No, I also made the switch and honestly it’s pretty much worked out of the box for me. I’ve got the integrated graphics with a discrete card too - I was worried initially, but it seems to handle it fine

I’ve had some sound issues, and a few games run worse or need some tweaking to run, but after dual booting for a while I’m considering wiping windows for extra storage

There’s inconveniences, but with windows getting worse and Linux getting better I’m feeling pretty good about the deal

Cyberpunk is basically futuristic GTA in a first person view, saints row 4 was basically GTA with superpowers, spiderman is basically GTA as Spider-Man

Even in this one format, there’s endless room for creativity and innovation. It’s a formula for a fun game…

But where I loved cyberpunk, watchdogs was similar in many ways and I just couldn’t get into it

The problem is that they want to shove slop in proven molds and get a winning game. It’s still slop

Mismanagement. They keep trying to make 9 women deliver a baby in 1 month, and switching out mothers mid pregnancy - some of these games have 20 formerly independent studios churning out content for the same game. That creates a need for a ton of oversight and coordination, and leads to a ton of wasted effort

I believe them when they say their costs have ballooned…I also know the tools have become extremely powerful, and that far smaller studios are creating far better games for a fraction of the cost

The funny thing is, my friend is LGBTQ - it’s not at all a dog whistle for them. It’s very real frustration at beloved games and IP being ruined

But they hear “go woke go broke” so often that they’ve been trained to look for inclusivity to blame. We like talking about topics like this, and each time I have to walk them through it again - “yes, the game is inclusive, yes, the game sucks. Let’s be precise and critique it, why does the game suck? What systems and processes keep causing this?”

I think my friend is doing this on purpose to help process the emotions, because it always ends with the same conclusion

"You think it’s a bad game because it is, you feel like it’s an attack because they went online and said you’re a bigot for thinking it’s bad, and we’re all biased but you’re self aware and this is coming from propaganda and very valid frustration, not hatred.

“Now let’s talk about the mechanisms through which consulting companies ruin everything we hold dear, and brainstorm ways to mitigate or fix these systematic problems. And would you look at that, you’re sounding just a little more like a leftist each time”

Identify the problem, trace it through the system, find the root cause, and brainstorm solutions/work arounds

Right on. The proof is in the pudding even their games I don’t finish, like the gwent one, aren’t bad or not fun, I just lost interest

I used this argument with my friend the other day - cyberpunk lets you play as a trans character, . People got upset when they found that out prelaunch… And then no one cared, the main complaint was bugs

It’s not “go woke and go broke”, it’s “no one wants shit media, and inclusivity is not a substitute for quality”

Inclusivity isn’t the problem, only bigots care if you make something great that happens to be inclusive. It’s observer bias, not correlation - inclusivity is generally good. Gamers don’t mind inclusivity, they’ll get the experience they want and ignore the options they don’t want

The problem is shit writing and gameplay

That’s not what I’m mad about. I’m mad that it won’t ever work - Ubisoft isn’t trying to figure out why their games are failing, they’re trying to figure out how to keep the stock price projections up

Hence this article, which is signaling to wall Street “we’re going to make layoffs and hire cheaper, less experienced people”. They’ll probably do it by closing studios and buying up new ones - that’s pretty much their standard operating procedure. They buy up a studio, take their IP to add to the pile, then turn it into a formula and churn out games until the players lose interest in the IP

What’s the problem? They’re too damn big. What’s the solution? Block them from acquiring more studios and they’ll die without leaving a swath of destruction on the way down. Ideally split them up. Do the same with Microsoft and EA, and we could save the gaming industry overnight (granted, more like over the course of a few years)

Voting with your wallet doesn’t work because to the leadership of a Corp, sales aren’t what matters. Stock price matters, which is only tentatively linked to how profitable the company is, which is only tentatively linked to the quality of their products

It undoubtedly burned out hundreds of game devs who wasted years of their work and improved nothing about the industry

Mission accomplished?

Well I wouldn’t say it’s important, because it doesn’t change anything

I would definitely say it’s a waste of money to buy their bad games. They deserve to fail. I’m not happy about it, because I want good games, not for IP to be stretched so far I no longer care about it

But it’s important to understand that AAA gaming is an oligopoly and not buying their games won’t change that. It will not improve gaming. Ubisoft will close another dozen studios, buy 13 more, and learn all the wrong lessons (see current situation)

“Voting with your wallet” does not give you any control, just like recycling does not save the planet. It’s a myth to redirect our attention

Structural problems can only be solved structurally.

They just ascribe a different metric as to why it failed

Yeah… That’s my point. They will never say “our game failed because it was overly formulaic, unpolished, and our customers are getting sick of our bullshit”

It doesn’t fit on the spreadsheet. They will never come to the correct conclusion. They structurally cannot

Motherfucker… How many times do you you have to fail before you listen to your customers, who are screaming what they want?

