secure better working hours and pay. The culture is the problem, and I’m not convinced a union can fix that.
Huh, well fear is a very different thing than stress. Once your stress turns into fear, you’re no longer personally invested in the project and are merely concerned about your own survival.
The video games industry definitely comes with a lot of stress, but they rely on passion to get value out of those long hours. This sounds like a situation of completely awful management, which won’t be fixed with a union (at least not immediately), since a bad manager can make life suck even if you have decent benefits, reasonable work hours, etc.
Then again, I don’t have a lot of details to go on, just that there’s allegations of “fear” at Daedelic.
With or without a union, improving wages and working conditions will improve productivity and the quality of the products being produced. This is an almost universal truth in research on the topic.
would you prefer games to be made by shareholders and execs or people who are passionate about making games and telling stories? when decisions are unilaterally made from the top down the quality of the product suffers, just look at nearly every AAA release from the last decade that have half-baked stories and enough bugs to make me start singing Hakuna Matata.
I love how this thread grouping is essentially argueing that the ends justify the means. Yeah, lets give a pass to companies in the name of capitalism.
Somehow they think less work means more game. I dunno, we’re way too deep into a circle jerk to hear any other opinions. Good for you to actually speak the obvious. Unions actually cure cancer too.
After one week I said fuck it. Yes there is a ton of exploration, yes there are spaceships, but the whole thing is just slow, confusing and boring. Hell, if I want to play “Life”, I can just go outside.
The tons of exploration you’re talking about are copy-pasted identical POIs, too, with the same enemies and objects in the same locations.
I honestly don’t understand what they expected us to be doing for the hundreds of hours and years they they hoped we’d be playing the game for. It’s certainly the most “ocean wide, inch deep” game for what it was marketed to be.
I think they expected a Skyrim style modding community to spring up over the next few years. To be fair, I think they might be right, since there are already Starfield mods and I'm still playing Skyrim 10 years after it came out.
And that’s what I like about it. Instead of sitting you down at telling you a story they give you a world to tell your own stories in. I like having the freedom to be creative, and I like seeing and exploring the creative ideas of other people. It’s not something I’ve seen other companies really do.
That's the problem with criticizing Bethesda games. The aspect of mod compatibility and creation is at once one of its greatest strengths, and also its most obvious and provocative criticisms, and the line between the two is very difficult to distinguish from an objective point of view.
I'm glad you're enjoying it. I tried it and decided it wasn't for me. I'd been spoilt by Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield feels like ancient by comparison.
It's kind of the same thing for Minecraft but you can still play Minecraft vanilla and have a good time because there's plenty in there to do and explore. The difference for me is that Minecraft provides a foundation to build upon whereas Starfield is hollow to begin with so just lacks its own identity.
Yeah but dont you already have skyrim for that? What new stories is this giving you the option for that skyrim couldnt handle, except this one doesnt start with magic and does start with guns?
And did the world need to be bone dry in order to be moddable? I dont remember skyrim being devoid of interest at all.
That'd be if you're crazy enough to not do any of the major quest chains or general side quests, those almost entirely take you to unique areas with their own exploration outside of the random exploration ones that you find just by exploring the galaxy.
I think it points to a larger issue with the game, which is being able to to distinguish and access the kinds of content that you want. You could easily randomly explore and end up seeing the same installation three times, or you could also randomly find other quests and go explore three unique locations and dungeons in a row instead. There is absolutely a large amount of unique content to play, though, it's disingenuous to say otherwise.
Your point is fair and works really well on its own, but in the context of the entire game, its systems, mechanics, and the entire experience they come together to create, I just can’t help but feel genuinely bored and disappointed regardless. The writing feels uninspired and generic; contrary to what some people have been saying, the writing isn’t a product of playing safe by the outsourced writers Bethesda used - it’s just bad, like a bad paint job on your car or poorly written software.
Even trying to side with the supposedly lowlife immoral inhabitants of the game’s world, you constantly hear either that they’re all family and friends (despite seeing one murder another because they got ripped off), or that they didn’t have a choice and still try to be “good”.
This isn’t what people expect from a Bethesda game in general, and from a game with ESRB rating of Mature (17+).
