My new pet theory is that CS:2 came out so that Valve had all their IP sitting at 2. So then at some point, when their audience is too old to play games anymore, and the youth don’t even know that Valve ever made games, they’ll release a 3-box with HL3, Portal 3, LFD 3, CS:3, TF3, and DOTA 3.
Would both people always have to be playing at the same time? Or would it be possible for one person to play and progress while the other person isn’t playing?
I think the idea of an open world RPG with more than one player, not necessarily competitive or coop, but each with their own quests and motives, is interesting. I’m often hanging out in discord with friends, and we’re all just chatting while playing different games. We might as well be playing in the same world, and occasionally influence each other.
You’d have to somehow make it clear to the players that the goal is not to party up and just walk around doing everyone’s quests together, though. Ooo what if it was the world of the last airbender, and each person started as a different bender in a different part of the world? And maybe one person is secretly the avatar, but they don’t know until they’ve progressed. Ok, I’ll stop intruding on your idea lol.
I was hoping this was the direction Dyson Sphere Program would go. I think it would be an interesting twist on the factory management genre if nature was working against you; not in a Factorio “aliens will attack you if they see your pollution” way, but a “you’re producing pollution, this is creating more in-climate weather that is damaging your factories and changing the landscape dynamically” sort of way. I think this was the natural next step given that the game is already about climbing the Kardashev scale, producing more energy so that you can construct the means to produce exponentially more energy. Seemed like the natural next step would be exploring the balancing act that has to happen to achieve that energy production without also creating systemic issues for yourself that make it infeasible.
Instead their latest patch adds aliens that attack you 😕.
I’ve only watched gameplay of Terra Nil, but it seems like it’s just an environmentalism themed puzzle game. You could replace all the titles with colors, and all the buildings and what they do with arbitrary rules, and it seems like it wouldn’t look anything like an ecosystem sim. It would be like taking the game Lights Out, changing dark spots to “growth”, light spots to “wastelands” and saying the goal is to balance out the ecosystem.
I didn’t see the late game though, so maybe I didn’t see where it shines.
The WoW raiding experience, but without the MMO, and possibly the addition of rogue lite elements (each raid is a run with its own progression, but wiping would be allowed and embraced).
The format of DRG or Gunfire Reborn is pretty close, but 1) I prefer the high fantasy setting of warcraft to the gunplay, 2) I’m not interested in procedural levels, and 3) I want the focus to be on polished boss mechanics.
Dungeon Defenders is also close, but 1) you’re defending instead of delving, and 2) it is also focused on killing waves of trash mobs rather than boss mechanics.
Destiny bosses are sometimes well designed, but 1) don’t care for the gunplay, 2) classes hardly matter, 3) it’s a max of 6 people, and I think closer to 10 is the sweet spot.
Gauntlet from a few years back was probably the closest, but still far from the mark. It could have used more mechanic heavy bosses, more meaningful gear, and a larger party size.
I think at this point, the only way they get media attention is if they do something outlandish like this. The adults get huffy and make posts like this, the kids don’t care at all and call them boomers, and all press is good for them. It started with “remember, no russian” and it’s the only reason I ever hear about COD anymore.
Can you think of a better term? I tried to clarify by saying, “thing that has internalized a ton of content that it can use to generate new content from”, but there’s not a succinct term for that. I would not call an LLM a mind, but I would say minds do this observe patterns->distill information->generate new patterns thing very well. So “mind-like” is all I could come up with.
legal definitions would only allow creativity to come from humans
That would be part of the ethical dilemma we will need to solve, which corporations will be on a very predictable side of. Our laws were written assuming that only humans were capable of creativity and consciousness (however linked, or not, the two might be).
That’s anybody, really. Everything you’ve ever accomplished has depended upon the insights and knowledge of countless other people who never saw a dime from you for it. That’s part of living in a society and it’s a crucial part of how it advances.
Yes, that is why I phrased it as I did.
I agree that art is a form of communication, but it’s also a source of inspiration regardless of the artist’s intent. A person can derive meaning that the artist never intended. So I wouldn’t say art is totally a subset of communication.
most of the value we get from creativity isn’t from the mechanics of creating something
This part I would disagree with. I think 99.999% of all art is created solely for the creator’s benefit. The other 0.00001% of art is hanging on display in museums, etc. In the case of creating music, the playing of the instrument is very important to the fulfillment of most musicians. And learning the mechanics of painting, or sculpting, etc., is where I think most of the value of most art comes from. The mechanism of creating art IS the act of communication; it’s channeling thoughts and feelings into something tangible. You likely had an art class in school, not because they wanted you to create something you could sell, or to learn a skill that was going to pay the bills, but because the act of creating art is fulfilling to the creator.
I think this is part of why Sand Mandalas are destroyed after they are finished being created. It’s not the existence of the piece that is important, it was the creation of it.
Yeah, that was the first red flag for me too. Even if it’s true, that would mean his experience in game dev is not that much longer than the time it took to make BG3.
But even if we assume years in the industry is not a useful metric, the article makes a bunch of other assumptions. Like saying the player is “punished” by the existence of so many dead end dialogue options. I don’t consider it a punishment to not see every single dialogue option a game has. I intend to make the choices in the game that I think are my best option, and if that means I miss out on some content, so be it, that’s the experience I got.
But to flat out call the game “not good” us laughable. Particularly from someone so green in the industry.
Totally agree, but where the line is, I think, is that companies want free lunch: they want to leverage a mind-like thing (either a human brain or a trained AI) that has internalized a ton off content that it can use to generate new content from, but they don’t ever want to pay them or treat them like a living being.
If these AI models ever become advanced enough that people actually consider them to be alive or conscious or something, suddenly the tables will turn, and companies will be fighting against their ethical treatment. It will basically be another, much more philosophically difficult, slavery debate, and we all know which side the corporations will be on.
Or maybe it’s simply a false equivalence we all need to accept. Maybe creativity can exist independent from a conscious brain, or maybe it’s just a vulnerability in human consciousness to look at these stochastic arrangements of data and say “that looks inspired”.
Either way, in 300 years our progenitors will look back at us and think, “wow, I can’t believe they thought that was ok. Clearly it was just a different time.”
CEOs have to schedule their sales many months ahead of time. Also, it was 2000 shares, which is peanuts.
The article is focusing on this guy because people know who he is. Instead, they should be focusing on the board members who sold tens of thousands of shares right before the announcement. From Kotaku:
Tomer Bar-Zeev, Unity’s president of growth, …sold 37,500 shares on September 1 for roughly $1,406,250, and board director Shlomo Dovrat, who sold 68,454 shares on August 30 for around $2,576,608.
Also, I actually didn’t know this until yesterday, but CEOs are also permitted to buy shares of their own company, so long as they clear the purchase with the SEC. But that would indicate they’re optimistic about their company…
Interesting, I didn’t realize this. I assumed a dev kit was always required for that behavior, and that’s why Nintendo offering a cheap switch dev kit was such a big deal. TIL