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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • Do I think it’ll happen? Yes, even if it’s not good, because AAA companies are cheap and have no taste. They thrive on just spewing out more content than a smaller studio could make, quality be damned.

    That said, whether or not it COULD be useful in the future I think depends on the context and how well you could tune the models.

    I think it has absolutely no place in a narrative game where intentional authorship is what people come for. Even if it’s passable, I want to know that what I’m hearing or reading was something SOMEONE wanted to say.

    But I think it could be interesting in more open ended, replayable sim games where you want to be able to try a wide variety of approaches and have different experiences each time, but it would be impractical for a dev to implement all those possibilities to the point where players would feel like the game adequately responds to their actions. However, I don’t think you could just drop a copy of chat gpt in there and call it a day. You want different NPCs to be different and you want some consistent reality that they all exist in and respond to. So you’d probably need to put in some constraints based on some hidden file describing a particular world gen’s state. A basic example would be the NPC knowing that the town you asked about is to their north or perhaps an existing relationship between 2 characters.

    Idk how technically feasible this would be, but it’d be a cool tool in the right context if done right. I think the key here is it can be good when it enhances what you want to do and you put in the effort to make it work vs just using it as a lazy shortcut.





  • Oh god. I was reading through the page and this gem was down in the section on the response from healthcare companies:

    Another executive was quoted saying “What’s most disturbing is the ability of people to hide behind their keyboards and lose their humanity.”

    Says the people who hide behind keyboards, phone calls, employees, doctors, guards, police as they hurt people they don’t know. Talk about losing your humanity.






  • That’s the neat part, there isn’t!

    But being more serious: I think I can express the feeling of things being particularly worse now in a way that isn’t just recency bias.

    Sure, over time technology has improved and that’s generally speaking allowed for better standards of living, at least for the people at the right end of that technology. (Not so great if you’re being conquered because someone shows up with guns for example.) So you could look at the past and say it was worse because materially things like food availability and medicine have become better over time.

    But key to this was that all of this was a struggle of humans over nature. To the extent things were bad, there were tangible things we could do to improve.

    These days, so many of our problems are self-inflicted and technology and economic development mostly makes them worse. Climate change is the obvious big one, but then there’s stuff like:

    • Weapons have become increasingly destructive and centrally usable. A small number of people can cause a lot more damage than they ever could in the past.

    • Surveillance technology invades our privacy in a way that’s unprecedented in human history.

    • Automation, communications, and transportation technology have made workers less and less powerful and therefore more subject to abuse and artificial poverty. This is one of the more messed up things about capitalism. Technology gets better and rather than getting the benefits of that progress, it actually hurts a lot of people.

    • Advances in science and technology, particularly data science, allow the powerful to hyper-optimize the bad things they were always doing or enables them to do things they’ve wanted to do.

    • A financialized economy creates economic catastrophes where people go homeless or starve without any actual changes to material conditions. The numbers got screwed up or the investors panicked and now everything sucks for no reason?

    • More generally, we can produce enough of the necessities of life for everyone, but capitalism ensures that those necessities won’t make it to people. Capitalism depends on scarcity. If you had a house you wouldn’t need to pay a landlord. If you had food you wouldn’t need to pay food companies. If you had both you wouldn’t need to go work and put up with awful conditions. We’ve solved our most fundamental problems and yet because of the interests of the system and those in power, that progress gets held back.

    In the past, even if things were rough now, you could maybe look forward to them improving. Now it feels like the walls are closing in. Unless we actively do something about it, things are going to get worse for most people as more and more wealth accumulates in private hands, as we become subject to increasingly powerful forms of control, and as the powerful destroy the environment we need to live.


  • People are asses sometimes, but whenever these conversations come up, I wonder: What do you even want from us? How are random people on the internet supposed to hold random anonymous trolls on the internet “accountable?” You can call them asses, but so? What if they don’t care? They’re anonymous. You could get mods to ban them, but if it’s a free service they can always make another anonymous account. It’s even more confusing in the context of something like an online game as opposed to a forum. What are you supposed to do about someone being an ass when you’ve probably never seen them before and probably won’t see them again?


  • Elden Ring. Although that’s only because I didn’t want to start a whole new character for the DLC. Does Nier Automata count? All the extra playthroughs are kind of just part of the complete experience of the story. Then there’s harder difficulties of roguelikes like StS.

    Beyond that, I tend to not end up being that interested in a NG+ unless there’s something substantially different about it like new story beats or I can play a cool build.




  • I played through the game long after it had been patched up. I enjoyed it enough. When Phantom Liberty released I went back to start a new save to play it and after playing through the different character background introductory bit I realized it just wasn’t going to be that different of an experience the second time around. So I just loaded up my endgame save for the DLC. I had fun with that, but going around with a maxed out character blowing everything up with a shotgun definitely trivialized things.


  • Not a niche game, but: day (???) of waiting for Sony to put Bloodborne on PC.

    Also, this is a bit of a tangent, but I really wish Nintendo would start putting some of their games on PC. Not even so that I can play them, I do have a switch, but because there are quite a few of them that just don’t do well on console, either performance-wise or in terms of UX. For example, I’ve been playing the new Zelda game. The game’s core mechanic involves scrolling through a MASSIVE list of objects to find what you’re looking for and the best solution the game has for this is a handful of sorting options that only get you so far when there are just this many things. Without changing any of the gameplay, you could make the experience soooo much better by:

    • Letting you use a mouse on the menu.
    • Adding a basic search filter.
    • Letting you hotkey some echoes.

    Some games just deserve better treatment than what they got from the limitations of their original platforms.


  • Yeah I think you’re right to some extent. It’s definitely harder to get invested in the ones with no or less VA. However, I think there’s also something to be said for the tutorials/starts of these games. The Larian games I’ve played had relatively punchy tutorials that lead into a nice amount of structured freedom very early into the experience. Disco Elsyium also gets you into the the thick of things without much explicit tutorializing because it’s so mechanic light your “tutorial” ends up just being gradual introduction to your main characters, the setting, and the case, which is what you’re here for anyway.

    The other CRPGs have hit me with the double whammy of tutorials that lead me by the nose for way too long while also just dumping paragraphs of exposition on me that have almost nothing to do with the immediate characters or plot.

    EDIT: Thinking about it a bit more: While you don’t need all the voice acting and cinematic to make good, dramatic, character focused story bits, I think the converse is true: It would have been a waste to get all these great VAs only to have them stand around and dryly deliver exposition. So it kind of had to be very character focused if it was going to work and be worth the effort.

    Imagine how much worse the start of BG3 would be if you run into Laezel and you just stop for like 5 minutes while you exhaust all her dialgogue options so she can explain the entire history of the Gith and the Ilithid. Even fully voice acted that would have killed the pacing.