Location: San Francisco
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: TypeScript/JS, React, node.js, Redis, Postgres, pgvector, LLM agents, Cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), ci/cd pipelines, other tech
Résumé/CV: on request
Email: charles@geuis.com
> Gameplay Type: First Person Shooter Role Playing Game
Summary: A long anticipated release with eight years of development time, the game’s launch has been plagued with bugs and poor performance as well as decidedly mixed reviews. Regardless, the title offers gamers the largest open world cyberpunk universe thus far, so despite the rather uninspired art design and a plot that brings nothing new to the genre, this game is the best available to allow players to immerse themselves in a cyberpunk setting.
This is a very dated and seriously opinionated review.
I call this genre of game, "Illusion of choice" games, but to be fair to cyberpunk 2077 it still does it better than any other games of its type.
If you think of it as a tree and each decision point branching out to millions of possibilities and outcomes then you'll be extremely disappointed, but if you think of it the other way, of a strong narrative that has a funnel of lots of different ways to reach the same outcome you'll find there is an impressive amount of ways to interact with the world.
If you suspend your disbelief and never play through a second time, then you may even come away feeling like your choices had severely important consequences.
That's about as good as you'll ever get from the genre. If you want full world simulation then you'll ironically end up with a boring game, because if all choices have genuine consequences, then it becomes impossible to tell a narrative, and you end up with something like rimworld or dwarf fortress. Impressive games in their own right, but are story generators not story-tellers.
Haven't really played CP2077 so I can't tell, but I was always of the impression that CRPG works best for fantasy or apocalyptic (System Shock, Fallout) genres because the world is typically much less complicated and the information doesn't travel easily, so it doesn't have to be fully simulated (especially in terms of consequences to your actions).
That I believe was always a problem for true cyberpunk games. In cyberpunk stories, information is everything. I am not sure I have seen a game that does cyberpunk really well by leaning into this complexity.
I enjoyed the game for the reasons you mentioned. I'm even able to enjoy the completely scripted and linear railroad shooters just like I'm able to enjoy a Hollywood blockbuster when my mood calls for it.
I have some issue with the initial marketing and the discussion surrounding the game though: choose your own backstory? Absolutely no impact at all, except some pre-recorded wingers in dialogues. RPG with a skill-tree? Absolutely 0 impact, you always have a way to get to a closed room, regardless of the perks you pick. And even if you pick non there is a vent open.
As long as you are aware that you are getting into what is basically a linear story in an open world, instead of another CD Projekt RED game _à la_ Witcher 3 which involved side stories that are as fleshed out as other full-sized games, yes it can be enjoyable.
It still one of the most amazing open-world futuristic games I have personally explored, which is a shame considering the rest of the game.
That is such an old school way of describing dialog trees. This isn't how it's done anymore. You're going to see more NN's making the decisions than fuzzy matching. That said, I think CDPR kicked the can when they didn't add more "lived in" scenarios in CP2077. The story was good but the world was hollow.
coming... What you have today is the result of 5 years ago of decisions. Give it time to catch up. There's a couple on the horizon that are going to blow you away. However, there are a few indie titles that have already incorporated some of this in smaller, unique ways. OMEA for example, or Wanderfolk.
From what I see these games simply use LLM apis, not some kind of sophisticated NN mechanics handling the decision trees.
They are not new in that, I have seen a couple of games that were basically slop (and terrible games, judging them as games) wrapping chatgpt.
Wanderfolk seems does not seem particularly inspiring, even the trailer has terrible audio mixing (there are times you cannot hear the narrator because of the game sounds, it is either fully made by an llm agent or by humans that do not seem capable of making a game if they cannot even make a proper short video) which does not make it feel very promising. Everything seems ai generated in general, and more like slop.
OMEA seems a bit more decent, and I would be curious to try it, but I do not like its visual art very much (it is ai generated "and curated by an artist" and it actually shows), and in particular the ai generated images of humans. Irrespective of what I think about ai image generation in art in principle, I think there is a deeper problem here as a game in (broadly) the visual novel genre must imo have a distinctive visual style, and their images just reads as ai generated (before I even read whether they are ai generated, it is that obvious). In general, I find this style of ai generated images of humans very offputting/uncanny (other assets, backgrounds etc I dont get bothered aesthetically as much) and I think I will find it hard stay engaged for long with such a game. Regardless, it seems a more decent attempt than most others I have seen. They do employ writers etc at least to create narratives, so it is probably not a total slop (otherwise, I can just roleplay with chatgpt directly or whatever).
