marelooke

Generative AI can't really replace creative jobs, because by its very nature it cannot be creative, it just regurgitates what it has learned, often in quite a mangled fashion. It can, however, be used for rapid prototyping, which as far as I can tell is also the use-case Swen is talking about. From my perspective there's two worries about these GenAI tools: juniors lean on them and don't actually understand the output, thus they do not learn, or pick up entirely wrong information that they take for truth execs think they will be able to replace people, because that's what Gen AI companies sell, and then they'll wake up and their company is on fire. After a bunch of People lost their jobs, of course. Maybe, but it will need to come from entirely different AI research, Generative AI is a dead end for that future, something even OpenAI has pretty much admitted at this point. Where Winds Meet has NPCs that are basically LLM bots, it sucks about as much as you'd expect it to if you've ever used the likes of ChatGPT. They're also fairly easy to break if you're somewhat familiar with these tools (eg. by just babbling until they run out of context at which point they forget their "personality" and you can make them do pretty much anything). There's some, let's say, interesting "conversations" with NPCs out there that are often very much NSFW...

Had to be careful to avoid spoilers, had some really nice screenshots from cutscenes, but alas, major spoilers in them. Starting the game off slowly... The environments are gorgeous Still does not do the location justice GOTY Cats, cats everywhere! The game sure has got the vibe down I'm sure she's angry for a reason Think I wandered into a Tomb Raider game Eeeeep Yeah...so I do happen to be colourblind Looks like I'm slightly more powerful than a single goose, go me!

Apparently the problem isn't just the translation, some of the lore supposedly is obtuse to the Chinese players as well per this Reddit post of a Chinese player. The English voice acting has mostly been fine, at least with a female MC, I don't dare try Chinese since some of the text assumes Chinese, and things do get cut off occasionally, especially when it comes to on-screen tips. Though there's some weird issues sometimes like where the subtitle runs behind one step with the spoken dialogue, or the lines are assigned to the wrong person, which is hopefully less of an issue in Chinese. I've yesterday finished the final boss we have access to for now, which seems to wrap up the Kaifeng storyline and I did have some trouble, though I managed it in one try in the end. I guess one tip for combat is to use the Healing Fan as an offhand, as well as to look into the weapon combinations in general, I found this video helpful to explain how I picked wrong initially

Been playing this game quite a bit recently on the default/recommended difficulty but with the parry prompts enabled (which means I can pretty much forget doing anything MP related). I never made it past the first boss of Dark Souls (not my cuppa tea), but I did greatly enjoy Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, to try and give some kind of indication of where I fall. I've basically completed the major content of the first region (Qinghe), and just started on Kaifeng (second region). Combat is rather hard to avoid, region completion relies, among other things, on finding boxes, which means you have to clear out hostile camps (chests are often locked until enemies are dead). Movement abilities tend to get disabled when you aggro enemies, so just running past usually isn't much of an option, and when it is it's generally obnoxious enough that you'd probably just want to beat them up anyway to get it over with. The main story bosses, at least so far, have been mostly fine for me, difficulty wise, but each major region also has a region story, and the final boss of Qinghe (first region) was pretty darn brutal and took me a couple of tries. Technically they (and the rest of the region story) are optional, but most of the storylines do appear to tie into the overarching narrative so I'd consider them very worthwhile to do. This is also why I'd recommend taking one's time exploring and at least completing the major plot lines in the region, and not just beelining the main story. There's also optional bosses, those can be skipped entirely, though I've accidentally triggered a few due to not being aware they were there, or them being in a place that makes them really hard to avoid. That said, once beaten they do not respawn in the open world. The lore/story is pretty interesting, but unfortunately most of the cultural nuance is lost in translation, leading to some pretty major gaps in understanding of the story for anyone not intimately familiar with Chinese culture/(folk)lore that I had to resort to Reddit to explain to me (thankfully there are Chinese players that really care and post comprehensive breakdowns of major storylines/events)

There's some setting that fudges the dice and is intended to help avoid chains of bad rolls, in practice it seems to make rolls worse (or at least more "average"), turning it off seemed to at least improve things for me. May be in my head, may not be, there's been evidence collected to indicate the former, but since Larian doesn't disclose how the setting atually works and kept updating it there's no telling how accurate that evidence still is. Anyway, may want to try turning it off (it's on by default) and see if that improves things for you, it did for me.

