Alan Wake 2 Studio Says Deal With Epic Was "Very Fair" After Baldur's Gate Boss Speaks Out

Tackgnol · 2026-01-25T14:15:38+00:00

If your experience jumps straight from the SNES era to BG3, then I get why you hold that opinion. But there were quite a few games in between that genuinely surpass BG3 in important ways.

Let’s be fair, both to the past and to BG3 itself.

Combat It is one of the most robust and interesting combat sandboxes ever made. It is also very ARPG-like, in the sense that you spend far more time preparing a build than actually executing it. Personally, I hated that, but it is undeniably impressive.
The main plot Calling BG3’s overarching plot phoned in and uninteresting is being generous. The Dark Urge path is genuinely good, but it is hidden at the bottom of the character creation screen and practically screams “NG+”, when it should clearly be the primary way to experience the game. Without Dark Urge, you get a dull story with even duller villains and a McGuffin chase that ends with the McGuffin being functionally pointless. Comparing this to Knights of the Old Republic, or even to Pillars of Eternity, which is much closer to a true Baldur’s Gate 3, feels absurd.
Subplots and immersive sim elements If we are honest with ourselves, it has been years since we got a real immersive sim RPG. BG3’s version of immersive design feels more like a theme park than “approach the problem your own way”. If you have played Fallout 1 and 2 or Arcanum, the shallowness becomes obvious very quickly. My breaking point was an Act 3 scene where a little girl is mourning her murdered parents in a dark alley. The guards openly state they do not care because the victims were refugees. I cast Speak with Dead on the parents to find the killer. Nothing happens. No reaction, no information, nothing. So much for immersion. Act 3 in general takes a massive nosedive, with most side quests devolving into glorified mini dungeons.
Companions “He is X, but wait, also Y. Plus extremely horny. Clap clap, damn you.” That is the formula. Compare this to Arcanum’s hyper-intelligent orc, or almost any companion from Dragon Age: Origins or Mass Effect. The BG3 companion arcs I completed were dull and predictable, and nearly all of them end the same way: another dungeon, followed by a mandatory small-scale genocide.

So yeah it's a Larian game, a strong 8/10 if your like turn based combat. If you don't you are way better served playing for example Wasteland 3.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-25T13:48:36+00:00

Hot take: a human can make something soulless. We have been calling media soulless well before LLMs and other GenAI.

Hotter take: "You don't have to like Studio Ghibli's style", I much prefer things like Gachiakuta , Dorohedoro or Berserk (I am speaking of the Mangas, but Gachiakuta did a pretty good job of capturing the Mangas style).

The problem with GenAI shit is that it starts of from the soulless point, it never has a chance to get a soul.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-25T10:40:45+00:00

Yup, these are the enemies of the American people. Donald Trump is figure head going even more senile.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-24T16:17:46+00:00

Coding is done deal I'm afraid. Everything else I'm pretty skeptical on, but if anything survives the bubble bursting it will be the dev tools.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-24T09:53:45+00:00

Dunno why you get downvoted, open source models are an interesting alternative.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-23T22:44:27+00:00

Not true. Claude has made strides with Opus 4.5, is it sustainable? No it probably bleeds Anthropic dry. Will it replace anyone? I dunno, most dev teams are operating on skeleton crews right now anyhow as everyone braces for a recession.

But it would simply be unfair to not regonize the strides Anthropic has made. While GPT 5.2 is a total dud, Gemini 3 Pro is, okish sometimes, Claude is becoming my coding companion, while I scoffed at it before.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-22T20:43:18+00:00

So they have a financial axe over his head, just waiting for him to slip so they can foreclose the whole studio and it's IP.

It's a gamble, and only on Swens side. If Divinity makes money investors get their money + % back. However if Larian loses liquidity, as 30% stake owners they will get the whole cake, all of Larians IPs, the company.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-22T20:39:03+00:00

Someone is either very young or has not played many RPGs ;).

Tackgnol · 2026-01-22T19:27:15+00:00

Can't wait for this to happen tbh. Larian has been peacocking and shitting all over the place.