In any case, these games are closer to being "llm wrappers with a certain harness" than having some actually new and sophisticated way to handle decision trees. Another issue with these games is that they do not even use some finetuned local llm, but use apis to providers, with which I am not that comfortable either.
I think you are taking things way to literally. Walking around in GTA and in RDR2 was a NN trained in bipedal locomotion (Dynamic Motion Synthesis - NaturalMotion Euphoria). LLM api's are how many are going to use the GPT's without wasting 6GB of VRAM on your GPU for a language model. No, there won't be some novel local neural net powering your next video game but there will be a neural net trained on the games narrative to provide you a more robust experience.
People are finding ways to include it in existing games but its going to take some time for the game devs themselves to release the games where narrative and dialog are more free-flowing.
Outside of that, there's also a huge huge opportunity in the TRELLIS.2 / Pixal3D space for quickly generating props and 3D assets.
I don't disagree with the points you made, I just never made it clear that upcoming games that utilize AI like this are not exactly how you would picture it. Still, expect some deeper integrations in the years to come.
My biggest complaint about the story is that it basically robs you from player agency. You are the side character in story of someone else. It is fully forced on you. And not in traditional I say acceptable manner. I understand if you are playing story of set character. But with Cyberpunk it feels like you are not. You are just carrying someone else around.
Side content itself is fine. I can pick to do it or not and approach it at least in some ways. With main story I only get to choose how to suffer.
Yeah, I wasn't a great fan of the story - it felt like they put a lot of emphasis on Keanu Reeves given he's a big celebrity and helped promote the game.
Hopefully, the sequel (which I believe is already being worked on) won't have such a story.
That said, I really liked the story in Phantom Liberty. In fact, that entire DLC was really well done.
Interesting. When I was playing I didn't care about Johnny and anything related to him. He was basically, mostly a politely treated hallucination for me.
It's basically WRPG vs JRPG. I think it's safe to say based on historical game performance/sales that most people prefer the "railroaded" story format of JRPG than WRPG role playing.
For most people, video games are about relaxing/unwinding, not embarking on a creative DnD roleplay with "real" consequences.
This is also why linear stories are so much more popular than "choose your own adventure" or "audience participation".
I agree with that, and there was another thing that really bothered me: The combination of "realistic" graphics and weaponry with "RPG-style" hit-points and combat mechanics simply doesn't work. It can't possibly work. When you empty a magnum revolver's cylinder directly into somebody's face, and they're just fine, still fighting you at 100% capacity -- there's too much dissonance between what you see and what you must expect to see.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution got around this by making gunplay genuinely dangerous, especially to your enemies. (Okay, much-maligned boss fights aside...)
In CP2077, the majority of enemies were just bullet-sponges, though. It was frankly terrible.
And, yeah, the world was disappointingly empty and lifeless. I don't think that the aesthetics were bad -- the game hewed closely to the fairly generic 2005-2015 "cyberpunk" tumblr aesthetic, and didn't do anything too interesting or take too many chances, but it was okay for all that. The setting was just vacant and boring, though.
It had nice cinematic moments - but it felt like GTA with a Hollywood cyberpunk movie attached. Going from bunnyhopping around rooftops and killing 1000s of gangsters and cops in broad daylight with heavy weapons and ridiculous cyberware, to a fairly railroaded narrative about apparently obscure mercenary V barely surviving was some tonal whiplash.
Aesthetically, what the game did was literally the very definition of "nothing new" and "uninspired." It wasn't bad, but they definitely weren't pushing any new angles or visions.
The general cyberpunk aesthetic was indeed established, what they did was bring it in a 3d, first person perspective world. And they had to bring it to that level of detail that it would look good and realistic from different angles, closely as well as from afar etc and in a way that represented the state of the art computer graphic realism of the time. I don't think this is trivial, "nothing new" or "uninspired".
Deus Ex:HR did the same thing, and did it in a much more original way. That game's black-and-gold color palette was objectively unusual for the cyberpunk genre -- where the conventional color sets were either black-and-green like an old terminal (or The Matrix), or the various shades of blue/pink/green/yellow/white neon lights. This is readily apparent if you browse cyberpunk tumblr, and the generic color sets map perfectly to CP2077's aesthetic.
The Deus Ex character designs, environment designs, and armor designs were also much less conventional.
I think that it's fair to call CP2077 aesthetically uninspired. It copied wholesale from the conventional and well-established aesthetic of the 2005-2015 period, without even changing anything. The end result is perfectly generic and looks like "art by committee" or "the path of least resistance."
