It’s not an open world, but Mirror’s Edge is a great game.
Wasn’t the second game open world tho? But that might be the reason it lost its charm for me.
Yes, it was. But EA ruined it with their launcher, so you can’t play it on Linux.
Yeah, I guess, but as long as the challenge is still achievable I can dig a large field.
It’s easier to place and organize finished assets than to create new ones, though, so after a while a lot of it starts to feel copy-pasted. I’m sure that noticeable lack of effort will only be exasperated by modern automation.
*exacerbated
My spelling is accepted when I search the word.
Yes, because that is a completely different word.
Not according to a simple search, no.
Yes, it close enough to a homonym that I can see your confusion. Exasperated is being fed up with something, exacerbated is something making a problem worse.
Edit - Oh, if you notice in your screenshot ddg got the definition you showed from wiktionary, so I wouldn’t treat that as an authoritative source.
You never had anything to gain by choosing a different word in this discussion, your goal is to prove my chosen word wrong, and you’ve failed so far.
Bro I was just trying to be helpful. I wasn’t trying to prove shit, I didn’t have any fucking goal or ulterior motive. Tell yourself whatever you need to get through the day though.
Dictionaries frequently show common usages, even when they are misnomers. Recommend taking this one onboard.
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I can’t get into fully open world games anymore. I am more of a fan of open ended levels like you see in the original Crysis. I am a lazy bastard and simply like a decent linear game with good gameplay and story. I will admit I do prefer more open spaces in multiplayer games like what you see in the Battlefield series though. However, the RockStar games are the exception to this for me because they all have really tightly, well-made linear stories, but the world is so well crafted that I don’t mind it being open world.
Only if the interesting content scales with size.
I am honestly excited to what GTA6 can bring to the content map. Considering how dense some parts of GTA 5 already are.GTA V dense? I found it incredibly bare, especially coming from GTA SA.
Yeah V has the most lifeless map of any GTA since 3. Even NPC detail was missing like umbrellas when it rains.
Didn’t play it so I can’t comment on the SA part.
At least they have loads of little details in obscure placesThat describes pretty much all GTA games though. The difference with V is that it has a much bigger map, so there are a lot more areas with uninteresting details.
Maybe it’s just me but I felt like the space was for the better. Maybe it’s just the fidelity of the game that helps it vs the older gen.
I want worlds big enough that I can suspend disbelief. True scale is too much (True Crime: Streets of LA was awful to traverse, for example) but too small and it feels like being in one of those play parks for small children. It’s a problem I’ve had with Fallout 3+, where the scale makes no sense. I don’t necessarily need the additional space to be dense with content (if it’s supposed to be a barren waste, why is it full of stuff?!).
I want to buy into these worlds, but I struggle when things feel ridiculous. Oh are you struggling for supplies? Even though there’s supplies 50m away from your settlement? Come on!
The first Red Dead Redemption hit the spot for me, as did the native settlement in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The scale isn’t actually realistic, but it’s large enough that I feel like it could be. GTA IV wasn’t bad either, but GTA V was too compact in many places for my tastes.
I suppose it’s much like the theatre. If a scene is well written it feels fine, but if the play calls attention to the limitations of the medium too much then it starts to become a bit silly.
The advantage of putting those supplies 50m away though is that it makes a better video game. Playing The Outer Worlds right after Starfield made me a-okay with every way they shrunk the Bethesda experience.
How are we defining “better”? For me it makes the experience worse because I lose all immersion. I’m trying to be immersed and my brain can let a lot slip (realism is not required!) but for me the limit is when it strains even basic credulity. Yes, 50m makes the quest less hassle, but if I don’t care about the quest due to the scope of the world then there’s a more fundamental issue.
In games where immersion isn’t a factor (e.g. The Binding of Isaac) that stuff doesn’t matter. In an explorable open world I content that it’s rather crucial.
All the immersion Bethesda could muster couldn’t make Starfield a better game than The Outer Worlds. The criticism was frequently that they made 1000 planets but that it would have been better if they’d focused on making 5 good ones, which is basically what Outer Worlds did. Putting the metaphorical supplies 50m away is what they found led to the best pacing, so suspend your disbelief a bit, and have a better time than if they’d put them further away. This isn’t prescriptive, btw. If it’s not your preference, it’s not your preference, but I think most people would prefer the compromise to immersion when it makes the game more fun.
