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At least 2 layers.
LLMs don’t think. They copy paste something that’s been found repeatedly in the data it was trained on, statistical probability of words going with other words. Hell, it doesn’t even know what words are or much less mean. So it’s at least 2+ layers removed from the truth, one being the one you pointed out, and another being an amalgamation (mishmash) of the data it was trained on.
Is it really that different though?
Lets say you get the 1 month pass, play any games you want and are part of that “service” for the duration, once it runs out you lose access to the games (unless you crack the downloaded files for them which would be like not returning the “rented” game I guess)
Personally just feels like the same scam cable tv was and now transforming into streaming services with ads.
I think a lot of people don’t realize that their pleasure receptors aren’t the same anymore (or are willingly blind to that fact?) and even if you recreate scenarios that might be as enjoyable as the ones that were 20 years ago, for a lot of people the sense of “childhood wonder” is either dulled or gone entirely after so many years so the result still wouldn’t be the same.
One of those times where it needs to pivot to an entirely different approach to the genre to make it viable, and I don’t see anybody doing that… yet?
I actually went to look into the examples mentioned above.
Hitman was apparently playable with “some targets” and other stuff locked behind online functionality but the base game was playable without. So this part definitely feeds into the “screwing people in new and exciting ways” that you mentioned.
For Deus Ex MD - apparently the binaries themselves were actually the DRM free ones, but the package that they gave GoG basically redirected all the DRM calls to Steam, which… resulted in a weird situation where it’s half stripped of some DRM measures while the other half required an actual crack to kill those calls that were redirected to a different platform entirely… so overall I wanna chuck it to a lazy “let’s get some brownie points and release it on GoG but let’s use this intern to package and ship it cuz we can’t be arsed to do a proper release” type of scenario.
Do I blame GoG for not checking it throughly? Yeah, a bit, but at the same time the onus should be on the providing party to deliver an adequate product that’s up to the requirements of the platform and if it’s not, maybe have a financial penalty clause for non-adherence in the distribution contract or something, I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer or anything.
Not sure how recent we’re talking but within the last year or so my 2 biggest disappointments have been once human and nightingale. I can usually work around jank and weird creative decisions, but unfortunately neither of these two were worth any of the time I’ve spent playing em since they felt like they didn’t seem to want you to progress.
Played once human for about 3 days, nightingale for around 3 hours and then refunded.
Look Outside just had a major 2.0 patch. Solid horror game. And it’s 30% off at the moment.
Fair points, but I’d argue to the contrary in light of the following:
- The steam deck was developed and released at the beginning of 2022. That’s a ~3.5 year difference in hardware and what was considered good value. (As a person buying a lot of hardware I might be a tad biased on this point so I acknowledge it)
- I did hear mixed things about the screen itself from a friend that has it, heard that it’s extremely scratch prone and that the battery doesn’t hold on for very long, but maybe that depends on the title you’re playing, the brightness and refresh rates.
- it can do 120hz, which is nice, but that’s game dependent and there’s no guarantee that it’s implemented or enabled for every game. From what I read previously, cyberpunk only does 30-40 fps on switch2 so that’s pretty much entirely out of the question for that title at least. I won’t make any guesses or misleading statements about other titles since I haven’t seen the benchmarks and haven’t been following the news on those.
- the fact that it’s robust and convenient to use in your hands is a perk imo, not a demerit, perhaps this is something more catered to the younguns which I don’t wholly understand though.
- also in regards to the above point, the controllers, albeit a little larger now, are still pretty bad and still experience the same issues as the previous generation thereof) subpar mechanism, no upgradeability, and no repairability besides having to send it to a repair center/replacement. Meanwhile should you experience any issues with your deck, the instructions and parts to fix it are available on the ifixit website at extremely reasonable prices should you wanna do it yourself.
- performance… I haven’t tried cyberpunk on my deck, so I can’t really comment on it specifically, but as far as a good chunk of the 100+ games that I’ve played on it are concerned, it’s been running extremely well in all aspects of the games, even the ones that weren’t fully steam deck verified… meanwhile even first party games like DK have lag spikes when you open the map on the latest and greatest… to me, that’s unacceptable.
- and while I understand the premise of people wanting to play first party games from Nintendo, similar to the above point the quality has been going downhill, and some of the newer IPs (Nintendo and even Sony) are being developed as more of cross platform release or ported to pc eventually (often with enhancements, optimizations and bug fixes)
I am going to briefly mention the subscription requirement for Nintendo online, some switch 2 versions of the games costing extra vs the switch 1 versions, as well the exorbitant prices (and lack of discounts even down the road) for any games sold on their store, and the fact that if you want to tinker with any of that, you can get hardware banned from online services entirely.
