NuXCOM_90Percent
@NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
- Comment on Microsoft patents system for AI helpers to finish games for you 4 days ago:
Yeah.
It is a REALLY dangerous tightrope to walk. But this makes me think of Arkham Knight. I LOVED Asylum and City. Even Origins was pretty good. But that fucking Batmobile.
So I beat the game, enter postgame, and take a look at my menu to see what I need for the secret ending. And I IMMEDIATELY shut the game down and go watch it on Youtube.
I would have loved to be able to skip past most of the random trophies hidden everywhere and instead do the fun puzzles and the Deathstroke fight and so forth.
The “correct” answer is that hiding the “real” ending and having so much bloat is the real problem. But different games have different ideologies. I LOVE Souls games and had a blast with Elden Ring’s DLC. I ALSO remember the hilarity of watching all the chuds get angry and mock games media for saying it was hard… and then getting their proverbial shit pushed in by like 90% of the Shadow Land and wet themselves at the mere sight of the Messmer, let alone the harder bosses.
Which gets back to the ongoing discussion of creator intent versus accessibility.
My expectation is that, should this take off, it would mostly just lead to even more padding similar to what we see with open world bloat. But… yeah.
- Comment on Valve reconfirm the Steam Frame, Steam Machine and Steam Controller are due in 2026 4 days ago:
Steam Machine, and presumably Controller, will release.
The Machine is just an HTPC with MAYBE a bespoke mobo and cooler (to my knowledge, nobody got a close enough look to truly confirm that). If they were planning for a Q1 release, those would have been all but done by the time they were formally announced and they are living in a warehouse.
The issue is the off the shelf (well, bulk purchased) storage and memory. Which… is the issue for a lot of computing at all levels right now.
My guess? We will have VERY limited release provisioned Steam Machines. “We got 500 units at this price” then “We got 700 units at THIS price” a week later and so forth. And there will probably be a Bring Your Own Memory/Storage version with greater availability for those who have some stockpiled or want to gamble.
As for the controllers? Controllers are actually really cheap to manufacture. Their cost is the R&D that goes into them. But they are generally very high mark-up (for the platform holders) and used to help offset the cost of the console itself. Think “gold plated HDMI”. That is why there have been so many third party controllers over the decades.
But those ALSO are sitting in a warehouse. It is just a question of how Valve wants to use them to offset Steam Machines.
The Steam Frame? Pretty sure that is fucked. Because the memory and storage is going to be soldered on (or outright integrated onto the board to begin with). And, as someone who has owned two HMDs (a Windows MR and now a facebook quest some shit or another)… it was probably always going to be a failure.
- Comment on California law to require operating systems to check your age 1 week ago:
If anyone actually looks through the legislature and the discourse around it:
It is not age verification like you need for pornhub. You aren’t giving a photocopy of your license to some org to verify you exist.
It is literally the same logic as “please enter your birthday to continue”. Just say you were born on jan 1 1900 or whatever. That will then be fetchable by the app/browser to send when a site requests it.
Which… seems like a really good system? It allows people who care about what their kids do to lock down their accounts. And it provides no meaningful PII for adults (or kids whose parents don’t care).
- Comment on Four years after the last one, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2's enhanced editions have a new patch out in Steam beta 2 weeks ago:
Finally, dynamic language support should make it easier from here on out for Beamdog to add new translations to the games without the need for a full patch “on most store fronts”. Instead, the developers anticipate being able to drop in new languages “on an ad hoc basis”. Speaking of, patch 2.7 adds community-made Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, and Ukrainian translations to Baldur’s Gate 2, plus Hungarian and Japanese ones to Icewind Dale.
THIS worries me a lot. Either the language packs become DLC (good) or they are going to be streamed from somewhere and the game lasts as long as the content server does.
Still, awesome. People shit on the Beamdog releases because “I can just run this with these forty mods and hacked binaries and a syncthing server and…”. But they are incredibly competent remasters/ports.
Just a shame Icewind Dale 2 is still in the “forever lost” state source wise. The Twins were actually a really fun set of antagonists.
