They don’t own Everquest or Planetside. That was Sony Online Entertainment (SOE for short and separate from Sony Playstation) and then it got sold to become Daybreak Game Company. And, Daybreak hasn’t been doing that great last I looked.
I just don’t think Bethesda has it in them anymore. Except for Id and formerly Tango Gameworks, Bethesda proper and a lot of the other studios it had, have just been missing the mark. Like a lot of big studios, they get big, start to regurgitate what they’ve already done, and then fail to capture people’s attention after a while.
Why do you think Valve’s employees haven’t pushed for many new games? Anticipation got too high and they didn’t want to compete with the legacy of Half-life or Portal. Half-life Alyx came out and it was decent, but it didn’t move the story forward that much. It was mostly about doing a good VR game. Now, they have Deadlock coming out and it has nothing to do with any of it’s previous games.
At a certain point, it’s like reading a book from an author that’s run out of ideas or hearing a song from an artist that doesn’t have anything relevant to say anymore. It’s time to move on and make room for someone wants to do something new. Only problem, these big ass companies are now mostly about making money and not about making games. They will ride whatever wave they can until they crash and burn.
The biggest thing companies want to do with AI is infinite cheap content. They want generate a movie or other entertainment for a 10th or even 20th of the cost while burning a state’s worth of energy. They’re going to try and generate a successful movie from models that are trained on previously successful movies. And, they’ll get it.
At least at first. Eventually, even we’ll burn out from endless selection of predictable movies and other entertainment. And, I’m not talking just once a year. More like once a month. At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, they’ll learn that the attention economy is not infinite. There is a limit of people, time, and money. They’re putting most of their eggs in the this basket and I hope it smashes to pieces.
AI isn’t here to improve anything. It’s here to open a path to infinite growth. Infinite entertainment, infinite weaponizing, infinite whatever. More predictable, infinite growth. Problem with that is that we’re slowing as a race and sooner or later it will start shrinking. The more they try to take, the quicker this is going to happen.
And folks, here in the comments, we have semi-Biblical experts discussing meaning and interpretation like it was LOTR or 40K lore. If someone needs that much explanation for their faith or even a cartoon, then at no point will we ever arrive a solid definition or consensus of the Christian God.
I like to keep things simple. Jesus was a black man and had some really cool ideas. His dad was not really present and second hand-stories about him are often mythical and confusing. Hell, the stories of Jesus are second-hand and often hard to nail down. People can’t agree on the word or rules of this religion so they fight other people outside and inside their religion to distract from the fact we are all going to die and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
Who? Oh, didn’t even notice.
That’s because you only see the levels of classes that are interesting to play. Most regular people are going to specialize in something that keeps them alive and has more use for the general public. Did you want to play a level 7 Dentist or a level 5 Pizza Chef? And feats like Least Painful Tooth Extraction for the Dentist or Perfect Toppings Distribution for the Pizza Chef?
This putz wrote an acclaimed book that got turned into an acclaimed movie? I have to ask did the script writer or Ron Howard change a lot of dialogue and stuff to make it a normal movie? Maybe, he had a really good editor that was like, “Dude, this is some misogynist shit, take it out”
I mean we could have had most of that or a close version of it. Still not sure flying cars are a good idea without a large amount of regulation.
But, we decided computers talking to each other was way more important. And, here we are. Computers talking to each other faster and better than ever. Celebrate the achievement of communication that has been turned into stream of revenue and almost unending growth. See how well we now communicate with each other. Much better than we ever did before. What a grand human achievement we have made.