Ben_H

I'm about 45 minutes in so far. This seems great so far. It follows the source material almost exactly. I randomly replayed the first few hours of P3 FES a couple weeks back so I remember it all and this game is almost identical. It's extremely noticeable how much smoother this game is to play compared to the old version. When you get to the school they actually tell you what to do rather than vaguely saying "You should find what class you're in" then dumping you to figure out what that means on your own and the minimap makes finding things a lot simpler.

I was worried about how the music would end up but it seems pretty decent so far. It's different but still works. I was reserving judgement until I got to a section that had "When The Moon's Reaching Out Stars" (that name is still hilarious) because that was best song in the old game but the new version is good too.

I really like the intro cinematic.

There's a pride flag pin in the one of the intro anime scenes and a female student talks about how much she... admires... Mitsuru. The old director guy that seemed shitty is well and truly gone.

My first "Wait, what?!?" moment was... seeing that the hallways in the school are now all one area, which, why wouldn't they be? It's not a PS2 game. It just surprised me because I've played Persona 3 several times and that's how it's always been.

They fixed the scaling for the bed in the MC's dorm room. It no longer appears to be 12 feet long and 8 feet wide.

That's good to hear.

That year or two where the forums weren't on the front page anywhere did seem to do a big hit to the number of people using the forum. That combined with the rise of Discord has caused a lot of folks to be over there instead of here. I'm not a big Discord user anymore which is why I'm mostly here.

As a former Dire Straits sicko that owns all their albums on vinyl, that's a bold pick as far as their "peak" era albums go since it's probably the most in the weeds album and least approachable one (the shortest song is nearly 6 minutes and the first 20 minutes of the album is extremely slow and meandering compared to most of their other albums. If you've only heard their songs that are in commercials or on soundtracks this album is basically the opposite of those songs). Not that it's a bad album or anything but as an intro to the band it's probably one of the trickier albums to sell.

"Telegraph Road", "Private Investigations", and "It Never Rains" all slap. I straight up don't like "Industrial Disease". It's among a small set of Dire Straits songs I don't like for whatever reason. The title track is take it or leave it for me.

Anyhow shoutout to the last 2 minutes of the song "Tunnel Of Love" off their album Making Movies. That bit of that song is absolutely incredible, especially the piano part in the last 30 seconds. They didn't have to go so hard but they did anyway.

I don't think it's a fair comparison to make though because around a decade ago, Microsoft started to put Windows on the back burner as a means of making money (notice how on that chart Windows revenue growth is on average completely flat, or even slightly negative at times? That's not a coincidence).

Around 2014 or so Microsoft aggressively shifted away from focusing on Windows to instead focusing on everyone using other Microsoft products, especially their new (at the time) Azure cloud services (remember "Microsoft <3 Linux"? That was one of the first public acknowledgements of this shift). As it became clear that Linux was going to win in the server space, Microsoft went all-in on making their server products compatible with Linux. As another example, as Macs started to become much more common in office environments, Microsoft stopped their old playbook of trying to convince people to stay on Windows and instead started offering actual competent Office products with feature parity on Mac/iOS and made their cloud services work just as well on Apple devices. The other major factor to keep in mind is that over the last decade or so, PC sales have dramatically slowed down as PCs have largely become comfortably fast enough for everyday office tasks. Microsoft could no longer rely on the OEM licensing revenue from people and companies buying new, much faster computers every couple years so they had to pivot.

It has to be emphasized that Microsoft has done everything they can to make most of their services platform-agnostic. They even put out things like Powershell on Mac/Linux and have put in massive efforts to make using their products as easy as possible, no matter where you are working from. On this account it's been a huge success for them. Visual Studio Code is now the default code/text editor for the majority of developers and Visual Studio Code is designed to work in a trivially easy manner with Microsoft's cloud services (but they also don't prevent you from installing add-ons to allow VS Code to work with competitor services. Microsoft just wants you using their stuff). They even give developers 60 hours of free server time a month now as a means of developing remotely using their new Github Codespaces tool (It's a super slick setup. It's like two clicks and you're in a remote server with decent specifications that you can install whatever dev tools you want on. It also hooks in seamlessly with VS Code or Jetbrains IDEs so you can edit on the server using those tools instead) as a means of getting them in the door.

I don't even like Microsoft and have a great deal of disdain for modern Windows but I still use a few of their services because they're genuinely quite good.

Every single time when an Embracer-led studio has layoffs the announcement seems to lead with "global economic context", "industry challenges", or some other nonsense like that to deflect blame from Embracer. Embracer have nobody else to blame on this. This is all their own doing. They bought up a huge portion of the industry with no plan other than to hope either cheap means of getting more money would continue or they would be able to secure substantial funding from a single source. When neither of those things happened, their entire plan fell apart and now we're seeing the consequences of that. The entire company was built on a bad gamble and the people suffering the consequences are, as always, the people furthest away from those who actively chose to make the gamble in the first place.

