The story goes on a bit longer than I was expecting as I was playing through it, and it definitely gets more and more epic as you ramp towards its conclusion. It will let you know when you are starting the final mission too, to give you time to do other stuff if you want before wrapping it all up.
Also, if you are a fan of the comics I highly recommend playing through the flame side quests. Probably the thing that has me most excited for DLC or the next game.
I dunno - it’s sort of what’s wrong with reviews these days.
Starfield’s first few hours are really slow and suck.
Then there’s this point at around 20-40 hours where it just clicks and you feel like you are in this massive open universe with so much to do.
And I think most reviewers were writing their reviews having rushed through to around that point.
And then you keep playing.
And you realize that in fact there isn’t a huge universe with so much to do, there’s a huge effective map with literally copy and paste repetition of everything you’ve already done. And it even doubled down (or rather went twelvefold down) on this repetition.
And that sense you got earlier on of a universe of untapped potential that had you looking past the flaws in an outdated engine and poor design choices now suddenly come up short, you are left with a game that has little redeeming value at the 60+ hour mark even though you might have thought it was potentially amazing at the 40 hour mark.
I can see why it reviewed well, as if I was under deadline to write a review for it and rushed a few faction quests and the main quest line and looked at the map of so much more to see having barely dipped a toe into certain other quests and exploration, I’d have rated it quite well. Even though after around 80 hours I was so over it that it’s nearly forgettable with the last 20 of those 80 hours being a miserable slog where I kept hoping to rediscover some magic. And I say that as someone who typically plays around 200+ hours in Bethesda games.
It sucks, but it takes too much time to realize it sucks for fans of the genre if you already forced yourself to play past the opening 15 hours hump as all reviewers have to.
I think it’d be really healthy for the industry if review scores regularly got updated by reviewers who continued to play past the point of writing the first stab at it.
By design was using procedural generation to build out the planets and to place points of interest into the world.
But what’s wild is that they had such repetitive and uninteresting “points of interest.”
They aren’t interesting at all. The name is a lie.
So yeah, if you wander the procedurally generated planet you can come across a cave. But it’s effectively the same cave you have gone through a half dozen times already.
My suspicion is that the creation engine isn’t very well equipped for complex procedural generation, so the point of interest areas are also broken up onto reused tiles that get repetitive quickly, as opposed to more modern engines that allow for procedurally generating levels and assets with enough entropy that even if it looks familiar it isn’t that it looks exactly the same.
Like, just look at the demoed features of UE5’s procedural generation, and how much less repetitive it looks when filling in areas than Starfield.
I expected more from Bethesda given Todd Howard has been focused on procedural generation for decades now, but I think they really shot themselves in the foot with not sending creation engine to a farm upstate.
Yes, they were able to reuse a lot from past development, but the core of what they were trying to deliver completely fell apart ultimately and his decades old dream project is going to be forgotten within a few years.
Your point about the screenplay reminds me of one of my biggest pet peeves with armchair commenters on AI these days.
Yeah, if you hop on ChatGPT, use the free version, and just ask it to write a story, you’re getting crap. But using that anecdotal experience to extrapolate what the SotA can do in production is a massive mistake.
Do professional writers just sit down at a computer and write out page after page into a final draft?
No. They start with a treatment, build out character arcs, write summaries of scenes, etc. Eventually they have a first draft which goes out to readers and changes are made.
To have an effective generative AI screenplay writer you need to replicate multiple stages and processes.
And you likely wouldn’t be using a chat-instruct fine tuned model, but rather individually fine tuned models for each process.
Video game writing is going to move more into writing pipelines for content generation than it is going to be writing final copy. And my guess is that most writers are going to be very happy when they see the results of what that can achieve, as they’ll be able to create storytelling experiences that are currently regarded as impossible, like where character choices really matter to outcomes and aren’t simply the illusion of choice to prevent fractalizing dialogue trees too much early on.
People are just freaking out thinking the tech is coming to replace them rather than realizing that headcounts are going to remain the same long term but with the technology enhancing their efforts they’ll be creating products beyond what they’ve even imagined.
Like, I really don’t think the average person - possibly even the average person in the industry - really has a grasp of what a game like BG3 with the same sized writing staff is going to look like with the generative AI tech available in just about 2-3 years, even if the current LLM baseline doesn’t advance at all between now and then.
