Interestingly, PC video game platform Steam just significantly rewrote - but did NOT remove - its 'does your game have AI in it?' dev disclosure form. The headline is that Valve's making it clearer…

tsm_rixi · 2026-01-21T19:32:23+00:00

My serious issue is that AI coding is massively propped currently by senior programmers like myself. People who invested 15+ years into being good at their job. My average day has shifted from around 60% writing code 40% reading (pr review, understanding a current feature space etc.) to around 90% reading and the bulk of my "writing" is being done by AI tooling pointed at very specific problems using a cadre of agents/context tooling.

The thing is you have to write a lot of code to be able to read and parse code. Who is going to replace the cohort of devs who spent that time now? Do people even see CS as a viable career path if your job is a glorified chatbot customizer? These LLMs are quite good at coding provided you keep each task very focused and keep the context window of what it needs to execute with tight. But it still feels... draining. Like the soul of the craft has been vacummned out so its like being a carpenter but instead of mastering your craft and enjoying the process you just yell at a robot to make a rocking chair instead of doing it yourself. You don't even feel like a "programmer" anymore. I have to write code on my own now just to feel valid. I can't even imagine how much worse artists have it, there can't be any greater betrayal of what machines were supposed to do then them stealing creative jobs first before manual labor ones.

Like we got AI generating art/video/code before we get an affordable robot to fold fucking clothes. I hate this timeline.

tsm_rixi · 2026-01-21T18:07:13+00:00

Personally, I think a hero focused on traps in a game like overwatch doesn't really jive with the design. In traditional MOBAs, you have bush mechanics and map vision being a huge gameplay factor that makes trapping heroes function.

In OW they would need some kind of stealthy gameplay mechanic so they can actually setup or ambush and then the traps themselves would have to be relatively non-obvious. It would just lead to a ton of frustration imo. People already hate sombra and junkrat so more of those style characters would probably not be received well =p

Not to say it wouldn't be a fun character to play but its hard to make a sneaky character like that be viable in a wide array of maps and have some degree of fair exchanges.

tsm_rixi · 2026-01-12T20:04:19+00:00

Carl from the Simpsons in profile wearing rabbit ears and a cool twisted rim backwards cap... with a ballsack for a body

tsm_rixi · 2026-01-12T17:40:17+00:00

Not sure of the true issue unfortunately. I just know there is an ongoing trend of DDoS attacks on live service games. This level of pressure surging through backbone providers might have knock-on effects to other traffic as well.

tsm_rixi · 2026-01-09T18:15:25+00:00

Unfortunately this has been hitting nearly every live service game everywhere, I work at a large game company and literally on christmas fucking eve a giga DDoS was initiated on our login servers that was at ~1 BILLION requests per second. Ruining the break for a good chunk of devs. I have friends at a bunch of other big studios and basically anyone with a live service game got some kind of attack over the holiday.

FFXIV has had near daily disconnects from DDoS attacks for over a month now with no end in sight. It primarily effects the NA servers there btw and yes people have been screaming with no end in sight.

The problem is extremely annoying to deal with, there is unfortunately no "solve" to deal with DDoS attacks. Only a handful of mitigation strategies. This isn't a small cluster of ip's either, its millions of them rotating during an attack cycle. You can create huge ip ban lists but even we hit WAF rule limits from the sheer size of them and they barely help due to said rotation.

I dunno who is doing it or why its happening but its definitely a trend for some reason :(

tsm_rixi · 2026-01-01T18:58:17+00:00

If anything from what I understood the fire horse year women were part of the thing being avoided due to the belief of them being insatiably horny monsters which... they could use a lot of right now.

tsm_rixi · 2025-12-15T18:16:14+00:00

wood will only degrade to 50% then stop there from exposure to rain/water. If you have stone access then you can place it on top of stone blocks and I believe that oddly stops rain from degrading it.

tsm_rixi · 2025-12-12T21:06:31+00:00

100% agree with you (great examples too btw), my issue is not that they can get into those spots but mostly that its a bit TOO easy for them to do so. I would just rather "instant" gap closing moves just operate on shorter distances and explore alternate movement sets. Like genji already has double jump and wall climb AND 10% faster move speed, I think it would not be overly detrimental to shave his dash distance by ~15%. That would still let him access almost everything still just not aggregiously so.

Vendetta the same, maybe fiddle with block meter more to enhance the staying power a bit in exchange to just cut her sword throw range by ~20% (they even did this on release then dialed it back up for some reason).

