On that, I agree.

This will be great for the workers, but I don’t think it will necessarily fix the issues in Bethesda’s organization when it comes to game development (and it won’t make them worse either).

Given what we know from Starfield, Bethesda is really lacking when it comes to planning: they aren’t doing a good job at establishing a compact vision for the final product which also results in having issues to establish an agile workflow to get from start to finish. In the best cases, this results in ludonarrative disonance where the story isn’t really supported by the mechanics of the game (example: Fallout 4’s story incentivizes the player to hurry up and look for their son, but they assign a lot of resources into making sandbox mechanics such as those related to base building); in the worst cases, this results in teams returning the ball to each other all the time because they aren’t properly coordinated to build things in the way other teams of the studio needs them, which loses a lot of time and becomes even more glaringly obvious the larger the project is.

The silver lining is: this problem isn’t so noticeable when the designers have the template of Oblivion in their minds and they’re making Skyrim, but it was going to be completely exposed when making the jump to a new IP (and thus a new universe), with a new engine, with some large design jumps such as ceding ground to dynamically created areas; so ES6 doesn’t have to be as much of a low point as it has been Starfield, as long as they’re conservative in their design choices. I’d vastly prefer the leadership of Bethesda to be completely reorganized, which would allow them to innovate by taking well measured risks, but I don’t have much hope for that scenario.

Those working conditions aren’t even good for companies seeking long-term growth. If you want to produce 5 years long projects that are high quality enough to storm the market, you need people who stays healthy and doesn’t get burnt, which requires consistent long-term humane conditions, or else you’re destroying whatever talent you had in your hands and will end up with a mediocre product.

Capitalism already has enough problems on a vacuum, but its current dominant version of prioritizing profits in the next quarter over literally anything else is disastrous.

Ok, I’ll open another thread, then.

REMOVED, DUPLICATE.

Not “an”. Plural.

I would have agreed some time ago, but they’ve shot the prices through the roof lately.

I took a good look at Skyrim’s Creation Club content after getting the latest release on Steam. I will, in an extremely polite manner, just say that it was underwhelming. I could accept paid mods if it was passion projects of people making DLC-sized content, such as Beyond Reach or Enderal. But that’s obviously not what this is all about. It’s just about further privatizing and exploiting whatever spaces of free community efforts do exist in an increasingly commodified world.

However, even when the project had been given the go ahead, Klindžić said the team was “set up to fail from the start”, due to not having been allowed a pre-production period. “Whenever we raised concerns about this and expressed we needed more writers if the deadlines were to be met, we were accused of not wanting to do our jobs,” Klindžić said.

“Pretty much from the moment the writing team’s pitch was approved in August of 2022, the other teams started production,” Tuulik added. "We didn’t even really know what the story or the characters were gonna be, when art teams were already making first character and environment concepts. I’m sure you can see how this is a big problem, when you’re making a narrative-led game.

“Essentially, the writing team had to work double-time from day one to supply other disciplines with work, whilst trying to write the first dialogues and sketch out the rest of the game at the same time. The writing team consisted of myself and Dora at the time.” Another developer added: “I don’t know if Dora and Argo ever felt in control.”

Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and call the headline bullshit. It should also be noted that Disco Elysium had 8 writers, on top of Kurvitz, and Kurvitz himself still argued that he went through crunch. Current ZA/UM’s management is a disaster and nothing good is going to come from it unless a brick falls upon their heads, and they magically learn that making good games requires a lot of work, or if you’re a capitalist, a lot of investment.

You’ll soon be in the top 5% if you have a keyboard app installed on your phone

…Those won’t go away, right? People aren’t going to start talking on the bus for their phones to auto-type the text messages they want to send through chat, right…?

It’s an amazingly click-baity headline.

Already mentioned below, but for better visibility: [email protected] has better moderation.

The purpose of the comment is clearly: “Cloudfare didn’t kick out the casinos because of a compromise with good ethics, but because it was making them lose money”. Please read it again.

Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information

Don’t use it???

AI has no means to check the heaps of garbage data is has been fed against reality, so even if someone were to somehow code one to be capable of deep, complex epistemological analysis (at which point it would already be something far different from what the media currently calls AI), as long as there’s enough flat out wrong stuff in its data there’s a growing chance of it screwing it up.

AI and its consequences have been a disaster for Google.

I’m sure all this nonsense waste of energy is exactly what we needed just to stop climate change.

I don’t know how it is in other countries, but Spanish high school math competitions are designed to test both logic and creativity. They’ll require you to use the material from your current year, but the way in which you have to apply that math isn’t obvious if your only competency in math is specifically passing high school tests. You don’t get a good score by being a proficient human calculator, but by applying good abstract analysis, which you should be able to apply in other areas of your life.

This won’t make Spez any more uncomfortable when he wants to sleep at night. According to him, that subreddit was “valuable discussion”.

Programmer here. While scaling up the work of an increasing number of programmers is probably harder in a pure logistical way, I feel like you’re severely underestimating the difficulty in scaling up an actual artistic vision. Setting up piles of modelers to produce assets like they’re assembly line workers isn’t going to result in a compelling world.

Currently enjoying a several weeks-long run in Rimworld. Potato graphics go really far is the gameplay design is solid.

I mean. The diminishing returns on larger teams in software development is an absolutely proven idea. But according to what I’m reading, the game is made by one person, which is probably not the ideal size for a game of these characteristics that becomes a hit. Still, expanding a 1-person team is going to be a slow process no matter what, especially for a project like this and right after a successful launch.