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That’s definitely one of the ways it’s going to be applied.
The bigger challenge is union negotiations around voice synthesis for those lines, but that will eventually get sorted out.
It won’t be dynamic, unless live service, but you’ll have significantly more fleshed out NPCs by the next generation of open world games (around 5-6 years from now).
Earlier than that will be somewhat enhanced, but not built from the ground up with it in mind the way the next generation will be.
The DLC is really the right balance for FromSoft.
The zones in the base game are slightly too big.
In the DLC, it’s still open world and extremely flexible in how you explore it, but there’s less wasted space.
It’s very tightly knit and the pacing is better as a result.
It’s like Elden Ring was watching masters of their craft cut their teeth on something new, and then the DLC was them applying everything they learned in that process.
Can’t wait for their next game in that same vein (especially not held back by last gen consoles).
I’ve always thought Superman would be such an interesting game to do right.
A game where you are invincible and OP, but other people aren’t.
Where the weight of impossible decisions pulls you down into the depths of despair.
I think the tech is finally getting to a point where it’d be possible to fill a virtual city with people powered by AI that makes you really care about the individuals in the world. To form relationships and friendships that matter to you. For there to be dynamic characters that put a smile on your face when you see them in your world.
And then to watch many of them die as a result of your failures, as despite being an invincible god among men you can’t beat the impossible.
I really think the gameplay in a Superman game done right can be one of the darkest and most brutal games ever done, with dramatic tension just not typically seen in video games. The juxtaposition of having God mode turned on the entire game but it not mattering to your goals and motivations because it isn’t on for the NPCs would be unlike anything I’ve seen to date.
The level of detail in Helldivers 2 is insane for the type of game and company size.
Deformable terrain and buildings, enemy animations when you shoot off different limbs and they keep moving towards you, your cape burns off more and more as you use your jetpack, etc.
Call of Duty has 3,000 devs working on their titles.
Arrowhead has around 100 employees total.
I very much believe this game took that long with a team that size, and it shows and is a large part of why it’s been so successful.
It’s outstanding, but even right now at its best it still isn’t perfect.
I’m very, very much looking forward to what they can eventually do using UE5 as the base in an era with generative AI to fill out the edges.
When the polish (pun intended) is there, the game is beyond everything else. But when you end up just a bit past the edges of where it holds your hand, it quickly loses the veneer, which is the key difference vs something like a Rockstar open world (but also very different budgets and aims).
There’s a handful of studios I think will adapt especially well to the future of game development, and CDPR is one of them.
Because it is going to be possible to have CP 2077 main scenario style interactions across an entire open world within the next decade. And who better to curate that experience than the people delivering it in a diagonal slice?
The worst was the week where they added accuracy to the arc weapons so after a long mission, usually right at extraction, the people using arc weapons would have accuracy go over an overflow and crash the game for everyone.
I just didn’t play at all until that was patched after a while.
People got so fucking angry being told they couldn’t bring arc weapons because it would literally crash the fucking game. No dude, I’m not telling you how to play, I’m telling you what’s going to ruin the entire run for everyone involved, including yourself.
I find if I play on the higher difficulties I tend to end up in very fun groups.
If I play on more relaxed difficulties, I usually have random people running across the map aggroing everything and then throwing their orbital barrage on top of me on the console doing the objective before setting themselves on fire somehow without even using any fire stratagems.
At which point the games sell worse, review worse, and the franchise effectively dies off as the publisher scrambles to reboot it (as with Ubisoft).
Your argument is somewhere in between a slippery slope and strawman.
This game right here and now is a game that isn’t designed around the mtx and so buying it or modding it in is a stupid idea for people to do, whereas a game built around mtx is going to be less enjoyable unless you buy it or mod it in.
When one day you have a future CAPCOM open world RPG designed with the mtx in mind, then you’ll have a point.
Yes, absolutely - CAPCOM sucks with this thing.
But crucially a terrible idea independent of the actual game design, unlike things such as Assassin’s Creed where it takes twice as long to level as it should because it was paced around buying XP boosts in a single player game.
In this case, it’s a terrible idea that would make the gameplay worse if bought, not a terrible idea that makes the gameplay worse unless bought.
Which is a very, very big difference.
There’s is no need for the microtransactions in the first place.
They don’t help you at all other than the first dozen hours, and the way they would help you will ruin your game curve.
The game isn’t designed around you having a portcrystal day one.
Edit: The game is a power fantasy. The whole point is you start out weak as shit where three goblins own you and you grow to the point you are using a half dozen weapons you’ve become a master in to kill dragons in seconds.
Buying more power at the beginning of that curve ruins the entire point of the game. This was CAPCOM execs saying “you need to put microtransactions in the game” and then the devs going “ok, how about this piece of junk over here players will have stacks of by endgame that could be a microtransaction.” And then the CAPCOM exec signing off who didn’t even play the game going “great, this will make shareholders happy.”
The only thing that’s useful is the portcrystal, and you will max out the number you can even use in a NG+ playthrough.
TLDR: Don’t buy the mtx and don’t use the mods either. These aren’t supposed to be part of your power curve in the game and were an afterthought that ruins the design if used.
