How does one even accidentally steal a texture someone else made?
One could easily apply Hanlon's Razor to this. For example:
Bob is a game artist. Bob has a folder on his desktop called "Inspirations", where he saves art pieces he finds online that he likes, and a folder called "Assets" where he saves things he's created for the game. Bob transfers to a new department in the studio, or quits, or is fired; either way, he returns his equipment to the IT office.
Dave is an IT guy at the studio. Dave takes Bob's computer after he leaves the job, and transfers all of Bob's files to the studio's shared drive. Dave isn't an art guy, and doesn't know the difference between "Inspirations" and "Assets", and dumps them all into the shared drive in a folder called "Bob's Things".
John is the studio's new artist, replacing Bob. John syncs "Bob's Things" to his computer. John assumes everything in this folder has already been cleared for use by Legal. John starts implementing the art into the game.
I used to be a pretty hardcore Destiny 2 player for several years. In that time, I've seen Bungie fuck up a lot of things. But those fuck-ups were almost entirely caused by somebody in the studio not playing close-enough attention to something, and details getting mixed up in the pipeline. I don't think anybody at Bungie knowingly put Antireal's art into the game. I think the more likely explanation is that there was a lack of oversight, and files that shouldn't have been mixed together, got mixed together.
Not to suggest that any of this excuses Bungie for multiple cases of plagiarism. Obviously, they need to have stricter standards in place when transferring files between parties. It's a colossal fuck-up, but I don't think that it was a fuck-up anybody set out to commit.
But we don’t actually have ownership rights any more, do we?
When it comes to video games, we've never had ownership rights. Buying a game has always been just buying a license. The only thing that's changed is that now publishers have a mechanism with which to enforce it.
It's hard to be critical of something that hasn't been released yet. All anybody had to go off of were statements from the developers, until the product was actually released and people could get their hands on it.
You should check out Embark Studios' (ARC Raiders dev) other game, The Finals. Literally the most innovative FPS I've ever played, it completely reinvents the competitive shooter genre.
What I especially love about the endings is that there isn't any "good" ending in the game. Some are worse than others, but there's never a net positive for V. No matter what, there is a human cost to victory. Night City would never allow some lowly merc to have a happy ending. Arguably, the "third option" can be seen as the "best" ending, as it costs the fewest amount of lives. But holy shit, the voicemails you get in that ending are heartbreaking.
Also, I think this is just an Mbin issue, but the spoiler tags don't work if there's a space before the closing tag.
It's one thing to read a cyberpunk novel or watch a cyberpunk movie and "get" the moral of the story, which is usually "misuse of technology is bad".
But it's another thing to actually spend time in that world; to feel the effects of corporate corruption on your community, to experience the addiction to mind- and body-altering technologies, to watch loved ones - who you've spent hours looking directly in the eye and having conversations with - have their lives taken from them unfairly so that the richest person in the world can get 0.0001% richer.
I'd always been wary of techno-corpo bullshit. But that game instilled an all-new level of hatred in me; a hatred toward billionaires and megacorporations, toward oligarchs and aristocrats, toward those with the resources to change things for the better but too apathetic to stick their necks out.
I believe OP is referring to input latency, which isn't so much a result of the system slowing down due to increased load, as much as running in a consistently slowed-down state causing a delay on your inputs being reflected on-screen. There's several reasons for why this is happening more often lately.
Part of it has to do with the displays we use nowadays. In the past, most players used a CRT TV/monitor to play games, which have famously fast response times (the time between receiving the video signal and rendering that signal on the screen is nearly zero). But modern displays, while having a much crisper picture, often tend to be slower at the act of actually firing pixels on the screen, causing that delay between pressing Jump and seeing your character begin jumping.
Some games also strain their systems so hard that, after various layers of post-processing effects get applied to every rendered frame, the displayed frames are already "old" before they're even sent down the HDMI cable, resulting in a laggier feel for the player. You'll see this difference in action with games that have a toggle for a "performance/quality" mode in the graphics settings. Usually this setting will enable/disable certain visual effects, reducing the load on the system and allowing your inputs to be registered faster.
It's definitely not going to live up to the hype. We already know what Hollow Knight is like, and we've seen a demo of what Silksong will be like from last year's E3, and... it's really not that much different. Not that that's an inherently bad thing, since Hollow Knight was already really good, so any improvement on that is only going to be better.
I worry that it'll suffer a similar fate to Duke Nukem Forever. In a vacuum, DNF isn't necessarily a bad game, but it suffered from being overhyped for years. So when it came out and just turned out to be "okay", that was the final nail in the coffin for the Duke Nukem franchise. I hope I'm wrong, though.