The criticism was frequently that they made 1000 planets but that it would have been better if they’d focused on making 5 good ones
I take zero issue with this! I think you’re misunderstanding my point.
Putting the metaphorical supplies 50m away is what they found led to the best pacing
I’m not talking about a metaphorical 50m, I’m talking in the game world 50m. It’s not an analogy for game design, I mean in a very literal sense that the worlds are a bit too small for my tastes.
I’m not talking about density of content or the number of locations in a game. I am talking about the level of size scaling that has been applied. Too small and I cannot get immersed, too large and it makes for a tedious play experience (that’s why I cited True Crime: Streets of LA, that uses 1:1 scaling for LA and as a result has a lousy overworld).
For my tastes the balance currently leans too heavily towards ludicrously small in many games. I quite liked the scale of the Watch_Dogs games, as a counter example.
Hell, it’d be cool if there was an engine that used something like content-aware scaling to adjust the distances to player preferences. Some people want a slog (that seems to be Death Stranding’s deal) and others want Wannado City.
so suspend your disbelief a bit
If this was advice I was able to act on then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. If this was an option, I’d do it! Do you think I enjoy being frustrated at this?! No! I wish it didn’t bother me! It’s a nuisance and gets in the way of fun!
I’m not talking about a metaphorical 50m, I’m talking in the game world 50m. It’s not an analogy for game design, I mean in a very literal sense that the worlds are a bit too small for my tastes.
But the size of the world is a part of the game design. What’s too big for The Outer Worlds might be just fine for Mad Max simply because one of those games lets you drive a car. The distance that those supplies can be away from where you start is dictated by what mechanics you have at your disposal to get there. It’s metaphorical because we’re talking about any time a game makes a decision like this with relation to how they scale their game world, not just that one time that you measured it out to be 50m.
I do think it’s worth examining why this is harder for you to suspend disbelief than other things in video games. You suspend disbelief every time your character loses or gains hit points rather than suffering actual injuries that need time to heal. You suspend disbelief any time you play a game in a real world city that isn’t represented in 1:1 scale (that’s basically all of them) like The Division or Spider-Man. So to the same end, I’ll take those supplies that are 50m away and it’s somehow too far for the quest giver to go get them, because it’s best for the design of the game, just like the scale of the world that they built.
It’s metaphorical because we’re talking about any time a game makes a decision like this with relation to how they scale their game world, not just that one time that you measured it out to be 50m.
That might be what you’re choosing to talk about, but it is categorically not what I was talking about.
But the size of the world is a part of the game design. What’s too big for The Outer Worlds might be just fine for Mad Max simply because one of those games lets you drive a car.
I know! I understand!
That’s why I picked a specific example of where I feel the balance in some popular games is poorly implemented for my tastes. Some games manage this well, some do not, and I feel that this often errs on the side of “50m outside the settlement”. Based on your comments, that doesn’t bother you.
Great, I wish I was as lucky.
For me, an open world game that gets the scaling wrong is not very fun to explore. Whether that’s too big or too small. It seems lots of gamers aren’t fussed about this. Arguing with me that my preferences are wrong doesn’t seem worthwhile. I understand the game design principles, that was never the issue.
I posted this because I think it’s interesting to compare notes on the parameters of this element of game design. What sort of scaling is too big? Why? How many people should be visible in a settlement to feel right? That sort of thing.
I do think it’s worth examining why this is harder for you to suspend disbelief than other things in video games. You suspend disbelief every time your character loses or gains hit points rather than suffering actual injuries that need time to heal. You suspend disbelief any time you play a game in a real world city that isn’t represented in 1:1 scale (that’s basically all of them) like The Division or Spider-Man. So to the same end, I’ll take those supplies that are 50m away and it’s somehow too far for the quest giver to go get them, because it’s best for the design of the game, just like the scale of the world that they built.
