The amount of advertising being poured into the most naff uses for “AI” suggests to me that none of the big boys have much of an idea as to what people might want to do with their water-chugging remix machines.

I think those are mostly excellent examples. I mean, you’re objectively wrong about Three Dog 😉 but the fact that I have an opinion at least means they tried.

My favourite parts of Fallout 4 were when they were brave enough to write new stuff rather than ticking boxes. I loved the synth side of things. I don’t really care for any of the Dunwich stuff but that’s okay, that’s just a simple “gothic horror is something I can take or leave”.

I don’t really love the radio. I mean, the music is excellent as it is (I have a MiniDisc full of tracks from the games), but in game it really doesn’t hold a candle to the haunting beauty of the music from the first two games (I’ve got an MD of that too!). The music thing mostly irks me because it’s old music - as in, it’s old to us and so by the 2070s it’s absolutely ancient. I wish they’d commissioned new music in the style of the old stuff instead. America might have had cultural stagnation in some ways but surely there was significant commercial appetite for new music, even if the musical style remained the same? (It doesn’t quite make sense but I do enjoy the loung singer from Fallout 4 having a song on the radio)

well i guess we disagree, say what you will about the gameplay of fallout 76 but it has provided some of the coolest lore and locations in the entire series. no joke. the lore in that game is awesome and they did a really good job with it

I’ve not played more than about an hour of Fallout 76 as I didn’t like the online aspect, the lack of NPCs (at the time), and the lack of slow motion VATS. I don’t single those out as objectively bad, just that they were things that I personally don’t care for. I’m glad they’ve done some cool stuff with it since, I just wish they’d been that brave in Fallout 3!

In closing I’m going to throw out the one thing that I hate that Bethesda got rid of and provided nothing to replace:

The text description box.

When I was playing Fallout 1 and 2 I looked at the world as more of an abstraction. Faces weren’t discernible (talking heads aside) so I would just see a raider, a farmer, etc… Locations could reuse assets. I’d then read the text box in the bottom corner to get my character’s interpretation of the scene. That stuff brought the world to life in a way that simple 3D graphics haven’t managed for me. I really have a soft spot for isometric/similar projections with pre-rendered graphics…

You think Bethesda introduced supermutants?

CaptainHolt_specifically_requested_it.jpg

People is this thread are smoking fucking crack and trying to rewrite history.

No, we’re just not measuring success the same way.

I consider a creative work to succeed or fail based on whether I think it’s any good. If you view creating games as a primarily capitalist exercise then sure, the original games obviously didn’t do as well.

Of course, it might be that you prefer the newer games, in which case you have a different opinion, which is how creative stuff works!

I also love Waterworld, The Postman, and the really, really long cut of Apocalypse Now. I’ve no idea how they performed commercially but I found them amazing cultural contributions by the teams involved. I wouldn’t recommend them to everyone but to the right audience they’re great.

It’s just the natural evolution of games.

Lol no.

The indie market isn’t drowning in fully 3D games, is it?

If Bethesda hadn’t taken up Fallout, it would have been forgotten in the dirt with Brotherhood of Steel, or Van Buren.

Probably. But it also wouldn’t have had Bethesda’s cack-handed interpretation of the setting. It’s why I’m enjoying the TV show - they seem to get basic stuff like “the Brotherhood of Steel are not The Good Guys - they’re more complex than that” and “Fallout doesn’t need super mutants to be Fallout”.

I’m not surprised that making the setting more simplistic, switching genre, and ploughing an enormous advertising budget into it resulted in better sales. The games weren’t bad, but Fallout 1 and 2 were great.

To compare it to other mediums - what’s most popular tends to be blander but the things that try their own thing have the most loyal fans. People were queuing up to watch the various Avengers films but you don’t meet many people who watch a lot of movies who would say they’re their favourite films. They’ll usually be fans of something that appeals to their sensibilities but didn’t set the world on fire when they came out.

Crucially I don’t want you to think I hate the Bethesda games. I don’t. However it never felt to me like they “got it”. They’re more theme parks than interactive narratives. I’m glad lots of people get to enjoy them but they don’t hold a candle to the first two - in my opinion.

My definition of doing good things with an IP is based on whether I think the resultant creative works are good, not on sales or popularity.

Fallout 3 was a perfectly fine game. I put about two hundred hours into it. It was a mediocre Fallout game.

I really dislike New Vegas but that’s due to the setting (I detest Vegas and everything related to it).

Fallout 4 tries some new stuff, some lands, some doesn’t, and I had a lot of fun with it.

Creatively I don’t feel Bethesda provided much.

Best use of the IP in decades. I don’t hate the other stuff but Andor knocked my socks off.

With the exception of Interplay (as in Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel), creatively Bethesda have done the least in making Fallout what it is.

I’m enjoying the TV show because it really illustrates how Bethesda really doesn’t get the setting, but other people do.

Edit: added clarification. Also, it’s my opinion and talking about sales figure that I was already well aware of don’t really change my mind regardless.

Edit2: Apparently Lemmy isn’t better than Reddit, that’s really disappointing. I would have thought an opinion other than “sales are all that matters” would have been good for discussion but instead I’m just farming downvotes.

If it can only handle tasks I can do myself it’s not very useful.

My experience has been that more complex cases it simply cannot manage. It’ll swear blind that it’s got it right and the result will be super specific to the example provided. If I knew what the strings would be exactly, in advance, I wouldn’t be writing regex 😂

That’s the thing though - I find that what it saves me in time writing it costs me in reviewing. I hate reviewing.

Shall we ask it to write functional regex too while we’re at it?

If it helps kill the damn thing, excellent.

If so, is it any good?

I imagine if one writes janky spaghetti then it’s easy to think that LLMs will result in redundancy. My experience is that they’re like having an over-enthusiastic junior who doesn’t learn. Useful when one can’t be bothered to write something with very limited scope but is quickly out of their depth on anything involved.

So you think that 90-100% of programming jobs WON’T be replaced by AI within a decade?

Stop, stop, I can’t breathe!

This really hammers home how naff the rats in Dishonored were. They’re slightly prettier than these but with eleven years of additional technological progress my expectations were a smidge higher.

I tend to find them useful for taking nebulous, multi-faceted situations and turning them into a better understanding of what’s going on and then determining actual actions.

As in “different customers want us to do different things, some of which overlap, some of which take ages, some of which are quick, some of which take a load of work to even understand, and who have we got ready to tackle this stuff?”

The meeting takes a while and melts everyone’s brains by the end, but the result isn’t loads more long meetings.

Not once ever.

I didn’t realise that the Department of Obvious was still being funded.