- Comment on Firefox 148.0 arrives with AI controls 2 weeks ago:
I mean… people using Firefox are doing it because of all the shit Google is shoving down chromium. Firefox has a LOT of room to fuck up before that is going to impact that demographic.
- Comment on Microsoft's throne room rejigging has seen Sarah Bond take the bullet for marketing strategy which was "failing internally", report claims 2 weeks ago:
Nah nah nah nah. THIS hit piece where apparently EVERYONE hated her and she is singlehandedly the cause of all the world’s problems is legit. Obviously.
Don’t get me wrong. She and Spencer are grade A assholes and should rest in piss for all the damage they did to the games industry and all the jobs that have been destroyed. But holy fuck is it depressing how quick The Internet is to leap on “Yeah. Absolutely everyone hated everything she did”.
- Comment on The Wolf Among Us, The Last Express and more join the GOG Preservation Program 2 weeks ago:
One of the games is Police Quest: SWAT 2 which is just delightful.
Half of it is copaganda of the highest level as presented by one of the evilest cops to ever live (seriously…). Like… a LOT of the LAPD’s reputation for police brutality and corruption can be tiedt o him. But it was a solid, for its time, squad tactics game that I do wish more modern takes on the genre would adopt. Having a “slice the pie” button is just so nice.
But what makes SWAT 2 so good? There was the SWAT campaign where you go through a series of police calls relating to an evil terrorist cult. And there is the Terrorist campaign where you play as the cult and are taking people hostage, indoctrinating them, and otherwise attacking SWAT. And the best tactic to even out the campaign (because you are up against the poster children for militarized police over spending) is:
On the second mission you do a home invasion where you take a family hostage. Take a LOT of explosives with you. While you are leading the cops on, plant explosives on the walkway to the house. Let negotiations fizzle out and when the swat teams come to raid? Blow them the fuck up. Double tap any survivors. Wipes out the LAPD which translates to an insane amount of money to equip your crew for the rest of the missions.
Back in the day? SWAT 2 was one of those “if you know you know” games across the late stage usenet/early stage gamefaqs discussions.
I desperately need some kind of an Oral History on how the fuck that game got made.
Also, as a bonus: My dad was annoyed I was playing too much XCOM and JA2 (mostly once he figured out I used female mercs in that…). So he got me a nice manly game about how great cops are… and boy howdy did he whup my ass when he realized I was mostly playing the Terrorist side and popping cops left and right.
- Comment on Games Workshop had a Warhammer FTL clone pulled from Steam over some overly Space Marine-esque shoulderpads 4 weeks ago:
I remember when RPS was THE best gaming blog out there.
Now?
According to the developers, Games Workshop’s inquisitors were particularly irked by the design of some shoulderpads in one of the featured trailers, referred to in correspondence as “oversized convex shoulder pads with a metallic rim”. Find a screen of the armour at stake in the vicinity of this paragraph. Tundra insist that those convex shoulderpads are all their own work, but say they’ve removed the trailer anyway to avoid disruption.
Shitty editing or AI slop? You decide.
As for the topic at hand: People were quick to glaze GW over their stance on not using generative AI. But that is part of a much bigger effort (including renaming the Imperial Guard and making all Space Marines “Primaris”) to lock down their copyrights and trademarks. Which “makes sense” considering Blizzard’s claim to fame is ripping them off mercilessly (which makes how many modern fluff characters are blatant ripoffs of their *craft counterparts even funnier).
And Void War? Has not been subtle about their influences. I hear it is a really solid FTL though.
- Comment on JSAUX announce a charging-friendly Steam Deck travel case 4 weeks ago:
You know linux is going mainstream when the site everyone links to is running copy for shit like this. Yay?
- Comment on Rockstar launch official roleplay mods store where you can spend $67 to turn GTA into Euro Truck Simulator 2 1 month ago:
So… the mods for a massively popular live service game that many of the world’s top streamers play on the regular is charging money for optional/premium content?