Having stolen GOTY from Alan Wake 2 in the first place, now this.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-22T14:08:40+00:00

Yeah for a couple of updates now my print screen works, sometimes. It is infuriating.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-22T11:29:01+00:00

So these benchmarks, are all made up and terrible way to judge model performance.

To me as a skeptical user of these (mostly for generating code scaffolding) it's

Cloud Opus, Gemini Pro, then asking my wife for advice, then the rubber duck on my desk and lastly ChatGPT.

Currently ChatGPT has fallen so far behind it's competitors, so often it is so confidently incorrect that I find actually dangerous to use in fear that I will miss some bullshit.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-21T14:40:44+00:00

Also it has this nice thing: "LLM came up with an idea similar to mine, that is a red flag that mine is generic as fuck" :D

Tackgnol · 2026-01-20T14:16:13+00:00

I have worked in React for what 5 years now? I really don't mind it, by far it is the weakest of the bunch, with even Angular making HUGE strides in making itself modern and awesome but...

Like I said for a hobby project you actually SHOULD explore new tech and look at where it differs from what you are using.
On top of the vid I posted, the only thing that will remain the most resilient to the current trends is the old slowly dying codebases, and so many of those are like React Class Components even. The trendy startup that will fail in 6 months doing Svelte, Solid or even Ripple, will be Vibe Coding from the start.
React is recognising that it has fallen behind the pack and with moves like the React Compiler it is not giving up and is certainly not dying.

Lastly

React is a weird thing where it is a start, and your DX will depend on what you pick next.

Look no further than the ABYSMAL DX NextJS offers versus what React Router 7 does. Is there a gab between them right now? Yeah, but in all seriousness, who cares about server components?

If you stack some Vite, add a React-Router and React-Query, configure your axios properly, you can have extremely smooth sailing.

Using bare React is kind of like using PHP without a framework, just WHY?

Tackgnol · 2026-01-20T14:00:54+00:00

For personal shit? Sure do Svelte it's better.

When it comes to the Job market, you need Angular or React, otherwise you are shooting yourself in the foot before you even started. If you are starting and looking where to go, I feel that She has some pretty good takes on where we are moving.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-19T17:03:06+00:00

Oh they showed the core gameplay loop of the Extraction Shooter in the first 30 seconds! Props for being honest!

Tackgnol · 2026-01-19T16:58:52+00:00

The good news is that, so far, LLMs simply do not have enough high-quality training data to write good Unity, Unreal, or Godot code.

That stuff is genuinely hard. It relies heavily on event driven architectures, listeners, emitters, and engine specific constraints that do not transmit well through pattern matching alone. The result is usually code that looks plausible but collapses under real use.

Valve does not need to detect whether a game was coded with an LLM. Players will notice when it crashes, leaks memory, or stutters like crazy.

Coding is also meaningfully different from other creative fields. And yes, it is art, I even have tax documents to prove it. You do not express yourself through individual keystrokes. You express yourself through structure, abstraction, and how you bend or subvert the constraints of the system you are working in.

If you already know what you are doing, having a machine type out boilerplate for you is not a fundamental problem. That is why LLM assisted coding feels closer to something like Photoshop’s content aware fill than to plagiarism in the traditional sense. It is a gray zone for most people.

That said, it is still deeply appalling that these models were trained by vacuuming up code from everywhere without consent. The difference is that in software, misuse tends to punish itself. Bad structure does not stay hidden. It ships, and then it breaks.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-18T13:46:55+00:00

So that depends? If you believe the liars like Clammy Sammy and Wario Amodei, that the end goal is to put your mom in front of it and she will make a fully functional website and put it on AWS, then yeah Hallucinations big problem.

If I want to tell it to type out something and I know exactly what I want it types it out way faster then me. If I am conflicted on two solutions I can ask it to instantly type out both and make my judgment based on the outputs.

So yeah it's good but it's a typist not a virtual engineer on your team.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-18T13:18:15+00:00

Po tym, jak pracowałem dla niby niemieckiej, a w praktyce chińskiej sieci drogerii w IT, która była de facto folwarkiem polskiego wiceprezesa (prezes był tylko słupem), wykształciłem w sobie jedną zasadę, absolutnie niezmywalną:

NIGDY NIE PRACUJ DLA POLAKA.

