This is my main concern about the game. With tech that moves this quickly, you have to understand that game companies who are established are living on the very edge of that debt.

Like starfield for example. Who knows how old it’s code is from the start of its development. It’s why Bethesda games break frequently and crash often. When you develop games on a 8-10 year cycle, think of how many hardware generations that is. 3 to 4 right? So when you’re talking about building an engine, then running it and building a game, then supporting it, all over the coarse of 15-20 years of coding? It’s a giant mess to program and there’s no way in hell it can be optimized properly.

Not to mention the massive task of upgrading the game as new hardware and new engine features arrive.

I won’t tell people what to do with their money, but it’s clear people have bought in to both of these games existing. And if it were my money, I’d want to believe in these devs. But for the rest of us, these games need to materialize as functional and fully featured releases for us to care.

And I don’t think the timeline is crazy so far with their development. What’s wild to me is thinking that a newly founded studio, even a well funded one, can knock out a competent single player and MMO with these scopes. It’s slim chances from an outsiders perspective.

Take a look at what mature and well funded studios are putting out in 2023. The likes of Starfield are actually some of the better cases. I know the incentives are different, but still. So I’m expecting a lot of tooling to need to be done for both these games to exist and exist at an enjoyable playability by the end of the 20s.

Anyways, im not trying to kill enthusiasm for people who enjoy interest in the project but to everyone outside of that, this isn’t reassuring. All large scope games should be considered to be nonexistent until they hit reviewers hands at this point.

I still kind of doubt it’s going anywhere fast. Because a game with this scope has already signed up for some pretty massive post-launch support. Let’s be generous and say it takes them another 2-3 years to develop this single player and another 5-6 to finish star citizen. That’s very generous.

They started pre-production in 2010. So it’s already been 13 years of development with near unlimited money on SC. So again, add 5 years till a mainstream launch and another 3-5 years of active support and you’ll be well over two decades deep in a single games development. That’s half of someone’s career to develop one game. Now we add another game on top of this.

The other game is admittedly much easier to develop but still it will take massive amounts of support. If Bethesda can’t do it well, why does anyone think this dev can and in such good time? I have my doubts.

Currently emulating the old Crash Team Racing as I make my way through most of the Crash Bandicoot games. The racing game is pretty hard as racing games go.

Still working on Divinity Original Sin 2. Game is fun and it’s a lot better than #1 in that series. It’s a large time investment but I do love the game.

I think people don’t often factor in that time in a game is just as much or more a cost than money is.

If I make it super nerdy, my equation for games would be more like fun / (money cost + time cost). But really I don’t actively quantify these things, I just have a sense of it.

The other thing id say is that games recently are being judged more on how they respect the players time. The max game money cost is locked in at $70, likely for a long time. So the thing being optimized right now is the fun/time part. Not respecting the players time is one of the worst crimes a game can commit in my opinion.

That’s what I’m hearing about games like Starfield and it’s always been a criticism for games like assassins creed. Like they’re fun games, but the time investment is far too large for what they offer.

The reason it doesn’t apply to sim games or city builders is because you are largely in control of how best your time is spent. That’s why open world games used to rule Steam for a long time and still somewhat do.

Anyways that’s my rant.

Okay so I fully agree on the use of better AI in games as competitors. The AI in games, though sometimes complex, is lacking in a lot of major games and the difficulty setting just basically amps up their damage and health instead of causing them to outplay you.

I think there are two solutions to better competitive games that reduces cheating and they’re already somewhat at work.

The first solution is implementing AI to detect cheating which has been done but very limited in scope. This will require more data collection for the user, but I fully support that if you’re being competitive and not playing casually. Why? Because in person sports also collect plenty of data on you, often even more invasive, to make sure you aren’t cheating. This can be done in collaboration with Microsoft actually because they have the ability to lock down their OS in certain ways while playing competitive games. They just haven’t bothered because no one asks. Same with Linux potentially if someone wanted to make that.

The second important improvement is to raise the stakes for someone who plays any sort of Esport game. I’m reminded of Valve requiring a phone number for CSGO because it’s easy to validate but raises the difficulty and price of cheating and bans. Having a higher price for competitive games is also entirely possible and also raises the stakes to cheat. The less accounts cheaters can buy, the better. Should it ask for a social security card? No. But I think that system bans based on hardware and IP are also important. You can also improve the value/time put into each account to make it more trustworthy. If a person plays CS for thousands of hours, make their account worth something.

