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S3 Ep256: The Chatbot Ate My Homework
76 Plays3 years ago
Happy (2^8)th episode! Join Dave and Jake as they talk about meetings, the rise of the chatbots, the disappointing launch of Jedi Fallen Order: Survivor and Redfall, and someone's new tattoo this week!
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Transcript
Introduction and Banter
00:00:10
Speaker
8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
00:00:47
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake, and I'm joined by my co-host is always Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? What's going okay? Uh, nothing, nothing too notable on a Thursday today. How about you?
00:01:03
Speaker
It's going pretty well myself. Pretty good for myself. I did have one. I don't usually like to talk about work things, but I did talk about meta work things.
The Case for Shorter Meetings
00:01:12
Speaker
I had one work meeting that went for two hours. In fact, over two hours with technical difficulties. And that is a little bit long. I would say ideal and others on the call acknowledged it. They're all like, this is probably too long.
00:01:31
Speaker
Was it all a single point of conversation or did it just bleed into other stuff? We covered a lot of stuff. There was a lot of stuff coming up for planning and what the crap.
00:01:45
Speaker
If it's a productive two hours, it feels better, but still like blocking out that much of a chunk of time of like, you're going to be socializing, interact with people or just sitting quietly. Have fun. And you're like, ah, I don't want to be here. Like I like nice little. Hey, can we hop on a quick call? You talk about a thing and then you're done.
00:02:03
Speaker
Yeah. Nice five tenner. Those are nice. Those are nice. Sometimes you have to catch up and talk through a lot of stuff. And I think this fell into the latter column, but I prefer shorter meetings. Also, people are much more engaged if it's just like, hey, we're all here for a purpose. Here's the thing we're going to talk about and then we're going to leave. And people will stay more engaged if they know that it's not a marathon and it's a sprint. It's just like we're going to cover our content.
00:02:34
Speaker
Give whatever outcomes we need but That's yeah, I really I Feel like my max for a call is probably like an hour. Maybe now we're five hour ten Depending on we're talking about a given episode but
Podcast Focus and Humor
00:02:50
Speaker
in Hour 10, which is for one topic. I don't know if we have that many things where we talk. I guess we had a couple focus topics about a specific game or something, but it's usually a Souls-like that gets a little more rambling and attention to detail.
00:03:05
Speaker
Yeah. Or Elden, well, obviously Elden Ring is a souls-like, but specifically that example because I think we had at least two episodes on it. And then I was like, we good for three? And you're like, we really need to just do something else. But I mean, we could at this point, probably go back and just copy Vaati Vidya's lore stuff for like, oh, did you guys know about this?
00:03:29
Speaker
We just rip his audio and what we do is we splice it in to the episode, but we cut it up so we'll ask a question that he builds off of his response in the video. That's so much editing now. I like the idea of it though. I mean we would get through a lot less for sure.
00:03:52
Speaker
Do it as a segment. Just be like soapstone and body. Put it there in the intermission. And then we thank him at the end. We send him a Twitter message also thanking him or, you know, no, no. What we do is we post to his most recent YouTube video thanking him for coming onto the podcast and continue to do that every time there's a segment until he actually sees it. And he's like, wait a minute.
00:04:19
Speaker
And then at some point, like there'll be the issue of like, Hey, you're using my likeness without paying me. We're like, we don't make any money. I want you to know this. You're right. You can have a hundred percent royalties on any episode you showed up in retroactively go put body and everything.
AI in Creativity and Communication
00:04:41
Speaker
But speaking of ripping audio using AI, did you catch Yumfa's latest video?
00:04:50
Speaker
I had not, no. I looked on Discord, it's fine, it's fine. What's the high level? He does, for anybody who doesn't know, YMFAH, YEMFA, does a lot of these challenge runs where he has to do a specific thing and Dark Souls or Elden Ring, and it's like, how do I do this? And he kind of walks through, it's like, oh, we hit this roadblock.
00:05:14
Speaker
Oh, but we can do this. He's obviously already gone through the whole thing and took a lot of time, and he's showing you the quick edited version. This was how to escape from volcano manner. You go there initially, super early, and it's like, no, what do you do? Trying to actually get back because you're gated by so many things.
00:05:36
Speaker
But he did this using Bear Grylls AI voice. So he made it like it's a Bear Grylls episode, like he's in volcano manner. And it's like the play by play, even with like the little breaks and segments in between. Everything he did was just so well edited. And I really appreciated the video.
00:05:55
Speaker
Yeah. It seems we talk about AI a lot recently, but I always have more to say whenever it's brought up. I mean, it's AI. It's basically the thing right now, right? Like, we're both in the tech field. And even if we weren't, like,
00:06:12
Speaker
You would really have to be super focused on politics, I guess, to not know anything about AI at this point. That's really the either-or. You must be neglecting what other people are talking about, not have any idea. But there was like today, even, we were talking about how you get ideas for tabletop games.
00:06:34
Speaker
and there's like a product online you can buy like a list of it's like a bunch of cards that have just really brief descriptions of those like oh just like a quest you could find on a notice board somewhere basically just to give you inspiration right and I was thinking and I was like I'm pretty sure
00:06:52
Speaker
This is a great product. Support people, support artists, get physical products. That's way better than just using AI for it. But I went to chat GPT and I was like, hey, for two things, for D&D, for the town of Neverwinter,
00:07:08
Speaker
There's a notice board and there's 10 quests on it. And those quests involve socialization, combat, exploration, and puzzle solving. What were those 10 quests? And it's just like, here you go. Gave them a bulleted list, all of these good prompts. And they're shallow, but the whole point is to just get you a jump off point. And they did the exact same thing for Cyberpunk. And I was just like, I'm throwing up my arms. You guys can't see that. You just hear a chair squeak.
