Sierra adventure games, like King’s Quest and Space Quest, were notorious for this kind of thing. Like there could be an item you have 1 chance to get, and you didn’t know, so you don’t get it and then several hours later when you’re at the end of the game, you realize you need that thing to solve the puzzle and actually move on. But you can’t. Because you didn’t get it when you had the chance and you can not go back.
I like the Unstable Ordinance from Space Quest IV that you can pick up near the start of the game. It’s entirely useless, you can’t ditch it, and if you have in your inventory near the end of the game, it blows up and kills you. Everytime. You have to restart nearly the whole game and resist the adventure game urge to grab everything that isn’t nailed down.
I thought it blew up when you went into the sewers which isn't long after you pick it up. But still, it's a trap you don't realize is a problem right away and really sucked :)
Those games didn’t give a fuck about your feelings. I remember some of those point and clicks had zero chill. I played one where all I wanted to do was cross the street. My character was immediately run over by a car and I had to start over. The typing games could be even worse. Oh sorry this bees nest is attacking you, here’s hoping you grabbed the bug spray under the carpet on the 3rd floor and are quick enough on your feet to type out the exact sequence of words necessary to get your character to use it. ‘Use bug spray’ sorry can you please be more specific. Oh never mind your character is dead, no saves, heres the worst 8 bit death audio anyone has ever created.
That’s the exact game that came to mind. At least a few years ago there was a website where you could play all those games , I don’t know if it’s still up.
Dedicated servers ran by the community with a server browser to find games/servers.
Really the golden age of multiplayer.
Found a nice server that runs well, chill and well moderated? add it to your favorites.
No lobbies, well… technically the whole server was the lobby, kinda.
No progression unlocks bullshit.
No ranking. No waiting on matchmaking. Just play.
No AI spying on every thing you say or do.
Maybe a “SIR this is a Christian server, so swearing will not be tolerated” or other warning of some kind now and then, even on games like Counterstrike.
Eventually, you’d get to know people, kinda like how you might start recognizing names here on lemmy.
You’d make friends, rivals, etc.
I miss those times.
I got into Titanfall 2 pretty late (like last month) and waiting 10 minutes to even get into a lobby is just annoying.
As opposed to joining a server and playing non stop on there.
It’s even less costs to the publisher than to host and scale on their own because the community is running your servers.
But then they can’t pull the plug to force people on a new release.
They can’t spy on as much shit.
They can’t sell as much private data.
It’s probably easier to sell microtransactions this way too.
Yeah but there were admins spying what you did and banning you. Quite frankly i have much greater trust in AI admins than human admins. Not that some human admins aren’t great, but why risk it? Same as self driven cars, as soon as they’re ready im ready to never drive again.
Sure, but the mistakes aren’t the main issue, it’s that AI is just a tool that by extention can be abused by the humans in control. You have no idea what rules they give it and what false positives result from it.
My primary concern here is that it’s Blizzard, whom love to gargle honey for China and is all for banning players that speak against them, is in charge of this AI.
Blizzard’s previously talked about using AI to verify reports of disruptive voice chat, which is now running in most regions, though not globally. The developer says it has seen this technology “correct negative behavior immediately, with many players improving their disruptive behavior after their first warning.”
Great, they can auto-ban players like Ng Wai Chung, I guess. For whatever they subjectively deem ‘harmful’. There’s also the looming idea that a friend can wander in my room, say something dumb, and now I’m closer to a ban because of an unrelated choice I made outside the game.
And we definitely trust Blizard to be good with all the audio data they get to harvest. That won’t be abused later, right?
I mean that’s a general argument against technology. Yes, more technology means more ruthlessly efficient abuse, but ultimately you think technology is better in the long run or not. Either way it is inevitable. Maybe in the EU they will ban those abuses, in China they won’t, and US will find some weird compromise between the two.
You trust a billion dollar company with no morals with your data? Isn’t that the whole point we are on this site? Community servers are like lemmy instances.
Sure, and they can have AI moderators in lemmy instances. Whatever problems are concerning about corporate AI admins also apply to corporate human admins.
They already have your data without the AI. Most games have had wide rangeing telemetry sent to the dev for over a decade now. This includes the text chat logs.
Unrelated to the topic, but wasn’t Titanfall 2 plagued by this one hacker that basically filled every lobby with bots to make the servers crash? I think I very recently heard about them resolving the issue and the player count surpassed the numbers at launch even.
Active moderation isn’t spying but using an AI is? The only reason those self-hosted community servers didn’t have problems was because they (usually) had active admins to see bad behavior and take action. This is merely automating that so a real human being doesn’t have to be there watching.
This is automating something based on blizzard rules not community rules. What if people want even stricter rules or looser or none at all or completely different rules? Also how many times have billion dollar companies been caught selling customers private info? Too many to count.
I see we’ve teleported back into the 1990s during the violent video games scare among parents. Gotta make excuses instead of, you know, actually facing the real problems.
Idiot here. Put in 40€. Skeptical before I put in the money. But I liked the vision and had some friends that liked the game. Played for maybe 40 hours. Had a lot of fun with it. And a bit less fun when it crashed right in a mission. That was 3 years ago. Haven’t touched it since. Maybe I’ll get into it again to check it out. But no hopes for it being completed
The first (and last) time I put in money was in the crowdfunding days. In fact, I did it so early they weren’t even using Kickstarter for funding.
Even though the current alpha is very buggy, I also more than got my money’s worth over the many, many years. I really would like to see the game get finished. But, what’s already there is really impressive.
