It’s a very mixed bag. You can (technically) do a Pacifist Run in BG3 that leans on conversation to keep earning XP in a game that heavily favors combat rewards.
But without prior experience in the story paths, it can be hard to know who can actually be cajoled and who is innately unreconcileable. Lots of NPCs lie or bluff or just bait you into giving up initiative.
You do get more story in dialogue. So if you don’t mind the odd ambush or icy rebuff, I’d say there’s more to diplomacy than just pain.
The gaming world appeared ablaze after the Indie Game Awards announced that it was rescinding the top honors awarded to RPG darling Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 due to the use of generative AI during development. Sandfall Interactive recently sat down with a group of influencers for a private interview session, where the French...
I’m hard pressed to name a nominee that wasn’t made with love. And it seems weird to insist a game as lauded as E33 needs another awards show genuflection to reaffirm it’s status.
It’s stupid because the game has already received a stack of awards a mile high. Nobody seriously cares about this. Nobody’s sales will be hurt in any meaningful capacity. It’s a dumb awards show, not the FCC.
People are going to use the tools available if it leads to quicker development cycles to get a product out.
I think this “placeholder art” is a silly line to draw. But the high profile of the game makes it a ripe target to make a statement.
If you really don’t want to reward people for “quicker development” over the human touch, might as well pick a game everyone already bought and highlight folks who did their dev work organically
We’ve had tools to manage workflows for decades. You don’t need Copilot injected into every corner of your interface to achieve this. I suspect the bigger challenge for Larian is working in a development suite that can’t be accused of having “AI Assist” hiding somewhere in the internals.
At a certain level, it is going to be a chore to determine who is or is not slopping up with AI media. Not every asset comes out with six fingers and a half-melted face.
I can see legitimate frustration with an industry that seems reliant on increasingly generic and interchangeable assets. AI just becomes the next iteration of this problem. You’ve expanded the warehouse of prefab images, but you’re still stuck with end products that are uncannily similar to everything else on the market.
And that’s before you get to the IP implications of farming all your content out to a third party that doesn’t seem to care where its base library is populated from.
You know it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, right?
Part of the “magic” of AI is how much of the design process gets hijacked by inference. At some scale you simply don’t have control of your own product anymore. What is normally a process of building up an asset by layers becomes flattened blobs you need to meticulously deconstruct and reconstruct if you want them to not look like total shit.
That’s a big part of the reason why “AI slop” looks so bad. Inference is fundamentally not how people create complex and delicate art pieces. It’s like constructing a house by starting with the paint job and ending with the framing lumber, then asking an architect to fix where you fucked up.
If you don’t like them, you can just chuck them in the trash and you won’t have wasted the work of an artist
If you engineer your art department to start with verbal prompts rather than sketches and rough drawings, you’re handcuffing yourself to the heuristics of your AI dataset. It doesn’t matter that you can throw away what you don’t like. It matters that you’re preemptively limiting yourself to what you’ll eventually approve.
This is just the whole robot sandwich thing to me.
If home kitchens were being replaced by pre-filled Automats, I’d be equally repulsed.
A tool is a tool. Fools may not use them well, but someone who understands how to properly use a tool can get great things out of it.
The most expert craftsman won’t get a round peg to fit into a square hole without doing some damage. At some point, you need to understand what the tool is useful for. And the danger of LLMs boils down to the seeming industrial scale willingness to sacrifice quality for expediency and defend the choice in the name of business profit.
Doesn’t anybody remember how internet search was in the early days? How you had to craft very specific searches to get something you actually wanted?
Internet search was as much constrained by what was online as what you entered in the prompt. You might ask for a horse and get a hundred different Palominos when you wanted a Clydesdale, not realizing the need to be specific. But you’re never going to find a picture of a Vermont Morgan horse if nobody bothered to snap a photo and host it where a crawler could find it.
