This is my main concern about the game. With tech that moves this quickly, you have to understand that game companies who are established are living on the very edge of that debt.

Like starfield for example. Who knows how old it’s code is from the start of its development. It’s why Bethesda games break frequently and crash often. When you develop games on a 8-10 year cycle, think of how many hardware generations that is. 3 to 4 right? So when you’re talking about building an engine, then running it and building a game, then supporting it, all over the coarse of 15-20 years of coding? It’s a giant mess to program and there’s no way in hell it can be optimized properly.

Not to mention the massive task of upgrading the game as new hardware and new engine features arrive.

This week is going great actually. I’m on a beeline for graduation this December and so I’ve mostly got my head down currently. Hoping to get admitted into grad school to keep going after this.

Some interesting things about my week: I spent most of yesterday modeling aquifers and aquifer systems. I know most people probably don’t know much about aquifers or how they work but it’s a lot more complicated than being an underground lake.

And anxiety is getting to me about graduation. Mostly because of family. Half of which do not know I’m bisexual and are pretty homophobic, so I’m thinking it won’t be worth it to have my boyfriend in attendance. Which is really rough on me. I know I should just tell them and they can pound sand if they don’t like it, but at the same time I don’t see them often and it puts my bf in an awkward spot. So he’s urging me to just let him stay home so he doesn’t have to be around that. And that’s a lot to process. I’m also inviting my dad who hasn’t talked to me since May when he found out. Who knows if he will show up.

And before anyone worries too much, I’m not like heartbroken about this. Homophobia just confuses me. All I can do is mitigate its effects but I’m always very confused why I even have to deal with it.

I won’t tell people what to do with their money, but it’s clear people have bought in to both of these games existing. And if it were my money, I’d want to believe in these devs. But for the rest of us, these games need to materialize as functional and fully featured releases for us to care.

And I don’t think the timeline is crazy so far with their development. What’s wild to me is thinking that a newly founded studio, even a well funded one, can knock out a competent single player and MMO with these scopes. It’s slim chances from an outsiders perspective.

Take a look at what mature and well funded studios are putting out in 2023. The likes of Starfield are actually some of the better cases. I know the incentives are different, but still. So I’m expecting a lot of tooling to need to be done for both these games to exist and exist at an enjoyable playability by the end of the 20s.

Anyways, im not trying to kill enthusiasm for people who enjoy interest in the project but to everyone outside of that, this isn’t reassuring. All large scope games should be considered to be nonexistent until they hit reviewers hands at this point.

I still kind of doubt it’s going anywhere fast. Because a game with this scope has already signed up for some pretty massive post-launch support. Let’s be generous and say it takes them another 2-3 years to develop this single player and another 5-6 to finish star citizen. That’s very generous.

They started pre-production in 2010. So it’s already been 13 years of development with near unlimited money on SC. So again, add 5 years till a mainstream launch and another 3-5 years of active support and you’ll be well over two decades deep in a single games development. That’s half of someone’s career to develop one game. Now we add another game on top of this.

The other game is admittedly much easier to develop but still it will take massive amounts of support. If Bethesda can’t do it well, why does anyone think this dev can and in such good time? I have my doubts.

I actually think these apps are perfectly fine, I just think that you should have to request the location from the phone and then that request also alerts the kid.

I’ll paint a different picture for parents in this thread. Gen Z does not have adequate social spaces in which to exist. So when you say “hey I’m going to track you” it’s like oh cool, track me going where exactly? To basketball practice and back? Or to the mall so you can know which store I’m in?

Parents are gaining more and more control over their kids and I don’t think it’s good. They aren’t independent people. As a kid I hated having zero autonomy, it sucked. So all this is achieving is making kids feel like it’s less hassle to just stay at home and play video games.

Currently emulating the old Crash Team Racing as I make my way through most of the Crash Bandicoot games. The racing game is pretty hard as racing games go.

Still working on Divinity Original Sin 2. Game is fun and it’s a lot better than #1 in that series. It’s a large time investment but I do love the game.

I think people don’t often factor in that time in a game is just as much or more a cost than money is.

If I make it super nerdy, my equation for games would be more like fun / (money cost + time cost). But really I don’t actively quantify these things, I just have a sense of it.

The other thing id say is that games recently are being judged more on how they respect the players time. The max game money cost is locked in at $70, likely for a long time. So the thing being optimized right now is the fun/time part. Not respecting the players time is one of the worst crimes a game can commit in my opinion.

That’s what I’m hearing about games like Starfield and it’s always been a criticism for games like assassins creed. Like they’re fun games, but the time investment is far too large for what they offer.