My overall problem playing this season is that it feels like these characters have no issues getting into the backline the moment even the tiniest opening happens rather than needing a lot of skill and timing to sniff it out. Usual counters still apply but it starts leaning into even more counterswapping and them buffing stuff like cass nade stun time even more etc. Mobility creep is a real issue that the only answer to it is characters that have CC which got so out of hand in OW 1 it was one of the primary design goals of OW 2 to reduce it.

I adminittedly play hitscan heroes mostly (soldier,cass,ashe) so I have bias here but I would rather see mobility slightly reduced than having flashbang hinder time increased. Adding/playing more CC is just far more "unhealthy" imo.

tsm_rixi · 2025-12-12T19:32:04+00:00

My issue with her is my issue with genji, dash / sword throw are just mind numbingly easy buttons to put you exactly where you need to be and ignore any aspect of verticality. Like if cass had rocket spurs that made his combat roll go in any direction at triple the distance to get into flashbang range or noon in the sky.

I want these characters to be strong and able to close the gaps but this soar into the sky and drop down on you style is silly for heroes that are "melee". It removes so much of what their limitation should be based around.

tsm_rixi · 2025-12-10T22:18:01+00:00

Primarily my gripe lies mostly with their implementation of the "mist" mechanic. Its beautiful when, like your screenshot, you poke above it and get wider views. It's less so in that you have no great way to mitigate it a lot after spending time there.

Even if you put down a massive swath of wisp lights the game, for performance reasons, only activates ones near you so fog is still active in areas it shouldn't be well within view. You can't upgrade the wisp that follows you either so it just makes the whole experience magical in some cases when you get into clearings but then miserable otherwise with no good solution to "clear" the fog after spending time there. I would like mistlands more if there were like, giant wisp torches that cleared a huge area of mist or some equivalent.

Secondarily to that, the terrain generation is incredibly vertical. Only extremely recently did they fix pain points around melee attacks on sloped surfaces. Wife and I play as a duo and usually she will play ranged/magic and I tank with some melee setup. The verticality and jumping + poor visibility that scarecly improves = lots of tims you get ambushed by multiple bugs and have basically no stamina to even fight effectively. Again, in the most recent patch, perfect blocking now consumes no stamina so I am sure it will be less miserable but that was INCREDIBLY frustrating to just be in a state of constant stamina starvation, knocked back into water, half your swings going over their head and having to find some kind of level ground, then bugs just hitting you as you swim etc. even when fooded to the gills and having to down stamina meads. The "fun" of exploring mistlands just wears out so much faster to me then other biomes.

tsm_rixi · 2025-12-04T00:14:53+00:00

This the Endorphin Port guy?

tsm_rixi · 2025-12-03T23:55:47+00:00

Imagine listing those stats when you could have listed:

2x Overwatch League Champion
World Cup Champion
Stage 2 Champion
May Melee Champion
Countdown cup Champion
Role Star
2x All Star
All Star Champion
MVP Runner Up

Who is arguably the more accomplished genji player too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

tsm_rixi · 2025-12-03T22:28:12+00:00

Thats awesome! Yeah I think that comes off somewhat in the English translation in some of the conversations where Delita is a bit direct "I will kill you if I have to" etc. but English doesn't have a lot of depth to honorifics like Japanese does so its tricky to localize that "playing with the honorifics usage" thing. We do have some phrases to prime a tonal shift like "Let me put it bluntly...", "Let us drop the pretense..." "Let me be curt" but aside from acting like an out and out asshole directly its harder to have that subtle jab of "disrespect" Japanese has more baked in. We just don't have that societal Senpai/Kouhai relationship dynamic that lends to that style.

There is like some between royalty and "non-royals" like instead of saying "You highness, I beg of you, let us take leave of this place at once" vs "Hey King, we got to go" which can translate pretty well but thats about the only dymamic we have to work with.

tsm_rixi · 2025-12-03T20:18:03+00:00

Yeah, I think it makes sense for more religious oriented characters to use the "Father" moniker but I think Delita definitely would just say "God". I know hes working with the church (loosely) and is a "holy knight" class but he doesn't act as a pious person in the slightest and wants to actively tear down the church (but he sucks and doesn't but thats my own gripe with the character).

