i would say “boycott EA,” but that’s accomplished approximately nothing for each of the previous bullshit ea moves (“pride and accomplishment” my favorite).
so enjoy your new Electronic Artsrabia
There are far too many gamers that will happily buy the yearly FC/FIFA or Call of Duty.
I’ve been boycotting them by accident. They just don’t make anything I want to play.
Yeah, this Saudi deal was not a smart move to do when they finally have a competitor (inzoi) after decades of being the only game in town, so to speak.
I don’t think Inzoi is going to be that big a competitor for many regular sims people. The usage of AI rubs some people the wrong way, they’ve had a shady creator’s programme, and their initial stance of “LGBTQ+ what’s that?” rubbed people the wrong way.
The unfortunate thing about this EA takeover is that The Sims, particularly in the past ~5 years or so has done great strides for representation and inclusivity. Like, the days of cauliflower afros are gone with EA bringing in black creators to the table, we have medical aids, there are various skin conditions, a pronoun and sexuality system. It’s far from the American-centric game it has traditionally been.
None of this seems likely with Trump and Saudi Arabia holding the reins however.
I was looking forward to a new Mass Effect, but the idea of playing one from Jared Kushner and Saudi Arabia makes me want to vomit.
Someone should make a Freespace RPG. It’s the same story, but since they never made a Freespace 3 there’s no Star Child bullshit.
Meanwhile inzoi is busy shoving AI into as many holes as they can find
Well i must say that it is probably one of the applications where it makes the most sense; Hallucinations don’t matter if it’s in a game, and it makes characters more lifelike and less NPC. I can get behind that!
How do you think hallucinations would impact a game? It doesn’t mean that characters in a game would react in novel and unpredictable ways, it means the game is less stable, more prone to issues.
the coding isn’t AI, it’s stuff like textures and apparently dialogue?
I think they were implying LLMs being used in behavior/responses of game characters rather than vibe coded game programming
Exactly. A specifically trained model could even run locally on the GPU, no need for always online, but at the cost of increased hardware requirements, especially VRAM.
Basic tasks like that aren’t super resource heavy, so I don’t think it would impact hardware requirements all that much.
Training the models is the most resource intensive part.
There are ultra low powered LLMs but even then you’re looking at at least 2GB, and the most typical graphics card has 8, so it’s going to be some impact at least. Their intelligence/capability scales hard with memory usage too, so for most things you might want to use it for the smallest ones likely would not be good enough.
For example there’s a Rimworld mod that adds locally generated flavor text dialogue, using such a low powered model. But it’s a really simple feature that doesn’t affect actual gameplay at all. Games where the gameplay interacts with LLM output in any way are going to have higher hardware requirements, to the point where they will need to use the graphics card more for that part and less for the actual graphics; it’s enough of a bottleneck that anyone wanting to do this will basically need to design the game around it.
It just means the death of offline gaming
Inzoi good? I not play. I see vid of creator.
I would recommend to check out Paralives instead
It’s very rough and barebones. Looks amazing though.
Does look neat
Paralives: Stonks 📈
Yeah check out Inzoi, I haven’t tried it since I don’t really get into Sims type games… but even if Inzoi isn’t a replacement this is a space RIPE for indie game companies since gameplay is mainly about roleplaying, story, mechanics and meaningful interaction rather than cinematic gameplay or insane graphics and physics engines.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2456740/inZOI/
I for one look forward to an explosion of Indie Sims-likes because even though I am not that interested in the genre I can appreciate how massively popular it is for not really being taken seriously by most of the game development world and I think that hurts the artistry and inclusiveness of game development as a whole because it sends the message to Sims fans that they aren’t actually serious video game fans when they are… and there is likely a MUCHHH bigger market than even the Sims can reach here given the genre is so underserved and innovation is slow at the moment (also nobody markets to Sims fans like they are video game fans in general, there is this sense of “casualness” to Sims that I think is silly, casual games are video games and “casual gamers” are gamers, period end of story).
Another game that gives me Sims vibes but isn’t really in the same category is Let’s School, I haven’t tried it but it gets really good reviews as a thoroughly fleshed out school management game where you build a school and try to grow it while having to manage students, teachers and the campus grounds. I think it might scratch a similar itch for people.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1937500/Lets_School/
I also haven’t tried Clanfolk but from the reviews I have read it seems like a chiller Rimworld with a bit more people/family management mechanics. It gets very highly reviewed, don’t pass over it because it looks like anotheerrrrr Rimworld-like. It seems like the house building and people management part of the game potentially might intrigue Sims fans even though it is a survival game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1700870/Clanfolk/
If you would like a Sims like game but focused instead on “dogs” that also makes you feel like you are on a dose of psychedelics than check out Wobbledogs.
Well, Rimworld, Dwarf fortress and FTL are mainly about story building too. But run on a budget PC.
Yeah but those are all brutally hard survival games!? They don’t give me a Sims vibe at all.
Paralives is supposed to go into early access this year too.
I’m so excited!!!
I’m looking forward to Paralives.