And a minor third improvement would be: match people with more matches/xp/hours with other people of similar dedication at similar skill levels. That means cheaters will decrease the more you play and a cheater would have to play for far longer with cheats undetected to get to that point.

There’s plenty that can be done, companies are just doing almost nothing about the problem because cheaters make them money.

And for good reason. If they trusted user input and took it at face value even for just the current conversation, the user could run wild and get it saying basically anything.

Also chatGPT not having current info is a problem when trying to feed it current info. It will either try to daydream with you or it will follow its data that has hundreds of sources saying they haven’t invaded yet.

As far as covering the companies ass, I think AI models currently have plenty of problems and I’m amazed that corporations can just let this run wild. Even being able to do what OP just did here is a big liability because more laws around AI aren’t even written yet. Companies are fine being sued and expect to be through this. They just think that will cost less than losing out on AI. And I think they’re right.

I like how Americans are treated like some special class. As if the US hasn’t had collateral damage in their attacks that harm citizens of other countries. The US just uses it as a very weak reason to get more involved…

Frankly I bought the Batman series just to support them and I’ll be buying the walking dead series bundle for the same reason. They have to release new stuff though and that’s going to be really really hard to do because they have to make a game that follows up on a major IP that they own from the old company and also make it really well. Not super likely.

That said, the original death of the company before was rough and was mostly about them expanding and not getting more funding. But the business model was also flawed imo. They forgot to significantly upgrade their games and the first big series, TWD, was the best written one. After that, flat.

If you want to know why they struggle, look at supermassive. Those guys eat telltales lunch and dominate the space. Is there room for both? Probably. But they’ve really got to deliver something killer with the new games or they’re dead again.

I don’t think that we need to continue to “think” it’s bad for the games industry. It IS bad for the industry. Period. Very famously, obsidian got less money and lost out on a bonus from the initial release of fallout NV because it didn’t hit 80 on metacritic. We need to stop pretending these scores are objective or reflect anything about user enjoyment of a game. Users maybe, but the critic score is worse than useless. It’s downright misinformation to aggregate critic scores.

Like the entire point of critics is to provide different perspectives on a game. Why would I want their average? The average of their opinion is not the average gamer opinion and it also isn’t the average of the individual readers opinion.

I need no further proof than go look up the last 5 games you played on metacritic and try to guess the critic and user score and get within 5 points each time.

Take a read of this summary (by IGN) of their Madden 22 review:

“ Madden NFL 22 is a grab bag of decent – if frequently underwhelming – ideas hurt by poor execution. Face of the Franchise, to put it mildly, is a mess. Homefield advantage is a solid addition, but it doesn’t quite capture the true extent of real on-field momentum swings. The new interface is an eyesore, and the new presentation is cast in a strange and unflattering shade of sickly green. It’s smoother and marginally more refined, but in so many ways it’s the same old Madden. In short, if you’re hoping for a massive leap forward for the series on the new generation of consoles (or on the old ones), you’re apt to be disappointed”

Now, I want you to read that and ask what you’d rate it based on this info (or the whole review).

IGN has a scale approximately this: 10. Masterpiece 9. Excellent 8. Great 7. Good 6. Okay 5. Mediocre

I don’t think I need to tell you that the user reviews for this game don’t even reach mediocre. Not to mention the gambling inclusion that IGN doesn’t take seriously in any sports game it reviews. But IGN still called Madden 22 a 6 or an “okay” game.

I’m not saying they’re lying necessarily but the result is the same. The honest critiques are ignored to keep receiving review codes. That score should be left out entirely but they refuse because it drives clicks. It’s a joke.

Ratings. Are. Stupid.

When it comes to movies and audience scores, sure, look at the rotten tomatoes score or whatever. But everyone should realize that the average score of EVERY CRITIC is just going to be a useless number.

Not only that but reviewers who represent entire companies like the people at IGN and elsewhere aren’t giving an honest opinion. I know this because a few of them have given their honest opinion before. They got fired for low scores.

This is the reason that I enjoy watching reviews from people like ACG or SkillUp. They don’t need to give a score because their opinion isn’t a number. Enjoyability isn’t a number. Both of those reviewers enjoy games slightly different than I do, but when I watch their reviews I get a sense of if I will enjoy them.