See, this is the thing people don’t realize when they think generative AI is going to reduce headcounts overall.
Corporations suck. The entire reason they exist is because of the high transactional costs surrounding labor (there’s a Nobel winning economics essay on this from the turn of the 20th century called “the nature of the firm”).
They will reduce value and increase price as much as possible because they only exist to be a middleman between the consumer and the producer.
But right now there’s no alternative. It’s crazy expensive to make AA and up games so you need to target mass market appeal to get the money for it and usually need to crawl up finance bros’ asses who don’t even play games and look down on those who do.
That’s all about to change dramatically.
Co-op studio structures where employees are owners, smaller teams with large aspirations, franchises with small but dedicated fan bases - these largely died out in the 90s besides remnant very indie groups as transactional costs to produce a game went through the roof and those costs are about to turn around.
Yes, gen AI means less people are needed to make a game. But it doesn’t mean less people will be making games. It means there will be more games, and games coming from people with vision rather than coming from people with a quarterly statement they are trying to maximize.
Hello Games was a team of around a dozen people, and while it was a bumpy road, using procgen allowed them to build an entire universe. Well procgen and a whole host of other tools are about to suck a lot less and be much more accessible to even small studios to make ambitious games.
My hope is that we see things happen rapidly enough that many of the thousands of devs who have lost their jobs at mega-corps will be able to reorganize to take on the Goliaths and win rather than be forced to move on to other industries.
A shakeup is about to happen that’s going to destroy the season pass, micro transaction, soulless meat grinder that’s most large studio/publishers today - it’s just maybe ~3 years out from the inflection point of no return.
But one thing is for certain - most of the largest games companies are woefully unprepared for what’s coming and are about to be stepped all over like Blockbuster or Circuit City.
What this is really saying is “you people are insane, please stop writing us about it, we’re aware, and fine, we’re “looking into it” even though we were aware of this for a few years now and already checked with legal that there’s nothing we can do unless the creators really messed up in some way.”
I think you’re confusing the advantages and strategies of having a subscription and the advantages and strategies of having a loss leader.
Not all subscriptions are designed to be loss leaders, and most of the benefits you see in GamePass (lower or even negative revenue in exchange for increased market share) is seen over and over with loss leaders that aren’t subscriptions.
Yes, I agree that Microsoft has adjusted strategy from a focus on winning console wars to increasing software gatekeeping across PC and now apparently even competitor consoles. And that GamePass plays a large part in that.
But it would be a mistake to assume that subscriptions in games are all going to have the same goals and focus as Microsoft with GamePass.
Not really.
Video on demand works because the content is short and you need a large variety in a pay period as a consumer.
I don’t just watch one show or movie in a month, it’s several. So bundling makes sense.
It’s also fairly commoditized. I will watch what movies are available on Netflix, not like I’m extremely committed to watch a single given movie as long as the general selection is good. Maybe there’s one or two films a year I care about seeing that specific film before it rotates into a subscription service I subscribe to (and if not, meh).
For video games, it’s maybe one title a month that I really care about playing and then I only have time for that one game. But I only really care about setting aside time for that game and a lot of the other options out there you couldn’t pay me to play.
They are very different markets and a subscription model isn’t necessarily the future or even what’s most profitable for a company to offer (as Sony was recently acknowledging).
You do realize it isn’t staying the same, right?
There is no status quo with AI.
It’s within literal months that leaps are occurring that defy most expert expectations and predictions.
While yes, creative writing is not part of the target of where models are improving right now (and there are IMO clear mistakes being made with foundational models contributing to that poor performance), we’re probably less than one dev cycle from the best AI outperforming an above average video game writer with institutional integration of the models.
And really, people thinking this is going to put writers out of business are missing the true value add for publishers.
You’ll see the same amount of writers as before. What will change is the amount of writing.
Being able to have a core writing team do the normal work they do of writing out main and side quests and then feeding all that writing into a model spitting out side NPC dialogue fitting in with the events taking place allows developers to make their world come alive in ways previously only accessible to the largest budgets in the industry like RDR2.
This also allows games that are successful to transition into more of a live service product without needing to have a massive audience.
For most live service games, you need as many people as possible playing to justify dedicating resources to continued development, or you need a subscription fee. But niche products with a dedicated fan base which aren’t overly popular are too small to justify continuous content development.
With AI that equation changes. More games have the opportunity to keep players engaged longer for continuing adventures when a smaller team can use generative systems to flesh out the product.
Everyone praises No Man’s Sky for their continued development with a team of about a dozen putting more and more content out, but the other side of the coin is that they can only successfully deliver updates that feel weighty because they are leveraging procgen to extend their efforts.
Imagine the next version of FF online where not only is there a core main story everyone experiences, but there are also individualized stories woven into it that are shaped around your interactions. Where every NPC can be spoken to and any one of them might lead to your next individualized adventure. A world that feels at once epic and shared with millions of other players while also personal and unique just for you.
Even if the individual writing wasn’t as planned out as world event scenario writing from lead writers, I’d sure as hell prefer to spend $16/mo on a world with little repetition and endless adventures than a world that only has a hundred hours of story every year and is mostly running the same things over and over in between waiting for small bursts of content updates.
