Finally someone tackles the lack of quantity in the video game market.
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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As someone who is into CRPGs I swear to fuck y'all are drowning while we have a nice comfy supply of Kentucky bourbon. The immersive sim guys are ripping up floor boards looking for anything and licking the condensation off of pipes.
I'm so thirsty my dude
Go play Deus Ex for the 1,567 time, itll hold ya over.
I feel called out by this but also so seen.
I guarantee 5-10 years from now, those same companies will be complaining that development is not happening fast enough, more developers will burn out, and this cycle will repeat again. Thus starts the new search for speeding things up yet again. The problem is that capitalism demands infinite growth and that translates to speed. So nothing will ever truly be fast enough to meet the demands of people that need their 5th vacation home.
I’m a programmer and I’ve been telling people this for a while now. You will never be fast enough. That’s not a jab or a criticism; it’s the reality of work demands under capitalism. It’s why when a manager constantly says we need to be faster, I start job searching again.
We are witnessing the stage of capitalism where innovation has peaked. That’s why we see ads permeating everything; why live services are in so many games; why data hoarding and required account login is in everything; why we have a seemingly never ending stream of remakes and reboots no one asked for. Capitalism has made it so that there is no time or space for truly new ideas and they instead milk what they can from what already exists.
Innovation has peaked? Didn't we just get AI? Is that not one of the largest innovations to occur in recent time?
It’s constantly proving to be a massive disappointment, at least in the hands of capitalists.
You haven't used Cursor yet, have you?
Never used that one but I use Copilot daily and have tried similar. Copilot has gotten considerably worse since I started using it (I think because they mixed in ChatGPT results), so I rely on it very little.
These tools make people too dependent upon them, similar to how a lot of us can no longer navigate without map software. It feels like I’m slowly building my own coffin the more I use AI to write my code.
Aside from that, when you start to dig into the energy and water consumption required to run these things, it’s kind of insane.
Yeah but that's only because business people usually have zero knowledge of science or technology in any way. They know as much about what AI actually does as your grandma. It's going to take years before AI is ready to start really replacing workers in anything. But that doesn't stop the hype train from trying to convince everyone its right around the corner.
But the point is that it shouldn’t replace people. I’ve been a programmer for 20+ years and there’s nothing that will make me want to work with tools I know can eventually replace me or someone else. Aside from that, the energy usage is getting batshit insane while we’re all in the midst of a climate crisis.
Today on "games I'll never play"...
Total Sony death.
Sounds like a desperate attempt to keep shareholders happy after they admitted how far they are from having more first party titles.
PS5 is such a failure. They will make a lot of money from it, but it's the generation that ruined PlayStations strong brand and trust
Wish they would instead use it to create NPCs with actual depth and the ability to respond more naturally instead of the same lines over and over
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.
You might be interested in Vaudeville (Steam Store)
It's interesting how this plays. Maybe check some let's plays to get a feel. But this could become a very cool way to interact with games.
Reviews definitely don't paint a good picture of it.
Yeah, game devs apparently did some shit, but that's not the point. Look up some let's play of it and see how you like the interaction.
You can use pyramid fragments and alien technology, I'm not touching playstation/sony products with a borrowed dick.
Really jamming that stick in the old spokes
They’re going to increase the amount of shovelware in the PlayStation Store at a geometric rate.
So back when we were waiting for Guild Wars 2 to release, a youtuber named WoodenPotatoes was invited to Arenanet to review the progress. He noticed in his videos that he saw several devs working on animations that were really not that important but would be immediately be noticed missing. His example was drawing and stowing weapons. With 5 races am a good dozen weapons this took an incredible amount of time. Now imagine that you can train an AI to do this and only have animators polish the result. A lot of time saved for more important stuff.
You think a game has not enough models or all the faces look alike? Not enough hair? Let an AI take care of that and have designers polish the result.