Fuck those modders! How dare they want to be compensated for their hard work!!!
- Comment on Larian hope to have future companions spend less time jumping straight into your bed, and more time with each other 1 month ago:
I feel like Shart at least kind of felt like you were getting to know her.
Contrast that with Gale who wants to show you a magic spell and immediately rips off his pants. And Lae’zel who, after a conversation where “Lae’zel disapproves” popped up like ten times, asks you to fuck (which… is kind of fitting for her, actually). Let a lone a certain druid who just does not take no for an answer and keeps asking right up until the end of the game if you’ll throw him a bone. It actively made me dislike the (otherwise wonderful) cast of companions a bit.
Don’t get me wrong. I am all for more “adult” relationships where you might just be casual fuck buddies. Pathfinder WOTR was kind of great for that where Miss Live Leaks herself basically says “so all this ritualistic murder of innocents got me hot and bothered. Wanna bang on the floor in a pile of their blood and entrails?”. But most of the “romances” in that game actually felt like you were getting to know your ragtag group of horrible vibes abominations with varying levels of mental and physical trauma.
Rather than “Hey, I know you want the Owlbear to show up but I wanna get nekkid instead”.
- Comment on Larian will no longer use GenAI for Divinity concept art, and any genAI used for other games will be "trained on data we own" 1 month ago:
There are different levels to “AI”. Generally speaking, people are referring to what is generally called “generative AI” in these cases.
You know all those insane tools in the adobe suite that can do stuff like literally erase a person from a photo or weather a surface or even select only the object you want to delete with a single click of the mouse? Those are, varying levels, of the same underlying algorithms behind “AI” content creation. Hell, most of the good plugins for IDEs for handling stuff like docstring or unit test stub generation are in a similar boat.
By and large, people don’t have major issues with those. Some of the training data gets really messy but they are a fundamental part of most creative workflows and can be argued as being comparable to using a reference book when drawing human anatomy and so forth.
The issue comes when you take that a dozen steps farther and have “generative AI”. Rather than take an existing photo and remove the ex you hope dies in a fire, you just say “hey grok. Make a photo of me on the streets of Osaka by myself. And undress a child while you’re at it”. Rather than create a docstring or unit test stub you just have Cursor write an app for you based off a prompt. And so forth.
At which point it stops being a case of someone using the same reference material to draw a superhero and more that guy who just traces porn for Marvel every month.
And… much like someone who can’t draw their way out of a paper bag, you see the same with generative AI use in content creation. Generative AI is generally great at replacing entry level employees. It can’t replace a skilled senior creative. And if you are wondering how you get people the experience they need to hit that tier… you get it.
But that leads to the other problem. If you are someone who is cutting costs left and right to increase profits and realized you can replace 60% of your staff with a subscription to openai? How long until you decide that if you just lower your standards a bit you can replace 80% instead?
- Comment on Larian will no longer use GenAI for Divinity concept art, and any genAI used for other games will be "trained on data we own" 1 month ago:
Yes and no.
Yes in the sense that they could write a model completely from first principles as it were. The algorithms to train the models are pretty trivial. Providing source material to train the model on to specialize it is also trivial… if you have it (which Larian presumably would).
The (vastly simplifying so anyone who wants to “well ackshually” can go suck Yurgir’s fat one (negative)) initial weights are the problem. Think of it like what is required for the model to even understand what “give me a weathered stone exterior texture” means. THOSE are fundamentally built on stolen IP (and the uncredited work of grad students around the world…).
How much you care about that is up to you. But that is what facebook et al had seedboxes running 24/7 to steal. They might not train “their model” on your favorite author’s work. But they used your favorite author’s work and previous generations of their model to create the initial weights they optimized on.
And a “from scratch” model will not have those. Many are trivially easy to find but those are also very poisoned.
- Comment on Epilogue reveal the SN Operator to play real SNES cartridges on various platforms 2 months ago:
Its GOL so of course there are more self links than actual context but:
There are a LOT of these kinds of devices coming out lately. Part of it is obviously cashing in on fear-based nostalgia. The other is… consoles have already begun dying at an alarming rate. And cartridges aren’t that far behind.
