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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • How would a engine change affect the game design philosophy of Bethesda?

    Performance? Visuals? Alright. But game design?

    Creation Engine powers Starfield and Fallout New Vegas. Quests can be complex, dynamic, with multiple endings, with lots of ways to approach them. Or they can be flat fetch quests. The tools allow both and everything in between.

    Bethesda just chooses to use the current game design framework and would choose the same on any other engine.

    They are actually updating their game design principles. They stopped using game design documents, they simplified the quests, they try to make sure every play through gets to see as much content as possible. Maybe they should stop updating.


  • Yeah, writing prompts it’s the long term goal, programming will be obsolete.

    Nobody that can write a problem in a structured language, taking edge cases into account, will be able to write a prompt for a LLM.

    Prompt writers will be the useful professionals, because NO big tech company is trying to make it obsolete making AI ubiquitous and transparent, aiming it to work for natural language requests made by normal users or simply from context clues. /s

    Prompt engineering it’s the griftiest side of the latest AI summer. Look a who is selling the courses. The same people that sold crypto courses, metaverse courses, Amazon dropship store courses…




  • Xbox One/Series S/SeriesX and PS4/5 are x86 PCs, Switch is an ARM phone.

    So, in the lowest level they are pretty out of the shelf hardware. Electronics are getting way to complicated to invest in the development of custom hardware architectures for a single product.

    You take a commonly used architecture, fork an Operating System that you have access to, bundle as many libraries as makes sense and call it a day. No one is going to use weird quirks of the hardware except if you make some deal with Unity or Unreal.

    Thank Sony and the Cell Processor for that.



  • They are completely disconnected, with the exception of the occasional spinoff or direct sequel, but those are easy to identify. The last game is probably the easier one of the series to pick up and play (this statement has been true for the whole existence of the series)

    Where to start? Depends. Everyone of them is a huge game and a big time investment.

    Taking into account you have no nostalgia for the series, I’d say your options, in order of what I think would stick are:

    • Option 1: the last one. If you just want to play a modern action/rpg game with AAA sensibilities but weird enough, is not a bad option. You have no need for any previous knowledge, the gameplay is completely different to the one in previous entries, etc. Haven’t played so I do t know if it’s any good.
    • Option 2: the 7 remake. One of the biggest milestones in the series retold for modern audiences, with updated graphics and narrative.
    • Option 3: 16bit retro experience: FFVI, SNES or GBA version. The pinnacle of the formula for the 8 and 16 bit consoles. Upcoming titles in the series are way different. Great in every way a game can be good.
    • Option 4: the 7 vanilla. The first international massive mainstream success for the series and one of the more influential video games in history. After this one, if you loved it:
      • Option 4a: the PSX trilogy. Go for FFVIII and FFIX for the full pre-render backgrounds and 3d models god killing trio.
      • Option 4b: the complication. If you are really into the setting and characters you have a few games complicating this one under the “Final Fantasy VII Compilation”. Some aren’t even RPGs.

    If you go completely Final Fantasy insane after any of those, start with FF, the first one from the NES and make your way through them all. Prepare a couple thousand hours.




  • New favorite way to use lemmy.

    Great design, feels responsive, works everywhere…

    PWAs are great, and for 99% of use cases are more than enough. We need a fake App Store that “installs” PWAs in people devices in a transparent way.

    Also let’s hope Apple is forced to open iOS to alternative rendering engines and complete full features browsers.

    And for a final irony boost, the PWA thing is the “”””original”””” vision for smartphones, at least according to Steve Jobs during the original iPhone keynote. Full circle and stuff.


  • The end of 0% interest means “business” no longer have access to free money. So now they want benefits, and growth but without the spending.

    Also we skipped a tech bubble crash around 2008, so these corpos deaths are more than overdue.

    The cicle as Doctorow says in his enshification tesis is:

    1.- be good to your users, spending tons of that VC and 0% interest loan free money.

    2.- be shit to your users, be good to your clients (add buyers, business that use your platform to do business)

    3.- be shit to everyone. Squeeze the platform and get every last dime of value as profit.

    Once you are in 3 there is no coming back. But these corporations have pulling the ladder behind them using an extra decade of dominant position to try to stop the cicle.


  • It’s just another kind of MLM right now. It always has been. The superbowl Larry David add was the swan song for crypto mainstream appeal.

    And you are right, most of the people that were telling you to buy cryptocurrency for reasons, now are into the “prompt engineering” fad.

    Por metaverse, only the really unicorn-chasing and completely clueless about technology marketing “gurus” got into it.