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Setting criticism of BGS aside, Fallout isn’t as “hard” with its lore as some. There are little inconsistencies between the games and other media that are basically written off as “gameplay mechanics things” or simple oversights.
…Hence there will probably be conflicts with the TV show. But that’s fine. It’s nothing earth shattering for the IP.
…Yeah. That’s a bit extreme.
You can sit back and let this stuff collapse under its own weight, you know.
TBH a violent reaction feels like is just going to help politicize this LLM mania (and therefore present an excuse to cement the enshittification). Let people see how awful and annoying it is all by itself.
You should break Meta glasses though. That’s totally warranted.
because anyone who knows even a scrap of how LLM/GANs work knows that the data needs to train a model would be far beyond the reach of a company of Larian’s scale
If it’s like an image/video model, they could start with existing open weights, and fine tune it. There are tons to pick from, and libraries to easily plug them into.
If it’s not, and something really niche, and doesn’t already exist to their satisfaction, it probably doesn’t need to be that big a model. A lot of weird stuff like sketch -> 3D models are trained on university student project time + money budgets (though plenty of those already exist).
We don’t need defenders coming in here trying to pretend that the CEO hasn’t just clarified that they are using AI for preproduction, we know this and it’s not up for debate now.
No. We don’t know.
And frankly, why do I need to play their game when I could just AI generate my own slop and save the 70 bucks
I dunno what you’re on about, that has nothing to do with tools used in preproduction. How do you know they’ll even use text models? Much less that a single would ever be shipped in the final game? And how are you equating LLM slop to a Larian RPG?
hit, it seems like they’ve forgotten about the community that got them to where they are today in favor of some AAA gaming nonsense.
Except literally every word that comes out of interviews is care for their developers, and their community, which they continue to support.
Frankly, there are plenty of games that people judge from the outset. There’s a reason why we have the saying “First impressions matter”. They’ve left a bad taste in anyone who dares question the ethics of AI use, but thankfully there might be an audience of people out there who like slop more than I dislike it so they could be ok. No skin off my nose.
Read that again; pretend it’s not about AI.
It sounds like language gamergate followers use as excuses to hate something they’ve never even played, when they’ve read some headline they don’t like.
…Look, if Divinity comes out and it has any slop in it, it can burn in hell. If it comes out that they partnered with OpenAI or whomever extensively, it deserves to get shunned and raked over coals.
But I do not like this zealous, uncompromising hate for something that hasn’t even come out, that we know little about, from a studio we have every reason to give the benefit of the doubt. It reminds me of the most toxic “gamer” parts of Reddit and other cesspools of the internet, and I don’t want it to spread here.
That’s extreme, and put abrasively.
…But the sentiment isn’t wong.
Except it’s not a small minority anymore, which is understandable given how pervasive chatbot enshittification is becoming. Maybe the ‘made with AI’ label isn’t enough to deter everyone, but it’s enough to kill social media momentum, which is largely how games sell these days.
WTF. That’s awful, and also totally baffling. “This single game is responsible for a huge chunk of revenue and introducting countless people to D&D; let’s lay off its staff and leadership.”
Baldur’s Gate 4 will arrive far sooner than you think, and it will be terrible.
What do you mean by this? An outsourced spinoff is already in the works? I don’t see that in the linked article.
At a certain level, it is going to be a chore to determine who is or is not slopping up with AI media. Not every asset comes out with six fingers and a half-melted face.
Image/video diffusion is a tiny subset of genAI. I’d bet nothing purely autogenerated makes it into a game.
I can see legitimate frustration with an industry that seems reliant on increasingly generic and interchangeable assets. AI just becomes the next iteration of this problem. You’ve expanded the warehouse of prefab images, but you’re still stuck with end products that are uncannily similar to everything else on the market.
See above. And in many spaces, there are a sea of models to choose from, and an easy ability to tune them to whatever style you want.
And that’s before you get to the IP implications of farming all your content out to a third party that doesn’t seem to care where its base library is populated from.
Thier tools can be totally in house, disconnected from the outside web, if they wish. They might just be a part of the pipeline on their graphics workstations.
Keep a distinction between “some machine learning in tedious parts of our workflows” and “a partnership with Big Tech APIs.” Those are totally different things.
It sounds like Larian is talking about the former, and I’m not worried about any loss of creativity from that.
Yeah, the outrage is overblown.
This doesn’t mean they’re enforcing a CoPilot quota or vibe coding the game or shipping slop; it could be simple autocompletion, or (say) a component that makes the mocap pipeline easier.
Don’t let Tech Bros poison dumb tools that could help out devs like Larian.
…Now, if they ship slop into the final game or announce an “OpenAI partnership,” that’s a different story.
