While I generally agree (and that applies to almost all “an LLM can’t do that” discussions):
Head counts are not going to remain the same. Well, it might in writing, but there is a reason the WGA went on strike.
If you can apply effective filters/transforms to a base texture, you can now do the same work that would have taken you weeks in a day or two. If you aren’t “wasting time” writing unit tests or making utility functions, you no longer need junior developers to punt the Charlie Work to. And so forth.
In some fields? Being able to do more with less means you do a LOT more.
But, generally speaking, that means you need fewer people and you pay fewer people.
This is one of many many reasons that we need to have been exploring UBI decades ago. Because we are increasingly going to see a decrease in employment as technology is more and more able to “get the job done”. And unlike with farm work and factory work… there isn’t really anything on the horizon for all the “creative” workers to do.
I know this is mostly posturing at this point but:
“AI” has been in big budget games for decades. Hell, the big deal with Oblivion was that they had magic technology to procedurally place trees according to various heuristics. And I think that also added a resource management system to NPCs so that we could DB Apple them?
Same with coding and art and sound and so forth.
All that cool magic wand and fancy ass filter shit in photoshop? Those are increasingly “AI” tools that will analyze the image and extrapolate what should or should not be “behind” something and so forth.
Coding? if you AREN’T using a tool to generate stubs and even tests at this point then you are wasting your own time.
Audio? Again, the same “AI” filters already exist. Same with tools to detect pauses or to split up dialogue and so forth.
The reality is just using it effectively. Oblivion was boring as hell because the entire overworld was empty and lifeless. Same with BOTW. Whereas Ubi, for all their actual gameplay flaws, are spectacular at adding POIs and “events” in strategic locations so that you find something while you are hiking across a forest to get to an objective.
Same with art and even CGI. You aren’t going to get a good outcome if you ask dall-e to make your art for you. But you are going to get good results if you start with a solid base and then procedurally add rust or spatter to it. You aren’t going to get a good result if you have your actors on a studio lit stage talking to nothing (Hi Prequel Trilogy). You are if you add lighting relative to the scene (The Volume) and use placeholders they can act off of.
And… same with writing. Ask ChatGPT to write your screenplay? It is going to be bad. Use the proper prompts to get the “voice” of a character right or to generate some background dialogue that you won’t even correctly hear because the mics are focused on Meg Ryan faking an orgasm? Suddenly you have a better “product” than everyone else who just tells extras to wing it or putty around. Same with having a Black Scottish Chick sound like she isn’t written by some white dude.
Neither? Wildlands has some REALLY shitty depictions of South America and Breakpoint is that modern day ubi-Clancy of “Are they ironically spewing right wing propaganda or?”. And Ubi in general is a company with rampant employee abuse of a sexual nature.
That said: Wildlands is the much better game. Breakpoint “feels” better, but it is clear it was designed to be a co-op live game from the start with most of the missions not designed for AI. Whereas Wildlands was very much set up to just have three problematic bearded dudes lean out of a jeep and unload on anything you drive past.
I obviously don’t have a deep insight into FDev’s finances. But they have pretty openly said that Elite is a foundation of the company.
And yet, they have done everything they can to kill that. Cutting back on social media spending to more or less make every single Influencer say the game is dying. Turn updates into a trickle of “You know that thing that was added two years ago? They finally added enemy NPCs around it”. And even actively screw over the people who were dumb enough to buy the ten year pass by not even providing steam keys for the pre-ordered expansion (currently on two of ten or so?) to let people take advantage of Valve’s CDN.
It is genuinely baffling. Other devs are, if anything, focusing too much on keeping the bread and butter live game “live”. Whereas FDev seem to have decided that they can do whatever to E:D and the money will keep flowing… which might be true but…
Also, should be obvious but: Lapsed E:D fan who bought the lifetime pass like an idiot.
Just to elaborate on the community streams more. Most live games have their community managers (sometimes devs) do a weekly or monthly stream where they play the game, talk about what is coming, interact with the playerbase, etc. They are almost all puff pieces, but whatever. FDev reduced the frequency of those (I forget if by half or straight to quarterly) which was IMMEDIATELY fuel for “Frontier is sunsetting Elite”. And it isn’t like they fired the community managers. They just… do less streams.