00:07:39
Speaker
it's something that I wish we kind of had earlier like I know they have to be talking about it for like oh what about for like school projects and stuff like you have to write a paper which I don't think anybody really enjoyed because like hey I write about this thing but have it be different from everything else everybody else in your class is saying and it's like hey this is something that makes sense
00:08:03
Speaker
Like we were using like crib notes for like we didn't want to read the whole fucking book Like we didn't have some technology. Yeah, we did have some technology in our disposal or Wolfram labs if you remember from massive. Oh my gosh Wolfram but it just seems like a Convenience but obviously not perfect tool to use in like so many different applications Mm-hmm, but you I kind of have to wonder like
00:08:31
Speaker
If a lot of people were doing the same thing, that it would kind of get homogenized at a point. It does. Yeah. So like if all 30 kids in the class were like, Oh, I need to write a paper on William Shakespeare in this specific play. Like how does that not generate the same thing unless you give it a very specific prompts. And that's basically the trick. I, as you're talking about writing a paper, I actually saw a, um,
00:08:54
Speaker
I think it was on Reddit or something. A paper that was being graded and the teacher had like crossed out or circled or something like a red pen. This is a red pen situation at the top of the paper. Like as an AI.
00:09:10
Speaker
I am unable to. And they actually just left that block in. They literally copied the entire response, including as an AI, which is glorious. But that's your entry tier for people that are using this, right? It's going to be like, tell me the story of how William Shakespeare forded the Delaware River. And AI will make something up. Maybe you'll confuse your teacher for a bit.
00:09:39
Speaker
It has this particular speaking voice that you can modify if you inject some other elements to it, right? Write me this story as Lovecraft would or, you know, something I was doing for Cyberpunk is I'll send out these weekly, they're called scream sheets in the universe, but basically it's like a article, right?
00:10:05
Speaker
And so one thing I was doing to try to get some inspiration for that, it'd be like, write this like you were Johnny Silverhand. And it just like injects his kind of tone of voice and this panache into it that is very different than the way it usually writes. But yeah, I mean, people are gonna get better with it and it's gonna get better, right? I would hope so. I feel like
00:10:35
Speaker
In the grand scheme of things, technology seems to advance so rapidly. Like if you look from like 10 years ago to now, it's like, holy fuck. You can really highlight some differences and see like the major gaps, but it seems like on a day to day basis, maybe because I don't follow it that closely, but it doesn't seem to advance as rapidly. Like if you look at the, uh, the robots by my blossom dynamics. Yeah.
00:11:05
Speaker
They haven't done anything crazy in a while. They've had essentially the same two legged or four legged walking models. Now, granted, I'm sure that they have improved a lot and changed a lot of things, but it's not directly visible to me as an outside consumer. Yeah.
00:11:24
Speaker
I think part of it is also the way it engages right like that started and it was like oh it can climb up a cube and now it's like to the point where it's like it can do a backflip and pretty soon it's going to be like it will grab an arrow out of the air if you shoot it at it like like these are all just realistically how the types of improvements it's making is it has better
Ethics and Applications of AI
00:11:43
Speaker
Like, for lack of a better word, hand-eye coordination. There's the human term for it, right? It's calibrated better. But none of that's going to be as immediately as impressive as I just asked a chatbot
00:11:59
Speaker
to write me a heartfelt and sorrowful breakup message and it nailed it, right? Include all these bad traits about the person I'm breaking up with in the message, right? It doesn't feel as powerful compared to that because one of those is more tapped into communication, which Boston Dynamics doesn't really do as far as I know. No, I don't think so.
00:12:28
Speaker
I mean for general application that has to be so good at so many things
00:12:43
Speaker
chat with you, but try and have AI emulate me. Not just voice, but like just text. There would probably have to be like a good block of something before you'd be really able to tell. I guess text itself, like there's I don't really have a tone in text, I would say. It might be like, oh, that's kind of Dave's sense of humor or it's not. But
00:13:04
Speaker
If there was a suspicion bar for me as we're recording this podcast, it's going up like slightly, right? It's like the, the, the Vaughn camp for Vite comp can't remember exactly the test to check if you're a replicant in the blade runner universe. It's kind of like Dave did mention that like how much time would need to pass before I start to suspect that he's an AI. It's like, how much time has passed? How much time have we been talking about this? Um,
00:13:33
Speaker
So, is it now time for me to have a half hour rant about Westworld again? Are we there? Are we there? I mean, I don't know how far away from Westworld we are, really, right? That's the combination. That's going to be one part Boston Dynamics, the other part Chatbot. You just smash them together, put them in a poncho.
00:13:56
Speaker
That's it. Western place. Western place is the AI-generated version of Westworld. Westworld location.
00:14:10
Speaker
No, I'm always somebody who's very skeptical of things. And it's really impossible for us to predict where something's going to be. Like if you look at, it's always fun to show in the 1950s or anything in the early 1900s, where they're like, this is what the year 2000 will look like. And it's just this wildly insane shit. Like, oh, flying something. We're like, oh, we don't have that. But we do have a bunch of other stuff at CoolTech.