A world where every NPC feels like a fleshed out dynamic individual with backstory, goals, and relationships. Where stories uniquely evolve with the player. These are things that have previously been technically impossible given resource constraints and attempts to even superficially resemble them ate up significant portions of AAA budgets (i.e. RDR2). And by the end of the next console generation, they will have become as normative as things like ray tracing or voiced lines are today.
They largely are going to remain the same. Specific roles may shift around as specific workloads become obsolete, and you will have a handful of companies chasing quarterly returns at the cost of long term returns by trying to downsize keeping the product the same and reducing headcount.
But most labor is supply constrained not demand constrained, and the only way reduced headcounts would remain the status quo across companies is if all companies reduce headcounts without redirecting improved productivity back into the product.
You think a 7x reduction in texturing labor is going to result in the same amount of assets in game but 1/7th the billable hours?
No, that’s not where this is going. Again, a handful of large studios will try to get away with that initially, but as soon as competitors that didn’t go the downsizing route are releasing games with scene complexity and variety that puts their products to shame that’s going to bounce back.
If the market was up to executives, they’d have a single programmer re-releasing Pong for $79 a pop. But the market is not up to executives, it’s up to the people buying the products. And while AI will allow smaller development teams to produce games in line with today’s AAA scale products, tomorrow’s AAA scale products are not going to be possible with significantly reduced headcounts, as they are definitely not going to be the same scale and scope as today’s leading games.
A 10 or even 100 fold increase in worker productivity only means a similar cut in the number of workers as long as the product has hit diminishing returns on productivity investment, and if anything the current state of games development is more dependent on labor resources than ever before, so it doesn’t seem we’ve hit that inflection point or will anytime soon.
Edit: The one and only place I can foresee a significant headcount drop because of AI in game dev is QA. They’re screwed in a few years.
You jest, but yeah, there very likely will be, especially given that there’s already full self-driving cars today on roads. The difference will just be that in ~10 years (by the end of the next console generation) that there will be better full self-driving cars on the road.
One of the big mistakes I see people make in trying to estimate capabilities is thinking of all in one models.
You’ll have one model that plays the game in ways that try a wider range of inputs and approaches to reach goals than what humans would produce (similar to the existing research like OpenAI training models to play Minecraft and mine diamonds off a handful of videos with input data and then a lot of YouTube videos).
Then the outputs generated by that model would be passed though another process that looks specifically for things ranging from sequence breaks to clipping. Some of those like sequence breaks aren’t even detections that need AI, and depending on just what data is generated by the ‘player’ AIs, a fair bit of other issues can be similarly detected with dumb approaches. The bugs that would be difficult for an AI to detect would be things like “I threw item A down 45 minutes ago but this NPC just had dialogue thanking me for bringing it back.” But even things like this are going to be well within the capabilities of multimodal AI within a few years as long as hardware continues to scale such that it doesn’t become cost prohibitive.
The way it’s going to start is that 3rd party companies dedicated to QA start feeding their own data and play tests into models to replicate and extend the behaviors, offering synthetic play testing as a cheap additional service to find low hanging fruit and cut down on human tester hours needed, and over time it will shift more and more towards synthetic testing.
You’ll still have human play testers around broader quality things like “is this fun” - but the QA that’s already being outsourced for bugs is going to almost certainly go the way of AI replacing humans entirely, or just nearly so.
Do you think that same result would have happened if horses had other skills outside of the specific skill set that was automated?
If horses happened to be really good at pulling carts AND really good at driving, for instance, might we not instead have even more horses than we did at the turn of the 19th century, just having shifted from pulling carts to driving them?
I’m not sure the inability of horses to adapt to changing industrialization is the best proxy for what’s going to happen to humans.
The game whose mismanagement still most upsets me.
It had/has the potential to be so incredible, and they screwed it over.
They were one of the first to have VR, then saw low numbers and wrote it off when they were really just too early to the market. Like - if they actually supported a PS5 version and supported PSVR2 with its foveated rendering right now, they’d probably be the bestselling VR game on PSN.
But no, instead, they dropped VR entirely for their poorly developed on foot expansion.
If they actually had resources pouring into the game, just think how amazing the world could be paired up with where generative AI will be within around 12 months. Actually intriguing plot lines playing out in local space voiced by the ship AI. That right there could have been a subscription add on.
But no, instead they just keep shuttering it more and more.
Where exactly does it say that the cross is the thing that should be the symbol for the religion?