Again, ignoring my expectations that the game’s marketing specifically built to be centered around me being able to tell my story and stuff, it’s just poorly written and executed in the vast majority of aspects that matter in a game like the one Starfield is trying to be - the motifs aren’t clear, the storytelling is the most basic straight-up lecture in every quest that never tries to adhere to the “show, don’t tell” principles, the tasks you have to do are just boring and generic, too; it’s 2023, Bethesda has published and made tons of games of various genres st this point, many of a larger caliber, yet they still purposefully choose to go with the cookie-cutter quests that involve no unique one-time mechanics or animations, rely on mostly generated animations that feel out of place most of the time, and have you feel like you’re playing a game from pre-2010 that you should be able to play on a toaster, but are somehow told to upgrade to the latest hardware because the company couldn’t be bothered to develop and optimize a proper experience.
The pain scratches off at way more places than just exploration in Starfield.
Two things I really like are the artstyle and building my own ships with actual interiors, but the latter actually falls short due to massive restrictions in terms of said interior designs and the fact that space is basically a big mostly empty room to teleport to and from, akin to many other places in the game; no wonder an SSD is required to play, and for the worst reasons possible in a modern AAA title of that ambition.
I loved the game at first, but a lot of that was due to my huge interest in the niche it could cover, space, and science fiction, and white unfortunately, I’ve discovered way too many prominent flaws while simply trying to have fun like I always managed in similar games, even from Bethesda.
I hope that mods and DLCs may save the game, but none of that is ever going to fix the game’s broken carcass of poor writing and uninspired practices.
Overall pretty valid criticisms, I am able to enjoy the game pretty well because my expectations were very tempered, and I still find it to be enjoyable in most of the Bethesda ways I've come to expect, which is really a culmination of too many small touches for me to exert the effort of writing down and cataloging.
The only thing I'll say to all of that is that when you said that the writing quality wasn't what we expect of Bethesda or a mature game, that's a bit silly. I'm a Bethesda fanboy, basically, and even so I've only ever expected serviceable to middlingly poor writing out of any of their games, and that's about what I feel the internet expects as well, not that that makes the criticism invalid, the writing is... well, serviceable at best or middlingly poor at worst, and I don't really come in with any expectations for good writing out of a game rated mature, either.
All a mature rating means is whatever specific traits are listed on the rating, leisure suit Larry box office bust is rated mature, and that game's writing is not emotionally mature by any means.
You are correct about most of these issues, though. Somehow, by sheer amount of story content and stuff to acquire and build, I'll probably still spend about a hundred hours in it before modding, and modding will probably take it to unknown lengths. I do believe when Todd Howard says the game was made to be played for a long time that he's indirectly talking about the mod support and the game's premise and interplanetary setup being the most ripe for user generated content, and I believe that that'll add much beyond the game's natural life, in an even larger ratio than older Bethesda games, which is its own possible criticism.
Even still, I'd have to say that the game lets down on enough critical fronts that it'll be my least favorite Bethesda game, with the top two spots going to Oblivion and Fallout 4, for me, personally. I do also have to admit, when I look at the big picture, getting more than a hundred hours of enjoyment out of a game, even for the full $70, is good value for time spent, to me, and I do enjoy the game. I don't enjoy it massively, but I can spend time in the world and accomplish tasks and feel satisfied, or enjoy the gunplay or conversations enough that I can't complain.
I've bought other games of higher critical opinion that I spent far, far less time in, and didn't get the same amount of cumulative enjoyment out of, because they just don't tap into my brain in whatever primal way that Bethesda games fit in, even Starfield, puzzlingly enough.
It was incredibly disappointing when I was exploring a world and landed near a factory, killed everything then I pick a random spot and I land once more near a factory, to my surprise EVERY SINGLE THING was completely the same the same Vaa Run loot hidden in the vents, the exact same food in the living quarters, the same locked weapon rack and the same enemies at the same positions. This is the laziest fucking game I’ve seen in a while.
That’s hilarious. I can’t believe someone would openly admit to putting malware in a paid mod, I’m surprised anyone actually bought it in the first place.
“These AAA publishers have, mostly, used this production scale to keep their top franchises in the top selling games each year.”