I’m not sure what your point here is? That my brain is broken? As I said, if I was able to overlook it, I would. I’m pretty sure I also said that I wasn’t looking for 1:1 as it actively hampers game design.
There’s more options than 1:1 or Wannado.
Good point. If you look at the Yakuza games, they’re typically set in a little entertainment district. The map isn’t huge but it’s not supposed to be. It feels the correct size for a busy little part of town.
Meanwhile, yeah, Fallout 3 gave me the impression that even before the war the DC metropolitan area was home to maybe a thousand people.
I recently rewatched Rango and the size of the main settlement in that is about the size of those in RDR. Reflecting on that, I suppose I want the map to reflect the kind of scale and focus seen in other media. A film or TV show doesn’t show us every street (usually) but it gives a sense of the scale of the place. If a game map couldn’t be used for an establishing shot without looking daft then it doesn’t really work for me, I reckon.
It’s something I like about the overhead perspective used by games like Fallout and Wasteland - I perceive what’s on screen as the area of the settlement that’s relevant to me but with the understanding that there’s more off screen. A character might mention going somewhere, much like in a play, and then reappear. Perhaps the player can go there, perhaps they can’t even see it, but it makes the world feel larger.
I suppose, much like in reality, we rarely visit every location of a place, but it needs to feel like it might enter our narrative in some way.
Games like Skyrim always bugged me a bit as I couldn’t walk for more than half a minute before I tripped over a quest or encounter of some sort. I feel like the devs were scared players would get bored if they didn’t see something exciting every few seconds. Sure I want to do stuff, but I also want to breath and look at the scenery and think about what I’m doing.
The real world is way more open; you travel for a good while between cities, and I really like when games do that as well. I’ll have to try Red Dead, but I thought Kingdom Come Deliverance struck a good balance. Even at top speed on a good horse, it takes minutes to ride between the major settlements, with only rare encounters coming up now and again.
Honestly, I love open worlds that are meaningful, rather than just big for the sake of being big. Yakuza games have very small world, but they dense as hell. They are filled with wacky side quests and many distractions.
I wouldn’t mind a much bigger world. If it’s actually populated. There needs to be shit to do. Reward me for going off the path.
8x the size of the world either means 1/8 the original handcrafted stuff per area or 8x the development time and cost, there’s no way you can get around this
World size, density, and traversal have to be balanced.
I tend to play without fast travel, and skyrim meets these three pretty well, using the carts and horse for faster travel.
GTA can be bigger, with cars and planes for long distances.
Large worlds are great, if they are packed w content, open barren landscapes are terrible.
Ghost recon wildlands for me is the sweet spot for a big, interesting world with good traversal options.
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ever played Death Stranding?
I did, and I really liked it. I am excited to see how the sequel holds up, the trailer was so whacky I couldn’t look away.
I put in about 6-8 hours and never came back. Not that it was bad or anything, but I just don’t have that kind of time and it wasn’t particularly compelling. I might try it again some day, but I didn’t really understand the hype. You deliver boxes for likes and try to not fall over while walking forever in a kinda scary sci-fi post apocalypse world. What am I missing? I heard great things about it making the journey less of a slog, but if anything, it made traveling feel like more of a slog. I just had to not fall over. It’s not like I was finding that much cool stuff along the way, just occasionally a slightly useful bridge made by some other player.
I had the exact same experience and don’t know what I’m missing that everyone else loved so much. It was all just so tedious.
I really wanted to like it, but nothing about the game hooked me. The world was cool and graphics were good but the core gameplay loop was tedious. I was hoping for a more interesting or threatening world to explore. The random objects placed by “xXXgamer420xXx” didn’t help my immersion. I wonder if the game would have been as successful if Kojima’s name wasn’t attached to it.
It’s definitely not for everyone, but the begining does an absolutely shit job of selling the game’s depth and the more interesting bits about the setting.
As you progress through the game you have vastly different landscape types where “hold forward and don’t tip over” isn’t enough to make it through. River deltas, canyons, mountains with and without snow, swamps, craggy wasteland strewn with boulders, open plains with enemy camps, forests, etc. You also get a decent variety of tools to use to tackle those challenges, and multiple ways to approach each one.
