Frankly, I think this is a very good thing. One of the worst things to happen to roleplaying was a generation of GMs thinking they have to be Brennan Lee Mulligan or Matt Mercer.

Stop worrying about how marketable your game is. Stop worrying about how good your writing and your performances are. Roleplaying games are, by their nature, intimate. Every single game is an experience shared between a small group of people. And that's exactly what makes them so powerful.

I've lost track of how many times players have literally cried during my games. I'm talking "Grave of The Fireflies" kind of tears here, not "My GM is an abusive dick" tears. Just the other day one my players told me that I'm the reason they can't listen to a particular song without crying, because it reminded them of a particular moment in one of my games. And that's the sort of thing that makes you think "Holy shit, I should be recording/livestreaming this." But if I did that, none of those moments would have ever happened, because my players aren't professional actors, and they would have been so self conscious about performing to a crowd that they would never have lost themselves in their characters like that.

Enjoy the intimacy. Enjoy the imperfection. There's nothing else like it.

Yeah, hit up YouTube, look for tutorials. There are some great guides to things you really should know (the game's tutorial is minimal at best) and handy tips for crime solving. Some of this stuff you can figure out in game with some intuitive leaps, like looking for security footage, or checking sales ledgers in stores to find out who bought a murder weapon. Other stuff is a little more obscure.

The game is still early access (or only just recently left it) so you also probably ran into some bugs. There are/were some missions that just spawned wrong and couldn't be completed.

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut adds full voice over, so no reading required. Also the voice work for the inner thoughts is done by Lenval Brown and it is incredible. Like, seriously, go look up some gameplay footage on this. That man has a voice that you can listen to all day.

Also, Mike Goodman now voices the Horrific Necktie in the final cut and its the best thing ever.

If you're liking the feeling of solving a mystery with no handholding, give Shadows of Doubt a look. 1920s detective noir set in an alt-history retro cyberpunk 1970s where the Coca-Cola corporation is the president of the USA. Yeah, that's a mouthful, but what you get is a proper hard-boiled detective story where you are in total control of how you pursue every case. The game gives you an honest to God murder board with string and sticky notes. There's no "detective mode" bullshit where you scan for clues and then the game solves the mystery for you. It's completely on you to find the evidence, follow leads, canvas witnesses, scrub through security footage, stake out a suspect's apartment or place of work, and finally make an arrest (and hope like hell you didn't finger the wrong person). This all plays out in a fully simulated city district. Every room in every building can be entered. Every NPC has a complete life; a partner (maybe), a home (usually), a job, a medical history, a shoe size, fingerprints, the works.

The voxel graphics aren't for everyone, and there's some areas where it's less complete than others, but those only really stand out because of how shockingly complete the world is in so many other ways. All in all, it's a brilliant game, and like nothing else out there.

This. Go into Outer Wilds knowing as little as possible. It's an incredible experience if you go in blind.

To paraphrase a description I gave in another thread about this game, at first it will feel like you're just fumbling around with no clear idea of what you're doing and why. The game presents itself as just this sort of open ended sandbox with no real purpose. That's OK, just explore and have fun for about the first half hour or so.

Because about half an hour in, more or less, is when The Event will happen. Do not ask what The Event is. You will know when it happens. It will be, clearly and unambiguously, The Event. And once it happens everything will click, and you'll go "Oh, that's what this game is about."

After The Event, go look at the computer in the back of your space ship. That will become your most important tool throughout the rest of the game.

The problem is that even the specific things they're good at, they don't do well enough to justify spending actual money on. And when I say "actual money", I'm not talking about the hilariously discounted prices AI companies are offering in an effort to capture an audience.

A bot that can do a job reasonably well, but still needs a human to check their work is, from an employment perspective, still an employee, just now with some very expensive helper software. And because of the inherent unreliability of LLMs, a problem that many top figures in the industry are finally admitting may never be solved, they will always need a human to check their work. And that human has to be competent enough to do the job without the AI, in order to figure out where and how it went wrong.

GenAI was supposed to put us all out of work, and maybe one day it will, but the current state of the technology isn't remotely close to being good enough to do that. It turns out that while bots can very effectively look and sound like humans, they're not remotely capable of thinking like humans, and that actually matters when your chatbot starts promising customers discounts that don't actually exist, to name one real example. What was treated as being the last ten percent is actually looking more and more like ninety-nine percent of the work in terms of creating something that can effectively replace a human being.

(As an aside, I can't help but feel that a big part of this epic faceplant arises from Silicon Valley fully ingesting the bullshit notion of "unskilled labour". Turns out working the drive thru at McDonald's is a more complicated job than people think, including McDonald's themselves. We've so undervalued the skills of vast swathes of our population that we were easily deluded into thinking they could all be replaced by simple machines. While some of those tasks certainly can, and will, be automated, there are some human elements - especially in conflict resolution - that are really hard to replace)

"What are the chances..."

Approximately 100%.

That doesn't mean that the slide will absolutely continue. There may be some fresh injection of hype that will push investor confidence back up, but right now the wind is definitely going out of the sails.

The core issue, as the Goldman - Sachs report notes, is that AI is currently being valued as a trillion dollar industry, but it has not remotely demonstrated the ability to solve a trillion dollar problem.

No one selling AI tools is able to demonstrate with confidence that they can be made reliable enough, or cheap enough, to truly replace the human element, and without that they will only ever be fun curiosities.

And that "cheap enough" part is critical. It is not only that GenAI is deeply unreliable, but also that it costs a truly staggering amount of money to operate (OpenAI are burning something like $10 billion a year). What's the point in replacing an employee you pay $10 an hour to handle customer service issues with a bot that costs $5 for every reply it generates?

The second one is definitely me. I've had so many players cry during games that I've lost track.

To be clear, always the good "This moment really emotionally resonated with me" kind of tears. I do very narrative heavy games, and I like to really crank the drama to 11.

Holy fucking shit that is bad.

There's zero fucking excuse for that. It's just straight up holocaust denial.

Alberta (where the oil sands are located) is known as "Texas North" up here. There's more than a few reasons why you don't want to be there if you're queer. Or trans. Or any skin color other white. Or a woman. Or....

Fuck that's cool. You lucky bastard.

A failure this monumental will almost certainly result in Sony taking the entire studio out back and shooting it, just to placate investors.

Edit: For context, Sony owns Firewalk - the studio - outright, they're not just the publisher.