Seriously if you go to outlets who give scores on games commonly, stop. Very little time is put into choosing these numbers and they reflect nothing about enjoying a game for you personally. Go watch a review from ACG or SkillUp. Outlets like IGN or PCGamer can’t hold a candle to these guys.

I’m not a game dev, but from my modding experience it depends on the game.

MOST of the games that have these insane file sizes actually do it to cut down on processing and on load time and reduce pop-in. If a texture or level doesn’t need any decompression, it loads faster. So entirely depends on the asset. So a lot of games do still compress textures. That’s why there’s a discrepancy between the data downloaded in steam and the actual runtime storage requirement.

The 3D models themselves are usually lower space. As is dialog and audio. Though all of those will be mildly compressed probably.

Does the patch size even mean anything anymore? It seems like they just ship out anything that can’t be recompiled on the users end

I was reserving judgement. Just giving reasons to be cautious going into this. Everyone should still be excited, I’m just saying “expect a Bethesda game” so look at their recent games and that’s what you’re getting into probably. With those expectations, you’re less likely to be disappointed

I’m just concerned and will wait for reviews before buying (like everyone should). Bethesda has a reputation for being slow to fix games and having lots of bugs and crashes at release. And even then, they patch them up to being playable and leave the rest for modders to fix.

What makes you think they stick with their games? They fix bugs for about a year or so after release and move on, just like any other studio. They fix stuff in re-releases but you have to pay for that.

Yes but they had an incentive to stay with it. It’s actively profitable. Whereas with star field not so much

You’re not wrong. But I was just pointing out the validity of talking about the semantics of piracy. I ultimately don’t care what people decide to do, just be aware of what it is you’re doing by blocking ads. Which is most of what Linus was saying.

It’s not like you see the ads that have trackers, they get blocked. So it’s still part of the agreement sort of. And you’re also aware that it’s revenue for them. People assume it’s a moral argument, it’s not. You can pirate from absolutely evil people, but it’s still piracy. That’s why I don’t view it as worth arguing over for the most part. I WANT people to realize that it’s piracy but that they’re actually doing something ethical.

After fallout 76, I’m worried. After canceling Prey 2, I’m worried.

I want to be clear still, piracy isn’t a problem or wrong necessarily. I’m not pushing a corporate narrative by saying this, I’m more concerned about creators and other sites that use ads for revenue such as newspapers. So if you want to “pay” a site without money, don’t pirate their content. That’s all. That’s similar to what Linus has said.

But I think this is somewhat similar to asking you for a ticket at the door for a movie. If the “ticket” is watching the ad and they’re asking you to buy the ticket (with premium) or get it from ads, bypassing the doorman would mean it’s piracy. Doesn’t even matter if the doorman doesn’t try to stop you. Doesn’t matter if they don’t pull you out of the movie.

You being the product is irrelevant to the piracy thing. But it is relevant to the moral thing

Purchasing and pirating don’t have contractural agreements. You don’t have to have a ToS to pirate something.

If DuckDuckGo does block the ad in their browser, they’ve done the work for you. And if they do not but instead Google decides to serve it to you without ads in a browser, it’s not piracy to not have ads.

As long as the intended revenue of the content you’re viewing is being blocked, you’re pretty much pirating it. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it’s just a definitional thing.

It is, yes. It’s a separate conversation of if it should be illegal or immoral to keep your privacy this way. But as long as you are violating the intended method of revenue for the content you’re viewing, that’s piracy to me.

I think most people hear piracy and think it’s immoral or illegal, but there are very valid reasons to pirate content such as game and movie preservation.

I see what you mean but I don’t agree. The deal being made here is obvious and you’re signing up to give them data in exchange for watching a video. You’re also signing up to view their ads. You have an option not to be the product at all. You already have the wheat, but you’re giving the middleman less than what was arranged, not just producing less.

And if you view it as okay to not give them what they’re asking for while getting the content anyways, that’s chill. Just recognize that you’re paying less for the content than they’re asking. This is even more enforced by YouTube and news papers who charge for ad free experiences.

Believe it or not, I think he has a point and isn’t at all a hypocrite. He’d show you how to pirate and torrent stuff (and has before) while also telling you he doesn’t recommend stealing. What he was saying is that the content isn’t meant to be free. The ads pay for the content. So not watching ads means the producer doesn’t get paid. Its a soft form of piracy but he wasn’t telling you what to do about that. He just said “Be aware you’re not giving people anything for their content”. I don’t know why thats controversial, he’s not even suggesting its illegal or even immoral. I never understood the arguments here but I also dont visit twitter

I’ll give them some fairness. When lightning originally launched, it was a great interface for lightweight power delivery and was more sturdy than the deplorable micro USB. I can’t explain just how bad microUSB is. So it made sense. I think USB-C just put in the legwork to be a much better adapter.

