#path of exile

If you read enough roundups of AI companion apps, they all start to blur together. Candy.ai shows up, a couple of clones show up, and the verdict is usually some lukewarm draw. I wanted to be more precise than that, so I judged sweetdream.ai on the things that actually matter day to day rather than on marketing copy.

Realism is the first axis. SweetDream's chat reads as natural and emotionally aware, and it carries memory across conversations, which is exactly where most rivals quietly drop the ball. You feel the difference within a few exchanges, when your AI girlfriend references something you mentioned last week without being prompted.

(Source)

Okay, Path of Exile 2, the game that Elon Musk desperately wants you to believe he's good at when he's not seig heiling, ripping off his shareholders or obsessing over his new AI waifu, is um... not great in terms of this design. (Pretty much all the promotional outfits for the female player characters are also terrible)

As with most games inspired by Diablo, it is extremely confusing why they would dip into the bikini armor trope anyway given how far you usually view the player character from.

Apparently it zooms in sometimes though, and this make things more confusing, the footage indicates that at least some of the choices of outfit the are much more more practical.

I also feel the need to point out that, as is common when creators want fantasy barbarism but only white people, they've gone with this Celt-coding of white-rasta-dreadlocks (Celts had braids, and sometimes matted hair, but never locs), wearing furs while others have chain mail (chain mail being a Celtic invention), wearing wode (a practice specific to the Picts, who were exclusively in northern and eastern Scotland) and having little metal (Celts, including Picts, were both made elaborate items out of various metals).

This is perhaps the strangest ongoing form of exotification, whereby the creators try to incorporate black hair and caricatures of olde (like skull belts), use it as shorthand for "primal" and "savage" then dab some wode make up on and pretend it's from history.

Honestly at this point just begging major studios to just maybe consider doing some research, avoid these tropes and even consider inventing some new imagery.

Also think about how confusing it is when you have only have 7 character classes, and 2 of them are "Huntress" and (female) "Ranger". Just thinking about that.

And also what it looks like when 3 of 7 classes have gendered names and they're all female ones (Huntress, Sorceress and Witch). Do you want to be associated with the most embarassing billionaire to ever live? Because this is how you get associated with the most embarassing billionaire to ever live.

I wonder what numbers this design would do for the teratophiles/monster-fuckers.