Eh, fuck it. I have no need for more “douche and a turd sandwich” “both sides suck” humor in the 2020s and I have zero desire to give rockstar any money after their blatant union busting.

Yeah… that is the other aspect where… labor is already getting fucked over massively so it becomes a question of how many jobs are even going away.

Exactly, as I don’t expect QA done by something that can’t think or feel to know what actually needs to be fixed

That is a very small part of QA’s responsibility. Mostly it is about testing and identifying bugs that get triaged by management. The person running the tests is NOT responsible for deciding what can and can’t ship.

And, in that regard… this is actually a REALLY good use of “AI” (not so much generative). Imagine something like the old “A star algorithm plays mario” where it is about finding different paths to accomplish the same goal (e.g. a quest) and immediately having a lot of exactly what steps led to the anomaly for the purposes of building a reproducer.

Which actually DOES feel like a really good use case… at the cost of massive computational costs (so… “AI”).

That said: it also has all of the usual labor implications. But from a purely technical “make the best games” standpoint? Managers overseeing a rack that is running through the games 24/7 for bugs that they can then review and prioritize seems like a REALLY good move.

Yeah. I’ve never worked anywhere that the staff didn’t have side channels for socializing out of work that inevitably ended up getting kinda borderline with some discussions. It’s against company policy and it is a problem but it is mostly ignored because good employees know where to draw the line and the orgs that own those third party chats tend to not be competitors.

And it leaves people open to stuff like this. “Well, you probably talked about your work schedule or compensation which we consider Office Use Only so you violated corporate policy and are eligible to be fired”

As for “Well, they should have used matrix or signal!”: Maybe. But if you’ve ever tried to convince a friend group to install another client then you know that is a much bigger struggle than convincing people to engage in collective bargaining.

But also? While it is possible rockstar/take2 just guessed, the more likely outcome is that someone narced. At which point it doesn’t actually matter if everyone was on Discord or Matrix or Signal or whatever.

Yeah. I never fucked with EU but I am a huge CK sicko and… I have a LOT of problems with Paradox as a publisher but they’ve really been pushing their internal/flagship studios to focus on onboarding and approachability for these games.

Was really surprised to see that the new East Asia DLC for CK3 actually added a new tutorial sequence/character. Haven’t sat down yet to see if it is focused on the Mandate of Heaven or if it is just for people who want to get back in and are sick and freaking tired of Petty King Murchad.

Big enough that I lose interest or notice the padding.

A lot of it boils down to execution. The more urban areas of a Sleeping Dogs or the TW3 map with the Bloody Baron (not the viking map) feel geuinely massive enough though both are on the smaller end. Whereas something like GTA5’s San Andreas actively pissed me off because so much of the game was just driving to and from set pieces on the interstate.

That said: I actively don’t care about completion unless I really love the game. So if something was 40000km^2… I might never leave the two square kilomters the actual game takes place in and not care about the rest.

As for Just Cause 2 and 3? Neither felt overly large but both were broken down into regions and I mostly just played those whenever I felt like over the course of a month or two. So it really was closer to “levels” than anything else.

Contrast that with a Far Cry 2 which is downright tiny and… I’ll never have the patience to drive past even one outpost ever again.

If you actually look at the MMO/MMO-adjacent landscape… most of the ones that are still alive are over a decade old with some legally allowed to drink.

• Runescape: 2001
• WoW: 2004
• LOTRO: 2007
• Star Wars TOR: 2011
• Guild Wars 2: 2012
• Final Fantasy MMO (that people actually liked): 2013
• Old School Runescape: 2013
• Elder Scrolls Online (about that…): 2014

And a lot of that has to do with people increasingly using MMOs as “comfort games” which… work best for the oldies. And most of the money going into game dev focused more on annual games and then live service games where you still spend about the same amount of money per year but feel better because it isn’t a monthly subscription. Instead of spending 10-15 bucks a month you spend 30-50 bucks every other month for the battle pass or the new expansion or the Officer D.Va skin and so forth. TOTALLY different.

So most of the newer MMO-ass MMOs are either doomed from the start for being overly niche or take a more Korean or Gacha oriented balance and monetization scheme where… they are competing against the juggernauts that are also closer to a decade old than not.

