Nice visuals, but the gameplay is very basic; kill 4 slimes, find 3 mcguffins, etc.

I'd say 'nothing to see here' but it's really the opposite... only things to see, nothing to play here. Move along. Move along.

The main developer is the composer for Minecraft, C418.

What's (relatively) new, however, is the over the top in-yo-face DEI bullshit where they put a black dude as a main in a Samurai game ffs.

I assume you're talking about Yasuke, a "well-documented historical figure with a strong claim to the title of Japan’s first non-Japanese samurai" who was in the latest Assassin's Creed game? Note that this article mocking people like you is Japanese, and despite the culture being famously racist and bigoted against outsiders they too agree that yes, there was a real black samurai, and westerners trying to deny that "know nothing about Japan in most cases and certainly know nothing about the Japanese language and the terminology they’re talking about".

They didn't 'add a black samurai' for DEI, they included a real person from history who existed for realsies in the time period their game was set.

My mother (in her 70s) is so stoked to finally have a house in WoW. Housing was the only reason she even entertained looking at other games like LOTRO and FFXIV at all.

AlexSledge wrote on Dec 24, 2024, 17:52:
This whole AI thing, people keep forgetting computers are math. And NOTHING but math, and developer opinions on what the code should do about that math.

You're 100% right about that. The issue is that you haven't proven that what we do in our minds isn't, at the basic physical level of neurons, also equivalent to math. You've just taken it as a magical assumption that our brains couldn't possibly be math because... reasons?

I agree that AGI isn't here yet, and LLMs are likely only a subset of what will be necessary to produce AGI. I also believe that the alignment problem is a serious issue, and we are treading dangerous territory as the various AI companies scramble to outdo each other, releasing untested models on the populace without ensuring safety first. They're already releasing the first agents, which can take action on our behalf (terribly bad and inefficient still, but...).

But I believe it's wrong to dismiss these advances because 'it's math'. I'm very sorry, but nothing about how we think is magic, or ineffable. Every time we've thought that humans were doing something special and unique and in defiance of algorithms, we later learn more and are able to replicate that algorithm in a computer. Math is reality, and to dismiss the current advances in AI because it's 'just math' is to ignore the very real risks inherent in AI and future AGI.

I'm expecting a lot of problems, to be honest. Anytime a development team switches engines it's really hard. Thousands of hours experience with tools gets wasted. Experienced devs become novices in new tools.

Hope it works out for them.

I've been following Unknown Worlds since they were just a mod team. I bought their tiny Sudoku app that they released just to bring in a little revenue while they were trying to get Subnautica out the door. It's really gratifying to see a team go from a struggling indie startup to releasing one of the best games of their decade.

I hope this succeeds. The physics in Subnautica have always been pretty floaty; I hope they can nail that down a bit for multiplayer.

The only people who dislike SBMM are those who need to stomp noobs to have a good time. This is the same mindset held by players who smurf or employ cheats to have fun. It's childish and indefensable.

$35 is pricey for an addon... and they will not have a sale (Wube is anti-sale), so that's the price it'll always be. So the game + addon is likely to be $70.

Regardless of the price, I'll buy it, because the game is literally without peer. There is no factory game that has yet to equal its accessibility, difficulty curve, and balance. But I'm hesitant to label the pricing decision 'smart'. We'll see.

Can you clarify what's broken for you? I'm pretty close to bug free; they even fixed a long-standing issue I had with monitor scaling.

Silent Bob wrote on May 3, 2024, 11:37:
If Private Division had a plan, they should have at least released some details as soon as possible.

I don't get your point. What you're saying is that, while they're clearing off their desks into cardboard boxes they should be simultaneosly posting their future plans for... lunch? There IS no future plans for any of them, they're fucking fired.

Take 2 has secured their position, along with Bethesda and EA, as yet another soulless corporate content mill.

They aren't splitting, they're rebranding. The owners still own 40% voting in all three companies, enough to force most votes to go the way they want. It's just a bullshit fake rebrand to wipe some of the stain of 'Embracer's bad name.

