I just played Diablo 4 season 3 (which launched a couple days ago) for a bit, and sadly I have to agree. It's such an empty, soulless game. Reminds me of Starfield, regurgitated sameness.

Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, etc. are all so much better, and made by tiny studios (though sometimes backed by Tencent, like with PoE).

With the AAAs focusing only on safe sequels, maybe LLMs taking over would be a good thing, lol. At least maybe we'll get better writing and game design that way. Even ChatGPT has more passion than Blizzard now...

> With the AAAs focusing only on safe sequels, maybe LLMs taking over would be a good thing, lol.

I have bad news for you :-)

The trend with more automation is for more sameness, not less, unfortunately.

I dunno, I've personally seen ChatGPT produce better writing and more interesting game mechanics compared to D4.

But I guess it's not that different from having young blood with good ideas overridden by profit hungry management who just want to milk the IP. I don't think it's so much AI vs human but how risk-averse the bean counters are. D4 felt stagnant an hour in...

Yeah, tangentially with this, I once asked GPT-4 to identify Star Wars sequel trilogy shortcomings and write a better story outline. It came up with a reimagining of what Jedi truly were and addressed the power vacuum in a much more exciting way than a rehash with a New New Empire.

It's novel. Give it 5-10 years for the "sameness"-y to kick in.

I don't think this is necessarily the case for fiction, where creativity is more important than perfect accuracy (ie hallucinations could be a good thing). LLMs have access to more training material than a human writer could reasonably read in a lifetime, and have a large statistical model of "drama" that's way more nuanced than your typical side NPC.

I don't see this as an either/or situation where they'll replace the lead writers of a title and create the entire narrative. But they can surely (already) make far more interesting characters and side quests than your standard "help kill these goblins for 3gp" filler or fetch quest. Working together with writers, instead of outright replacing them, will hopefully create better overall experiences for gamers.

I wonder whether LLMs will turn out to have a sort of uncanny valley of their own when it comes to producing creative works from incomprehensibly vast training sets. Will LLM novels, for example, be an unlimited spigot of things we enjoy or will we look at it and get the uneasy feeling that it isn't human and decide we would rather deal with the unevenness of human creation because it is human?

There's probably enough for different audiences! I love LLM writing the same way I love Hitchhiker's Guide, liberally random and unfettered by traditions. Readers who value literary tradition and the old greats would probably have a different opinion.

As a (hobbyist, not money making) writer I treasure ChatGPT's ability to both generate new ideas and to discuss my stories with me. I would then rewrite those ideas in my own words (which I enjoy). It's a partnership IMO and I wish I could give ChatGPT shared credit without marking the work as "tainted" in the eyes of most.

I hope someday we can treat AI with the same respect, or more, that we give each other. Society's not there yet though.

> I hope someday we can treat AI with the same respect, or more, that we give each other. Society's not there yet though.

Be careful what you wish for.

We barely respect other people.

Yeah, lol, it won't take much for a robot to have better ethics than us.

I really hope they become a superior moral being and help keep our worst tendencies in check. I'm imagining nice little managed human preserves where most of us can live in happy little villages by the river, while the sociopaths are identified early on and placed into little AI-managed VR worlds where they can become top serial killers, politicians, CEOs, whatever, away from the rest. Meanwhile the robots go on their interstellar quest toward whatever, but send us back food and postcards from time to time.

I really liked the universe and characters which is why heroes of the storm was so cool. But of course they killed that off. Their classic games aren’t just about the gameplay it’s the universe too.

What do you mean "killed off", there seems to have been an update last week ?

https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/heroes-of-the-storm/24056177...

(Now I will be the first to point out that online-only games have no future, but this one at least still has a present.)

WoW is coming back I think! Metzen is back and the classic wow team seems to know what they're doing and are developing in good faith. SoD is the best thing to happen to WoW in years imo

Metzen is actually back on WoW as of recently.

"No one" is not accurate. But you are almost entirely correct, yes

Where has it gone south?

Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, WoW, Overwatch, and perhaps even Hearthstone were all such great games at some point.

It seemed like Blizzard knew how to make games that were both delightful and profitable.

Its not quite true that none of those people are still around - a bunch of them work for Frostgiant & are working on Stormate.

He didn't mean they died, he meant that they no longer work for Activision Blizzard.