Taken to the next level with LLMs, you’re never going to infer a Vermont Morgan if it isn’t in the training data. You’re never going to even think to look for one, if the LLM hasn’t bothered to index it properly. And because these AI engines are constantly eating their own tails, what you get is a basket of horses that are inferred between a Palomino and a Clydesdale, sucked back into training data, and inferred in between a Palomino and a Palomino-Clydesdale, and sucked back into the training data, and, and, and…
I think artists could use gen AI to make more good art than ever
I don’t think using an increasingly elaborate and sophisticated crutch will teach you to sprint faster than Hussein Bolt. Removing steps in the artistic process and relying on glorified Clipart Catalogs will not improve your output. It will speed up your output and meet some minimum viable standard for release. But the goal of that process is to remove human involvement, not improve human involvement.
I will say, gen AI seems to be the only way to combat the insane BEC attacks we have today.
Which is great. Love to use algorithmic defenses to combat algorithmic attacks.
But that’s a completely different problem than using inference to generate art assets.
Glitzy AAA open-world-ish games have beautiful visuals but their replayability is near zero
I mean, I gotta disagree, at least in part. Some of these games don’t age well. But I still know folks who line up for the “WoW Classic” experience. Hell, I know people who have been playing since the game came out in '02/'03(?) and now they’re out playing with their kids. I know one family who plays with their grandmother, ffs.
I think one thing that really gave Blizzard and Nintendo titles staying power was the choice to deliberately tack towards the cartoon-y style of art. When you’re not going for that hyper-real experience, the games age better. Hard to pick up a vintage Laura Croft or Devil May Cry without feeling its age. But Wind Waker? Mario 64? They do just fine.
why do the right thing when you can buy a new shiny toy
It’s not like they’re plastering “We Busted A Union To Get This Game Out Six Months Late” on the packaging. The overwhelming majority of retail customers have no idea how the sausage is made. Those that are curious enough to ask typically aren’t the ones going in on the “Rape And Loot Simulator” franchise to begin with.
Gotta get off this hobby horse of blaming the anonymous gooner gamer at the bottom of the food chain for decisions made in a smoke-filled board room long beforehand.
Hype around a game is directly related to the marketing budget. If people are looking forward to the next edition in a franchise, it is inevitably because they’ve been bombarded with “NEW THING! NEW THING! NEW THING!” radio/TV/streaming ad reels for months prior.
All that aside, yeah our countries hate unions and hate workers and everyone in power hates you and wants you to die.
We’re going to replace all the working class schlubs with AI, haven’t you heard?
No they aren’t. Games flop all the time and the companies don’t quit this bullshit. No business executive has ever walked out of a tense call with their investors and re-committed themselves to being nicer to the staff. You’re delusional if you think people not buying a game results in the quality of life of that game’s staff improving.
What improves the lives of game developers is going indie and doing well. What improves the odds of doing well as an indie developer is producing games that can compete with the GTAs absent the absurd marketing budgets. That requires a symbiosis between indie games media, indie developers, and early adopters. But the gooner gamer is at the end of the line in any event. They don’t even know the game exists until it gets a splash ad on the Steam Store.
Your retail consumer market is a consequence of industry practices, not a cause.
Bunch of sycophants all soft criticizing games like a review magazine afraid of offending the makers while talking about their playthrough.
Almost as though its a heavily astroturfed community and many of the accounts are exactly this.
Heaven help you if you have an actual opinion outside of the box
That’s just social media in a nutshell. You’re either a loyal footsoldier or a radical insurgent. But you need to find your opposing faction and do battle with them. And then, if you get too confrontational, the Mods/Admins need to ban you for doing exactly what the site incentivizes.
The degree to which people will idolize God of War’s Kratos and shit all over Horizon’s Aloy is crazy, given how these are functionally the same character.
I really didn’t understand the complaints that she was unattractive or even outright ugly.
She didn’t look like the silhouette on a truck’s mudflaps. So she’s hideous by default. But then nobody seems to qualify as “hot enough” anymore. Sidney Sweeny isn’t hot enough. Taylor Swift isn’t hot enough. Ciri from the Witcher isn’t hot enough. Freya Allan from the TV Show of the Witcher isn’t hot enough. Fucking Jessica Rabbit isn’t hot enough.