The forest doesn't look organic and too constructed? Have an AI naturally grow the forest. Wait, there are plenty of games already doing that. When CEOs talk about speeding up game development they don't mean to push out generic games fully developed by AI (well some might mean that) but to tackle the aspect of game development that slow the entire process down but not adding quality.
Given that Starfield took what? 8 years to development and resulted in a (according to the internet pretty bad) generic aged science fiction RPG. I'd prefer some AI supported development when the overall quality increases and AAA game development is not longer a decade long project.
There is plenty of bad things to say about AI but it does offer improvements.
AAA games don't have a production quality or even a development time problem. They have a far more existential one. A gameplay focus problem. These are games made with profit as first priority, not fun. They have confused engagement and addiction with gameplay quality. Live services poisoned their design language. This is why they want more, faster, at higher budgets. The fallacy is that more, faster, more graphically demanding, will magically make them all the money.
I want less games, with lower budgets, that take longer to make, have less graphic and animation fidelity, that pay better to their devs to do their job well. And I mean it.
The video games market is already overflowed for its size, yet somehow these companies are inflating their budgets like balloons instead and charging ever more and more for shittier games that somehow cost more to make. This isn't sustainable. AI won't fix any of these issues.
I find myself buying almost exclusively from indie devs lately. They make games that still have a soul and aren’t driven by this stupid mentality that better looking magically equals more engaging gameplay.
There are probably a ton of devs in the video game world that were once passionate about making games, that have since been burned out by the industry’s grueling demands. AI is a bandage on a far bigger existential problem and that real problem is capitalism.
If I see a game that costs $70-100 now, I drive right past it. So many of those high dollar AAA turn out to be absolute duds that have live service and other BS jammed into them that some suits in a boardroom thought up.
If you truly break it down, you'll notice that AAA only actually makes two or three games, open world third person action RPG with parkour, open world shooter with looting and crafting, and live-service coop/competitive shooter with loot boxes. Every iteration of these same ideas are just varnishing the same bored gameplay concepts over and over with different coats of theming and slightly different stories. I only ever find original and stimulating gameplay on indie projects and the occasional small studio. They're the only ones actually experimenting with innovative game design and varied concepts.
Yeah, 100%. They don’t build games first; they build a profit framework and then build a game around that.
you can already do that with regular tools, you dont need ai bullshit for his
and ai writing would create even more generic bethesda rpg than any person could even dream of, are you huffing some techbro fumes?
Not huffing anything, strict non smoker here. I'm just working in a non games tech area and can see, how two ML OPs developers do the work of 10 engineers. Work that those engineers never wanted to do in the first place that took up the vast majority of their time and prevented them from doing their actual work, preventing catastrophic failures of large industrial factories.
We totally agree on AI writing but there is way more than this to AI.
And "AI bad" is en Par with "ThAt's sOciaLiSm". I'd rather reap the benefits and manage and regulate the risks of a new technology than to condemn it completely because I don't like certain parts of it
For me personally, the solution I prefer to see for “Our idea for this game is shaping up to be packed full assets that will swamp development” is for them to find some excuse to cut the content. Genuinely. Artistry thrives in the presence of limitations.
Have an AI naturally grow the forest. Wait, there are plenty of games already doing that
What games out of curiosity? You don’t just mean normal procedural generation which has been around forever? It’s not the same as using AI to generate a million different haircuts.
The first game I saw with advanced logic was Far Cry 3. The devs would simulate how tree spread, die and wither and then let this run for hundreds of generations. Then they would alter the forest to fit in buildings und other stuff
The animation stuff you mentioned exists today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt1yNJ180Cs
this is the sane way to use AI, let it to mundane tasks so people can do more rewarding and fun stuff. unfortunately for most CEOs and shareholders, AI=how many employees can I fire and replace with AI.
Can you imagine them investing all that money in AI and the end result is their employees can work less but earn the same salary? yeesh they would rather die