Category Archives: Commentary
(AI)Moral Hazard
There are a lot of strong feelings out there regarding the use of AI to generate artwork or other assets for videogames. Regardless of where you fall on the “training” aspect of AI, it seems clear that a game developer opting for AI art is taking away an employment possibility for a human artists.
One possibility I had not previously imagined though, is when a paid human artist themselves (allegedly) uses AI to generate the art:
Released as part of [Project Zomboid] build 42, these new images for the survival game seemingly contain some visual anomalies that may be attributable to AI generation tools. In the picture of the person using the radio, for example, the handle of the radio is misaligned with its main casing, the wire on the headphones seems to merge into the character’s hair, and there is an odd number of lines on the stand-up microphone – on one side of the microphone there are five indentations, but on the other side, which ought to be symmetrical, there are six.
It is worth noting that this is all forum speculation – AI has not been proven, although it certainly seems suspicious. Moreover, the “AAA concept artist” commissioned is not some rando, but the very one that did the still-used cover art of Project Zomboid from back in 2011. So this particular controversy is literally the worst of all possible worlds: game developer did the right thing by hiring a professional artist with proven track record for thousands of dollars, and received either AI-assisted artwork (bad), or non-AI artwork with human error that is now assumed to be because of AI (worse).
All of which is a complete distraction to another otherwise commendable game update (worst).
“Either way, they are gone for now – likely forever, as frankly after two years of hard work from our entire team in getting build 42 done, it would break my heart if discussion as to whether we’d used AI on a few loading screens that were produced externally to the company pretty recently was to completely overshadow all that effort and passion and hard work the team put into getting B42 out there.”
Truly, it is an unenviable time to be an artist. AI technology is only going to improve, and as it does, you will be increasingly competing against both “Prompt Engineers” and anonymous internet sleuths hunting for clues to “expose” you for Reddit karma. Eventually, AI-generated content will be so prevalent that none of it will matter; I could imagine ads that are dynamically drawn in, say, anime-style because it noticed you had CrunchyRoll open in another tab, or with the realistic likeness of a TV star from your most-watched Netflix show.
Right now, utilizing AI as a business is a sign of being cheap and invites controversy. Perhaps it remains so, presuming the ad-based hellscape imagined above. But at a certain point, AI will probably figure out symmetry and how many Rs are in strawberry and we will likely be none the wiser.
Or we will just assume everything is AI-generated and it won’t matter. Same difference.
Winter Sale Radar
There is zero reason why I should be thinking about new videogames for myself. But if I were, here is my list of current deals, snipped from IsThereAnyDeal:
Sons of the Forest, ASKA, and Soulmask are all in there because survival-crafting. I never actually got around to finishing the original Forest though, as horror is not really my jam as it turns out. A sequel that probably doubles-down on the same thing probably isn’t the best idea, but… well, I did get ~25 hours out of the original. I’m hesitating on ASKA because it seems more of a colony sim than survival per the user reviews. Soulmask is more solidly in the strike-zone, if only it was more than 20% off.
Not much to say about Fields of Mistria. It has a Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam (10k+ reviews), it’s cute, and a farming sim. It is also very much one of the situations where you’d be better off waiting until it’s out of Early Access and the rest of the game is implemented before diving in.
Stoneshard is one I’m really debating. It is apparently a very punishing game, including having a dumb save system in which you can lose a lot of progress. At the same time, sometimes you feel like being punished, you know? I enjoyed Zero Sievert and its own “lose everything if you die” schtick, so maybe it would be enjoyable too.
Elex is a weird one to include, as I have never played a “Gothic” game or really have any sort of idea why they’re famous. In fact, all of the videos I have watched on the subject lead me to believe it has terrible combat, jank galore, a mid story, and few redeeming features. One of said features is the “freedom to do anything,” but that doesn’t seem especially well-defined. Like, more freedom than any Elder Scrolls or Fallout game? Still, Gothic-likes get talked about and I did notice a few overhaul mods on Nexus that appear to smooth some of the rough gameplay edges.
Not listed above, but Guild Wars 2 is having an expansion sale. I have literally not played in over a year, I believe, certainly not since the latest expansion Secrets of the Obscure came out. The sale makes the latest expansion cost $20, which isn’t terrible. The challenge is always that you end up playing GW2 again, e.g. consume the story content, then farm metas for pocket change to convert into gems to play dress-up. That’s… probably every MMO, to be fair. The problem with GW2 though is that it’s a bit harder to avoid the whole “log into 8 alts to open chests every day before you really start playing” time sink. Plus, you know, I missed months and months of cheap Legendary goodie bags from when the expansion first came out. Feelsbadman.
