I enjoyed The Cycle: Frontier for a while, back in 2022, but the constant drag of having to insure your kit for a decent run meant that the grind was a bit crazy.

But it was Dark and Darker that made me realise that extraction shooters weren't my bag. At least ARC is trying to match solos together... Dark and Darker was an absolute shit-fest. I remember, as a newb, I was walking around the waiting lobby, examining players randomly, and I came across a team of three, fully kitted out, and each member had at least (!) 15 healing potions. As a newb, I could afford, perhaps three. Sure enough, they were waiting at extraction. I hope they enjoyed the rusty sword I'd looted, and a couple of arrows. I never did find a bow...

Maybe ARC's community will prove me wrong, but these games almost always skew towards a small group of try-hards with too much time on their hands basically griefing newcomers. Too early to tell right now though.

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The (steam) reviews on TW:WH3 are shocking. I thought this was a well-loved series, and maybe the first two games are in a better place, but jeez - you rarely see "mostly negative" except on absolute stinkers! It's denuvo-encumbered too. Great.

Etrian Odessey is a weird one too - decent reviews, but ultimately a fairly weak remaster of a well-loved series, so it's a nostalgia cash-in... and it's denuvo-encumbered?! Pass.

The rest seem average to decent, but nothing stands out. I remember feeling genuine excitement when I was subbed to Humble Choice a few years ago. It feels like it's really nose-dived since.

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This is shaping up. I'm definitely excited for more Skyrim, which is bizarre, cos I've played it to death by now! It might get me back into Fallout 4 though, which I've barely scratched the surface of.

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Yeah, they lost a sale here, thanks to Denuvo. I never played the originals, but would love to have given this a try.

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That's a wild response, dziadulewicz. I'm not going to break it down line by line, as tempting as that is. I'll just re-iterate some of my position on it.

1. I'll start by being super-clear - we are definitely talking about genAI, not AI generally. AI has been around for decades and the neural networks that power them have had enormous benefits. It's marketed to niche areas where it serves a specific purpose. Great! Meanwhile genAI is glitzy, but it's also power hungry and sold to billions around the world. Power hungry x consumers = the planet burns. Or if that's an over-dramatisation, then here's a fact - three genAI advocates (Google, Microsoft and most recently Meta) have re-started three separate large-scale nuclear programs to power genAI.

2. genAI is incredibly inaccurate. I could go on, but that's the crux of it. It lies. All the time. Convincingly. And yet we're meant to rely on code it produces? Or excel functions? Or financial forecasts? Oh, we're not and we have to check everything ourselves? Yep, but then where's the efficiency gains? Turns out, there aren't any - go read that article I've mentioned twice in this thread already.

3. genAI is front-loaded on price. We're not paying the correct amount of money to use it. The genAI companies are losing BILLIONS when they offer this service. That's not sustainable, so what's the catch? I have theories, but honestly can't be arsed speculating here.

4. Until your comment, dziadulewicz, no-one would be crazy enough to suggest that genAI is going to enrich our lives soooo much that we'll actually have more free time to spend with family or donate our time to worthy causes. That's absurd. If people have more free time as a result of this AI "boom", it's because they've been fired from their job. This isn't a golden age of productivity and happiness. It's a bleak, sharp downturn in employment worldwide. That usually leads to several unpleasant trends: increased crime, decreased mental health, decreased life expectancy, etc.

I think I'm gonna unsub from this discussion though. It's pretty clear that most of us have already made up our minds on genAI. The next 24-36 months will see it swing one way or another, I think.

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Across our businesses, we're delivering great customer experiences every day

As one of said customers for a small number of Amazon services, this is absolutely delusional.

When Amazon works well, it's an invisible service. Plumbing. I don't think "gosh, I'm glad I picked Amazon for this". When it doesn't work, it's a car crash. Getting to speak to anyone, ever, is already near-impossible. And now there will be fourteen thousand less people who care about "great customer experiences", and more AI that definitely won't shift the dial.

This entire AI rollercoaster is like a fascinating real-life, global study of "Locked In Syndrome" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome). When you spend $10Bn in a company, you absolutely need it to succeed.

The disparity of expectation between normal people and big tech here is absolutely mind-boggling.

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There was a study done that found it seemed to make people slower at coding . . . but they thought it made them faster

There's a link to that study in my article which I linked in an earlier comment. It's fascinating, the disparity between what they thought would happen and the recorded results.

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Again, you (and the people freaking out) are missing the point

Someone doesn't agree with you, so they're "freaking out". Why? "For no reason". What else, oh yeah, they're "missing the point".

Aye okay. Ignore all the perfectly valid reasons that many, many people have for despising AI. That's it's driving job losses. That's it's unethically produced. That it's driving a move away from green energy back towards nuclear. That it produces slop that actually reduces productivity. It's consolidating wealth in big tech. It makes you dumber.

I could go on. I wrote a short article on my own website: https://www.scaine.net/site/2025/06/the-ethics-of-ai-june-2025/ [External Link]

But ignore all that. We're missing the point. Somehow. 100%.

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Yeah, AI has been poisoned. In this case, it's just funny that it's such a negative term now that the title had to specify that it's "intelligent" artificial intelligence! :grin:

As for calling it something else, maybe just putting "enemy" or "game" in front of the term is enough. Or skip AI entirely and use "behaviours", or something? It's a bit long-winded, isn't it!?

We'll just to steal the term back somehow. Wait for the genAI bubble to burst, perhaps.

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This looks very good, like 7 Days to Die with improved graphics. I doubt the world is anywhere near as destructible as 7D2D, but the world looks pretty convincing - much less "ruined" than in 7D2D. It doesn't look like the building is too over-the-top either. Hopefully there's no maze-running required to survive late-game hordes!

Definitely will be checking this out!

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