Went back to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 now that about a year has passed and we're on the 1.6.1 patch to see how far the game has come and...well, they've added Night Vision Devices, and the Mosin, and it does run more stable, but other than that very little seems to have changed about the things I disliked. In fact, one of my main complaints, enemy spawning, seems to have regressed since I last played, even at release with enemies obnoxiously spawning around you it'd take some effort to actually catch them "popping in", but on 1.6.1 I've literally had enemies pop into existence right in front of me on enough occasions that it's become rather bothersome. There's also generally too many, it's literally impossible to get from A to B without the game spawning a bunch of enemies around you, if you're lucky they'll be too busy fighting each-other (which, I suppose, is an improvement over release where they'd all go for you). To test whether it was the game or I was just imagining things it I decided to make the trek from Quiet to Azimuth Station (after the mission that takes place there) multiple times in a row, this is a short distance that has you cross a tiny strip of empty bog, of the 8 times in a row I made the corssing (4 in each direction) I didn't run into anything only once, every other time there was something going on in this tiny strip of land. That's ridiculous, especially since there's no realistic way for anything to get there. Missions still have the same issues they've always had with exposition but they've somehow managed to break in-world subtitles (which is a bit of an issue, seeing as I can't stand the English VO, but I also don't speak Ukrainian...) so I have to rely on memory for much of the context. Haven't had any main missions outright break though, which is nice. Worst I had was an early side missions for the Ward in the Chemical Plant that I had to reload 6 or 7 times to get to function correctly. So yeah...there's supposed to be an engine update in the next patch (1.7), honestly not sure what good it'll do unless it somehow also fixes the spawn issues.

Not sure why but I'm getting Shadow Warrior vibes from this.

Expected them to boil the frog longer before doing this, with some luck this teaches a lot of people a thing or two about how these subscription services do business. Then again, if they haven't figured it out by now they may just be beyond help anyway.

You can already pick a specific crisis to happen, so I doubt that's much of a concern, I just want the inverse option: the ability to exclude certain crises without turning off the entire DLC they are in. Cetana is also very different from every other crisis. Most crises shake up the galaxy with their rampages, as generally by the time they spawn borders are kinda entrenched, and the crisis forces the galaxy to take action, shaking up borders and the political landscape. As far as I can tell that's their whole point. Cetana is just "there", and unless you, as the player, do a bunch of stuff, and set up very specific fleet compositions to deal with her insane difficulty (compared to every other crisis out there) there's really nothing happening until she presses her "I win"-button. The AI won't lift a finger, not even when she declares war on the entire galaxy (not that, given her power levels, they'd be much help anyway), and until she does it's pretty much business as usual. She may be fun once, or for some challenge run, but by and large I'd call her boring, as there's a whole lot of nothing, then a single massive fleet battle that you hopefully win, and...that's kinda it... If you beat her the game is basically over as there's probably not a whole lot left to do until the victory year as I'd be rather surprised that anyone able to beat Cetana would be having any issues beating up the rest of the galaxy after, if need be. Honestly, design-wise she really feels more like an elaborate event-chain than an endgame crisis. Maybe in a game with multiple crises having her mixed in, I can see that being more engaging, but on default settings with only the single major crisis? I'd rather not have it be her.

Parked my last Stellaris game after I basically won (Galactic Emperor, smacked the Contingency, and enough fleet power to walk over anyone who even looked at me funny). Almost thought I managed to make the Unbidden spawn, but seems Ultima Vergilis just is being ominous when you already beat the crisis, shame. Started a new game and since I usually turtle I figured I'd force myself into early combat by going at is as a Driven Exterminator Gestalt Consciousness. Only to spawn between two Fallen Empires and another Driven Exterminator. Great. Also ended up running into some major Trade deficit issues because I'm not familiar with how to play machines, so ended up mostly turtling anyway while I figured out/fixed my economy. At that point one of the Fallen Empires decides to awaken, and since I can't handle them in a fair fight I build up fortress systems and fleets like mad and shelve any plans for wanton galactic murder sprees. Aaaand then Cetana decides to spawn, obliterating the FE(s), taking some of my (fortified) systems with her and then just basically ruining the rest of the game (as far as I'm concerned). All the research options for the crisis end up outside my borders, so unless I want to fight a whole load of wars to get to them I have no access to them. So I have content myself with nabbing her transports, trying to get somewhere with the situation that way. Unfortunately she somehow goes hostile before she declares war somehow, despite me having "good" rep (bug?) and just "removes" some of my biggest fleets (not even combat, just dialogue and *poof* fleet gone...). Once she finally does declare war I try beelining her with everything I have left but just get smacked like a fly. She, herself, has 1.5m fleet power, and the rest of the crap in the system she hides in counts for another million or so, even before losing a bunch of ships to bs I managed only like half that. AI doesn't even try to deal with her, like at all, unlike every other crisis where at least they can act as a distraction. Might as well be alone in the galaxy for this one, and can't rely on Fallen Empires to do, well ... anything as she just outright murders them with a 100% guarantee when she spawns. This is also where I learned you can't disable a specific crisis, you can pick a specific one, but you can't say "give me any random one, except for that one", which is annoying as from what I've seen I don't think I want her in most of my games (but I don't necessarily want to disable the whole DLC) as she seems ridiculously over-tuned compared to every other crisis (and I just generally dislike things being on timers like this).