Also the giant plot hole missing here is that Apple sits on the USB forum I believe and so has some say in what the billions of devices they produce use to charge. They just can’t make money off of a standard now.

I hadn’t heard this. Good on the EU not letting them squirrel out of this (hopefully)

It makes them a very small amount of money. But they’ve also been rumored to be making iPhones use a “Made for Apple” type of cable for faster charging speeds. I think that would be really dumb but here we are.

I believe they go off of a basis of % of GDP, which is higher than usual due to the COVID relief

I think these are accurate. Siri is better at being summoned and doing quick tasks but I feel like Google has a lot more features.

And for having to tinker less, absolutely true so far

The only reason I chose this phone is because I determined that the interconnected apps and services were more worth it in my social circle. Without that, the value proposition basically becomes even to me.

I guess my thing is that technology is important to me and at some point having tech work better overall even if it’s more expensive is more important to me. Plus a lot of Apple stuff is well made and has great resale value so it becomes more manageable that way.

That is odd. But I can definitely tell you that most of the solutions for casting your phone to a tv never worked for me on android. Smart cast almost never worked for me at all. But I will slightly miss the Dex software which was occasionally useful.

I think the best solution for me was getting an NVIDIA shield and using 3rd party apps anyways. It’s better than casting and works more consistently.

I have devices that already use USB C so now I have to have two cables in the same location where before I only needed one. And also transfer and charging speeds are much slower with lightning. I think my phone takes much longer to charge, especially at lower battery percentages.

Overall, pretty much every device should have USB C by now. Apple only stays this way to further lock people into the ecosystem.

I think it’s less about the speed of the animations and just the consistency of them animating in the OS. I mean, even settings in the menu animate nicely with sliding toggles and page swipe gestures. Those may exist on some android phones or can be added, I don’t know, but I noticed them since my Note definitely did far less animation. I know it’s not for everyone, but the iOS animations seem on the snappier side to me. I also used to remove them on my android phone and I put them back because it caused issues for me with some apps just looking rough when they launched. So yes, YMMV.

And it’s a great point about the specific android OS. So yeah take this as a comparison of OneUI on a 3.5 year old phone compared to an almost 3 year old iPhone. If I was to go back to android, it would not be back to Samsung. Both phones I bought from them were overpriced and aged rather poorly imo.

My objective isn’t to crap all over these phones or a certain OS. Each has their downsides. More my point was that if you switch off of a similar OS or have some of the issues I had and go to an iPhone, what might you expect?

So yeah, blame Samsung but for me it won’t make a difference until someone forces RCS as a standard which may very well bring me back to android. Just thought I’d see what it’s like after nearly a decade since I’ve used an iPhone. The last iPhone I had was an iPhone 5.

Well for photos I’m currently using Google photos to transfer stuff but I’ll be moving away from that pretty soon so im not the person to ask probably. The hope is that I can find an app to either directly transfer photos or have my own cloud storage going forward.

I’d prefer to move away from Google services but it does make backing up photos very easy so there’s that

Apologies, its an exaggeration on the ‘full minute’ part of the spectrum but I have noticed that the assistant is faster by quite a bit. I’ll change that part. While using the assistant and asking it to play music in my car, it would often take up to 30 seconds to get from me finishing saying the prompt, it uploading to google, coming back, and playing the music I want. Siri takes about 10 seconds at most.

I have had many times where the assistant just gave up on me though, especially while driving. It would stop my music when I summoned it for about 20 seconds, appear to be listening, and then tell me that it was sorry and couldn’t complete my request or would say nothing and resume the music. I got so frustrated with the assistant in my car that I stopped using it entirely. Could just be my experience, seems like some people think Auto and the assistant work just fine for them.

I like this kind of input because it displays use cases and problems that I haven’t thought of which is exactly why I made the post, so thanks for saying all this and taking the time for that.

That being said, I’m not trying to fight but I’ll give my perspective of how I feel about the issues you raised as an average user just to provide some context in case anyone is concerned about this stuff.