This is why voting with your wallet is nonsense. They’ll never learn why they failed, only that they did

I don’t agree with that at all - that’s how art works. You take ideas and techniques and copy them, adding your own twist in the process. Art is about more than the aesthetic - the backstory is what gives it value. Stealing that is plagiarism, everything else is artistic inspiration… If you add nothing new you’ve made a cheap knockoff, which is very different from plagiarism

Palworld has its own lore, its own type system, its own battle mechanics, and as far as gameplay it’s nothing like Pokemon. All it has in common is many creatures you capture in a ball, with designs largely based on IRL animals and Japanese folklore. They’ve made something new no matter how you slice it

Oh, I said that as a programmer all right. And that’s how I’ve approached AI - I ran it locally, and kept poking it until I began to get a feel for it. Until I could see patterns. Until I could put together a methodology

They exist. Word choice matters greatly. Shorter is better. Varied word choice is better. Less “orders” is better. Strange combinations of tokens can convey something in non-obvious ways. They all seem to have a very strong attachment to the name “Luna”

They’re as deterministic as any software is, if you run it in the same state with the same input you’ll get the same result, sometimes with minor wording changes

And software isn’t as deterministic as we pretend it is. Programming doesn’t require it either, luckily. Every program you’ll ever write is interacting with complex systems no one fully understands, and it will sometimes act unpredictably

Programming is about finding patterns in the chaos, then using them to get the result you want. You need consistency - not deterministic outcomes. You can program with anything you can find the patterns in - even human behavior or the physical world. You can program yourself.

You can treat AI like something unknowable, or you can find the patterns and put them in your toolbox

That’s how I look at AI. It will never (in it’s current forms) replace people, but it can turn a passionate creator into a one person army

Using AI is a form of programming - you turn the right words into action. Programming is magic, an AI user is a warlock

Not really… This isn’t people being empowered, this is people being chewed up and spit out

I’m not sure customers are falling for it - this is why voting with your wallet doesn’t work. People rage against games that launch in an unfinished state, particularly when they’re full price. Steam reviews often incorporate price point - statements like “don’t buy this at full price” or “this might have been worth it at $20, but this is not a $70 game” come up a lot

Sales for AAA games are way down, we just saw the biggest failure in gaming history. Casual reading of steam reviews show people clearly have different expectations based on price, Twitter sometimes explodes with anger at specific moves (like Helldivers requiring PSN) and they back off (temporarily), but they always go back to the bullshit

The feedback mechanism of “voting with your wallet” doesn’t communicate this message. Metrics show purchases, refunds, and active users… That’s what fits on a spreadsheet. They see a game failing, but that doesn’t mean they’ve understood why

AAA studios don’t want to understand what makes a game succeed or fail - they just want a formula to min-max ROI. They want strong numbers at launch, but they also want to minimize production costs, and they treat costs (like developers) as line items - they learn the wrong lessons, because they aren’t concerned with the creative part of game design. They want to be the next Madden or assassin’s creed, they want to figure out how to get players to pay $70 + micro transactions (or better yet a subscription too), but they also want their employees to be interchangeable cogs they can push to burn out then replace

AAA gaming is dying from this, but it’s an oligarchy at this point - large corporations are unable to understand nuance or truly innovate - these are things people do when they have autonomy. They don’t do team building or R&D anymore - that’s a gamble that sometimes pays off big, but not in a quarter or two. They aquire then kill off what made the team work in the first place - any individual can tell you that’s a recipe for failure, but by nature they keep the decision making far removed from the people actually doing the work

But then someone will see a spreadsheet and calculate the “missed” revenue, and whoever made that decision either gets replaced or given strict orders next time

Even if they manage to dig their heels in, it will come up again and again. It looks like a money shaped hole, and so organizationally they’ll keep coming back to it

It is a great way to make games, many indie games do this. A team can do this, but a corporation can’t - subtlety doesn’t fit on a spreadsheet

That’s the thing - AI isn’t about size, it’s about categorizing the state of the world. If you can understand an action in context and possible responses, a Markov chain can learn and respond appropriately with the processing of a calculator - it really doesn’t take much

I think an individual opinion can matter, even k the face of commercial success

But here’s the thing - “I don’t like it” doesn’t cut it. If you can’t tell me why you don’t like the beetles, your opinion is less than worthless

Personally, I think the beetles were great, and I think rush of rain was too. It was the first rouglike platformer shooter I’ve ever heard of… The beetles consistently pushed boundaries, doing it once doesn’t put you on their level

On the other hand, the beetles were able to to that because no one was there to tell them no. I agree with the sentiment - games are art. I’d happily overlook a dozen failures for each success

They’re trying to hedge their bets. Nintendo effectively dropped out of the home console market, Microsoft has transitioned away from the console, so Sony is dipping a toe in

Going along those lines, treat your people better. Retention is always important, but every role in game creation is inherently a skilled artistic job

You can swap out one cashier or factory worker for another, and after an adjustment period, your revenue won’t change much. You can’t swap out one programmer for another - that’s like changing the artist halfway through building a sculpture

You will not get the initial vision, and you need someone far more skilled to make something good out mid way through