I remember a lot of love for the Guild Wars franchise and for the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMOs.
But as a business model, they’re dinosaurs in every sense of the term. Very expensive to produce and maintain. You really need a critical mass of players to cover the costs. They can’t compete on graphics/gameplay relative to your Looter-Shooters or JRPGs. And once the title launches, you’ve got this vanguard of power-users/whales who demand all your attention while the bulk of your player base burns out before they even get to the endgame. So unlike a seasonal Fortnite or Minecraft, you risk a rapid fall-off in participation unless you can satisfy both the high and low ends of the market.
When there’s one or two big MMOs, they can build these enormous audiences and clean up. When there’s a million of them, they can’t kept people engaged long enough to cover their operating costs.
I would initially tap the breaks on this, if for no other reason than “AI doing Q&A” reads more like corporate buzzwords than material policy. Big software developers should already have much of their Q&A automated, at least at the base layer. Further automating Q&A is generally a better business practice, as it helps catch more bugs in the Dev/Test cycle sooner.
Then consider that Q&A work by end users is historically a miserable and soul-sucking job. Converting those roles to debuggers and active devs does a lot for both the business and the workforce. When compared to “AI is doing the art” this is night-and-day, the very definition of the “Getting rid of the jobs people hate so they can do the work they love” that AI was supposed to deliver.
Finally, I’m forced to drag out the old “95% of AI implementations fail” statistic. Far more worried that they’re going to implement a model that costs a fortune and delivers mediocre results than that they’ll implement an AI driven round of end-user testing.
Turning Q&A over to the Roomba AI to find corners of the setting that snag the user would be Gud Aktuly.
I wouldn’t be shy about getting into Remake or Rebirth now. They both stand up as their own games (concise start/ending, somewhat distinct mechanics, each one is easily 40+ hours of gameplay). And with Part 3 targeted for 2027 release, I suspect this kind of overhaul would be outside their dev cycle to implement.
Part 2 is already using the engine from Part 1 with minor adjustments. I suspect most of Part 3 development is cinematics and world building.
From a game dev perspective, user Q&A QA is often annoying and repetitive labor. Endlessly criss-crossing terran hitting different buttons to make sure you don’t snag a corner or click objects in a sequence that triggers a state freeze. Hooking a PS controller to Roomba logic and having a digital tool rapidly rerun routes and explore button combos over and over, looking for failed states, is significantly better for you than hoping an overworked team of dummy players can recreate the failed state by tripping into it manually.
I mean, as a branding exercise, every form of sophisticated automation is getting the “AI” label.
Past that, advanced pathing algorithms are what Q&A systems need to validate all possible actions within a space. That’s the bread-and-butter of AI. Its also generally how you’d describe simulated end-users on a test system.
And hire other people with the excess budget. Hell, depending on how badly these systems are implemented, you can end up with more staff supporting the testing system than you had doing the testing.
It’s quite literally the least bad thing they’ve done across two terms in office.
Given that the use of these songs implies tacit approval from the artist
Who seriously believes that? We’re so beyond “Death of the Artist” at this point. FFS, I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard the chorus line of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The USA” played full on patriotically, without a tinge of irony or self-reflection.
The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Foundation broadened its reach by attending the world’s biggest video games event this summer – but faces challenges funding its work helping underrepresented developers
Listen, I think its cool that people are following their dreams. But I can’t imagine looking at the modern world and thinking “The thing we’re really lacking right now is new video games”.
What I would love to see is the existing pool of video game developers enjoying more labor protections, shorter working hours, paid sick leave, and guaranteed housing/health care benefits. Because, as someone who has seen the industry chew up and spit out really talented developers, that strikes me as far more important than just learning to code or getting networked into the crunch pipeline at EA or Microsoft.
Walles says: “My favourite example of someone in our cohort who has work experience but is trying to break into the games industry is this young man from Nigeria. He’s a home builder, he’s project managing every day, building houses – and he codes. He wants to take that project management experience and become a producer in video games.”
