Ardenfall looks good and I vaguely recall liking the 2022 demo.

But it is interesting how everything is “morrowind inspired” these days. Which was especially egregious with stuff like Dread Delusion. Those aren’t “Morrowind likes”. They are Gothic.

Sort of like back in the 10s (?) when any even slightly retro aesthetic FPS was “a DOOM game”. Which was REALLY funny with stuff like Strafe where EVERYONE hated it because it didn’t feel enough like DOOM… because it was just Quake 1.

I loved Morrowind and I loved Gothic and I loved Kings Field so all this shit is great for me. But it is real annoying and I am concerned when an otherwise amazing game will get clowned on because there was more Daggerfall or Gothic than Morrowind in the “Morrowind inspired game”.

A lot of devs of “wiki games” have been doing this lately.

Digital Extremes/Warframe did it a month or two back. And a lot of people have speculated that https://wiki.warframe.com/w/WARFRAME_Wiki:Stakeholder_Analysis and the old fandom equivalent “explains” it but that is inherently tinfoil and biased speculation.

Relative to a fandom wiki: I guess? Although you are inherently going to have the same content theft problems where the vast majority of modern wikis are just ripped from the game guides that games media are still paid to prepare.

Relative to an official wiki with developer backing? No, it is not a replacement.

Also: I would generally be very wary of any of the plugins to redirect you since they have VERY broad permissions to… hijack your browser traffic. If you are keeping up to date and monitoring them you are probably fine but that feels like a great example in waiting to find out a bad actor pushed some code last week…

Makes sense.

It is the fundamental problem with anything with “realistic” “raster” lighting. Visually you want it to look like what a city street actually looks like. Lamp post there with a nice bright bulb in it. But the actual lighting needs to look like it was filmed on a sound stage with a blue filter because THAT is “realistic”. So you have a lot of lighting trickery and so forth. The texture of the light source/bulb might be super bright but it is actually three invisible light sources that project the light that was baked into that scene.

When you switch that over to RTX? Maybe you hand tweak it so you actually get light from that street light. And, as anyone who has actually walked around a city at night can tell you, that shit is bright as hell… which makes all the areas where a street light isn’t REALLY dark and kind of creepy. Or maybe it is the phantom light sources that made things look nice that now make things look wrong.

We ran into this a lot at the start of the RT generation. Some parts of Control looked AMAZING and other parts look like… an office building. Some parts of Cyberpunk 2077 looked gorgeous and straight out of a Nicolas Refn film and others looked shiny and splotchy.

And its why one of the best demonstrations of ray tracing is… still kind of Quake 2. Because that is a game that was designed around the concepts behind ray tracing (dynamic lighting from real light sources) but also looks alien enough that our brains won’t say “That cave full of aliens looks wrong”

Its why I am so excited that the new DOOM is going to require Ray Tracing. That is gonna REALLY suck since I am “Team AMD” but it also means that level designers will be targeting one lighting scheme and can design around that.

Which gets to the crux of it. Unless you are reading REALLY hard sci-fi, most of the tech boils down to “a wizard did it”.

Like, the OT of Star Wars is 100% a fantasy series and it was only the EU (and later the PT) that tried to explain the tech and make it more sci-fi. Similarly, a lot of the litrpg writers think Sanderson is a softy and go ridiculously hard on explaining their magic systems in greater detail than actual textbooks.

And, at the end of the day, they are all just different shades of speculative fiction that primarily use magic/tech/magitech as a plot device to explore the impact on society of whatever metaphor the big bad is.

Even those examples are the kinds of things that “fall apart” if you actually think things through.

Art? Actual human artists tend to use a ridiculous amount of “AI” these days and have been for well over a decade (probably closer to two, depending on how you define “AI”). Stuff like magic erasers/brushes are inherently looking at the picture around it (training data) and then extrapolating/magicking what it would look like if you didn’t have that logo on your shirt and so forth. Same with a lot of weathering techniques/algorithms and so forth.

Same with coding. People more or less understand that anyone who is working on something more complex than a coding exercise is going to be googling a lot (even if it is just that you will never ever remember how to do file i/o in python off the top of your head). So a tool that does exactly that is… bad?

Which gets back to the reality of things. Much like with writing a business email or organizing a calendar: If a computer program can do your entire job for you… maybe shut the fuck up about that program? Chatgpt et al aren’t meant to replace the senior or principle software engineer who is in lots of design meetings or optimizing the critical path of your corporate secret sauce.

It is replacing junior engineers and interns (which is gonna REALLY hurt in ten years but…). Chatgpt hallucinated a nonsense function? That is what CI testing and code review is for. Same as if that intern forgot to commit a file or that rockstar from facebook never ran the test suite.