Haven’t used bazzite, but there is an App Store you can get all of the apps anyone would need.

Its one of the quirks of a lot of the atomic distros. Because they are specifically built around the idea of having a specific set of packages at a specific range of versions for every rev of the distro itself… adding more packages is kind of a clusterfuck.

For flatpaks (and I think appimages too?), it is seamless. For anything else you are googling the commands to add packages as “layers” and so forth

And, to be fair to Bazzite (which I use for my HTPC and love it on there), I have had zero issues with actual gaming. Steam out of the box and Heroic is one flatpak away. But holy shit was adding iperf3 to test some network infrastructure tweaks a Thing.

Its why I personally recommend to friends to just raw dog Fedora rather than use one of the atomic distros. Atomic distros make a lot of sense for deployed machines but for anything someone is going to use as “their” computer? Just learn to not type sudo before every command you run… and maybe get a jetkvm so your tech savvy friend can fix your computer after an nvidia driver update.

Bazzite is great, but it still has the failure(maybe it’s not failure to you and me, but the average gamer) is that most stuff isn’t just, download .exe, run that .exe there are loops and frameworks that need to be installed through command line

Strong disagree on “most”

For the vast majority of users? Everything they need is in Steam and MAYBE Heroic, which is the same as on Windows.

In terms of non-gaming? I… have very strong Thoughts on atomic distros and the hoops Bazzite et al make you jump through with regard to layering and the like, but they are in Discover and the like. So “app store” experience.

I personally don’t think Bazzite is a good desktop OS (but I love it for my HTPC). But any of the user friendly distros (e.g. Fedora, Mint, and Ubuntu) should be almost zero command line usage unless you have a reason to use it.

Up until the big UI/UX update a few years back, the vast majority of people had never heard about Dwarf Fortress outside of the sickos and the people who remember when LPs were forum/blog posts.

Unreal World has been in that same category where the people who play it love it and the rest vaguely recall their favorite youtubers maybe trying it out once.

Yeah… that is a pretty shit article?

Describing Bilibili as “a social media company” is like describing Google as “a search engine” or Microsoft as “the people what make the calculator app”.

Duckov seems solid from what I have seen. It also has the full might of Chinese Youtube behind it and has been doing sponsorships with basically any influencer who will take the money. Its as simple as that.

Yeah.

I can’t speak to Mexico. But, at least in the US, video games very much have been a pipeline for both rehabilitation of the military’s image and direct recruitment. It is what leads to generations that believe tier ninety special force operators are the greatest people ever which both provides “They know what they are doing and have their reasons” and “I want to be one of those”

I am not aware of any cartel friendly games (unless you REALLY disliked Fifty Cent, I guess?) but I wouldn’t immediately rule this out IF it is part of a wider media push.

Violent video games do not make you violent. But “cool guys doing cool shit” makes people want to “do cool shit”. There is a reason (para)militaries around the world tend to cooperate with, and outright fund, so much media that glazes them. Hell, military/spy porn is sometimes so good that it makes you ALMOST stop making jokes about how Sullivan Stapleton should play Hank Hill in a live action KOTH (that man wishes he had Hank Hill’s ass).

As long as you run the proprietary nvidia drivers, performance is more or less noise for a given driver version. There IS some annoyance with slower releases for drivers to Linux but… nvidia has had much bigger problems with new driver releases over the past year.

The big issue is if you run the open source community drivers. And… if you are spending leather jacket money and then using low performance drivers… you are an idiot. Because Mistah J already has the metrics and money he wants and doesn’t care if you actually use your card after buying it.

Those are a related but still “acceptable” situation where they are contractors who are generally over leveraged to the point that a single missed deal is enough to kill them. Which is definitely not helped by (allegedly?) being told the contract is for 3 scenes, it getting bumped up to 5, and them not even getting the final versions of the costumes until a week before it needs to be turned in. And then getting told they can either deal with it or never work for totally not Marvel ever again.