I don’t know what the current “meta” products are, but back in the day you just buy a retrode (?), rip all your roms (and, actually importantly, your save data), and then just keep the cartridges in a box somewhere so you know you have it while you instead just play your games with no issues.
- Comment on GeForce Now’s 100-hour monthly limit goes live in 2026 2 months ago:
GFN is not for “hardcore gamers”. Well… at least not until recently (more on that).
It is more for the people who might mostly play older titles but want to experience the newest hotness. That 1070 has zero problems with all the indie games but you have heard that Clair Obscur is REAL good and you want high fidelity toesy woesies. Or maybe you mostly just play Madden and Call of Duty every year and don’t want to spend the money on a new computer (… assuming you play either on PC).
And it is nVidia so their linux support is a shitshow, but I was personally VERY tempted to try GFN when Dragon’s Dogma 2 was shitting the bed endlessly at launch. Ended up buying a new graphics card instead which… has somehow turned out to be a good decision?
But if you are the kind of person who upgrades every 5-8 years and cares about high fidelity gaming? You don’t need this.
… Assuming you upgraded in 2024. Because now EVERYTHING costs an arm and a leg and just gets worse and worse by the week.
Like, imagine buying a wagyu beef but only owning a microwave? So you rent a kitchen?
Change that to a nice 2 inch bone-in ribeye. Actually don’t, since that is also best cooked on a stove. But let’s move past that.
It is not that you don’t have a kitchen. It is that you don’t have a grill or a range hood (ooh, that actually works). So you rent a grill for the weekend.
And… that isn’t too dissimilar from people who get gym memberships so they can go climbing (because they don’t live in an area where they can easily do it outdoors) or because they don’t want to buy expensive gear.
And… honestly? A couple years back I had to help emergency cater a friend’s wedding (it was a whole thing). I… would totally pay money to get access to that kitchen a few times a year. Like… holy shit was it amazing.
- Comment on Call of Duty co-creator, Infinity Ward and Respawn Entertainment co-founder, and Battlefield head Vince Zampella dies aged 55 2 months ago:
If there is one thing The Internet agrees upon, it is that the virtuous response to any death is to engage in competitive mourning.
Religious/“Religious” christians tend to embrace that mindset because so much of their beliefs are built upon the idea of deathbed repentance overriding all else. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader as to why an org that has had varying levels of political and military power over the millennia would love the idea that anything you do can be absolved with a single prayer (and a “charitable donation”).
Millennials and GenZ have a tendency to think the world is Steven Universe and what matters is that THEY are virtuous and forgiving and blah blah blah blah blah. Everyone knows you can stop an intergalactic war by showing you have the biggest heart!
We saw very similar bullshit with terry bolea and r kelley and the like. Folk tried to do that with kirk before EVERYONE agreed it was just too funny to care.
Personally? I’ve driven down that road in the past. Even driving the speed limit it is a “fun” road and it is well known that “car people” love to race down it at insane speeds. And Zampella pulled a paul walker doing so. It sucks and I do feel bad for his (very well off) family but also… yeah.
As a “gamer”: Zampella and his team more or less defined FPSes for almost 30 years (I think he was part of the original Medal of Honor?) for good (Titanfall 2) and for ill (… Titanfall 1). But… the vast majority of those games consisted of “Let’s go to Generic-stan and kill some brown people” and folk like Rami Ismail have highlighted this time and time again to deaf ears. Because it very much normalizes the idea that “we” are fighting mindless savages in Oil-stan and makes it much easier to ignore the horrific human rights violations in less lucrative locales.
- Comment on Amongst all the success, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 studio Sandfall Interactive isn't interested in expansion 2 months ago:
Why would they? They already hire massive numbers of contractors when they need to scale up.
