Project Zomboid is a blast, especially when you really dig into the options for changing game rules. You can basically craft your own custom zombie apocalypse. You can decide how the virus works, whether zombies are slow or fast, whether they have good eyesight, good hearing, how strong they are, where they spawn. You can change loot rarities, how long it’s been since the outbreak started, when the power gets shut off, etc, etc.
Two ways to read this and I think both are somewhat true.
Option one; They’re OPEC now. They set the supply, and you bring the demand because you have no other choice. This lets them push prices up, which pushes margins up, and that hopefully props up their insanely inflated share price a little longer.
Option two; They’re well aware that demand is going to fall off a cliff soon. We’re already at “Nvidia is paying people to buy their GPUs” and have been for a while. The AI industry can’t afford to keep this train running, and even financial chicanery and circular dealing will only get them so far. Companies are building out data centres with zero plan for how to make any profit from them. When the GPUs they have age out, they’re not gonna buy more, they’re gonna go bankrupt (allowing the banks to sieze the mountain of now worthless three year old burned out GPUs that they used as collateral). And there’s not enough venture capital left for new data centre builds. The genAI financial engine is reaching its peak, and Nvidia doesn’t want to be stuck with a mountain of production that no one wants to buy.
Yes, and I feel like I addressed that with “…those plans come with a ton of asterixes…”
It’s actually insane to think about what could have been accomplished with the capital investment that has collectively gone into generative AI, public ledger blockchain, and metaverse VR projects. IIRC its over a trillion dollars. There are credible plans for more or less ending world hunger for under ten billion. Yeah, those plans come with a ton of asterixes, but the point is, if that’s what ten gets you, imagine what you could do with a hundred billion? Now think about what a trillion could do. It’s honestly sickening.
There’s still a metaverse budget?
I seriously doubt that any of the decision makers involved in this process actually watch anime.
Anyone in management who cared probably didn’t have enough pull / authority to do a damn thing about it.
Internal review also takes time and expertise. Those things cost money, and the whole point of the exercise is to not spend money.
No one uses generative AI because they actually care about the quality of the end product.
But even allowing for those points, it’s entirely possible that they did, in fact, do quality review. Extensively. But at some point the generation costs exceeded their allowed budget and this is what they settled on. This is the thing that lurks behind bad quality AI art; the fact that what we see is often the best result out of many, many tries. The Coca Cola holiday ad had to be stitched together from hours upon hours of failed attempts. Even the horrendously bad looking end product wasn’t as bad as many of the failed outputs they got.
OK. How does it wash your ass?
Just seems like a lot of downside for a $350,000 device that can barely do the job of a shower.
“The user lies down…”
How does it wash your back?
It’s actually a brilliant monetization model. If you want to use it as is, it’s free, even for large corporate clients.
If you want to get rid of the puppygirls though, that’s when you have to pay.
The worst part is that this failure will probably kill any chance of The Chinese Room getting to actually take a proper swing at this, from scratch, with time and a real budget. It really feels like if they were allowed to do that they would hit it out of the park. Bloodlines 2 is a much better game than the review scores suggest, mostly weighed down by the expectations people put in the Bloodlines name.
Depends what you want to do with those character sheets.
If you just want a text file that people can paste their character sheet into, this will work: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/taf/ If you want to actually build full custom character sheets, you probably want something more like this: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/universal-tabletop-system/ Or this: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/custom-system-builder/
There’s also a general purpose PbTA system that’s meant to be customised into different PbTA hacks: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/pbta/
I guess in the sense that you have to load some kind of system to play, there’s a requirement to use some sort of plugin, so maybe that’s a dealbreaker. But it’s generally not an issue. While premium content for Foundry exists, it’s mostly in the form of rulebooks and scenarios that have been ported into it by the people who make and sell those games. The actual systems are all free, with literally only one exception (Brambletrek, for some reason).
So, it seems like the plugins don’t really affect you either way then? If you don’t want that added functionality, you’re good to just not use it, right?
Can you help us to understand why the plugins to add games is a problem for you?
Maybe I’m missing your meaning here, but it reads kind of like you’re expecting some kind of situation where a single VTT would somehow support every game system out of the box?
Honestly, everyone should give this site a look. A lot of the entry level lessons are just a really good intro to the basics of modern operating systems and how they really work under the hood. Then as you continue to dig in, you start learning how to break them / break into them. It’s really good stuff presented in a very digestible format with real machines for you to test everything on.
Do not cite the deep magics to me, I was there when they were written. I grew up on System Shock and Deus Ex, and that’s exactly why I found Dishonoured so hard to get into. Those other games gave the player a complete free choice in how to approach them, but Dishonoured doesn’t do that. It presents an apparently wide open field, but the moment you pick a particular path and set off down it, the game wags its finger and says “Oh no, not like that. That’s not how you’re supposed to play.”
There’s also a lot of stuff throughout the game about how the city gets more corrupted, more rats everywhere, that sort of thing. Some of this makes some stuff harder, some of it is just vibes. But all of it is the designers very noticeably wagging their finger under your nose for engaging with the mechanics they made and actively encouraged you to engage with.
I’d be happy with either option. If you’re going to punish the player for not doing perfect (eg, no kill) stealth, don’t tease them with a bunch of really exciting combat mechanics. If you’re going to include all the exciting combat mechanics, don’t punish people for using them.
I bailed on Dishonoured for one very specific reason; the morality system.
Dishonoured is, in my opinion a spectacular example of game design, and an equally spectacular example of how to break your game design by not understanding the way players interact with the tools you give them.
Dishonoured is a stealth game. It’s also a game with a superb combat system, and a really fun and exciting set of powers for the player to enjoy using. These things can, sort of co-exist, if somewhat uneasily. But then you add the morality system.
The morality system, in effect, punishes you for playing the game in a non-stealthy way. Or, more specifically, for playing with the wrong kind of stealth. The morality system wants you to ghost the whole game, slipping past every opponent without the slightest evidence you were ever there. But doing that means not engaging with most of the powers and any of the combat.
Having the option to follow a ghost playstyle is great. But when the game sets up a bunch of really fun mechanics, then punishes you for engaging with those mechanics in exactly the way they were designed to be engaged with, that just sucks.
So, they had multiplayer, and it worked very well, but then they went through a whole bunch of major reworks to underlying systems that broke multiplayer, and they basically went “Yeah, that’s gonna stay broken for a while until we get all this shit done, please be patient.”