Latest 30 Comments

Love these improvements. I have been lucky as the game has been remarkably stable on my system. I have seen the performance drop lately though so it's good to see them addressing it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

The God of Unintended Consequences is going to have a blast with this.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I, for one, welcome our mindless, soulless overlords.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Not really surprising from a publisher that can ruin the development of games like Callisto Protocol by arbitrarily cutting development time.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Did you hear that? That’s your cue to run!

Could be an unintended honest statement about the Denuvo roll-out.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I wanted to respond but my AI agent ran out of tokens...

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

@Caldathras

How are these glasses for people who are prone to vertigo/motion-sickness though?

I would say they're usable, but with caveats. I have the XReal ones that come with their little "Beam" Android box, which enables some headtracking functionality, so the screen appears to stay in the same location in one's surroundings.
I don't actually use it much for gaming though, as there's a Decky Loader plugin called "XR Gaming Plugin" that enables much the same functionality, directly from the Steam Deck.
It's not perfect though, there's still some occasional delay in how the screen moves, so it's likely to depend on your comfort level.
That said, the most comfortable way, is still just laying flat down with the Deck on may lap and my face aimed at the ceiling, so no need for any head-tracking that way

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Gross 🤢

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I'm sure it's going to turn out fine...

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Given the age & performance of the port ( pre proton ? ) they should probably pull it if they are no longer supporting the linux version consistently. Proton's performance now often exceeds native compared with the windows version.

No. They should fix the native port. Maybe add a Vulkan renderer if possible. Proton (Wine + DXVK) is a great thing for running Windows games on Linux (SteamOS), but it should not be a replacement solution for actual native ports.

If there already is a native port, it is always better to fix that port (if possible/feasible) instead of just nuking it and relying on the Windows version running using Proton.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

The half-full-glass kid in me wants to think it's good that at least this will increase accountability for contributors.

No point in downright outlawing this slop; but at least, at very least, it can be made (more) transparent.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Given the age & performance of the port ( pre proton ? ) they should probably pull it if they are no longer supporting the linux version consistently. Proton's performance now often exceeds native compared with the windows version.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

It's both good and bad in my opinion:

Good: Many people rudely throw AI generated text and expect others (that often have less time to waste) to figure out if the message even makes sense. There is a severe lack of ownership. This basically says that if you propose something bad that was AI generated we can shout at you regardless of if you understand it or not. Basically raise the cost of proposing AI slop as a discouragement.

Bad: The REAL bad thing in my opinion is how people's time is wasted by even having to go through this motions in the first place. It's stating that we're basically giving up in regards to using stolen work and fencing things.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Yikes

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

What a disappointment...

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

With that title I'd have expected Arcomage. Pass.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Finally, a new Labs experiment!

Unfortunately it does a pretty bad job showing me games I would be interested in. It shows a bunch of sexual games, visual novels, free games, puzzle games... all kinds of games I never play.

With all the info Steam has of my playing habits I'm sure they can make better recommendations. Hope they improve it.

Also, a reminder that the "Interactive Recommender" still exists and it works ok to discover games that went under your radar.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Thaaaat... looks like Venom is a playable character!

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Some people think I am strange, because I boycott games forcing a male character on me, and will continue to do so until the day when there is a halfway equal amount of games with female protagonists out there. I guess there are not a lot of people like me around, because these game still seem to sell very well. :D

29% of male players and 76% of female players prefer playing as a female character.

https://quanticfoundry.com/2021/08/05/character-gender/

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Tingus Goose was at this year's PAX Australia at the Aus Indie Showcase (tons of amazing games there). Love the artwork in this one, and they had awesome little sticker sheets too. Looking forward to it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I still wish Valve would adapt the Deck technology to a laptop form-factor. A 14" or 15" screen would be great. Economically priced like the Deck, of course.

And I wish Valve would release a circular trackpad-only (no joystick) variant of the Steam Deck OLED with same pricing.
🙄

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Hrm, I would like to admit that while I talk about the AI bubble bursting, the Chinese stuff is a very different question. That could well prosper, which is something I find worrisome even though at least some of the Chinese stuff is open source.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

snip

Great post.

Do you want me to generate a microphone for you to drop...

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Man. Those kids are so sweet and wholesome playing fun games together. Not like the ones that used to chase me around the schoolyard hoping to beat me up. Envy.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Some of the same artists now throwing spite at AI and anyone using it or being even mildly in favor of it, said the exact same thing about Photoshop and why it will kill all art.

I don't think they did, though? There were some people who were upset about art done on software, but they were different people with different concerns. Many of the people upset about AI are generally quite pro-technology.

I think it's also worth noting that in the past, some of the concerns about new technologies have been justified--just because a new technology won, does not mean that its overall impact was positive. It just means somebody made money from it. Success and beneficial impact are two different topics.

You can go back, for instance, to the water mill. Water mills were often imposed by feudal lords. Water mills ground flour more efficiently than hand mills, they harnessed the power of water to replace human muscle power, but that's not the main reason feudal lords liked them. Feudal lords liked them because they were a central point peasants had to bring their grain, where the lord could tax it. In order to force peasants to use this central point, feudal lords actively outlawed hand mills to stop peasants from grinding their own grain at home and not paying tax. Clearly the peasants would have preferred to use the less-efficient hand mills and not pay the lord, or there would have been no need to ban them. By the time the feudal period ended, hand mills were largely obsolete; the water mill had won the technological battle, which was really a political battle. But that wasn't actually a good thing for the peasants.

