wollywoo

Form-factor is super important for a portable, but to me a console is just something that sits on my entertainment stand. I don't care what it looks like or how big it is as long as I can fit it in somehow.

@bigsocrates: Oh, alright then. That allays my fears. Still, it sure would be nice to be able to download them on to the next system instead of having to dig out my old one out of the garage (or buy a brand new one if it breaks.)

I don't have either of these systems so it doesn't affect me. But I buy 90%+ of my games digitally, so it would really suck if they shut down the Switch online service and I lost/broke my Switch and could not get any of my library back. Console publishers really need to adopt the Steam model - I still have all my Steam purchases from ~2004 and I don't have any worries about them. With Nintendo, though - who knows. Could go *poof* at any moment.

@cikame: Yeah, the voice thing is definitely an issue. It's getting better - chatgpt's new voice feature seems pretty good - but it's definitely going to be behind human voice actors. Maybe they can do a blend, where some important lines are delivered by humans and then somehow used as hints to the voice synthesizer so that it's not so obvious which are human. An investigation game with AI sounds very cool.

I've thought about the consistency problem too. You might not want every person playing the game to get completely different facts about each character. You could ameliorate this somewhat by having long pre-written bios of basic things about each character. For even more details you could augment this by pre-written AI-generated backgrounds that make up even more detail that don't make much difference to the story. But yeah, at some point it's going to start making up random stuff and it's inevitably going to break immersion when things become too wild or inconsistent.

Yeah, I think cloud integration would be a good way to go, for the short term. Internet bandwidth is not that much of an issue since it's only passing text back and forth. There would be a bit of lag but that's not game-breaking. I'd hope in future there will be a lot of optimization that will bring down the size of the models considerably for specific use-cases - e.g. a random orc doesn't have to have all the knowledge of Wikipedia.

Fair enough, I could've been more clear. Regarding NPC dialog staying on-topic, I actually think this is not that hard, at least at surface level. With chatgpt, you can just tell it to act like a certain character and give it rules as to what it can talk about, and it will only talk about those things. If this is all you did, most likely there would be easy ways to jailbreak this and get it to do and say really weird shit, so tuning this properly would definitely be a challenge. But I think it's doable. And I more or less agree with you re: creativity - I'd suggest it'd be used more to augment the authored content with interactivity instead of replacing it. You don't need that much creativity if you're just acting-out a well-defined NPC role.

To clarify, when I say "AI" I essentially mean the use of LLMs or other deep-learning models to be used in real-time. Not counting asset or code generation during dev time. That's what's covered in the first poll option, but not what I'm interested in.

The debate around what does or doesn't count as "AI" is a little meaningless. AI as a field of academic research has existed for several decades under that name. The name doesn't imply that it's as smart as a human or as Data.

@borgmaster: Can't tell if you were responding to my post above or to what extent that was sarcasm or sincere. But I think the essence of Soulslike gameplay is to put the player in difficult, put surmountable, situations, and to put an added layer of tension by extra punishment for losing, so that the feeling of accomplishment is great. I have no problem with any of that, personally. I just don't like Souls-style slow, heavy control schemes.

I just can't with Souls-like combat. I need quick and snappy combat, not slow and deliberate moves. Let me jump in, get a hit, jump out. Give me big glowing weak points and a nice flashy response to hits, ala Zelda. Telegraph enemy attacks more so I have a chance. I don't mind difficult games, but I need to have some control over what's happening. See: Metroid Dread, Hollow Knight, God of War, Spider-Man. Too bad, because the world design from Elden Ring seems so interesting.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie. 3/5. Well, it's a pretty fun watch. I wasn't expecting much in terms of pathos but the relationship between the Brothers is done pretty well. All the references are fun - interesting how it tends to skew toward the most recent Mario games instead of having a lot of nods to 8-bit era Mario.

It seems a little weird to use *forced marriage* as the major threat for a kids' movie in 2023. This will probably go over the kids' heads, but isn't it a little... rape-y in its implications? And yeah I know this was directly from Mario Odyssey, even including the specific outfits. It was kinda weird there too. Also, Jack Black's song is super annoying.

I will also add: any silent protagonist in a dialogue scene. They usually make pretty derpy faces. BG3 is pretty guilty of this.