C-suite drove that game into the ground with dogshit decisions for the past 3-4 years, and that’s just the game itself- the way that studio treats their devs is abysmal.

I absolutely swear by these things, and the upcoming Steam Controller is the only thing that’ll make me shelve it. I’ve got 3 of them lying around at this point.

Sanctions are the extremely moderate position. Let the empire fall.

I felt so bad because our mom got these AI prints made of all of our dogs doing silly things this year. Like her heart was in the right place but holy shit please don’t. Right into the storage unit as a “memento” of 2025 I guess.

Scammers are making bank off the shitty theft machines that’s for sure

I’ve been eyeballing this one for a while, along with OpenFortress. Also found Gold Rush today which seems to be EXACTLY what I’m looking for (and the things they’re avoiding are literally the reasons I stopped playing TF2 around 2011ish). Unfortunately the playercounts for these sorts of mods are abysmally low.

Not inherently, but it does somewhat fall under the same umbrella. Cowbee summed it up far better than I could.

That being said, it’s kind of ironic how many FOSS projects are maintained by nazi chuds.

Usually if this happens for me it’s an issue with the gluetun end, since all the big names love to throttle known VPNs. Fixes itself after a few minutes, but if I’m not feeling lazy a quick stack restart tends to fix it too.

It’s both tbh

The live-service games that live on do so because of a constant investment and commitment to the game and the community it harbours. The moment people think the writing’s on the walls, they jump ship.

This especially. Just as an example, I sunk way too much time into Destiny 2, and recently picked up Warframe after putting D2 away last year, and the difference between the studios behind them both is night and day. The former feels like an abusive relationship, built on constant FOMO, removing content, and constantly skirting around the community’s numerous issues with the game’s systems and sandbox (and that’s all on top of Bungie/Sony execs treating the actual devs like garbage).

The latter feels like a game where the players are genuinely treated as the game’s lifeblood and rather than nickel and dime them for every last thing, the devs give them what they want, and the devs get to make what they want to make. Not to mention literally everything in the game minus community-created cosmetics can be earned without spending anything at all.

These sorts of comparisons are all over the place. PoE2 compared to Diablo 4 or post-Krafton Last Epoch for example. You can’t just pump out a live service game and hope shit sticks, you need to foster a community around it.

The only ones I play these days are Warframe and occasionally PoE2, both relatively smaller dev teams with large publisher backing but mostly left to their own devices to do whatever the fuck they want. Coming from the predatory FOMO hell that was Destiny 2, getting into similar games but ones that actually respect the players is refreshing.

I have zero interest in throwaway AAA slop in general, let alone with all the usual live service shit tacked on.

The amount of genuinely good and successful live service games is so minimal that it’s actual insanity seeing AAA execs trying to reinvent the wheel and failing every time.

I mean let’s be honest here every single one’s been dogshit for centuries but Jefferson’s definitely still the most vile. It’s a damn low bar though considering how many genocidal war criminals and pedos have been in that office.

I got a new PC at the start of this year. Switched to CachyOS about 2 weeks in. Unfortunately running a brand new nvidia card, but it’s my last for sure.

Yeah this is something that keeps getting completely lost in this conversation.

The assets in question were from development during 2022-2023 at the latest. GenAI image tools at that time were extremely primitive compared to what’s out there now - remember DallE-Mini? That’s the kind of thing they were using. And because these tools hadn’t breached containment yet, literally no one was talking about ethical issues yet. Sandfall was basically just experimenting with brand new tech long before it was “good” and long before anyone was talking about it.

Now? It’s good to see them committed to avoiding it. GenAI is a plague and should be treated as such. But 2022-ish was totally different than today.

I was already leaning against getting a Switch 2 when they first announced it, but advertising a tech demo as a paid product sealed it for me.

A contractor used it for placeholder background assets in 2022 when the best genAI tech available was DallE-Mini and literally no one was even remotely aware of any ethical concerns yet.

Like I get that time feels nonexistent since 2020 but people seem to forget genAI was literally not even a known thing until 2024 at the earliest.

Today genAI and all those who support it in any capacity deserve to rot in hell, and it shouldn’t even be used for placeholders or concepts at any stage in the process. That’s a given. But why are we applying 2025 standards to something clearly done at a time before anyone knew anything about this shit?

Also the article people keep bringing up about Sandfall admitting they use “AI” is nothing but conflated buzzwords and has literally nothing to do with genAI, they’re very obviously referring to regular ass machine learning and Unreal tools that have existed for ages.

GenAI shouldn’t be used in any part of the process, including concepts and placeholders.

That being said, the assets that slipped through in E33 were from 2022. The most powerful publicly available genAI tool at the time was fuckin DallE-Mini, which basically just spit out fuzzy messes. None of the ethical concerns were common knowledge yet, Altman and his ilk were basically nobodies at the time, this was far before any of the current tools and companies that are driving everything to hell.

On top of that, there’s a dogshit article going around where Sandfall says they “use a small bit of AI” internally, and elaborate that they’re referring to Unreal machine learning tools and such, not genAI.

Fuck genAI, fuck Altman, and fuck anyone who intentionally uses any of this shit today, but the E33 case is a literal non-issue. They had 2022 fuzzy garbage slip through the cracks, immediately removed it, and there’s absolutely nothing to indicate that they’re using the modern, problematic tech today.

The only issue here is that there’s no reason for it to be considered an indie game. That’s it.

Also based on development timelines, these couple of textures were likely from the DallE-Mini era, long before anyone was even talking about ethical concerns with the tech and before fuckass Altman was a known name.

There’s another article going around where they say they use a “little bit” of AI but they’re very obviously referring to Unreal tools and regular old machine learning.

This whole thing is dramatically overblown. Absolutely fuck genAI and every data center should be bulldozed over. But this is a huge case over literally nothing.

E33 should be disqualified for all these awards for not being an indie game (the devs themselves have called it “AA” if I recall, and they had a sizeable budget to burn). Should genAI be tolerated in any part of the development process? Absolutely not. Should a game and studio be completely brought down because of 2022-ish placeholders from before the ethical issues of the tech were common knowledge, which were also quickly patched out in less than a week? Absolutely not.

Specifically, nazis and fascists. It’s a genuine nazi bar.

I was losing my damn mind when I saw this leak and my former roommate was on the first page 💀 Can’t say I was surprised.