Hacker News Reader

Comment by dannersy | Hacker News Reader

You're cherry picking. The open world games aren't as compelling anymore since the novelty is wearing off. I can cherry pick, too. For example, Starfield in all its grandeur is pretty boring.

And the users may not care about code directly, but they definitely do indirectly. The less optimized and more off-the-shelf solutions have seen a stark decrease in performance but allowing game development to be more approachable.

LLMs saving engineers and developers time is an unfounded claim because immediate results does not mean net positive. Actually, I'd argue that any software engineer worth their salt knows intimately that more immediate results is usually at the expense of long term sustainability.

View on HN

Startfield is boring because of the bad writing and they made a space exploration game where there are loading screens between the planet and space and you don’t actually explore space.

They fundamentally misunderstood what they were promising, it’s the same as making a pirate game where you never steer the ship or drop anchor.

You can prove people are not bored with the concept as new gamers still start playing fallout new Vegas or skyrim today despite them being old and janky.

This is why Sid Meier's Pirates [0] remains such a great game.

It was really a combination of mini-games:

- you got steer a ship (or fleet of ships) around the Caribbean

- ship to ship combat

- fencing

- dancing (with the Governors' daughters)

- trading (from port to port or with captured goods0

- side quests

Each time I played it with my oldest, it felt like a brand new game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Pirates!

Played this as a kid, genuinely great gameplay loop and felt very immersive at the time.

I think my point stands. Procedural generation is a tool that usually works best when it is supplementary. What makes New Vegas an amazing game is all the hand built narratives and intricate storylines. So yeah, I agree, Starfield is boring because of the story. But if the procedural vastness was interesting enough to not be boring, then we wouldn't be talking about this to begin with.

Starfield wasn't procedural vastness though, No Man's Sky is but what Starfield was is handmade content then a loading screen then a minigame then a loading screen then a small procedural "instance"/"dungeon" not a vast seamless world to explore.

Im inclined to say that if Bathesta used LLMs for story based on known best seller books - it would be better than the garbage created by so called “modern script writers”.

The same could be said about Hollywood movies and series.

When agenda is more important than fun, books, movies, games are not labour of love but neglet.

Yeah I mean, I think procgen is cool tech, but there's a reason we don't talk about Daggerfall the same way we talk about Morrowind

Agreed.

> Starfield in all its grandeur is pretty boring.

And yet "No Mans Sky" is massively popular.

> ny software engineer worth their salt knows intimately that more immediate results is usually at the expense of long term sustainability.

And any software engineer worth their salt realizes there are 100s if not 1000s of problems to be solved and trying to paint a broad picture of development is naive. You have only seen 1% (at best) of the current software development field and yet you're confidently saying that a tool that is being used by a large part of it isn't actually useful. You'd have to have a massive ego to be able to categorically tell thousands of other people that what they're doing is both wrong and not useful and that they things they are seeing aren't actually true.

No Man's Sky got better as they were more intentional with their content. The game has more substance and a lot of that had to be added by hand. It is dropped in procedurally but they had to touch it up, manually, to make it interesting. Let's not revise history.

I don't think it has anything to do with ego. There are studies on the topic of AI and productivity and I assume we have a way to go before we can say anything concretely. Software workflows permeate the industry you're in. You're putting words in my mouth, I said nothing about what people are doing is wrong or not useful. I said the claim that generative AI is making engineers more productive is an unfounded one. What code you shit out isn't where the work starts or ends. Using expedient solutions and having to face potentially more work in the future isn't even something that is a claim about software, I can make that claim about life.

You need to evaluate what you read rather than putting your own twist on what I've said.

You said:

> LLMs saving engineers and developers time is an unfounded claim

By whom exactly? If I say it saves me time, and another developer says the same, and so on, than it is categorically not unfounded. In fact, it's the opposite.

You've completely missed the point if you don't understand how telling other people that their own experience in such a large field is "unfounded" simply because it doesn't line up with your experience.

> we have a way to go before we can say anything concretely

No YOU do. It's quite apparent to me how it can save time in the myriad of things I need to perform as a software developer (and have been doing).

Anecdotal evidence, how scientific of you. When I say it's unfounded, I'm saying it hasn't been proven with actual research and data. So when you ask, "by whom?", that's exactly my point, it is unfounded. That's what that word means, no one has made a claim, backed by data, that AI is making significant waves on productivity. I don't think I've missed the point at all, but it seems I hit an emotional nerve with you though, so the conversation is over.

Do I have to explain to another adult (presumably) what the word "unfounded" means? Are you purposely ignoring the hundreds of articles popping up on this site demonstrating the capabilities of these tools? Are they all lying?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com