I don't get this; Bioware was bought from MS - another soulless megacorp (which for the record is suffering from the same issues today). During the time EA was 'running it into the ground', they released all but one of the core Mass Effect titles, and 3 Dragon Age games, all of which are considered to be good to excellent.
Usually when fraud is involved, people don't care about justice, they care about getting their money back, which means often the less legally competent party (who are often victims themselves) have to pay up, and good luck getting your money back.
The story sounds like CashApp didn't do proper KYC, so they should be held liable. Also I very much doubt that someone built up a sophisticated operation just for 1 victim, so there must be others. Why doesn't the police connect the dots?
They don't care. My iPhone was stolen. Through a circuitous route, I was able to get the details of the eBay seller, someone who lived near me, and whose listing pages couldn't have been more blatant if it had a neon sign on it: 100+ laptops, mostly Macs, "no chargers, no accessories", often activation locked. Same with phones.
So I went to my PD, with the buyer information, the seller, all of this. Their response:
"Well, he probably didn't steal it himself."
Huh, "Isn't it still a crime to knowingly sell stolen property?"
"..."
"..."
Nothing done. As of a year later he was still steadily adding multiple phones and laptops a week to his listings.
I'm not a lawyer, but it feels like you should consult one. If you have the legal information of this person and they have possession of your activation locked phone, sounds like you could at least sue him civilly or in small claims court for the value of it, if the DA won't do anything
I've been doing a lot of devops lately, writing tons of templates, configs, scripts in like 3 programming languages, wrestling with 'cloud-based' constructs - with LLMs ofc.
LLMs make all this work easy, otherwise it'd be borderline impossible.
It's all BS. Hosting a CRUD app should be an executable for the server (written in boring lang/lib of my choice) + an SQLite db. Of course it's a bit more than that, but not by much.
There are wonderful IDEs and tools out there which help humans do the task, and good design keeps the complexity under control.
LLMs on the other hand both are sources of the mess and solutions to it. Without good tooling you'll be much more inclined to reach for an LLM.
> LLMs make all this work easy, otherwise it'd be borderline impossible.
This is exactly it. We all know and envy that guy who can bang out a script on demand that makes any task simple, and we also know we'll never be that guy.
LLMs are superhuman knowledge remixers. And that's exactly what we need to deal with a lot of software development tasks.
Thanks to the magic of Google, I've learned that Mexican scorpion antivenom was in fact developed in Mexico, by a Mexican company, and now you did too.
Weird, I have a friend who's a hardcore DA fan, and he liked it, but told me it's very different.
Tbh, I think the issue is that old RPG designers understood players have very different values and goals, hell they even wrote some academic articles on it:
The devs of today played the games of yesterday, and felt that the game catered to them, and then sought out making a game like that, but they didn't put in the effort or consideration to appeal to other kinds of players.
And turns out there's economics involved - while people playing shooters want to shoot people in general, RPG players are a diverse bunch with different needs, and if you don't scratch the itch of a certain subgroup, that's part of the audience gone.
Which results in a bomb - a game made for 20% of the playerbase will sell 20% of the copies, and will be a flop.
I disagree. This is the strategy taken by AAA games and is the reason why the AAA games are in such rough shape.
A game that tries to appeal to 100% of people will, at best, be a lowest-common-denominator mess, and very likely manage to turn off everyone because it includes something that they actively don't want in their game.
A game that targets a specific niche while not caring about others does not have that problem. Because the target audience is smaller, it can't support enormous budgets, but enormous budgets don't usually mean the difference between a good and bad game. And a game targeting a niche takes less money to develop, anyway.
I'm not sure it's the niche or targeting problem. I think we're getting games with flat out fewer features and smaller scope than earlier entries in the series because _so_ much energy is disproportionately put into graphics. DA:VG was trimmed and had vastly less complexity and depth than any previous DA.
I'm not certain if that's time/budget versus "simplifying the game for everyone".
It's easier to balance a game with 10 "sets" of armor + weapon - as opposed to having a myriad options of armor per body part and weapon combos/etc. DA:VG was the most beautiful but shallow Dragon Age game.
Graphics is part of the problem, certainly, but at least it's moderately independent of the rest. You can scale the quality up and down without affecting the rest (within limits: having many armor variants, etc. are more costly with greater graphic fidelity). As far as the rest: all of these different gameplay mechanics have a complexity cost. You can try to add everything, but then you run into balance problems and/or it just feels too complex for most people, not to mention having a high development cost. So something needs to be simplified, and that means either reducing the depth or reducing the mechanics. But if you've already decided to include something for everyone, that necessarily means that everything is shallow.
I think it is also that DA intentionally had a very complex story tapestry, mostly tried to avoid resets between games, and Veilguard went very deep in Elf and Mage storylines at something of a cost of other storylines. If you were very invested in Elf and Mage storylines (say you had been playing and/or romancing Elves and Mages and Elf Mages since DA:O) then Veilguard was extremely personal and culminated a lot of deep lore things and personal stakes things. On the other hand if you didn't side that way/play that way, I could see it feeling a lot less memorable/important.
> Which results in a bomb - a game made for 20% of the playerbase will sell 20% of the copies, and will be a flop.
That's not a given at all. A good game targeted at a nieche can well be more successful than some jack of all trades master of none amalgamation that tries to cateer to everyone but fails in being truly great for anyone.
Halo went from <200 people making a game from scratch to >2k people making the same game on an engine (without multiplayer) - so the design scope is even smaller now.
I don't get how you can lower the scope, have 10x the staff, and still overwork yourself - I mean, I certainly think it's possible, but that speaks of colossal mismanagement.
I mean the graphics got better (not that anyone cares, people still play old games, if graphics were a true differentiator, people would say new games are better because they look better, but they don't).
This is very hard to explain - and so expensive it's actively killing the industry.
> market for small, portable nuclear reactors is exclusively limited to submarines and aircraft carriers
SMRs are being commercialized. Likewise nuclear cargo ships have been seriously studies. Nuclear reactor powered (not just RTG) satellites have been built.
I know this is beside your point, but I think if we figured out how to commercialize this, demand would come.
It is, because just like you mentioned, there's no exponential physics to back up growth. LLMs have to stop scaling up compute, because there's only so much resources.
But even if we think back to the previous decade or two (sans AI), most of tech has been a a red queen's race - developing and improving stuff, without any real substantial results.
Microservices and orchestration are not better than old monoliths. Electron apps are not better than native. Most programs people actually use have decades-old codebases.
Video games of today don't look substantially better or play different than ones from 15 years ago.
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