“You see, we like money…”

It’s not really that Concord was bad, and more that it was unremarkable.

The game was trying so hard to be a clone of Overwatch that what they ended up with was the gaming equivalent of those knock-off GI Joe clones your mother would buy you from the dollar store. Except that Overwatch is free, and Concord was $40. Why am I going to spend more money on getting the knock-off version?

Copying what works only gets you so far. At some point, you have to actually step ahead of the thing you’re copying.

For anyone not familiar with this game, or anyone who’s only familiarity is through the trailers (which really focus on tone and visuals), I really want to recommend the videos by YouTuber Riloe, who has been playing early builds with the devs and chatting to them extensively about the game. They’re really well produced videos, and they really help to explain the tone of the game, the interesting mechanical ideas behind it, and what exactly this company is trying to achieve. Obviously, take with a grain of salt, the guy is clearly a fan and these videos aren’t really trying to be critical, so this should all be read as basically press releases;

This antishooter game is beautiful and horrifying

The living war ecosystem where you don’t matter

The beautifully dark warscape of the antishooter

I’m really excited for this game. Not just for the visuals, but for everything they’re doing with the mechanical design. The idea of playing as scavengers trapped between two warring factions is incredibly cool, and based on early previews it sounds like there are a lot of very clever design elements, especially in the AI, all built to back up that core idea. For example enemies intelligently prioritize targets; a tank won’t focus on infantry if there’s an enemy tank present, and even when it does target the infantry it’ll use its machine guns, not the main cannon. Enemies will focus on you if you make yourself the biggest threat, but if you’re smart and follow the flow of battle you can keep their focus elsewhere.

That’s really smart stuff, and by all accounts it works very well. I also really like what the studio is doing more broadly. They’re really trying to push back on a lot of the toxic practices in the gaming industry. I’ll be getting the game day one, mostly just to reward them for trying to do something different.

Yeah, Saber basically bought themselves back from Embracer (Embracer are desperate for money after they absolutely fucked an investment deal), and in the process bought back a bunch of other companies, including New World Interactive (Insurgency devs) and 3D Realms. They also have an outstanding option to buy 4A and Zen Studios.

No microtransactions

Saber off to a good start after getting themselves out of Embracer. I hope this pays off for them. The game looks great and I’m excited to play it.

Yeah, the immediate problem with comparing gun to non-gun kills is that anything involving a gun is automatically more likely to result in someone dead. So it doesn’t really give you a picture of how Indy likes to approach problems. And once a gun does become the tool of choice in a scene, the body count is likely to rack up a lot faster. You can show five people getting gunned down much faster than you can show one Nazi getting his head propellered off. Guns tend to be how disposable mooks die, but signature enemies get the more elaborate deaths.

Super excited to try this out. Darktide has taken over from Vermintide for my normal play, but getting to play as a Skaven sounds fucking awesome.

Is… Is that what the image generator thinks a bong looks like? What the fuck even is that? Are they just burning a jar full of weed while Mickey shoves the barrel of a fifties sci-fi laser pistol in his mouth?

Very different to the games that came after it, and probably the actual inspiration for SAO in the show. The whole thing about players speccing into crafting or whatever and then setting up their own shop was a really big thing on UO servers. Players would literally build entire towns together, and then fill them with shops that they would run. There was a huge part of the player base that were basically civilians, kind of like Arma modern life roleplay servers.

Also, for the record… It’s still running, somehow.

Actually the closest thing in terms of the classless skill system would be pretty much the granddaddy of all MMOs, Ultima Online.

New Raycevick video? Fuck yeah!

I think you mean “Control Years 5 Later”

Where are people getting the idea that it even has anything to do with the attack helicopter meme? Because both things reference flying military hardware? Because as far as I can see that’s literally the only “connection”.

The “aerosexual” thing is because people on NCD constantly post extremely horny art of anthropomorphic fighter planes. This has nothing to do with identifying as anything. They don’t want to be fighter planes, they want to fuck fighter planes, because if you’re not a weirdo who’s horny as hell for military hardware then what are you even doing on NCD? And the joke is, to be clear, entirely self deprecating. It’s “haha, we’re a really weird and fucked up community aren’t we guys?”

Shattered Horizon. It was awesome.

To be fair, a lot of GOG games are already for CPUs and OS’s that don’t exist. Like, a significant amount of their library was meant to run in DOS on a 486. They’re pretty fucking good at making that not be a problem.

WAIT FUCK SHIT FUCKING WHAT HOLY FUCKING FUCK HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS??!!?!

Yeah, there was zero miscommunication here. They got caught with their hand in the cookie jar and now they’re trying to bullshit their way out.

You’re offering a hypothetical where AI art can actually reproduce all of the capabilities of human art. Not just broad aesthetics, but emotion, intentionality, subtext, use of imagery, understanding of the human soul…

Is that ever going to be truly possible? Maybe if we create real, true AI. Something that’s actually sentient.

But putting that aside, if we accept your premise, then sure, I doubt anyone would care. Then again, once an AI is able to create truly human art, what would be the difference between an AI and a human?

AI is fucking cool. The idea of living in a fully automated post scarcity future where advanced learning machines take away all of the need for manual or intellectual labour sounds amazing. But the goal should be to make a world where humans are freed from drudgery and given more time to create and appreciate art and beauty. Instead we’re creating a world where humans toil away our lives while searching for brief sparks of joy in mass produced, corporate owned art that barely qualifies as art. Seems kind of fucked to me.

Instead of asking how far we can go in terms of automating away our ability to create beautiful things, shouldn’t we be asking how far we can go in terms of automating away the barriers to people creating beautiful things?

So, the big problem right now with AI art is that there’s no real way to modify it without basically completely redoing it.

You can alter the prompts, but due to the intentionally chaotic nature of the models, what you’ll get out is a completely different image. You can’t just be like “I want her head tilted a little more to the left, and give her a bigger smile, but keep everything else the same.” When you’re working on professional art, generally what happens is the artist presents you with each version, from rough sketches to finished line art, to rough paint work, and you request changes as you go. There’s a collaboration as you guide them towards the result you want. But with AI you’re just shotgunning outputs and hoping that one of them lands close enough. That’s fine for your bedroom wall, but not for a professional environment.

And if you want to have a human artist go in and make those changes to the finished image, they have to contend with the fact that they only have a finished image, not any of the layers from sketch through to brush work to lighting and so on. So they’re basically stuck trying to seamlessly paint over the existing image. That’s harder than it sounds.

Can artists use AI as a tool? Absolutely. Generate like 50 versions of a scene, use them as references. Or ask it for a sketch, then paint over that in your style. You can correct mistakes and make adjustments along the way. But the idea that humans can just “touch up” AI art to fix the mistakes doesn’t really work.