These are, as you mentioned, not hardware related, but are still quite hefty anti consumer practices and while not the main topic of the above hardware discussion, should carry a lot of weight in the decision to buy into that ecosystem.
https://www.gog.com/en/patrons
Launched the other day if you want to throw a bit of money to their cause
https://yearofthelinuxdesktop.net/
According to the flowchart there, cachyOS or bazzite, also some other tools and recommendations, good luck!
Steam is fine, for the most part, but steam is also DRM. Personally I opt to buy games on GoG, because whatever releases there, you can download the installer and play offline, anywhere, anytime, and due to the platform requirements it strips a lot of the extra nonsense of requiring accounts and launchers and such.
The one downside is some publishers/developers don’t have the latest version on there or release on there later as definitive builds, but it’s better than having to deal with all that nonsense to begin with.
https://yearofthelinuxdesktop.net/
Good resource for those needing a bit of convincing and/or hand holding.
I’m not sure steam deck would even be considered “high cost” since you can get a refurbished unit directly from steam for about half the price of a switch 2.
And even a brand new one is still cheaper.
Plus there are parts and instructions available on how to fix and replace pieces yourself should that ever be needed, unlike some drift issues from Nintendo’s controllers where they basically tell you to spend more money or get bent.
A reminder that AA-AAA is basically just specifying how much money has been poured into its development. Not how much love, passion and hard work went into creating it.
Baldurs gate 3 is made by an indie game studio.
As in they’re independent and are not beholden to a publisher or external revenue sources that own their idea and forces them to take business decisions they don’t want to due to monetary reasons and outside pressure.
And yes, absolutely S+ tier games.
Not sure if this applies to you, but when it just released early on, there were difficulties between versions and save games from earlier ones didn’t play nice after updates, so I struggled to get through act 2, but then I disabled the auto update and played through it pretty much flawlessly, granted I had to start a new save file.
As long as people can host a server instance, does it matter?
Hypothetically, even if it costs 1000$ per hour in AWS fees to get the required hardware to run that, at least you have the option to, alternatively have a peer to peer option to play smaller version on a LAN with a max of however many players your own network can support, there could be many implementations, which at the end of the day would still allow you to play the game when the official servers (authentication or room hosts) are shuttered and inaccessible
The main point of SKG is that currently, we, as customers, are not even getting the short end of the stick, we are getting no stick, despite having paid for it.
And ultimately, at the end of the day, not our problem to try to figure this out, the point is we’re unhappy with the current situation and want things to change.
Also note that none of this is retroactive, will only apply to games released in the future, so having an end of life plan as a requirement from the get-go is pretty simple to work on when nothing was done yet.
I agree that it’s rather unique blend of a walking simulator and does explore death and loss through an extremely lengthy story that has some touching moments, however the slog of the “meat” of the game is absolutely not worth it to get to the core of it all.
If you’re interested, I recommend watching the “game movie” on YouTube, where they just show the dialogues and skip almost all of the walking, granted even then you’d probably want to skip/fast forward through a massive chunk of it all where it’s the same animations over and over again. (Such as the load/unload/qpid sequence, etc)
The “experts” in this case are 2 teachers assistants in game design in one university weighing in on a whole swath of reasons such as financial impacts and other stuff, on which they are totally qualified to talk about.
We have reached the stage where if my son does his math homework, he should be referred to as a “math expert”, article’s a joke.
Personally I have a pair of the cloud alpha, and had them for about 2 years now, they’re very good for what they are
I can’t speak to their other cheaper headsets but with this one I got, I feel that the quality between friends who had the version before it and the ones that were purchased by a colleague last month don’t really differ much in terms of quality.
Again, I can’t speak to their stinger line or other models. Maybe those were affected more by the HP acquisition.
Seen a bit of a rise of those sort of people since moltbook or whatever it’s called emerged, trying to sucker people into believing the random bullshit generator is sentient or cognizant of its assets in any way.
What’s worse homie said “nu-uh” it’s not statistical probability and then proceeded to describe a statistical probability mesh.
Might help a bit if we all stop slapping the AI term on everything and start calling things what they are such as scripting, large language models, cronjobs, etc.
Trying to argue with those people just makes me sad and tired :(