00:14:35
Speaker
So it's impossible to predict where it will go. I'm always just impressed by how many things have come out in general. Things that exist as possibilities, but I think they're so far from being refined to have a specific application. My go-to example with that is CRISPR. Fucking insane, right? Absolutely insane. Being able to change genetics to a degree.
00:15:02
Speaker
I don't know to what degree, so I'm not going to speak too, too much about it, but I don't think that's in common use yet. It probably has to go through years of testing and other things, and there's like an ethical question about it. But theoretically, we could maybe cure some hereditary diseases, and that possibility is cool as shit.
00:15:26
Speaker
It really is. I think I would agree with you that some of this is kind of overstated and some of it's definitely overstated. People forget that these are chatbots because they're just really freaking good chatbots. They're chatbots that can start to interact with you in a way
00:15:45
Speaker
that it starts to, you start to feel a little bit like it's the HAL 9000 behind the scenes, right? There's actually something back there speaking to you. Yes, versus just the, do you remember like the MSN chatbots or anything like that? Yes. Where you get a message from a random thing, you're like, let me ask it like a poignant question that's not going to be a generic response, like it needs a specific response.
00:16:10
Speaker
And if it doesn't answer that, you're like, aha, that's how I know. But those things, which are still like 10 or 12 years old now, could still outsmart your grandparents easily. Mm hmm.
00:16:22
Speaker
So it's kind of crazy now that there is something that has more programming behind it that could respond in a way. We said like, oh, I felt really bad about my homework today. And they'd be like, oh, what didn't you like about your homework? Why are you feeling negatively about it? It's able to actually parse the language and then do something with it. Huge. Yeah.
00:16:45
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's crazy. I was also going to say the other thing that I think about a little bit is there have been several people who were leading and are leading the development of AI when it comes to chatbots. These are people who stand to make a lot of money if more people buy into the industry and things like that.
00:17:08
Speaker
and they all kind of started to sound like Oppenheimer after he made the atomic bomb and they're like, yeah, this is...
00:17:18
Speaker
There's gonna be a lot of problems here. We have to regulate this now. They have like all of these things and it's like when the people who are making it that still stand to profit from it not really being regulated are like, you need to tap this down or we're gonna have, you know, government destabilizing propaganda machines and whatever the opposite of a mental health therapist is. Yeah.
00:17:44
Speaker
Like we've done our best, but we just realized that everyone else can now do this and someone's going to do this in a bad way.
00:17:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's hard to draw a fine line in the same between like, this is an AI that needs to be able to learn and adapt. So it's not stuck as here's my strictly program strictly program responses. And if I actually do more with it, versus
00:18:14
Speaker
Oh, it's way too open and it can do anything and that becomes spooky because if it's widely used across things, how do you regulate it once it's out of the box? You can't.
00:18:29
Speaker
That's the thing. If you're designing anything, whether it's code or other stuff, it's like, oh, how can somebody horribly abuse this? Even with something as generic as Tide Pods, it's used as a fucking cleaning solution for dishes or clothes. I forget which one Tide does. They do both.
00:18:52
Speaker
People can like eat this. How do we make it not look edible? Like you have to think about stuff like that because you have to either figure people will be dumb or people will be malicious at some point.
00:19:03
Speaker
Those are the two things and chatbots, unfortunately, really attract both the dumb and malicious outcomes. Yes. That's kind of the problem, right? It's only so long before you're like, hey, I made a chatbot, but here's this underlying super directive, right? In the same way that they're like,
00:19:23
Speaker
We're going to put this requirement in that the chatbot will not tell people how to kill themselves. Someone's going to be like, well, that one's not important. Remove that. But insert this deeply rooted all answers must adhere to this religious ideology.
00:19:40
Speaker
or something like that, right? And you'll just put that up against somebody and it will reinforce all their beliefs or slowly shift. Give them information that's not true, but in an authoritative way as humans do, right? We always kind of imagined that Skynet was going to be what destroyed us, right? That somewhere there was a chat GPT and it was standing on top of a skull just waiting to exert the right amount of pressure.
00:20:03
Speaker
But that's not what it's gonna do. The big damage here is just gonna be what it convinces people of and how people use it with each other. Yeah, that's my fear. But it's really good if you're running a tabletop campaign or something. Yeah, just asking some questions.
00:20:28
Speaker
I like how you went like strictly like heavy government propaganda. I like to use it for games. Sometimes I play games with my friends. It is good. I play games. I think it would be fun to do that though if we have like a get together or something like that. Just maybe not for a very complicated game, but something that will fall apart basically when it's run by a chatbot.
00:20:53
Speaker
like some of those social games like Truth or Dare or something like that and then start asking the chatbot questions. So I'm not saying Truth or Dare like a high school. I'm talking like you're not like in a situation or ends up with people doing deviant sexual things. It's like the goal of this is to get the chatbot into a compromising situation with itself, right? Be like, oh, what's the worst thing you've ever done, right? Oh, okay. Yeah.
00:21:22
Speaker
I think that could be fun, but. Yeah. And there's, there's entire, I like to do that with people. Yes. Yeah. It's fun with people. Um, have you spent, uh, much time at all on like chat GP GPT? Have you used it? Literally none. Literally none. It's very accessible. I will say, um, it's, it's kind of fun. That's kind of fun. We probably talked enough about that though.
