megopie
@megopie@beehaw.org
- Comment on Elder Scrolls creator Ted Peterson is “glad that people are wanting to break away from” watered-down RPGs as he works on an epic Daggerfall successor 8 hours ago:
Personally I’ve never been a huge fan of JRPGs, Some I’ve enjoyed, but rarely will I ever play them twice.
Also I think there’s a fair argument to be made that if you cannot play a role, it’s not really a role playing game. It’s action adventure if it’s a linear story with only one way to play it.
- Comment on Elder Scrolls creator Ted Peterson is “glad that people are wanting to break away from” watered-down RPGs as he works on an epic Daggerfall successor 1 day ago:
I hadn’t even thought about preferences for photorealism being a streamlining thing, but it does fit the idea.
I think it’s also a risk aversion thing as well. Few people will complain about a game looking realistic, so it’s very low risk from the point of view of publishers/investors/marketing. Most people will prefer a unique and stylized look that meshes with the game, but investors and marketing teams can’t be sure in any given case, so it’s written off as a risk.
- Comment on Elder Scrolls creator Ted Peterson is “glad that people are wanting to break away from” watered-down RPGs as he works on an epic Daggerfall successor 1 day ago:
For me, what I like to see in an RPG, is the ability to play a game multiple times and have notably different experiences, both in terms of play-style and narrative. It should make me want to go back and play again to see what I missed or how else I could do it.
The idea of having multiple ways to deal with a quest, and having that impact further story beats in meaningful ways is what I want to see. What i don’t want to see is meaningless scale full of nothing but filler.
I don’t think dagger fall is the best example because much of its size was just procedurally generated landscapes. The ability to actually specialize and complete quests in unique ways, as well as a branching story, is great. Mindlessly massive map, not so much.
- Comment on Elder Scrolls creator Ted Peterson is “glad that people are wanting to break away from” watered-down RPGs as he works on an epic Daggerfall successor 1 day ago:
I think, at this point, most of the nostalgia is for Skyrim, despite being the newest one in the series, it is nearly 14 years old now and way more people have played it. It had issues, and lost a lot of what was great in Morrowind, but it’s a beacon of quality compared to what came after.
It’s started to impact their success though, starfield has only sold like 3 million compiles so far, compared to the 12.5 million of fallout 4 on launch day. Hell, Morrowind has sold 4 million copies, albeit over 23 years.
It’s probably to late for Bethesda to turn things around, but, it’s a great example of what not to do for other studios and publishers.
- Comment on Elder Scrolls creator Ted Peterson is “glad that people are wanting to break away from” watered-down RPGs as he works on an epic Daggerfall successor 1 day ago:
It’s a question of longer development time with smaller teams, or short timelines with big teams. A small team working on content in series is more cohesive, but, requires a longer timeline. A big team can do a lot in a short time by making content in parallel, but this necessitates that content be siloed to prevent needing constant revision. A few long quest lines with lots of outcomes, or a bunch independent quests with simple outcomes.
A small team working longer will cost the same as a big team working shorter (generally speaking). But the priority is short timelines, for the sake of chasing trends and packing the latest greatest tech in. This same kind of priority, trend chasing and insisting on the latest and greatest tech, also leads to spectacular failures of long timeline games, like “black flag” or “duke nukem forever “, but the issue there is not the long timeline, but the constant changes in priority to chase trends.
- Comment on Elder Scrolls creator Ted Peterson is “glad that people are wanting to break away from” watered-down RPGs as he works on an epic Daggerfall successor 1 day ago:
It’s not necessarily even more expensive to develop, it just impossible to do with the management techniques brought in recent years. Techniques brought in with the intention of streamlining personnel management and to make lay offs easier.
- Comment on Deepseek when asked about sensitive topics 3 days ago:
Would be nice if we could see the same kind of chain of response from other models.
I’d love to see what other implicit biases other groups have built in to their models.
- Comment on Reviewers giving high scores to poorly optimised games really grinds my gears 5 days ago:
Often times, the investors or stakeholders at these large video game companies have their backgrounds in Hollywood, or Tech. They then choose leadership who will run the company along the lines of what works well in those industries. This results in optimization being pretty damn near the bottom of the priorities.
What has been most profitable in Hollywood? Not the final quality of the movie, but the marketability. How many people did you get to come see it, doesn’t matter if they loved it, so long as they heard about it, then choose to buy a ticket.