Well again, it depends.
“Mandate its usage” could mean the motion cap/animation people have to learn some kind of automation tool, that’s now part of the engine.
That’s fine.
And that’s very different from the “you MUST make X hits to Microsoft Copilot” type garbage that’s so common now.
I’m harping on this because I’m afraid Larian will try something reasonable, yet get immense, unwarranted backlash (both internally and publically) because of other workers’ experiences with enshittified ML. And how politicized “AI” is becoming.
Machine learning is not bad. Tech Bro evangelism and the virus they spread among executives, is. And I don’t want the garbage they sell to poison tools studios like Larian could use to get ahead of AAA publishers.
Well that can be reasonable. Obviously don’t vibe code an engine, but LLMs are great for basic code autocomplete, or quick utility scripts, things like that.
Really specialized AI (not LLMs/GenAI) can be great at, say, turning raw mocap into character animations. Or turning artist sketches into 3D models. Cogs in their pipeline, so to speak, which has nothing to do with GenAI slop making it into a final product.
The line is very fine though, and most in the business world skew to the side of pushing slop.
That sounds excellent.
I truly love that Larian leadership frames everything they talk about around devs and their needs/wants. Another D&D game? “Oh, that’s great and all, but our devs hearts weren’t in it so we dropped it like a rock.” New engine? They ramble about improvements to dev workflows. It is so obviously a top priority.
This is a fair point. When I made the original comment, I didn’t realize their in house engine went so far back:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divinity_Engine
If they can shoehorn in something akin to KCD2’s or Satisfactory’s Global Illumination, but keep their dev workflows and existing systems in place, that’d be perfect.
Depends how much they “redo”.
I’m utterly terrified of them pulling an Andromeda/2077 and getting stuck in dev hell trying to debug the new engine bits instead of actually building the game. This is the advantage of prebuilt engines: someone else has already one all the hardware support/optimization and contemporary architecture stuff for you.
I’m less afraid of them pulling a Starfield, I suppose. The “divinity engine” in BG3 already runs okay. It’s not sleek like CryEngine KCD2, but it doesn’t feel janky or dated either, and even the mildest refresh over BG3 would be fine.
At first, Larian had planned to continue working with Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast division on Dungeons & Dragons, but Vincke said he and his team spent a few months working on a new project before realizing they weren’t feeling the excitement they once did. “Conceptually, all of the ingredients for a really cool game were there except the hearts of the developers,” he said. They abandoned that game last year and pivoted to Divinity, a franchise that Larian also happens to own.
It’s crazy they have the finances to be working on a D&D franchise game and decide “…Nah. Let’s do something else.”
They recently switched to a new engine…
Uh oh.
I know folks like to hate on Unity, and Borderlands 3. Rightfully so. But let me list out some “in house engine” releases:
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Cyberpunk 2077, which Nvidia backing
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Mass Effect Andromeda, after previously being Unreal
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Starfield
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Paradox Grand Strategy, like Stellaris
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A “smaller studio” example, Distant Worlds 2
All these drug their developers through hell, and we’re still technical messes at release. And after.
Now let’s look at some others:
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KCD2: CryEngine
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Expedition 33: Unreal
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Black Myth Wukong: Unreal
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Stray: Unreal
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As a “smaller studio” example, Satisfactory: Unreal
…I’m just saying. Making a modern engine from scratch is hard. There are just too many things to worry about. And the record of “RPG studios rolling a new in house engine” is not great.
So what I hope this means is Larian moving to CryEngine or something like that, and not making something from scratch. But if they’re talking about early access so soon, I bet they licensed another engine.
FYI I didn’t get a Lemmy notification to your reply. This is really annoing, and its just about pushing me to try Piefed…
But yeah, I buy this. But problems:
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It costs Valve a lot more money.
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It requires more employees, or at least contractors/grants.
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It requires finding expertise/passion in niches, and categorizing a whole lot of games.
And that’s what I think is needed. If Steam wants to be the Google of gaming that’s fine… as long as someone else is competing with a different approach to split the difference. Just Steam’s approach by itself would be bad, I think.
- The gaming community have seemingly decided they like a Valve monopoly, which is quite unfortunate.
Given Valve’s sort of libertarian/hands off ethos, I don’t think they’re going to take the “1st pary editorial team” approach. Heck, they seem to be aware of the issue, hence the Steam Curators program, but its not the same as bankrolling an editorial team that does it for a living.
Fair.
What’s to be done about that, though? Steam does not control social media, and customer attention is finite.
Is the issue organizational? Should all these solo/tiny devs have better ways to collaborate so they make fewer, better games?
Or is it mostly a structural problem with the Steam Store?
