Wait, does it? Oh, man, it does! I actively remember the praise, where did I get so much Mandela effect from this? I didn’t even think to look it up, I was so certain.
In any case, here’s to being actively wrong and still having made your point. Eternal is the lesser game in general, and I have played it much less, but it’s still telling I straight up forgot and invented an alternate scenario about it.
I don’t think the setup for Doom 16 would be particularly doable over LAN without rebuilding the game or giving you the server code. Servers are doing a LOT of work in this.
Nobody did. It was one of this weird wave of interesting multiplayer setups that just didn’t have the competitive cleanness of the established stuff and nobody ended up caring about.
It was midly interesting to try out once, but let’s say there’s a reason they didn’t do a MP mode in the sequel and every reviewer praised that choice.
I don’t know how this happened, but I am glad that it happened and yes, I just bought Doom 2016 again.
Ah, so my first reaction is “what actual indie developer who knows what they’re talking about excludes BG3 from AAA”?
Turns out not this one, apparently, since the creative use of quotes seems intended to obscure that “AAA schlock” is not from the dev, it’s from the journalist rehashing a quote from an article about a quote from a podcast. Speaking of schlock.
Anyway, I’m on the fence about the core point. I agree on principle that “dumbed down” doesn’t make things mainstream. I agree that this is a lesson the industry insists on refusing to learn, even after The Sims doulbing as architecture software, WoW casual moms playing with a dozen UI mods, Fortnite core players building gothic cathedrals in five seconds and Roblox contianing entire gamedev teams made of unpaid children.
Whatever the mainstream wants, “simple” has nothing to do with it.
Do I think BG3 means somebody should fund Pillars 3? Yeeeeah, not so sure. BG3 works because it was the literal best time to be making D&D stuff, because it had two extremely beloved brands propping it up, because it’s a sequel to two extremely well received, accessible CRPGs that both did a lot better than Pillars to begin with, because they were both focused on multiplayer and free-form systems instead of straight-up literature. Nuance matters here.
And then somebody (a lot of somebodies) gave them two hundred million to make it, so it also looks at least as good as anything Bioware ever did during their heyday. That’s probably why BG3 has 140K players on Steam right now and Avowed has 1K and never peaked past 10K.
There are lessons from BG I’d love to see the industry learn. I want them to learn the right ones, though, because if they go ahead and invest another nine digits on the wrong thing then we WILL actually have to wait another 30 years for another game like that.
They actually lampshade this further down the article, at the point where clickbaiting has fulfilled its goal.
It’s almost nostalgic being mildly annoyed at some slightly sub-par journalistic ethics displayed by Gizmodo and company. Feels quaint and nostalgic now. I honestly didn’t know Gizmodo was still running, if I’m perfectly honest. It’s been quite the decade.
Not even the first guy to incel his way to an extremely inaccurate AI virtual girlfriend chatbot based on an inaccessible married celebrity.
Just saying, Geordi is NOT the face you want to use for warnings about ethical generative AI usage.
Hah. Yeah, I’ll do that as soon as you invent a way to freeze time.
For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure it’s less energy efficient to run a local open source LLM than to offload the task to a data center, but the flexibility and privacy are too big of a deal to ignore.
In any case chatbots suck at finding accurate information reliably, but they are actually pretty good at reaching things you already know or can verify at a glance with suprisingly little information. The fact that a piece of tech is being misused often doesn’t mean it’s useless. This simplistic black-and-white stuff is so dumb and social media is so full of it. Speaking of often misused technology, I suppose.
Not to be that guy, but if there’s a fictional character that made a career out of prompt engineering a surprisingly flaky AI it’s Geordi La Forge. The guy hasn’t given the hand to a “Computer!” interaction in his life.
He literally fed his notes to a chatbot to make a custom assistant and then dated the custom assistant.
Subscription cost/value is hard to measure because you can get promos and sales plus you’re receiving a bunch of games as part of the package, so… sure, that’s 80 bucks a year for basic and what? 120+ for the higher tiers, but how much that is a straight add to the cost of the hardware does depend on how much of that money you’d have spent buying the games new (or still signing up to Game Pass if you were eyeing an Xbox instead, I suppose).
So that is valid back-of-the-envelope math, but not really accurate.
Plus the “only play offline” scenario is still a viable use case. I cancelled my PS Plus and Xbox Live subs because I only ever played offline games on consoles.
“I wouldn’t recommend one ever” is just not a reasonable stance today, and I don’t know if I’d say you can build a PC that “demolishes a PS5” for that money. What GPU would you need to do 4K60 or 1440p120 upscaled on AAA? The B580/4060 tier won’t cut it, you need one step up. A 4070 shows up for 650 bucks on my local Amazon. The 4060 Ti for 550. Current gen AMD is more expensive than that.
