- 0 Posts
- 50 Comments
Those two studios for the game because it was Hardsuit’s idea to make the game in the first place and TCR barely kept Paradox from canceling the have after they kicked Hardsuit out of the project.
I think it basically went like this (simplified):
Hardsuit: “Hey Paradox, we wanna make Bloodlines 2. We have everything worked out, we have the best possible writers involved, and it’s a real passion project; here’s our pitch.”
Paradox: “Wow, that pitch convinced us completely! You get all the green lights in the world!”
Hardsuit: “Now keep in mind we’ve never done a project on this scale before so we’ll need plenty of time—”
Paradox: “We set you on an extremely aggressive schedule. Surely that’ll motivate you into delivering perfection!”
Hardsuit: “That’s literally the exact opposite of what we need.”
Paradox: “But it’s the exact non-opposite of what you get. Now chop chop, we already gave the release date to the press.”
Hardsuit: “We’re not getting the game done in that timeframe.”
Paradox: “No problem; we’ll delay a little bit. Surely nobody will mind.”
Hardsuit: “It’ll take more than ‘a little bit’. We told you that—”
Paradox: “Okay, sure, whatever, the game’s canceled now. Don’t call us back.”
TCR: “Hey, can we try to salvage this? We really wanna see this made. But we’d like to throw away all of the writing, characters, and gameplay. Everything except the setting, really.”
Paradox: “Okay, sounds reasonable. But make it snappy.”
TCR: “We’d also like to change the name because what we can deliver won’t really be a proper sequel to—”
Paradox: “Bloodlines 2 it is. Good discussion. Glad we talked about this.”
TCR: “That’s literally the exact opposite of what we asked for.”
Paradox: “Can’t hear you; too busy launching the sequel to one of the most beloved cult classics in the action RPG genre.”
Customers: “Well, this is a pretty bad sequel. Decent game but they really shouldn’t have called it Bloodlines 2. We’re disappointed.”
Paradox: “The only logical course of action is to swear to never release a non-strategy game ever again because nobody appreciates our art.”
Eh, Heroic isn’t free of fault either; e.g. when it offered to auto-install REDmod along with CP2077 I couldn’t launch the game because the REDmod it installed was completely broken. I’d say that Steam is slightly less buggy than Heroic overall, both of them being pretty damn solid. Haven’t used Lutris much because, well, Steam and Heroic work well enough.
Would a leaner Steam be nice? Yeah, but reliable, lean cross-platform GUI toolkits aren’t easy to come by.
You’d think that that’s the one thing LLMs should be good at – have characters respond to arbitrary input in-character according to the game state. Unfortunately, restricting output to match the game state is mathematically impossible with LLMs; hallucinations are inevitable and can cause characters to randomly start lying or talking about things thy can’t know about. Plus, LLMs are very heavy on resources.
There are non-generative AI techniques that could be interesting for games, of course; especially ones that can afford to run at a slower pace like seconds or tens of seconds. For example, something that makes characters dynamically adapt their medium-term action plan to the situation every once in a while could work well. But I don’t think we’re going to see useful AI-driven dialogue anytime soon.
And that’s it: There’s simply no competition at the same level of quality. Sure, there’s other chat services but none that also offer effortless voice with good noise rejection, screen sharing, media sharing, all at no extra effort and available for free. (I am aware that the latter is dependent on Discord being relatively early in a lifecycle that will invariably end in massive enshittification.)
Features like threads aren’t super important to the users but being able to just conjure up a highly scalable chat community with built-in streaming support is. And yes, the network effect plays a major role as well.
I’m am member of a server that is currently evaluating jumping ship because the looming IPO promises swift enshittification like with all other social media companies. But we’re also aware that moving to any other service means that new users are less likely to show up – many people already have Discord but few are willing to install a client for something they’ve never heard of like Matrix.
It’s not like that would stop Nintendo. Japanese patent law is much less strict on the concept of prior art. IIRC, you can essentially tack new claims onto old patents and the Japanese patent office will treat the result as if the new claims had been patented by you all along. They did that against Pocketpair already.
The Marathon AIs weren’t all bad.
Leela meant well but was completely outclassed.
Durandal had been rampant since before the first game and only reached some degree of stability once he stole that Pfhor ship. He was basically designed to be unstable. While he was certainly an asshole with rather loose morals, he also made sure that Leela could warm humanity about the Pfhor and that his S’pht allies got what they wanted. He’s on the verge of being an antihero.
Tycho… Well, we only saw him after the Pfhor rebuilt him and that version of him is pretty clearly a villain.
Thoth was barely conscious until he merged with Durandal. I can’t say much about him. He is possibly involved with altering the timeline after the W’rkncacnter was released so I’d book him as a good guy.
(I am mad at the new Marathon but for different reasons than the AIs.)
While moving away from IPv4 isn’t really pressing anymore, there are still avoidable annoyances in v4 land.