The keyboard is absolutely something that, if android keyboards are a must for you, you might be upset by. I have yet to customize my keyboard at all so I’m trying the default layout for now. I don’t mind the app bar because it isn’t any worse than the few keyboards I used on android. Swipe to text works fine for me but autocorrect does occasionally get words wrong. Not any worse than my android keyboards though (I’ve tried all the major ones out there too). However, I’m fine with my typing pace on iOS, so that doesn’t bother me. I have a couple UX complaints with it but nothing to make me ditch the phone. Might just take time for me to get comfy.

As for messaging, I noted a lot of what you said in the previous post I made. Not having RCS is their fault, it sucks, but if the EU gets it figured out it may tempt me back to Android. I don’t mind the messaging app so far because it does provide a lot of functionality for socializing that Googles alternatives just don’t have or are done poorly. Not everyone will use the entire messaging app but a lot of the complaints are niche to me. Ive never even heard of AMR files. Also I believe searching for messages is being added but I agree that its absence is rather odd.

Connectivity does suck. Hopefully it will improve on newer models but again, I hardly ever have a reason to connect my phone directly to my PC. I back up all of my photos over wifi so I have no need. In fact, my previous phone was used only a handful of times for file transfer. So it isn’t important to me and I don’t think its important to average users, but its a good note and I hope a switch to USB-C will improve that.

Also your situation with PDFs is odd. I’ve had the opposite experience as I actually took a short vacation the past week with my device. It brought up and stored the event emails, tickets (in the wallet) and maps that I needed for the event pretty easily. I definitely had to open a couple of PDFs but maybe it used my connection. So I’ll say that I’m not sure what thats about but I’d bet an app can solve that problem.

Your last point is a mixed bag. Community support is hard to find but if you’ve ever looked at forums asking google how to fix something its pretty much the exact same thing. Only difference is that a workaround is usually possible but requires a bit more effort. Like uninstalling their default apps for instance. Or changing the per-app notification sound (may be fixed now idk). When I tried to search for those things, all the google responses just said “pound sand, we’ll add it to our totally real feature request list”. Still, adaptability is more an Android thing for sure.

I’ve started to realize that the android platform is wider than I thought when posting my original comments. There were features I wasn’t aware of, had incorrect perceptions of, or had variance based on my specific model of phone and car. Another user here pointed that out to me about their screen layout being different. I’m happy to correct things though if you think that I need to. I’m only human :)

I’m not a fanboy, quite the opposite if you read my original post. I’ve been on android for a long time before this. So not trying to circlejerk. I felt like this could be valuable insight for people wishing to change platforms. I even put at the bottom of one or both of my posts that I don’t want a platform war, that’s dumb and isn’t the point.

I really appreciate your response, it’s exactly what I was hoping to add to the post here. I want people to hear what is working for others in the Android ecosystem. I’m just hoping to add some valuable input about why I didn’t want to be on android anymore and how that went.

To respond though, the animations thing like you said had to do with my phone slowing down. Why? No clue. I don’t think it was my fault, I don’t mess with my phone and I kept my apps minimal and storage wasn’t close to full. I’m not saying it’s impossible to get smooth animations on android, my phone used to have them, but I will say that most UI features animate more consistently and nicer out of the box with iPhone. I’ll also give a nod to what I said about people who tinker. That was me and I enjoyed the freedom of android for a long time. But I didn’t want to spend the time to get it perfect anymore. I setup my phone in a couple of days how I wanted it and now I don’t feel the need to touch very much on it. Different strokes. I should also note though that my phone was only about 3 or 4 years old at that point and was chugging more than I expect at that mark.

The assistant thing is anecdotal, but Google does a pretty decent job. Unfortunately their integrations with my model of choice were subpar so I didn’t enjoy using it but I can see why people would prefer one or the other. I like the simplicity of Siri I guess (common theme) whereas Google has built an assistant with a million gizmos to it. I’ll get back to you on the smart home stuff eventually :)

CarPlay is going to be another anecdote. My car is not old, a 2017, but I don’t have a similar interface. Maybe it’s the smaller screen or something? But it’s only changed UI like once I think. Either way, for me and my car it works better and I commented what I did as I noticed it. So I guess YMMV on that.

It’s always seemed to me like android prioritizes new and flashy stuff and easily forgets their older legacy devices. Support being hit or miss is why I gave up android, but it could just be on Samsungs side. Just a thought, Cheers!