That doesn’t happen until around the 3rd century, 200 years after most of the new treatment was written.
Fun fact: initially the cross was a symbol made on the forehead or with the hand. So if you were looking for Revelation prophecy fulfillment, maybe the buying and selling of salvation under the sign of the cross on forehead and in hand should be the thing people are worried about, and not RFID payments.
Just like how Christians worry about blaspheming the Holy Spirit as a supposedly unforgivable sin while conveniently overlooking Paul’s swearing he’s telling the truth on the Holy Spirit in Romans 8 (a chapter entirely absent in Marcion’s version of the letter).
It’s always wild to me when believers act like they actually know anything about the book while clearly not knowing much about it at all, as opposed to at least having the wisdom to know what they don’t know.
Ah - so they think if they aren’t wearing the cross he’ll have forgotten about the whole crucifixion thing?
I mean, to be fair he was only up there for like half a day - so short they allegedly needed to poke him given how unusual dying that quickly was for the execution method (though it was suspiciously shortly after drinking something in two accounts).
So yeah, maybe they have a point and a reminder is warranted.
“Hey you, remember that they nailed you to a cross! Don’t forget! The most important thing in your life was that. You said some other stuff that I don’t really remember and usually zone out about on Sundays, but for sure the whole getting nailed to wood part was really really important and the ultimate summation of your life’s purpose. It was somehow necessary because I like to look at boobs on the Internet. So thanks for that, and again - don’t forget about it, because I’m sure it was very forgettable.”
If you read the Bible, the importance and significance of the event where Jesus died on a cross is kind of hard to miss.
Not really. There’s one line in the Synoptics about “unless you carry the cross as I do” and a few mentions of the cross in the Epistles, but it didn’t have nearly the significance it later takes on in the religion.
The gospels certainly cover the crucifixion with the passion narrative, but at the time it was more about dealing with the embarrassment of the cross than its glorification - the Messiah was supposed to be a war leader who led the Jews in a final battle of liberation and instead their guy was crucified.
So the narrative is mostly around trying to address how really this embarrassing event was fulfilling prophecy and addressing why he didn’t just magic himself off of it (eventually developing the narrative to the point that in John he effectively does just that spiritually, leading to later beliefs like docetism - that he was a phantom without corporeal form and didn’t suffer at all on the cross, popular around the time the focus on the cross was starting).
Again, you can see that in the earliest of the Epistles the cross is referred to as “the offense of the cross” (Gal 5:11), and at this early point the significance is clearly still developing as Paul sees the cross as symbolically crucifying the world to him in Gal 6:14 (Paul’s undisputed letters have 2-5x the personal reference of the non-Pauline Epistles, much like the writing of vulnerable narcissists).
The Christology around the significance of the cross simply isn’t where you think it is when the NT is being composed to support your view of it as symbolically hard to miss. In the text itself, it’s actually quite easy to miss, which was why it took two centuries to become a thing.
It makes more sense when you know that 2nd temple Judaism had an entire economy built around animal sacrifice for sins, and that the temple central to that is destroyed a few decades after Jesus died as Christianity was starting to take off.
So positioning Jesus’s death not as an embarrassing failure to manifest earlier messianic prophecy but as this ultimate sacrifice making the animal sacrifices that could no longer be performed unnecessary was a very convenient belief to attract Jewish converts.
Of course, then Mark 11:16, where Jesus bans anyone from carrying animal sacrifices through the temple in the first place while alive becomes an inconvenient detail, which is probably why it later disappears from Luke and Matthew.
So Christianity probably really was a split from 2nd temple Judaism at the time of Jesus on the point of animal sacrifice, but then following his death the death itself gets reworked back into the paradigm of animal sacrifice by those coming later (i.e. Paul) which then later makes it more attractive to Jews who no longer have a temple after 70 CE when it takes even greater prominence.
The irony of course is that looking at some of the early apocryphal sayings of Jesus on the ridiculousness of sin and salvation as an inherent birthright that shouldn’t be given over to another to be lent back out at interest - this development of the crucifixion as an ultimate sacrifice on behalf of humanity was possibly the exact opposite of a historical Jesus’s whole point, even if it was favored for survivorship bias given the destruction of the temple.
She’s been great for a long time. One of the few people with public comments on the industry that has a really great intuitive grasp on the business side of it.