Do I skirt around the edges of the terrorist camp or try to speed through on a motorcycle? Should I try to defeat them to make the area easier for a while? What tools do I need to get through the terrain on the outskirts? How many ladders and climbing ropes? How am I going to carry that all with the cargo and deliver it within the time limit? What do I need to defeat them? Can I? Should I do that while I carry the cargo, risking it? Should I clear it before I take on the delivery? Should I take the time to build a zipline network and then come back later when I can just zipline through? Is there enough bandwidth for buildings that I can afford a zipline network? Should I grind out some other delivery destinations to unlock more bandwidth? Maybe I should repair the highways in the area instead and drive through? How do I get the resources I need for building this stuff? Will I do repeatable deliveries for the materials, scavenge them from lost cargo in dangerous places, fight the terrorists and take theirs? Do I take on extra difficult delivery conditions (time, cargo damage) for higher rewards? How do I deal with those additional requirements?
But again, the game does a piss poor job of demonstration any of this depth off from the begining. It also does a terrible job signposting how and when you unlock more tools. So you can grind shit out the hard way, then do one mission for someone different (that you could have done the whole time) and unlock something that would have made the grind half as difficult. Shit didn’t really “click” for me until more than 20 hours in, which is pretty unforgivable.
For anyone thinking about playing or picking it up again, my advice:
Get the deluxe edition. It has a bunch of seemingly minor QoL additions in terms of new equipment and some added functionality for old ones that make a ton of difference.
Slam through the starting area. Unless you really want to grind, just do the main quest path and ignore the side stuff. You can come back later with gear that will keep it from being such a slog. This would have cut down my “20 hours until it clicked” by a ton.
After you take the boat to the second map, you can take things slower. I reccomend focusing on the main quests until you unlock each new “hub”, then do as much side content as you’re interested in. On the second map the game does a better job of indicating the story sections in advance that you might want to grind out side content to be better prepared for.
Most of all, don’t treat Death Stranding like a normal game that’s meant to entertain and keep you hanging on for the next beat. It’s a slow, contemplative game while you grind out sidequests. I mostly play it to relax. Put a video up on my second monitor, or listen to a podcast, and deliver shit.
I’d also like to throw another good point to the ones you have provided: The game is also about helping other players along on their journey.
Once I got to the good equipment, I laid down as much as I could to help others on their journey. I even went as far as grinding (which I legitimately hate doing) to build the roads, build the zip lines, and fixing other people’s equipment that I had used.
That, to me, was one of the cooler aspects of the game!
Same. I struggled with RDR2 and gave up on Elden Ring.
Rdr2 is too fucking big lmao
I found it to be so immersive, that the large map size was a bonus to me. I wanted to see it all, and by god I did. I have done every single thing on that game.
I found it even more immersive by camping when it got dark out, cooking to eat, and then going to bed. When I woke in the daylight, I would sit there and have Arthur drink a cup of joe, break down the camp, and continue on with my journey to wherever.
Now I want to play it all over again for a fifth time. >:(
I’ve not enjoyed single player, Arthur is only allowed to be a cunt for story reasons, the moment I’m doing it I get penalised. It’s not bad but it’s… Eh. At least it was only $30 on sale.
Ah, I’m sorry you didn’t get to enjoy it! It is my favorite game of all time, so that’s sad to hear.
Still got my money’s worth, about 10hrs in single player, although a lot of fucking about that certainly wasn’t productive, mostly just been around valentine and the place to the east. A bit more than that online.
I’d be really interested to see an action RPG type game that just embraces the real-life scale of the world and lets you screw about with the rate of time passing like in Kerbal Space Program when you’re walking a long way. You’d have to limit the scale of the story to make it manageable to develop, but I think there’s the potential for something cool in there. Maybe there are only two or three villages in one valley, but they’re all full villages and they’re actually several kilometres apart. Make sure that whatever goals you have are time-gated in some way so that you actually have to weigh up whether you can afford to walk to the other village, because even though you fast-forward it so that it only takes a minute of real-life time to walk there it’s actually most of the day in-game.
Outward is your game.
Never heard of this one, but I will check it out. Thank you for the recommendation!
Not quite KSP whole planet scale, but uh, Kenshi.
