It would also require more optimized builds, leaving little wiggle-room for mistakes.

How?

For any set of stats, it wouldn’t matter if you got there at level 2 or level 20. Mudcrabs built for an optimized level 10 wouldn’t spawn just because you are level 10. They’d spawn when you’ve spent as many points as you would have, had you optimized to level 10.

The real issue would be “the Draugr are training” kinds of builds. If you put half your points into personality… the bandits did not.

you simply get a flat 12 points to spend every time you level up.

… that’s the wrong problem entirely! Complicated leveling was just another minigame to optimize.

If they wanted it to be painless, they could’ve leveled the world according to your total stats. Attack the player based on how much their numbers went up, instead of how often they went up.

The deeper problem in Oblivion was that you could blast goblins with a single fireball at level one, and then when you got stronger and put all your points in kill-stuff-harder attributes, the same fireball against the same goblins just tickled.

Wait what? They even said they fixed the leveling, in the announcement video! This was the one thing everyone agreed was broken, and it barely mattered which mod you chose to fix it, because all of them were an improvement. How’d they fuck this up twice?

Talked shit to some dunmer, didn’t know he was from Maar Gan.

Not including Abigail Thorn.

Hell yes, Coincident! Congratufuckinglations!

For anyone new to classic Doom runs: you can’t save. There are no i-frames. If two rockets arrive at your location, you just die. This map also has multiple platforming segments where falling off means death… in a game where you cannot jump. This map is not Kaizo Mario kinds of cruel, because Kaizo maps have a gimmick you’re supposed to perform. Some of the fights are pure “ha ha good luck.” There’s recently-unearthed footage of the designer personally beating like a fifth of the map, and even he’s just winging it.

For shorter introductions to ass-reamingly difficult maps, consider Zero Master’s speedruns of Sunder. E.g. Hollow Icon.

Doom.

It’s April. Have you looked outside lately? Reality’s pretty fucking green.

Oblivion is aggressively verdant. The fuck happened?

Brown RPG was the one before that!

Massively single-player. I like it.

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.

Ban the entire business model.

Entertainment is a tool for emotional manipulation - usually toward enjoyment. Fiction seeks suspension of disbelief and attachment to completely artificial interests and goals. Charging actual currency for anything under that fiction is an abuse. It’s exploiting your brain’s fuzzy separation of wants. However much you desire a goal in soccer, it’s just a ball going through some posts. It has no economic utility. There is no exchange rate between score and hamburgers.

Maximizing that mistake is the entire driving force of this industry-swallowing abuse. It’s half of all revenue. Boycotts don’t work. It’s in $70, flagship-franchise, single-player games. It costs nothing to add, even in games you already bought. Only legislation will fix this.

Now the usual excuses.

‘Just don’t pay them.’ The entire game is expertly crafted to make you crave whatever they’re charging for. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that’s what makes them games. Gently convincing you over time is the developer’s job.

‘You want it for free!’ You want it ‘for free.’ I want people to buy games. Like how it worked for forty years straight.

‘But servers need money.’ This shit’s in World Of Warcraft - a subscription MMO. You think Blizzard is hurting?

‘But arcades–’ were renting someone else’s machine. Your own phone doesn’t get to charge you a quarter per minute.

‘But cosmetics–’ are still an engineered desire which can be denied until you pay more money.

‘But budgets–’ follow revenue, always always always. It has never been easier to make a game. Companies choose to spend millions because they expect to make billions.

‘Well it’s better value.’ This bullshit makes them more money… and they get the money from you… so this “free” bullshit costs you more money. You get it? In no reality should it be possible to pay the price of a whole-ass game for one imaginary hat.

This machine deserved so much better. It was supposed to be a lightweight headset, until Japanese liability laws became absolute, and it turned out misaligned images could make children crosseyed. Hence the battery-powered desk unit containing a piddly mobile CPU and a solid steel rail.

G-Zero alone would have been sick.

By design. That’s… that’s literally what these games are for. You’re supposed to be addicted and frustrated until you fork over real money.

All the mechanisms that games use to make your brain do the happy juice are kept behind the part where you pay real money over and over.

Should be simple to do better than the sound designers over at Riot

Your explicit argument is that “better” isn’t the standard, when it comes to cranking out textures or whatever. But suddenly when it’s your thing - there’s no possible way that passable results could work. Disruptive change won’t affect your profession, because good-enough audio never happens in video games, a medium obsessed with escalating… audio quality? No, right, graphics. The thing you figure AI will be awesome for, when someone needs two hundred variations, to-day. And when that demand becomes reasonable there’s no fucking way the studio will demand two thousand.

I mean, you clearly know more than me

‘You’re being a hypocrite, judged on your own statements, in this thread alone.’

‘YOU THINK YOU’RE BETTER THAN ME AT EVERYTHING?!?!?!’

