Produced by Niantic-ed Off.

You’re getting downvoted, but the move to fully-voiced dialogue absolutely killed the level of reactivity in games, and AI is one of the few ways to bring that level of detail back without bloating budgets even higher than they already are.

Voice acting is expensive (and makes rewrites expensive too), and spending development funds on anything players won’t hear is considered “wasted money” so you rarely see meaningful branching in storylines anymore outside of the biggest budget games. Conversations have also became short and stilted to keep recording costs and disk space down. Just look at the freaking encyclopedia that was Morrowind dialogue compared to the single sentence sound bytes used for conversations in Oblivion and Skyrim.

I’m not a fan of how AI has been handled by corporations, but if they set up a system where voice actors (and other creatives) could be hired to train models, get paid for every project that uses them, and they (or their estate) have the right to look at and refuse projects the same as if they’d taken the contract normally, I’d be all for the AI revolution.

There’s a middle ground where generative AI is fair to creative talent and opens up a world of possibilities. It’s unlikely, but hopefully one day we get there.

TL;DR: their argument is that using AI trained on an actor, even with said actor’s blessing, is unfair because it shuts out other actors who used to get work imitating that voice.

I think dueling is still technically legal in a few places.

Modification of any other file types (like scripts, configs or libraries) is not allowed and the files will not be loaded by the game

It seems they’re blocked by the game itself.

Bad news for modders. From their FAQ:

The types of files that can be modified:

• Animations
• Textures
• Models
• Videos
• Sounds
• Shaders (only on PC)

Modification of any other file types (like scripts, configs or libraries) is not allowed and the files will not be loaded by the game and accepted by moderation.

So it looks like they are dropping the vast majority of existing mod support despite the new Steam Workshop integration (or more likely because of it, since now they’re responsible for policing their mods). I guess we won’t see updated versions of Anomoly or any of the other mods that kept the game alive and popular all this time.

The limitation on modified configs is especially baffling. In the old games they were the primary way of fixing the game’s jank, and you shouldn’t be able to make anything malicious with them (short of bad entries that crash the game).

IIRC the old XRay engine is open source (or the source leaked and the devs gave the okay for modders to improve it), so here’s hoping someone can reverse engineer and backport any major improvements this edition adds to the originals.

As is tradition.

I don’t think it’s actually gotten much worse (things even got slightly better after a few countries threatened legislation for going after children), it’s just that those tactics have slowly made their way out of the mobile space (where post-installation monetization strategies are a result of users expecting mobile games to be free, or at most a couple of dollars) and into regular gaming.

A free-to-play gacha game on Android having a scummy monetization model is nothing new, but an $80 (soon to be $90) AAA game double- and triple-dipping into your wallet with paid season passes and FOMO banners and all that other junk, plus plastering ads on its menus? That’s still relatively new to consoles/PC, and putting that crap in games you paid for represents a new level of greed.

Not that video specifically, but the others were along the same vein. They were all completely open about how they abused psychology to get people hooked, and spoke about players using dehumanizing terms like assets or cash cows. It was disgusting how shameless they were.

I’m still salty they turned Marathon into an extraction shooter. Marathon, one of the all-time narrative greats!

Why make millions releasing games people want when you can potentially make billions by abusing addiction research to keep users playing long past the point they enjoy your game?

(I’m vaguely associated with the gaming industry. I knew things were about to go downhill when I started getting invites to lectures on retaining players and extracting money by using unethical psychological tricks - this was nearly fifteen years ago and targeted at mobile devs, but it’s long since infected the entire industry)

*Monkey’s paw curls*

Your wish has been granted. Look forward to our upcoming Syphon: Extraction, an exciting extraction shooter with none of the gameplay you remember!

Also on the docket is Ape Escape Infinity, a gacha featuring all your favorite apes and up to several minutes of gameplay. Now supports importing NFT apes, because our execs are still pushing crypto as the next big thing for some reason!

The funny thing is being enslaved by the religious zealots is one of the best starts you can pick in the game. You’re stuck in a quarry doing backbreaking work (which levels strength), are fed just enough that you won’t die (acquiring food is normally a nightmare in the early game), and most importantly the guards won’t (intentionally) kill you, only knock you unconscious if you misbehave. Which matters because taking damage is how you train toughness, making it one of only a few places on the entire world map where you can train it without a high risk of death.

And it gets better. Every night after your shift you can sneak out and practice lock picking on doors and slave shackles and assassinating sleeping guards (since failure only results in a beatdown), which combined with the strength and toughness grinding leads to you becoming a ninja powerhouse by the time you escape.

10/10, would lead a slave uprising again.

I copy+pasted my lunch without thinking and overwrote my clipboard; guess I’m sans vehicle now.

“Hey, that guy said to tell you-”

“I heard him.”

(I know this is a shitpost, but I couldn’t resist lore-dumping)

The Dark Sign is actually Gwyn’s curse on humanity to seal away their potential (the Dark Soul being the only fragment of the First Flame that can be shared and passed on without weakening, he feared humanity growing powerful enough to topple the gods through sheer numbers). That’s why the Dark Sign appears as a flame encircling the Dark. When the First Flame weakens enough, his seal becomes visible as the Dark within humanity begins breaking free.

Shivering Isles rivals Morrowind in my mind. It has a strange and unique setting and most of the content is incredibly well-written, which contrasts sharply with the standard medieval setting of baseline Oblivion (mandatory reminder that Cyrodiil was supposed to be a rainforest, but the devs retconned it to make development easier).

The other expansion, Knights of the Nine, was just a bunch of fetch quests to unlock an armor set and was disappointing in comparison to even the base game (though at least the final boss fight was cool). It also put behavioral tracking on the DLC’s rewards that would disable them if your character gained infamy, forcing you to repeat a bunch of boring travel quests to fix them whenever this happened. There’s a reason KotN never comes up in discussions about the game.

Yep.

Yeah, it ran on AOL’s platform and was a multiplayer dungeon crawler similar to SSI’s other stuff.

Digital Molecular Matter, the DMM you mentioned in Force Unleashed, is just as interesting IMO. It calculated how objects would break under various types of stress and produced some of the best and most realistic destruction in gaming. It even simulated wood splintering vertically when twisted!

I’m guessing it had similar problems to Euphoria since I haven’t seen it mentioned since.

90% of Oblivion’s voice acting budget must have gone to paying for Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean to say a few dozen lines. It’s long been a meme that basically every other person in Cyrodill shares the same six or seven voice actors.