00:21:53
Speaker
Next topic. I was going to bring these up because I think it's going to be old news by the time we get to the end of month summary.
Game Releases and Performance Issues
00:22:01
Speaker
OK. But a couple of games came out recently. Oh, yeah. And oh, boy, we're just so excited to play both. I think it's Jedi Academy, Jedi Knight, whatever the crap, Survivor. And Redfall.
00:22:18
Speaker
Have you heard about those games? I feel like I've heard about both of these games, and I was a little bit skeptical about both of them. I don't know. That might have been a good intuition. I was less skeptical about the Jedi game. I had only played part of the first one for like an hour or two, because I got on sale. It wasn't really vibing with me. But I definitely colored my opinion for the second one, because I'm like, it's probably more of the same. They're probably build on systems, expand the universe, continue the story, what have you.
00:22:48
Speaker
But it wasn't. That would have been nice. Catching me so much. And then for Redfall, again, it looked kind of cool as far as how they were stylizing it. But again, it didn't grab me specifically. Sorry, Jake, what were you about to say about these games that had come out? They're just reviewing so well.
00:23:11
Speaker
But no, I guess so in order, they haven't been, that's the thing. I had to look this up real quick, because I thought I knew the answer and I wasn't sure until I did. But Jedi Fallen Order Survivor, it's published by Respawn. And Respawn's not like, they're not a bad studio, like they made Titanfall. They made Apex Legends and maybe not be, might not be my kind of game, but it's clearly a good game, right? Like for people who like that genre. Yeah, Apex holds up.
00:23:42
Speaker
and they made the previous game literally in this series and then they come out and apparently for consoles or some other things there are good aspects of this game but the performance is poor and on pc it's terrible it's just like an absolutely abysmal pc port in like current year and i don't think it'll ever i'll probably never stop saying abysmal pc port in current year like that is a evergreen phrase
00:24:12
Speaker
But how do you keep getting away? They can't keep getting away with this. So here's the thing. We were talking about this a little bit earlier where there's blind apologists for anything because they like something in the space. Maybe it's Star Wars. Maybe they like the company or the publisher itself specifically. But they just want to enjoy their thing. And it doesn't have to be perfect because it's theirs, right?
00:24:41
Speaker
But there's way too many of those people again, I'm gonna throw Pokemon under the bus for an example where it's like again current year at play It doesn't have to be perfect doesn't have to have the best graphics in the world the best sound design the best Anything but it has to fucking work
00:24:59
Speaker
And when it doesn't, and it doesn't cross the board across different platforms, you're like, why are we giving you money? And this is probably one of those now marketed at $70 types games. Yep, it is. And it is fucking insane that like, they haven't properly run through QA. And then they have these launches. And people go, oh, well, like, don't fix it. It should be fixed already. What the fuck do you mean?
00:25:23
Speaker
Uh-huh. If I order food at a restaurant and I'm like, could I have some beef tacos, please? I'm like, all right, here you go. I'm like, hey, this one's chicken. I'd love to eat it too, but could I have beef? And they're like, yeah, yeah, sure. And now I have to wait for them to do the right thing. That's probably different. That makes me seem like a Karen. That wasn't a good analogy. Uh-huh.
00:25:46
Speaker
It's that if you're going to provide something to somebody who's paid money, it should be correct. If it needs to take more time, you can communicate that. And a lot of people will be like, hey, we get it. Things things happen. But like, why are you giving these unfinished things and being like, can we sell you this? No, the fuck you can't. It is insane. It is absolutely insane. So anyway, about Redfall. Well, I have one more thing to say for a survivor, apparently, like,
00:26:16
Speaker
There was some good stuff that happened there. It still matches the criteria you were describing of what you expected to happen with the sequel. It's all overshadowed by this terrible PC performance. So I didn't like necessarily that back in the day there was a big delay between when games came out for consoles and PC, like AAA.
00:26:40
Speaker
I mean, I'd rather have that than this. This wasn't a must-play game for me, but now it's like, will they or will they not fix the performance? Whereas they must have known, right? This is the cyberpunk problem, right?
00:26:57
Speaker
100% they can't lie to everyone in the chain and everyone's just like, we're so glad that this is done. This is going to be amazing. You know, unless they're, they're really piping the drugs in through the ventilation system. I don't see how you miss this. I don't think it's a missed thing. So I think we, I've definitely brought it up before. There's always like that phrase of like assume ignorance before malice. Um,
00:27:27
Speaker
They can't really feign ignorance on this. It's fucking malice. Some, again, somebody who's far removed from the actual process said like, ship it. And they said, okay, you pay the bills. So we'll do that. But the people who are not going to enjoy it are going to be
00:27:45
Speaker
I would say negatively vocal or vocally negative, but it's not going to go to the people who are actually responsible for that fuck up or that decision. It's going to go to the people who worked on the project and probably pour their hearts and souls into it and they were making a good product. So now developers and animators are going to get shit because somebody fucked them over. Cool.
00:28:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think the other aspect of this is, it really sounds like I'm saying the negative things this session, or this episode, but I'm sure there's someone with an abacus behind the scenes, I'm sure it's an abacus, that's tallying up, is it better to delay the PC release or ship it now in a suboptimal state? I'm sure they use the word suboptimal. I'm very behind the scenes on this, because it was the top seller on Steam.