I just don't even know what to say anymore. It's every week at this point. I guess the only hope is that this is some end of fiscal quarter nonsense and that the layoffs will slow down soon.

I've avoided everything outside of the first two trailers and one tiny preview thing so I'm going in almost entirely cold. I generally loved Persona 3 FES though that game is extremely tough to go back to now because of how rough several aspects of the gameplay are. The various quality of life improvements in basically everything from Persona 4 onward aren't in FES which makes things as simple as fusing Personas a huge pain in the butt (If you've only played Persona 3 Portable and later games and haven't seen the Endurance Run: You know that fusion search thing? Persona 3 and vanilla Persona 4 don't have that. You have to manually go through every combination of potential groupings to see what fusions you get. Also, you have to repeatedly try fusions to get the right spells you want instead of picking them. That's how Vinny and Jeff would end up spending whole episodes of the Endurance Run fusing rather than it being like 10 minutes max) I think in one of the various Persona 3 FES threads a year or two back I said "they need to remake this game but with all the modern updates" and it sounds like this is that, which is perfect.

I actually went back and played P3 FES (except The Answer. I won't miss The Answer. I saw people hand-wringing about this new one not having the Answer and it's like, do these people hate themselves?) part way through last year and played a bit more of the NG+ a couple months back so I'm quite fresh on what was in that game. It'll be neat to see what they changed.

I bought it rather than subscribing to Game Pass both because I want to play it on my Steam Deck but also because I tend to go back to these games a ton so I'm sure I'll get my money out of it.

Anyhow I probably won't post anymore until I've played the thing. Too bad there's no pre-loading it on Steam. I bought it earlier today because I wanted to but it doesn't seem that you can.

Okay? Assets sold on those market places are sold with the express purpose of being modified and used in games. What you described is totally fine and how those marketplaces work.

If the AI is being trained to create Pokemon or something easily recognisable but a tree, rock or background textures, not counting AI built aiding the development process. How would you know the AI building mesh models wasn't trained using assests bought from the Unreal & Unity marketplace without permission?

This sounds like some nonsense from Twitter and generally isn't how this stuff works. A person generally wouldn't be able to tell but that's beside the point (In general, usually testing whether something is AI generated or not is left up to computers since they are far, far more capable of doing so). For commercially available AI tool makers, it is in their best interest to be as transparent as possible regarding where they got their training data from because their customers don't want to have to be concerned about potential legal issues down the line. Adobe isn't going to risk their business by using legally sketchy data to train their generative fill tools.

For small teams or individuals, creating something as complicated as a custom machine learning tool using legally sketchy data they paid for to generate models would be so prohibitively expensive and time-consuming compared to just using a ready-made tool already available that it would make no sense.

It's definitely possible. Training data isn't some infinite, unknowable thing that's impossible to keep track of or check. There are already AI tools that exist where the people/companies making them specifically used a set of training data that they knew they had rights to. One example is Getty Images' image generation tool that they trained on their massive image library. Since it's Getty's tool and dataset they can guarantee there will be no potential legal blowback for using the tool compared to the similar tools that used potentially sketchy sets of training images. I imagine this type of approach to AI tools will be popular since it's much safer for businesses to use from a legal perspective.

We're literally seeing this happen in the movie industry right now with the audience fatigue showing for Marvel movies. Those movies had budgets in the hundreds of millions and were being treated as if they were guaranteed money printing machines (a similar thing happened previously with Star Wars too). Now suddenly these movies are shakier looking financially and the studios producing them are left figuring out what to do next since their hugely expensive safe bets aren't safe anymore. A lot of the game publishers seem to be copying this big budget franchise movie model but without any obvious pivots to move to should their big budget games lose the interest of the audience (See pre-Microsoft Activision, who went from having a diverse line up of games to literally only Call of Duty. Had Call of Duty suddenly lost popularity and sales, the Activision part of ABK would have been boned and the company would have been purely reliant on Candy Crush microtransactions and WoW to survive since they've basically got rid of everything else and Blizzard's two most recent games weren't massive hits like Blizzard games of old were).

It's not though. That's what's so weird about the video player problems. I was using Firefox on Windows 11 too, just like you were. I had every extension disabled, had cleared my cache, and done everything that was necessary to fix the problem but still couldn't get older videos to play.

The extra weird thing for me is I cancelled my premium until the player was fixed since that's what I had stayed subscribed to premium for, and as soon as my account was downgraded the player started working flawlessly again. Like I literally opened a non-premium video that hadn't been working for me a couple days previous and it was suddenly working again. It makes absolutely no sense.