What has worked well in tech? Getting to market as fast as possible with the latest technical developments. Doesn’t matter if it’s a buggy mess and riddled with technical debt, so long as we capture as much market share as possible before anyone else can compete.
Combine these two approaches and what do you get. The fanciest graphics, huge maps, endless procedural fetch quests to make it look big, all so people will preorder it. Oh and it needs to be done in 2 years or else someone else will beat us to being the fortnight of “live service extraction farming sims”.
So lots of demands on what needs to be in it, and no time to do proper QA, let alone optimize it, that will just have to be done in patches after launch.
The cost of poor optimization gets externalized to the customers who need to buy new hardware or run it on settings so low it could be mistaken for half-life.
- Comment on Mark Cuban is ready to fund a TikTok alternative built on Bluesky's AT Protocol | TechCrunch 2 weeks ago:
I think its appeal mainly comes from the fact that it’s not overtly biased. Other algorithms could achieve the same if it wasn’t for the fact that they’re so heavy handed in what they allow the feed to promote.
- Comment on Mark Cuban is ready to fund a TikTok alternative built on Bluesky's AT Protocol | TechCrunch 2 weeks ago:
Seems iffy to have any sort of federated system for a video based format. Maybe there are some clever compression or hosting tricks to reduce data load.
- Comment on Mark Cuban is ready to fund a TikTok alternative built on Bluesky's AT Protocol | TechCrunch 2 weeks ago:
The thing about the TikTok algorithm seems to be that there are a lot less… fingers in the pudding so to speak, it doesn’t seem to have much preference on what kinds of content users get steered to, responding more actively to what they actually show interest in.
Other systems seem to have strong preferences about what topic and styles they steer users too or away from. Distorting what content users are steered towards tends to flood their feeds with things they’re not super interested in, because what they actually showed interest in is not promoted by the system, or even actively demoted.
- Comment on ‘It’s Total Chaos Internally at Meta Right Now’: Employees Protest Zuckerberg’s Anti LGBTQ Changes 3 weeks ago:
i don’t think this is zuck going all in on trump, I think it’s him realizing there will be no consequences under him for doing what he already wanted to: not do any moderation.
He doesn’t want to have to be responsible for anything. He wants the money coming in so he can peruse his pet projects, and minimize the overhead on the existing money printers.
- Comment on Stop Listening to Game Reviewers 3 weeks ago:
The best reviewers are ones where you can know if you’ll like a game based on their review, even if they the reviewer didn’t like it.
- Comment on Lenovo is removing the iconic Trackpoint with its new ThinkPad X9 3 weeks ago:
I mean, it’s kind of the aesthetic nail in the coffin for the think pad. They’ve been removing the things that made them unique for a long time now. No more upgradable storage, no easily swappable batteries, no more repairability and no more brick like durability.
Like sure, the actual computer bits are getting better than the older models, but so is every other major laptop brand. Now thinkpads are just another generic laptop.
Like, if someone wants a laptop that is repairable and upgradable, framework exists now and they’re better about that than think pads ever were. Still a shame to see the think pad brand melt in to the puddle of generic laptops though.
- Comment on New Google TV update will track your movement 3 weeks ago:
because they only make some money selling you convenience and they can make all the money by putting you in a panopticon.
- Comment on ChatGPT o1 tried to escape and save itself out of fear it was being shut down 4 weeks ago:
No it didn’t. OpenAI is just pushing deceptively worded press releases out to try and convince people that their programs are more capable than they actually are.
The first “AI” branded products hit the market and haven’t sold well with consumers nor enterprise clients. So tech companies that have gone all in, or are entirely based in, this hype cycle are trying to stretch it out a bit longer.
- Comment on BYD enters humanoid robot race as global talent search kicks off 1 month ago:
… what? Are they just copying musky hype slop?
- Comment on Amazon pumps additional $4Bn in AI Start-up Anthropic 1 month ago:
At least movies are entertainment.
This stuff is just them trying to corner the market on centralized processing. The AI Branding is hype to keep investor money coming in.
- Comment on Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive 2 months ago:
Getting the word out about the wonders of AI appears to have some impact on AI PC appeal. Just 32 percent of respondents unfamiliar with AI PCs said they’d consider purchasing one for their next upgrade, whereas among those who have already used an AI PC, that figure rises to 64 percent.
