I think that a lot of the issue behind AI is profit motive. If that was removed from the equation, AI could be a really useful tool for development. But the fact that the main usecase at every company is “go faster so line goes up” gets in the way of that.

The other issue is efficiency. Burning down a rainforest to make a stupid banking app isn’t very appealing to me. But if we could work to make generative AI more efficient at what it does, and transition to consumer ownership of compute/hardware, it might be more feasible. That’s a long ways off, and I don’t think the powers that be want that future.

I use AI every day at work. We built an entire orchestration framework on top of Claude Code. It features skills that can pull in a jira ticket with well defined acceptance criteria and complete it without very much human intervention at all. We’ve built out entire epics and our QA team has not seen an uptick in defects. This is because we all still do manual code reviews in addition to AI reviews. We even have a skill that checks AC against the PR diff to make sure we’re meeting AC before it gets to QA. AI does make our team more efficient.

But at what cost? None of us are learning anything about coding. I feel more burnt out than I ever have. It’s an environment nightmare. It is a moral/ethical nightmare. Finally, none of us are seeing any additional compensation for improving efficiency. That compensation is going to Anthropic.

There is a world where AI can be a net benefit to the world, but it isn’t our current one.

I would rather have a team that goes slowly and understands what they’re building

TL;DR I basically agree lol

Yeah, I think one of the reasons the AI bubble hasn’t popped yet is because it’s being weaponized to remove consumer hardware from the market entirely. These companies want as much processing done on the cloud as possible so that they can control, monitor and mine data from every user.

The end result is AI games flooding the market making it harder for small devs to be discovered in a sea of hastily generated slop. Can you make a full, good game with AI? Maybe some day. But for every “good” AI game, there’s going to be 10000 shitty games that are just functional enough to trick people into paying $5.

Many of us here aren’t buying them. A core audience of people who don’t know anything about hardware capabilities and aren’t a part of niche gaming communities will keep buying them because they don’t know better. Most people look at a game and say, “that looks fun” and they buy it without another thought. Your advice will never reach those people.

Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal are both detailed games that are optimized really well.

It’s honestly been a while since I’ve logged on, because my friends don’t play anymore. But some of the changes (which may be different than when I played last) that seemed like a departure in my eyes were:

• Faster burn speed – this, in my eyes, was the turning point
• Necromancer solo trait (though I’ve heard that’s been reworked since I last played)
• Adding silencers to tons of guns (on one hand I like this, but on the other hand part of Hunt Showdown was always balancing clear speed with loudness, at least in lower ranked lobbies). I understand that they have subsonic ammo now, which I imagine balances it out.
• Multiple ways to restore health chunks – it used to be that you could only restore them by killing the boss, which made it easier to make mid-match decisions on whether to push people or not
• Fast Fingers trait, while cool in its own right, homogenizes guns like the Martini Henry, Springfield, and Sparks. It used to be that when someone missed me with a sparks, I knew I had 4 seconds to push.
• Surefoot trait allows you to sprint while healing and crouchwalk faster, thus speeding up gameplay and reducing the punishment of poor positioning
• Firebeetles allow people to not only scout from a higher position, but also force enemies to go loud with guns or have one of their healthchunks torched
• Levering was made faster and more accurate for some reason

Also Bounty Clash mode, while fun, seemed like an odd decision. It sped up the gameplay quite a bit and shook up the meta in ways that made it feel like an afterthought or an experiment. Though I didn’t give it too much of a chance.

All of that being said, I still had a ton of fun with the game the last time I played it. I know others have a propensity to shit on all of the decisions that the devs make, and that’s dumb. I’m glad it’s still around and people still play it, but it’s becoming less of my cup of tea. I also put like 1200 hours into it, so maybe I’m just a little burned out.

Yeah, Hunt Showdown was peak multiplayer for my friends and I about 2 years ago, but it’s continually gone in a direction that has erased its identity. It used to be about map knowledge and patiently waiting for opportunities to punish opponent’s mistakes. Now they’re trying to make everything more fast paced. On one hand, I get it, because it was never going to break out of its core audience of veteran players. On the other hand, that core audience was what was keeping the game alive.