I never quite understood, why it’s not more popular among big publishers to create smaller games throughout the year. You can have risky AAA titles in development and compete in the AA market at the same time.
It's just easier to advertise a single big game rather than several smaller ones. Even if you are interested in games it's impossible to keep track of everything that's being released. More casual players are aware of even fewer games. That's why AAA games still sell so well because they are the only games a lot of people are even aware of.
If the companies have to split their marketing budget between multiple titles, they would reach a much smaller audience. And even if one of the smaller titles would be a hit, it probably sells fewer copies for a lower price.
Half the cost of the game is marketing. And marketing is an effort that builds upon itself
The more smaller games you have, the more you have to market to niches from scratch. And niches are generally more inclined to be informed users. And it takes a developer with vision to make a satisfying niche hit. Well it always takes vision but…
Meanwhile one big bombastic game will get a bunch of mainstream folks hyped over qualifiers of scope instead of quality. Yes, I am saying hype culture is primarily an idiot’s hobby, but idiots still got cash.
Plus, plus, most studios don’t really see their junior devs as something worth fostering. Better off burning them out and replacing them.
Because the first job of anybody who is responsible for green lighting game development at these huge publishers is to not get fired. Making a game that only just breaks even or even worse makes a loss puts you at risk of getting fired. Even a relatively small game from a large publisher costs a ton to develop and market and has increased risk that nobody will actually buy and play it, at least in the most profitable first few months.
Franchises are so popular with this crowd is because they do not have to worry about name recognition. Hardest thing about getting a brand new title out is just getting people to know it exists and then to be excited about it. Franchises you hardly have to to do any work for that, you know you are going to get press and gamer interest, they sell themselves right up until they release and people get the chance to see if its a house of cards or not.
Its that front loading of sales that they are after, the shops having to buy in stock, idiots who pre order or buy before its clear if the game is broken in someway. Its the most profitable time as the game is at its most expensive, and it enables rapid repayment of the development costs. Games that start slow and have a very long tail of sales do not interest them anywhere near as much as they have already moved onto the next project and already been judged on the initial (under) performance of the game.
Bethesdas remaster would probably be nothing more than a version with updated graphics and lighting and support for modern software. This guy is rebuilding the game from scratch in a modern engine.
Fun fact there were olny six years between Oblivion and Skyrims release. Thats right skyrim has been out longer than the release time between oblivion and skyrim.
Which is in itself a slightly updated version of Oblivions gamebryo, which was conceived in the 90s. Calling it a modern engine is extremely generous if not completely wrong.
These people are rebuilding the game from "scratch" in Skyrim's Creation Engine version, but it's still nothing more than a version with updated graphics and lightning. Bethesda's probably going to be using FO4 or Starfield's CE version, which will have the same result albeit shinier.
Unity had made their plans clear. Whether they backtrack a bit now or not doesn’t matter. We know what direction they are heading: squeeze more money out of indie devs
That's correct. Even with this backtrack, it's a safe bet that they'll likely re-introduce this same policy with different wording once they believe their consumers have calmed down.
The controlling shares of Unity are held by a trifecta of private equity and venture capital organizations. That’s why this is happening. It’s a classical presentation of the (short-term) profit über alles enshitification cycle.
The insider transaction history for Unity Software Inc shows a clear trend: over the past year, there have been 49 insider sells and no insider buys. This could be a red flag for potential investors, as it suggests that those with the most intimate knowledge of the company's operations and prospects are choosing to sell their shares
Or it just means they see it as compensation and are selling for taxes and expenses, not because they are worried about the long term direction of the company.
Ehh, the top folks at Google were all selling their maximum-permitted amount every window they got for a decade and the stock held up.
You typically don’t need to buy shares as an insider, the company just prints more gambling slips – er, I’m sorry, non-transferrable stock options – and hands them out.
Yes, but it doesn’t rise to the level of “insider trading,” which means using internal-only information to make trading decisions. If they sell these stocks regularly, on a schedule, in the same quantity, it’s not insider trading.
And that’s exactly what they’re doing, you can see their trades, and they’re consistent for about the same amount. So they’re not trading because of changes going on internally, they’re trading based on a schedule, probably because they need cash flow for some reason. My guess is taxes for their stock compensation.
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