Pendell

I just finished Firmament, the new game from Cyan, the creators of Myst. It's... just fine! It scratches that Myst-like itch; the realms are gorgeous, it has a lot of puzzles that are grounded in physicality and mostly involve powering or fueling things and turning them on. I was disappointed that there's not really a big turn to the mechanics; you do a thing in each of three realms, collecting three upgrades for your tool along the way, then you do a harder thing in each of the three realms, then you finish the game. Many of Cyan's other games add a fun complication in the second half; I'm thinking of the lovely revelation of how Obduction's worlds are connected. The story in Firmament is fine, but mostly boils down to introducing a mystery in the first hour, letting you solve puzzles for five hours, and then explaining the (not hugely novel) mystery in the last hour. Not Cyan's best work, but not their worst.

The VR was gorgeous but the controls were almost unusable and my rig chugged way too much in complex scenes for it to be playable. That's okay; I'm happy to play in pancake mode.

There's one big issue I have, though: they seem to have made extensive use of AI content generation.

#video games #The Cohost Global Feed #The Cohost Global Feed (Marxist-Leninist)#AI art discourse #fuck ai art #cyan worlds #cyan #myst #firmament

Natalie @nex35/31/2023, 2:23 AM

just got a refund for this game

really intensely disappointed in Cyan here

#firmament #ai #large language models

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in reply to @gaw's post:

dante, personally @dante5/31/2023, 1:38 AM

This is TREMENDOUSLY disappointing to hear, what the hell

Assessed Unoriginal @UncreativeOpinions5/31/2023, 2:14 AM

The Miller brother's have been posting various AI-generated stuff of twitter for a while now. So to some extent they appear to be true believers and I doubt they'd be particularly ashamed of it.

Firmament has always seemed like a weird non-priority for Cyan. It was half-positioned as a VR-first game, but then walked back when that raised expectations for VR users. And the game was seldom mentioned across the years of development in preference to plugging more Myst remakes. I'm fine with them prioritising whatever they want, but it does also suggest it was never meant to be "The next big game by Cyan!"

The original projected fulfilment date for the Kickstarter was mid-2020. Those are usually complete fiction but the Kickstarter itself was run in 2019, so you'd hope they'd have had at least some idea of what it would be and what was required by then.

Maybe to some degree there was some pre-AI fad experimentation with Neural Nets/PCG that inadvertently got caught up in later culture wars. But to me it suggests the game was always meant to be a smaller scope/"cheaper" side project, and they saw an opportunity to paper over the cracks with various AI tools.

I mostly backed the Kickstarter mostly because Obduction turned out fantastically. But haven't actually played more than 10 minutes after discovering I was affected by a critical error (narrator audio not playing after the first monologue) in the launch version.

Gregory Avery-Weir @gaw5/31/2023, 3:18 AM

I was perfectly happy to chalk up the release delays to COVID. The wild thing is that the 3D environments are gorgeous and amazing and clearly handmade, but they seem to have used AI for some of the easier parts (and also for 2D art, which is not easy but which they still shouldn't use AI for).

Michael Klamerus @Michael-Klamerus5/31/2023, 3:02 AM

Awww that's so disappointing. I love Cyan and was having a good time with this too and this is so frustrating to hear.

Ryusui @ryusui5/31/2023, 3:16 AM

legitimately disgusted by this news. is it possible to demand a refund from a Kickstarter if i've already technically claimed my reward? @_@;

Iggy @iggydinosaur6/1/2023, 11:37 AM

Yeah this is a part I don't quite feel happy about. The group seemed deep into the AI prior to it taking off in the public's eye. It's unclear to me what was used, how, etc. I find AI at best a child's trinket in how it is being used and there are serious legal problems to using it.

To some extent, a lot of the worlds feel much different than it's closest comparator in a 3-dimensional space, Obduction. That is not to say the realms of Firmament are entirely bland, but the brush strokes of say, the various ice fields, seem devoid at times of human-intervention and feel lifeless. It would not surprise me if much larger portions of the game than we could guess were AI-generated.

Given the constraints/changes of the release date, and what one can assume having played through, that a portion of such things as the posters and newspaper clipping were AI-generated. I didn't see a credit to any acting or voice-artists but I could be wrong.

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