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I think where it shines is in helping you write code you’ve never written before. I never touched Swift before and I made a fully functional iOS app in a week. Also, even with stuff I have done before, I can say “write me a function that does x” and it will and it usually works.
Like just yesterday I asked it to write me a function that would generate and serve up an .ics file based on a selected date and extrapolate the date of a recurring monthly meeting based on the day of the week picked and its position (1st week, 2nd week, etc) within the month and then make the .ics file reflect all that. I could have generated that code myself by hand but it would have probably taken me an hour or two. It did it in about five seconds and it worked perfectly.
Yeah, you have to know what you’re doing in general and there’s a lot of babysitting involved, but anyone who thinks it’s just useless is plain wrong. It’s fucking amazing.
Edit: lol the article is referring to a study that was using GPT 3.5, which is all but useless for coding. 4.0 has been out for a year blowing everybody’s minds. Clickbait trash.
Yes and this is what Starfield doesn’t do. Starfield doesn’t actually have whole planets generated by a shared seed. Planets in Starfield are just unlimited sources of randomly generated playboxes. Since the planets don’t actually exist, they can’t properly be said to be explorable.
For anyone interested in this topic, there is a super great video that explains the difference between procedural generation and random generation and how a tiny amount of data can be used to generate extremely complex things.
But I don’t think they can grab that explorer fanbase again, they are just against procedural generation in general, they probably wanted Outer Worlds but bigger.
I don’t think that’s true. Elite Dangerous is one of my favorite games and it’s procedurally generated. I think the issue is that that’s not exactly what Starfield is.
When you “land” in Starfield (outside a handcrafted city or similar), you land in a procedurally generated box made just for you. It isn’t repeatable by anybody but you. Other people who “land” in the same spot will not see what you saw, they get their own procedurally generated box. The contents of the box are similar (the terrain is the right color, the flora and fauna are the same). If you were to see something particularly cool in your box (although I never did when I was playing the game) - ie: “unusually tall mountain range” or “unusually deep valley” - you can’t tell someone “hey go to coordinates x,y and check this out!” You CAN do this in Elite Dangerous. All worlds, all settlements - everything is the same for everyone, and if you explore through it all and you find something interesting, you can share it with people.
In Starfield, your box always contains an uninteresting/unremarkable patch of terrain and magically, literally everywhere you land, there are structures and ships within walking distance - none of which anyone can get to but you.
There is literally no WAY to explore. Everywhere you land, it’s just another box and it will always contain the same variation on the same things. That isn’t exploration. Exploration implies things that exist whether you are there or not and which can be found by someone if they look long enough.
I got a code for a free month of Gamepass Ultimate. Played Starfield for a month and had the option to pay to continue or cancel. I canceled. I didn’t even keep my saves, the game truly bores me to tears.
Honestly though, I give Gamepass Ultimate pretty high marks. I was able to play Starfield on my Xbox One S via cloud streaming and seamlessly switch to an actual install of it on my PC when my SO wasn’t busy playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I could see myself paying $17 for a month’s worth of it in the future to keep from blowing $80 on the next Starfield.
This looks like a great game, but “can we do this? Is this even possible?” I mean Super Paper Mario did it in 2007.
Unfortunately I think it’s a losing battle. I’m not sure why the entire industry doesn’t do what Blizzard has done with D3/4 (ie: physical copy or not, it’s always online, validating your user and exposing you to mtx) but it seems to me that “resistance is futile” as more young players are normalized to it and it becomes the rule rather than the exception.
For my part, I generally refuse. But of course, the “generally” part is why they will all eventually succeed. There are games that always-online is more necessary because of multiplayer and shared world. There are also games where always-online is nothing more than naked capitalist bullshit. But who’s to say where it’s appropriate to draw that line? The players? Christ knows D4 isn’t hurting for money because they haven’t gotten mine.
So if you think that your single-player experience has no technical reason why it should be always-online, Blizzard’s just gonna be all: that’s just like… your opinion, man.
How can $15 million be considered a lot of money in a month when Diablo 4 has made a billion dollars in just over a year? I mean, that’s a factor of 10.
I could also ask how it could be possible that Diablo could make a billion dollars despite pretty much everyone saying it sucks? And then what might the logic be in subsequently firing all the people who made it?
But I digress.