major gaming mags were seemingly afraid to mark down major games from major studios because they didn’t want to be denied review codes in the future

Wasn’t it more/also they were worried about ongoing advertising deals? Like it wasn’t even necessarily the review staff themselves being in on it so much as the execs leaning on them to not threaten the revenue stream.

IIRC for GTA5 it was all satire aimed at mid 2000s Fox, both the trashy reality TV side of it and Fox News. I’m not gonna say it doesn’t revel too much in the spectacle of just taking something that’s already awful and dialing it up a bit, but it’s more in the style of the Onion where most of the bits are taking the mask off an institution or trend and having it honestly portray itself as what it is (like the Fox News expy literally having the tagline “confirming your prejudices” or an American Idol expy literally just being assholes reveling in cruelty) than South Park style nihilism - it has a point to make and that’s that American culture is reactionary and repulsively self-centered and consumerist, even as it is itself reveling in being trashy slop.

You’ve got to remember, everything after GTA3 was written in the context of the Bush era and none of it was written after gamergate: it has the sort of incoherent dirtbag quasi-left contemporary counter culture stance of recognizing the US as bloodthirsty, pointlessly cruel, and deeply unserious but also not having any sort of framework for understanding or addressing that and being entirely too libertine and chauvinist on top of that. It’s kind of alien to anything we have now, because that whole counter culture basically got wiped out by gamergate crystalizing the chauvinist libertines into open fascists baying for blood and forcing everyone else to stop tacitly tolerating them.

Perhaps they’re just airbrushed artwork on top of the armor. It seems like the sort of sardonic thing that character would do.

Matt Ward is such an awful writer that exposure to his prose is an actual psychic damage hazard.

I think it’s something from an old Rogue Trader article? So it may be more a metacommentary from an old writer sort of thing, that Gothic would have been descended from Mandarin with a bunch of English vocabulary mixed in, albeit all unrecognizable after tens of thousands of years of sound changes.

Also the Emperor is from somewhere in what is now Turkey and canonically the most common language the humans speak (“Gothic”) is descended from Mandarin and is just artistically portrayed as being Latin based because “High Gothic” is supposed to scan as archaic in the way that inserting incorrect Latin into English does.

Canonically literally every Space Marine (except for the Blood Angels IIRC) should have dark skin when exposed to sunlight and then (except for the Salamanders) flash to an unnatural pallor when they step inside, because one of the mutations they get is photochromic skin to protect them from getting sunburns while still ensuring they get enough vitamin D. That sounds incredibly stupid and like I just made it up but that is the actual canon from the lore, along with Space Marines eating their enemies brains to gain their knowledge and having acid spit like the xenomorph.

Warhammer 40K is a very silly franchise and the art direction does it a disservice by not leaning into it more.

The Elder Scrolls series, flaws and all, is generally better about applying magic to its world-building.

For the most part its worldbuilding is like the one thing The Elder Scrolls actually did really well (that and Morrowind’s aesthetic/art direction), at least in terms of the lore. Where it fails is translating that intricate, weird, well-thought-out worldbuilding into gameplay and storytelling.

Everyone I’ve ever known who played The Sims 4 basically just played it because WW is a thing, yeah lmao.

It was weirdly complex and could basically be summed up as “imagine if all the little side mechanics Sims 4 got from DLCs were actually fleshed out into full fledged mechanics with at least some content to them, it actively simulated the entire neighborhood at once which was also bigger and had more stuff in it, and its difficulty was curved a little more towards actually having to try a little like in earlier games.”

It also took forever to load and would actively break without a community patch to regularly fix and clean up invalid background simulation stuff because of compounding errors with said simulation, like background-simulated sims glitching into invalid positions and spamming pathfinding errors - the community patch ran a garbage collection script every in-game day to detect and fix those before they could get out of hand and it worked great. But apart from that it was really good and an iterative improvement over The Sims 2 which had been an iterative improvement over The Sims. It would have been amazing if The Sims 4 had just sort of cleaned it up and kept building on that complexity instead of rebuilding something simpler from the ground up and switching into a minimum-viable-product content churn forever because it’s sitting in a niche where it has no real competition at all.

Not even then, really. Everything in it is just so completely and utterly shallow even compared to comparable things in The Sims 3. It has a huge variety of things that do basically nothing with a core gameplay loop that’s even more of just a “passively win” idle game than the earlier games. I’ve pirated it a few times over the years to see what’s been added and it’s always just sort of disappointing and the new content is less interesting than it sounded like.

It’s really disappointing that they just kind of stripped down 3 and then just treaded water ever since instead of building on any of the mechanics 3 introduced.

