meduka
8d ago
This is pretty much my stance too, now. I saw the Vampyr (which was a solid 7/10 vampire RPG) devs released a new game, then noticed all the marketing was about their cringe interracial coupling. No thanks. And allegedly there's a romance between the (black) male protagonist and the (Japanese) female protagonist in the new AC: I'm sure that'll play well in Japan.
For me, it's just a strong signal that the developers do not care about making a good game on its own merits, and are (in the best case!) cynically playing to the woke gaming press. (If they're true believers, that's even worse.) White leftists writing fiction about black people is basically never going to turn out good, because white leftists worship blacks, and that worship is going to get in the way of any interesting story. In the case of the new AC game, it's even worse -- do you think a white leftist is going to competently write about anti-black Sengoku-era Japanese racism? Or even deal with the subject at all? (Actually, they might -- I think there's an argument to be made that the only people white leftists hate almost as much as other whites, are the Japanese.)
I would have much less of an issue with it all, if any substantial percent of the dev team were actually black, or blacks made up a substantial percentage of their target demographic -- but they aren't, and don't! It's retarded signalling all the way down.
meduka
13d ago
I know basically nothing about soccer (what's an offside?) but I had a good time playing Football Manager 2024 on Game Pass. I actually subscribed to check out Lies of P (which wasn't bad) but ended up putting 50 hours into FM instead. I picked the crappiest, lowest ranked amateur Japanese team I could find and with a mix of lucky scouting discoveries and a couple of clutch third world imports, managed to drag them to the top of their bracket over a few seasons. Then we got promoted and none of my players could compete with the actual pros. Was quite tragic.
Anyway, I'd kill for something with FM-level depth but literally any other setting. There are a surprising number of management games out there but nothing compares in terms of sheer overwhelming complexity. I played a fair amount of Motorsport Manager (quite old now) and, despite also knowing nothing about F1 (though it's not licensed, so I suppose that is probably more of a plus than anything) really enjoyed the gameplay loop of poaching staff, choosing when and how to spend your very limited budget, taking big risks on race days when you have no other choice, etc.
meduka
14d ago
The screen sharing is the most exciting part (for me, anyway): we're maybe less than a year away from opening the ChatGPT app and being able to share screen, hand control over, and tell it to get your project compiling while you go grab a coffee or something. I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't jumped on this, with OS-level support you could expose a lot of context and possible interaction directly to the LLM without relying on vision (but I guess if vision is good/cheap enough then that's not necessary!)
I use Copilot a lot now that it's just natively there at all times, but it has basically zero ability to interact with the OS (I think all it can do is rearrange windows, pop up some settings, and read Edge web page content). I'd like it to have a "shared command prompt" that it can autonomously type commands into when I tell it to do things. The pasting back and forth is annoying.
I suspect with ZIRP on the way out we'll see more tech companies tightening their belts. The reality of it is that most tech companies are horribly over staffed (look at Twitter, where allegedly 80% of the employees were let go, with no ensuing technical disaster that was, nonetheless, oft predicted.) There have always been theories floating around as to why these companies become so bloated with dead weight employees: FAANG hires anyone remotely competent and gives them make-work to keep them from their competitors, was a common belief.
I think the reality is a bit more nuanced than that and less strategic: headcounts bloat because when you're already making good money, the easiest way to increase your status is to increase the number of people "working under you". So projects which could reasonably be handled by one "10x developer" get spun out into entire teams to make the lead look better. And his boss is happier because now he is responsible for more people, which makes him look even more important, and so on. With fat enough margins (and/or a zero interest rate environment) this process can continue for a very long time. It's how a firm like Dropbox winds up with over 3000 employees.
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