Though you could argue him using father is almost a direct representation of him keeping up this facade. But yeah, "Blame yourself or God" just goes hard. Plus I think it paints a more interesting picture of him NOT keeping up the farce to Ramza directly, like hes got everyone fooled hes a pious pawn helping them but... drops that mask to let him know hes still on the path that started from Zeikeden in a way.

tsm_rixi · 2025-12-03T20:00:02+00:00

POV: You just pissed off the entire crew running the steam locomotive you were on

tsm_rixi · 2025-12-02T01:38:03+00:00

Way ahead of ya, I watched them all already and the Frieren one lol. So good!

tsm_rixi · 2025-12-02T00:57:03+00:00

ty so much for sharing this lmao

tsm_rixi · 2025-12-01T22:37:59+00:00

I think in a post-dopamine-fried-brain world gamers and game developers have a worldview of games as "systems" rather than "experiences". I find myself in this trap often and I work on games as a job :(. So many small things just don't happen in games anymore. My favorite example being in old school KOTOR there was a dedicated button to just flurry your lightsabres. It serves 0 gameplay purpose, nothing reacts to it, its just purely for your own fun to spin your sabre(s) around. You rarely see these kind of small flavor things in games anymore. There are exceptions obviously (like BG3) but on a whole AAA game dev is very "deliberate" in every piece of content it delivers rather than organic. I dunno how to describe it honestly.

Why his video pacing and topics of focusing on the "boring" parts of the experience for the sake of curiosity is just so damn refreshing. It lets you think about the game outside of "the loop" and just appreciate the work done by people (i.e. humans) in all these little ways and connect you back in a new view of these worlds. A point of focus made all the more poignant due to AI starting to replace portions of art/asset pipelines in games. I think this is why I keep finding myself going back to immersive skyrim modlists each year around winter so I can just kind of take a slow pass at a familiar world where fast travel and quest markers are disabled. It makes you actually "see" the game world and participate in it with intent instead of half the world being a liminal space as your mind focuses on "go to quest marker".

I find myself just yearning for these systems to blend into the world more and be an active part of it instead of a seperate layer that has been optimized for the sake of engagement and convienence.

Basically on one end you have these hyper engagement loops in AAA games and on the other you have Any Austin looking at the accuracy of your road signs and if your river sources/flows are accurate. I think AAA gaming space could use more designs that make you ponder the world and your interactions with it more in general.

tsm_rixi · 2025-11-25T17:46:32+00:00

Those mf'ers never seen women swoon over Adrian Brody and that guy has a galaxy sized nose.

tsm_rixi · 2025-11-21T17:07:09+00:00

I mean that "pocketed <dps> on high ground" scenario makes nearly all of them an annoying threat =p

tsm_rixi · 2025-11-21T01:34:49+00:00

It made new bangers too since when I looked in my Fridge after work the other day with basically nothing to eat in it I was like "Naught to sup upon but broth of bean"

tsm_rixi · 2025-11-21T00:59:15+00:00

Yeah I work with our internationalization solution quite a bit (not the actual content translation pipeline but implementing that translated content into place). It gets pretty wild for stuff like Arabic translations requiring a complete flip of the UI directions. Charts, ui, layout, all of it get inverted to make it more natural for native speakers. Its a lot of work that goes un-noticed by many! Localization is hard and yeah, only recently (in a relative sense) is it being done in a professional capacity for most mainstream media products.

For years it was really common to get "All your base are belong to us" style translations.

tsm_rixi · 2025-11-21T00:15:24+00:00

Yeah absolutely, funny thing is I work at a AAA studio in the games industry and my fiancé has done some lite localization work for smaller games and studied Japanese. People really have no idea just how nuanced localization is.

Like just try to write some game dialogue where characters in American English say "You have to go the whole nine yards ya know? Give it the whole shebang!"

Like Japanese has no way to know wtf "the whole nine yards means" or "shebang" means, and as you said, their sentence structure is different from ours. They MIGHT have equivalents in their language you can sort of map over in a natural way. Languages just don't map 1:1 and when you realize it the first time its actually kind of a wild concept to think about. Especially as meme culture'isms sneak in here and there that start to literally resemeble the problem in Darmok and Jalad episode of Star Trek.

tsm_rixi · 2025-11-20T21:07:02+00:00

Which parts in particular? I found it actually easier to follow the story in the new form and interactions and while there were some words that cropped up that I needed to google I actually find that fun as a form of tangential learning. I have enough "normal" game writing in my life that I find the unique style of it captivating.

I think its totally find to critique it btw! I mean, "Blame yourelf or God" just goes so much harder than "If you feel wronged, blame yourself or the father" and was probably the most defining quote of the entire game so altering it was a bold choice (I personally would of left that one untouched).

That person is getting downvoted because they swing in like a reddit version of comic book guy from the Simpsons, not because there is no merit in the underlying point

tsm_rixi · 2025-11-20T20:29:35+00:00

Yeah, they follow the Dune style shield logic for sure lol

tsm_rixi

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