AI makes perfect sense for any live service provider, and Square Enix has one of the most successful live service products to date. Of course they are going to be investing into it as it rapidly improves.
I’m surprised I don’t see Alan Wake 2 as its own entry in the list so far.
I don’t like horror games, and I didn’t care that much for the first game, or even necessarily Control, but Alan Wake 2 was really impressive. Showcased the power of the format of video games for cinematic narrative in a way that raised the bar even higher than it’d been before, similar to how BG3 and TotK raised the bar in player choice and open ended game design.
And just such a visually striking game too.
It’s not the procedural generation that’s the problem.
It’s that they are building on top of a shit engine and so they only procedurally generated the landscapes and don’t procedurally generate the actual content.
So you will go to 25 different generated planets and then do the exact same output 25 different times. The exact same outpost. With the same crap in each room. The same exact layout.
The most extreme example of this ridiculousness is the temples with the exact same minigame hundreds of times on hundreds of plants in different playthroughs.
It’s not that it has procedural generation.
It’s that it doesn’t have enough of it to execute on the concept of a full and varied universe.
One: Link’s Awakening trademark
Two: Actually, per Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s supreme court decision, damages are limited to 3 years prior to the suit being filed with no recovery for earlier infringements.
Three: Capcom cease and desist less than a year ago - did you not even bother checking before confidently stating it ‘never’ happened?
Bethesda is owned by Zenimax, and an officially licensed mod scene is completely different.
If you want to run the mods for Bethesda’s games, you need the retail software to do so.
I guarantee that if a group was creating a Morrowind remake that didn’t require owning some Bethesda core game that was being modded to achieve that, Zenimax’s lawyers would be quick to be on top of the issue.
It’s not like there’s not examples where Bethesda’s lawyers caused mods to be shut down where it involved redistribution of Bethesda game assets without needing to buy the game.
which are not the norm across the industry for how IP issues are handled…
Go ahead and cite whatever you think the ‘norm’ is then.
Where else do you see publishers turning a blind eye to unlicensed remakes of their games?
The difference isn’t Nintendo being more legal trigger happy, it’s that their stuff is way more often being used in unlicensed ways so they come up more often in stuff like this.
But there’s a ton of examples of the same being the ‘norm’:
You must have an odd sense of ‘norm’
Edit: Also, it’s a bit more complicated in terms of IP, but it is relevant to future works.
For example, fictional characters.
Let’s take Mickey Mouse as an example. Steamboat Willie is entering public domain, so the protections on the character as defined in that work is entering the public domain. But characterization of the figure in works still under copyright that have added unique details are still protected.
But the test for infringement of a fictional character is twofold. (1) Can the figure be copyrighted? (2) Is there infringement of unique characteristics?
That second part becomes much more difficult to enforce if you’ve been allowing millions of variations of your protected character when you initial work defining the character is no longer enforceable.
So if LoZ on the NES enters the public domain making ‘Ganon’ as a pig usable by people, but since that game there’s been tons of spinoffs by others having Ganon as a human before Nintendo had Ganon as depicted in OoT, then they’d have a much harder time enforcing copyright on Ganon being depicted as a human even if Ganon as a pig was no longer under copyright.
No lawyer is going to say “yeah, let 3rd parties use your IP willy nilly, I’m sure it will be fine and not bite us in the ass later on.”
For example:
Copyright protection is effectively never lost, unless explicitly given away or the copyright has expired. However, if you do not actively defend your copyright, there may be broader unauthorized uses than you would like. It is a good idea to pursue enforcement actions as soon as you discover misuse of your copyright protected material.
Edit 2: Or the statute of limitations:
If you have experienced copyright infringement, you have the right to pursue a lawsuit. However, you only have a limited time frame during which to file a claim. This legal principle is called the “statute of limitations.” Ensuring that you file a claim to enforce your copyright within the statute of limitations is crucial. If you wait too long, you will lose the right to enforce your copyright and obtain your deserved damages.
So a fan project that you don’t enforce against for three years which eventually monetizes as competition without infringement trademarks would be a potential concern.
It’s less Nintendo and more shitty trademark and IP laws.
If you don’t aggressively go after anyone that is transgressing your IP, you can lose it.
IP really needs major and comprehensive reform. It’s not going to happen anytime soon as too much is built up around the status quo, but it really should be done.
The Rock, Paper review in particular seemed to resonate a lot with what I suspect I’d end up feeling when it talked about how glad the reviewer was to not have to keep playing the game any longer.
I don’t mind the core elements of Ubi’s design, but they’ve recently been cranking the dial on the repetition to 11 to the point I find myself exhausted by continuing to play their games to the end.
FC3 was the perfect amount of Ubisoft.
I was really hoping for something more like FC3 meets Avatar and not FC6/AC:Valhalla meets Avatar, which looking at the reviews is what they delivered.
In many cases yes (though I’ve been in good ones when playing off and on, usually the smaller the more there’s actual group activities).
But they are essential to be a part of for blueprints and trading, which are very core parts of the game.