The bright neon etc aesthetic is indeed a standard cyberpunk aesthetic, back since the 80s already. CP2077 is part of the cannon cyberpunk TT franchise, and they wanted to stay close to its aesthetic. It is not a brave choice, but it is a choice that targets familiarity of the audience that may be intimately or minimally aware of the 80s-90s cyberpunk retrofuturistic aesthetic. In this sense I do agree that it was "the path of least resistance", but I think it made sense. You cannot target both novelty and familiarity at the same time. It is not the case that the aesthetic is exhausted in computer games and it makes sense to target something new, in which case I would think that the criticism made more sense.
By which I guess you mean they copied Syd Mead? Sure. But that's totally valid. I personally don't really like the game (too many rpg trappings of being stuck in conversations I truly don't care about) but the way the city was realized is gorgeous, especially if you're into brutalism in any way. It's very reminiscent of the BTS system in Bangkok the way that there's a lot of straight concrete.
Not only Syd Mead, but he's in that set. (One of the great environment designers, but not a particularly noteworthy character designer or, e.g., UI designer.) Put it like this: They copied a well-established aesthetic, which was extremely popular at the time. It fed, and fed upon, the synthwave genre's ascent in the early 2010s. There was even some fawning over brutalism in the ~decade before the game was released: https://tacticalneuralimplant.tumblr.com/post/47196027149
Thing is, nothing was added to the game's aesthetic. No artist or designer put, as it were, his own stamp on the game's designs or environments. It was strictly generic and derivative. So by the time it came out I had seen it all a million times before. It could not have been less original, less inspired.
This is such a bizarre take - a piece of media set in "New York" isn't "uninspired" because it uses NY as a backdrop. It's what it does with it.
Same as a historical/fantasy game isn't "uninspired" and "nothing new" if it grounds itself in medieval style.
Same here - CP2077 is an established gameworld and putting the game in it is what the title promises. It's so strange to see complaints that a Cyberpunk franchise game looks like Cyberpunk IP. Especially when you see just how beautifully realized it is in IF YOU ACTUALLY PLAY IT.
I mean, yes the technical problems have been fixed, but it's still the same old boring story, repetitive gameplay and a very abrupt ending. And for being a cyberpunk game there's definitely too little cyberspace and 'netrunning' in the game. It's essentially a "GTA 2077" with slightly better gunplay (FWIW though, I still enjoyed the first playthrough for what the game is - e.g. a first-person-shooter with some very light RPG elements, but I couldn't endure a second playthrough, for that the different character stories and builds simply don't differ enough).
To be fair, I think it is probably hard to implement actual netrunning without losing immersion. Netrunning is its very own world there. Not sure what are good examples of netrunning implementations in videogames. In shadowrun series it was ok, but esp in the last one it became a bit tedious.
Or, open the comments and then click the title link. Then click back when you’re done reading the article, so you can read the comments. That’s my preferred mobile workflow anyways.
I finally made progress today on a deeply intractable problem that Sonnet was just incapable of solving despite hours of experimentation and multiple attempts. I swapped over to Opus in a new handoff session with the expectation of using at least one 5 hour session. It wasn't quick and took several hours but eventually Opus dialed in on several cascading base failures resulting from how the base vision model was being converted to coreml. It eventually was able to provide a combination of conversion and Swift changes that semi fixed the issue but still didn't solve the core conversion issues.
Then since Anthropic was so kind to provide $100 for Fable credits, I did another handoff to let Fable attack the root issues again. Several more hours and I'm back to seeing the same issues again and Fable is wandering around trying different things. I'm down about $40 of free money and still don't have a solution.
This is where having the human engineer in the loop benefits from a deep understanding of the problem domain. In this case, I don't yet.
I know the high level architecture I'm building, but the deep specifics of how vision models work and how conversion across platforms should be done isn't something I know yet.
So I'm left learning as I go and relying on constant feedback with the models to provide what guidance I can while learning exactly what is being done.
Someone who already knows these architectures would likely be able to get to the solution much faster.
Yeah exactly. The other day I caught myself prompting Claude a very specific question about the code architecture for something I'm working on to have it refactor something I intuited about the code, and realized that I could only ask that because of
my decades of software development experience. No vibecoder without those decades could have asked that, and in doing so, I saved my company I don't know how much in future code debt issues.
New interview question. Tell me about a time that AI generated bad code for you, and how did you fix it?