The reason it doesn’t apply to sim games or city builders is because you are largely in control of how best your time is spent. That’s why open world games used to rule Steam for a long time and still somewhat do.

Anyways that’s my rant.

Okay so I fully agree on the use of better AI in games as competitors. The AI in games, though sometimes complex, is lacking in a lot of major games and the difficulty setting just basically amps up their damage and health instead of causing them to outplay you.

I think there are two solutions to better competitive games that reduces cheating and they’re already somewhat at work.

The first solution is implementing AI to detect cheating which has been done but very limited in scope. This will require more data collection for the user, but I fully support that if you’re being competitive and not playing casually. Why? Because in person sports also collect plenty of data on you, often even more invasive, to make sure you aren’t cheating. This can be done in collaboration with Microsoft actually because they have the ability to lock down their OS in certain ways while playing competitive games. They just haven’t bothered because no one asks. Same with Linux potentially if someone wanted to make that.

The second important improvement is to raise the stakes for someone who plays any sort of Esport game. I’m reminded of Valve requiring a phone number for CSGO because it’s easy to validate but raises the difficulty and price of cheating and bans. Having a higher price for competitive games is also entirely possible and also raises the stakes to cheat. The less accounts cheaters can buy, the better. Should it ask for a social security card? No. But I think that system bans based on hardware and IP are also important. You can also improve the value/time put into each account to make it more trustworthy. If a person plays CS for thousands of hours, make their account worth something.

And a minor third improvement would be: match people with more matches/xp/hours with other people of similar dedication at similar skill levels. That means cheaters will decrease the more you play and a cheater would have to play for far longer with cheats undetected to get to that point.

There’s plenty that can be done, companies are just doing almost nothing about the problem because cheaters make them money.

Haha I haven’t ever gone that far, I wish I could do that. I’m at university but I can’t let too much slip since I’m trying to head for grad school. Just have to muster the effort to finish the next 6-7 weeks till finals are here. But thanks for the motivation!

Currently drowning in school work but I’m about to graduate so I’m just pushing myself through.

Currently shopping for a new graphics card as a grad gift actually. I’m leaning toward something similar to the rx 7800xt which would be my first AMD card. It’s hard to argue with the numbers, especially since I don’t expect to be using ray tracing or DLSS for at least a couple years.

Overall, struggling to stay motivated and very sleep deprived. It’s my fault though, I need to return to meditation

Well, an oil spill is still probably worse. Depends on volume of spilled oil. Also depends on if that oil is replaced by using renewables.

The typical spill playbook is to slowly clean this up while also creating emissions elsewhere and also disrupting the environment more to repair the pipeline or whatever alternative they have.

And for good reason. If they trusted user input and took it at face value even for just the current conversation, the user could run wild and get it saying basically anything.

Also chatGPT not having current info is a problem when trying to feed it current info. It will either try to daydream with you or it will follow its data that has hundreds of sources saying they haven’t invaded yet.

As far as covering the companies ass, I think AI models currently have plenty of problems and I’m amazed that corporations can just let this run wild. Even being able to do what OP just did here is a big liability because more laws around AI aren’t even written yet. Companies are fine being sued and expect to be through this. They just think that will cost less than losing out on AI. And I think they’re right.

I like how Americans are treated like some special class. As if the US hasn’t had collateral damage in their attacks that harm citizens of other countries. The US just uses it as a very weak reason to get more involved…

It really isn’t. Many salient points here that you breezed over. Focus on the US because that’s who we need to fix right now. Solar panel waste is a big problem. Does the US recycle them? Or anything? No not really. They recycle 10% of them.

Now that doesn’t kill the idea, but I would need to see the US sign laws to recycle them or improve that rate before I’d believe that the panels wouldn’t end up wasted.

Next: wind turbines killing bird populations is real even if it’s a minor concern because it stacks on everything you mentioned. Our estimates aren’t great but the ecological impact of these turbines is not well understood over the whole of the US. I like them more than solar, sure, and they’re better than fossil fuels absolutely. Just wish we can understand that these two have issues we need to solve to deploy them everywhere.

As for the land comparison, that’s not a great statistic. The parking lots will only get bigger in the US, I promise. Cars are too prevalent. Maybe in 30 years, not now though. So we have to increase land use. I have yet to see US cities do much more than putting the turbines on pasture land and they usually choose undeveloped land in the middle of nowhere. So yes, valid concern.

The thing about transport is fine if they’re equal, I’m not about to fight you on something you’re this passionate about.

