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Didn't see one, so I figured I would create one, just to say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all you lovely saints, sinners, heretics, heathens, faithful, lost and found people out there. I haven't been active online much the last month and a half, because crunch time and projects going live at years end. Comes with the profession Hope you guys are going to enjoy some time off with family, friends, loved ones or favourite spider pet, whatever you fancy ❤️

The only people that AI should replace are CEOs and politicians.

Atlas Fallen I was quite surprised that the sysstem was locked by the NG cycle, but then I was almost always at 2-3 stage of Momentum (higher damage received and inflicted, also the dagger transforms into a greatsword), so it kind of makes sense. There was a way around the guard which I missed on the first playthrough.

Happy holidays!

Merry holidays and happy Christmas, everybody!

and a Festivus for the rest of us!

Wish you all a wonderful holiday season! 🍻

On AI use, sorry but I am hardcore in the opposite direction from most of you. Given my strong negative views of (most) humans (nature, capability, behavior), I can't wait for highly evolved AI systems to replace humans. I especially can't wait for AI systems to replace humans as drivers given the basic inability of most humans to properly operate an automobile.

Happy Holidays!

I'm sorry but everyone is doing it now, even if they say they don't. It's more honest of them mentioning it than just going "nooooo, we would neeever use ai!!1" while the truth is that their devs sure as **** are using ai to some extend.

Eh, there are use cases. Chatbots and image creation might have the spotlight at the moment because they're rather visible and easily accessed by the public, but they're far from the only ones out there. Back in 2024 the Nobel prize in chemistry went to a group of scientists behind an AI project called AlphaFold used to predict protein folding. The potential for AlphaFold 3 is basically endless, down to creating custom proteins for specific individuals to treat their medical conditions (and for everyone outside the US for reasonable prices even). AI models are already better at finding tumors than humans. That doesn't mean that OpenAI and the other tech companies aren't at the heart of an insane investment bubble at the moment. OpenAI is bleeding money by the tens of billions each quarter but still wants to buy 40% of the world's DRAM waver supply and buy northwards of 30 billion dollars worth of AWS computing power. Datacenters are being built with no hardware, no power and no water to supply them. It's probably no longer a question of if, but rather one of when the overheated market will correct itself, and a lot of people will lose a lot of money in the process while a few will gain a lot. Like with every gold rush and investment bubble, ever since ye faithful tulips of yore. Or, for a more recent one, the NFT hype. AI on the other hand, that is here to stay, and not all of it is bad.

Well, also Fallout1. Still, I fundamentally don’t understand why the common need for “you do this now or you DIEEEEE. Also here is a world full of sideactivities to explore.” I mean I do get it. Universal thread of destruction is an easy narrative hook for a custom protagonist. It still just doesn’t make sense. Surely, your hook should be about exploration and discovery, and reason to engage with the world, not the opposite. Obsidian usually is good with this stuff, though I felt both Pillars did have this issue as well.

I think Expeditions: Viking managed to achieve it - the time limit was generous but present and made sense for the story. I suppose, the same could be said about the tutorial in Tyranny, but the scale there was smaller. For Larian's D&D game, if I am not mistaken, the party discovered that the illithid transformation is delayed quite early and from there it was trying to find a cure at a more leisurely pace. Then again, even if it continued to be urgent, every other NPC was promising solutions at the start, so going along with them could be in-character. Well, also looking for a high-level cleric, a pickaxe, and the True Resurrection spell, which would be travelling straight to the nearest large city.

