I get the feeling that the level of popularity was a bit of a surprise, and that its warranted expanding some features beyond what was initially planned. I can see a lot of features becoming massive time sinks with diminishing returns otherwise.

Not sure why this is downvoted, radiant quests were a big feature in Skyrim, and were technically kinda impressive, but still repetitive. Likewise, quests for the College of Bards were mostly just a dungeon fetch quests and things.

It’s still a great game, but it was great for the bits that were handcrafted.

But give it 5-10 years and I’d be very interested to see another pass at procedural generation using machine learning, especially dialogue, could open the doors to more creativity than would be possible when doing it all by hand!

I agree it’s not particularly impactful, and most would have made an exception, but it only takes one person to argue that it’ doesn’t matter, or to defend it as something deliberate on the news to upset a lot of people.

Id say the biggest problem with this reasoning is that these protests do not save millions of people, and that that number would be easy to reduce, that the only reason that those occur is that nobody fancies doing anything about it.

In the same way, my employer going out of business would be a big deal to me, my colleagues and a few others, but it’s ultimately unimportant compared to climate change. But if that happened due to these protests, it wouldn’t actually fix anything.

I don’t dislike these protests because I don’t agree with the core message, I dislike them because I genuinely see them as counter productive. Talking to people about climate issues at the moment feels like I’ve jumped back in time 20 years, and mainstream beliefs 5 years ago now get you put in the “tree hugging hippie” catagory, as people think about “those protestors”.

This can’t change overnight, as I’ve said, there no ‘just’ anything when it comes to the fuel and infrastructure that powers our world. The faster we change, the more impact there will be on quality of life, these are sacrifices that everyone will have to bear, and so the main battle is the political will, it’s about people across the world choosing to make sacrifices. This is why poisoning the otherwise positive image of environmentalism and pissing lots of people off for intangible ‘gains’ genuinely concerns me.

I really disagree with this premise.

For example, where I’ve worked, I’ve generally found it easy to make improvements that solely benefit the environment, even though they are virtually always more expensive and carry no other advantages, and often additional disadvantages.

Since the more recent protests, though, and especially after we all nearly lost our jobs due to the antics of a handful of protestors, that support has just gone. Being greener is no longer and end unto itself, and people don’t want to either be seen as supporting their cause or ‘helping’ the people who cause real problems for everyday people.

It may not be logical, but even I am quieter about my environmentism because I don’t really want to be associated with people who proudly block ambulances and cause pain for thousands of regular people.

Because ultimately, nobody’s going to ‘just stop’. We’re not here due to the scheming of a few people, there are a lot of reasons oil is currently so ubiquitous, and fixing it is going to be a fairly gradual process. Fortunately, oil isn’t the only way we can fix emissions, and so progress over spans of a decade or two, when that progress is going in parallel, can yield dramatic results.

My concern is that antics like these are going to slow or even reverse some of the political will to suffer the short term pain required to make these changes as quickly as we need.

CA will do literally anything to avoid making Medieval 3.

I mean, what are their salaries? I genuinely don’t know, one would assume that a specialised job like that would command a pretty solid salary, and the assumption would be that working on a project like this would get them to the top of the list for applications to other companies.

I don’t know how the job was advertised, but seeing how the industry works from the outside, I would never assume a job for life at a game studio, but you could still count on security after working on a project like this.

I work a steady job, it’s hard, and the pay is okay for me, I suspect a game dev will earn several times what I do, part of which is due to the short term, or at least risky nature of the roles, the rest would be down to the specialist skills.

I don’t really think that forming a union signifies that at all, I’d say it’s more likely down to the ongoing working conditions.

Because you can always go and get a warehousing job or similar, it’s steady, but kinda boring and lower pay.

The money may keep rolling in for those who invested the most and took the largest risks. But that’s irrelevant IMO. You take a job for the pay that’s offered, and it lasts as long as it does, how long that is depends on the kind of role.

I’m making assumptions, but I think everyone here is too. But I do particularly resent the ‘slaves’ comment as it is disrespectful of the employees, and diminishes actual slavery which is bigger than ever.

That’s how employment works. Calling them slaves is ignoring the fact that they have agency and compensation, unlike actual slaves.

No job is permemnent, it would be ridiculous to expect otherwise, but it varies between industries. Gaming is a low-frequency project-based industry, you know there will be lots of work while in development, and once that’s over, there’s not going to be as much work to do.

How else should this work?