Its a pretty damn big world, pretty sure it is significantly larger than Skyrim.
You’ve got world speed controls, rpg style mechanics and progression, and you can have multiple members of your party, and you can build your entire own town if you want to.
The game is filled with many roving factions, who all have a sort of reputation dynamic with all other factions, as well as yourself/party.
The game is full of many different story lines, many of them conflict with each other and cannot all be done, there is no such thing as a plot armored, impossible to kill npc, and there are tons of unique, npcs you can meet and have many kinds of interactions with.
If you want to take on a huge faction, you can, but you’re probably going to need to literally raise your own army to do so.
Main downside is the control scheme is fairly awkward / old school… its basically like an mmo from the early 00’s, but single player; click to tell your peeps where to go sort of thing, awkward camera controls by modern standards for an ARPG.
You don’t directly control the combat of your character like in Skyrim, the game basically rng rolls based on you and your opponents stats to determine who uses what kind of attack or block or dodge… but you can set different combat stances, basicsally.
… So its not an ARPG in the sense of Skyrim or AssCreed or Dark Souls… but it is an ARPG in a more loose sense, that its an RPG mechanics style game and world, without rigid turn based combat, which all revolves around action.
But the scale you are looking for is there. If you don’t set the time to fast forward, it can easily take 15 minutes to an hour or more to walk between settlements or major landmarks, depending on what part of the map you’re in.
Nothing is really obvious from the onset of the game in terms if what you are supposed to do, beyond not get murdered, eat, drink and sleep to stay alive.
It’s very much a sandbox approach, but theres tons and tons of stuff to do if you are capable of directing yourself.
Also, lots of mods that add more content, immersion, and deepen or alter gameplay mechanics.
Kenshi 2 is in the works with upgraded engine and graphics… ETA totally unknown.
I tried to play that game and totally failed to grasp the controls. The idea of is is appealing. I might have to give it another go.
I am honestly kind of baffled that no one has made a mod that makes the camera/control scheme into something more up to modern standards, like a mode shift button that toggles you into a modern 3rd person control scheme.
I’d attempt it myself if my wrist wasn’t so fucked up
That sounds fascinating! I’m pretty tolerant of jank in games if they’re doing something engaging, and while I do enjoy the combat systems of the Souls games I am totally okay with a more abstracted system. Hell I love Paradox’s grand strategy games, and this sounds a lot like how battles work in those — the meaningful decision is in which fights you pick and how you prepare for them rather than your actions within the fight itself.
Daggerfall was like this, if I’m not mistaken (I got into TES with Morrowind, and I’ve never found the time to play the older games).
The map was about the size of Great Britain, and mostly empty, even if it had about fifteen thousand locations spread about it.
I’ve been playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance for the last few weeks and have found the balance to be pretty spot on. At first the world seems massive, and you have to travel around on foot, then eventually you get a horse and can also auto travel between locations. I think they really nailed the balance in that game.
Yeah, that game gets it right. I played it with the map turned off and the sleep walking perk and had the best time of it.
Think the second one will finally make me buy a ps5
Damn I’m literally playing Wildlands now. It’s a really fun game to just drop in if you want to cause some mayhem.
I think the disconnect has to do with old gamers vs new. Old gamers were used to getting one game every 6mo to a year. New gamers are looking for a variety of that or short bangers. Idk I somehow fall between. I can play a long game as long as it comes in digestible amounts where I can easily drop it and pick it back up. All I know is ‘AAA’ type studios are out of touch as fuck. Only game I can think of in recent memory that was long and checked all the boxes would be God Of War. Horizon Zero Dawn as well. Coincidentally both ports from PS but I’m PC.
It’s funny, I actually was thinking it’s the other way around. Older gamers have a million different things begging for attention, so longer games just aren’t as appealing anymore. Younger gamers can easily find the time to sit down for hours at a time uninterrupted.
In reality, it’s probably somewhere in between. Younger people also gave increasingly smaller attention spans due to social media, so there probably are a growing number of them that just wouldn’t sit with one game for that long.
They mean gamers of old. That is, currently old gamers, but back when we were young, and had time, and not a lot of games to fill it with, so we appreciated a longer game.