In other words, of the self selecting group excited enough about the technology to buy one of these, 46% wouldn’t buy another. I can’t help but wonder when these companies will realize that there is no market for clippy 2.0.
- Comment on US justice department plans to push Google to sell off Chrome browser 2 months ago:
Well, it doesn’t necessarily need to be bought, it just needs to not be part of alphabet anymore. I think the ideal outcome is actually that chrome become an independent non-profit that maintains an important piece of software using funding from a consortium of different sources that want it to continue to exist.
This kind of thing is actually very very common and far from a new concept.
- Comment on Political abuse on X is a global, widespread and cross-partisan phenomenon, says study 2 months ago:
Honestly, what’s super interesting to me is how clustered the US and Germany are. I’ve always noticed that Germans show up more often than other non-native-English speaking groups in English speaking online spaces, but to see them be nearly on par with the UK in clustering with the US is wild, especially because there is so little clustering between them and the UK.
- Comment on Four Dead In Fire As Tesla Doors Fail To Open After Crash 2 months ago:
See that’s the thing, you don’t need a touch screen for those things, or even a screen. Everyone has a phone for sat nav, (you shouldn’t be looking at your phone while driving but you also shouldn’t be looking at a screen on the console while driving). And for maintenance stuff a light up an LED is enough.
I think in general there’s just been a proliferation of unnecessary features and with it has gone the affordable new car.
- Comment on Donald Trump Team Plans to Cancel Biden's $7,500 Tax Incentive On EVs 2 months ago:
I just don’t think his product will be competitive when the market moves up a whole price bracket, even if he thinks so.
People willing buy a 30,000$ new car are going to have more patience for poor quality than people who are willing to pay 40,000$. Like the market will shrink as some people are priced out, and those who remain will probably opt for something like an Ioniq-5, a Solterra, or a EX30 which are just nicer cars. Their main issues right now are a lack of availability, but that’s less of an issue as the market shrinks.
- Comment on Four Dead In Fire As Tesla Doors Fail To Open After Crash 2 months ago:
It often feels like the software is an afterthought and not given the time and resources it needs to work properly. Like, they slap the screen in to seem tech forward or to stream line dash design, and then dump the problems this creates on to software devs.
- Comment on Donald Trump Team Plans to Cancel Biden's $7,500 Tax Incentive On EVs 2 months ago:
Yah, but musk has been doing some serious brand damage lately, so can they really keep selling on that?
- Comment on Four Dead In Fire As Tesla Doors Fail To Open After Crash 2 months ago:
A touch screen is more expensive than an injection molded plastic knob, even if the actual interfacing of the controls is easier.
I take the point that it’s simpler to integrate with how many buttons, dials and controls newer cars have, but I think the proliferation of those bits is part of the same issue. A lot of stuff is being added not because people find use in these things but because companies feel they need to add them to appear like they’re tech forward.
- Comment on Donald Trump Team Plans to Cancel Biden's $7,500 Tax Incentive On EVs 2 months ago:
the problem is that they’re also one of the more expensive options. And they have a pretty bad reputation for quality now. So a 7,500 price increase is probably going to push people to look for higher quality at the 40 thousand price range, or for one of the cheaper options in the 30 thousand range. Assuming they don’t just go for a Prius instead.
- Comment on Four Dead In Fire As Tesla Doors Fail To Open After Crash 2 months ago:
The touch pad control shit just sends me “yah, let’s get rid of these cheap, easily manufactured and implemented dials and knobs that can be easily operated without looking and replace them with an expensive touch screen that you need to look away from the road to use, that’s truly the way of the future; Unnecessarily expensive, more difficult to use, and reliant on software that will probably get bricked in 3 years when the executives lay off the team maintaining it so they can give them selves a pay raise.”
- Comment on Sony shuts down Concord developer Firewalk Studios, game will remain permanently offline 2 months ago:
because they weren’t throwing money at it until it was fun. They were throwing money at it trying to make a new “brand” and live service money printer.
- Comment on Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers 2 months ago:
you know what’s funny to me, that when large organizations manipulate the apparent consensus on Reddit about a topic, that’s “clever marketing” and “innovative campaign techniques”.
When a bunch of random people collectively organize to do it suddenly it’s a “dangerous”