Gaming

It sucks that I can't boycott their garbage anymore than I already do.

This is what happens when everything on the planet is run by suits who are incapable of seeing anything but the bottom line. Exploit the creatives until they can be replaced by shitty robots that don't do the job half as well but are cheaper to use.

Our dumb cyberpunk future is now.

So sad these guys own the Tribes IP

They already refuse to fix their EAC so that the game can run on Linux so I can't not play their game any more than I already do. I played Paladins briefly when Overwatch was having its China drama and enjoyed it, but I'm done booting Windows to play games.

Never forget the guys who founded hi rez come from ncr a cash register company. They believe in money first.

I loved tribes and they killed it for smite. I actually loved smite a ton and played it a lot.

I definitely think some sort of residuals or compensation for reusing their voice AI should happen if they are profiting off of it.

That being said, I see a world in the very near future where voice actors don't even act out their lines and just say a number of things for recording to train an AI voiced version of themselves. Then directors/creators and just manipulate and use it as they please to create their product.

Some mods in games are getting this already, voiced Morrowind and the like, and I definitely seeing it as a boon. Voice acting has always been a weak point when it came to stuff like that as you can write/script/design the best you can but can lack decent/any voice acting.

Interested to see how things play out.

It will be interesting to see how these kind of things develop over the next few years. Of course, it's very enticing for developers to use AI voices, as they can probably save massive amounts of money through it. Will the voice actors have any options to stop this?

I will happily continue to not pay for games that do this and I won’t be missing out on anything.

This is on par with restaurants that microwave garbage food. They’re phoning it in to squeeze as much profit as possible out of the product. That tells me you don’t want to make games people enjoy, you want to make games that do nothing but maximize profit. I ain’t here for that shit. I’m willing to pay money for companies that respect art and trades, not ones that worship capitalism and exist to appease assholes in suits.

This reduces the minuscule interest I had in replaying Paladins to a negative number. Smite's been nothing but frustrating garbage, but I thought that with a bit of polish and a lot more character development, Paladins had promise when it came out. Starting a labor dispute to begin a practice that will degrade the overall quality of the game means it's not worth my hard disk space to install their products - it's clear things are only going to get worse for Hi-Rez titles from here.

Fuck Hi-Rez for making a really good Tribes game and then abandoning it for Smite. I sure hope they merely licensed the name and don't hold rights to the entire IP, cuz I want a good, modern Tribes game so bad.

Fuck them even more for this.

ah man. I kind of liked paladin's hussle as the overwatch lunch-stealers. Now who am I supposed to root for? TF2 again? Is that game even still alive?

Ugh. I used to love what Hi-Rez put out. Global Agenda was probably my favorite game by them. From my home state as well. They've always made terrible business decisions though. This, of course, is no exception

Haven't played for a couple of years now, but honestly loved Paladins and Smite appealed to me in concept (never really had enough time to spare to learn how to play MOBA). While the communities and creatives in and around the games are awesome, it's been known that the higher-ups and some of the management are extremely shitty forever. It's one of the reasons why the games didn't get the attention they deserve, why the promising esports scenes around them are dead etc. Not surprised, but still sad they've decided to fuck over the VAs like that and shoot themselves in the foot once again in terms of reputation

Generally I wouldn't have a problem with this if use is restricted to the specific game, and the payment was satisfactory.

Hi-rez has always been known for making a good product than ruining it. 8 years later in Paladins and they still haven’t reverted cb12

I don't really see a problem with this, quite the opposite, it's an important step forward for gaming. It's similar to the transition from FMV to motion capture. You can complain all day long that the actors will be out of the job when games can render them in real time, but for the time being at least, you still need them, it's just that their recorded performance will not be the final result you see in the game. Voice recordings are malleable now and can be changed and edited in ways that weren't possible before. This opens up a lot of possibility that just wouldn't have been affordable before, e.g. similar to how a real time rendered sequence can reflect your current equipment, which a FMV could not, a AI-voice can now reflect your custom character, name, race, health, age, gender and whatever, without having an actor record the same line a million times.

And yeah, maybe the celebrity voice actor might lose a bit of status and become more like the mo-cap stunt man. But for gaming as a whole, I just see nothing but upsides. And it's not just AAA games either, just look at all the small indie games that can't afford voice acting, only for some lines or only English, with AI they can offer all the languages and all the lines, for which it would have been impossible to pay for without AI.

And it's not like the voice actor is out of a job, if you want some AAA level performance, you can't just get that out of AI just yet. AI is great at transforming and editing content, but much less good at generating original content from scratch, especially if it needs to fit a given artistic vision.