Current young gamers have vast libraries of games to choose from, and shortened attention spans due to social media.
Old people also have those same new games and also have the same social media and attention span issues.
I quite like sandbox games so in those cases I would like it bigger, but at the same time I have no need for some main storyline to be in the game either. I want to be able to live in the world and either challenge comes just from surviving or things you find while exploring.
And I really don’t like sandbox games, so I need a really good story or really compelling gameplay, and neither needs a huge map or tons of hours.
Don’t try to please everyone. A good sandbox game doesn’t need a story, a good story game doesn’t need sandbox elements, and good gameplay can be really short.
Yeah a lot of these games that try and do a bit of everything seem to often fail to entertain anyone.
Huge game worlds were awesome back when it was challeng to make them. People have proved they can be done. Now it needs balance.
The biggness doesn’t matter as much as how much there is to do in a meaningful and rewarding way.
I think it really depends on the game.
An MMO or a sandbox game I can sink hours and hours into. I don’t know how many hours I’ve lost to games like Minecraft, Rimworld, etc. Even if those types of games might have “objectives”, I’m more likely to just kind of do my own thing.
And I had something like 500 days logged in with my Final Fantasy XI character. It was my default game and I kept playing because I always felt I had something to do and people to meet.
Narrative focused games? Nope. While I might enjoy playing, the narrative can feel more like a chore in a game that has too much stuff to do, especially if mechanics or areas are locked behind it. I will end up ADHD because I hit a block or feel like the game is forcing me to do the main story when I don’t want to.
I had that happen in Fallout 3 where I was just wondering around, having fun exploring and stumbling on things, and I end up finding someone I didn’t even know I needed to look for connected to my dad and suddenly I felt I was being pulled away from what I found fun.
Might be why I really liked 76 despite the hate it got/gets.
Agreed, to an extent.
I do think advancements in AI will eventually give us open world games with infinite procedurally generated engaging quests and NPC interactions. That’ll be cool. In the meantime, I don’t need a team of humans to burn themselves out to produce a large amount of bleh content.
I do think advancements in AI will eventually give us open world games with infinite procedurally generated engaging quests and NPC interactions.
If you want to believe in fairy tales that is fine, but the problem is when CEOs believe in those fairy tales and use them to fire their artists and developers which is already happening.
…and there will be no market correction back to actually hiring humans and paying them a living wage and treating them humanely once your only option for AAA games is AI slop…
That’s not what they said. There is a difference between using AI in a short sighted effort to cut costs and using it to enhance content created by people. AI is a broad term, and just because a bunch of rich asshole morons are misusing a version of it that does have use does not make it automatically bad. AI, Generative or not, is just a tool.
There have been games that have procedural generation for decades in one form or another to create practically infinite content for players, but they are always limited in other ways. Minecraft can generate an “infinite” world, but what you do in the world is limited to what has been ready built. Hell, Games like Skyrim randomly generate NPCs all the time, but they are shallow and don’t really add much to the game.
Having people build out the mechanics, the spells, the world, and other features with a basic foundation of game play and then having AI implemented to combine those features in a way based on player interaction, or create NPCs that are doing similar things the player can that can make the world feel more alive is likely the next real advancement that games will have.
Sure, you could have people make hundreds, if not thousands, of NPCs, but they are going to be very derivative and you’ll see the usual “copy paste” people that aimlessly wonder around or do one or two things and making that many NPCs that aren’t story driven would be mind numbing work.
Sure, you could have people make hundreds, if not thousands, of NPCs, but they are going to be very derivative and you’ll see the usual “copy paste” people that aimlessly wonder around or do one or two things and making that many NPCs that aren’t story driven would be mind numbing work.
If you think “damn I need to make a bunch of fluff here to fill up space but I find the process excruciatingly boring and unfulfilling” please for the love of all that is good and beautiful please stop making art, it isn’t making anybody’s life better including yours. Make art because you desire to create the thing you are actively making in your hands, and if your heart tells you that it isn’t worth it, that means you aren’t making art that is worthwhile.