Good question! I think I'll use that as a counter question next time I interview. Ask a technical member of the team I'm interviewing with how they handled that situation.
I've been a long, long term customer of Namecheap as well.
Domain privacy protection is a feature that Namecheap provides for all valid domains. Its included by default at no extra cost.
The poster didn't indicate if they had this feature enabled or not for the domain. It would have prevented the college club person from even seeing their email address to initiate a password reset.
This clearly isn't an answer for NC's customer support personnel and company policies.
But I've been a happy customer for many years and I discourage others from immediately reading other comments and rushing to jump to other registrars without doing your due dilligence.
Remember that in any situation, the people most likely to leave negative comments and reviews are the people that have had genuine bad experiences or feel like they've been slighted, even if unwarranted.
Yes it was enabled but it's unclear to me how effective it would've been in this case.
I attempted to login after support changed the password, but prior to the club president connecting with me. So I filed a support ticket that my password stopped working, and to NameCheap's credit they locked the account shortly thereafter. I worked with support later to regain access.
I don't know for sure if the club president was able to successfully auth with the new password before NC locked the account at my request. To be completely transparent, keeping this domain on my personal account was a legacy arrangement that probably should have been handed off sooner. Student club turnover being what it is, I was just renewing it so it wouldn't get squatted. We are fully transferring ownership to them now so there's no friction.
It's fair to criticize this arrangement as messy. Regardless, NC shouldn't have simply handed over the account to an unverified phone caller.
I’ve reset 2FA with a known password and it was pretty onerous. Had to provide a lot of info: username, full name on account, other domains, phone number, order number, email, invoice IDs and payment proof. Asking for my legal ID would have been an improvement, but someone would need a lot more than “pretty please” on the phone.
How is domain privacy relevant here? That only hides your email from public records. What if the attacker already knows it (as they did in this case)? Email address is quite literally something you are meant to share publicly. It is not a password.
I think their point was that if WHOIS data were hidden, a password reset request that relied on providing the email address would've been impossible. But since NC's account management allows visitors to provide just a domain name to generate an unlock email, domain privacy wouldn't be a protective layer here.
I still don’t get the argument. Say I call your bank and convince them to give me full control of your account. Are you going to go “well the bank didn’t publish my account number anywhere, so they are in the clear”?
I agree, it's not an excuse to hand over an account. I think that commenter was considering practical mitigations for a broken system, not necessarily absolving NC of responsibility had my WHOIS been public.
>Convinced how? Often such things are via "knowing things" about the account holder.
i have some experience with social engineering attacks (former infosec turned teacher) and it was probably a combination of:
- caller confidence that they were the club owner/manager (because they were)
- offering/sending club-specific information that matched information on the site (flyers, pamphlets, etc.)
- "call the number on the website and i will answer it"
- an official college website page that had the caller listed as an owner/manager of the club
- some poor 20-something year old working in a hellish, windowless tier 1 tech support center
https://bsky.app/profile/neocities.org/post/3mnkqgxostk2k - This is recent and inexcusable sloppy work for a domain registrar. Private equity explains it if they're cutting and offshoring operations. Even if they hadn't been acquired by PE, it is still inexcusable. They didn't even bother to respond publicly to explain how it happened and that they're course correcting.
No. Even with the amount of co2 current being dumped into the atmosphere there's not enough total solar energy capture to Venus things up. A few thousand years, absolutely.
To add: desertification and more or less removing the support systems for modern population levels can easily happen with what's going on. But the oceans won't boil first. Everything else will die first.
Why are you only talking about co2 if you're going to try and be serious when responding to a joke? Please make an attempt to understand the situation better if you care that much.
because, intentionally or otherwise, your joke is 'too on the nose', as comedians put it, and 'will the oceans boil first' is, unfortunately, not an unreasonable question to ask, as during any positive feedback loop there is the chance for it to go into runaway. The second planet in our solar system likely experienced just such a cascading change, for example. Earth hasn't gone there before, or we wouldn't be talking (that so-called 'weak anthropic effect' Stephen Hawking was on about in _A Brief History of Time_,) but there is no a priori reason to think it _couldn't_, given a sufficient carbon pulse.
That said, we're more likely looking at more of a prehistoric scenario, near as I can suss, which would be more like, 'most high-metabolism creatures can't hack it, but at least you get some really cool massive dragonflies!'. This is emphatically a place we've been before, and, given all the prehistoric carbon now in every breath, a place we will likely be seeing again, and soon.
I'm very sorry about your planet and you have my condolences.