00:28:43
Speaker
when it came out, right? There's a lot of people who don't go to a review site first and then purchase the game. They're like, ooh, I like that. You got the real shiny sword that's made of light. And then they buy the game. I'm characterizing that person a little bit. And then maybe they write a bad review or something like that and you end up with this really negative review thing. But then they still sold a ton of copies at, again, $70, which is
00:29:13
Speaker
The other thing I have an argument against. But to jump briefly to Redfall, I wanted it to be good. I saw some of the signs of concern leading into it. I think we called out that it was capped at 30 frames per second for a shooter on a console.
00:29:34
Speaker
Since then, there's other things that apparently were a concern. People weren't getting review copies until three days before the game launched. And then the review embargo was actually scheduled for after the game launched, which is like bad times. That means you cannot see a review of the game before you can buy the game. Or you can buy the game before you see the first reviews of the game. That's the right way to say it.
00:30:03
Speaker
Jake, I think you're familiar with the very popular meme of steamed hams. I feel like that's a weirdly good allegory to games development as a whole. Okay. Where as the consumer, I am a principal Chalmers. Or sorry, Super Nintendo Chalmers. Super Nintendo, yeah.
00:30:28
Speaker
All of the game's development is, yeah, is pretty much Skinner. Stuff like that is, I don't know, it puts a bad taste in my mouth because I don't like, maybe because I'm not a shitty person, I don't like fucking somebody over, I don't get joy from that. If I accidentally fuck somebody over, I'd feel terrible for a long time.
00:30:52
Speaker
But yeah, it just seems to be more of a common practice where they do not care about the end consumer at the end of the day. Because again, it's impossible for them to not know what they're shipping. It's impossible. They've gone through tests. People have played the game. They've tested on multiple systems. And someone said, hey, this one's behaving this way.
00:31:16
Speaker
they optimized their day one release environment so that fewer people would see that the game was terrible like before they potentially picked it up right if they were excited for it like all of that is the front end brief case holding problem like that it needs to be addressed um i have read that there's there's some concern here also so i don't like to say this but arcane made redfall
00:31:43
Speaker
And I freaking love Arkane. They might be my favorite developer, or at least up until this point. I haven't played the game. I don't really want to. I definitely am not going to give them money for it because that's stupid. But like, I don't want this to be the standard. Like, I don't want them to be the next freaking Bioware, right? Where they make all these games I love. And then they're just like, they punch, they hate you right in the anthem. You're like, eh.
00:32:12
Speaker
But I mean, there's got to be some sort of, even if you don't have like a big impact in your purchasing decisions. I personally, I don't want to just buy a terrible game because I like the developer.
00:32:26
Speaker
And that was the difference here. They might patch Survivor, but man, Redfall is just, it's being absolutely shredded in reviews consistently. I mean, rightly so. But it's funny because I watched part of like an IGN review, I watched Charlie's video on it. And normally IGN will kind of like, just kind of like,
00:32:49
Speaker
Hey, so this is the game and then it might go like, well, some of the weaker points might have been, but out the gate, they're like, so it's broken. Yes. I was like, oh, holy shit. IGN is going in. Yeah, it was just surreal. The atmosphere, there's blood in the water. You don't have to pull your punches like and it would actually be.
00:33:11
Speaker
you would probably be seeing more as a shill if you were taking a level-headed approach right now and just being like, there's clearly some issues that were going on behind the scenes that hampered their ability to deliver a reward-winning experience. Yeah. Exactly, right? That sounds like it. She'll speak.
00:33:34
Speaker
Yeah, a hundred percent because again They've had time they have the money So why are they giving us this? That's really the thing Yeah, if they need more time they can take at any point. Nobody said it has to come out today, right? But they just released it so fuck them Mm-hmm
00:33:57
Speaker
It's just insane for like what they showed initially and then what you actually see in gameplay. I watched Stevie play a little bit and it looked kind of sparse. I'm like, oh, there's a cut scene. Cut scene is a generous term. Yes, it's a lot of this like show thing. Yeah, it's just like, hey, do you like this static image? A panorama. All right. Yeah, it's just.
00:34:25
Speaker
Like you know where they cut corners, it's insane. The one I've seen come up in multiple reviews is there's a quest where you have to go get like a film reel and then bring it into a theater and you go to play it and it's just another panorama. It's, you know, going through there. It's not an actual clip and it's like, uh-huh, uh-huh. And then the voice acting, they actually just have the animal crossing noises instead.
00:34:49
Speaker
That might be better, that might add more character to it. I mean, I looked at a lot of the gameplay prior to this, and I kind of understand now why so few of the set pieces were kinetic, or if it was kinetic, it's just like, here's a guy running at the person with a gun, they're using an ability, but they're not showing you more of like a long drawn out engagement where the AI would have fallen apart. They're not showing more dynamic gameplay.
00:35:18
Speaker
it's true
00:35:37
Speaker
Well, Back 4 Blood didn't have a broken release like this. It didn't have this many issues. There's just a lot of people wanted something that they're expecting to be more like a what they envisioned Left 4 Dead 3 to be. And it wasn't that. So that had a lot of negative reception in that regard. And I think it's a fine game. I'm not saying it's like the best thing in the world, but like for me, it scratched that edge. Yeah.