I have finished Atlas Fallen on the highest difficulty in NG+. The interesting part is that the tools available (the weapon upgrades, new armour sets, and the more powerful Essence Stones) effectively offset it - while the bosses could 1-shoot me, I also was almost instantly and constantly at high Momentum (which additionally meant higher damage to me) and able to use the Shatter attacks with a lot of i-frames repeatedly. The longer battles were somewhat challenging, especially as the screen was getting more "noise" (from the weapon particles to the number of opponents), but, overall, it was easier than the first playthrough. The only issue is one of the randomly appearing battles with various modifiers. The foes to be faced vary, but the reward progression is static and carries over between the NG cycles. The thing there is that it is not hard to get hit once and the battle despawns after that. I assume, if I reloaded, the same battle would have been accessible at the same spot, but I have not tried. The regular random battles have an auto-save nearby and the main story ones can be restarted from the start of the encounter which is incredibly convenient. I am satisfied with the experience and might try replaying it in a few years. On a random note, the NG+ armour sets look much better than the NG ones. They are more detailed and more fitting.

ok, finished Silksong. 100% completion, all achievemnents unlocked, but 4 ones speedrun and ironman related. I liked it very much. I have nitpicks, though a lot of it is related to optional content so I don't know how to feel about it. Some 100% requirements I thought were unreasonably tedious or obscure, but then again, it is completely optional to do so 🤷‍♂️. I am sure someone figuring some things out, for me it was googling things out once I run out of ideas and went "how the heck was I supposed to find that?!". Not as good of a metroidvania as Hollow Knight, but much better action-platformer. Loved movement, really liked combat. Most bosses are excellent, few are tedious. Ah, I wasn't too fond of act3. The bosses that become available there are great, but overall I am not sure of the new content available there required an entire new act3. Then again, I thought Castlevania's reverse castle was a bit lame as well.

Well, maybe. If your story is "I have a ticking bomb and need to solve it ASAP", then I would say you either create a linear adventure that will support this story, or create more open adventure that still forces player to hurry and move forward. I just don't think urgency and here is massive world full of optional content mesh together. Neither is a bad choice, and I just don't those two choices go well together. And of course, various games suffer from it in various ways. That a problem is common, doesn't make it non-existent, and if you make narratively centric game, it sticks out if the experience of playing the game doesn't support said narrative - at least it does to me. If game builds up someone to be a powerful being they should be a difficult fight. If the game builds up something as urgent, at least it should provide narrative excuse as to why we might want to get distracted. I am not saying that such flawes make a game automatically terrible, but it might negatively impact the experience for some looking to get immersed in the story.

And also on the smaller scale

On the other hand, the existing Forgotten Realms worldbuilding can get in the way of immersion as well. I did not find the existence of the Act 2 area being left cursed for the past 100 years to believable for example, in a similar way perhaps to how Bethesda Fallout games would have you believe people still live in bombed out ruins full of debris 200 years after the war. And that's to say nothing of how the story interacts with access to restorative and resurrection magic in the setting. But yeah, mechanically the D:OS games were weird with the extremely steep level scaling essentially funneling the player into a fixed path through the zones. BG3 didn't have that issue at all, but in some ways had the opposite problem inherent to modern D&D which unbelievably still has things like empty level-ups where you don't do anything but click the confirm button, and the continuing insanity of only every second stat point increase doing anything (seriously, a quarter of a century of this nonsense). Thankfully Cyberpunk did not level/stat/perk-gate silent takedowns so I could still merrily ignore every single mechanic complained about by that YouTuber. Healing? Grenades? Stamina? Never heard of 'em.

At this point I think the worry - if one is worried - should be about AI effect shrinking/replacing jobs all over, from low-tier to upper management - not just artistic creatives. Although with potential population replacement crisis in some countries (not enough generational babies), not having enough "replacement" workers in many areas in 40-60 years could be a serious issue in terms of companies/economy and possible restructuring of such infrastructure systems - and by then AI/robotics might help in some fashion there. Maybe it won't happen but who knows anymore. Then there will be another baby boom at some point and they'll have to make jobs again. On the potentially bright side, 300 years from now AI could be part of what moves humanity closer to no money motivation of ST:TNG. "You mean you don't get paid???" Either that, or Skynet. Either or.

Peter Greene, 60 - chr. actor. Probably best recalled re: his unsavory role in Pulp Fiction, but for some reason I always think of his tiny role in The Usual Suspects or maybe The Mask.