- Comment on Shock horror, Ark 2 has been delayed, with its story now apparently at the whims of Vin Diesel 2 months ago:
It was apparently announced in 2020 so assume they put him on the short list in closer to 2018. So 7-ish years ago.
And… Vin Diesel of 2018 (even 2022) was a REALLY good pick. Nerds like him because of Riddick. Normies like him because of Dom. And he is very much the kind of celebrity who will go WAY too hard on marketing for video games/“nerd shit”.
Of course, in the interim we received MANY reminders that he is, at best, a perv and more likely a sex pest. And the Fast and the Furious series cratered harder than gal gadot getting yeeted off an airplane on the world’s longest runway.
- Comment on Firefox dev clarifies there will be an AI 'kill switch' 2 months ago:
Perhaps Mozilla doesn’t quite fit into this category,
Then don’t fucking compare it to rape
- Comment on Firefox dev clarifies there will be an AI 'kill switch' 2 months ago:
…
MAYBE don’t trivialize rape by comparing a software you don’t like to… rape.
- Comment on Total War: THREE KINGDOMS gets a GOG release along with various DLC 2 months ago:
3K is a delightful hot mess.
For those unaware: It was theoretically a historical Total War (e.g. Medieval and Shogun) set in the Chinese Warring States period. But, as the title suggests, it is very heavily influenced by the Romance of the Three Kingdoms version of that period where most of those historical generals are borderline demigods to begin with. AND it is very much “The book based on the movie based on the book” where their version of ROTK is very heavily influenced by Dynasty Warriors.
So the end result is a historical TW that is VERY clearly a mod for Total Warhammer. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t, but basically nobody was actually happy since it wasn’t Dynasty Warriors enough for the Total Warhammer crowd and didn’t really care about the logistics and politics of The Warring States for sickos like me.
- Comment on Latest Steam Deck update will warn you if an Xbox controller needs upgrading 2 months ago:
I can’t speak to xbox controllers, but I have a VM on my desktop for updating my 8bitdo controllers and de-drm’ing my kobo (formerly kindle) purchases.
For the former, the qemu gui “redirect usb device” is sufficient.
- Comment on Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases 2 months ago:
Do we know what valve defines “release” as?
This has come up a lot over the years but between “early access” games that launch in borderline beta form and live games that never leave it (and if you see a similarity between those: congrats, you now understand how important marketing is)… what is the actual difference between a fully new release and a game that just got a major update with 10 hours of story content?
This semi-famously came up back pre-pandemic when Alex Navarro made a fairly impassioned soapbox about Fire Pro World and how if they didn’t discuss it for Giant Bomb’s GOTY the year it entered EA then they never would… and then was immediately shut down. Although Jeff Gerstmann has often talked about how GOTY discussions are really just shopper’s guides and he has always approached them from that perspective.
- Comment on Larian want to release Divinity in "three to four years", and they're making limited use of generative AI 2 months ago:
Concept/placeholder art always sneaks through. It is just the reality of development. You can’t hold off on all level design until all assets are finalized and you can’t restart from scratch every time an asset is updated. Sometimes it is generative ai bullshit. Sometimes it is a picture of someone’s cat. There are plenty of examples of this throughout the decades.
Like all things, it is about quality control and how much studios (are allowed to) care.
I don’t blame people for being freaked out. Even acknowledging this is a yellow flag. But it also is actually a really good use case for generative AI since it will allow everyone to more or less work in parallel. I… don’t like the placeholder text aspect but there is also a lot to be said about UI/UX using actual “speaking cadence” text rather than just lorem ipsum.
- Comment on GOG formally announce their GOG Patrons subscription donation system 2 months ago:
GOL is a useful news aggregator but a REALLY shitty blog site. I subscribe to the RSS feed but basically never click through an article since the only useful information comes from the headline in almost all cases. So “oh, that sounds cool, let me search for a better source”
It is just that the mods of this board love to post every single GOL blog post for Engagement purposes, I guess.