This is such a bleak read, knowing how many people - both inside the gaming industry and out - who are struggling to find affordable housing.
We have a lot of entries appearing in Steam, yes, but a huge percentage of them are investor-driven, research-founded money farms.
Where do you think future game developers are getting funneled? This is a tail as old as the industry. Big firms sponsor these entry level programs in order to glut the market with cheap labor.
We’re kind of complacent with having people like Valve around making Steam, but we kind of need more people in that space for people to turn to as every major console gets enshittified.
I do not think we need more game developers (particularly in an industry that’s contracting labor demand in the pivot to AI) more than we need housing developers (particularly in a real estate market that is struggling to meet new production targets).
I’m personally a big fan of doing the very tiny semi-transparent (X) that’s impossible to click on as far away from the “Yes, Please Digitally Fuck My Wallet Pussy” blinking blue bar at bottom center of the screen.
Your ads are not gonna work the way you think they’ll work
They’re banking on people too young/old to know how to navigate past the screen to accidentally sign up for shit.
My one-year-old son accidentally got ahold of my TV remote and signed me back up for Netflix by pushing random buttons a month ago. Had to go through the TV and scour it of all the little pre-installed buy-me apps to make sure that couldn’t happen as easily again. Still not quite sure how to disable the “Netflix” button that’s built into the remote, shy of carving it out with a knife.
Sure. But a lot of the marketing is geared towards younger people unfamiliar with the service. I remember getting deluged with ads my freshman year of high school and again my freshman year of college, for instance.
They’re banking on their unsubscribe process being so obnoxious that they’ll lose fewer people than they gain, year to year. And given the steady growth of revenues for these programs, it appears to work over the long term.
Yeah, you’re pissing people off. But when everyone operates this way, it just becomes the standard for accessing this form of entertainment. Like ad reels before a movie starts. “Well, I just won’t go to the movies!” is a hollow protest in the midst of the crowds of people fighting to get into the theater.
In the same way that slot machines and roulette wheels aren’t sustainable, sure. Once you figure out they’re a scam, you stop playing them.
But you don’t need to trick all the people all the time. You just need to trick enough people to turn a steady profit. Firms like Microsoft and EA have figured out a formula that’s worked for a long time and now they’re just running the playbook. Like any good bookie in Vegas, they make money off the suckers. And they reinvest a sizeable chunk of their profits into marketing to bring in new marks. And there’s always new marks.
No-one will enjoy where that leads
There will be a dozen senior executives in a VIP lounge absolutely enjoying where this goes in another five or ten years.
The bigger your market grows, the more aware the cultural zeitgeist becomes
You’d like to think so. But look at Robinhood. Five years ago, everyone was screaming about how it was a rigged game. Citadel Investments was manipulating the options markets. Fidelity was getting insider deals. Everything was rigged. People needed to protest. Close out your account. Yadda yadda yadda.
What happened after that? As far as I can tell, Robinhood is more popular than ever. They’re certainly more profitable than ever. There was never any reform or regulation. Mostly, Reddit and similar big name social media firms just purged all the whinners and inflated the profiles of the shills and hacks.
A bookie in Vegas, one city, could keep running their casino forever
DraftKings has been making money hand over fist. They’re desperately trying to find new things for people to bet on. This isn’t one bookie in one city, it’s an international conglomerate that’s expanded its market share around the globe. It is a worldwide bookie.
Soulless cash grab with a healthy veneer of jingoism and plenty of toxic masculinity.
You’ll play your Muscle Man Beats Up The Evil Foreigners game, you’ll pay top dollar for it, and if you’re lucky you’ll get a loot box with a Trump/MBS NFT in it.
Was going to say… Who is out there buying games way outside their machines’ specs? Seems pretty straightforward.
I do get a little annoyed at the folks angry at BL4 using a higher end engine. Like, it does look a lot better than previous iterations. That engine upgrade wasn’t for nothing.
There are a ton of looter shooters floating around that aren’t using the Unreal 5 engine. Just play one of those instead.