Just yesterday a friend and I had a lot of fun getting our laptops to connect to a public network. Why? Because IPv4 doesn’t have many private ranges and not only did the address of their captive portal conflict with the address space of a VPN we’re both in, the address of their DNS server also conflicted with the default address space my friend’s Docker setup operated in.
Figuring that out was a riot.
In addition to what Wolf told you, here’s a few little extra tidbits:
Some games have native Linux versions. If they don’t, you typically play them through Proton, a gaming-ready version of the Wine compatibility layer. Steam directly supports this through compatibility settings (Steam -> Settings -> Compatibility for default settings or Game properties -> Compatibility for per-game settings). Sometimes specific Proton versions will be better for specific games but usually you don’t need to worry about it much.
Proton is damn good. Expect performance for most games to be within ± 5% of the performance you’d get on Windows. Yes, some games run better on Proton than on native DirectX.
Valve recently decided to enable Proton by default for games that don’t have a Linux version. You can enable it yourself in the settings if it isn’t enabled yet.
You can even force games with a native Linux version to use Proton by setting it in the game’s compatibility settings. In that case Steam will download the Windows version.
Seconded, with caveats. Garuda is basically a gaming-ready Arch with a few of the rough edges filed off (and a 1337 G4M3R desktop theme preinstalled). I quite like their convenience stuff but in the end it’s still Arch.
Pros: It’s easy to set up and conveniently comes with everything you need to start gaming. It defaults to the KDE desktop, which will feel fairly familiar to Windows expats. It allows you to do whatever you want to do, in true Linux fashion. Cons: It’s still Arch-based so you will be living at the bleeding edge. A certain amount of occasional instability is to be expected. The default theme might put you off if you’re not into the whole gamer aesthetic but it’s easy to change.
I also see people recommending Bazzite and similar immutable distros and honestly, I can see the appeal. They’re harder to break and Discover (or whichever Flathub frontend you use) is very welcoming and convenient for managing your installed apps.
Pros: You’re less involved with the OS’s technical underpinnings than with an Arch-based distro. Immutables are designed to be robust. The Flatpak-centric workflow feels slicker than a traditional package manager. Cons: The design restricts your freedom to a certain degree. Flatpak has a few caveats compared to native software packages.
In the end I’d say that Garuda is great if you’re interested in learning more about how Linux works and want to be able to tinker with the system. There’s a ton of resources on technical stuff in Arch and all of them apply to Garuda as well. On the other hand, an immutable like Bazzite is great if you’Re not interested in Linux internals and just want something that works and is hard to break.
Entra isn’t Azure. Entra ID is what they renamed Azure Active Directory to. But not always; there’s also Azure Active Directory B2C (yes, that’s the fully expanded name). And various other Azure-branded things that may or may not belong together.
Microsoft are spectacularly bad at naming things.
It’s a miracle they haven’t renamed Windows 11 to “360 365” or “Live 6.5” or “Active-DOS Series X” or something.
My most used features so far are vertical splitters, vertical nudging, and the new placement modes for conveyors and pipes. With an honorable mention going to conveyor wall holes, which also free up a lot of design options.
Honestly, though, just about everything in this update has been a godsend. Priority splitters are the only thing I haven’t really used yet. Even the elevators rock; being able to zoop up to 200 meters up or down in one go can make them useful even as a temporary yardstick for tall structures. (Also, I did end up needing to go 150 meters straight down to get at some resources and can confirm that elevators handle their intended purpose very well.)
Never use Amazon for expensive electronics. There’s too much nonsense going on.
I tried to preorder a phone once. Sony offered a pair of earbuds as a preorder gift and I wanted that specific phone anyway so hey, why not. Unfortunately, their fulfillment partner happened to be Amazon.
Instead of my phone I received a book about Lemmy Kilmister. Oh, and they couldn’t correct the error; all they could do was to have me send the book back and get a refund and buy the phone again – which of course took me out of the preorder program.
Yeah, no. There’s too much bullshit with Amazon to trust them with expensive gear.
One problem is that in a world without major problems, stakes have to be low (which is perfectly fine and can make for an engaging story) or an external threat has to be introduced. The latter can easily feel forced or disconnected with the world.
I wonder how it would be to have a nonlinear game set in two time periods. One is a solarpunk-ish idyll under threat (with the protagonist’s actions focused on protecting it) and the other is a preceding industrial dystopia (with the protagonist’s actions focused on effecting change for the better).
Throughout the game the player first learns that the dystopian protagonist’s actions did succeed in changing the world for the better but also that the threats faced by the idyllic period are consequences of those actions. The message is that even ideal decisions can have negative effects down the line, “happily ever after” endings don’t really exist, and happiness requires maintenance. Yet, change for the better is both possible and worth the effort.
Not everyone needs to talk to everyone. But many people need to talk to many people.
Microsoft had to abandon the initial Vista project and start over because they couldn’t manage a team of 1000 developers. People working on adjacent features had to go through so many layers of management that in some cases the closest shared manager was Bill Gates. For something like getting a change in the shutdown code reflected in the shutdown dialog.
