He also questions "who the f*** is playing" GOTY nominee Donkey Kong Bananza
  • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    GOTY is always rigged. It’s like how you can have Hades 2 (this isn’t a criticism of the game, I think it’s pretty damn good) in the ‘Best Game by an Independent Developer’ category when SuperGiant Games has been a mainstay of the industry for nearly a decade now with 24 listed employees and dozens of others involved in the projects.

    That doesn’t make Shroud correct though. If Arc Raiders was shooting for a GOTY, it should have released at the beginning or middle of the summer. It isn’t that surprising that it isn’t there, it just hasn’t been around long enough and doesn’t have a huge audience outside of the ‘Man I love, but am sick of, Tarkov’ demo, which admittedly pretty big, but also fucking starved for real content and committed to a game whose developer have openly stated that they do not actually care if the game is fun or not. No shit they are gonna go bananas for something expanding the genre, while it is gonna be a pretty lack luster response from gamers and the industry at large.

    So yes, it is rigged, but Arc Raiders not being nominated is a pretty poor example of that process.

  • Dort_Owl [they/them, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    51·
    3 days ago

    What the fuck is Arc Raiders lmao

    The streamer also believes that “sequels have no right to be Game of the Year,” with the exception of “game-changing sequels like Grand Theft Auto 6, Grand Theft Auto 5, Grand Theft Auto 4, the Witcher 4, for example.”

    GTA 6 isn’t even out yet how can it be a game-changer?

  • DragonBallZinn [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    41·
    3 days ago

    Always the biggest victim complexes.

    AI bros please fucking get the hint already. No one except other AI bros like you, and we don’t need you and your fancy techslop to “fix” games. Go automate away something people don’t want to do. Have the clankers do our taxes or something, I don’t know. That’s your priority. Not game design.

    • Orcocracy [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      3 days ago

      The ghosts in Pac-Man were actually piloted by tiny leprechauns trapped in the arcade cabinet by a witch’s spell. If you beat a secret level they get set free, but in return the player is imprisoned to replace them.

  • NuraShiny [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    35·
    3 days ago

    The Media: “Guy who can click on video game character heads really well has a shit take!”

    Me: “Wow, thanks, The Media, I really needed to know!”

    The Media: “You’re welcome. Now please click some ads on our site.”

    Me: “Anything for you, The Media, you are so very very important.”

  • RedSturgeon [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    19·
    3 days ago

    Aren’t freeze-gamer s supposed to be super nitpicky about blurry graphics, fps stutters and so on.

    But now that it’s poor quality AI gen voices, slapped on top of otherwise what seems like a very well made game, they’re gonna talk about how we’re just not ready for it?

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      3 days ago

      I’m still unclear what the AI voices in it even are, going off what people have been saying about it. It sounds like the actual NPC dialogue was from voice actors, who were also hired to provide samples for a text-to-speech thing for player characters? Or that it’s doing a speech-to-text and then text-to-speech filter process on proximity VOIP? If it’s literally just “it’s using text-to-speech tech on dynamic text that players provide” that’s such a completely unobjectionable thing that I can only imagine the backlash is coming from people who see the buzzword “AI” and immediately think ChatGPT instead of “text-to-speech with a slightly higher quality than it used to have”.

      • schlongjohnson [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        you can do a ping in game that makes your character say: “i have a (insert game item here” or “let’s go to (insert game location here)”. from what i understand they trained ai off the hired voice actors, with consent, to voice these lines

        • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          See that doesn’t sound any different from just having them record a phonemic inventory for a traditional text-to-speech system, it’s just simplifying the process and making it so the text doesn’t need to have a corresponding pronunciation key, and presumably meshing it in a bit better.

      • invalidusernamelol [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        3 days ago

        The sudden use of AI for literally anything that uses some algorithm is annoying.

        It flattens what is a very diverse field into “ChatBot Slop”. Kinda like suddenly calling every restaurant “Fast Food”

      • RedSturgeon [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        It’s okay I guess. I just am not impressed by the quality. Do I think this impacts the game in a major way? Not really.

        There’s definitely better sounding voice changers already, listened to a bit of people using them in-game and it’s not impressive, which makes me wonder why is the quality subpar, compared to other ones, like what vtubers use. Is it because they’re made in a different way or is it because you need so much samples of someone’s voice to make it sound good—that it’s not possible to actually pay someone, for the labor it takes to produce it, and they’d either have to consent to work for a really low hourly/for free or someone just takes it without offering anything in exchange/forces them to do it.

        I’m not saying I’m against the technology, but I do think it’s not being used to it’s fullest potential or being misused, for various reasons.

        But hey on the bright side, for the Game enjoyers, everyone will forget about this in a bit, but the publicity might end up letting more people to know about the game and hopefully that ends up helping everyone in the end.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    20·
    3 days ago

    Arc Raiders is very good. The shitty voices genuinely bring down the experience in a completely needless way though, particularly when the voice work that’s in the game would amount to like 5 people in a sound booth for one day.

    Even with all the anti-AI arguments this site usually has put to one side. No industry awards should not reward laziness, it would be bad for the industry to encourage a practice that is genuinely detrimental to quality in the industry. You can look at this purely from an industry focused self-interested viewpoint, it’s not good for the industry at all.

    As a game Arc Raiders is great. No denying that. It does deserve the numbers it is currently achieving. But Embark need to move away from this AI voice shit. Even on the subreddit which is dominated by people who love the game you still see a roughly even split between idiots that say it doesn’t affect the game and people who agree that the AI voices are shitty.

    This is a real shame because, aside from this decision, the game probably has the best sound design in the last 10 years, in particular the proximity chat feature is the best implemented proximity chat that has ever existed in a game, it goes so far as to add realistic environmental effects to the proximity voice, if you’re in an echo-ey hall the prox voice echoes just like your footsteps or shots will, it’s really neat.