Procedural generation is a staple of many gaming genres already, but the difference between procedural generation and AI is that a human can ensure that procedural generation will reliably reproduce interesting content, AI has no such proven ability and you can’t just assume that it will attain that ability at some point. Crucially in all the critically successful games that leverage procedural generation the motivation is not to provide endless content but rather to “shuffle” the deck of a carefully hand selected array of cards to create a specific experience that never repeats quite identically which is a crucial element of mechanically challenging roguelike game design.
Enter The Gungeon wouldn’t be made better by swapping out the careful level design considerations for AI generated slop, it would ruin the precisely crafted balance and gamefeel that has lead to it being considered a modern classic.
Procedural generation is not AI, it is in fact philosophically the opposite of AI in that procedural generation procedurally creates and mixes content instead of machine learning which just learns to bullshit pattern match from material that is 9 times out of 10 stolen from exploited artists. One of those things you can tweak to reliably provide fun, challenging and interesting level design that remixes human created elements in ways that don’t undermine the humane element of them and the other is a bullshitting machine. I am sure the bullshitting machine will get better, but it will never not be a bullshitting machine and the success of procedurally generated design in gaming really has NOTHING to do with what we now define as “AI” whatsoever. Rather, on the contrary procedural generated design has far more in common with the now largely forgotten attempts in AI research to create procedural intelligence by explicitly defining thinking and logic routines that could then be modified and built upon by a logical agent operating in a human defined architecture.
If you want to talk about AI in the context of how people used to define AI before the explosive growth and hype of machine learning basically erased an entire branch of research from the public consciousness, well yes that older style of AI design has actually shown itself to be continually relevant to game design…
What fairy tale? You can run models right now that people have trained to work as DnD DM’s. I guess you’re not keeping up with developments, but it’s already happening.
I agree. They won’t want to hire humans back. Capitalism will not continue to function in an AI driven economy. It’s going to be feudalism or communism. And if we don’t do something about it, I know which one the capitalists will choose.
It is crap, I mean AI can be fun at providing raw grist for the creative mill of a human artist, but it is a grist used to compose a plywood of human art that was violently shredded apart and stamped back into the vague impression of a wholistically shaped entity with a grain and texture that contains nothing of the fluid mark of a living being recording an individual history throughout the artistic process of creation.
Is plywood cool and useful? Sure.
Am I glad plywood was invented? Absolutely!!!
Am I exhausted by techbros holding up plywood next to beautiful wood boards and not only trying to gaslight people into thinking they are identical but also trying to argue that we no longer need trees because any day now we will be able to make magic synthetic woodchips and go straight to plywood? To the point that I want to throw up every time I hear it and also why do we even desire to do that in the context of human art?.
But you’re taking it to the extreme, to the point of dishonesty. You’re so incensed about the overuse and overselling of AI, that you’re now lying about what it can do to diminish it.
To build on your example, you’re so upset about the sales pitch for plywood, that you’re now trying to claim it’s a fairy tale fabrication and shouldn’t & couldn’t be used to build with at all.
Ehh, I think it’ll be a looong time before machine learning can make meaningful character interactions.
It may be able to make maps faster, slightly better versions of something like No Man’s Sky or Minecraft (both already sporting functionally “infinite” procedural generation), or fill a city like Cyberpunk 2077’s with slightly less mindless wandering NPCs, but I don’t think it’ll help make story-based RPGs bigger in a useful way
The NPCs that stand out in an RPG do so because they typically have a well-crafted, and finite, story arch which is incredibly difficult to do with machine learning and trying to make things more procedurally generated.
I think we’re nearly there as is. There’s already mods that integrate ChatGPT with Skyrim NPC’s. There’s definitely room for improvement, but just these fan projects have achieved some impressive results.
Pair that with the developers’ eagerness to eventually fire most of their writing staff, and they’ve got a lot of incentive to dump money into improving what already exists.
My concern is that this will lead to more abandonware. Star Trek: Bridge Crew had integrated voice commands using some IBM service to process. Once their agreement with IBM ended, they shut down the feature in the game. So what happens when a developer integrates AI as a cornerstone to a game’s storylines, using remote servers to do all of the processing, and then decide to end support for the game?