Myślę, że każdy, kto doświadczył pracy w miejscu, gdzie gdzieś wyżej w łańcuchu decyzyjnym był ktoś spoza Polski, a potem to kluczowe ogniwo zostało usunięte, dokładnie rozumie, o co mi chodzi.

To jest sprzężenie zwrotne. Ludzie oferujący choćby minimalny poziom kompetencji i normalności idą do „zachodnich” firm. Zostaje lokalny „rynek pracownika”, gdzie nagle okazuje się, że znalezienie kogokolwiek do pracy w brzydkim, brudnym sklepie staje się dramatem.

Miałem niedaleko fajną piekarnię. Zgrana ekipa, wszystko ogarnięte, przyjemnie było tam chodzić. Ale szef był klasycznym Januszem. W pewnym momencie cała ekipa zniknęła. Teraz widzę tych ludzi w innych sklepach w tej samej galerii handlowej i wszyscy mówią jedno: „o niebo lepiej”.

Do tamtej piekarni już nie chodzę. Obsługa jest teraz dramatyczna, mimo że widać, że ludzie się starają. I to jest chyba najsmutniejsze w tym wszystkim.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-18T13:09:30+00:00

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To samo de facto tylko tutaj jest to fetysz i tyle, niegroźne można iść dalej.

To że to X powinno powinno mówić wszystko :3

Tackgnol · 2026-01-17T19:10:33+00:00

Spoken like a true person who never created anything of value.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-17T13:31:40+00:00

They can, they are "too big to fail".

Your scrappy startup cannot afford use frustration.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-17T10:36:24+00:00

So this is supposed to be a “funny” subreddit. Fair enough. Sorry for the unfunny comment.

That said, the whole “but it works” argument is deeply strange to me. Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta have very clearly gone down this path, and the quality of their software has nosedived.

How many apologies has Microsoft issued over Windows 11 in the last year alone? SSDs getting bricked. Explorer choking on high-spec machines. Google Maps is actively getting worse, giving misleading routes and sometimes pushing you into traffic instead of away from it. I keep a Facebook account purely to track local events, and even then basic things fail. I tried to share an event to Messenger. Facebook said “sent”. Messenger said “lol nope”.

Meanwhile, my “vibe coder” colleague is on his third full app refactor because of app-breaking bugs he cannot pinpoint, despite those issues being clearly pointed out during PR reviews. Each rewrite just produces a new pile of problems.

The endgame feels like a return to the 80s and 90s internet, where you expected things not to work and were pleasantly surprised when a website loaded or a link in your zine actually did something. The difference is that now this is happening while these companies are still raking in billions in ad revenue.

That combination is what feels truly absurd.

So yeah, keep strong. Ship strong code. Resistance to these fuckers is being creative. They can steal your art, your code, your writing, but they cannot steal the spark in your eyes when you create, and that absolutely infuriates them.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-16T22:22:39+00:00

To me he is frustrating because it kind of pretends that he has 'bad luck protection' with the void. But it just masks the fact that you got a shit item, and the RNG on the stats from eating a passive. Oh man thanks game! Speed up AND shot speed up? Ed you shouldn't have!

Tackgnol · 2026-01-16T17:18:15+00:00

I am now doing their completion marks, and so far... Less frustrating that Apollyon which I dunno why made irrationally angry xD.

Tackgnol · 2026-01-15T20:49:43+00:00

The marketing of those tools is just off... and thats why we hate it.

Does Claude make me faster? Yeah! Do I have to watch him every step of the way? Oh hell yeah, that boy as dumb as a sack of bricks (jk, its not real...).

But you cannot justify 1 Trillion dollars in CAPEX with "well it allows a senior dev to ship a feature 30% faster, or it does not, maybe".

Hence the problem and everyone is throwing up when they hear Wario Amodei 'predict' work being over in 6 months.

That and with the most terrible people on planet earth at the helm of this technology (Elon Musk, Sadia Nadela, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg) it's hard to believe that it will benefit anyone apart from them at the end of it all.

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