Yup, I had this exact issue with this game and everything paradox. I can’t enjoy it if I feel I’m not getting a complete experience, and if doing so means buying a hundred bullshit DLC, I’m out.

I’m not saying I agree with it, just what I’ve observed in other discussions.

I’m not happy with generative AI in general. It’s worn out the novelty and is very clearly just another tool to extract as much value out of people while giving next to nothing in return.

Unfortunately, the cat is out of the bag, and the vast majority of people don’t understand how it works or why it is a problem. Meaning that, not enough people make a fuss, to the point where no action is taken towards legislating against it in a meaningful way.

The end result is games like this, which find a position where it’s not quite objectional enough for most people to make a fuss about it.

I think the reason most people are okay with it is, firstly, because it runs locally, not on some massive datacenter somewhere.

Secondly, the type of AI used is either not generative; for the “smart Zoi”, feature, where it’s basically just an AI driven NPC logic system; you tell them what they should act like in a prompt and it informs what they do and why, taking it a bit further than their basic needs.

Or, where it is generative, it’s within its own ecosystem. It’s generative, but for its own consumption, rather than polluting the general web with garbage content like most generative AI is. If this causes their own ecosystem to be drowned out with garbage, it’s their own problem solve, not ours. They have a financial stake in keeping that ecosystem healthy to engage with, since I believe it’s a source of monetisation?

I’ve played the game for a few hours, but unfortunately I’ve aged-out of enjoying this type of game I guess. I used to be a big Sims fan, but neither that nor Inzoi grab me as it would have 20 years ago.

I’d consider it if it was SteamOS, since I love the Steam Deck, but it’s performance is just shy of where I’d like it to be.

No SteamOS is a hard pass from me though. I’ve just finished ditching Windows on my gaming PC, I don’t intend to back step back to Windows, especially on a handheld.

The original Test Drive Unlimited was great, but it rightfully bombed in reviews due to some really bad technical issues. Some of the car characteristics were really bad and off the mark, and the game suffered from an engine issue that was a problem other racing games had solved long ago;

On long slopes, the geometry of the road didn’t curve properly; the angle would have a polygonal jagging issue. This was most likely to shave off performance cost on the 360. Other games had already solved this issue by effectively smoothing angle changes, but TDU did not do anything of the sort. The result was that on hilly terrain cars would constantly bump around and lose traction due to weird unexpected air-time. Some cars were affected far worse than others, particularly super cars had a bad time.

I loved TDU, I loved cruising around in my Shelby Cobra and doing the one-hour tour around the island for decent money.

But the list of flaws is pretty long, and the technical issues made it a nonstarter for anything competitive.

It honestly wasn’t so bad. I played about 80 hours of it, right after launch. In typical Bethesda fashion, I used a few ini tweaks and such to tailor it to my tastes. Mostly fixing the Stealth (which was horribly broken at launch) and balance changes like reducing the bullet spongyness of enemies.

Both are now patched and configurable through the built-in difficulty settings.

I enjoyed my time with it. I went in expecting a space-skyrim with typical Bethesda jank, and that’s exactly what we got.

I switched to using Moonlight to stream rather than Steam’s built-in RemotelyPlay months ago. It was just absolutely unusable; not a bandwidth issue, had that in spades. The problem was that it would either not connect, connect to a blank/green screen or the audio/video would randomly cut out. It would work maybe a fifth of the time, and if I had to reconnect for whatever reason, it would absolutely always fail.

Moonlight? It worked out of the gate, and has never failed despite running on some beefy encoding settings since I have very good WiFi with next to no interference from neighbors.

I desperately want Steam’s own offering to be better though. Not having to install a second tool, and to just connect from Steam directly would be a much more polished experience.

It’s doubly absurd considering Microsoft owns one of the biggest build and deployment automation pipelines as part of their Azure offerings. Most of it is aimed at Azure, but so much of the Xbox backend is just Azure under the hood anyway. Azure Pipelines should have had integrations for this on day one.

Yup. Okay-ish solo, but amazing with a friend or two.

Well, I suspect they will get their chance. The remake was incredible, and if they can pull it off a second time with DS2, I suspect 3 will follow too.

The third game had some decent ideas. The weapon crafting was conceptually interesting and thematically appropriate with Isaac being an engineer. The co-op could have been done better, but I had a blast with it.

Nuke the MTX shit from orbit and redo large swathes of the story though. What they did to Ellie was a disgrace.