Godot is pretty heavily documented at this point. I would recommend finding videos from over a month ago (so it isn’t just posturing), but it is consistently a solid “B” engine as it were.
But the real issue hasn’t changed. Because of licensing and ideological reasons, adding in hooks for console development remains a mess. And that is not something that any company (… okay, Rami Ismail/Vlambeer would totally talk about this and burn a few bridges in the process) is going to really talk about because it is a lose lose. It pisses off the platform owners AND will be viewed as “unfair” by the fanboys.
Yeah. if memory serves, it both under-performed and under-reviewed which is likely why the follow up never happened. Glad that Pillars did well enough to not only get a (really interesting) sequel but also a Skyrim-lite, but really hoping Obsidian goes back to the concept, if not universe, of Tyranny. Because that was interesting and shockingly nuanced for a video game.
Pentiment is a good sign, but I really hope that MS realizes what they have with Sawyer (and Obsidian+inXile in general). Like, I get why old school CRPGs never grew beyond their niche. But these were doing nuanced and “shades of grey” stories LONG before people lost their god damned minds over why people think Our Glorious And Perfect Hero Joel might have done a single bad in his entire life.
Like, Sony have mostly taken over the “prestige television” of gaming as it were. But there is a lot of room to turn MS’s studios into the “weird indie films” of gaming.
I think The Eternal Champion from Arena transcended or some bullshit? But in Daggerfall you are just some dude who gains power of a reality warping mech for one crucial moment.
Battlespire I want to say you were just some random ass wizard? And Redguard you are just some dude trying to rescue his sister (?).
And even Morrowind is more complex than that since you ARE just some dude. But by following the steps of the prophecy (and, futzing with the magic artifact that created some of the gods to begin with) you BECOME a god.
And even Oblivion, you were just some dude who helped out Sean Bean until the DLC.
And I think in ESO you are something “Other” because of your lack of a soul?
The more I think about it, the more Skyrim is really the odd one out for making you a godling to begin with.
Old man yelling at clouds, but holy crap was Morrowind awesome. Actively questioning whether Tiber Septim/Talos was actually a god, exploration of the nature of the gods to begin with, bug based taxis, etc. Like, even the idea of whether The Nerevarine is actually Nerevar Reborn or just someone else who stole from the same god fount that The Tribunal did is explicitly never answered.
And then Oblivion immediately confirms that, yes, the Septims are magic linchpins of the entire universe.
It is very much not worth going back to if you don’t have the nostalgia, but check out Morrowind. You are still saving the multiverse but it is just so “weird” that it truly remains memorable.
As for CRPGs that are well worth a first play in 2023:
Disco Elysium. You play as a washed up amnesiac cop trying to solve a murder mystery. VERY much about “role playing” and while the main story goes places, it is fairly “down to earth” with a greater focus on exploring the philosophy of the world rather than fighting it.
Planescape: Torment. The inspiration for the former. You play as an amnesiac (hmm) man who woke up in a mortuary at the nexus of the multiverse. Your companion is a talking skull who seems to know more about you than he is letting on. And you explore the ad&d era Forgotten Realms multiverse as you try to understand why you can’t die, who you actually are, and What Can Change The Nature of a Man? Stakes get somewhat high, but it is still “down to earth” in the same way The Odyssey is
Tyranny. You play as more or less a middle manager for The Emperor who has conquered the world and is putting down anything even resembling a rebellion. Hijinks ensue, and you now need to navigate a civil war between two major factions while deciding what you will do with your greater power. Like all good Obsidian games, it feels like it ends about two thirds of the way through so you never really “save the world” per say, but you gain a deep understanding of what that would entail and need to decide if the ends justify the means. Also pretty notable in that it is an “evil” campaign in that even the “good” outcome of most quests is choosing the lesser of two evils. Like condemning a man to be brutally tortured and enslaved so that a town can be spared and so forth.
