The reason is better is because a number on its own doesn’t provide any representation whatsoever of the passing of time. It represents the current observed time, but it does nothing to represent graphically how much of the day is left.

The arguably best representation of the passing of time is a 24h analogue watch/clock, even if that has its own set of issues which make it a terrible way of displaying the current time.

Absolutely not comparable to floppy disks. The hands are a representation, not a technology. Technology-wise, most modern “analog” wristwatches are quartz, and therefore digital, not actually analog. Yet we choose to make them with hands because that provides a better representation of the passing of time.

I’ve found the article here, gone in, and immediately forgot that it wasn’t the onion as it didn’t sound like something remotely true. Then I was immediately confused about how they’d made the satire look so real, with even fake-pipe photos. That’s been a confusing 5 minutes…

No no no WB, you wanted to make it live service, now you deal with it keep adding content for the next 5 years.

Obviously very far from reality, but I wish live service games were required to have a clear, binding plan for how long they’re going to be supported and what’s the exit plan. If they’re a service, they should have an enforceable contract.

That would help buyers not buy a game that is going to be sunset in a year, and/or prevent publishers from releasing cash-grabbing garbage with no evident business plan or idea on why players are going to find the game worthy of giving them money for years.

I believe so. I have some roles in my team I’m hiring for, that have reading code and fixing small bugs as one of the requirements, but not developing code from scratch. (It’s a sort-of field engineering role).

We do test for both things (treating the “developing code from scratch” as bonus points rather than a strict pass/fail) and some people can find and fix bugs in a couple minutes, but are incapable of writing some basic python to iterate through prime numbers and store them in an array.

I bought Tekken 7 to play on the steam deck because of this. I didn’t realise I needed to buy the ultimate edition (or whatever it’s called) and now half the players were hidden behind DLCs, so I feel I paid for half a game. I’m staying away from Tekken for the foreseeable.

I don’t think it’s bad, in fact I wonder the same. These are my colleagues because it’s the same path I took - I now work developing self-driving cars (I slowly transitioned from aerospace to manufacturing automation to robotics) and it’s the most rewarding job I’ve ever had, and it feels very much like engineering. I don’t care if I’m not a “manufacturing engineer” anymore; I really like my job and I like my title to reflect somewhat accurately what I do, but that’s the extent I care about it.

No, that’s precisely the opposite of my point. If you drive an Uber, you’re an Uber driver. People are “CEO” or “Judge” despite nobody having a CEO or Judge degree. Your profession is what you do, not what you happened to study in your teens to get there.

I don’t think what you study in your degree is the defining factor. Obviously this is country-specific but I feel you job title isn’t always linked 1:1 to your title.

I studied Industrial Engineering, which in Spain exists as a degree but not as a job position. Position wise, I’ve been a mechanical design engineer, a manufacturing engineer, an automation engineer, robotics engineer, and these days I’m mostly a software engineer. I’m definitely specialised in engineering, regardless of the tools I’m applying to solve the task at hand.

Hmmm. But all the people around me working in software studied multiple years in an Engineering field. In my case, I studied a 5-year industrial engineering and two masters afterwards; I feel very comfortable wearing the “software engineer” or more accurately “robotics engineer” badge.

If they’re getting money through micro transactions they can charge absolutely precisely £0. I can’t be bothered paying for a game that isn’t complete.

He pointed out that one of WBD’s latest big games, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, was a disappointment for the company.

[…]

“Rather than just launching a one-and-done console game, how do we develop a game around, for example, a Hogwarts Legacy or Harry Potter, that is a live-service where people can live and work and build and play in that world in an ongoing basis?” he said.

How do you say “whoooosh” in corporate?

But then also many people don’t have credit cards - they’re frowned upon in many countries with a more debt-averse culture.

Whatever the solution is, it seems like it would end up being something country-specific and not something that scales well across the internet. Probably credit cards work for the US, but then we’d need to find something that works for the remaining 95% of the world population.

As of 2022, 54 countries had implemented special taxes on sugary drinks and/or sugar in general: https://www.obesityevidencehub.org.au/collections/prevention/countries-that-have-implemented-taxes-on-sugar-sweetened-beverages-ssbs

In many cases that covers sweets, snacks, etc. as well. Food is usually quite heavily regulated (in the sense that there’s lots of regulation, not that it’s actually strict or as much as it should be), even if it’s not immediately obvious to us as consumers. E.g. there are ingredients that get banned because of being addictive or having certain harmful effects.

Porn is age gated worldwide, and in some cases censored. I’d class that as regulated pretty much all over the world, regardless of how hard/easy it is to circumvent the regulations (e.g. for a 17-year-old to access a porn website).

I think that actually covers all of the items in the list!

Assuming you’re including debit cards here (as most people do when they say “credit card”): you can get one under 18. In fact a few countries are already going fully cashless, with nobody (including kids) being able to pay with cash. If I open the Revolut app, I get right away on the home screen a banner for “Revolut <18”.

I’m not sure what could be a better solution though.

Which is why many of these things are regulated, especially if they include addictive substances.

This doesn’t necessarily apply to multiplayer games though: the free-to-play part of the playerbase is there to pad the numbers and ensure queues are short (if it’s a match based game), cities are lively (if it’s a MMORPG), etc.

If the developer can’t appeal to those too, then you’re left with a ghost town of a game that can’t appeal to the whales either.

Unfortunately in the 2020s you don’t even own the games you have the physical media for.

Edit: as a more serious answer, Linux might be a better bet than Windows for playing windows games (ironically), either through Proton or Wine.

I think it’s the second. Even on No Man’s Sky, with the bazillion worlds, they all exist “as they are” and are consistent from the beginning. If you revisit a planet, it’s exactly as it was.

Now with what I know about this technology, I suspect the way this happens is every planet had a seed (a number) that you can pass to the “random planet generator” it will generate exactly the same thing over and over. Then basically when you load a new planet it goes “right, with this seed, what would we have in these coordinates?” And the answer is persistent.

However having seen how that looks in NMS, I feel they’d have had to add a bit of extra spice to be able to sell a single world. In my mind that involves manually crafted areas almost necessarily, as well as checking most of the planet manually to oversee the procedural generator and massage anything that doesn’t pass a level of quality. If I were to make this game myself, I would use procedural generation for the different areas and not for the whole planet, so that I can give certain sections of the map a “reroll” if I don’t like them.

I don’t think you can handcraft a whole world with any reasonable team/timeframe for video game development. Looking at the (very short) video I suspect there will be handcrafted areas like cities, and they’ve put more emphasis on that than in NMS because the size is more manageable. But 80 or 90% needs to be procgen to make it something that can be delivered in years and not decades. Although being a single world, maybe that let them have more visibility of what was being generated (vs checking millions of planets) and then tweak manually large parts of it.