Total Playtime: Stoatal Playtime; Our DLSS 5 Is ON
Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.
It's a news episode this week, and you know what that means: people getting cross about AI. The results are at least entertaining, though, starting with NVIDIA's DLSS technology which promises to yassify game characters regardless of circumstance or the artistic decisions of their creators. This is seemingly in service of photorealism, which has been the final goal of graphics card manufacturers since the days when they put weird CGI fairies on the boxes, but has never really been creatively interesting and never will be because we already know what reality looks like.
It nevertheless appears inevitable that the technology will be both widely available and widely used despite making the output actively worse, making it the videogame equivalent of TVs using motion smoothing by default, but in the meantime the memes have been pretty good and that's the best we can hope for in the grim darkness of the far future.
This week's other big AI lols came from Krafton, and a legal judgement which stated that the company's CEO asked ChatGPT how to screw the Subnautica developers out of their bonus and proceeded to follow its advice despite a number of real human lawyers telling him it wouldn't work. A real human judge has now confirmed this, so now the founders of Unknown Worlds have to return to work and ship the game in what we can only assume are conditions of extreme awkwardness.
There is also time to consider Jeff Kaplan's tales of the doomed Overwatch League, Alice's tales of catching Brendy stealing confectionary from YouTubers, and a zoo creature cursed with sentience and a podcast. They've even played some games, too, which is the sort of thing that happens when I'm away.
You can listen to the episode right here on this page, or find it in your podcasting app of choice:
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/total-playtime/id1790845149
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1jPv8y9BRzqATFT7zXRxKW
RSS: https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/6786cf573ceecdbe85eac067
Acast: https://shows.acast.com/total-playtime
I can't stress enough that you should not email Alice about Disco Elysium but we do encourage feedback on almost every other topic at totalplaytimepod@gmail.com.
Links!
ARC Raiders is replacing some of the genAI, and Digital Foundry saw Nvidia's DLSS5 and thought it was great, but everyone else made fun of it. Nvidia's CEO says we're all wrong; Kotaku asked a bunch of devs and they all hate it too. The Subnautica 2 lawsuit got weird (apparently it's coming out in May now, a decision Brendy describes as 'SUSPICIOUSLY fast'), Jeff Kaplan had a bad time.
Games!
Nate clamped his own mouth shut rather than talk about AoEII again, but Brendy has been playing Slay The Spire 2, and Alice has been playing Esoteric Ebb! They wrote about them on this very website. Alice also got to play the demo for the upcoming Darkside Detective game, Backside of the Moon. She was very excited.
Recommendations!
1997 Australian comedy The Castle, Death Rider by Rhuairidh James, and commissioning an independent artist (specifically, this one)
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