spicy noodles

In principle, I agree, but I feel like part of that is just AAA vs. indie.

AAA games need to provide lots of lukewarm content, because many more casual players will buy them and expect much bang for their buck + haven’t seen this lukewarm content a million times already.

On the other hand, indies will basically only be bought by people more enthusiastic about the hobby. As such, they have to pick out one or two aspects and excel at them, so that it’s something new for that crowd.

Hello Games was indie and unknown at the time, so likely only attracted that gaming enthusiast crowd, which would have been more easily bored by the extremely lukewarm content in Starfield.

I mean, so far, all of them require tons of humanly produced data.

Discriminative AI (deep learning et al) requires humans to label data for hours on end, per use-case.
And generative AI (LLMs et al) require just insane amounts of human works to copy from, albeit not necessarily limited to individual use-cases.

I guess, what I’m saying is that the ratio of how much labor humans (involuntarily) invested into AIs, compared to the labor these AIs actually perform, is likely a lot higher than 70%.

Yeah, maybe it could look like that, but obviously they haven’t actually implemented everything to make it look like that, so it’s still completely up in the air, whether it actually will look like that.

I watched it on my phone in 1080p60 and the scale didn’t bother me. It’s not like I have to read a lot of text and the precise position of the player character is mostly irrelevant, too. Like, if you get hit by a train or something, the screen will flash red and you’ll react to it, too, so I’ll know what’s going on.

Well, and I don’t look at the screen at all times anyways. 🙃

Would like to see more of this journey…

The modding community won’t be terribly motivated to build on top of their base game either, if the base game doesn’t feel worth playing for long…

I quite like the star-button on Mastodon for this. Just pings the comment author that you appreciated their comment. So, it’s not an indication to some algorithm that this comment is incredibly relevant for everyone, because well, some comments just aren’t.

Believe me, I really don’t care to defend Bethesda. I’m not saying their engine is incredibly good.
I’m mostly saying, I feel like their games would be different and even more AAA-generic, if they built it on top of Unreal or Unity. And I’m giving them mild props for not just buying into the duopoly.

But I’m also just saying that, as a result of building their own engine, Bethesda can’t just quickly prototype something. To see what the final game looks/feels like, they have to invest years into engine development.

I feel like it’s not impossible for them to be fun, for example the Everspace series does focus on action gameplay, but yeah, tons of titles try to go for realism and showing off the scale correctly, which is neat for space nerds, but quite contrary to actual fun.

I feel like this is emblematic of why many AAA titles are so dull.

I mean, you gotta give Bethesda some props here for developing their own engine. Indies don’t do that.
But still, 8 years ago, they had this idea of a Bethesda game in space. Maybe they should have seen it coming that this concept won’t work out terribly well, but ultimately someone decided to go ahead with it and then they spent 7 years building a space physics simulation, procedural planet generation and so on.

There was no way, they could have not released this game after realizing the concept doesn’t work out terribly well. Or taken a step back and shifted the focus of the game towards space flight. Or taken a step back and deviate from the Bethesda-typical formula for this space theme.
These are options you have, when you’ve spent a few months prototyping, not after multiple years. They had to roll with the concept and basically try to bruteforce the fun into it.

Yeah, I fell out of love with Bethesda with Skyrim, and I’ve never been big on scifi, so I knew it wasn’t going to be for me, but even with my lowered expectations, it just looked so incredibly generic.

I guess, I forgot to factor in that it’s also a AAA title. Those are, of course, prohibited by law from containing any resemblance of fun. But yeah, I don’t know, it just looked like generic space game + generic shooter + generic Bethesda game. And then, as you’ve said, we’ve seen plenty games in each of those categories. Merely combining the categories, doesn’t yet make for a good game.

At the risk of spelling out common knowledge (it is common where I live), there’s also lots of so-called migratory birds. During winter months, they’ll fly into warmer regions near the equator and fly back for spring.

In particular, they may just not be able to find food when there’s a thick snow cover.

Ah, so it’s just that you can play singleplayer already before release, but it will also be available to everyone who buys the game after release?

I interpreted this sentence:

VGC’s Modern Warfare 3 review says of the campaign: “Sold as a pre-order bonus and […]"

…to mean that it would only be available to those who pre-ordered. Which would certainly be wild, but I thought, maybe that is why it’s so short then.

Wow, the whole singleplayer campaign is a pre-order bonus? It really must be bad, if they’re so hellbent on getting people to buy it before they know what they’ll get.

Or if you can’t, then at least don’t promise all kinds of features that you obviously won’t be able to implement. No one forced them to build up all that hype.

I think Starcraft has enough story and character development by now that its identity is more than just the mechanics that it started with.

I can imagine that, but I don’t think anyone but RTS fans know that.
I feel like, if they want to ‘bring it back’ as a brand, they would need to do an RTS game with all the marketing and such, to please the fans and bring it back into the public’s memory, and then they could follow it up with a non-RTS spinoff.

If they don’t do it like this, they’ll likely have another debacle like with Diablo Immortals, where fans are waiting for a full-fledged title in that series and they’re announcing something that’s just not that.

Hours into his testimony, Trump attempted to read from a piece of paper he retrieved from his pocket. “I’d love to read this, your honor, if I could. Am I allowed to do that?” Trump asked. The judge said no.

Now I’m just imagining him reading a chapter of Shakespeare or something, like he thought he was in literature club.

Not that I could imagine Trump visiting a literature club, but I can imagine him thinking it.

Raccoons:

May I introduce you to the concept of Microsoft Excel?

One time, someone from HR asked me, if I could help them with an Excel formula. So, I quickly looked up how to do something like that in Excel, adapted it as needed on my laptop, then sent it to them. And well, it didn’t work on their system, because I coded it in English, whereas their OS was in German.

This, but like, unironically. It’s literally an averaging machine. Sure, not everyone can be above-average in everything, but if you think it produces really good texts, maybe your standards just aren’t very high…