Pathfinder 2e is basically just D&D done better than D&D itself has ever done. It’s like if 3.5e had been refined into a more streamlined and modern game with a bunch of the bad-design-decisions that are baked into the fabric of D&D mitigated as much as they possibly can without just ripping them out, and they found a way to keep the variety and customizability of 3.5e but without as many exponentially compounding consequences.

Basically, where D&D went down this path of flattening out the splat and turning characters into basically straight line level up progressions with as few choices as possible and no room for character building (that is, you choose your class, your major class feature, and then that’s it you’re done you just level up and never think about anything again unless you’re a magic user who gets to choose which spell you want to be allowed to cast once per day), Pathfinder 2e went down the path of pruning the sprawl of options down to a few major branches for each class, and then fleshed that out with a lot of little choices that aren’t particularly meaningful but which leave tons of room for flavorful character building and which make sure that every level everyone is making some sort of choice no matter how small and fluffy that choice is.

I hate proprietary AI models so much. They’re all the material and social problems of open source ones, but entirely in the hands of the dullest and most ontologically evil corporate suits alive. Trying to make a machine that’s the sum of decades or centuries of human culture and which extrudes a fine paste somewhat resembling the same, that’s obviously a very mixed bag at best, but when that paste is just going straight into a selection of corporate injection molds there are no possible positives left, only the complete enclosure of human culture and its replacement with injection molded slop.

AIDungeon was such a hilarious shitshow, for all that it was an entertaining toy for a while. Honestly I feel a baffling sort of nostalgia for the GPT-2 era of chatbots where it was new and good enough to be interesting but bad enough to be incredibly funny. It was so much better than the bland slop modern chatbots are where they’re bad enough to be useless and good enough to be boring. It’s like schlocky grindhouse B-movie slop vs modern overcooked Hollywood slop.

IIRC what they’re really angling for is getting out of publishing books to begin with and instead selling AI GMs as a service who just play what may as well be calvinball with the players based on a secret ruleset if any at all. Edit: to add onto this, IIRC the reason 5e lacked the massive amount of splatbooks they relied on in earlier editions was because they really wanted to shift towards selling digital services and wanted to get away from things like “people playing the game having a copy of the rules” in favor of them just like, buying an NPC or an item or some shit for a virtual tabletop, because they really want to be a shitty microtransaction-filled MMO but without all the “investing resources into actually making and running that sort of thing” part.

So basically they’re trying to be AIDungeon even though that failed miserably because people only wanted it for porn and also the concept was untenable as a serious thing and also still is completely untenable.

In other words they should go for it, put all their eggs in that incredibly stupid basket, and stop making RPGs at all. I am saying this because I want what’s best for them, obviously, and not because I want to see D&D finally come to an end and make way for other, better systems. Definitely.

They seem to go back and forth on whether they’re loss leaders subsidized by more expensive games and captive paid online services or mediocre hardware sold at a premium to their captive audience. Last gen was AFAIK the loss leader phase (and the one before that was outdated, dogshit hardware sold at a premium from the start), so now we’re on to the squeezing their audience for as much as they can phase, and in another 5 years they’ll do another loss leader console, and so on.

One could definitely build a sort of RPGMaker framework engine kind of thing on traditional procgen methods that builds a bunch of prompts to get assets from text and image generators while the engine itself provides the structure and all the mechanical bits. Hell, I could probably have the concept working in a month or two of work, depending on how low the bar for “it makes a game” is.

It would just suck horribly and make the actual worst nonsense you’ve ever seen. Like just as I can see how all the parts to make this would fit together I can also see how everywhere the generators are involved will just straight up fail and produce absolute random garbage because that’s what they do, they produce nonsense that at best only looks good in isolation and to do any better than that they have to both be actively shackled to a very narrow task with tools that require human curation and design tailored to the situation and even then their outputs still have to be carefully curated and edited by hand afterwards.

Just generating images right now is so convoluted that people understand the process a little bit title themselves as “prompt engineers”.

It’s not convoluted or hard at all, they’re just self-aggrandizing dipshits who think learning a few rote prayers and spamming keyword salad into a prompt box while doing gacha pulls with the “generate” button is some sort of esoteric task. The most complicated it gets is setting up workflows in comfyui, which is a simple flowchart for babies that’s straightforward and extremely simple compared to even the simplest of actual programming tasks.

Statistically speaking, the only thing advertisers are good at selling is their own services to businesses. Advertising is a miserably bad investment that mostly just eats up funds, even as it’s forced to exist by businesses needing to be seen and known about. Like nobody alive sees an ad and thinks “ah, I must own [thing] now!” they just maybe notice that [thing] exists and maybe at some point remember that it exists but are more likely to just run across it when doing a search for [general type of thing] later anyways. But without engaging in it, businesses suffocate because they never build up a critical mass of being known about.

It’s all such a fucking stupid and pointless grift that has no reason at all to exist and it doesn’t even do the one thing it’s claiming to do well at all.