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 [External Link]). 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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I kind of weirdly wish more games would do this. I love the focus of a single player game, and if the online elements are entirely separate... good?

Not all games, I guess. Some of them weave the multiplayer quite seamlessly. But still...

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Good to see! Not sure I love this series enough to buy after Denuvo is in the bin, but at least buying it is an option now.

I'm always a bit torn on buying after removal. At the end of the day, Denuvo has already flicked their finger at paying customers, and had their slice of the pie, a slice that won't have been applied to the developers, artists, music, or quality assurance. So it's got to be something I love before I'll pull the trigger.

Looking at the Denuvo-encumbered titles out now, I'd say that list is probably quite small: Hifi Rush, and Deathloop are the only two certainties. I also have a weird craving to play Strange Brigade, even though it's over seven years old now. And I'd probably have tried the Persona series by now too.

So yeah, Denuvo can still get in the sea. But if it can piss off outta those games there, I might consider purchasing them!

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