The game has missed every possible deadline, and there’s every chance it will never be finished. But, the one comforting fact is that it’s missing the deadlines because they’re being too ambitious. Like, they redid the game engine to use 64 bit precision instead of 32 bit because they want it to be possible to drop a wrench at some random spot on the surface of a planet, and have another player fly across the solar system, go to the right spot, and see a wrench sitting there.
I wouldn’t put any more money in today, but I’m still glad I helped fund the game, and because I’ve been able to keep from adding more money, I actually consider my money well spent.
I bought it for a short time. They have a 30 day policy.
I returned it within the week. Its just way too buggy. I dont even care about the pay to play ships, whatever.
But the bugs with missions was awful. The NPC/AI fighting is nonexistant. The flight characteristics were better with n64’s star fox 64. Its just not even close to being there.
Im a sucker for space games. If i want a flight sim ill play elite. If i want a space legs discovery game, ill play starfield. If i want to get stoned and look at weird animals with small heads and cool colors, ill fire up no mans sky.
Squadron 42 has been the primary development focus, star citizen is just the playground made by a few devs with left over sq42 modules - until sq42 launches then star citizen will be the main development focus. Until then, star citizen is just a fundraising platform, I thought this was obvious
I bought the cheapest version a few years ago. Turns out that the game was a tech demo, but a very glorious tech demo. Flying near the cities, to the atmosphere, in space, all were very beautifully done.
As a game, pretty much a failure though. As a money vacuum, pretty good.
I think it was a positive experience as a whole, though. Never experienced anything similar since or before.
Yeah exactly, he left because he finished the job he was there to do. Now they are acting like this is some kind of move to placate their customers as if it wasn’t the plan all along.
True, but will also prevent you from getting any other updates or bug fixes. This is such a scummy action for Ubi to do, I wouldn't it put it past em to pair this with some sort of game bricking.... "glitch" that needs a patch.
They use ai to generate inaccurate pages, cover up text with egregious ads and refuse to remove content written by dissatisfied, migrating users but mostly just make unusable websites in general (I’m sure there’s even more reasons to boycott however)
And before that the majority of their content was scraped from other, well-meaning sources. They just have great SEO, don’t mind copy+pasting, and hope that the network effect makes them to de facto source for [insert topic] while serving you ads.
Their website is also extremely laggy with all the boatloads of ads they keep covering their pages with. The ads really got extremely out of control and made the entire website completely unusable for me - at least it’s possible to bypass that with BreezeWiki for now…
We removed it way before the pricing change was announced because the views were so low, not because we didn’t want people to see it.
(emphasis theirs)
I don’t believe that in the slightest. While yes, they did do that quite a while before the change took place, it was hosted there as an easy way to track changes to the ToS. I bet it was more of a “Any changes we make will stand out a lot more”, not realizing that any big change they make was going to stand out regardless (this whole thing being an example).
I mean come on, they could’ve at least tried with a better lie. I would’ve gone “Eh, maybe” if they’d said something like “Our legal team suggested that we keep it hosted in a central location, on our website”. But really, “not enough people looked at it”?? What a joke.
To be honest, in the face of how dumb that lie would be and how I have come to view stats-based decision-making (where companies favour decisions they can point to some KPI for because it makes them seem scientifically grounded over ones made “just” with human reasoning), I’ll invoke Hanlon’s Razor and say:
I absolutely think it’s possible some middle-manager looked at the view stats and decided they’d look better if they cut some chaff, never mind just what that chaff may be. Protests - if issued ar all - went unheard or unheeded, and the change went through because the numbers told them to make it.
It’s awful optics, in any case, but I’m willing to concede it may be dumb coincidence paired with dumb decisions, probably made by someone wholly uninvolved with the pricing change decision, rather than actual dumb malice.
(Doesn’t excuse the rest of their bullshit, of course)
I definitely wouldn’t completely discount that as a possibility for sure, but Unity sure is bad at damage control (as are most companies that make dumb decisions like this) - even if this is true, it would’ve been better to just not mention it, as it could only ever just douse fuel onto the already out-of-control PR fire that has erupted due to all of this.
No dispute on that front, it’s a dumb move to excuse a dumb move with a dumb excuse at a dumb time where nobody will believe that it was genuinely just dumb instead of malicious. And who knows, I might be totally wrong too.
My giving them this much credit is really just out of (possibly misplaced) idealistic desire to find alternate explanations before jumping right to accusations of malice. I’m not even entirety sure I believe it myself, to be honest.
Literally no one but legal should have the authority to remove a contract from the website, and allowing any other human being to do so is gross negligence at absolute best.
It should have sent a cascade of giant red flags the second it was touched.
Oh it definitely would be grossly negligent, but the amount of technical systems I’ve seen that somebody should have a stake in but wasn’t actually involved with… well, if Legal’s purview ends at writing up those terms, Compliance made sure they’re up in an appropriate place and nobody thought to put “make sure they are automatically involved of any change affecting this” on the checklist, all the boxes have been ticked and they won’t notice until the fallout starts hitting.
In an ideal world, any change to the master branch of that repo or to the repo itself should require the approval of a technically versed member of Legal/Compliance (or one of each, if they’re separate teams). In reality, that approval process may well exist only on paper, with no technical safeguards to enforce it.
No company “only realizes” anything when it comes to their financials. They had forecasts for the entire year, and accountants keeping track of that shit on daily basis. Every CEO gets together with their CFO on the regular. They know exactly where the company is headed financially, and they prepare what they are going to say to their shareholders quarterly.
Layoffs like this are always planned. The fact that they aren’t capitalizing on the Unity fuck-up to make up the difference shows their ineptitude.
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