I’ve been picking them up religiously after I found out I missed Frostpunk. The only ones I’ve played were the big names like Control, Death Standing, and the old Fallout games. For everything else, the client doesn’t give you enough information to decide if it’s worth your time or not. I keep having to go back and forth between Epic and Steam to read reviews and the “similar to other games you’ve played” thing. It’s not worth the effort.

Denuvo works on a subscription basis. Sooner or later, they’re going to decide it’s not worth paying for anymore and the game will be available to pirate. Waiting a year is nothing.

I’m honestly tempted to get back into the game just to figure out how to cheat now. All the added anti-cheat stuff makes it a much more interesting challenge, and I do have the right skillset to tackle this. It would tie in nicely with some of my research projects too.

Sad that pepe is still on these lists after all the efforts to take it back.

GT Sophy on Gran Turismo

The game trying to force that plot twist felt very jarring and pulled me out of the immersion right from the start. My guy, you have no idea how long you’ve been in there. Why are you asking around for a child?

Loot box and that gambling business aside, wouldn’t the FOMO argument also apply to the video game itself? If everyone around you is playing this game, you’ll be pressured into purchasing it yourself as well.

You don’t pay people because it’s the only motivator. You pay people because you need money to survive in this world. If we don’t, then the only people who can afford to spend time making mods are those who are already have their basic needs taken care of through other means.

I would like to see a world where anyone with the passion for modding can make mods.

Someone still had to make the decision to put all of these elements together in one characters.

Considering that both were designed with the same historical period and location in mind, that’s not surprising. But the hood? And parkour? That can’t also be a coincidence, can it?

Ah, I see. Though I would call this manipulative, not dishonest.

entities that seems honest are the most secretly dishonest

It’s the converse. By definition, dishonest entities (that are good at what they do) will appear honest.

Definitions aside, let’s go back to my original argument. To rephrase it a bit: A transparently manipulative entity is better than a deceptive and manipulative entity. So why protest the added transparency and not the manipulation?

I think I’m missing an important part of your argument here. What are they doing that you consider to be dishonest?

Worse than what they’ve been doing for the last decade? It seems to me like this is a better state of things because it’s clearly a lot of money for one big purchase, so you know immediately that it’s not something you can afford. Better transparency, so less manipulative.

I feel like if anything has the right to be ridiculously expensive, it’s art.

• It’s not a necessity for survival.
• It’s not a necessity to live a fulfilling life.
• There’s so much else available to us that can fulfill the same purpose that are cheap/free.
• A one time $435 cost feels a lot more expensive than lots of small purchases adding up to the same amount, meaning this is more likely to be purchased exclusively by people who can actually afford it, unlike the latter which can trick people into spending more than they can afford.
• It funds free entertainment for everyone who don’t have the ability to pay.

What’s the downside?

I have no interest in this game, so I wouldn’t know how it actually affects gameplay. But do you not agree that this is shitty business practice? You have a game. Sell the game. If you want microtransactions, then produce extra art or something and sell that. You can even make the case that separating out parts of the game into various DLCs on launch is acceptable. You’re at least charging for something of value that you created.

Implementing anti-cheat costs resources and makes the end result strictly worse. Now you want people to pay you to undo that? That’s creating negative value. We want the economy to run on people creating positive value.

I think a more apt comparison is if you’re renting out a place where every light switch is three-way with one switch near the light it controls and another in a closet with all the other light switches. You can control the ones in the closet for free, but the ones in a reasonable location are pay-per-use. The problem isn’t that the features aren’t available for free. It’s that they poured resources into deliberately making things worse, then they charge you to undo that. Literally creating negative value.

I really enjoyed those tbh. One of my favourite things to do in RDR2 is just riding around and enjoying the scenery, or chilling in Saint-Denis at night time. Gaming time is chill time. There’s no rush to finish a story.

I remember playing the first game and getting stuck on the tutorial because I was mashing the left click button trying to swing my sword only to have Geralt hip thrust at the enemies.

But once you figure out how to swing the sword, the game’s actually pretty fun. One thing I particularly liked is that there’s an investigative storyline where you actually have to go and investigate and figure out the answer with the clues provided, and you can fail. I went into it thinking it would be like most modern games where you only get obviously correct or incorrect dialog options and angered everyone in the process.

Same here. The game needs such a big time investment and there just isn’t time for that anymore these days. They did do a pretty good job with the item and skill order recommendations, so at least ARAM is still kind of accessible.

Sure, cracks still exist, but I’ve stopped downloading them in favour of buying off Steam because the user experience was a lot better. I’m sure I can’t be the only one to do this.

It sounds like we just disagree on what constitutes a core element of a game. I’m very happy to not have to pay for things I don’t care about, but I can understand that it sucks when you do care about it and there aren’t as many people to split the costs with.

What about microtransactions makes them evil? Is your gripe just about loot boxes? Or paying for art? Or is it the middleman? I don’t understand how charging for art in the context of a video game can be inherently evil.

Would that actually be sustainable for a game that’s constantly changing? The ones I’m familiar with are League of Legends and TFT, so I’ll use those as examples. These games rely on having a large playerbase, or else matchmaking will be all over the place and it wouldn’t be any fun for anyone. Having to pay for the game would shrink that playerbase considerably. Having to pay for updates makes this essentially a subscription model, since it’s makes no sense to maintain old versions of the game and further fracturing the playerbase that is already small to begin with, and subscriptions will also deter a lot of people from playing the game.

If it’s one of those single player story-based games that you play once and never touch again, then yeah, the model makes sense. Though I don’t see the harm in having the option to buy cosmetics. It’s not something I’m personally interested in so I just don’t touch that stuff, but I like that we’re valuing the work of artists more.

I find that having no in-game progression of any kind is part of the appeal of these kinds of games. The progression comes from improving your own skills at the game.

If not microtransactions for cosmetics, then what would be a better business model in your opinion?

What’s this thing you call FM?

Right, I see where the confusion comes from. I mention current LLMs to say that the architecture and pre-training procedure we currently have produce models that are already capable of generating the type of outputs that can be used in this context. I make no claims about the quality of the output, but some additional fine-tuning on the game’s specific story can take things very far.

When you say LLMs are not AI, I’m guessing what you mean is that they are not artificial general intelligence (AGI), and that I agree with. But AI is very broad, including things as simple as A* search. Decision trees aren’t any more AGI than LLMs and they’ve been able to produce some very compelling stories, so this isn’t a very good argument. We don’t need AGI to write good stories.

The compute resources required for these models is something that can be fixed as well. On the hardware side, consumer hardware are continuously getting more powerful over time. On the software side, we’re also seeing a lot of great results from the smaller 7b parameter models, and these are general purpose language models. If you just need something for your one game, you can likely distill the model into something much smaller.

The training data that we used for the current generation of LLMs are already out there and curated. We know that this dataset can achieve the performance of today’s LLMs, and you can continue to train on that same data in the future. As long as you control where your new data comes from, this is not an issue.

Current LLMs being bad at it doesn’t mean they’ll always be bad at it. Their current state is the worst they’re ever going to be, and we’re talking about a hypothetical future here. I don’t see any reason why they can’t be improved into a state usable for writing a story with all the worldbuilding details provided.

Why wouldn’t they? It’s a lot easier to write out intricate backstories for each character/location independently than it is to build decision trees for every possible combination of decisions that the player makes. That’s basically what current LLMs allow for.

I just played through the first Fallout game earlier this year. I guess that puts me on a 25 year lag. I’ve been playing a bit of Atari 2600 games too, but that’s more for work related reasons than for entertainment.