Contract for, let’s say Ant Man 3, is done but they are already in the hole because of the resources they spent on that and having to turn down other movies and then they get told they won’t be getting the contract for Dr Strange 2 and to go fuck themselves. And, of course, the entire internet (especially the generative ai loving chuds at corridor digital) shit on their work because it is horrible and “looks like someone made it in an afternoon” which… they kind of did because they weren’t even allowed to know who the villain in that sequence was until a month before it was due.

Whereas what we are seeing more of, this year in particular, is effectively entire departments getting spun up for a project and then everyone laid off when it is done. Has cost and severance implications but it is how corporations are getting the kind of senior staff who don’t want the instability of contract work… more or less on contract work. Which is why this is still a big news story.

Nowhere near it.

The “corporate roles” are likely a case of dwnsizing after building out infrastructure and policies/protocols. A LOT of companies are doing it these days. They staffed up for a project, finished (or pivoted) the project, and now have full time staff that they don’t actually need. And rather than work on new efforts they just look for an excuse to purge the because they know they can rehire for the next big push. Ironically, that is a model that had a LOT of use in video games in the days before DLC.

And the warehouse jobs (what this is to “distract” from) are about attempts at automation. Which… okay, it is really hard to do worse than the grossly incompetent, and yet STILL horrifically underpaid, staff they already have so that will probably actually be a net positive to consumers. Which will, in turn, result in rapidly hiring back that staff when the warehouses all collapse because they got an extra shipment of SD cards and had nowhere to store them.

Aside from the windows and armory crate bullshit (both of which go away if you install bazzite…), the ROG allies are actually pretty good hardware for their price.

Because… you aren’t driving 4k@60 for under a thousand bucks. And the ROG Ally X whatever is very comparable to laptops with similar hardware. And while I do not at all think you need that power in a handheld, people are going to notice it when it gets compared to a PS5 pro or a PS6. Which it will.

Let Sony launch the PS6 at 1k or higher. Let Microsoft somehow get the xbox series 2 out at 2k because they are pulling a The Producers or whatever. And if there is demand? Premium ass Steam Box. If there is not? MAYBE do a more premium 500-800 USD NUC. And if people REALLY love the ASUS Bumfuck ROG Seventy Seven Y Y Z or whatever? Give ASUS 20 bucks to sell a shit ton with SteamOS installed by default.

The key difference is that Valve were trying to build a market with the Steam Boxes. SteamOS is already demonstrably viable for “console” gaming and the consoles are going to be selling bigass PCs in 2027 already. Let them take the risk and then let Valve swoop in.

Which… is kinda what they did with the Steam Deck. GDP and Aya Neo put in the work to make handheld form factor laptops at semi-reasonable prices. Valve rolled up and wrecked their shit with the Steam Deck.

All signs are that we are getting the new VR headset first.

And it is probably in Valve’s best interest to let other people drive the HTPC consoles. They are not going to be cheap since “1024 at 40 FPS” doesn’t scale all that well to a 50 inch 4k display. So let other integrators deal with that. Just release the steam controller 2 already.

And I’ll say that you can get a really nice AMD NUC HTPC for under 500 bucks that can handle “steam deck games” on a TV. And I THINK I have a way to get Display Port -> HDMI 2.1 that I need to sit down and test.

I want to say that is one of the last bosses of the DLC “narratively”?

But yeah. From love stuff like that. Gargoyles and Maneater in Dark 1 and Demon. The gargoyle gauntlet in Dark 2. The idea being that it is meant to pressure you but is really just a thinly veiled DPS gate.

I forget if the tree fuckers are one at a time or if they can Four Kings to overwhelm you, but the idea is that you are going to take damage but that is what your estus is for. The idea being that you can spike DPS to minimize the damage you take per health bar. And then you cry when you realize you decided to do that on NG+ where you can no longer rush them.

The one which is like four bosses in a row?

Get more scadutree fragments to increase your DPS and look into weapon arts that drop a DOT blob on the field (e.g. a magma puddle) since those are meant to hurt enemies that walk past and do ridiculous damage on the biggies what barely move.

And if your build supports if (or you want to go hang out with mommy), Great Stars is RIDICULOUSLY good for the DLC due to healing per hit. And the Prayerful Strike weapon art is more or less cheating in the DLC because of a mix of strong healing and holy being one of the few elements DLC bosses tend to at least not be strong against.