- 0 Posts
- 112 Comments
The joke of these games is that they aren’t notably more weird than titles Bethesda and Bioware were famous for turning out. Hard to get more weird than Fallout’s more esoteric vaults or Morrowind’s bizarre cults and exotic cultures.
BG3/KC:D have been, if anything, a direct successors to the old classics. They’re faithfully propagating the fundamental ideas these old titles represented in a way the new studios are unable to reproduce.
Also, honorable mention to the poor bastards who released Disco Elysium and then got their studio stripped out from underneath them by their financiers. Absolute gem of a game and you should feel free to pirate it without a twinge of guilt.
I think maybe it’s naive to think that if the cost goes down, shrimp jesus won’t just be in higher demand.
Not that demand will go down but that economic cost of generating this nonsense will go down. The number of people shipping this back and forth to each other isn’t going to meaningfully change, because Facebook has saturated the social media market.
If you make it more efficient to flood cyberspace with bullshit, cyberspace will just be flooded with more bullshit.
The efficiency is in the real cost of running the model, not in how it is applied. The real bottleneck for AI right now is human adoption. Guys like Altman keep insisting a new iteration (that requires a few hundred miles of nuclear power plants to power) will finally get us a model that people want to use. And speculators in the financial sector seemed willing to cut him a check to go through with it.
Knocking down the real physical cost of this boondoggle is going to de-monopolize this awful idea, which means Altman won’t have a trillion dollar line of credit to fuck around with exclusively. We’ll still do it, but Wall Street won’t have Sam leading them around by the nose when they can get the same thing for 1/100th of the price.
What DeepSeek has done is to eliminate the threat of “exclusive” AI tools - ones that only a handful of mega-corps can dictate terms of use for.
Now you can have a Wikipedia-style AI (or a Wookiepedia AI, for that matter) that’s divorced from the C-levels looking to monopolize sectors of the service economy.
And now people exchange one American Junk-spitting Spyware for a Chinese junk-spitting spyware.
LLMs aren’t spyware, they’re graphs that organize large bodies of data for quick and user-friendly retrieval. The Wikipedia schema accomplishes a similar, abet more primitive, role. There’s nothing wrong with the fundamentals of the technology, just the applications that Westoids doggedly insist it be used for.
If you no longer need to boil down half a Great Lake to create the next iteration of Shrimp Jesus, that’s good whether or not you think Meta should be dedicating millions of hours of compute to this mind-eroding activity.
Not really a question of national intentions. This is just a piece of technology open-sourced by a private tech company working overseas. If a Chinese company releases a better mousetrap, there’s no reason to evaluate it based on the politics of the host nation.
Throwing a wrench in the American proposal to build out $500B in tech centers is just collateral damage created by a bad American software schema. If the Americans had invested more time in software engineers and less in raw data-center horsepower, they might have come up with this on their own years earlier.
Democrats and Republicans have been shoveling truckload after truckload of cash into a Potemkin Village of a technology stack for the last five years. A Chinese tech company just came in with a dirt cheap open-sourced alternative and I guarantee you the American firms will pile on to crib off the work.
Far from fucking them over, China just did the Americans’ homework for them. They just did it in a way that undercuts all the “Sam Altman is the Tech Messiah! He will bring about AI God!” holy roller nonsense that was propping up a handful of mega-firm inflated stock valuations.
Small and Mid-cap tech firms will flourish with these innovations. Microsoft will have to write the last $13B it sunk into OpenAI as a lose.
Isn’t the South Korean peninsula home to several dozen US military bases?
You don’t need to go all the way back to the Han Dynasty to find the charter that gives US the right to militarily occupy the continent indefinitely. The Truman Doctrine seems sufficient.
I mean, I’m old enough to remember Edward Snowden’s PRISM leaks. I can’t rule out that a Chinese-backed software company is functioning comparably to its American counterparts.
It’s just crazy to see how American attitude towards national surveillance has been twisted from “Damn, its bad that the state can spy on me all the time, but if I haven’t done anything wrong there’s probably nothing to worry about” to “It’s important that the people spying on me are Elon Musk and Donald Trump, rather than that evil Xi Jinping.”
CS:GO, which is the most predatory
Plenty of Gacha Games are more predatory than CS:GO. Valve is happy to host them all. CS:GO is a big money maker precisely because it has a large and enduring user base that isn’t fixated on Pay2Win game mechanics. Compare that to SummonerWars or Diablo Immortal or even just Candy Crush. There’s no contest.
casinos just find new loopholes to circumvent the law
They don’t “find new loopholes”, they explicitly lobby/capture the agencies/courts that write/interpret the rules and carve out loopholes.
Might as well say “You can’t keep money in a bank, the robbers will just find a way in” while a guy in a ski-mask walks through the front door, hands the teller a $20, and is lead directly into the vault with a complementary tot bag.
Crackdowns won’t stop the gambling on CS, legislation and enforcement won’t change it, but making items non-tradeable, or damaging item value or appeal through any method, can stop the gambling
There are countries that impose limits on what tech companies are allowed to advertise, distribute, and collect revenues on outside of the US. These countries don’t have President-elects who are joined at the hip with their country’s most wealth individuals, bending over backwards to make the billionaires happy.
Valve running an illegal underage casino
Valve doesn’t run the casino. Valve owns the real estate under the casino and collects a rent. The casino is run by a kaleidoscope of fly-by-night marketing firms after being constructed with sweatshop labor from development studios in countries with abysmal labor laws.