And special mention goes to Torment: Tides of Numenera which is inXile’s spiritual successor to Planescape, but I never actually got around to playing it. But everything I have seen puts it in that same category as Planescape of “anyone who has played this will tell you they played it because it is that damned good”. Mix of way too much going on and always being a bit off put by inXile’s approach to CRPG combat. Think I backed the kickstarter though.
People will constantly point to grey market sites like g2a and even gmg (g2a is really more of a black market site but…) and smugly mock anyone who DARES to buy a game new. Everyone cheers for (one of the daddies of gamergate) Total Biscuit’s mantra of never preorder and will insist that publishers and devs are trying to nickle and dime/steal from them for daring to release DLC for a three year old game.
And then we wonder why studios shut down.
So no, you aren’t looking for “solidarity”. You are so self obsessed with not getting what you want that you are recontextualizing it as everyone else is taking things away from you to get what they want.
Because: I would love it if there weren’t giant conglomerations of studios. But then I remember how some of the best studios out there, such as Digital Extremes and Larian, have stories of “Yeah, it was make or break and we really lucked out with getting in on the ground floor of some new concept or marketing gimmick”. Like, we would not have Baldurs Gate 3 if Larian had waited even a year or so longer before starting the D:OS kickstarter. Because rather than people saying “oh shit, we can get a new classic CRPG” it would have been “Fuck kickstarter. It is all vaporware. You are a fucking mark if you give them money”.
And if the choice is between having a different publisher on a game and hoping that enough folk from Obsidian end up in the same place to make another Pentiment or Tyranny? Fuck it, I’ll gladly let whoever keep the lights on.
It won’t fulfill your apparent need to have people pat you on the tummy and say you are a good boy but:
PC more or less is THE second platform (or first, with console as second) for a lot of people at this point. So if the option is:
Studio goes out of business because a great game didn’t sell amazingly well. See Mimimi for a “good” example of this
Soft or hard acquisition results in games trapped on a single platform with questionable backwards compatibility policies. Bayonetta 2 and 3 being nintendo exclusives until the end of Nintendo is a “good” example of this
Soft or hard acquisition results in game that is console exclusive to one platform, but also on PC
I’ll always pick 3. Because as console prices increase? A “couple years old” gaming PC is not horrifically expensive (so long as crypto stays in the shitter…).
But also? Shit like Geforce Now and other streaming solutions means that people (who don’t live in the ass end of nowhere and have such horrible internet they wouldn’t be able to download the day one patches anyway) can play these games on their macbooks or even their chromebooks.
It is worth understanding that, at least historically, CDP is a lot closer to “Polish Electronic Arts” than a dev studio. Not sure how that has shifted over the past decade or so and the new approach to localization and distribution.
I doubt they are going to shut the doors and move. But it is a possibility. Just cite that the CP expansion hasn’t sold well enough and they were still recovering from the initial bomb of CP and that they were counting on that Witcher 1 remake and it is a hard time financially and they would be operating at a much smaller capacity while they reorg. Do layoffs that are legally legit, and then reopen elsewhere citing concerns over geopolitics.
But yeah. My money is more on satellite studios that eventually become the primary. Takes a few years longer but drastically reduces union power and gives a warning to the industry as a whole. And is generally the solution in these situations.
Haven’t been following LOTF2 so massive grain of salt but:
In LOTF1, your class actually had a very strong impact on gameplay. It defined your magic which boiled down to buff, direct damage, and an ult. I THINK you could change that on an NG+ cycle but it has been a minute.
Since it is a different dev team and a more modern game, I assume it is closer to Remnant or Code Vein (aka “Sexy goth anime vampires”) where it is an equip slot that impacts stats and spells but you can more easily swap it out.
If you click the article you’ll see this is tied to the 2020 allegations. Which were mostly following on previous issues but nobody cared about abuse back then.
The discussion is about the ongoing narrative that EA intentionally killed TF2 by releasing it too close to BF1 and CODIW. I pointed out that BF1 was not the juggernaut people think it is. You talked about how BF4 was a success even though it had a rough start… which is exactly what TF2 had.