Generative AI is also a very political technology, and if it succeeds (which does not look like happening, at least in the current iteration) any benefits will flow overwhelmingly to uber-wealthy oligarchs. Some other benefits will go to people who, like me, can't do art, or who, like some other people, can't write their own essays. But costs will go to a lot more people than benefit and will be much more serious. A lot of the objections to LLM AI are essentially political in nature, and I think anyone should think two or three times before choosing to be on the oligarch side of those politics. Most other AI criticisms are about an observed dumbing down of what's on the internet from AI "slop", which does seem to be a very real phenomenon.

Photoshop was not a very political technology; it did not really shift the category of people who were doing art or how much money they made from it; to the extent that it made artists or graphic designers more productive, that mainly led to a "speed-up" in what was expected of artist production, and thus an inflation in how much art assets could be produced for any given project. Objections to it were mainly about artistic sensibilities, about the "feel" as it were of doing art, about the general idea of heightening and computer-orienting the technology around creating art. It was the kind of stuff we call "Luddism" even though it quite specifically isn't--Luddism has come to be associated with the idea of romantic, instinctive dislike of technology, but actual Luddism was about politics and the very real fact that industry was turning independent craftspeople who made decent livings into impoverished factory workers who worked 12 hour days in incredibly bad conditions. I do have some sympathy, to a point, for general appeals for less technology in our lives, but it's a quite different argument.

Just because people A didn't like technology A, and people B didn't like technology B that had applications in the same field, doesn't mean people A had the same concerns as people B, let alone that they were the same people.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

The top 5 LLMs are all Chinese-made these days and most of them use a fraction of the parameters the Western models use (to the degree you can run them on machines easily within reach even for smaller companies, no AWS needed).

interesting.. & Compounding that, in the west we will Might see (after a certain time has past ;) ) a move to regulate Ai across the board as a bulwark against things such as identity theft & misrepresentation, updated intellectual property law, political propaganda. So then, how does Ai stand if that should happen if all the unregulated models and a lot of servers clusters are located in china ?

Would that matter in terms of digital warfare, propaganda ? Could we see a restriction on china Ai too ?
Genuinely asking as i have no idea how the chips would fall.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Had to switch to GE-Proton, otherwise it wouldn't start...

And a bit of meta-progression would be nice. Just replaying things over and over again gets a bit old after a few games.

Generally cool game though.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

It does to some people. Whether they have a choice or not ? Well, being informed about the inclusion of Ai at least for now will help people make their own ethical choices.

Fair enough. Everyone has their own standards of what they accept and don't. Some people think I am strange, because I boycott games forcing a male character on me, and will continue to do so until the day when there is a halfway equal amount of games with female protagonists out there. I guess there are not a lot of people like me around, because these game still seem to sell very well. :D

that cost of generating those will suddenly be REALLY high

I skimmed that article quick, and while the numbers seem correct, that's because US/Western-made AI models all seemed to have been developed as if resources don't matter at all. Chinese-made models are taking over, among things because they can be trained and run for a fraction of that cost. The top 5 LLMs are all Chinese-made these days and most of them use a fraction of the parameters the Western models use (to the degree you can run them on machines easily within reach even for smaller companies, no AWS needed). Open AI and Anthropic are basically dead in the water, and unless they pull something really amazing out of the hat near year, they will be out of business.
In the end, there is absolutely nothing about that article that made me agree with the "haha, it's going to blow up!" prediction. People will realize that just throwing more computing power at the problem isn't sustainable and develop models cheaper to train and operate. Like China already did.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Because in the end it doesn't matter what made a game as long as it's fun to play.

It does to some people. Whether they have a choice or not ? Well, being informed about the inclusion of Ai at least for now will help people make their own ethical choices.

Pretty much every transformative technology destroys jobs and businesses. That's normal. People who feel threatened by said new technology typically turn into haters, thinking they can stop or at least delay it. That has never worked.

it may not have worked to completely stop a technology (and that's not really what most people are concerned about), however societal outcry from the public & general activism has enabled legislators to protect it's citizens from the worst impacts of said technology, or at the very least install guard rails.

This carte blanche attitude of "suck it up, it's here deal with it" , "you are obsolete" and then "your a hater " if you don't agree, is a kind of thinking that leads a very bad political climate. When there is no informed consent.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

^ That's exactly what I'm sincerely hoping for as well. That it'll eventually (can that be ... like ... tomorrow pls?) bankrupt all the major players and the whole thing will collapse / burst. There'll be a million apps & services that suddenly have features ripped out of them or become hideously expensive. Which will just mean people won't use them or they'll be delisted.

Like for instance, shitty game devs that currently use free (or almost free) ai to generate background art like pictures on the walls or something in an rpg ... that cost of generating those will suddenly be REALLY high. It will then once again go back to the artists to create those background art on the walls. Like it should have all along damnit.

also side note: Ed is so great. His podcast is worth a listen as well.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment