Yeah BioWare has felt like a kind of zombie studio to me for a while. They managed to coast along on Mass Effect/Dragon Age momentum for like a decade or so, but I can’t remember the last time they had a big hit game.

Plus those type of games are the ones that take quite a lot of time and resources to do well, so I can’t see that fitting in well with EA’s new “generate endless AI slop until we pay off our debts” business model.

My first thought was they’ll probably use it to generate endless slop assets for The Sims, since people seem to pick up whatever they put out for that.

Just sitting here playing the long game, waiting for EA to finally implode and get sold off for parts so we can finally get a new Command & Conquer.

They also likely won’t be threatened by it - they’ll either wreck it from outside or weasel their way into it and enshittify it from the inside, as with all things.

For just text LLMs, they seem to run on surprisingly modest hardware. My laptop only has 8GB RAM and integrated graphics and it can run one. It’s a little slow and it runs the CPU kind of hot, but it works.

It’d be neat if data centers could also be desalination plants. IE, you extract the seawater, desalinate it, use it for cooling, then add the fresh water into the general water supply when it’s done with. I’m sure there are probably many reasons why that wouldn’t work though.

I dunno how people here feel about Banksy but I’ve always quite liked this quote:

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

Ah but that’s not how being a gamer works. When the game companies do something sleazy you have to:

• Complain about it endlessly online

• Buy the game anyway and play it for 500 hours, stopping occasionally to post online about how terrible it is

• Buy all the DLC, complain about it being a ripoff and then leave a negative Steam review

Then start saving for the sequel, which will be nowhere near as good as the first game.

TBH I don’t really believe anything NASA says when it comes to stuff like this. It’s basically been ~5 years away from going back to the moon and ~20 years from going to Mars for my entire life, and I’m not a young person.

I played through exactly one full game, and it just felt… pointless, I guess? Like I was just clicking through turns to get to the end and none of it mattered. Then it told me I’d lost and was like “K” and then played Civ VI for a bit.

Yeah I have two without noses now, but I finally got Flesh Shaping unlocked so soon I can start pumping out replacements. Also the leader got a bionic spine, then immediately got both legs blown off in the next fight. She is costing me a lot in advanced components lol.

I’m very deep into a full Rimworld playthrough with the new DLC. Being able to build a grav ship and hop around the world has opened it up so much that I’ll probably be on this for a while yet.

Obligatory weird Rimworld storytime: I’m currently super invested in this one character who was a dirt mole kid that some colony guests just left behind. We took her in because why not, and she turned out to be a pretty good melee scrapper with a penchant for losing body parts. No worries, we have bionics, we can rebuild her. So a bionic eye, an arm and a couple of new legs later, she gets her nose shot off by a turret. At the same moment some vampires arrive and want to have a meeting in our spaceship, and offer to make someone a vampire in return. So now I’m pretty sure immortal noseless cyborg vampire girl is going to end up leading the whole colony but I really want to see where this goes. The current leader is the last OG colonist still alive, but she’s currently ruling from hospital because a lancer blew the spine right out of her body so her effectiveness is limited until I can source a new spine.

Yeah I’ve tried it and bounced off it a couple of times, but I get the sense that it’s one of those games where eventually I’ll push past the beginning part and then become obsessed with it for a while lol. Alien: Isolation was one of those too.

I don’t want to share my old reddit name but I got this:

Your Reddit comments are so consistently ‘removed because of killing 3rd party apps,’ we’re starting to think you’re less a user and more a digital ghost haunting the ruins of old Reddit. Dedication, or just stubbornness?

Phew lol

A while back I heard someone describe LLMs as a magic 8-ball with infinite answers that uses math to nudge it towards the answer you want.

On the plus side, I have removed myself as a problem for them. You’re welcome, Ubisoft!

I had an experience with Zomboid a while ago that I’ve never had with any other game. I’d had my character going for a while, had my base set up, all was going good and I was looting random houses. I came up to this one house that was completely ordinary but something in the back of my brain just went NOPE. There were no signs of anything sketchy from the outside but some sort of survival switch went off in my brain and was like “if you go in there you’re fucked” and I just walked away and left it.

Of course I’ll never know now if that was accurate or not, but I’ve never had that weird instinct go off from a game before lol.

Yeah that’s pretty much the vibe for Zomboid, the opening text crawl literally says “This is how you died.” It’s not a matter of whether you make it or not, just how long you last and what happens before they inevitably get you lol.

Also if you die from a zombie bite, you can respawn as a new person and track down the zombie of your previous character to loot your stuff back which is fun.

Not as far as I know. I haven’t played the latest update but I did a full playthrough on the last one and I finished it but it was such a slog. It’s like the opposite of the other Civ games, where you sit down for 5 minutes and lose an hour, with 7 you sit down and go “right, I’ll play for an hour” and then you check the time and it’s only been 10 minutes lol.

I did the same thing with Surviving Mars lol. Played it on Epic, liked it, bought the whole thing and all the DLC on Steam. Actually I did that with Dredge too now that I think about it.