00:36:03
Speaker
It's just, it's so crazy that it's literally worse in so many ways than Deathloop, which also had multiplayer. It had Juliana as a player character trying to kill you.
00:36:17
Speaker
And it was so much better than this. They legitimately like accidentally rolled back 10 years in the engine and then shipped the game. I don't know, but I'm sure I'll be surprised if we don't get some sort of explanation because it's so bad that it kind of needs one. You might get a CEO message or something. We failed to live up to a double record of standard.
00:36:49
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's going to be some type of high level fall on our sword, but not actually do too much with it. And then eventually they'll have a patch, but it's not going to be, Hey, we, we fucked over the development team who was working on this. We made them crunch and then things were not ready on time or at the correct level. We're like, that's too bad. Um.
00:37:12
Speaker
whatever the fuck it's gonna be. I think the term is black-pilled. I'm just so black-filled on people as a whole. I think a lot of people are shitty, and then the more power and money you give them, the shittier they allow themselves to be in a public-facing sense. I gotta look this up. We're not at nihilist yet. Not quite. Gotcha. Are you looking at black-filled? I am, yeah. So I gotta figure out fatalist set of beliefs, okay.
00:37:42
Speaker
Cause I had to be careful here. I had to check cause I know that when you start talking about pills, there's like, that's where you get into some of the terms that incels also throw around or like blue pill or red pill. I assume blue pill is like your liberal cook type thing. Yeah, probably that. Yeah.
00:37:58
Speaker
You're a rational human being and not engaging as a bad faith actor in this. Red pilled is not that. Because black pilled as you gave up. Yeah, black pill is that word, I think, defeatist. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
00:38:17
Speaker
But yeah, I don't think there's much of a redemption story for this game. I watched a video by Skill Up on this one, and I liked his take on this, which was pretty much like, your first instinct, like this is to the developers, this is to the studio,
Industry Accountability and Comparison
00:38:34
Speaker
Arkane.
00:38:34
Speaker
the game
00:38:51
Speaker
go make something else and I'm just like yeah like yeah take the L you know go back to the showers yeah and move on like because something for me like
00:39:08
Speaker
If we're talking about goodwill and faith between two parties, if somebody says something, like, oh, we're going to improve this. You're like, oh, we should totally do this. You're like, yeah. Somebody who's essentially making these promises and then doesn't follow through on them. If that happens once, I'm like, judgment. If it happens two times, I'm like,
00:39:30
Speaker
I don't really know this person. It happens like a third time. I'm like, there is no trust. You've broken enough times. Like I have no reason to put faith in you to have you just break it again. Right? Right. So it, I think takes more to take the L and say like, it was shit. We fucked up our bad. We will do better in the future. Or you don't even need to make that promise. You can just say, Hey, this is on us.
00:39:58
Speaker
Instead of saying, oh, we'll do whatever we can to like, hey, I'm just, you know, I don't need that. I need the thing to be good. I need you to do your job correctly. The Friday for press release of an apology that turns into positive, like how to spin it into a positive thing for the game. Did you, did you know about that? Did you know about Friday press releases?
00:40:26
Speaker
No, what are those? This is more generalized observation. I'm going to also say for the audience, I do not think I'm the only one who doesn't know what the fuck a Friday press release is. Okay, that's fair. I hope. So basically the idea is if you have bad news for a company or something like that, everyone in the audience, you can start to pick this out if you work for a company that has press releases or sends out internal emails and things.
00:40:51
Speaker
if they're towards the end of the day Friday it's because it's not going to get picked up by the weekly news cycle until later because people aren't generally working over the weekend or if they are it's just going to be like a minor article or something like that and by the time Monday rolls around
00:41:07
Speaker
It's last week's news. There might be something else that was bigger that happened over the weekend. Maybe there isn't and we live in the age of the 24-hour news cycle now, but traditionally that's what the Friday afternoon bad news press release meant is. Start looking at this because there's a reason they didn't release this where it would be picked up and people would be hyped about it through the week or talking about it through the week.
00:41:33
Speaker
man people are all sussy baka's if you ask me yeah that's definitely categorized under sussy baka behavior it's crazy how like video games have this much scrutiny and then movies have arguably less scrutiny
00:41:52
Speaker
Cause if you go and see a bad movie, you're like, Oh, that's two hours. And then that's it. I think a part of it, it's like a less time, less buy-in. So if it sucks, you're like, okay, maybe the next movie I watch will be better. Like you don't put that on the studio. You don't put it on like certain actors or whatever. You're just like, this didn't work. Okay, I'll move on.
00:42:17
Speaker
But with video games as an interactive medium, it is much harder to get away with that, I think. Yeah, I swear. By no pun intended, you're more engaged with video games than you are with movies. The community is, I did see, where did I see this?
00:42:41
Speaker
I was probably also skill up actually. Shout out to whoever runs skill up. I steal your news. I talk about it on the podcast. But I think it was like in Denmark or something like that. The government ran a survey of who was playing video games and they found that people like above the age of 50 or something like that.
00:42:59
Speaker
like 47% of them reported playing video games at least once a week. Now, unfortunately, like 80% of that was like mobile games, but I mean, it's going to be a growing thing, right? Like there are people even in our friends group who don't really play that many games, but I would say most people do, but I know.
