Agreed. As I understand it, $50k-$100k is on the high end for a TV show to use a clip from a very well known song in an episode. Some band I’ve never heard of being paid $22k for their song to be played in the background of a game might be a little on the low end, so it’s totally reasonable for the band to counter, but it’s also totally reasonable for Rockstar to turn down a 10x counter. Publicly crying about it seems childish. The game is gonna happen with or without your song.
Not quite the same, but in WoW, you couldn’t talk to the opposing faction. So sometimes people would make characters like this just to hang out in the other faction’s zones and communicate using only emotes. Good times…
Hah, sorry everyone jumped down your throat on the choice of words. Stardew Valley would be good for anyone old enough to read who would enjoy taking care of their own farm and building a relationship with villagers. I would call the graphics “cute”, but not gratuitously so (which might be preferred). Cooking Mama is another one that has a good reputation on non-mobile platforms, and it looks like they made an Android version. (Haven’t played the Android version, hopefully it’s not full of micro transactions).
The Steam Link tried and succeeded at this. My guess is only technical people understood its use-case at the time. For hardware to do well on a large scale it needs to be standalone. You turn it on and immediately see the benefit of it. Can’t be dependent on the customer’s other hardware.
To be fair, it’s not easy to make a big open world that feels immersive and competes with linear games in terms of fidelity (art, rendering, sound, music, etc), even if you know exactly where the player will go and what they’ll do. Trying to then account for every possible permutation of game state and player action is an exponential explosion of work. Without some kind of AI figuring out a believable way for the game to respond in any given situation, your only practical option is to make some assumptions, pick a small set of “golden paths” and polish those.
R* devs work their asses off to an ethically questionable degree as it is, I don’t think it’s fair to imply they’re not making the best possible experience at that scale with the technology available.
I’m fine with stressful, high risk gameplay, it’s when the game asks me to spend a bunch of time doing something I don’t find fun that it loses me.
Subnautica in particular did this to me. All my friends who like Outer Wilds told me to play Subnautica. I loved the exploration and story, but I didn’t care at all about building a fancy base that I would never see again after finishing the game. There was a particular point where I was bottlenecked on finding a single resource type that was located in one single place in a giant ocean, which turned out to be a place I felt I was being told not to go yet (trying to avoid spoilers). I thought i was being dense, just not learning what the game was trying to teach me, so I ended up having to look it up, only to realize the game did an absolutely piss poor job of directing me toward the resource. My entire experience was soured by that.
It was after that that I decided single player survival crafters are not my thing. I like them as a multiplayer experience, because you can amortize busy work across multiple people, and socialize as you do it, but by myself I’d rather do anything else. I get it if someone finds it relaxing to do that kind of thing, but it’s not for me.
Man, I really wanted to like this game, I love the setting, art, music, and overall aesthetics, but I’m having trouble finding the fun.
When I first heard about it, I was hoping it was basically a linear road down the coast, with a story to experience along the way (kinda like the boat/car sections of HL2). But then it turned out to be a repetitive grind. There are some mechanics I think are novel and add a lot of fun (ex. the Quirks system), but 90% of what I was doing in the game felt unfun and pointless so I could eventually return to the garage and do it all again.
The copyright issue is tangential. You don’t have to train a model using unethically sourced artwork, just like you don’t have to build a structure using slave labor. Nintendo has the resources to legally protect themselves one way or another if they actually wanted to use generative AI.
We haven’t really seen high quality art that uses AI as part of the creative process yet, but this could be similar to the animation studios of the 90s who refused to use computers. They’re all out of business now.
The reality is, generative AI is a really powerful tool, so they will be at a disadvantage going forward if they don’t use it.
Honestly, 80% of everything is crap, and 80% of businesses fail, and that’s nobody’s fault. It would be even worse if they tried to ship a turd they knew wouldn’t satisfy players.
I understand if you’re sad that the game didn’t turn out and you don’t get to play it, but I’m just proud of them for taking the risk to begin with, and I’m sorry it didn’t turn out how anyone would have liked. Sometimes thems the brakes.