I’ve been recently been thinking about Arkane Studio’s Prey which is a immersive sim, with a pretty good rogue like dlc, that probably has one of the strongest hooks of any game I’ve played. If you liked Halflife, System Shock, or Deus Ex it’s definitely worth a play....
Uplink - A hacking sim game that’s actually quite addictive in a playthrough. Will make you feel like you’re in the movie Hackers.
Spycraft: The Great Game - An adventure game that had as consultants CIA director William Colby and KGB Major-General Oleg Kalugin.
I don’t know a lot of people that have played these, but they definitely rank up there for me as some of the more interesting and unique games I’ve played over the decades.
The year this was being shown at E3, I got my best friend in as my ‘photographer’ for the show under a press pass, and set up a bunch of private gameplay demos of games (by this point nothing interesting was shown on the show floor anymore).
When we went to our appointment at the Square Enix booth, they immediately ushered us into a room with nothing but two Japanese guys, and were like “ok, go ahead and ask your questions.”
Apparently they thought we’d sat through an earlier gameplay demo which they never set up, and we were suddenly sitting with the game director and their translator for a half hour interview about a title I hadn’t even seen or knew anything about - and an interview conducted through a translator on top of that (and I’d intentionally been trying to avoid ending up in interviews in the first place).
It was one of the more surreal experiences I’ve had in life, and very much reminded me of the times I’d be in a book discussion in high school for a reading assignment I hadn’t done, frantically grabbing on to any thread that seemed legit and running with it.
Scaling content means there’s little power scaling variety, viable builds are very narrow so there’s not much build variety, the leveling curve is punishingly slow because they are trying to live service it, and seasons have lame rewards and boring features so far. Dungeon variety is nearly non-existent and poorly randomized with time wasting objective design.
Also it’s a Diablo game where none of the endgame content takes place in Hell.
TL;DR: Designing games as a live service means designing around time wasting and anti-player choices.
The co-creator of the Dragon Age franchise has commented on the reaction to one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s main female characters, saying fans “always treated male characters with more forgiveness”.
Lae’zel was my favorite origin character and who I ended up romancing and sticking with through my playthrough.
I wouldn’t have expected that going into it, but I found her writing to be probably the most complex and interesting arc out of everyone.
Whereas Shadowheart, who I went into it thinking would be the one I’d want to romance, was insufferable by halfway though and I was regularly wishing she had less relevance to the core plot.
I’m glad Lae’zel wasn’t male, and honestly I find the suggestion annoying given that the entire plot around the Githyanki is extremely focused on the matriarchal nature of the society.
Spider-Man 2 is The Fastest-Selling Game in PlayStation History (www.gamescensor.com)
Starfield Desperately Needs More Unique Locations (www.thegamer.com)
AI in big budget games is inevitable, say dev vets from Assassin's Creed and Everquest 2: 'Developers hate it … the money is still going to drive absolutely everybody to do it' (www.pcgamer.com)
Elite Dangerous studio Frontier Developments announce layoffs and "organisational review" (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
Why do they worship crosses (feddit.de)
The games industry sucks (www.youtube.com)
Same title as the video. Game dev writer Alanah Pierce offers her POV on the recent layoffs from Epic Games....
What games can you recommend that didn't get the appreciation that they deserved?
I’ve been recently been thinking about Arkane Studio’s Prey which is a immersive sim, with a pretty good rogue like dlc, that probably has one of the strongest hooks of any game I’ve played. If you liked Halflife, System Shock, or Deus Ex it’s definitely worth a play....
SAG-AFTRA members overwhelmingly vote in favour of authorising video game strike (www.eurogamer.net)
Members of the major SAG-AFTRA acting union have overwhelmingly voted in favour of authorising a potential video game strike....
Diablo 4 Twitch viewership continues to drop as Diablo 3 overtakes it (www.charlieintel.com)
Baldur's Gate 3 is 'romance for games 101,' former Dragon Age writer says (www.pcgamesn.com)
Love and romance have become an integral part of Baldur's Gate 3, but former Dragon Age and BG2 writer David Gaider says BG3's romance is "too overt."
If Baldur’s Gate 3’s Lae'zel Were Male Fans ‘Would Be More Forgiving’, Dragon Age Co-Creator Says (www.ign.com)
The co-creator of the Dragon Age franchise has commented on the reaction to one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s main female characters, saying fans “always treated male characters with more forgiveness”.