Of course, the problem there is that the internet is chock full of “rock star coders” who just insist the world would be a better place if they never had to talk to anyone and were always given perfectly formed tickets so they could just put their headphones on and work and ignore Sophie’s birthday and never be bothered by someone asking them for help (because, trust me, you ALWAYS want to talk to That Guy about… anything). And they don’t realize that they were never actually hot shit and were mostly always doing entry level work.

Personally? I only trust AI to directly write my code for me if it is in an airgapped environment because I will never trust black box code I pulled off the internet to touch corporate data. But I will 100% use it in place of google to get an example of how to do something that I can use for a utility function or adapt to solving my real problem. And, regardless, I will review and test that just as thoroughly as the code Fred in accounting’s son wrote because I am the one staying late if we break production.

And just to add on, here is what I told a friend’s kid who is an undergrad comp sci:

LLMs are awesome tools. But if the only thing you bring to the table is that you can translate the tickets I assigned to you to a query to chatgpt? Why am I paying you? Why am I not expensing a prompt engineering course on udemy and doing it myself?

Right now? Finding a job is hard but there are a lot of people like me who understand we still need to hire entry level coders to make sure we have staff ready to replace attrition over the next decade (or even five years). But I can only hire so many people and we aren’t a charity: If you can’t do your job we will drop you the moment we get told to trim our budget.

So use LLMs because they are an incredibly useful tool. But also get involved in design and planning as quickly as possible. You don’t want to be the person writing the prompts. You want to be the person figuring out what prompts we need to write.

I have long standing issues with fares and the narrative shortcuts and tropes he uses.

But yeah. Watched the first hour or so on a stream and it was pure nonsense. It shows a complete lack of understanding of what SFF even is (there is a reason we just call it “Science Fiction and Fantasy”) but even what writing is. One character can never shut the fuck up about how “I am going to get published. Were you published. PUBLISHED” because apparently this dystopic future where machine learning steals ideas from people and combine them into the best stories ever told doesn’t have ebooks.

I got on a Whitest Kids You Know kick recently and they were talking about when they jacked off one of the guys on stage in a massage parlor skit. And I think it was Trevor (RIP) who couldn’t stop laughing about how they were dumbass kids who had no idea how ANYTHING worked and that was the basis for so many of their skits.

And yeah. That is definitely the rosetta stone to fares et al’s writing. Whether they are talking about undercover cops or writing or what it means to be a child of divorce.

Again: What is the percent “accurate” of an SEO infested blog about why ivermectin will cure all your problems? What is the percent “accurate” of some kid on gamefaqs insisting that you totally can see Lara’s tatas if you do this 90 button command? Or even the people who insist that Jimi was talking about wanting to kiss some dude in Purple Haze.

Everyone is hellbent on insisting that AI hallucinates and… it does. You know who else hallucinates? Dumbfucks. And the internet is chock full of them. And guess what LLMs are training on? Its the same reason I always laugh when people talk about how AI can’t do feet or hands and ignore the existence of Rob Liefeld or WHY so many cartoon characters only have four fingers.

Like I said: I don’t like the AI Assistants that won’t tell me where they got information from and it is why I pay for Kagi (they are also AI infested but they put that at higher tiers so I get a better search experience at the tier I pay for). But I 100% use stuff like chatgpt to sift through the ninety bazillion blogs to find me a snippet of a helm chart that I can then deep dive on whether a given function even exists.

But the reality is that people are still benchmarking LLMs against a reality that has never existed. The question shouldn’t be “we need this to be 100% accurate and never hallucinate” and instead be “What web pages or resources were used to create this answer” and then doing what we should always be doing: Checking the sources to see if they at least seem trustworthy.

People love to make these claims.

Nothing is “100% accurate” to begin with. Humans spew constant FUD and outright malicious misinformation. Just do some googling for anything medical, for example.

So either we acknowledge that everything is already “sewage” and this changes nothing or we acknowledge that people already can find value from searching for answers to questions and they just need to apply critical thought toward whether I_Fucked_your_mom_416 on gamefaqs is a valid source or not.

Which gets to my big issue with most of the “AI Assistant” features. They don’t source their information. I am all for not needing to remember the magic incantations to restrict my searches to a single site or use boolean operators when I can instead “ask jeeves” as it were. But I still want the citation of where information was pulled from so I can at least skim it.

They replaced Sonia Blade’s VO with ronda rousey because they apparently wanted incredibly wooden delivery of every single line. rousey is a terf who was also a sandy hook truther up until she got clowned on so hard by the reddit wrestling community (the same one who keep insisting that nobody could possibly have known about what vince mcmahon was doing one door over from their office…) that she insisted she was just asking questions and had changed her mind.

Someone like tom cruise or donnie yen is deeply problematic but at least is entertaining. rousey is a shitbag who makes everything she has ever been in less enjoyable.

I have finally figured out why the modern MK animations are so horrifically ass. They are trying to replicate the old pseudo-FMV of the original games but with high fidelity models. So everything looks incredibly stiff the moment an attack animation ends because it is just skipping/fast forwarding frames. So you have all the floatiness of a Tekken while somehow being even more stiff than MK2 was.

