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.

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.

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 also leads to spectacular failures of long timeline games, like “black flag” or “duke nukem forever “. The issue there is not the long timeline, but the constant changes in priority to chase trends.

Would be nice if those cushy piles of money got in to the hands of the local orgs doing material good. Might convince people that the party isn’t just there to Hoover up money based on fear.

part of the change that needs to be made is to start incorporating organizations and groups that have actual local presence in to the planning structure, and stop relying on consultant groups who have little to no direct connections to people on the ground. Groups that do something in communities and are active beyond just the election cycle, something along the lines of food banks, unions, and non profits that do actual material good for people, not just write white papers.

They have much more trust, and much better understanding of what the needs and concerns are, rather than people who’s main source of information on issues is opinion pieces in nationally published “news”.

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.

This is story is news-media rage bate to obscure the attempt to purge the civil service to make space for cronies.

Just put out an ultimatum to 94% of civil servants. “Work from the office or else be fired” including “paid leave” until September.

From what I know, they’re lumping a broad range in to this “end of work from home” order. Lot of people included work remotely as part of their job, such as USGS people who are doing survey work in the field or staff at embassies.

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.

He’s the guy who wants to rip out all the bike lanes too, right?

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.

The major three currents of thought I’ve noticed are:

“They earned that money fairly, and by fairly I mean they didn’t get caught doing anything legal (Or did get caught but didn’t face consequences), which means they’re smart, thus more deserving than people who weren’t smart enough to do it. The fact they have that much money proves they deserve it”

Or

“I don’t like when I have to pay taxes and think they should be lowered or gone, this is now an ideological position rather than a position based on personal self interest, therefore I will support any tax cuts even if they don’t benefit me directly”

Or

“ I dislike these government programs, but, these programs are generally popular. So I can’t convince a majority to support cutting them. Instead, I will support cutting taxes to increase the budget deficit and then support cutting the programs to shrink the budget deficit”

There are plenty of other international outlets on there to give other perspectives, RT doesn’t give perspectives though, they give intentionally incorrect information to create confusion, not even to push a specific line, just to muddy the waters as much as possible. It subtracts from context, doesn’t add to it.

seems like the common thread of trumps circle is people who are in so much trouble that the only way out is through presidential protection.

Whether that be legal, financial, or social trouble.

It’s a dangerous combo, cornered animals and all that, but also makes for a fragile coalition, not the kind of thing that holds together when a real challenge emerges.

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.

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.

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.

Alter the incentive structures of the systems so as to make it unappealing to pedal sensationalism. Change how algorithms work for promoting content so it doesn’t reward rage bait. Don’t have bad behavior be rewarded with attention, especially not when attention is money.

The best reviewers are ones where you can know if you’ll like a game based on their review, even if they didn’t like it.

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.

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.