It’s not impossible to build a functional PC around that purchase, but man, you better be a savvy hardware guy or have one on hand. A quick glance shows my local trusted builders will give you a vanilla 8 Gig 4060 paired with an Intel i5 12th gen and 32 gigs of slow-ish DDR4. I mean, you’ll play some games, they’ll look fine with some tinkering, but that’s barely PS5 tier, let alone PS5 Pro. And that’s assuming you’re plugging that thing into a TV like a bulky, noisy console. Otherwise you’re gonna need a monitor to go with it.
Again, not saying it’s not an option. Absolutely the right move for a whole bunch of people.
But everybody? Sight unseen? In all circumstances? Yeah, nah. When my little cousin comes asking I’m not just pointing him at the cheapo trashcan PC, I’m asking questions. Do they have a laptop in good nick for work/school? Do they have a decent TV/monitor to use with it? What kinds of games do they want to play? It’s not a one-size-fits-all thing the way it was five to ten years ago.
Right.
But right now, to play Fortnite tomorrow for 500 bucks that PC will give you worse looks and performance than a PS5.
I don’t mind the notion that it’s still a better purchase and you get a computer to work and study out of that deal and you have an easier upgrade path and no need to pay subscriptions. All that as it may be.
But it’s not a no-brainer at all and it’s more expensive in the vast majority of scenarios.
I’d be less nitpicky about this, but it actually was true for a couple of years in the Xbox 360/PS3 generations, when consoles were very limited by several parts of their hardware and PC GPUs were amazing value for money. Think 970-1080Ti range.
But that has changed a lot and it’s important to acknowledge that while consoles have become less value by having fewer exclusives and more upkeep costs through online subscriptions, PCs have become less value by an absolutely bonkers bananas insane reduction in GPU availability and value for money. Thanks, cryptobros and AIbros.
It unfortunately takes some thinking and checking options to see what makes sense for a gamer on a budget these days. It’s a lot harder than it used to be across the board, and that sucks.
You can build yourself a PC for less.
You can’t build yourself a more powerful PC for less. Especially since the PS5 Pro isn’t getting a price bump in Europe.
You can barely find a dedicated GPU for less money than a base PS5 at all these days. I guess if you go dumpster diving or are very patient in a used parts website you could technically get there, but it’d be a bit of a project.
Just quoting the source blog. I’m guessing the phat non-digital SKU is either still in production or still in stock.
Honestly that’s because speeding up localizations by having the first pass be machine-made is not something that waited for GenAI to happen. It’s been going on for a while using good old machine translators.
Now, Google Translate and similar tools have been reliant on machine learning for ages, people just weren’t freaking out about it because “AI” hadn’t gone viral. It’s been weird to watch this sort of thing play out.
FWIW, if they are using the same loc workflow and genAI works better than good old machine translations for a first pass go ahead and do GenAI. From what I’ve seen casually it’s not necessarily faster or more reliable, but I’m not working on loc professionally. Maybe that’s what he means when he talks about using it in “backend processes”?
OK, so this is weird and that headline doesn’t tell the full story.
So in Europe the only price going up is the non-Pro base PS5 Digital Edition (by 10%, not 25%).
The PS5 SKUs with a disk drive are staying the same. The PS5 Pro price is staying the same. The standalone disk drive price is actually going down.
So… WTF is happening here?
I’m guessing that the fact the US dollar is collapsing thanks to tangerine man and the Euro is quickly becoming a reserve currency and the exchange rate is going up is messing with things in strange ways? Gonna guess that some manufacturing from some regions is currently more expensive to import but maybe optical drives are still being made in the EU so they can eat some of the costs that way but Australia gets hit by both? I don’t know.
Man, what a mess. It’s the dominoes meme but with the US having a shit public education system on one end and Australian PS5s getting more expensive in the other.
Didn’t stop them when the EU prices were the higher ones due to taxes.
The headline here is confusing and not covering all the changes. Some prices are staying the same and some are actually going down. There’s something else going on here and I don’t get it.
I mean… too late? Face recognition has been part of biometric passport security for years now.
If anything my first flag for this is that about 50% of the time I try it I end up having to call over a security person because it tends to flake out a bunch. I’ve had better luck recently, so maybe it’s ready now?
This becoming an app may be the logical next step, but I do think there’s some value to carrying a physical copy of the biometric data with you. If we’re not losing the paper passport I don’t see why I’d need to double up on recognition software. If you’re already matching my face to my passport and my boarding pass is also matched to my passport it sure seems like we already have all the pieces in place for this without wasting more money on more contractors and giving them more of our data to store.
I don’t think this is as controversial now as it was maybe five, eight years ago. There are plenty of online games on up-front fees.
What the behind the scenes numbers need to be to support online costs indefinitely will change game-to-game. It’ll probably be easier to make it sustainable if you have this decision made out of the gate, so that probably helped them. We’ll see how they do, the game does seem fun. If anything, Rocket League-but-actual-football seems like a thing that should have happened by now.
Sure! I mean, why not? Hell, release the game DRM free in the first place on all platforms, huh? Why did we have to wait a decade and buy it twice before we could get the DRM version of any part of it, after all?
But you weren’t complaining about it yesterday and you’re way closer to the right outcome today. I would much rather have a DRM free version of some part of that game than not.