Still. T-1000’s moves look fine? I haven’t kept up with the series since I noped out on 11 (?) because of the Sandy Hook truther terf but is Bobby’s moveset actually built around grandma? Or is she his assist and just front and center for some reason? And I will admit that I found the fatality to be emblematic of all the problems I have had with modern MK where it is just gory and boring? Like, it is very much a reference to the movies but… you have a liquid metal monstrocity. Give us some body horror amped up to 11 so it is funny as hell.

Also, while I am whinging: I assume that wasn’t ACTUALLY Bobby Patrick because they didn’t say it was. But it really sounds like the VA was emulating modern “I have smoked three packs a day for 50 years” Bobby and not 90s B Pat.

And not a single black person in any of them.

There were no sex cards, but if memory serves you could “romance” Jaheira (while effectively standing on the still warm corpse of her husband), Aerie (I remember that being kind of fucked but it has been 20 years), Viconia, and one of the boring dudes.

The “romances” weren’t particularly well written but… they honestly aren’t much better these days. We mostly just, as a culture, have moved on from needing everything to be a storybook romance and understanding that sometimes you just need a bang. Which makes “romance” in games a hell of a lot easier.

But also, since BG2 (well, NWN), Bioware have basically made their entire thing “romance options” and so forth. Similar to how Obsidian and Owlcat decided the real culture war was Turn Based versus Real Time With Pause. And Larian realized that we could do all the environmental nonsense that was originally only an option for tabletop games with GMs who didn’t know why you were asking when it last rained.

None of what you listed is “new”. Also, Morrowind wasn’t actually “strange” in the slightest. Plenty of fantasy RPGs had elements of sci-fi and weird bug shit (see: Wizardry and even Might and Magic) and the “you can screw up the main quest” was similarly common at the time. Planescape I’ll give you.

Which is also true here. BG3 is not “strange”, It is literally the third Baldurs Gate game and continues most of the same themes and concepts. Yeah, it is a whole lot more gay but even that is not out of the ordinary for CRPGs at this point and had been pushed by companies like Larian, Obsidian, and Owlcat. Hell, the Mass Effects and Dragon Ages deserve a LOT of props for how horny and gay they were and normalizing the idea of picking the right dialogue options for a sexy card cutscene (also see CD Projekt Red).

And KCD2 is one of the most bog standard power fantasy games out there.

Like most articles of this variety, this is just a fancy way of saying “people should make good games”

And I like swiss cheese on my ham sandwiches. Oh, sorry, I thought we were just saying non sequitors.

In all seriousness, that is not an answer to the question. Yes, some (often older) people will always use a search engine to find the same website they browse all the time. But search engines are also incredibly valuable for finding new things or verifying claims. I have a bookmark for the Warframe wiki but that doesn’t help me when I want to research different monitor energy efficiencies or find a repair guide for my toaster oven.

And while people CAN collect a set of (searchable) websites for different topics they are interested in… that is how we got into (one of) our current mess(es). How many people just use reddit for everything and thus make themselves vulnerable to corporate shittery and misinformation campaigns.

I haven’t checked this week (yay, might already be too late) but my understanding is that amazon only disabled the web interface to download ebooks to a computer.

Using the (Windows) Kindle for PC App at a sufficiently old version was still working last week even after people had claimed the web interface was disabled.

It is only a matter of time but it is also something that the vast majority of people are too computer illiterate to do so it is probably going to be a decent amount of time. Cost amazon more to disable it than to let people do it.

To my knowledge, Sanderson has not spoken out against Kindle*. His kickstarter was mostly to advertise Dragonsteel which is likely going to become his own publishing house at some point.

And while… fuck amazon, Kindle is a ridiculously author friendly platform to publish on and is the only reason we have so many amazing self published authors these days. And while KU is not great per book, it is an excellent way to get people interested in an author and buy their latest books. I strongly encourage actually reading what authors say instead of what users and armchair financial analysts do.

*: I would be incredibly shocked if he did. I think he is definitely becoming more “woke” than “mormon” these days based off his writing and character details but he is still very much a business person

I strongly encourage POLITELY reaching out to your favorite authors on social media to talk to them about this.

One of my favorite guilty pleasure reads is very open that this is why his ebooks are only on kindle. But he is also looking into alternatives (especially since he is now big enough to have at least a small publisher) because the readers he is trying to help with KU are the ones asking him to get away from it.

Not going to tear down my de-drm setup any time soon. But optimistic I might be able to before amazon does it for me.

RENEGADE!!!

Yeah. I think it was hilarious to “hack” government displays to show this in protest.

I am REALLY uncomfortable with sharing it on a wider basis. Because, at the risk of sounding like DNC leadership, it is opening a huge can of worms. Imagine if instead this was musk posting a deepfake of him and AOC similar to how he offered to rape taylor swift a while back?