A great game if you like gritty fantasy, turn based tactics, and losing.

I think that even in the scenario where AI is great at voice acting, there will be human voice actors left in the same way that there are people who perform live music left - a tiny number of superstars (new AIs will be trained on their performances), a few talented but obscure professionals who manage to make a relatively meager a living, and some hobbyists who do it for fun. There might even be more human voice actors than there are now simply because of population growth (or rather because of the growth of the population well-off enough to worry about that sort of thing). However, what Béart seems to be saying is that there won’t be excellent AI voice acting, not that at least some human voice actors will have jobs despite the AI, and I don’t think she’s particularly qualified to make that prediction.

(I admit that I am baffled by the fact that people think AI won’t be able to do something at all simply because AI isn’t particularly good at doing it right now. Why are these people ignoring the extremely rapid rate of progress of AI?)

I’m actually somewhat sympathetic to those guys, at least because an older relative of mine was a skilled mechanical engineer who simply could not make the transition from pencil-and-paper drafting to CAD software despite trying very hard. He had the common “old people have difficulty using computers” problem despite actually having a great deal of interest in the new technology.

With that said, he was out of a job whether or not he deserved that.

I think Béart is a good voice actor but I don’t think that gives her special insight into the future of AI development. On the contrary, those people who would lose both money and meaning if a certain task is done well by a machine will be biased towards underestimating the probability that that task will be done well by a machine in the near future.

Yes, this wasn’t an admission because it’s a well-known fact that is not inconsistent with Nintendo’s earlier actions. The headline is deceptive and people don’t read the article. The article itself contains no new information and it is only worth reading for someone who has been deceived by the headline and needs to be set straight by the same people who wrote the deceptive headline. It’s click bait that shouldn’t exist.

I wish they would enable that in battle.net games so I don’t have to choose between trading and it.

I played Diablo II so much as a kid and then when the remake came out over twenty years later, it was just as great as I remembered and I play it regularly. I haven’t bought Diablo III or IV.

(It was much harder when I was a kid so I do wish there was more challenge now.)

Do people want to play Warcraft 2? I have a lot of nostalgic memories of when I played it as a kid but unlike the other remastered old Blizzard games, it isn’t very good by 21st century standards.

Why would Internet Archive have people’s passwords stored?

The bad news is that you have an Internet Archive account, your username and email could well have been captured by the site’s attackers.

Oh so it’s not a problem for anyone without an Internet Archive login?

licensing issues

I understand that the buyer doesn’t lose the de facto ability to install the game from a local copy of the installer, but is it possible to lose the de jure right to install the game in that way due to licensing issues on GOG’s end? I’m not saying it is, I’m just curious.

Ok but then who exactly is the World Bank propagandizing to on Twitter?

Why was the World Bank advertising on Twitter (or anywhere) in the first place?

The summer winds came blowing in from across the sea…

I didn’t like the 3D Fallouts but I had fond memories of the original two, so I tried to replay Fallout 2 a few years ago. The writing is great but the gameplay has not aged well. Combat is simply tedious, especially against many enemies at once. You have to wait for them to slowly take their turns one by one, then on your turn you often just stand still and shoot once. Outside of combat, there’s a lot of running back and forth which gets quite tedious too. I guess I had more patience twenty five years ago than I do now…

Because people disagree about whether a certain ideology is desirable, you could have an accurate portrayal of it accepted as positive by its supporters and negative by its opponents. The supporters aren’t necessarily missing “satire” - maybe they see the same thing that the opponents do, but they like it.

Maybe I’m weird because anything over 20 FPS looks smooth to me (and I know it doesn’t to other people) but what’s the point of going over 60 FPS? Can anyone actually see the difference or is this just a matter of “bigger numbers must be better”?

I don’t think this is a case of tech outpacing legislation because I expect that ultimately legislation will be rather favorable to tech. There’s too much money to be made using AI for the government to extend copyright protection to training data.

(Plus, I sympathize with voice actors in the sense that I’m sad that a lot of them will lose their jobs, and that’s independent of what I think about AI development and copyright law.)

I sympathize with the voice actors but at the same time I think this is a losing battle. I expect AI voices to be widespread and employment opportunities for voice actors to diminish (although I think high-budget games will still use human voice actors for a while). Maybe being open to AI is actually the best case scenario for getting at least some of the money involved.

I’ve ruined games for myself by starting over repeatedly to get some achievement I don’t even enjoy trying to get, not having fun, and never finishing the game. (I do the same thing with higher difficulties.)

I wish there was an option to just disable all achievements in games - it would help me enjoy games a lot more. You’re probably thinking “If he doesn’t like achievements, why doesn’t he just ignore them?” but I can’t.

The worst is actually a sandbox game I play that tracks achievements per-save. (It’ll tell you that you failed the achievement in that save even if you already got it in a different one.) There’s an achievement that requires doing something boring for several hours as soon as you start the game, or otherwise you can’t get it on that save. So of course I feel compelled to do that boring thing every single time I want to start a new save.

Minthara, a companion who could previously only be recruited by joining her side and more or less committing genocide on a grove full of tieflings, can now simply be knocked out and talked to at a later point in the game where all of that drama can be ignored.

Minthara was being mind-controlled. When she’s free, she’s still evil but not that evil - she even asks the player character what his excuse for killing the tieflings is, since he wasn’t mind-controlled.

(Knocking her out still doesn’t make sense, but mostly because at that point in the game the player has no in-character reason to think that she’s special aside from the fact that all the other enemies are goblins and she’s a Forgotten Realms BDSM sex symbol drow.)

two monster-girls

reject them, choose the half-elf

People hate living out their wildest dreams, I guess.

You’re right and I’m wrong. I guess I’m out of touch - what did the Wolfire guys do since then that makes you dislike them?

humble

That’s who’s suing Valve here.

Edit: I’m wrong, they created Humble Bundle but haven’t owned it since 2017.

I think it’s more likely that one survey or the other (or both) are simply nonsense.

But it isn’t getting quadrupled either, at least because there aren’t enough COBOL programmers in the world to write that much new code that quickly.

according to a 2022 survey, there’s over 800 billion lines of COBOL in use on production systems, up from an estimated 220 billion in 2017

That doesn’t sound right at all. How could the amount of COBOL code in use quadruple at a time when everyone is trying to phase it out?

It’s-a no longer me, Mario!

This is the ideal make body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.