Huge teams become exponentially harder to manage efficiently.
It’ll be marketed as Skyrim with all LLM text and end up as Oblivion with prefab text chunks.
Even disregarding the fact that current LLMs can’t stop hallucinating and going off track (which seems to be an inherent property of the approach), they need crazy accounts of memory. If you don’t want the game to use a tiny model with a bad quantization, you can probably expect to spend at least 20 gigs of VRAM and a fair chunk of the GPU’s power on just the LLM.
What we might see is a game that uses a small neural net to match freeform player input to a dialogue tree. But that’s nothing like full LLM-driven dialogue.
System Shock (the remake) with a cut-down version of the Ironman mod to provide randomization. It’s only slight loot randomization so there’s no major pathing changes but it’s fun nonetheless.
I like randomizers. They add some additional replay value to already good games. I must’ve played through randomized Bloodstained a down times already – and twice that for Super Metroid. (And then there’s the beautiful mess that is randomized Borderlands 2. I don’t think I’m ever going to finish a run but man are they wild.)
Good point. If you look at the Yakuza games, they’re typically set in a little entertainment district. The map isn’t huge but it’s not supposed to be. It feels the correct size for a busy little part of town.
Meanwhile, yeah, Fallout 3 gave me the impression that even before the war the DC metropolitan area was home to maybe a thousand people.
I’m not really a fan of MMORPGs, both due to the gameplay (MMOs are grindy by nature and the hotkey-driven autocombat of most MMORPGs isn’t interesting enough to sustain that for me) and because of often aggressive monetization.
I do like some MMOs in other genres, though. Path of Exile is an action RPG with drop-in multiplayer and a rudimentary built-in trading system. It’s basically Diablo 3 in good. Plus, its monetization system is one of the fairest I’ve seen so far, with the only MTXes that offer gameplay benefits being on sale literally every other weekend.
Path of Exile 2 (currently in closed beta) is basically the same with a tweaked skill system and a soulslike dodge roll mechanic that you’re expected to use. Pretty decent, a bit slower-paced than the first one.
I should also pick up Warframe again one of these days. The repetitive nature of MMOs isn’t as bad when it’s a mobility-focused third-person shooter. And IIRC, there’s not much you can get with MTX that you can’t also get through gameplay somehow. Plus, it’s also a game that you can just play singleplayer if you want.
Using AI driven software is willful negligence.
Not necessarily. Neural nets are excellent at fuzzy matching tasks and make for great filters – but nothing more. If you hook one up to a crawler you get a fairly effective way of identifying websites that match certain criteria. You can then have people review those matches to see if infringement happened. It’s basically a glorified search tool.
Of course if you skip the review step you’re doing the equivalent of running a Google search for your brand name and DMCAing all of the search results. That would be negligent.
There is no indication that Funko/BrandShield did that, however. They say that infringing content was found and we have strong indications that a now-deleted Itch project did contain official screenshots of Funko Fusion so the infringement threshold might have been met. Their takedown request was apparently made in good faith.
Now, why the entire domain was taken down, that is the question. It might be a miscommunication or they might’ve mailed the hosting provider directly. I can imagine everything from human error to faulty processes as the root cause here. What I don’t believe is that they made a high-level decision to nuke Itch.
Who needs to face the consequences depends on who screwed up here. For now we’ll have to make do with both Funko and BrandShield taking a PR hit.
Exactly. If this was “Marathon: Return to Deimos” or “Marathon: Battleroid Arena” or even “Marathon Infinity Plus One” I wouldn’t complain. Much.
But just taking the name (and logo) of the original one? The game that started Bungie’s path towards being one of the big names of the FPS genre? That’s like saying they went straight from Pathways Into Darkness to Halo. That’s not honoring Marathon, it’s a soulless recycling of an old IP.
My vent cores feel distinctly unblasted.
Man, I hate it when they make new games that have exactly the same name as an older game by the same company. And this one’s not even a remake. I have no idea if Marathon (1994) and Marathon (upcoming) even play in the same universe but they don’t seem to have much in common gameplay-wise. Ugh.
Makes me wanna install M1A1 Aleph One (didn’t know it does M1 directly these days) and shoot some Pfhor, though.
“You finished a computer game, Atticus.”
The truth was a burning green crack through my brain.
Credits scrolling by, a reminder of the talent behind a just-finished journey. The feeling of triumph, slowly replaced by the creeping grayness of ordinary life.
I had finished a computer game. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of.
Speak for yourself. I’m going to migrate all of my 22-bit RSA keys to a longer key length. And not 24 bits, either, given that they’re probably working on a bigger quantum computer already. I gotta go so long that no computer can ever crack it.
64-bit RSA will surely be secure for the foreseeable future, cost be damned.
In reality, the most common answers are “No shit, Sherlock!” and “What’s Copilot?”
The “Shut up!” only comes after you point out that Linux doesn’t have forced AI bullshit.
(They hated Jesus because he told them he uses Arch, btw.)