As for the uranium ore extraction problem, my point is that it’s a problem that the west actually has a chance at fixing. They can mine their own uranium, they can find other sources. Meanwhile china owns most of the solar power production. Most of the panels are made by slaves. The cobalt mines involve entire countries worth of human rights issues.

I don’t dislike the use of solar and wind, I just feel that the takes here have been far from balanced when nuclear has some real advantages if you’re being honest about the weaknesses of current renewables.

Frankly I bought the Batman series just to support them and I’ll be buying the walking dead series bundle for the same reason. They have to release new stuff though and that’s going to be really really hard to do because they have to make a game that follows up on a major IP that they own from the old company and also make it really well. Not super likely.

That said, the original death of the company before was rough and was mostly about them expanding and not getting more funding. But the business model was also flawed imo. They forgot to significantly upgrade their games and the first big series, TWD, was the best written one. After that, flat.

If you want to know why they struggle, look at supermassive. Those guys eat telltales lunch and dominate the space. Is there room for both? Probably. But they’ve really got to deliver something killer with the new games or they’re dead again.

While I agree that these renewables can be effective, they have many problems that stop me from supporting them over nuclear even at a lower cost.

We aren’t recycling solar panels enough, so I’m not optimistic that heavy metals won’t be polluting our dirt in the future. Wind still is killing birds and uses massive amounts of land. And that’s before we get into the cost of transporting these things from china which requires pollution from shipping and also kills wildlife. And then on top of that, there’s a very real human rights problem as solar currently is made mostly by slaves at multiple steps in the supply chain.

Extremely busy. I’m putting in 50 or so hour weeks doing school work but so far, the grades are actually coming out okay. This week and next are exam weeks though so I’ll have to report back after that. Hope everyone is doing well this week tho :)

I don’t think that we need to continue to “think” it’s bad for the games industry. It IS bad for the industry. Period. Very famously, obsidian got less money and lost out on a bonus from the initial release of fallout NV because it didn’t hit 80 on metacritic. We need to stop pretending these scores are objective or reflect anything about user enjoyment of a game. Users maybe, but the critic score is worse than useless. It’s downright misinformation to aggregate critic scores.

Like the entire point of critics is to provide different perspectives on a game. Why would I want their average? The average of their opinion is not the average gamer opinion and it also isn’t the average of the individual readers opinion.

I need no further proof than go look up the last 5 games you played on metacritic and try to guess the critic and user score and get within 5 points each time.

Take a read of this summary (by IGN) of their Madden 22 review:

“ Madden NFL 22 is a grab bag of decent – if frequently underwhelming – ideas hurt by poor execution. Face of the Franchise, to put it mildly, is a mess. Homefield advantage is a solid addition, but it doesn’t quite capture the true extent of real on-field momentum swings. The new interface is an eyesore, and the new presentation is cast in a strange and unflattering shade of sickly green. It’s smoother and marginally more refined, but in so many ways it’s the same old Madden. In short, if you’re hoping for a massive leap forward for the series on the new generation of consoles (or on the old ones), you’re apt to be disappointed”

Now, I want you to read that and ask what you’d rate it based on this info (or the whole review).

IGN has a scale approximately this: 10. Masterpiece 9. Excellent 8. Great 7. Good 6. Okay 5. Mediocre

I don’t think I need to tell you that the user reviews for this game don’t even reach mediocre. Not to mention the gambling inclusion that IGN doesn’t take seriously in any sports game it reviews. But IGN still called Madden 22 a 6 or an “okay” game.

I’m not saying they’re lying necessarily but the result is the same. The honest critiques are ignored to keep receiving review codes. That score should be left out entirely but they refuse because it drives clicks. It’s a joke.

Ratings. Are. Stupid.

When it comes to movies and audience scores, sure, look at the rotten tomatoes score or whatever. But everyone should realize that the average score of EVERY CRITIC is just going to be a useless number.

Not only that but reviewers who represent entire companies like the people at IGN and elsewhere aren’t giving an honest opinion. I know this because a few of them have given their honest opinion before. They got fired for low scores.

This is the reason that I enjoy watching reviews from people like ACG or SkillUp. They don’t need to give a score because their opinion isn’t a number. Enjoyability isn’t a number. Both of those reviewers enjoy games slightly different than I do, but when I watch their reviews I get a sense of if I will enjoy them.

Seriously if you go to outlets who give scores on games commonly, stop. Very little time is put into choosing these numbers and they reflect nothing about enjoying a game for you personally. Go watch a review from ACG or SkillUp. Outlets like IGN or PCGamer can’t hold a candle to these guys.