In any case, I’m going to be sitting on these deals for a bit. The Steam sale continues until January 2nd, so that gives me about a week and a half to see if Epic or Amazon ends up giving the games away for free, or if they appear in a Fanatical bundle, or if I just lose interest altogether.
Time and Place
Wildstar is one of those failed MMOs I have a bit of (perhaps misguided) nostalgia for. Granted, it’s a lot easier to remember only the good parts of something when the thing no longer exists to remind you of the bad. Wildstar’s terrible combat system, banal questing, radically tone-deaf developers pushing a hardcore experience for no one all seems to fade away with time. Meanwhile, the evocative art design, hoverboards, and astounding home building/decoration options springs right to mind.
I bring this all up because of an interesting article I read the other day about Tim Cain spending 6 years working on Wildstar. And that wasn’t even all of it, as the game took another three years to release from there. Then the author drops this bomb:
To put it into perspective, when work began on WildStar, World of Warcraft was still in its vanilla era. When WildStar finally launched, we’d seen The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, and Warlords of Draenor was just around the corner.
No fucking wonder, dude. I had really never understood why the Wildstar devs believed the hardcore angle was a winning strategy in an MMO. Yeah, the original MMOs had that hardcore element to them and were successful. Were they successful because of the hardcore-ness? I would argue “clearly not.” But if the Wildstar devs were laying the groundwork for the game back in the age of vanilla WoW, their stubbornness nine years later makes perfect sense. That level of difficulty was what they were familiar with and wanted to “compete” against. Or perhaps even bring back.
Alas, the zeitgeist had since moved on.
Broken FOMOmeter
It’s really sad to see games at 40%+ discounts still end up being almost $40.
I guess it’s not that much of a difference back (in my day) when games MSRP’d for $60, but psychologically… nope. Not doing it. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is probably not the best example either.
Even with all the other sales going on, it was ironically Satisfactory that most recently broke my internal FOMOmeter. I typically try to stock up on cheap games to assuage my ephemeral gaming moods, as not doing so can lead to ruining an experience by forcing myself to play something else. In the depths of mainlining Satisfactory though, I would throw some discounted games in my Steam cart… and leave them there. A few days later, I would check back and realize they were no longer on sale. *Empty cart*.
A few cycles of that and the spell was broken.
We’ll see how long it lasts, but so far, so good. If nothing else, the fact that Satisfactory is an indie game that consumed my life for 120+ hours whereas I have a literal graveyard of half-finished AAA titles should give me pause. Or maybe I’m just fully into survival-crafting/deckbuilding/roguelike/automation territory now. It can go either way.
Decemberiment
Trying an experiment for December: just post stuff as I go.
Finished a second session of 1000xRESIST. It’s been a long time since I’ve taken so many screenshots. Looks like… 58 total, so far. Not really because of the visuals, although those are good, but rather the sometimes hilarious, sometime brutal dialogue.
And then you get into stuff like this.
That’s not really brutal, but most of what I’ve taken have spoilers so, yeah.
The experience has been great overall, although it is absolutely a walking-simulator style game. You walk around, talk to people, get pulled into crazy sequences, do some very light puzzle work with time skipping, and, uh, fly around by shooting at glowy purple things? It’s kinda weird.
The other thing I wanted to briefly talk about here is that I really, really enjoy the general weirdness of the made-up words/phrases it has. “Hekki ALLMO,” “Sphere to Square,” “Six to One,” “Hair to Hair,” and so on. A lot of games and/or media stick in random crap into dialog to enhance the “realness” of the fictional world, but many times it feels forced or otherwise a token effort. Think of all those fantasy games where people exclaim “By the [#gods]!” and basically nothing else. A Handmaid’s Tale did a fantastic job with its phrases; Game of Thrones had a lot of phrases, but, eh, sometimes felt more (ironically) rote than meaningful. 1000xRESIST lands much closer to A Handmaid’s Tale. Maybe it’s the repetition or something like the smaller scale of interaction.
Or maybe it’s just fucking catchy and evocative. “Hair to hair” is nonsense, but you could make sense out of it. Standing back-to-back? Being linked genetically? Regardless, it’s cool.
Game Passed
As you know, Game Pass has been good to me over the years. I haven’t been playing as much, but it definitely still feels worth the subscription. Recently, I even started playing through the last portion of the Starcraft 2 campaign (Protoss) which I missed back in the day. Definitely looking forward to STALKER 2 as well… maybe a year from now when they work out all the bugs.
Then again, I recently logged in and saw this message:
Specifically, that message was regarding Coral Island. I enjoyed my time well enough, got decently far within the game’s narrative and just sort of trailed off. Which was strategic in a way, because the game wasn’t actually done – there was a very obviously cordoned-off Savannah biome, among other things. And here I am, a year later, and the game is leaving.
There does appear to be a convoluted method of finding and porting your save file over to the Steam version. Or, you know, just buying it from Microsoft. Either way, the value proposition in that is a bit dubious. I’ve already played for 46 hours… am I really going to pay $25+ to reach whatever “endgame” is available? On the other hand, it also feels bad losing access. Which, of course, happens all the time with Game Pass. It’s just that I haven’t actually been burned in quite this way before.
Oh well.
Welp – 2024 Election Edition
I suppose they do say you get the government you deserve. And apparently we deserve to be fucked.
For my own grief processing and prognostication, let’s speculate for a presumed posterity:
- Certainty – End of all US support for Ukraine, eventually leading to a “negotiated peace” whereby Russia annexes even more of the country. Ukraine will not be able to join NATO, of course.
- Certainty – Full-throttle support of Netanyahu’s Israeli government and the continued purge of Palestinians. This is arguably already happening, but it will be dialed up further.
- Certainty – Climate is fucked. Not only has the current Supreme Court already gutted Federal agencies’ ability to regulate environmental impacts, Trump has vowed to cut things further. We may already have hit some inevitable tipping points, but inaction – let alone acceleration – is not something we can afford.
- Certainty – Massive increase to federal debt. Despite tax cuts never paying for themselves, Republicans will approve Trump’s corporate/income tax cuts and the government will generate less revenue as a result. Weird how that works.
- Certainty – Trump will escape all legal accountability and revel in naked, in-your-face corruption. For example, elevating Judge Aileen Cannon to Attorney General or, you know, having an open bank account pipeline directly into Trump’s pocket via DJT stock.
- Likely – Economic recession and/or collapse. Trump has vowed to implement broad, across-the-board tariffs (e.g. regressive taxes), including potentially replacing Federal Income taxes altogether with tariffs. Additionally, Trump will appoint Elon Musk to a potential cabinet-level position with a broad mandate to cut government spending from… somewhere. The only real place to do so with any impact would be from Medicare and/or Social Security. Meanwhile, Trump is also promising mass deportation which, regardless of where you fall on the issue, will result in economic upheaval. See: Florida.
- Likely – Rollback of mandatory vaccines and general societal health initiatives, and increase in childhood polio (!!!) and measles. Trump has invited RFK Jr (aka brain worm guy, aka dead bear cub prankster, aka whale decapitator) to “go wild” on health in his administration. RFK Jr is deeper in the conspiracy tank than even Trump, and will use the platform to broadcast nonsense further. Only the best people.
- Likely – Continued attacks on the legal rights and general humanity of LGBTQ+ individuals. In particular, banning (directly or indirectly) gender-affirming care for all ages.
- Possible – Nationwide abortion ban via Comstock Act and/or removal of FDA approval of mifepristone.
- Possible – Elimination of the ACA and general upheaval in the health insurance market as a result. Reminder: the ACA was “saved” by John McCain back in 2017. Other reminder: “Preexisting condition” used to be a thing that denied you coverage and can absolutely be a thing again. Other other reminder: having COVID is absolutely a preexisting condition for dozens of things.
- Possible – All the absolutely batshit crazy Project 2025 ratfuckery.
There are some people – a majority, apparently – that may consider all this alarmist. After all, we had four years of Trump already, and he did not build a wall that Mexico paid for, among other things. I guess we will have to see. Because isn’t that fun? Chaos at the highest levels! What will the aggrieved mind of a 78-year man with a family history of dementia think of next? Stay tuned!
Hi-Jacked
Guys. Satisfactory has hijacked my brain. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on, but I have played basically nothing else in the last two weeks. I’m not into this genre, but I’m apparently into this game.
And I’m not even done. I mean, probably kinda sorta close? Still got two endgame items to factorized in this phase, neither of which I can build yet, and have spent the last three days working my way to harnessing Nitrogen gas. I think there is one more phase after this, but maybe not. Who knows.
Regardless, for now this shit has me wireheaded something fierce. Bounced off Factorio, didn’t get too sucked into Dyson Sphere Program in the days before it left Game Pass, but Satisfactory is apparently my jam. I doubt that I’m into it enough to like start another playthrough or whatever, but goddamn.
Looking at that list though, I don’t think it matters much. It has already joined an esteemed company.
In any case, that’s where I’ve been and/or will be for the foreseeable future.
Autobivalence
I have a love/hate relationship with automation games, like Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Satisfactory, and others.
On the one hand, they mostly satisfy the survival-adjacent itch of accumulating resources, building a “base,” and otherwise growing stronger each play session. Any game where you can think about it offline and come back the next day and be better off for having pondered, is a huge win in my book. These games should be localized entirely within and up my alley.
I also hate them.
Long-term readers know that I very frequently engage in “optimizing the fun” out of the games I play. There are two corrections to make here. First, “optimizing the fun” is a strange way of rephrasing “leveraging my full mind towards achieving success.” By no means am I implying that I’m some genius or whatever, but I do enjoy not having to handicap myself in Perk/Skill/Talent/Strategy selection because the designers left in some obviously OP power. If a given move is powerful, I’m going to utilize it, even if the game is less fun as a result… because the game is already less fun if I have to ignore imbalanced shit. Looking at a list of available choices and finding the surprising synergies of given combinations is precisely the fun I’m looking for. Optimization is fun.
However, this is where the second correction comes in: I dislike trial-and-error, e.g. reinventing the wheel, e.g. the grunt work. This is where all the automation games lose me. While it is technically optimization, I do not find it at all fun or engaging to spend hours rearranging conveyer belts to increase production by 5% or whatever. That’s assuming I would even know how to make things better, which I honestly do not. Indeed, it irks me every time in these games’ tech trees when Blueprints are unlocked, as it confers the assumption any of my macaroni factory art is worth copy & pasting. But I also know that just copying the perfected blueprints of others would “rob” me of a lot of the gameplay of these titles. So… I usually just struggle, flail about, recognize I’m not having fun, and uninstall.
Having said that, I am playing Satisfactory in 4-hour increments every evening for the past few days.
I was playing Dyson Sphere Program (DSP) a few days before that, as I saw that it was leaving Game Pass and so I wanted to give it a whirl. While DSP was fun enough, it really reminded me a lot of Factorio which I had bounced off of. Conversely, Satisfactory improves (IMO) a lot on the general formula. For one thing, the “tech tree” unlocks by consuming regular items rather than abstracted science cubes. The actual tech unlocks are are immediately grokkable too, like a faster conveyer belt, new building, unlocked resource, or whatever. In DSP, I would research 5-6 things in a row without actually understanding what (if anything) they did or how it would impact my factory until later.
The main thing though is that I “cheated” in Satisfactory. More specifically, I watched a Youtube series on compact, scalable blueprints of various buildings. I’m assuming someone out there would consider that cheating. But here’s the thing: it actually unlocked the game for me. I have heard of things like “main bus” and “manifold” and similar jargon before, but all that did was make me feel as though there was a secret language that everyone was just supposed to know. After watching the series of Youtube videos and recreating them inside the game, I understood. Even better, the designs weren’t 100% efficient. Which meant I had a choice: sacrificing Efficiency for Quality of Life (i.e. simplicity).
That’s the secret about optimization: it’s always in relation to something else. Maximum widgets/min? Sure, there’s one answer to that. The most widgets/min while also maintaining your sanity and/or having fun? Something something Sid Meier interesting decisions!
Anyway, I’m at 30 hours in Satisfactory and counting. There are some elements I’m not too fond of – it’s hard to justify exploring the map before you spend dozens of hours setting up a factory to output stuff in your absence – but overall it has been surprisingly… satisfactory.
In An Age 
End of Year: 2024 Edition
Dec 31
Posted by Azuriel
Just like 2023, except with more oligarchy.
