Yeah, at this point I think it’s somewhat of a useless distraction. They do the validation work to prevent any problems from it, but an immense amount of drama seems to arise every time the topic comes up, and I’m sure Anthropic (and many insufferable AI bros) have been crowing to high heaven that Linus Torvalds uses it.

They’ve clearly chosen to allow it at the highest level for anyone competent enough to validate the work and stand by it. Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT won’t be answering reviewer questions about the implementation, that’s up to the human standing by the work, so they only need to know about the human, from a practical perspective.

This is truly horrible, amazing work.

Yeah… unfortunately I’m unsurprised. E33 is undeniably technically messy, even on PC with some mods to fix issues like framerate capped cutscenes, it’s got some attacks that trigger noticeable stutters and the like, even with shaders compiled. And I noticed visual issues like a ton of pop-in travelling the world map.

But like… this is a small team, and my god they had a jawdropping art direction, it’s a gorgeous game. I haven’t watched the video myself (and don’t intend to), but if you wanted to criticize UE for creating an engine that encourages bad habits in smaller projects like this, that would be fine, the issues I ran into undeniably have some “UE5-ness” about them. But if you put it in terms of “this game doesn’t look good/is bad”, you’ve totally lost me. It’s not pushing any technical boundaries, but it’s the most visually striking game I’ve played in ages.

Good art direction always beats out technology. Technology is just there to help the art shine, or to hold it back, but tech alone never defines a game.

Yeah, personally played it on a 7900XTX (ew, Nvidia /s), on both Windows and Linux. They also have console versions, so definitely not vendor locked!

I’d 100% agree with you if it was though, a totally vendor-locked game would be really gross.

I enjoyed Threat Interactive for a while, really in-depth content, but I found him so angry and so constantly negative that I found it overbearing. Realized I just wasn’t having fun with his content anymore, the doom and gloom was just excessive.

Also, I don’t think things are all bad. Yes there’s a metric ton of BS, and stuff like ghosting isn’t a delightful new problem. But a lot of the new tech is interesting, once the technology matures and sheds some of the excessive performance costs that required these compromises.

Let me give an example. DOOM TDA took a lot of flak for requiring raytracing, and indeed performance is a lot slower than Eternal, but it actually runs pretty well on a broad spread of hardware and looks fantastic. Also, the game’s destruction feels fantastic, it’s badass to see your gunfire shredding small buildings, it adds a lot, and it would be impossible to light dynamic geometry and physics like that without RT. I want to see that kind of destruction brought to a ton of games, but I don’t want to go back to the flat lighting of the early 3D era either. RT does both, so I want to see where that technology can go, even if it means we’ll get a bunch of games with so-so implementations and compromises while the industry figures it out.

It’s also just… cool. Sue me, I’m into tech, I want to see a game run at 20FPS with high resolution path tracing even if that’s far from practical and probably not the best use of dev resources lol.

I’m surprised you feel you need that much. Personally, I’m tinkering on a 7900XTX, with 24Gb of VRAM. I can’t run the massive new models, like the latest Deepseek Flash at 400+ Gb, but neither can 192Gb. Means my context isn’t unlimited, but I’m able to run even big local models like Qwen3.8 at Q4_K_M with a context of 64K, which is enough when paired with a front end like Hermes that can run compaction and invoke subagents. Honestly, I’d describe 24Gb as a sweet spot for local AI usage, 32Gb sounds like comfortable headroom for a larger context window, or even multiple heads.

To be fair, I guess it is unified memory, and it doesn’t sound like you’re running it on a dedicated machine, so maybe the other stuff you’re running is pushing past 8Gb and giving you less space for AI than me. But 128Gb still sounds like wild excess to me, well into the diminishing returns of slightly more accurate rounding and needlessly large context.

I appreciate that pushback (/s), although honestly if you (like myself) find AI-tells like that cringe, you’re almost certainly not the type of person using it addictively.

There’s a pretty strong body of research that lots of people are subconsciously picking up language patterns from AI, such as the increased prevalence of words like “delve”. It’s the basic social mirroring we do to pick up language from anyone we talk to, only weirdly twisted because the thing so many people are talking to isn’t human.

“I appreciate that pushback” isn’t a commonly complained enough tell that people would be intentionally avoiding it, I find it pretty believable that a heavy AI user would unironically use it in a Q&A.

Honestly it sounds like, which I think might be worse, that he’s been using it so much that he’s picked up its mannerisms of speech. From his own description of the confrontations his wife and family had with him, it sounds like he’s been talking to it a lot on his own time.

Gotta agree, it’s a testament to how addicting that type of validation is that he’s finding it addictive as “a source of dopamine”. He’s always struck me as pretty level headed in my (admittedly limited) watching of him, and he’s clearly a smart guy. Reminds me of how nobody is totally immune to forces like advertising and predatory stuff like gambling.