But yeah. I like CD Projekt and GoG. But they have a long history of downright performative activism. They’ll do or say whatever will increase sales in a given month but rarely follow through. Even their raison d’etre of “sell old games” has faded. But, because they still talk a big game, nobody cares that they have just as much “gooner bait” as Steam (AND in a format that doesn’t broadcast to all your friends that you are jacking it. Just saying…).
I will definitely buy old games “new” at GoG. Which leads to a lot of hilarious moments where I remember something existed (Warhammer Mark of Chaos), go to see if it is there, and realize I bought it three years ago.
The “tip jar” and now “donation” subscription just… feel REALLY REALLY bad.
- Comment on ‘Our industry has been strip-mined’: video game workers protest at The Game Awards 2 months ago:
But guys. This game was made with ONLY 30 people. And keighley is one of us. He let Ms Piggy neg him!
- Comment on Total War: Warhammer 40,000 wants to be "the seminal Warhammer 40K game," says its devs, who sell me in just 8 words: "You can customize the fingers on Space Marines!" plus Gamestar article 2 months ago:
A huge chunk of Space Marine 2’s story is about how Titus basically got screwed over by the Imperium for the sin of… treating Guard like human beings and fighting back against Chaos. A big arc is even that his squadmates (other Spesh Mahrines) don’t entirely trust him but learn to do so. And while I haven’t gotten around to it yet, I would be shocked if Owlcat didn’t take some pot shots at the zealots in Rogue Trader.
- Comment on Total War: Warhammer 40,000 wants to be "the seminal Warhammer 40K game," says its devs, who sell me in just 8 words: "You can customize the fingers on Space Marines!" plus Gamestar article 2 months ago:
All fandoms have the people who REALLY don’t get the message. Chief amongst them is basically any time chuds listen to Rage Against The Machine. Others are the people who key in that Vegeta is awesome but don’t understand why so much of that is centered around the Buu saga and him rejecting who he used to be.
As for 40k? Yeah. I do have a problem with the people who very unironically worship the imperium.
But it is also worth remembering how many of the beloved (imperium) stories are about actively defying that. Eisenhorn and Ravenor are both poster children for radicals who regularly fall afoul of the more puritan of their orders. Gaunt is regularly set up to die by other Imperial Guard. Hell, we somehow got a sequel to frigging Space Marine (game) and both of those are very much about the fundamental flaw in how the imperium fights Chaos.
Hell, the Ciaphas Cain series is literally space Blackadder with so many plots basically being about Ciaphas actively trying to prevent the imperium from killing both him and itself (to the point Inquisitors cover for him… and only one of them is after his Cain).
And of the lesser known books and games? So many of them are fundamentally tragedies that highlight the futility of war with PLENTY of characters dying for the stupidest of reasons.
Is 40k anti-fascist? At one point, maybe. But it very much hasn’t been for the past 30 or so years and there are a LOT of stories about GW actively interfering when a writer gets too close to the actual point.
But it is also important to remember the power that these long running cultural touchstones have. Star Wars has very much flirted with politics for its entire almost 50 year run. Sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. But, as a result, Andor was immensely powerful for having 40 years worth of build-up to an episode that centered around a speech in which a politician condemned fascism and genocide. And… a lot of people were kinda forced to listen to that “against their will” because they like the laser swords.
Do I at all think Total Warhammer 40k is going to be that? No. But it will continue to do what 40k has done for decades: Chuds will cheer because chuddiness. And the rest of the fanbase will increasingly realize “so… the super fascist armies are bad?”
- Comment on Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union, with 165 workers at Doom studio the latest to vote in favour 2 months ago:
Because suddenly this erases the fact that the parent company, who gets all the money for that game (devs do not get royalties and any sales based bonus windows are long past) are still constantly glazing israel and the idf?
- Comment on Larian reveal a new Divinity RPG that boasts "greater breadth & depth than ever before" 2 months ago:
As much as I love D:OS (and acknowledge almost the entire studio is geared for that)… I REALLY want this to be another ARPG (DD) or weird 00s pseudo-Gothic (D2). I would even settle for a mediocre RTS/dating game (D:DC).