Replies (triggering notifications) and avatars are the two things I miss. I don't really miss the forum at all - I was rarely on there, given the Discord.

The OSA has been fiercely criticised and for good reason - complex, layered yet without nuance, harsh to small sites, vague on specifics. It's an absolute mystery how either this became law, or the absolute fools behind it believe that it actually makes a difference to reducing paedophilia. Those same fools are now lobbying for encryption backdoors, so you know the kind of IQ we're dealing with here.

And I get it. Child safety should be key, and unbreakable encrypted comms ARE an enabler for bad (paedophilia) as well as good (privacy). But this ain't it, chief. It's not even close.

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These are great changes. I only played "3D Dota 2" for a week or so back in August when it came out. It felt overwhelming. The playerbase seems to agree too, with player count dropping from it's early peak of 175K down to today's average 15K. Hope this boosts interest again.

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Then again, technophobia is real

Well, also ethical standards. They're real too. Just ask all the striking voice artists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%932025_SAG-AFTRA_video_game_strike [External Link]

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I'm looking forward to the no-doubt-coming assertion that AI was trained on reaped movies or music. Then the likes of the RIAA, Paramount, WB and Sony Entertainment will be throwing the legal heavyweights out there, for restitution - for billions in lost royalties. It will be a glorious court case, dragging all the big-tech into the firing line. Napster, but with heavyweights on both sides, juking it out for all that stolen revenue.

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Please also make a stamp for "No Procedurally Generated Junk".

Noita would like a word. And HellDivers 2. And Astroneer. And Path of Exile. Windblown. Dead Cells. Remnant. Those are just the games I've played in the last three months that use procedural generation, and are superb.

Say, translation. What if I write a game in french and use the help of ChatGPT to translate it? The material is already mine, its not stolen. It would noticeably improve the quality of the translation. Would this void the use of this badge?

Yeah, an on/off badge is going to be problematic for reasons like this. A lot of the authors I read now have disclaimers at the start or end of the book, basically saying "no AI was used in the creation of this work". I think for games, it's not a disclaimer that's needed, but a declaration. If you can say "AI was used to generate the French translation, but no other AI tools were used", that's still really valuable.

Ah, yes, the "AI bad" bandwagon.
We'll see how that is going in 5-10 years

As Tubbi notes, it's not about "AI is bad", it's about the creators of any given AI stomping all over people's rights. No attribution, no compensation. Just stealing people's work from torrent sites (a good read: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-over-81-7tb-of-pirated-books-to-train-ai-authors-say/ [External Link]).

*moderator snip*

Anyone thinking that what AI companies are doing here isn't bad - just look at Sky. If you buy a Sky Sports sub, it's about £30/month for your household. If you buy it for a pub, where many people will benefit, it's between £1100/month and £2100/month.

If AI companies actually compensated their sources for the works they stole (again, read that Ars Technica article on Meta above) to create their offerings, AI just wouldn't be possible. Authors can make anywhere up to £12K in the UK when their book hits the library. But AI? Nah. Just rip it off the torrents and pay whatever meaningless fines the courts decree.

Using AI today is ethically bankrupt. No two ways about it.

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It's jumped from a daily average of 15 players to over a thousand. Can't imagine it'll last long, but nice to see.

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Also. Can the crash please happen, like, tomorrow? The whole deepseek thing is helping, but I'd love to just turbocharge the collapse so we can be through and done with all the absurdity.

This entire cycle just reminds me so much of RPA from around the 2010's. Same bullshit optimism from execs about "staff reduction" (or, if trying to be politically correct, "staff efficiency") and same underwhelming, erratic, difficult-to-reproduce, difficult-to-troubleshoot results.

The worst thing about RPA was that the slightest change to your processes would break it (even when those changes were outwith your control, such as when accessing data via a website, or API). I suspect the same will be true if you introduce AI.

Anyway, there's STILL companies banging on about RPA today, so don't get your hopes up on the AI crash being all that dramatic. Companies have already poured too many billions of dollars into it for it to just go away, sadly. Gartner are predicting hundreds of billions of spend this year and next. The crash will come, I'm sure, but it'll more likely along the lines of the well known "Gartner Hype Cycle". The crash will only realign expectation to reality, then we'll actually see AI being used where it's actually effective, and we'll stop seeing utter crap like Phil was spraying, above.

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OMG OMG OMG!!!

Ever since my 100 hours in Slay the Spire kind of tired me out of this genre, I'd been waiting for the next big hit. For a while it was Roguebook, with 70 hours. But then came Monster Train - what a game! Only an extra 10 hours, but unlike Roguebook, I found Monster Train to be a game I could keep coming to even after unlocking most/all of its content. Each run just felt really different, driven mostly by your choice of which two clans will be running on the train.

The synergies between clans made for really surprising and satisfying gameplay. Can't wait to see what they have in store for Monster Train 2!

Now I know why they announced the end of development on Inkbound. I'm still sad about that - my two regular internet buddies and I played hundreds of hours of Inkbound (308!! Jesus), and it has/had potential for so much more, but hey ho. Now I can get excited that the team is focused on another franchise I love!

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@Mohandevir

I have absolutely no clue about AI, but I'm wondering if it couldn't be used, for old games that we have access to the code. Kind of feed that code to an AI that will make it compatible with modern hardware?

That's a far more feasible scenario than the absolute word soup Phil is spilling above. The challenge would be training the AI on appropriate hardware data and interfaces so that it can transition the code from one architecture to another. Still a far cry, in my mind, but at least you can see the bare bones of how you might go about it.

Showing an AI videos of the game and getting it to recreate the game... and then calling THAT preservation? Laughable. Cringeworthy. Deluded.

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XBOX cares about game preservation? Is Phil Spencer an AI, because this is some top drawer hallucination, right here. Running an AI model to emulate not just the hardware, but the game itself? Absolutely delusional.

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