Turns out, it takes very few employees to be the landlord of a casino. But the casino can’t make money without a battalion of scammy sales shits and a legion of cheap construction workers. Valve can’t make money without these workers. But because it collects rents on the real estate rather than revenues on the casino itself, it doesn’t need to include these staffers in its accounting books.
I’d say it’s less about imagination than gameplay. I’m reminded of old action figures. Some of them were articulated at the knees, elbows, feet, wrists, and head. Very posable, but you could see all the joints. Then you had the bigger and more detailed figures, but they were barely more than statues. Looked great but you couldn’t really do anything with them.
And then you had themed Lego sets. Only a vague passing resemblance to the IP, but your imagination is the limit on what you do with them.
Have you tried partnering with Disney and incorporating some Marvel/Star Wars IP into the Balatro Cinematic Universe? Perhaps selling your company to Ubisoft or Sony and letting their massive legal/lobbyist team take a swing at this? Perhaps you could just take a total end-run around the problem and release an edition that uses the Minor Arcana instead of standard poker cards?
When I first got WC2, I discovered that my 1x CD couldn’t read from the disc fast enough for me to play it. The game would run for about five or ten minutes, then crash. I made it about half way through first campaign - 5 to 10 minutes at a time - before I was able to afford a 4x CD and play it normally.
WC3 was the pinnacle of the PC RTS gaming era imo
I’ve heard a lot of mixed opinions on the WC3 Leaders mechanic, as it focuses gameplay around farming and single points of failure (losing a leader at the wrong moment often meant losing the game)
In that light, Starcraft was the pinnacle of PC RTS gaming and WC3 was an experimental variation that branched off into an RTS variant that would eventually congeal into DOTA, the pinnacle of PC MOBA gaming.
That’s like saying “A hamburger is good, but I just can’t into bacon double cheeseburgers.”
I mean, I would say this unironically.
I’ll add that WC1 had fewer variances between factions. Orcs and Humans were almost identical. That made the game more akin to a real time digital chess than WC2, which made Orcs marginally more aggressive and Humans more defensive. I think WC2 is more fun because of the asymmetry, but that’s purely a question of taste. I’m not going to begrudge someone who has a fondness for the original.
It only really makes sense when the remaster is trash
I gotta disagree. Even when the remaster is (arguably) better than the original, there’s a lot of value in the original art assets and the more rudimentary gameplay as a historical guidestone. For the same reason you wouldn’t tear up the original Mona Lisa because we’ve got a high resolution digital copy, you don’t just scrub copies of the original version of Pong from the internet because we have Wii Tennis.
There’s more to game development than that. Setting, art style, gameplay loop, interface…
The argument being made is that a “proven” mechanism for monetization is getting in the way of developing other attributes of gameplay, as the
- get potential players aware of it
and
- then have them pay
Steps are made the focus of design, and only known existing formulas for the above encourage the
- invest some money
step.
Amazon policy is to stack rank all of its employees and regularly fire anyone in the bottom tranche. So any kind of deliberate slowdown would need to be incredibly well-coordinated. Even then, there would inevitably be a ton of attrition as the automatic Fire Everyone triggers started kicking in.
Its not enough to play by the rules with a company as vast and encompassing as Amazon. You need to take it a step further and start sabotaging the anti-organizing functions of the company. Start shoving monkey wrenches in the employee monitoring systems. Start dismantling the automation that allows the business to function at such a breakneck pace. You’ve got to get in there and break the machine before it breaks you.
I believe the Palworld devs got caught plagiarizing in their own internal messaging.
I honestly feel like Nintendo simply can’t let people do what they do, better.
Palworld was very explicitly cribbing from Nintendo IP. Down to the lead developers caught on record demanding that certain existing Pokemon be used as models for their content.
Also, the game was a bit of a flash in the pan. Idk if I’d conclude they “did it better” so much as they capitalized on a couple of popular trends to catch a surge of early adoption. Pokemon’s been chugging along since 1996. Lets see if Palworld can survive a full three years, nevermind the next 30.
I saw so many people play that game with the take-away “Communism in Eastern Europe / Socialist Latin America / China & North Korea was awful! I’m so glad I live in a liberal democracy where I’ve got rights and freedoms, here in <Insert English-speaking Western Country Here>”. Guys with Ron Paul rEVOLution bumper stickers would explain how we need to keep our guns close and never surrender to those liberty-hating leftists, so Papers Please! couldn’t happen here.
And as the years dragged on, the thing I heard over and over again was that liberty was under attack by Secret Communists who were infiltrating our newspapers and TVs and online forums, our college campuses, our office spaces, and our government bureaucracies. And the vector they were using to do it was… illegal immigration. First it was Al Qaeda slipping over the border to do more 9/11s. Then it was the Insidious Chinese with their America-Hating Confucius Centers, doing brainwashing and kidnapping and god knows what else. And at last it was the mobs of Venezuelan biker gangs, Cuban double-agents, and Che Guevera loving Nicaraguan/El Salvadorian/Mexican Ultra-Left Communists, breaking into the US to steal our welfare and ruin our public schools and take over our suburban neighborhoods.
The only way to keep us from living in Papers, Please! was to find these people and root them out. No more Iranian ISIS infiltrators teaching anti-semitism classes at Columbia. No more Woke DEI transgender employees at the State Department. No more speaking Spanish! Or surrender-monkey French! Or the vile tongue of the thieving, cheating, lazy, stupid Han People!
By god, if there was only some way we could find out who was evil and who was good. Some kind of document that only the righteous, God-Fearing, red-blooded American could carry (because if we caught you being a dirtbag leftist we could take it away). We need some kind of identifying document, some permanent record we could use to track the dissidents. Some kind of papers, please!