You’re not the only one who thought that.

They kind of tried that, but unfortunately it wasn’t very good.

But we all know how things would end.

The furthest you can bring them in the base game is that part with the falling elevator. I had like 7-8 NPCs following me when I reached that spot.

Right, but there’s a difference between automating a refund if they can detect the purchase happened in the last two weeks and has less than two hours of playtime, versus complex support problems being handled by an LLM that can be mislead or hallucinate.

I suppose it’s fine if it’s limited to giving advice on solving the problem and has to escalate to a human if any server side action is required, but it being tied to anti-cheat has me worried that’s not the case.

Their current recommendation engine is already a marvel and the only one I’ve ever come across that actually directs me to niche stuff I might be interested in.

It’s a good time to recommend the Discworld book Jingo, which remains just as relevant as when it was written.

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. *No one* ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.

And another quote from Feet of Clay:

Just because someone’s a member of an ethnic minority doesn’t mean they’re not a nasty small-minded little jerk

(And then there’s The Fifth Elephant that’s so painfully spot-on that I’d rather not spoil a single moment of it. Terry Pratchett was amazing and I wish he was still around to share his humor and wisdom. We could use a few laughs right now.)

I know Valve wants to remain a small-ish company, but automating in-house support has literally never improved things for the customer. It’s even worse if it’s tied into their anti-cheat - a false positive can lock you and your entire family out of multiplayer, and good luck getting a human to overturn it after the former support staff is moved to other teams.

I’d say it’s weird they didn’t focus on using this to help fix their nearly nonexistent community moderation, but I’ve been told their hands-off approach is deliberate due to a libertarian bent among the higher ups.

Lock S-foils in attack position!

How the hell would it have connected to MGS and not just Metal Gear? 🤨

The ending shows that the whole game exists to explain a “plot hole” that literally nobody cared about (how Big Boss survived his “death” in Metal Gear). The scrapped final mission, Mission 51, would have come before that and finished Eli’s plotline, setting him on the path to becoming Liquid Snake by the time of Metal Gear Solid.

And Ground Zeroes was always planned as a separate game to MGS5. They were supposed to release at the same time, but 5’s development got delayed.

I’m going off of what people said around the time of Kojima’s exit, which is that Konami were unhappy with how long V was taking and forced Kojima to release Ground Zeroes as a standalone. It seems I misinterpreted what that meant!

Removed by mod

*cough*

Oh no, another rabbit hole.

Well, down I go!

You’re lucky you weren’t at the late game when that happened. I was sleep deprived when I got to the “shut the console off NOW” and “I need scissors! 61!” Codec calls. i was genuinely questioning my sanity a bit.

The ultimate crime of MGSV is that they cut the ending mission that directly tied it to Metal Gear Solid. Without it the game’s more a prequel to Metal Gear than the Solid series.

That and cutting Ground Zeroes out into its own game when it was originally supposed to be a chapter in V. It should have been retroactively included.

I would do terrible things for a remaster of Revengeance that adds in all the features they had to cut during development to get it to run on only 256 MB each of RAM and VRAM. The sword slicing in the released version is impressive, but the original prototype was nuts.

So the next day, I asked him, “So how is it?” He was shellshocked. “Snake died, man.” Excitement was gone. His day at school was ruined. I didn’t check in with him later, but presumably, a 7th grader couldn’t make heads or tails of the ending of that game, if he made it that far.

Sounds like you asked him right after he finished the Tanker chapter but before “Iroquois Pliskin” showed up on the Big Shell.

I didn’t play it myself until a few years later, and it was one of the most talked-about endings in all of video games, because it was so barely comprehensible, at best.

The ending was mangled due to 9/11 happening right before the game’s release and them rushing to recut and sanitize the finale, which had huge swaths of Manhattan being leveled by Metal Gear Arsenal ramming through it.

Presumably the original cut was more coherent, but I’m guessing nothing could have lessened the final mindfuck of “every leader of the Patriots has been dead for over a century”.

I wasn’t disagreeing, just expanding on your point. :)

I’d say a kick to the face but he’d probably enjoy that.

There are examples of lost metals in real life. Damascus/wootz steel (the actual historical metal, not the pattern welding technique often marketed as Damascus steel) was produced for multiple millennia and was prized for its ability to hold a sharp edge and resist shattering, before the technique to make it was lost in the early 1900s.

Modern material analysis has identified some of how and why it was so resilient and metallurgists have come up with reproductions that achieve most of its qualities, but the exact technique and circumstances behind it remain lost to time even though it only stopped being produced a mere century ago.