One problem: so many small/solo devs are terrible at listing their game.
I’m not talking about sophisticated marketing. I’m talking about extensive tagging, a flashy description, good well-framed screenshots, and taking a few minutes to search for and gift some YouTubers in your niche. Whatever their situation, the devs can do this.
And I’m shocked by how many don’t.
It’s… not hard. Not compared to game dev.
I don’t know a solution either, as I don’t understand why basics are skipped. Maybe they’re kinda in a bubble/isolated?
Perhaps Steam should be more forceful about tagging and describing games before they can be listed. I get Valve don’t want to be “restrictive gatekeepers,” but that is not a high barrier.
Oh that’s awesome. Yeah, I see the rumors now:
Selfishly, I hope their other half’a working on a sci fi game. Or a cyberpunk one?
Shadowrun? Gods, that IP would be perfect for Larian.
Maybe theres confusing crossover?
I’m of the opinion that Starfield, in particular, is unreasonably tolerated even though (from what I played) it’s a dreadful, archaic, boring and sluggish game. I’m of the opinion that FO76 released in a particularly bad state, and that Todd behaved in a smiley “tech bro” kind of way immediately after its release. And I will pound BGS all day over that.
On the other hand, yeah, I’m all for devs re releasing games. It gives them visibility! BGS does it so much it’s kind of a meme, but it’s not bad.
So, BGS deserves some skepticism. But not over Skyrim, really.
Then watch on a plug-in Android TV box. Or take to the high seas.
I’m just saying, if you’re going to stream from an internet service anyway, video/audio on every HTPC streaming app I’ve tried looks bad. Netflix is the best, and it’s still heavily compromised. And (at least on my Sony), the local Android apps tend to have the best system integration for rescaling, HDR, setting the correct refresh rate, per app IQ settings and so on.
But that obviously doesn’t apply if you’re hosting it locally though Kodi, Jellyfin, Plex or whatever.
TBH you should be playing DRM content though smart TV/TV box apps anyway. Desktop Windows playback is more technically limited (for instance, no auto resolution/refresh rate switching) and aside from that you usually get a worse bitrate stream on a stuttery player.
I don’t even know about DRM playback on Linux.
And the discoverability pipe is breaking.
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No one reads oldschool curators like RockPaperShotgun anymore. They’re barely afloat.
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Generic algorithmic social media like YouTube tends to snowball a few games.
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Forums are dead. Reddit is dystopian.
That leaves Steam’s algorithm, and a sea of sparsely seen solo reviewers. But there are billions of people oblivious to passion projects they’d love, and playing AAAs or gacha phone apps instead.
That’s a bit extreme. Everything from Hazelight (It Takes Two, Split Fiction) is sublime, they still have Respawn making Star Wars games. They have Sims. And (outside sports games) they’ve dialed down the “MTX meme” they were a decade ago.
…I’m not saying they’re good. But they’re nowhere near Activision-Blizzard enshittified, nor hurling towards it as fast as Xbox Studios and some other AAAs.
The base Mac Mini is not super powerful. Physically, the silicon comparable to AMD Strix Point, which you’d find in any AMD laptop.
I am not trying to rag on Apple here: their stuff is fine. It’s ridiculously power efficient. It’d be beyond excellent for a handheld like the Steam Deck, or a VR headset.
…But a plug in gaming console? That’s more ‘M4 Pro’ silicon. And what they charge for that speaks for itself.
M chips are super expensive. They’re optimized for low clockspeed/idle efficiency and pay through the nose for cutting edge processes, whereas most gaming hardware is optimized for pure speed/$, with the smallest die area and cheapest memory possible, at the expense of power efficiency.
And honestly the CPU/GPU divide over traces is more economical. “Unified memory” programming isn’t strictly needed for games at the moment.
And, practically, Apple demands very high margins. I just can’t see them pricing a console aggressively.
Do folks enjoy Starfield these days?
Or 76?
I’ve been playing BGS since Oblivion, and my experience was:
76 was boring, even with coop. That’s saying something. The world was interesting, but the main and side (fetch) quests were the dullest, buggiest things that kept trying to sell us some anti grind stuff; and this was well after launch.
Starfield was… well, even more boring. It felt like Fallout 3 with all the jank, 10X the production budget, 100X the graphics requirements (as smooth as a cactus on my 3090), yet somehow, none of the charm. I only played for a bit, but I don’t remember a single character name. Whereas I can still recall little side quests from Oblivion and FO3. Quirks persisted all the way from Oblivion, yet all the fun bugs were patched out. Basically, ME: Andromeda was better in every way.
But, you know, whatever floats peoples boats. I’m curious if these games have grown a following over whatever I was missing.