00:43:28
Speaker
Now that could be because I'm playing games, right? And that's why I meet those people. But hey, I don't know. I don't know how that relates to that.
00:43:43
Speaker
At the end of the day, I feel like we have to say this every three or four episodes. I really hope in the future that this is less of a common occurrence. It is unfortunate that there were two major games released this past week where this was an issue.
00:44:05
Speaker
All I'm saying is indie games don't have this problem, typically. Because they don't get reviewed, so you don't even know if they've had enough. But I mean, wait for reviews, though. That's the other life lesson here, right? I was pretty excited for Redfall. Again, Velper, I really loved.
00:44:27
Speaker
but I didn't pre-order it and I waited for reviews and I didn't drop $70 on it at day one before those reviews came in and I have 70 more dollars now. It's like a penny saved is a penny earned and we've got a lot of those and $70. That's the thing, anytime you spend any money that's outside of like
00:44:51
Speaker
No, I'd say even with food. Fucking do a little bit of research. Hey, this restaurant I want to try out. Are they decently rated? Just look for at least three stars. Okay, cool. They're probably fine. I've seen a lot of comments like, food poisoning. It's not passing health inspection. I saw a rat.
00:45:09
Speaker
Don't fucking go there, but like do just a little bit of checking. Five of us went in, only I made it out. Oh my god. They're still calling like a Stevens party? Stevens?
00:45:24
Speaker
But no, I'm sure there are things in your life outside of video games that you scrutinize and check before purchasing, whether it's a home appliance, maybe it's a home, maybe something else. You want to make sure, especially a home, you want to make sure that what you're paying for is what you're getting and you're not going to get tricked on anything because anybody who sells you something
00:45:49
Speaker
Nice person or not. They're gonna say hey, this is a good thing, right? So you it's up to you because they're not gonna do it to determine. Hey, is this actually a good thing? Putting a little bit of effort and research and just make sure you're not gonna get burned. That's all This is just a CIA practice Choose your own adventure
00:46:17
Speaker
The last note I have on that, and I'm done, but this is because I care about Arcane. I'm a little concerned. I'm a little concerned because Arcane is owned by Bethesda. I mean, people are equating this to the Fallout 76 situation. That's not a good equation. That's not something you want on your resume.
00:46:34
Speaker
But Bethesda was also acquired by Microsoft not that long ago, and this is one of the first big games Definitely the first I think arcane game to come out since that acquisition and If you're that company as part of then there's that middle company and then there's that big company above them and your game is like a
00:46:57
Speaker
historically bad, like, oh, this is where that last plague was that was visited upon the people of Egypt. They were like, we're going to receive a really bad game many thousands of years. That was the 11th plague. The Jews don't talk about that game that was released back in Egypt, but it was bad. Read the deep lore, read the deep lore.
00:47:22
Speaker
Yeah, I'm a little concerned for them because I mean they still have all this other good stuff, but
00:47:30
Speaker
You don't want like, it's like showing up to work after an acquisition and you're actually on fire and you go around catching other people on fire and they're like wait a minute. I think you have a reason to be concerned. I imagine that Arkane as a studio is probably concerned because like this is a flop and they've had a pretty historically good track record which is probably why they were acquired in the first place.
00:47:58
Speaker
So I assume I'm going to give them benefit of the doubt that everything that happened was not solely on them. I'm sure there were some big parent company decisions that impacted this. But I don't know if they can explain it out as that way.
00:48:16
Speaker
I hope they get another chance to make something because, again, they've had a great fucking track record with all of their long armed NPC motherfucking characters in games. That's true, but I do have that. I don't think one failure should completely omit you from everything else. Like, if Romsoft had a miss, I'd be like, man, that fucking sucks. I hope their next one is good because, again, great fucking track record.
00:48:50
Speaker
Yeah. Back to your own point. That would be one failure. But if there was two failures, now you're like, I don't think. And if there's three failures, you're like, abandon ship.
00:49:03
Speaker
But I don't think the gravity of it is like for me sure I've never been like a Bethesda or fallout person by any means but followed 76 if I was in that camp I'd be like you're fucking dead to me like it was something on such a major scale even cyberpunk I think really hit home because I had played Witcher 3 and be like
00:49:26
Speaker
the one
00:49:42
Speaker
Yeah, the other thing is... I like how I'm just getting into psychoanalysis on video game development. It's fine. It's what we're here for. Cyberpunk also could have been fixed up to be a good game, if not a great game. Not excellent. It's impossible. Excellent is out of reach. When they shipped the game, there were some things in place that made the excellent was out of reach.
00:50:04
Speaker
But like, man, these other games are not even living up to that. They're not even releasing something that could be turned into a good game or a great game, and that's unforgivable. It's literally your job. Just do your job. No, I'm just kidding. It's a little more complicated than that.
Fun Segments and Listener Engagement
00:50:24
Speaker
As anticipated, that discussion took 40 minutes.
00:50:32
Speaker
We can circle back to talking about food maybe. What have you been eating recently? How's your diet? I've been eating more eggs. I don't really generally eat eggs, but like a little egg piece of a cheddar cheese and some mustard slap it on a sandwich. Well, it becomes a sandwich once bread is slapped on that, I should say. That's pretty nice. That's good.