This is actually from 2022, but I missed it back in the day. This is quite important research imo, and very relevant lately. Link to the paper itself: www.sciencedirect.com/…/S0747563222001637
Conservatives want to take all our games away, they have hated video games for decades, they made it clear for years that they want to see games censored the same way as movies and television.
Wasn’t the OG 80s era censorship campaign coming from Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman?
Didn’t we get this whole '10s era Christian Conservative “We just want to debate! We just want our free speech on College Campus and The Internet!” campaign?
It seems as though censorship of <insert bad thing> is mostly just a wedge issue to put your partisan group on the side of the current popular media trend. In the '80s, it was saying you were Opposed To Satan during the Satanic Panic. In the 90s, it was saying you were Opposed to Gangster Rap and Saggy Pants and Drugs. In the '00s, we were in an ideological war against Islam. In the '10s, we were in an ideological war against Big Government Socialism Taking Over Our Lives. In the '20s its been the War on Woke Foreigners.
Do you all really think Palantir and associated social monitoring programs are just going to make drones to try to spy on what American citizens are masturbating to? Nope! Palantir is a broad-spectrum monitoring company, and they will have various manner of AI bots scanning the contents of your hard-drive and reporting your browsing and downloading habits to all kinds of agencies and institutions who would loooooove to have more “product” to sell to our for-profit prison industry!
That’s one theory.
Another is that we’re trying to put together an industrial scale compromat operation, such that any given individual can be smeared and alienated from the public at-large if they oppose the current regime.
I’m sure advertising can function as a side hustle. But we’ve been drifting away from any kind of real consumer economy for nearly a decade. Everything is “how quickly can the government and its business interests cycle money between one another to replicate economic growth”? You don’t really need end-users if all you’re making is an AI-driven marketplace.
With OD and Physint in the works, Hideo Kojima says Kojima Productions is heading towards its "Third Phase," with the creator to focus on "staying grounded and laying solid foundations" in 2026 (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Commentary on taking feedback as a game designer, from someone who worked on the original DOOM. angielski
After GOTY pull, Clair Obscur devs draw line in sand: 'Everything will be made by humans by us' (www.polygon.com) angielski
The gaming world appeared ablaze after the Indie Game Awards announced that it was rescinding the top honors awarded to RPG darling Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 due to the use of generative AI during development. Sandfall Interactive recently sat down with a group of influencers for a private interview session, where the French...
Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' (www.ign.com) angielski
‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
What's going on over at dwarf fortress? angielski
After Apple originally announced the first version of Halo in 1999, Xbox apparently called Bungie and said "'Steve Jobs can't have that. We're going to buy you.'" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
The median price of best-selling new games on Steam has dropped in the past 2 years, research finds: "Charging >$25 is getting trickier, as players compare value to the $10-$15 indie titles" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
'I think we're in the fight of our lives': Fired Rockstar employees and IWGB are confident the GTA 6 developer will be held accountable for its alleged union busting (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Game marketing company takes down blog post bragging about how good it is at astroturfing Reddit after Reddit finds the post (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Look how much I'd need to purchase a fraction of their game time! angielski
Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027 (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
US government uses Halo images in a call to 'destroy' immigration, Microsoft declines to comment (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
The non-profit helping people from all over the world to become successful game developers (www.theguardian.com) angielski
The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Foundation broadened its reach by attending the world’s biggest video games event this summer – but faces challenges funding its work helping underrepresented developers
Xbox consoles are now getting a fullscreen Xbox Game Pass Ultimate ad at boot, just a day after a 50% price hike was announced angielski
source...
EA CEO says company values will 'remain unchanged' under the new ownership of Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner's investment firm (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Right…
'My Advice to Users Is to Accept Reality and Tune, or to Not Play' — Randy Pitchford Is at the 'Get a Refund From Steam' Stage of the Borderlands 4 PC Performance Backlash (www.ign.com) angielski
'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to research (www.psypost.org) angielski
This is actually from 2022, but I missed it back in the day. This is quite important research imo, and very relevant lately. Link to the paper itself: www.sciencedirect.com/…/S0747563222001637
Whine harder you assholes angielski