I'm not sure that it's 100% bullshit. There's a reason that three of the longest running and most successful live service games are run by Valve (Counter Strike, Team Fortress, and DotA 2). I play a lot of DotA myself, and there is value in a competetive game that keeps changing and evolving to stay interesting and new. I don't play it, but Fortnite's success is bluntly obvious.

The issue is less about live service as a business model, and more about live service as a game design goal. I think most people would agree that designing a game with long-term monetization as your primary design goal is likely to fail. I think that creating good games first, and then transitioning them to a long term sustainability model after release may be a better long term goal.

It's the same problem in the movie industry... they started out making one-off movies, then sequalizing the good ones (usually... let's ignore Back to the Future). The Matrix is a good example. But then The Avengers live-serviced their sequals and spinoffs, and a bunch of other studios tried to make movies that had sequals built-in to the script. Instead of telling the story they wanted to tell, they told some of the story and tried to sell the resolution in a sequal. The end result was just an unsatisfying movie that didn't do well.

Prez wrote on Apr 5, 2024, 20:14:
does this sound like what any of the robotic money whores beholden to their shareholders sound like?

While that's often true, I would like to point out the counter example of John Legere. Was T-Mobile really better than all the other carriers? Probably not. But their CEO really did a good job of not sounding like a typical CEO drone, whether or not it was PR lies or truth.

Whoopsie, sorry... gave him too much credit there. PA did give 10K to a charity in challenge to Jack (for which he reported them for harassment, because he's a douche). However, Child's Play was created a couple years earlier than that, in response to al article by Bill France about how games were training killers. Same tripe as Jack spewed, but a couple years earlier.

Remember that Jack Thompson, indirectly, created Child's Play... by being such an idiot that the Penny Arcade team wanted to prove to him how wrong he was by creating a charity all about giving games to kids (including violent ones, because fuck you Jack).

only the legendary Sword of Motion him.

Seems like you (or they) accidentally a word or two. 'will defeat' perhaps?

While this is a nifty idea, in theory, there are two significant problems with it:

• Minor NPC dialog is how voice actors break into the business and pay the rent. This kind of generative dialog for all the 'unimportant' side dialog is going to eliminate the entry level voice acting jobs, putting a long term damper an that entire industry.
• It's going to run into the same hallucination issues all generative AI has. In the next year we're going to have videos where the NPC spouts racist bullshit, endorses Trump for president, praises the Gaza genocide, and offers to suck the player's dick after some leading prompts from the PC.

Despite that, I think that there's no avoiding these changes in the long term, and within a decade this will be commonplace. However, like any tool, I think some developers will do it well and some won't like the difference between Bioware and CD Projekt cutscenes.

Paradox isn't perfect, but I think they do one thing very well: Release a product, then keep updating it for years while simultaneously monetizing it via optional expansion packs. They're incentivised to make the product good enough that you want to keep coming back and keeping it fresh with new content. They don't do live service bullshit (aka, make the product bad and release DLC that patches the badness). They release a game, then release content for the game. They don't deliberately release half a game then fix the holes with DLC... though it certainly felt that way for some people with City: Skylines II.

Is all the content worth it? Not for me. I bought some of the Stellaris expansions, and skipped others. I think I only got one of the DLC for the original Cities Skylines, but I also played it less than Stellaris.

About half the expansions are worthwhile (IMO) the others are not. Notably, I should add the caveat that an expansion is worthwhile if it'll make a handful more playthroughs exciting and new. Since a full game takes me 30+ hours (I'm slow), that's a pretty good ROI for a $5-$10 expansion.

If you're still playing regular rounds of Stellaris (which I think is the best 4X game in existence) then the expansions are probably worthwhile. If you played a couple games and it didn't gel with you, or if you never finished a game, then of course the expansions aren't targeted at you.

That said, I'm confused about the current one; we already have machine intelligences... I don't get what the new one is going to add. The trailer explained nothing. *shrug* Not every expansion is a success.