It's why Conan Exiles is still my favourite "survival" game. There's an actual story, though Funcom, probably in preparation of Dune's launch, kinda pushed it aside for some "modern" checklist bollocks, but it's still all there. What I enjoy is that you have to go out and *find* the story and slowly puzzle together what happened. And the game has a goal that you can complete, if you so choose: getting out of the situation you find yourself in after the intro. I'd imagine the gameplay is similar to Dune, at least my impression of Dune is that it's just Conan Exiles in the Dune universe without the option to host your own server (but I haven't played it, just to be clear) Personally I haven't really stopped bouncing around half-finished games. Went back to the original DOOM reboot and apparently I'd left that off at the last boss, so I killed that and freed up some disk space. I also made a little bit of progress in Mass Effect: Andromeda, but the game just hasn't been able to hold my attention after first contact. I'll probably finish it, eventually. Mostly I've been having a lot of fun in Stellaris, tried getting through a game with Knights of the Toxic God a few times (using the predefined species) and got absolutely stomped in the early game multiple times, so I increased galaxy size with less of us in it to give me some more breathing room at the start. Also added another 300years to the "game end" condition as my last game where I wasn't sniffed out early ended when stuff started getting real. After beating the endgame crisis the awakened fallen empire decided to go after me for war mongering (I mean, I was sitting on massive fleets and I just cleansed the universe of two crisis, which I guess makes me the bad guy) and everyone else decided to close borders, blocking some of my fleets from getting out of the Contingency system, so they were stuck until I could buy a Gate to teleport out (I expected this, so I came prepared). They had a bunch of fleets with 2 to 3 times my fleet's power but decided to attack me in a heavily fortified system (3 maxed out Citadels set up to deal with them specifically). Lost like half of the ships I was able to actually field but managed to murderify both of their strongest fleets (somewhere around 4million fleet power together). Little while later that Gate got finished, freeing up two fleets in prime fighting condition, and now I'm just happily stomping down Awakened Empire systems. Hope I can take them down entirely before the war ends, if not I may just declare them a galactic crisis and have everyone beat down on them (I have so much political influence due to my fleets that anything I want done in the Galactic Community, goes, it's hilarious, maybe I should run for Emperor next...)

(no, I don't actually think using that long term is a good idea, but it's neat )

Missing out on UT3 is not that big of a loss, I'd argue. Though I see they added achievements at some point, so maybe I'll play through the campaign again eventually. I bought that game on DVD unless I'm very mistaken, though I think it was one of those "have disc, need Steam anyway"-releases that were so popular at the time. But there may be some new-old-stock out there still if you really, really want to complete the collection...

Been putting some hours into Soulmask recently. It has very similar vibes to Conan Exiles, a game I sunk a fair few hours into (and that I still occasionally play, but more as a building game ), so I'll mostly be comparing against that. At a high level they are very similar, end up in some weird place due to weird reasons and have to build/craft your way out of things, you bonk natives on the head to add them to your tribe, etc. From where I stand there's two major differences: The first one being that your main character is weaker than everyone else (stats are hard-capped below those of other NPCs), and you are, in fact, not expected to use it most of the time. This is where the titular "soulmask" comes in, you can use it to "Control" other tribesmen that you recruit, taking over their skills, inventory, gear, etc. The one downside tribesmen have is that they can die permanently (at least initially), while your PC will just respawn. The second one is that Tribe management is much more involved than in Conan. Tribesmen are much more active, and in fact much more along the lines of what I wished Conan Exiles had when I started playing it: you can assign them various tasks and they'll go out and do them. If you assign them to logging they'll go out to the area you assigned them to chop wood, grabbing an axe from storage if they don't have one, for crafting they'll run around collecting materials from chests to then craft the things you queued up. The downside of this situation is that you have to rely on AI pathing, so being creative with base placement/interior may not be the best of ideas. I had the great idea to build up on a cliff, with the result that my tribesmen often get stuck at the base of said cliff instead of pathing around. There's still some limitations I wish there weren't, for example they won't repair their gear when it breaks, instead they'll toss it and grab new stuff from chests if they can, otherwise they'll just start idling. Overall having a good time and probably worth checking out if you enjoy(ed) Conan Exiles.