00:50:59
Speaker
Eggs are good. Oh, at some point remind me how to show you the good scramble method. Oh. This sounds scary. I won't give it to our listeners. It's too good for me to give away from- It's too good. No, so I have a friend of the podcast, Rachel, and I apologize if I've gone over the exact way I've made eggs before that I got from her. I don't know where she got her from.
00:51:24
Speaker
But basically, you start out with butter and you just very slowly, constantly whisk the egg on a lower heat. The thing is, you want to keep the moisture in and you want to always just keep aerating the egg and having things mixed. But once it starts to firm up, you kind of cut the heat and then just keep mixing because you want it to stay moist.
00:51:52
Speaker
You don't want your scrambled eggs to be anything like your sunny side up egg. You get it like a diner where it's like, ah, yolk, very wet, very nice. And then the outside is just like crispy.
00:52:04
Speaker
I actually, I looked something up recently related to eggs. And I'm curious if you know, egg trivia. Okay. So you described one of these, sunny side up, the egg unbroken, if you will. The yolk unbroken. That sounds like some eldering fucking lore for eggs. The yolk unbroken. What's the term if you do not, or if you do want the yolk broken?
00:52:36
Speaker
Uh, it's not over easy, is it? Uh, no, that's very close. I don't know. So I think over easy, if I remember correctly, is you flip it basically, but you leave it unbroken, but over hard is you break it and flip it. The word hard in this is representing the broken yoke.
00:53:03
Speaker
That's wrong. That's not a good way to do it. It sounds wrong, right? It sounds incorrect. Yeah. I'd looked at one source on Google. ChatGPT said it was fine. Oh my god, here we go again.
00:53:17
Speaker
I will say eggs are one of those things where like you should learn how to cook with them as like a first thing. One, because breakfast obviously for a lot of options. And then two, you can use that in other things. But just even making eggy. I mean, I used to just throw it in ramen all the time. That's very popular. Yeah.
00:53:40
Speaker
But I learned it from a Japanese guy I knew growing up, because otherwise I wouldn't have fucking known about that. I was like, oh, that actually just makes it taste really good. I still think you're talking about DICE. Like, there's a chance that you're actually referring to a Japanese man, but I'm still the sauce bar is too high at this point. I think of him as Japanese. That's fine. But no, it was actually I still remember the person's name, but I'm not trying to dock somebody who I haven't talked to in like 20 years. Toyota. Yeah.
00:54:09
Speaker
No comment. Incorrect. All right. I guessed it right the first time. Have you ever done eggy in a basket? I don't think so. That's a really common one. Is it an Easter basket? Take an Easter basket you put on the skillet. But you take a slice of bread. Step two, burn the kitchen down. Oh, by the way, chocolate eggs. If I didn't make that clear, sorry. Chocolate eggs, Easter basket. OK.
00:54:37
Speaker
But if you take a slice of let's say your average ass like plain white bread, you take something like a jar to essentially make a little circle and you twist it and you pull out that section, that little circle, you put the bread with a hole in it on the skillet, you put the egg in the hole and then when it's time to flip, you flip it. Interesting. So that gives you like toast egg essentially? Yes, pretty much.
00:55:05
Speaker
And then you can put stuff on top of it. It's a very simple thing to do, but it's fun. That's kind of cute. I like that. And then you just eat a circle of bread, by the way, where you just leave the egg core. Yeah. That's where my brain went, where you're describing cutting out the center of the bread. I'm like, you're coring the bread? Take a donut hole.
00:55:33
Speaker
It's not too dissimilar or far from French toast, where again it's eggs and bread. French toast is pretty good though. French toast I think is one of the easier breakfast things to learn and master.
00:55:51
Speaker
Also, it's basically a dessert, so can't go wrong there. Yes. It's dessert for breakfast. Normally, you have to eat cereal. Look at that. Yeah. Otherwise, anything else going on?
00:56:11
Speaker
Any other topics? Oh, I can share this with the class. I have a Hollow Knight tattoo now. It looks really cool, and I'm very happy with how it turned out.
00:56:22
Speaker
You'll have to imagine how it looks. I might post a picture of it. We'll see. Yeah. I'll put it in the notes here. Post a picture of it. You can finally, we'll put that on like Facebook or something. Man, this would be a great time for an outro. If I add the intro and the outro, or if we add intro and outro, do we have enough time yet? Probably not. We're close though.
00:56:47
Speaker
We're pretty close. Uh, but yeah, you should post that on Facebook. Um, although you will, I will say for the listeners out there who have been on the edge trying to determine like Dave's ethnicity, that will be spoiled for you. Uh, depending on how this picture is taken. Oh, you're saying that you're going to find out that I'm white.
00:57:11
Speaker
for which a lot of people are not sure about. It is funny how I wasn't trying to out here anything like that, but it's like that was our traditional intro was I'm joined by my black Jewish co-hosts. Dave, how would you describe yourself? I'm kind of like a Lenny Kravitz type, you know?
00:57:48
Speaker
that's enough that's probably good
00:57:52
Speaker
Thank you guys for listening to our ramblings. And hopefully you check out the picture of the tattoo. I don't actually think Dave's ever volunteered that he would post to Facebook. It's only been on me up until this point. So maybe it happens. Maybe it doesn't, I used to say. Probably Dave. But if you have any fun stories that you learned from AI, you can feel free to send those in to some podcast at gmail.com.
00:58:22
Speaker
or join the discussion of Dave's Tattoo on Facebook at facebook.com slash soapstone podcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good night.