Jesus.

I consider myself pretty positive about the potential for generative AI, especially in game development, and it’s still embarrassing watching you aggressively fail to handle polite criticism. You lurched in with ‘I bet people will downvote my lukewarm take!’ and then got big mad when that happened. Like it was a surprise.

This latest comment is an open wound of grievances which I, personally, didn’t say a god damned word about. You’re just showing your whole ass over… cut content? For some reason? Who asked. And you’re trying to turn measured pushback regarding your sweeping claims into some chest-beating dominance-game, where one of us has to go away humiliated and quintessentially stupid forever, instead of just saying - oh, guess that was a slight overreach, whoopsie daisy.

My condolences to anyone who works under you. However good you are at your job, the way you handle disagreement is demonstrably miserable. Please get better at it.

More importantly: don’t make games that rely on runaway success.

If your game is fun even if only a dozen people buy it, great! If it requires ten thousand global players right out the gate, and will cease to function once that number drops, you are fucked, by design.

If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t theft.

Ahhh, fuck. I didn’t know that’s where they found Doug Bowser.

But it’ll never apply to what you do, because you’re special and that’s different.

Nuance nuance nuance! Plagiarism machine. Zero cognitive dissonance.

Generated content is great, it lets you go home early and fuck your wife! But let me ask you, novice: would YOU ever play a game with generated content?

This whole industry makes impossible broken demands, isn’t it just the tits? We’d never make games under-budget if not for this tech that I myself said was useless shite until just now. There’s no way increased productivity will also be crunched to demand 2000 textures in this eighty-hour week.

Obviously that scaling for selection doesn’t apply to MY job, because AI will never do what I do, unlike how I think it can handle everyone else’s work. Everyone insisting I’m not superior to all these NPCs I work with must not experience nuuuaaance.

Did Nintendo recently buy EA?

This is what I’m talking about: an unwillingness to see anything but finished products. Not developing the content in a big-ass game… just adding stuff to a big-ass game. Like BG3 begins fully-formed as the exact product you’ve already played.

Like it’d be awful if similar new games took less than six years, three hundred people, and one hundred million dollars.

Oh my god you’re still trying to have it both ways.

Demonstrating some crazy idea always confuses people who expect a finished product. The fact this works at all is sci-fi witchcraft.

Video generators offer rendering without models, levels, textures, shaders-- anything. And they’ll do shocking photorealism as easily as cartoons. This one runs at interactive speeds. That’s fucking crazy! It’s only doing one part of one game that’d run on a potato, and it’s not doing it especially well, but holy shit, it’s doing it. Even if the context length stayed laughably short - this is an FMV you can walk around in. This is something artists could feed and prune and get real fuckin’ weird with, until it’s an inescapable dream sequence that looks like nothing we know how to render.

The most realistic near-term application of generative AI technology remains as coding assistants and perhaps rapid prototyping tools for developers, rather than a drop-in replacement for traditional game development pipelines.

Sure, let’s pretend text is all it can generate. Not textures, models, character designs, et very cetera. What possible use could people have for an army of robots if they only do a half-assed job?

And yeah yeah yeah, it does a mediocre job of whatever you do. That’s the opposite of safety. Disruptive change only cares about whether it can do the job. Already the answer seems to be a soft yes.

Right now is the worst the tech will ever be, again.

When it’s other people’s work, well, people need a nuanced opinion about this nascent technological breakthrough.

When it’s your specific area of expertise, it’s “the plagiarism machine.”

You are Knoll’s law personified.

It’s fundamentally a make-shit-up device. It’s like pulling words out of a hat. You cannot get mad at the hat for giving you poetry when you asked for nonfiction.

Get mad at the company which bolted the hat to your keyboard and promised you it was psychic.

ryujinx’s creator got a big check to stop

Yeah, his kneecaps and zero cents.

It felt good to get in, it felt good to get out.

Which is to say: being the prettiest fish in a drying pond feels great until you’re dead.

Beats people who have the mic nowhere near their face. 4K video! Sounds like a bathroom.

Fuck software patents.

Is the embedded video part of the Lemmy update? That’s a mixed bag.

I’m pretty sure the quote is from that webcomic, but it would have been across three panels.

Honestly the single-panel version works at least as well.

… A Softer World?

Like a co-op NPC?

… oh no. Clippy is back.

… why would it not work as-is?

Nobody’s gonna forget what you fumbled, Konami.

The entire business model is a scam.

All counterarguments have been bickering about word choice when tricking people out of their money, or glibly endorsing tricking people out of their money.

And NOTHING HAS CHANGED in twenty years - yeah? Not a fucking thing that should shift how they release games. Consoles are still sooo different from PCs, with their AMD x64 CPUs and AMD RDNA GPUs.

It works better now than Discord will later.

It sounds like they already had a safe harbor even if they didn’t jump when a company said so.