Exactly this. The new game cycle these days is:

• Game is announced with shiny video showing all sorts of cool stuff.
• Release date is announced.
• Game is delayed.
• Reviewers/early access people get it, turns out it has none of the cool stuff form the announcement video.
• Game is delayed again.
• Game finally comes out, with 3 different tiers that are like $80, $100 and $120 CAD depending on if you want the version of the game that’s 30%, 40% or 50% complete.
• Game doesn’t work.
• After about two years and 10 DLC packs you have about 80% of the functional game, the other 20% being stuff they were supposed to add but just never bothered, what are you gonna do about it? By this point you no longer care about the game anyway.
• Sequel is announced with shiny video showing all sorts of cool stuff, devs promise they’ve fixed all the broken stuff this time for real.
• Company gets bought by EA or Epic, all devs are replaced.
• Game is delayed.

Like genuinely who wants to bother with that nonsense anymore TBH.

I’m currently playing:

• Star Citizen (I know I know. I paid like $40 into the Kickstarter years ago and I dip in about once a year or so.)
• Last of Us 2 (again)
• Schedule I on Steam Deck is pretty fun.

I’m also currently gearing up to get horrendously addicted to Rimworld again since there’s apparently a new DLC on the way.

Yeah it’s pretty much the same whenever the Money People get involved in anything. It inevitably stops being about making something really cool, or even just making a living from making something, and becomes all about shipping the absolute minimum viable product and then strip-mining as much cash as you can out of it at all costs, and then dumping it when people stop buying it.

And the thing that gets me is that this makes nobody happy. The creators hate it because they’re making trash, consumers hate it because they’re being ripped off, and the Money People aren’t even happy because they never are. They always want more.

I have a long-running conspiracy theory that Google deliberately makes the UI’s of their various services (Android, Google Docs, Youtube etc.) baffling and they hide important features away so that you have to use Google to search how to do things.

Yeah I used to be super addicted to Overwatch 1, but I bailed as soon as 2 came out. I can honestly say I’ve never played it since.

Yeah that’s honestly the main thing for me too. It’s $120 Canadian for the Deluxe version. My price point is like… $30, especially since by all accounts it’s not even finished.

Someone will install Doom on you and post it on the internet

Yeah same here, my Deck in its case easily fits into a backpack, I think it’s portable enough. At a certain point you can only make things smaller by cutting essential stuff I think.

I’ve seen one of those folding phones IRL, and it seemed to have a big visible crease running right down the middle of the screen, which I could also see in this video. It looked annoying enough for a phone, I can’t imagine how bad it would be for a gaming device. Plus as others have said, that button layout is horrendous.

I got Surviving Mars for free on Epic and really liked it, but I instead spent more money to buy the full game & all the DLC from Steam just on general principle lol.

Just as a heads up, the Hitman trilogy is absurdly complicated to purchase for some unknown reason. I own the first two and I literally cannot work out how to buy the third one.

So tread carefully I guess lol.

Yeah I have a Steam Deck with a dock and bluetooth mouse & keyboard, it’s basically just a desktop PC lol.

Although the Deck does struggle a bit with super high-end games, so a similar thing with beefier hardware could fill a niche there I guess?

When the first Steam Machines were announced years ago, I assumed they’d all be running the same hardware like consoles do, and I thought that was actually quite a good idea because it could give game devs a sort of “baseline” set of hardware to aim for, as opposed to the sort of “vaguely make it run on Windows” system we seem to have currently. So if the new ones are all more-or-less the same kit like the Steam Decks are, and they take off well enough, it could be handy in that way I guess.

Plus it’ll presumably run SteamOS so more Linux exposure which I always appreciate.

Once you wrap your head around it, Rimworld is great for stuff like that. Once you start thinking outside the lines you can perform the most outrageous war crimes for literally no reason other than your own entertainment.

Like, if an enemy sends a raiding party you can nuke half the map with nerve gas to kill them, then skin them, eat them to keep the colony growing, then load all their skins into a pod and fire it back into the enemy base. The game doesn’t encourage you to do stuff like that, but it also doesn’t stop you lol.

Or you can use the skins to make hats and trench-coats.

I don’t know the name of it, but I really enjoy the sort of gameplay where you roll up to an enemy compound or something, and then you just sort of chip away at it and cause chaos until it all falls apart.

The sort of thing you’d do in Farcry, where you’d snipe some dudes, plant traps, shoot the tiger cage so the tiger would get out and eat people etc.

I would make a very rare exception and pre-order only certain titles, like if there was a new Civ Game, cause I knew I was going to get it immediately anyway and sometimes they’d let you pre-load.

But with the new Civ being nearly $170 CAD for the full version, I’m not even doing that anymore. I look forward to the real Civ VII release date of sometime in the 2027 Steam Christmas sale lol.

English, where the word ‘jam’ can mean traffic, a stuck door, to play music, to cram things into a tight space or a fruity preserve lol

From what I’ve read, the problem at Bioware seems to be with management. IIRC the last Dragon Age was started as a live service game, then scrapped and restarted, and I believe Anthem was also scrapped and restarted at least once, and Mass Effect Andromeda had a bunch of its creative team quit halfway through. So management getting rid of most of the staff for Mass Effect 5 (which was announced as being in development back in 2020) doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

I find it’s great for doing all the piddly day-to-day crap that I don’t want to put much brain power into, like writing cover letters and emailing the bank or whatever.

I think as long as it’s used sparingly it can free you up to do stuff you’d rather be doing, but IMO where people go wrong is when they use it to do the stuff they want to be doing as well.

Yeah I own 1 and 2, all I need is a button that’s like “click this to get the rest of it” and I’ll do it. But I haven’t picked up 3 because I don’t want to spend an hour figuring out how to buy the fucking thing that will probably end up not getting me all the content anyway.