Man am I tired of being shafted for not having kids, the when it comes to holidays, covering for other staff and things, employees with kids always take priority and employees without don’t have an ‘excuse’. Extending that to layoffs is extremely toxic and punitive to younger workers.

Huh? They don’t have a monopoly in any space, and have significant competitors. And I don’t really see how they are slowing down innovation. I think it’s fair to say that Nvidia are investing significanly in R&D, and is driving innovation more than anyone else in the industry for the moment.

Why is it shit?

Because useful tools that generate income are more valuable than things that make games look more better.

AI is what’s justifying pumping over $7bn into R&D per year, which drives improvements to gaming cards too.

Every card they sell makes a CEO richer, among a huge swathe of other effects.

Then I’d argue that reviews don’t give a complete picture, if that’s the case. Because it’s hard to argue that Overwatch is really the worst game on Steam.

Good luck!

Sometimes that’s a tactic, sometimes it’s wild optimism, and sometimes they seem content to make a loss every year and prop it up with investment.

I don’t know about stealing, they stopped taking money when I unsubbed, now I’m watching shit that somebody else paid to make, while not giving them a penny back!

Honestly this seems a bit much. I recently started playing again after years and am generally enjoying it. I guess I already have most of the skins I want from OW1, so I don’t really think about the cosmetics of it. But the gameplay is still just as fun as far as I can remember, the balance seems fine.

But I think lets take off the rose-tinted glasses on OW1. You know what I don’t miss? Needing to buy tons of loot boxes during a specific period in order to get one skin that you particularly wanted. At least now it seems you can just buy what you want, if you care.

Not a fan of Blizzard, although their customer service has been great. And while I think that Overwatch is more deserving of criticism than most, I really get the impression that people at the moment just seem to default to ‘outraged’ unless proven otherwise when it comes to game companies. I don’t know, I just kinda feel like people need to chill just a little, because this is basically all about a slightly different way of selling cosmetics.

I think what’s more important is a real shift towards your ‘type 3’ games. Overwatch is a competitive FPS where users expect new content, which is a big part of the issue. My favourite game to play in the last few years has been Pavlov VR. I bought it for like £15 2 years ago. Since then it’s had a major update, more like an expansion pack that many companies would sell as a new game, and has more recently had a large overhaul. Tons of community maps, content and gamemodes, and just a blast. Before the recent update, the devs were getting lots of hate because the game was ‘dead’. I was like, mate, the game is finished. What more do you want? What more do you think you deserve, did you not get your money’s worth? Why does a game need to constantly change to not be ‘dead’?

Anyway, Overwatch is always going to be that kind of game, but what I’d love to see is more of a move towards the type 3 model for games where that makes sense, that’s what will actually make a difference, it’s what’s actually important. Not wanting microtransactions to be structured slightly differently.

I miss proper expansion packs. The whole 'you liked game? We’ve basically made another game on the same engine and using lots of the same assets as the game you liked, so you can play more game. It has about as much content as game, and is like 50% of the price.

But then how else can I overcomplicate things? You’re right, thanks, and also thanks for the heads up on Proxmox. I picked up an old Checkpoint 4800 for less than the 400g solid copper heatsink is worth which I will run Proxmox on, which will give me a chance to get to know it!

The server is amazing, way quieter than I expected, I had a whole soundproofed rack planned, but the fans just chill at 20%! I think it’ll be almost silent once I have the rack built.

Lots of people get on okay with it, and I’m not the most experienced, but docker problems with Scale seem to be common, and the direction TrueNAS is going with Scale isn’t going to make it any better.

I think Core is a bit better. But I’m definitely going to move away from it for Docker. Unraid was so easy for Docker, and I see it has ZFS support now, I’ll let you know how I get on.

Also, don’t forget the 720 has an internal USB port, because I did!

I mean, why not? It is convenient, and to me, really well priced for what you get. There’s lots of things that offer far worse value for money that we don’t really think about.

And I host my own Plex server with Sonarr, Radarr, etc. But sometimes, you just want to jump into something, and TV series can take a huge amount of space.

I don’t know why Netflix is considered so morally repugnant, when they do still offer a good service for the money.

Convenience is worth something to a lot of people.

Not necessarily, companies like Twitter make consistent losses with no real path to change that, yet its deemed to have value by investors.

That makes it even dumber though, surely? Lots of people invest in tech businesses that are not profitable and have no plans to become sustainable, some idiots even buy them.

It’s things like user count and activity that will be more meaningful in that scenario, so one should avoid doing anything to reduce those figures.