Workwise, I remain one of the most-senior members of my overall department. In the coming months, I am going to have to get a pretty difficult certification to maintain my present job title, likely to detriment of my organization. After all, once I have the official certification, I can officially… just go anywhere else. On the other hand, the job market isn’t all that great and not slated to look any better. Also, at this point, I’m kinda all-in on the pension. Theoretically, I could retire at 57 with full benefits!
Family is doing well. Wife is trying to get student loan forgiveness before the regime change fucks everyone over, and we should be successful. Kiddo is in kindergarten at a private school, because school shooting fears. No, seriously. Welcome to America!
Anyway, let’s talk videogames. Ones in bold have been completed.
Steam (514.5h)
As in prior years, I am not including games I played significantly in the past. This omission really only effects Stardew Valley and Sun Haven, when I started new & modded saves of both about mid-year. Both games ended up getting their total playtime doubled as a result, actually, but ironically I never made past Year 1 Winter in either. Truly a testament to how poorly I pace myself in life-sim games.
Baldur’s Gate 3 was not omitted – I played zero minutes of it in 2024. It’s kinda embarrassing at this point, but also Patch 8 is going to coming out Soon™ and will include a dozen additional sub-classes. Waited this long, what’s another indeterminable amount of time?
Epic Game Store (118h)
I just said that I don’t include previously-played games, but I think +86h on Cyberpunk 2077 deserves a mention. Aside from that, Dead Island 2 was the only other Epic game I played this year. which makes things all the more ridiculous that I have rather religiously acquired every free game offered each week.
Epic still has most of the heavy-hitting AAA games I have yet to start and/or complete. Alan Wake 2, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Death Stranding, specifically.
Xbox Game Pass (104.5h)
Game Pass has mostly been a pass for me this year. I stayed subscribed for the entire year, which is foolish, although the majority of that time was had at an absurd discount from stacking codes from last year. On the other hand, I can’t really blame Microsoft here. My “Play Later” queue includes Dead Space Remake, Lies of P, Tales of Arise, Persona 3 Reload, Octopath Traveler 2, ARK: Survival Ascended, Stalker 2, COD #whatever, and so on. Nevermind however many games arrived and then departed throughout the year that I have forgotten about.
Still, now that I’m back on a month-to-month plan, it may be worth taking a closer look at where I’m spending my time (and money). I think Avowed is the biggest title I’m looking forward to, and that’s in February. On the other hand, Game Pass continues to have the uncanny ability to push in surprise games I already purchased. Dead Island 2 showing up recently was particularly vexing to me.
Other Unmentionables
Yeah, I still play Hearthstone. Sometimes a lot. In fact, I would probably be embarrassed if there was any way to actually track the time spent throughout the year. One should never feel “embarrassed” for playing a game, of course, but in my particular situation, it is always at the expense of anything else I could be playing instead. Like, I would be sitting in my chair, staring at the list of titles unplayed, and then… close Steam and boot up Hearthstone as a sort of unthinking default.
It doesn’t help that Hearthstone itself is in a pretty miserable state right now. The latest expansion was a total flop, set intentionally weak presumably to help reign in power creep. But that only works when sets rotate, so everyone is still playing powerful cards from two years ago. There is a Starcraft-themed mini-set coming in January that may shake things up, but not if they want to keep power creep under control. In Battlegrounds, a new season meant they removed Quests/Buddies/Trinkets, which makes games less variable and more boring.
Another recent game without hour-tracking I’ve been playing a lot is Balatro (mobile). Again, not sure how long I’ve played, but I have unlocked all the decks and unlocked all the stakes on one of the decks (e.g. highest ascension). I started to do the same on another deck, and going from Orange Stake down to the basic one was eye-opening to me. Was it always this easy? Sure… probably after 100 hours.
What’s Next
I am going to largely rehash my goals from last year, with a caveat: I no longer care about “finishing” games and absolve myself from any guilt surrounding it. I go back and forth on this, of course, but at the same time I am realizing that I feel better about life when “done” games are no longer visible in my library. Did I beat V Rising? Nope. But I did play until I could derive no more enjoyment from it, so why let it keep taking up space? I’ve been good on this front already, just need to stay strong in 2025.
Games I would like to complete this coming year:
Basically… you know, all those AAA games I have in my library.
In any case, I hope everyone gets everything they voted for in 2025.
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Tags: End of Year, Epic Game Store, Steam, Xbox Game Pass